Politics Archive

“The report reads less like a medical analysis and more like an anti-trans screed—politicized, inflammatory, and devoid of scholarly grounding,” writes journalist Erin Reed in comprehensively fact-checking the 400-page document.

Drop-shipping packages straight from China to shoppers’ homes was kind of the whole point of retailers like Temu. In response to Donald Trump’s tariffs, Temu now tells Wired that it’s switching to a “local fulfillment model” where orders come from US warehouses. With the de minimis exception officially dead (at least for now), it’s no surprise that retailers are scrambling — especially sites like Temu, whose wide product offerings depended on the exception.

Per The New York Times:

Former TikTok director of UX research Eric Morrison testifies in a short video deposition that as of 2022, unlike Facebook and Instagram, TikTok “was not necessarily serving that need to connect to people that you already know.” This is the need that the FTC says Facebook and Instagram uniquely fill, alongside the smaller apps Snapchat and MeWe.

Hegeman concedes that even with TikTok becoming a more significant competitor in the past two years, Facebook’s user base and the time users spend on it have continued to grow.

Donald Trump announced Thursday that he would remove Michael Waltz as National Security Advisor and appoint him as ambassador to the United Nations. CBS reported earlier that Trump did not want to explicitly fire Waltz, the person who accidentally added The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg to the group chat, but waited several weeks before he could spin the demotion as part of a reorganization strategy at the National Security Council.

Hegeman says that the (not publicly disclosed) number of users who opted out of off-app tracking through Apple’s App Tracking Transparency policy mostly reflects Apple’s scare tactics in framing the question to users, rather than whether users actually prefer not to share their data with Meta. He adds that Apple frames the ask very differently when asking users about similar opt-ins for its own products. “I think it’s a clear example of them trying to leverage their position controlling the iOS operating system to advantage their position in the market,” he says.

Sometime after 2018, Meta realized that focusing on surfacing friends and family content wasn’t helping it as much as it had hoped. Competitors like TikTok were taking over a lot of time users would spend online, and Hegeman says Meta found it to be a better strategy to broaden the focus of the Facebook app to include investments in video and other kinds of content.

In 2021, Meta found that by reducing the relative amount of ads some groups saw by 80 percent, it only saw about a 3 percent increase of a usage metric. This shows ads aren’t a major cost for consumers, Hegeman says, because if a company like Apple lowered the price of its iPhone by 80 percent, it would likely see much more than a 3 percent increase in sales.

In response to regulations in the EU, Meta began offering an ad-free version of its products there for 6 Euros a month. But that offering hasn’t caught on, Hegeman says — just about 0.007 percent of users opted to pay for the service.