MAMAA stocks have a collective market cap exceeding $6.6 trillion and with S&P 500’s total market cap being about $30.1 trillion in September, these five stocks had accounted for 22 percent of the entire index. 

Big tech stocks took a massive hit in 2022, with each of the MAMAA stocks declining at least 13 percent, year-to-date. Once at the dais of success, tech stocks were imperial to the market and now they are taking it down with them. According to a report by Barron’s, the past couple of weeks have been ruinous for S&P 500 Index and the NASDAQ Composite which have pruned by 2.67 percent and 3.33 percent, respectively. 

But what makes the situation unfavorable for other stocks and assets is not just the impending rise of interest rates but also that investors haven’t experienced the economy’s losing steam.

Former chief economist at Wells Fargo, John Silvia, now heading Dynamic Economic Strategy pointed out the real final sales were slowing and this could present a problem for equities and real estate – slower earnings pressured by capitalization rates have negative consequences. (Real final sales are gross domestic product less inventory).

This has been relatively different from the economic slowdowns between 2005-2009 and even 2020, for that sake. During these skirmish times, diminishing interest rates were able to help offset weak growth. But this time, the rates have had to begin from zero and need to push much more to even closely resemble the historical figures. 

The rising interest rates shoved investors out of risk assets and revenue growth rates of large-cap tech stocks have been abating, which has triggered compressed valuations in the market as higher rates reduce the value of future cash flows.

“Stocks that have traded at excessive valuations have to be re-priced and big tech companies are still adjusting to the realities of a lesser speculative and more reality-based sensible valuation.”

Is The Market Influenced By Big Tech Stocks?

According to Bloomberg, the FAANG + MNT stocks (Facebook/Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google/Alphabet, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla) warranted for 3.05 percent points of the 3.81 percent advance in the S&P 500 Index, through the turn of the year in February 2023. This data is indicative of the dependency of the stock market on the performance of these big tech stocks. 

The reign of FAANG stocks was imminent because they obeyed all the rules that propelled positive changes in their company’s stock prices, as per Forbes.   

Additionally, before the rates started to move upward, the S&P 500’s year-to-date advance had been reduced to less than 50 percent of its highest peak of 8.10 percent on 2nd February.

In November 2021, the FAANG feeling began to wane when investors reached a peculiar conclusion of the Fed raising interest rates to fight persistent inflation, with Jerome Powell being re-nominated as the Fed Chief. This triggered the dormant sectoral rotation. 

The concept of ‘beat and raise’ reveals that for any company’s stock price to rise, the company must report quarterly revenue and earnings growth, to boost the forecasts exceeding investors’ expectations. While investors can’t judge for certain whether or not a company will beat and raise every quarter, they can certainly draw conclusions from its track record. Investors bet on long-term decisions by assessing if the company is favoring good investments in future growth.

And this phenomenon is superseded by sectoral rotation – the contrary decision that shifts capital from high-growth tech companies to alleged cyclical stocks when they are driven by expectations that higher interest rates will bump its value.

How Can Smaller Tech Companies Survive Without The Big Tech?

All the big tech companies are suffering from the bite of competition. So can smaller tech companies survive without the dominion of the humongous corporations of tech? The answer is a plausible yes. 

Small tech companies can do so because their target market is something which big companies consider trivial to be bothered with. All the MAMAA stocks have technology at its foundation but all are not considered tech stocks as per GICS (Global Industry Classification Standard). While Alphabet and Meta are classified under Communications Services Stocks, Amazon is labeled as a Consumer Discretionary Stock. 

Many smaller companies design applications for specific purposes which might be inconsequential for a bigger company. For example, a smaller company can make tens of millions in revenue by designing a simple software which could collate data from the sensors of a prototype aircraft but a company like Microsoft would not even consider any project that could project any earnings less than $100 million. While larger companies focus on the big, small-scale companies can experiment with lots of ideas to be imbued in, succeed, and later be acquired by the same large company. 

