An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After years of building political pressure for antitrust scrutiny of major tech companies, this month Congress and the US government delivered. The House Antitrust Subcommittee released a report accusing Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook of monopolistic behavior. The Department of Justice filed a complaint against Google alleging the company prevents consumers from sampling other search engines. The new fervor for tech antitrust has so far overlooked an equally obvious target: US broadband providers. "If you want to talk about a history of using gatekeeper power to harm competitors, there are few better examples," says Gigi Sohn, a fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy. Sohn and other critics of the four companies that dominate US broadband -- Verizon, Comcast, Charter Communications, and AT&T -- argue that antitrust intervention has been needed for years to lower prices and widen Internet access. Analysis by Microsoft last year concluded that as many as 162.8 million Americans do not use the Internet at broadband speeds (as many as 42.8 million lack meaningful broadband), and New America's Open Technology Institute recently found that US consumers pay, on average, more than those in Europe, Asia, or elsewhere in North America.

The Department of Justice complaint against Google argues that the company's payments to Apple to set its search engine as the default on the iPhone make it too onerous for consumers to choose a competing search provider. For tens of millions of Americans, changing broadband providers is even more difficult -- it requires moving. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which promotes community broadband projects, recently estimated from Federal Communications Commission data that some 80 million Americans can only get high-speed broadband service from one provider. "That is quite intentional on the part of cable operators," says Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School. "These companies are extracting rent from Americans based on their monopoly positions." The United States has suffered, and broken up, telecom monopolies in the past. AT&T had a government-sanctioned monopoly for much of the 20th century, until it was broken up in 1984. The 1996 Telecom Act included rules for phone providers aimed at encouraging competition, but it excluded "information services," leaving broadband companies freer rein. The White House and Congress will both need to act in order to make US broadband more competitive. "Options worth considering include reversing some of the acquisitions that turned Comcast and others into nation-spanning giants and mandating that companies allow competitors to use their networks, as is common in Europe, [says Joshua Stager, a senior policy counsel at New America's Open Technology Institute.]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg Law: The Federal Communications Commission is poised to delay $9 billion in rural 5G subsidies for 18 to 24 months so it can fix mapping flaws that bar the agency from determining which areas need the service. The holdup is the most recent delay in the FCC's nine-year effort to pay wireless carriers to expand service to remote areas that otherwise are too unprofitable to serve. The FCC scrapped a similar subsidy effort last year, after it found carriers' maps exaggerated existing coverage areas, meaning locations that needed the subsidies wouldn't have gotten them.

The commission plans to vote Oct. 27 on an order that would create the new $9 billion effort to replace the program it scrapped. Under the order, however, the agency would wait to award funds until it evaluates new data it's collecting on rural service locations. The replacement 5G program would distribute twice as many funds as its predecessor. As in the earlier effort, the subsidies would come from the agency's Universal Service Fund, which is raised from monthly fees on consumers' phone bills. It will likely take until at least mid-2022 for the FCC to collect the data, putting the commission on track to start awarding the funding to carriers later that year. That timeline assumes Congress appropriates the $65 million needed to fund the initiative next year, though there is bipartisan support to do so.

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors: Here's one of the weirdest aspects of Tuesday's iPhone launch event: Apple has been less than forthright about the real prices of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini. At the event, Apple referred to these products as starting at $699 (iPhone 12 mini) and $799 (iPhone 12), but those prices are not actually accurate unless you slap a big asterisk on there. (As Apple does on its marketing pages, because it must.) Here's what's actually happening, at least in the U.S.: Apple has cut deals with AT&T and Verizon that give existing customers of those carriers $30 off their purchases. The actual prices of the two models are $729 and $829, and that's what you'll pay if you're a U.S. subscriber to Sprint, T-Mobile, any smaller pay-as-you-go carriers, or if you want to buy a SIM-free model with no carrier connection at all. (The 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max are the same price on all carriers.) It's embarrassing that Apple is hiding the real price of the iPhone 12.

Virginia's voter-registration website went offline Tuesday on the state's last day to register before the Nov. 3 election, in what officials attributed to an accidental cutting of a fiber-optic cable. From a report: The Virginia Information Technologies Agency said that the Verizon cable was inadvertently struck during work for a roadside utilities project and that several agencies were affected. The Virginia Department of Elections didn't immediately respond to a request asking if the deadline to register, originally set for the end of Tuesday, would be extended once service was restored. Voters can also register using a paper application. In recent weeks, voter-registration websites in Florida and Pennsylvania, both considered potentially decisive swing states for the presidential election, crashed due, officials said, to glitches. Florida extended the deadline to register to vote after its registration website malfunctioned. The state's secretary of state cited unprecedented traffic to the site as the cause.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: T-Mobile US CEO Mike Sievert yesterday fired back at AT&T and Verizon, saying the carriers' complaints about T-Mobile obtaining more spectrum licenses show that they are afraid of competition. "The duopolists are scrambling to block this new competition any way they can... Suddenly in the unfamiliar position of not having a dominant stranglehold on the wireless market, and preferring not to meet the competitive challenge in the marketplace, AT&T and Verizon are urging the FCC to slow T-Mobile down and choke off our ability to compete fairly for added radio spectrum," Sievert wrote in a blog post. As we wrote Monday, Verizon and AT&T have urged the Federal Communications Commission to impose limits on T-Mobile's ability to obtain more spectrum licenses. AT&T complained that T-Mobile's acquisition of Sprint allowed it to amass "an unprecedented concentration of spectrum."

