The Reddit and Astera Labs IPOs last week ate up a lot of media oxygen.
And with good reason, the two tech IPOs priced well and traded with even more gusto.
After a long dearth for technology offerings, seeing two large, multi-billion dollar offerings in the same week was part of a much-needed win for private-market tech companies, and sigh of relief for the same.
But there was another offering last week that has a tech-angle to it: Trump Media and Technology Group, which is the company behind Truth Social.
More from TechCrunch here, but the gist is that after much back-and-forth, it merged with its chosen SPAC and started to trade.
In India, a government-run agency will now monitor and undertake fact-checking for government related matters on social media even as tech giants expressed grave concerns about it last year.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT on Wednesday wrote in a gazette notification that it is cementing into law its proposal from last year about making the fact checking unit of Press Information Bureau the dedicated arbiter of truth for New Delhi matters.
The Ministry of Information and Broadcast established the fact checking unit of Press Information Bureau in 2019 with the aim to dispel misinformation about government matters.
The unit, however, has been criticized for falsely labelling information critical to the government as misleading.
Relying on a government agency such as the Press Information Bureau as the sole source to fact-check government business without giving it a clear definition or providing clear checks and balances “may lead to misuse during implementation of the law, which will profoundly infringe on press freedom,” Asia Internet Coalition, an industry group that represents Meta, Amazon, Google and Apple cautioned last year.
Two months ago, media giant Fox Corp. partnered with Polygon Labs, the team behind the Ethereum-focused layer-2 blockchain, to tackle deepfake distrust.
Fox and Polygon launched Verify, a protocol that aims to protect their IP while letting consumers verify the authenticity of content.
“When you put that content on chain, you can now validate that content was created by a certain individual or brand,” Blank said.
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Cricket match streaming has been the prime driver of new users for streaming platforms in India.
By securing numerous cricket rights, Disney and Reliance have left rival services with limited content options to attract fans.
“The 2023-27 IPL broadcasting now sit under the JV – Viacom 18 has digital streaming rights (won for US$2.9bn) while Star has TV broadcasting rights for US$2.8bn.
Combined with about 8% of the TV market that Viacom18 assumes in India, the merged operations — which will feature some 120 TV channels — will command about 49% of the broadcasting market.
In a statement Wednesday, Disney and Reliance said they will reach 750 million users in India with the merged entity.
Elon Musk’s crusade against the extremism research organization the Center for Countering Digital Hate will have its day in court on Thursday.
After Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the CCDH published reports detailing rising hate speech on X and how unbanned accounts, including neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, stood to make the company millions in ad revenue.
Unlike the CCDH lawsuit, X is suing Media Matters for America in Texas, which doesn’t have California’s anti-SLAPP protections.
A loss in court for the CCDH would likely have an immediate chilling effect on researchers who track hate speech and misinformation on social media.
“This ridiculous lawsuit is a textbook example of a wealthy, unaccountable company weaponizing the courts to silence researchers, simply for studying the spread of hate speech, misinformation and extremism online,” Ahmed said.
WhatsApp announced today that it is rolling out a “search by date” function for individual and group chats on Android devices.
Users can only search for a chat on a particular date instead of specifying a date range.
To use the feature, users have to go a one-on-one or group chat details by tapping on the contact or the group name.
To search by date, they have to tap on the search button and then tap the calendar icon.
Users can already search through conversations by media type such as links, media, and docs through the conversation detail page.
Reliance, its portfolio Viacom18 and Disney are merging their media businesses in India, creating the largest media entity in the South Asian market.
Reliance will control and own 16.34% of the joint venture, which it has valued at $8.5 billion.
Reliance, which is India’s most valuable firm, said it sees an opportunity to expand and streamline its presence in the Indian fast-growing market by merging its media assets with Disney India.
Reliance, which owns more than 60% in Viacom18, plans to invest $1.4 billion into the joint venture for its growth strategy.
The “strategic” merger of Reliance and Disney India also unites two leading Indian streamers, JioCinema and Disney+Hotstar.
Saining Xie, a computer science professor at NYU, began the research project that spawned the diffusion transformer in June 2022.
Diffusion models typically have a “backbone,” or engine of sorts, called a U-Net.
In other words, larger and larger transformer models can be trained with significant but not unattainable increases in compute.
The current process of training diffusion transformers potentially introduces some inefficiencies and performance loss, but Xie believes this can be addressed over the long horizon.
“I’m interested in integrating the domains of content understanding and creation within the framework of diffusion transformers.
Six months on from its launch, Subsets has already claimed some decent customers including the New York Times’-owned Athletic and Danish newspaper Børsen.
The media businessWhile Subsets could be applied to any subscription business, it’s currently focused on the digital media vertical.
Subsets allows non-technical teams to run retention “experiments” on subsets (hence the company name) of their subscriber base, to see what actions might lead a customer to staying on-board.
These experiments might be a series of push notifications or email offering a subscription discount, or perhaps a free upgrade to unlock new features.
Aside from lead backers Upfin and YC, Subsets’ pre-seed round included investments from a slew of institutional and angel investors including Cuesta Labs; Sandhill Markets; and Peakon founder Phillip Chambers.
The Supreme Court could decide the future of content moderation — or it could puntThe Supreme Court is considering the fate of two state laws that limit how social media companies can moderate the content on their platforms.
The two laws were both crafted by Republican lawmakers to punish social media companies for their perceived anti-conservative bias.
“Supreme Court cases can fizzle in this way, much to the frustration in most cases to other parties,” Barrett said.
“It’s clear that the Supreme Court needs to update its First Amendment jurisprudence to take into account this vast technological change,” Barrett said.
“… The Supreme Court often lags behind society in dealing with these kinds of things, and now it’s time to deal with it.”
