Mark Zuckerberg’s election-season gift to Republicans
CNN
Mark Zuckerberg is handing Republicans political victories ahead of the 2024 presidential election, acquiescing to years of GOP grievances over his company’s policies.
Mark Zuckerberg is handing Republicans political victories ahead of the 2024 presidential election, acquiescing to years of GOP grievances over his company’s policies. In recent days, the Meta chief executive has made newsworthy public statements implicitly supporting right-wing “censorship” narratives and offered praise for Donald Trump as “badass” – even as he claimed he wanted to appear “neutral” and nonpartisan. On Monday, Zuckerberg sent a letter to the powerful House Judiciary Committee, stating that the Biden administration had “pressured” Meta to “censor” content during the pandemic. “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg said. The Meta chief added that the pressure he felt was “wrong” and he came to “regret” that his company, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, was not more outspoken. The letter was immediately weaponized by Trump, who used it to once again promote the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
Google announced a deal Tuesday to buy rapidly growing cybersecurity firm Wiz for $32 billion. It will be the tech giant’s biggest-ever acquisition.
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Officials in Beijing and Hong Kong spoke out Tuesday against a proposal to sell ports in the Panama Canal to a consortium led by BlackRock, sending shares in the Hong Kong-based conglomerate that owns the ports plummeting.
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Hong Kong property magnate Lee Shau Kee, one of the city’s richest men, died on Monday at the age of 97, Henderson Land, the group that he founded, said in a statement.
The Trump administration filed a motion to extend two deadlines in U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel’s lawsuit against a U.S. national security panel to give the government more time to wrap up merger talks with the firms, a filing showed on Monday.
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President Donald Trump has said he doesn’t intend to create exemptions from steel and aluminum tariffs and that additional sectoral, as well as reciprocal tariffs will be imposed on April 2.