Verizon has the most spectrum of any US carrier "by far" but "has the anti-competitive instincts and sheer audacity to complain that a much smaller T-Mobile has too much," Sievert wrote. "After holding massive spectrum advantages over T-Mobile and others for decades, Verizon and AT&T just can't stand the idea of anyone else being ahead of them or having a fair shot in an auction where they plan to use their financial might to do what they have always done -- dominate." Sievert also wrote that the 600MHz spectrum T-Mobile is leasing was previously controlled by AT&T. "AT&T had won at auction the spectrum that Columbia Capital is now leasing to T-Mobile and -- guess what -- AT&T decided it didn't want it and sold it to Columbia," Sievert wrote. "Verizon, the ringleader in opposing this lease, never bothered to even show up and bid for any 600MHz spectrum. In short, we have AT&T and Verizon seeking to block T-Mobile from using spectrum that AT&T decided to jettison, and Verizon had no interest in pursuing. Now both companies are seeking to block T-Mobile from putting this spectrum to use for the benefit of American consumers."

Intel today announced the launch of new products tailored to edge computing scenarios like digital signage, interactive kiosks, medical devices, and health care service robots. From a report: The 11th Gen Intel Core Processors, Atom x6000E Series, Pentium, Celeron N, and J Series bring new AI security, functional safety, and real-time capabilities to edge customers, the chipmaker says, laying the groundwork for innovative future applications. Intel expects the edge market to be a $65 billion silicon opportunity by 2024. The company's own revenue in the space grew more than 20% to $9.5 billion in 2018. And according to a 2020 IDC report, up to 70% of all enterprises will process data at the edge within three years. To date, Intel claims to have cultivated an ecosystem of more than 1,200 partners, including Accenture, Bosch, ExxonMobil, Philips, Verizon, and ViewSonic, with over 15,000 end customer deployments across "nearly every industry."

The 11th Gen Core processors -- which Intel previewed in early September -- are enhanced for internet of things (IoT) use cases requiring high-speed processing, computer vision, and low-latency deterministic processing, the company says. They bring an up to 23% performance gain in single-threaded workloads, a 19% performance gain in multithreaded workloads, and an up to 2.95 times performance gain in graphics workloads versus the previous generation. New dual video decode boxes allow the processors to ingest up to 40 simultaneous video streams at 1080p up to 30 frames per second and output four channels of 4K or two channels of 8K video. According to Intel, the combination of the 11th Gen's SuperFin process improvements, miscellaneous architectural enhancements, and Intel's OpenVINO software optimizations translates to 50% faster inferences per second compared with the previous 8th Gen processor using CPU mode or up to 90% faster inferences using the processors' GPU-accelerated mode.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T and Verizon are worried about T-Mobile's vast spectrum holdings and have asked the Federal Communications Commission to impose limits on the carrier's ability to obtain more spectrum licenses. Verizon kicked things off in August when it petitioned the FCC to reconsider its acceptance of a new lease that would give T-Mobile another 10MHz to 30MHz of spectrum in the 600MHz band in 204 counties. AT&T followed that up on Friday with a filing that supports many of the points made in Verizon's petition. T-Mobile was once the smallest of four national carriers and complained that it didn't have enough low-band spectrum to match AT&T and Verizon's superior coverage. But T-Mobile surged past Sprint in recent years and then bought the company, making T-Mobile one of three big nationwide carriers along with AT&T and Verizon. T-Mobile also bolstered its low-band spectrum holdings by dominating a 600MHz auction in 2017.

"The combination of Sprint and T-Mobile has resulted in an unprecedented concentration of spectrum in the hands of one carrier," AT&T wrote in its filing to the FCC on Friday. "In fact, the combined company exceeds the Commission's spectrum screen, often by a wide margin, in Cellular Market Areas representing 82 percent of the US population, including all major markets." T-Mobile's large spectrum holdings demand "changes in how the Commission addresses additional acquisitions of spectrum by that carrier," AT&T said in another part of the filing. AT&T also posted a blog on the topic, saying that "Additional spectrum leases with Dish will cause T-Mobile to exceed the 250MHz screen by as much as 136MHz." Officially, AT&T said it "takes no position on whether T-Mobile's lease applications were properly accepted by the FCC," but the company said that the FCC "should provide an explanation of why it permitted T-Mobile to further exceed the spectrum screen." "The Commission's failure to issue a written order in a transaction allowing spectrum aggregation in excess of the screen to this degree is highly unusual... Moreover, without a written order explaining its analysis, there is no evidence that the Commission has carefully attempted to evaluate the potential for competitive harm," AT&T wrote.