MAMAA or FAANG are dominant in their field as they have amassed huge economies of scale that act as a barrier to keep other companies at bay. Could monopoly be a chance at innovation because big tech companies need not worry about competition? Maybe, but large companies just struggle to do so because they cannot be as successful as a small/new company with a single focus to innovate. Big tech does not need to innovate anymore because they just have a fiduciary responsibility to make money for shareholders, which they certainly do. 

When the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) shifted into its antitrust probing in the United States’ largest tech companies in 2019, it marked a new phase of implicating this monopolistic behavior. 

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, the investigations were primarily focused on the patterns of how systematic acquisitions targeted younger startups that could disrupt the monopoly status quo of the industry if they became big. 

The reason for this probe was to determine if the industry giants were evading regulatory scrutiny and acquiring companies that could potentially harm its competition and hurt the consumers and hence, ordered Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet to provide comprehensive information of all the acquisitions of fledgling companies over the past decade. 

While the investigations are advancing more than before, highly diversified streams of business and revenue can aid at least 3 of the MAMAA five, namely Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, in countering their antitrust arguments. 

The post Reality Check: Can Tech Stocks Ruin the Market? appeared first on Industry Leaders Magazine.

If the history of 200 years of stock-exchange experience has taught anything, it is that any successful investing is built on evergreen wealth-building principles. Some of those principles call for patience, and discipline to disregard short-term forecasts and bet on long-term prospects.

And in the present financial paradigm, any colloquy of investment-worthy stocks is abridged without mentioning FAANG stocks – since they are one of the long-term and most promising stocks of the 21st century.

The top five S&P 500 Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) tech stocks in 2022 were Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, Broadcom, and Apple. 

What are FAANG Stocks?

Tech giants are renowned as the most lucrative investments for long-term gains with a stellar track record of growth and stability. The acronym FANG, coined by The Street’s Bob Lang and reiterated by CNBC’s Jim Cramer in 2013, spells out the four most prominent technology companies of the U.S. including Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, often praised as the “dominating pioneers in their markets.” Cramer grouped these companies under outsized market appreciation as they all belonged to the threads of high-growth stocks with digitization.  

In recent years, there were perhaps only a few companies that could match the distinct business models of FANG. In 2017, the inclusion of Apple in the team made FAANG an elite collective of technology stocks, rather than the original internet-based company stocks. 

While many investors expressed their concerns about FAANG stocks being superficial and volatile, analysts countered that the growth of these companies had been justified over the years, by their well-grounded financial and operational performance. 

How Did FAANG Become The Most Elite Family Of Tech Companies?

FAANG stocks and Microsoft shares grew more swiftly than the overall benchmark index S&P 500 during the late 2010s, reigning influence over the stock market. When 2014 drew to a close, FAANG stocks accounted for about 7.4 percent of the market cap of the S&P 500, which nearly doubled to 14.4 percent by the end of 2019. At the same time, FAANG stocks’ collective market cap increased by over 178.5 percent, in contrast to S&P 500’s 46.5 percent. 

With each stock rising to market capitalization greater than $1 trillion in 2020, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google represented the largest S&P 500 components with Meta Platforms trailing behind, as per Forbes.

According to a report by CFI, the combined market value of FAANG is nearly $5 trillion, which attributes to more than 10 percent of the $31 trillion of the U.S. stock market’s total market capitalization. 

This corresponds to the power of FAANG stocks, making them affect the whole market with even the smallest price change, impacting even investors who do not own any of the elite family’s stocks. 

As the best-performing tech companies of the last two decades, with a unanimous reputation of being high-growth investment stocks on the NASDAQ exchange platform, the core FAANG stocks make up for about 29 percent of the platform’s index value. 

The momentum of FAANG stocks was perceived to be strong, which beckoned the high-profile purchase interests of influential investors such as Soros Fund Management, Renaissance Technologies, and Berkshire Hathaway. Due to the intrinsic worth that software engineers bring to these tech giants, FAANG is none the miser on the payrolls, classifying them as the most sought-after companies in the world.

A summary of the FAANG companies:

Facebook

Established In:   2004 by Mark Zuckerberg.

Market Cap:   $439.56 billion.

Operating Profits: $28.944 billion.

