Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and YouTube announce new partnership to fight terrorism online. Also, Pandora has some CEO drama, and Tesla boosts its credit line.
Top of the Order:
Common Ground: Usually, the biggest of the big in the internet industry don’ t necessarily like working together. For example, there’s a lot of money to be made in digital advertising, and you can bet that Facebook thinks every dollar spent on ads on YouTube is a dollar that should be going into the coffers of Mark Zuckerberg & Co. These are companies that don’ t want their rivals to succeed too much.
But, even opponents can sometimes find some common ground. And on Monday, Facebook, YouTube, Microsoft and Twitter did that by laying out details about a new combined effort to fight terrorism and clamp down on terror-supporting groups online.
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Biz Break: Amazon’s Wardrobe; Tim and Trump; Instagram vs. Snapchat heats up The new initiative, called the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, calls for Facebook, Microsoft, YouTube and Twitter to “continue to make our hosted consumer services hostile to terrorists and violent extremists.”
Among the matters the four companies will put their weight behind are:
–Technologies that the members can share and implement, to detect terrorist-related content.
–Research, for building and guiding future decisions on how take down improper content.
–Knowledge-sharing, which includes sharing information with governmental agencies, companies and groups that are working on methods to crack down on terrorism-related speech, videos and other content online.
The group said it will periodically give progress reports related to identifying and removing content that supports terrorism groups.
Middle Innings:
New Tune at Pandora?: Tim Westergren, chief executive and co-founder of Pandora Media, may be about to give up his job.
On Monday, the Recode tech news site said that according to “people familiar with the company’s plans, ” Westergren will soon step aside as Pandora’s CEO and take on a different position at the Oakland-based internet radio company. Speculation that Westergren might, at some time, be out as Pandora’s boss has simmered almost since he took on the job in March 2016, due to a declining stock price and some larger shareholders calling for Pandora to explore selling itself. That speculation grew earlier in June, when Pandora sold a 19 percent stake in the company to Sirius XM for $480 million.
Bottom of the Lineup:
Credit Where Credit’s Due: You have to spend money to make money, as the old expression goes. And with big plans in the works for its Model 3 sedan, Tesla intends to spend a lot of money on the cars’ production in hopes of reaping the benefits of a successful launch of the first so-called “moderately priced” car in Tesla’s history.
Tesla has increased its credit lines by $800 million, to $1.825 billion, in order to ensure that it can spend what it needs to get the $35,000 Model 3 running when the company starts producing the first vehicles in July.
Quote of the Day: “We’ re focused on episodic shows and helping all our partners understand what works across different verticals and topics.” — Nick Grudin, Facebook’s vice president for media partnerships. Grudin was quoted in a Wall Street Journal article regarding the company reaching out to Hollywood studios about producing original programming for the social-media giant.
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