Good morning. 🗣️ Top talker: The John Bolton book has leaked. Per NYT, it describes several occasions in which President Donald Trump expressed willingness to halt criminal investigations "to... give personal favors to dictators he liked." He also allegedly sought China's help in winning the 2020 election, per this excerpt in WSJ.

📚 The anecdotes will help Bolton sell books next week. But they would have been more useful to the nation had he shared them with lawmakers prior to the House impeachment vote last December.

🍸 Happy hour fodder: Bolton says the president didn't know that Britain is a nuclear power and asked if Finland is part of Russia. He also says Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slipped him a note during a 2018 meeting with Kim Jong-un, calling Trump "full of s---."

😬 Not-so-happy hour: Bolton says Trump privately told him that reporters should go to prison or be killed. "These people should be executed," the president allegedly said. "They are scumbags."

Join the Market: 🗞️ Newsletter | 🎙️ Podcast

Bloomberg/Getty

Bay vs. Beltway

Washington is at war over Section 230. That's good for the status quo.

Moving the Market: Silicon Valley's social media giants have found themselves locked in the middle of a fight between Republicans and Democrats over the future of online speech and the Section 230 legal protections that have been essential to their success.

• The latest: Attorney General Bill Barr has called on Congress to adopt legislation that would threaten Section 230, which effectively gives social media platforms immunity from responsibility for the content that users post on their platforms.

• Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., has also introduced a bill that would limit Section 230 and allow Americans to sue tech companies that censor political speech or hide content from competitors.

The big picture: Republicans and Democrats, including both President Trump and Joe Biden, are threatening to peel back Section 230 protections, but for very different reasons.

• Since both sides have different goals for reforming the law, it's highly likely that nothing will come of their efforts.

Right vs. left: Generally speaking, Republicans believe tech firms censor too much conservative content, while Democrats believe tech firms don't do enough to censor misinformation and hate speech.

• Some Republicans, including Barr, want to reform the law so tech companies only get Section 230 protections if they moderate in "good faith" to remain politically neutral. (Defining "good faith" presents its own Pandora's Box of challenges).

• Some Democrats, including Biden, want to remove Section 230 altogether so tech firms would have no liability protection and would therefore be forced to moderate content more aggressively.

What's next: Probably nothing. Since the right and the left disagree entirely about what reform should look like, there's little chance of Congress passing any significant overhaul of the law.

• Republicans especially don't want Section 230 to go away entirely, because making tech companies liable for the content on their platforms would almost certainly increase censorship.

But it's Washington, so... enjoy the fight.

Bloomberg/Getty

The ad game

ADL, NAACP vs. Facebook

Big in the Bay, big in the Beltway: "Several American civil-rights groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and the NAACP, are encouraging big advertisers to pull spending from Facebook to protest what they say is the company’s failure to make its platform a less-hostile place," WSJ's Deepa Seetharaman reports.

• The big picture: The pressure from civil rights groups is a perfect illustration of the contrasting pressures that Facebook and other social media firms face from the left (which wants more censorship) and the right (which wants less).

• What's next: Most calls for advertising boycotts usually end one of two ways. 1. Advertisers don't actually boycott. 2. Some do, then they eventually come back. Given Facebook's dominance of the online ad market, we're hard pressed to see how this time will be any different.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is also facing pressure from employees at his philanthropic organization, at least 70 of whom have called on he and his wife Priscilla Chan to do more to combat systemic racism.

💸 How to give it 💸

Reed Hastings and his wife, Patty Quillin, are committing $120 million to the United Negro College Fund and two historically Black colleges as part of the fight for racial justice.

• "The times are the most stressed, the most painful, that we’ve ever seen in our lives," Hastings told our colleague Craig Melvin. "But out of that pain can come some opportunity, too."

Drew Angerer/Getty

Bird's the word

Jack Dorsey turns to audio

Big in the Bay: Jack Dorsey has rolled out a new Twitter feature that lets users record and tweet up to 140 seconds of audio, an experiment that could transform how public figures, journalists and the general public use the social media service.

• "There’s a lot that can be left unsaid or uninterpreted using text, so we hope voice Tweeting will create a more human experience for listeners and storytellers alike," Twitter's Maya Patterson and Rémy Bourgoin said in a statement.

The big picture: The audio experiment could mark the next evolution of Twitter, a once text-only platform that has since expanded to photos, videos and gifs. If so, it will put new demands on Twitter's efforts to moderate content.

• In a statement, Twitter said it would "review any reported voice tweets in line with our rules, and take action, including labeling, as needed."

What's next: The feature is currently limited to certain iOS users, but will roll out to all users in the coming weeks.

Market Links

• Daniel Ek brings Kim Kardashian to Spotify (WSJ)

• Eric Yuan will offer full encryption on Zoom (Bloomberg)

• Zhang Yiming sees $500m in U.S. TikTok revenue (Information)

• Michael Pack brings Trump loyalists to USAGM (NYT)

• Joe Scarborough blows up at Facebook (Mediaite)

⚾ What's next: Baseball may be coming back after all. The league has sent a proposal for a 60-game season at full prorated pay to the MLB Players Association, ESPN's Buster Olney reports. "No deal is done, but... the latest offer is seen as significant progress."

See you tomorrow.