Facebook Inc. (previously FB, now META) was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 as a social networking service company. Currently listing over 2.5 billion active users, Facebook could be termed the first application to gain widespread recognition and was once the most downloaded application in the 2010s. Available in 111 different languages, the social media platform transcended the world to Web 2.0 and was renamed Meta Platforms in October 2021, which owns proliferated subsidiaries like Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR. 

Facebook’s primary revenue stream was online advertisements and the social media giant Meta Platform’s market capitalization is over $439.56 billion, as of February 2023. 

Amazon

Established In:   1994 by Jeff Bezos.

Market Cap:   $960.89 billion.

Operating Profits: $17.3 billion.

A diversified tech company with roots in e-commerce, cloud computing, and consumer electronics, Amazon (AMZN) was established in 1994 by Jeff Bezos as an online bookstore. Today, it is one of the most proliferated and largest e-commerce retailers which currently owns subsidiaries like Whole Foods Market and Twitch. Artificial Intelligence assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Amazon Echo, have increasingly become popular in recent years. Amazon operates in several countries around the world. Branching out into delivery systems and streaming services, Amazon listed over 100 million global subscribers by 2018 and its current market capitalization exceeds $960.89 billion. 

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud computing platform continues to drive the company’s profitability with a revenue bolster of 27 percent and operating profits of $17.3 billion year-to-date, which is 33 percent higher year over year. Amazon’s dominance in the e-commerce industry and now AWS paves way for this FAANG stock to be one of the strongest buys for long-term investors, despite the volatile economic conditions of the stock market. 

Apple

Established In:   1976 by Steve Jobs.

Market Cap:   $2.34 trillion.

Operating Profits: $113.965 billion.

The multinational technology company Apple is the oldest FAANG company founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs and others, based in California. Presently, the largest IT company in the world, Apple was also the first U.S. company to have accomplished a market cap of over $1 trillion. When Apple went public in December 1980, it raised over $100 million through IPO. 

The film Pirates Of Silicon Valley is based on the heated struggles of Apple’s Jobs VS Microsoft’s Gates, between 1971 – 1999.

For a brief period, Apple’s stock value surpassed $3 trillion in January 2022 and was acknowledged as the biggest listed company in the world. With nearly revenues of $275 billion, the current market cap of Apple is $2.34 trillion. 

Netflix

Established In:   1997 by Reed Hastings.

Market Cap:   $143.86 billion.

Operating Profits: $5.633 billion.

Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings, Netflix (NFLX) was a media provider that offered subscription-based online streaming of various films and television shows. Lately, it is the world’s largest streaming service dominating the entertainment industry with over 209 million paid memberships. 

Netflix was all the rage after the pandemic forced people to stay and work from their homes. With a market cap of $235 billion in December 2020, Netflix is operating in over 190 countries and has entered the realm of content production, now funding its exclusive TV shows and movies. As the new normal simmer to an end, the usage of Netflix has dwindled and the company has faced terrible downfalls in user subscriptions. The market cap of Netflix as of February 2023 is $143.86 billion.

Google

Established In:   1998 by Larry Page & Sergey Brin.

Market Cap:   $1.15 trillion.

Operating Profits: $83.6 billion.

If there’s another highly-recommended FAANG stock, it’s that of Google. 

Known as the world’s dominant search engine, Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998 in California. Offering 20 million shares at $85 per share, the company went public in August 2004. Google provides internet-based products and services and triggered its success with productivity services such as Google Docs, Google Sheets, YouTube, and Gmail. 

Google is also responsible for developing the famous mobile operating system Android and other consumer electronics such as Chromebook laptops, Pixel phones, and Google Home devices. 

Google has been the market leader in online advertising for over a decade and contributed $104 billion to its parent company, Alphabet’s revenue in 2020. Despite concerns about the evolving economy, the behemoth’s monopoly over its growth strategies in search engines and huge potential for Google Cloud makes it a commanding stock to buy for long-term investors. 

The best FAANG company recommended to work for is Google, for the best employee satisfaction and work-life balance it offers. 

