Week in Review

Acquisitions

  • In a move meant to grow its e-commerce business, Facebook Inc. said it plans to acquire Kustomer in a deal that two people with knowledge of the talks said values the New York-based customer relationship management startup at close to $1 billion, though the move would be subject to regulatory approval. 
  • Salesforce.com Inc. said it has reached a $27.7 billion deal to acquire Slack Technologies Inc. in a cash-and-stock transaction that will be the company’s largest acquisition ever and position it to better compete with its significantly bigger rival Microsoft Corp., which has its own Slack-esque chat functionality as part of its Teams software suite.

Facebook

  • Facebook’s independent Oversight Board has selected its first six cases of removed content to review after considering more than 20,000 submissions, with the chosen ones covering a range of issues that marked the posts for deletion, including reported violations of hate speech, violence and nudity rules. After the board arrives at a decision on a case, Facebook, which said it is focused on issues that have “the potential to affect lots of users” globally, will have up to 90 days to act on the ruling. 
  • The Justice Department sued Facebook, alleging in a 17-page complaint that the social media company’s advertising for at least 2,600 positions between 2018 and 2019 that were eventually filled by H-1B visa workers was insufficient to ensure that Facebook had adequately searched for a U.S. employee to fill the posts before choosing to sponsor foreign professionals. 
  • Facebook failed to correctly apply fact-checking labels to about 60 percent of the most viral posts on the platform containing false claims about elections in Georgia ahead of next month’s Senate runoffs, according to a report from nonprofit research group Avaaz, which said the posts without a fact-checking label accounted for more than 370,000 interactions.

Elections

  • Attorney General William Barr said in an interview that the Department of Justice has found no evidence of “fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election,” noting that both the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security “haven’t seen anything to substantiate” allegations that “machines were programmed essentially to skew election results.”

Huawei

  • The Justice Department is in talks with Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies Co.’s chief financial officer, over a deal that would enable her to return to China in exchange for admitting wrongdoing related to allegedly violating U.S. sanctions on Iran on behalf of her company, according to people familiar with the matter, though some sources cautioned that Meng has not been receptive to the proposal.

Section 230

  • President Donald Trump threatened to veto an annual bill authorizing about $1 trillion in defense spending if it doesn’t include a repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, tweeting that if the “very dangerous & unfair Section 230 is not completely terminated” as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, he “will be forced to unequivocally VETO the Bill. Senate Armed Services Committee Chair James Inhofe (R-Okla.) dismissed the president’s efforts to include a repeal of Section 230 in the NDAA, saying that while he agrees with the president regarding the liability shield for tech companies, the provision “has nothing to do with the military.”

Google

  • The National Labor Relations Board said that Google likely violated labor law when it fired Laurence Berland and Kathryn Spiers, who were involved in labor organizing, for what Google said were “clear and repeated violations of our data security policies.” Berland and Spiers say that the NLRB complaint, which they were briefed on but has not been released, alleges that the company selectively enforced unlawful policies that prohibited employees from viewing internal documents and that Google surveilled workers who viewed a presentation about one effort to unionize the company’s contractors.
  • Hundreds of academics and researchers wrote an open letter expressing support for noted AI researcher Timnit Gebru, one of the few Black women in the field, and criticized Google after Gebru said that she was fired for sending an email expressing dissatisfaction with management over its hiring practices and treatment of marginalized groups and that Google had demanded she retract an AI ethics paper she co-authored that was critical of some computer language methods that Google uses in its products.

What’s Ahead

  • Both the House and Senate are scheduled to be in session.
  • The Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on Wednesday at 10 a.m. on “The Invalidation of the EU-US Privacy Shield and the Future of Transatlantic Data Flows.”
  • The Federal Communications Commission’s next open commission meeting is Thursday. Agenda items include an order to remove telecommunications equipment that poses a national security risk and an order to reconsider the agency’s previous interpretation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
  • The Senate is set to vote as early as this week on whether to approve Nathan Simington’s nomination to replace Michael O’Rielly on the FCC. Simington’s role in editing a petition to the FCC on reinterpreting Section 230 has sparked concerns from Democratic lawmakers, while a confirmation could leave the agency deadlocked at 2 Republicans and 2 Democrats when Chairman Ajit Pai steps down in January.
  • A European Union rule set to take effect Dec. 20 would prohibit the use of software that scans for sexual abuse imagery and grooming behavior from online predators, as well as restrict the monitoring of digital services such as email and messaging apps within the bloc.
  • A New York-led group of U.S. states is planning to file an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook this week, according to four people familiar with the matter, with one source saying more than 40 states are set to sign onto the action. 
  • Federal and state antitrust authorities are planning to file up to four new lawsuits before February targeting Google and Facebook over their respective dominance in search and advertising and social media, according to people familiar with the matter.

Events Calendar (All Times Local)

12/07/2020
Center for Democracy and Technology’s Future of Speech Online virtual forum 11:00 am
McAfee and The Center for Strategic & International Studies will host event on “The Hidden Costs of Cybercrime” 3:00 pm
12/08/2020
VentureBeat’s virtual event: “EVOLVE: Ensuring Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in AI”
DSI’s 2nd Annual Digital Forensics for National Security Symposium
International Institute of Communications annual Washington conference – virtual 8:00 am
Center for Democracy and Technology’s Future of Speech Online virtual forum 11:00 am
12/09/2020
VentureBeat Transform – AI in Healthcare (virtual)
DSI’s 2nd Annual Digital Forensics for National Security Symposium
International Institute of Communications annual Washington conference – virtual 8:00 am
Qualcomm’s Smart Cities Accelerate 2020 – virtual 9:00 am
Senate Commerce Committee hearing on “The Invalidation of the EU-US Privacy Shield and the Future of Transatlantic Data Flows” 10:00 am
Center for Democracy and Technology’s Future of Speech Online virtual forum 11:00 am
View full calendar

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