Quiet quitting. Working from home. The Great Resignation. Whatever you want to call it, the attitude of many Americans toward work appears to have changed during the long pandemic — and, generally speaking, not for the better. This new approach threatens to do long-lasting damage to economic growth and prosperity. Until Covid, most employed Americans […]
Read More
Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said on Tuesday that it planned to lay off about 10,000 employees, or roughly 13 percent of its work force, the latest move to hew to what the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has called a “year of efficiency.” The layoffs will affect its recruiting team this week, with […]
Read More
“We always said it was like a start-up,” Mr. Anderson wrote, “with zero risk if you failed.” The layoffs, which totaled about 18,000 across Amazon, came with a hiring freeze, limiting options for movement internally. Numerous employees of the company wrote Mr. Anderson that his post had hit a nerve. They told him that they […]
Read More
Sridhar Ramaswamy, who led Google’s advertising division from 2013 to 2018, said Microsoft and Google recognized that their current search business might not survive. “The wall of ads and sea of blue links is a thing of the past,” said Mr. Ramaswamy, who now runs Neeva, a subscription-based search engine. Amazon, which has a larger […]
Read More
Meta has long been concerned about losing teenagers and young adults to rivals like TikTok and Snapchat, especially since that audience is highly coveted by advertisers. Facebook, which Mark Zuckerberg created in 2004 while at Harvard, was aimed at college students in its early years but has struggled in recent years with an aging user […]
Read More
WASHINGTON — The last time the Supreme Court considered what the First Amendment has to say about threats, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. found himself reciting lyrics from the rapper Eminem. “Dada make a nice bed for mommy at the bottom of the lake,” the chief justice said at a 2014 argument, quoting from […]
Read More
Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — wants power users to start paying for some of its sites’ features, taking a page out of Twitter’s playbook in charging for verified blue check marks. A new subscription service called Meta Verified will become available this week in Australia and New Zealand and will […]
Read More
Valentine’s Day breakup The F.T.C.’s biggest internal critic won’t be hanging around to push back against the agency and its chair, Lina Khan, who’s come under repeated fire from the political right and big business for being too tough on mergers. In a blunt breakup letter published on Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal, Commissioner […]
Read More
Digital ad spending, while still growing overall, “has decelerated precipitously,” according to an analysis last month by the research firm Insider Intelligence. Twitter seems to be faring the worst. The company has struggled to retain top-flight advertisers since Mr. Musk took over as owner in October, amid fears of a proliferation of hate speech and […]
Read More
Everybody’s got a bot Just over two months ago, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public, instantly thrusting the A.I.-powered chatbot into the center of mainstream discourse, with debates about how it could transform business, education and more. (It also spurred Microsoft to invest $10 billion in OpenAI.) Now Google and the Chinese tech giant Baidu […]
Read More
Although the usage of deepfakes in the recently discovered pro-China disinformation campaign was ham handed, it opens a new chapter in information warfare. In recent weeks, another video using similar A.I. technology was uncovered online, showing fictitious people who described themselves as Americans, promoting support for the government of Burkina Faso, which faces scrutiny for […]
Read MoreMeta’s stock surged on Thursday after the company reported better-than-expected earnings, said it would buy back billions of dollars in its stock, and overcame a court challenge to its ambitions in the so-called metaverse. Shares of the tech giant, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, climbed more than 24 percent, which would be its […]
Read More
The Wall Street Journal revealed last week that researchers at Instagram had studied for years how its photo-sharing app affects young users and found that it can be particularly harmful to teenage girls, news that alarmed parents and lawmakers. According to the research, which was not publicly released, Instagram makes body image issues worse for […]
Read More