As one of the leading tech giants investing in AI technologies, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai launched language model ChatGPT’s rival, Bard – the solid tech battle of the decade. The market cap of Google is $1.15 trillion as of February 2023. 

The post From Silicon Valley To Wall Street: FAANG Stocks Ruled The Market appeared first on Industry Leaders Magazine.

In the decade following the invention of the social media site, Instagram’s algorithms have changed our lives completely. The app is a great medium for staying connected with friends and family, but behind-the-scenes it is a data mine that quietly gathers information about everything you do, and stores it for later use. Although lawmakers are trying to pass a data privacy bill, it is still a far way off. 

The History of Instagram

Instagram was first launched in 2010, as a photo-sharing app for the iPhone. It was founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, both of whom graduated from Stanford. It registered over one million users in two months and crossed the 10 million milestone in a year.

Within two years, it was The go-to app for millennials and Gen Z-ers to share their lives with their circle. The app’s popularity and growth potential caught the eye of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who correctly identified it as a threat to FB and decided to neutralize the risk by bringing it under him. In 2012, Facebook Inc., acquired Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock. Although it was a shockingly huge sum for a small company with just 13 employees, Facebook has reaped millions in profit and then some.

The strategic business decision proved successful, as by 2020 Instagram boasted over one billion users and contributed upwards of $20 billion to Facebook’s annual revenue.

As of 2022, Instagram’s brand value stands at almost $33.5 billion, and is one of the top then most valuable media brands in the world.

Insta-Stalking: The Official Explanation

Today, everyone fears Instagram’s algorithm, as if it is one magical know-it-all tool that oversees everything people do on the app. But on Instagram’s blog, Adam Mosseri explains that there is no one Instagram algorithm that is responsible for the workings of the site. Instead, the company uses a combination of “algorithms, classifiers, and processes, each with its own purpose.”

The Feed curates what you see, based on past behavior and what you care about. Every part of the app, be it Feed, Explore, or Reels, uses its own Instagram algorithm to tailor the experience for the individual user. As people mostly use Feed and Stories to keep track of their friends’ lives, Instagram uses “signals” — everything from what time a post was shared to what you liked to which device you are using — to curate your experience. The algorithms use this to predict your future behavior and accordingly modify what you see.

What Does the Instagram Algorithm Track?

Instagram prioritizes content for you by tracking three main points of activity.

Interest – The app’s algorithm tracks what sites and pages you visit. It wants to know what piques your interest and why. The posts you see on the Explore page are curated based on your behavior. It also monitors which posts you like and what kind of content you look for. The algorithm tries to mix and match things based on this, and continues to curate your Feed based on your interests.

Relationships – Instagram knows that you would like to keep a close watch on some people over others. The app monitors your relationships on the site — whom you message, how often you like someone’s posts, whom you search for etc. The app watches over your interactions and prioritizes the posts/ videos of these people on your Feed.

Timelines – Earlier, the Instagram timeline worked in a chronological order. Whatever was posted earlier, gets pushed back as new content comes in. Not anymore. Instagram’s algorithm identifies what type of content will be more engaging and enticing for you, and accordingly plays around with your timeline. The posts are arranged according to priority and will push content from your favorite accounts to your timeline.

Instagram’s Tracking Analysis

Recently, a new analysis of the Instagram app threw up some shocking findings on how much the social media platform monitors user activity. The study conducted by Felix Karuse, published in August 2022, found that Instagram monitors all activity rendered inside the app. This includes all third-party links and ads within their app using a custom in-app browser. The use of a customer browser means that the site is able to “track every single interaction with external websites, from all form inputs like passwords and addresses, to every single tap”.

Instagram monitors everything the user does throughout the in-app browser, without explicit permission from the user or the website. The app injects its own JavaScript code into every website shown, including when you click on ads. Although the injected script does not do this currently, custom scripts can give them greater access to what you do. Custom scripts on third-party websites allow the app to monitor interactions, likes, screenshots, along with sensitive data like email ids, passwords, and even credit card numbers.

