Welcome to the TechMeme Right Home for Wednesday, January 8th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Tons and tons of controversy and fallout from Meta's announced content moderation changes yesterday.

I've got what I think is a fair comprehensive rundown of all the angles.

Interesting new rounds for Blue Sky and Anthropic, and the coolest

stuff I've seen from CES thus far, including are rollable laptop screens finally ready for prime time?

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

So, Meta's decision to change its content moderation processes announced yesterday caused a whole lot of controversy.

If you checked tech meme this morning, like half the page was made up of articles talking about this.

Employees inside META have apparently been sounding off internally.

Lots of criticism from outside as well, like META's fact-checking partners,

PolitiFact and fact-check.org, saying

they had no role in deciding what the company did with the fact-checked content that they provided,

denying Meta's claim that Meta had no control over the moderation. And other fact-checking

partners, including USA Today, say they were blindsided by META's decision to drop them and reject

claims of being too politically biased. Now, a lot of the controversy stems from speculation that

these moves were made to curry favor with the incoming administration. In fact, yesterday

Donald Trump said, meta has, quote, come a long way after the company announced it will end

its fact-checking program, and that meta's, quote, come a long way after the company announced it will end its fact-checking

program, and that meta's, quote, presentation was excellent. But a taste of this controversy,

the verge is reporting that meta is dropping fact-checking after incoming FCC head Brendan Carr

threatened it over such practices. Quote, Trump's FCC chairman pick and current FCC

Commissioner Brendan Carr is a self-identified free speech defender with a creative

...