|
May 28, 2020 
By DYLAN BYERS in Los Angeles & AHIZA GARCÍA-HODGES in San Francisco Good morning. 🇨🇳 New this A.M.: The Chinese parliament has effectively given itself the authority to quash unrest in Hong Kong, a move that could bring an end to the city's semi-autonomous status and its special trade relationship with the United States.
🚀 Elon Musk's highly anticipated SpaceX launch was called off less than 20 minutes before launch due to bad weather. He and NASA plan to try again on Saturday.
Join the Market: 🗞️ Newsletter | 🎙️ Podcast
Oliver Douliery/Getty Political theater President Trump goes to war with Silicon Valley, sort of
Moving the Market: President Donald Trump is expected to issue an executive order today that seeks to punish social media companies for making editorial judgments about the content on their platforms, a political maneuver that will, at the very least, ratchet up tensions between the White House and Silicon Valley.
• The executive order, a draft of which was obtained by NBC News, would make it easier for federal regulators to hold social media companies liable for policing speech, suspending accounts, removing posts or passing judgment on the veracity of what users say or write.
• It would do so by asking the FCC to reconsider the scope of Section 230, which gives social media platforms immunity from liability for the content posted by their users. The order argues that tech firms forfeit these protections once they interfere with users' speech.
• The order would also give the FTC the ability to investigate claims of bias by these platforms and prohibit all federal agencies from advertising on platforms that regulators deem to be non-neutral.
• The order comes just days after the president accused Twitter of "stifling free speech" because it provided links to a fact check for his false claims about the 2020 election and mail-in ballots. (Twitter declared the president's claims "misleading.")
The big picture: The president's order will reinforce conservative anxieties about big tech's liberal bias, but practically speaking it is toothless. It leaves the thorny business of figuring out how to actually police social media up to the FCC and FTC, two independent agencies that are already struggling to rein in Silicon Valley's power.
• More importantly, it is likely to be challenged by the courts, which have long ruled in favor of immunity for the tech firms. "You can’t just issue an executive order and overturn on a whim 25 years of judicial precedent about how a law is interpreted," Kate Klonick, an assistant law professor at St. John’s University, tells The New York Times. The order is "likely not going to be upheld by a court.”
Bloomberg/Getty Social feud Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey spar over speech
Big in the Bay, big in the Beltway: Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter chief Jack Dorsey traded thinly veiled shots at one another yesterday over their companies' contrasting approaches to President Trump's false statements.
• The big picture: The two social media chiefs have been at the forefront of the ongoing debate over big tech's role in policing speech. With this new tiff, the two executives are drawing lines in the sand.
During an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Zuckerberg criticized Dorsey's decision to fact-check President Trump's false claims about the 2020 election and mail-in ballots:
• "We have a different policy than Twitter on this," Zuckerberg said. "I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. ... Private companies... shouldn't be in the position of doing that."
Dorsey responded Wednesday night:
• "We’ll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally," the Twitter chief wrote. "This does not make us an 'arbiter of truth.' Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves."
What's next: Andrew Ross Sorkin will interview Zuckerberg this morning on CNBC's Squawk Box.
💸 How to spend it 💸
Big in the Bay: Reid Hoffman, Dustin Moskovitz, Laurene Powell Jobs, Eric Schmidt and other Silicon Valley Democrats are spending tens of millions of dollars to help Joe Biden defeat President Trump in November, Recode's Teddy Schleifer reports.
• The big picture: Their efforts "are poised to make them some of the country’s most influential people when it comes to shaping the November results."
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Maxing out John Stankey has launched HBO Max. How'd it go?
Streaming wars: Two years after AT&T's $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner, the telecom giant has finally launched HBO Max and made its entry into the Hollywood streaming wars.
• The big picture: 24 hours in, the general consensus is that the catalogue is strong, but the originals are few.
The good, via Variety's Caroline Framke: "The HBO Max interface is impressively user friendly. It has a solid search function and several 'hubs' with more in-depth catalogs. ... While there are some originals available... this service... is all about the depth of its library."
The bad, via Verge's Joshua Rivera: HBO Max has "an absolutely stuffed back catalog of terrific TV and movies... But the more you dig, the more you find strange holes in the library — and the more you realize it’s not really clear what HBO Max is supposed to offer."
• To which I would add: "Holes in the library" is actually a feature, not a bug. Streaming services need subscribers to pay every month. If your primary asset is a catalogue, rather than new originals, you need to keep rotating what's on offer to keep people engaged.
On/and: There's also confusion among existing HBO subscribers over how to access the service. Those who subscribe through traditional provides like Comcast can make the switch; Amazon and Roku users cannot. (NYT's Ed Lee has a handy guide.)
Bloomberg/Getty Layoff watch Shari Redstone makes cuts at CBS Entertainment, News
Moving Midtown: Shari Redstone has started yet another round of layoffs at ViacomCBS as the two companies continue their post-merger integration. The cuts will primarily affect the CBS news, entertainment, sports and studios divisions.
• In a statement, a CBS spokesperson attributed the cuts to the integration with Viacom as well as the need to "adapt to changes in our business, including those related to COVID-19."
The big picture: Nearly every media company has been forced to cut cost amid the pandemic, but those cuts are particularly acute at ViacomCBS, given it was already looking to reduce staff in the wake of its merger late last year.
Jim Bennett/Getty iHollywood Eddy Cue lands Scorcese and Apple's biggest film yet
Talk of Tinseltown: "Apple has nabbed director Martin Scorsese’s next film, 'Killers of the Flower Moon,' starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro," WSJ's Joe Flint and R.T. Watson report.
• The big picture: "The project will be Apple’s biggest foray into film yet as it beat out other interested companies, including Netflix, which produced Mr. Scorsese’s last film."
• "The film will be labeled an Apple Original Film, and Paramount Pictures, which was the original home for the movie, will distribute the movie theatrically."
• "This is the second major movie acquisition Apple has made in recent days. It also acquired 'Greyhound,' a Tom Hanks World War II movie that previously was at Sony Pictures."
The backstory: "Paramount Pictures, a unit of ViacomCBS, had both creative and financial issues with the movie, whose budget ballooned to more than $200 million, according to a person with knowledge of the situation."
📚 What's next: Summer of Snap. The Los Angeles Unified School District has partnered with Snapchat to create "The A-List Book Club," a celebrity-backed summer reading list for students.
See you tomorrow.
Follow Dylan Byers
Follow Ahiza García-Hodges
Get the NBC News Mobile App 
|