In short, the in-app browser is the powerful all-seeing eye that can track everything happening on another website, including tap, input, scrolling behavior, what content is copied and pasted, what purchases are made, and even which ads are viewed. Krause also points out that building and maintaining an in-app browser requires considerable effort and is a deliberate move. He cautions that Meta Inc., Instagram’s parent company, collects any and all data that does not require explicit user permission.

With over one billion users, the amount of data that Instagram can collect is staggering and worrying.

In 2019, a Business Insider study revealed that Instagram allowed San Francisco-based marketing agency, HYP3R, to collect data on its users, including stories, photos, location, and bio, to create profiles on millions. Only after the study was published did Instagram ban HYP3R and announced that it had made a product change. However, HYP3R was not your average unknown marketing firm. It is listed as a Facebook Marketing Partner, meaning that the company is a preferred Instagram partner and that though the app has policies against this kind of behavior, nothing was done to police its tracking activity until BI raised the issue.

Instagram’s data policy admits that the app collects a wide range of data. It states, “We collect the content, communications and other information you provide when you use our Products, including when you sign up for an account, create or share content and message or communicate with others. This can include information in or about the content that you provide (e.g. metadata), such as the location of a photo or the date a file was created. It can also include what you see through features that we provide, such as our camera, so we can do things such as suggest masks and filters that you might like, or give you tips on using camera formats. Our systems automatically process content and communications that you and others provide to analyze context and what’s in them.”

Reach and Repercussions

According to Statista, the United States leads in the usage of Instagram with over 140 million users. It is followed by India with around 120 million users. For marketing, Instagram ads is one of the most preferred platforms, as according to Hootsuite, Insta ads have the potential to reach 849.3 million users. 

Instagram generated an estimated $47.6 billion revenue in 2021, and is the fourth most popular social media app worldwide. As over 70% of Instagram users are under 35 years old, marketers and influencers find it easy to showcase their products and services on the app.

How to Protect your privacy

Apple’s App Tracking Transparency forces apps to get the user’s explicit permission before tracking their data across apps owned by other companies. It is said that this feature alone is costing Facebook around $10 billion every year.

Change account settings to private – One of the simplest ways to ensure that your Instagram account is secure is to set the profile to private. This lets you have greater control on who sees your activity. In Instagram’s setting menu, go to Privacy>Account Privacy> and activate the Private Account setting.

Get rid of personalized ads – This is one of the trickiest factors as enabling this feature requires you to log into Facebook. You must go to Facebook’s ad settings, move to Your Ad Preferences page, and click on Ad Settings to reveal two options. Disable both these options – Ads based on data from partners” and “Ads based on your activity on Facebook Company Products that you see elsewhere.” This way, Facebook will be unable to target you with information it gathers outside of Instagram.

Despite all the safety/ privacy precautions, there is no denying that whatever you put out into the Internet stays forever. No matter how much we delete data, some traces of it will continue to exist. Not to mention, media companies often make it difficult to access this knowledge. The privacy settings are often buried underneath lots of heavy jargons, which bore you enough to log out before completing the task you set out to do.

As the Internet has infiltrated every aspect of our daily lives, posting any kind of information online comes with its own set of risks. Other than hackers looking to unearth your private details, potential employers and customers also use social media to run background checks on you. It is recommended that you always keep privacy-enhancing settings On and moderate what you put out into the world wide web. Another important trick is to have a good antivirus program for your devices. It provides a vital layer of security that can save you from many pitfalls.

Any comment, image, or post made online stays forever, as despite your best efforts, you do not have control over the screenshots or copies others have made. Be as cautious and sensible in your online social life as you are in your in-person social life.

The post How the Instagram Algorithm Reads Your Mind appeared first on Industry Leaders Magazine.

According to a Bloomberg report, Mark Zuckerberg slipped to the 5^th spot on the billionaires’ list after Facebook stocks nosedived due to the global outage. Zuckerberg, with a total wealth of 121.6 billion, has fallen behind Bill Gates.

The outage also knocked down Facebook’s stock by 4.9% on Monday, October 4, which took Zuckerberg’s worth down from $140 billion to $121.6 billion.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook encourages hate speech for profit, says whistleblower

The stock slide comes at a time when the social media giant is in the midst of a PR crisis.

