Of course, officially it is not an invasion. Russia recognized to so-called Ukraine rebel regions Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states. Consequently, Russian president Vladimir Putin has ordered Russian troops to “maintain peace” in these two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine. In two official decrees, Putin on Monday instructed the country’s defense ministry to assume “the function of maintaining peace” in the eastern regions.
Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, has lost more than half a trillion dollars in market value since its August 2021 peak. Half of that vaporized in a single day, the biggest drop ever in the global stock exchange history. Once the sixth-largest company in the world by market capitalization, Meta has fallen out of the top ten, replaced by two computer-chip makers, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and the Chinese e-commerce company Tencent.
Social media is a powerful marketing tool, and influencers are the name of the game. The best influencers on Instagram and TikTok earn millions. Regulated financial institutions and scammers deploy influencers to chase after clients and victims, respectively. Lately, the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has taken action against Freetrade (www.freetrade.io) and ordered the regulated broker to remove all paid-for sponsored influencer advertisements and posts across all social media platforms.
Meta Platforms saw its stock market value slump by more than $230B last week. A record daily loss for a US firm. Its shares fell 26.4% after quarterly figures disappointed investors. Meta also said that Facebook's daily active users (DAUs) had dropped for the first time in its 18-year history and fell to 1.929B in the three months to the end of December, compared to 1.930B in the previous quarter.
In December 2020, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sought to break up Meta and to unwind acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Unfortunately, Judge James E. Boasberg found that FTC had not plausibly supported its case, and thus could not proceed. Under the new chair Lina Khan FTC re-filed with more evidence and now the case has been approved for trial. But now TikTok is the new champion. In 2021, it was the most visited website in the world.
We have all done it. When we had physical or mental problems, we confidently turned to Dr. Google for a diagnosis. The huge database behind Dr. Google should theoretically enable them to make the most accurate diagnoses. But only theoretically. In addition to data, training is also needed to make a diagnosis. Increasingly, the young cyberspace generation is turning to TikTok for diagnoses, reports Julie Jargon in the WSJ.