On September 13, the Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of stories based on a cache of internal documents, revealing that Facebook knew about a range of issues with its products – such as the sale of domestic workers on Instagram and the harm it does to teenage girls’ mental health. The report has drawn the attention of government officials, and on Monday, the whistleblower revealed herself.

The whistleblower, an ex-worker named Frances Haugen, said Facebook had deliberately manipulated its algorithms to amplify hate speech.

In response, Facebook has highlighted that the issues facing its products are intricate and not caused by technology alone.

“I think it gives people comfort to assume that there must be a technological or a technical explanation for the issues of political polarization in the United States,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, told CNN.

“Sorry for disruption”

On Monday evening, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger went down for millions of users worldwide. People were unable to send or receive messages on any of the platforms. “We are aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Andy Stone, Facebook communications executive said in a tweet.

According to DownDetector, a site that tracks WhatsApp outages, 40 percent of users were able to download the app, 30 percent had trouble in sending messages and 22 percent had problems using the web version.

In April, Instagram and Facebook went down for millions of users worldwide for a couple of hours. The outage was the second in less than a month for Facebook.

The post Mark Zuckerberg drops down in billionaire list as Facebook goes dark appeared first on Industry Leaders Magazine.

The Michael Saylor-owned company now has 108,992 coins at an aggregate purchase price of $2.918 billion and an average price of $26,769 per bitcoin. The holdings are worth about $5.3 billion at bitcoin’s current levels.

The company bought the current cryptocurrency lot at an average price of $45,294. The 50-day moving average price of bitcoin stands at $37,849.

Michael Saylor is one of the most vocal advocates of bitcoin and has even claimed that he influenced Tesla and Elon Musk to invest $1.5 billion in the digital currency. He believes that borrowing money and buying bitcoins is similar to investing early in Facebook stock.

“If you borrow billions of dollars at 1% interest and invest it in the next Big Tech digital network that you thought was going to be the dominant Amazon or Google or Facebook of money, why wouldn’t you?”  Saylor said, according to CNBC. “I mean, if I could borrow $1 billion and buy Facebook a decade ago for 1% interest, I think I would’ve done quite well.”

Saylor was explaining his company’s debt-ridden policies for investing in bitcoins. MicroStrategy has notched up more than a $2.2 billion in debt at 1.5% interest.

The company has financed its bitcoin buying spree with company cash flows, equity issuance, convertible debt, senior secured debt and a $1 billion shelf registration. “Our point of view is being a leveraged, bitcoin-long company is a good thing for our shareholders,” he said.

This is not the only major investment that MicroStrategy has made in bitcoins. Earlier in June, it spent roughly $489 million to purchase 13,005 bitcoin.

Saylor emphasized that the company’s association with bitcoins has driven brand awareness for MicroStrategy by a factor of 100.

MicroStrategy’s second-quarter earnings report showed an impairment of $424.8 million on its bitcoin holdings. Its stock is largely used as a proxy for the price of bitcoin by most investors.

Bitcoin prices stood at $48,971 per coin on Tuesday morning. It topped $50,000 for the first time since mid-May earlier this week.

Shares of MicroStrategy fell 2.8% after the opening bell. The stock has sunk from a high of $1,273 per share in March to $718 now.

The bullish cryptocurrency market has unleashed a frenzy of interest globally. In addition to MicroStrategy, Blockstream, a bitcoin infrastructure company, has raised US $ 210 million in a Series B funding with backing from Baillie Gifford and iFinex.
The funding has raised its valuation to $3.2 billion. The funds will be used to bolster

Blockstream’s mining business, including its Blockstream Energy service, which invests in renewable power generation projects.

The bullish bitcoins is seeing wider adoption, notwithstanding many fund managers’ warning of its volatility. Another converter to the cryptocurrency market is Subtract, a publishing platform with half-a-million paying subscribers, which has announced that it will accept payment in BTC. Substack is backed by VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.

The post MicroStrategy increases its bitcoin hoard to 108,992, worth $5.3 billion at current price appeared first on Industry Leaders Magazine.

The court dismissed complaints brought in by the Federal Trade Commission and 46 states against the social media company for monopolistic practices. The ruling led Democrats and Republicans to make a strident call to rewrite the antitrust rules and pass the six major bills still pending in the Senate to rein in the Big Tech companies.

Judge James Boasberg’s of the federal court in Washington, DC ruled that the FTC laws had “failed to plead enough facts to plausibly establish” that Facebook had monopoly power over the social networking market. “[W]hatever it may mean to the public, ‘monopoly power’ is a term of art under federal law with a precise economic meaning: the power to profitably raise prices or exclude competition in a properly defined market,” he wrote.

Amy Klobuchar, Democratic chair of the Senate antitrust committee, tweeted: “The ruling shows why our antitrust laws need to be updated after years of bad precedent. We can’t meet the challenges of the modern digital economy with pared-down agencies & limited legal tools.” Ken Buck, Republican on the House antitrust committee, said: “Congress needs to provide additional tools and resources to our antitrust enforcers to go after Big Tech companies engaging in anti-competitive conduct.”

Judge Boasberg also dismissed a similar case led by New York attorney-general Letitia James, representing a group of 46 states and two other jurisdictions, saying that the allegations were too old to be prosecuted.

The FTC had accused the company in December of anti-competitive conduct and wanted it to break up from Instagram and WhatsApp, the companies it acquired in 2012 and 2014 for $1bn and $19bn, respectively.

It is believed that the FTC will appeal the case. It has 30 days to file a new complaint. In a press statement, the FTC said,“It was closely reviewing the opinion and assessing the best option forward.”

Facebook said about the decisions, “We are pleased that today’s decisions recognise the defects in the government complaints filed against Facebook.” It added that Facebook “competes fairly every day to earn people’s time and attention”.

Regulators and legislatures are finding it difficult to define antitrust laws for the digital era. Traditionally, anti-monopoly laws were implemented by showing unfair price manipulation by the dominant company, which ultimately the customers’ were forced to pay.

The judge said the commission only made a bare minimum allegation that Facebook had a dominant market share exceeding 60%, and that no other social network of comparable scale exists in the U.S.

“These allegations—which do not even provide an estimated actual figure or range for Facebook’s market share at any point over the past ten years—ultimately fall short of plausibly establishing that Facebook holds market power, “ he said.

But in the digital era, it is not about charging a higher price, it is more complex involving the number of people using your services in exchange for data. Lina Khan, a prominent Big Tech critic and the FTC chair, says such companies can abuse their market power without charging anything, whether by degrading services or demanding that customers hand over more personal data. “Facebook’s power is obvious, and yet we have a judge here getting into arcane details of what makes up the market,” said William Kovacic, a former FTC chair. “It will be held up as the precise example of why we need to change the law.”

News of the judge’s decisions saw Facebook’s shares trading up 4.2%, valuing the company above $1 trillion for the first time in its history.

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The European Commission and UK’s Competition Markets Authority (CMA) are probing whether Facebook is abusing a dominant position in the social media or digital advertising markets through the collection and use of advertising data.

The investigation will also seek to determine whether Facebook and Facebook Marketplace is in breach of EU competition rules.

The British and European authorities will join forces to probe Facebook.

“Facebook is used by almost 3 billion people on a monthly basis and almost 7 million firms advertise on Facebook in total. Facebook collects vast troves of data on the activities of users of its social network and beyond, enabling it to target specific customer groups,” said Margrethe Vestager, who is both the competition commissioner and one of the Commission’s executive vice-presidents, in a statement.

“We will look in detail at whether this data gives Facebook an undue competitive advantage in particular on the online classified ads sector, where people buy and sell goods every day, and where Facebook also competes with companies from which it collects data. In today’s digital economy, data should not be used in ways that distort competition.”

The European Commission is concerned about digital marketers who need to use Facebook, their rival, to advertise for their services online.

A Facebook spokesperson said: “We are always developing new and better services to meet the evolving demand from people who use Facebook.

“Marketplace and Dating offer people more choices and both products operate in a highly competitive environment with many large incumbents. We will continue to cooperate fully with the investigations to demonstrate that they are without merit.”

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He also shared a total of 22 policies, 12 on Facebook and 10 on Instagram to let the public know how they implement the policies in the popular social media application.

The Community Standard Report for 2021 lists the rates of harmful content, including nudity, graphic content and violence users were exposed to. While there is nudity of 0.03 percent to 0.04 percent on Facebook and Instagram; there was a 0.05 percent to 0.06 percent hate speech, violence, and uncensored content on Facebook. He also said that AI (artificial intelligence) technology played a big part in their success in reducing their rate from 23.6 percent in 2017 to today. He added that nearly 97% of hate speech was removed from the platform before it reached audiences.

During the first quarter, Facebook took down 9.8 million pieces of organized hate content, up from 6.4 million in the last quarter of last year.

“We evaluate the effectiveness of our enforcement by trying to keep the prevalence of hate speech on our platform as low as possible, while minimizing mistakes in the content that we remove,” said Rosen.

According to Mark Fiore from the Transparency Report team, 99.7 percent of all fraud-related removals were proactive. That means they were removed before being reported by anyone. As a result, approximately 335 million pieces of suspicious fake content were removed. From Instagram, nearly 2.5 million suspicious content was removed.

Facebook has even covered copyright transactions that were removed from its various platforms, nearly 10 million were cut, and 78 percent were spotted with the help of AI. Both Facebook and Instagram use a “Rights Manager” tool that automatically detects infringing material. Facebook also uses the third-party service Audible Magic to spot and remove pirated music tracks.

And since the start of the pandemic, the company says it’s removed more than 18 million pieces of Covid-related misinformation from Facebook and Instagram.

It also revealed government requests for user data during the last six months of 2020 rose by ten per cent to 191,013.

The US once again submitted the largest number of requests, followed by India, Germany, France, Brazil and the UK. Facebook received 61,262 requests in the US – much the same as in the first half of 2020.

“As we have said in prior reports, we always scrutinize every government request we receive to make sure it is legally valid, no matter which government makes the request,” says Chris Sonderby, VP and deputy general counsel.

“If we determine that a request appears to be deficient or overly broad, we push back and will fight in court, if necessary. We do not provide governments with ‘back doors’ to people’s information.”

The post Facebook launches Transparency Center, reveals data on piracy and hate content appeared first on Industry Leaders Magazine.

The flagship social network will introduce a set of experimental audio tools to create a sound studio, allowing users to mix audio tracks, add sound and voice effects, and filters using speech-to-text and sound morphing features, Facebook said in a statement.

Here’s a gist of all that Facebook is planning to introduce in the coming weeks. The social network plans to launch a feature called Soundbites, which it described as a “short-form, creative audio clips for capturing anecdotes, jokes, moments of inspiration, poems, and many other things we haven’t yet imagined.”

The feature is similar to audio clips on WhatsApp and Messenger, with the exception of a more shareable emphasis. Facebook plans to roll this feature to a “small number of creators” in the coming weeks before it’s launched to a global audience.

Facebook also plans to launch a long-form audio tool for users to be able to listen to podcasts directly within the website/app. The podcast tool will provide suggestions based on the user’s interests. One can also share and comment on podcasts just like any other content on Facebook.

What’s interesting is that Facebook is looking to integrate Clubhouse’s primary features into the social network too. The social media company plans to launch another audio-only tool of Rooms, also known as Live Audio Rooms. This experimental tool will be like any public room on the internet. Facebook interns to allow the tools to be used by artists, politicians, public figures and content creators to interact with users at large. Users will also be able to donate to creators during a Live Audio Session.

Facebook aims to launch these audio tools in a bid to make audio experiences seamless on its platform. The company plans to let users play music from its wide-ranging sound collection, as well as apply a range of sound effects, and voice filters to create unique content.

The social media company is also working on a unique tool that will enable users to send effects like “crickets chirping to quote from popular songs” in Messenger and WhatsApp. It could very much be an audio version of a GIF. For all things and more on the platform, we’ll have to wait and see.

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