Verizon, the largest wireless network in the U.S., has acquired Tracfone, the largest mobile virtual network operator. The Verge reports: Tracfone is the largest reseller of wireless services in the US, with 21 million subscribers, around 850 employees, and a network of more than 90,000 retail locations. It's owned by Mexico-based America Movil, and along with the Tracfone brand, operates the Net10 and Straight Talk brands in the US. More than 13 million Tracfone customers already rely on Verizon's wireless network; Tracfone doesn't run its own physical network in the US and instead rides on other cellphone carriers' systems for a fee.

The acquisition gives Verizon a bigger foothold in the value and low-income wireless segments. Verizon says it will continue to offer Tracfone's Lifeline service, which allows qualifying customers to receive free phones and free monthly minutes, and StraightTalk, which offers prepaid, no-contract service phone plans. The deal will include $3.125 billion of cash and $3.125 billion in Verizon common stock. Tracfone could also receive an additional $650 million cash payment tied to performance measures. It's expected to close in the second half of 2021.

According to Engadget, Motorola's brand-new Razr sports an improved design, support for 5G, and corrects many of the issues the first model was notorious for. Chris Velazco writes: Motorola was always clear that the Razr is a "design-first" device, and it went to great lengths to recreate the visual vibe that its classic flip phones ran with for its first foldable. To pack some much-needed extras into this new model, though, Motorola had to make some changes: The new Razr is a little chubbier, and a features a "chin" that's a bit less prominent than the original's. Personally, these changes are enough to make the Razr just a little less visually striking, but they're worth it when you consider what Motorola could pack in here as a result.

For one, Motorola squeezed a better camera into the Razr's top half. My biggest gripe with the original Razr's 16-megapixel rear shooter wasn't that it was bad, per se -- it just wasn't great compared to every other camera you'd find in a similarly priced phone. In response, Motorola chose a 48-megapixel camera for this new model, which should improve photo quality substantially. The somewhat pokey Snapdragon 710 found in the first Razr also is gone, replaced here by a more modern Snapdragon 765G and 8GB of RAM. As I said, we're not working with flagship power here, but the new Razr has everything it needs to run much more smoothly this time around.

By now, it might sound like Motorola has improved this new Razr on all fronts, and that's very nearly true. There are only a few things Motorola didn't change here, like its 6.2-inch flexible internal display. It's the exact same panel they used last time, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, I was still hoping a second-gen Razr screen would run at a resolution higher than 876 x 2,142. Maybe more curious is the fact that, in the United States anyway, Motorola just plans to call this phone the "Razr," and doesn't plan to differentiate it from the Verizon-only model it released earlier this year. "[I]t's still not a flagship phone, and at $1400 we're not sure it's a great deal either," Velazco says. "But for people who want an extremely pocket-friendly foldable that's also usable while closed, Motorola just might be on the right track."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T smartphone users who see their network indicators switch from "4G" to "5G" shouldn't necessarily expect that they're about to get faster speeds. In PCMag's annual mobile-network testing, released today, 5G phones connected to AT&T got slower speeds than 4G phones in 21 out of 22 cities. PCMag concluded that "AT&T 5G right now appears to be essentially worthless," though AT&T's average download speed of 103.1Mbps was nearly as good as Verizon's thanks to a strong 4G performance. Of course, AT&T 5G should be faster than 4G in the long run -- this isn't another case of AT&T misleadingly labeling its 4G network as a type of 5G. Instead, the disappointing result on PCMag's test has to do with how today's 5G phones work and with how AT&T allocates spectrum.

The counterintuitive result doesn't reveal much about the actual differences between 4G and 5G technology. Instead, it's reflective of how AT&T has used its spectrum to deploy 5G so far. As PCMag explained, "AT&T's 5G slices off a narrow bit of the old 850MHz cellular band and assigns it to 5G, to give phones a valid 5G icon without increasing performance. And because of the way current 5G phones work, it often reduces performance. AT&T's 4G network benefits from the aggregation of channels from different frequencies. "The most recent phones are able to assemble up to seven of them -- that's called seven-carrier aggregation, and it's why AT&T won [the PCMag tests] last year," the article said. 5G phones can't handle that yet, PCMag analyst Sascha Segan wrote: "But 5G phones can't add as many 4G channels to a 5G channel. So if they're in 5G mode, they're giving up 4G channels so they can use that extremely narrow, often 5MHz 5G channel, and the result is slower performance: faux G. For AT&T, using a 5G phone in testing was often a step backward from our 4G-only phone."

A federal appeals court upheld the Federal Communications Commission's rules that limit municipalities' ability to negotiate with telecom companies such as AT&T and Verizon that are seeking to deploy thousands of 5G antennas on city streets and neighborhoods. From a report: The ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is a blow to dozens of cities that sued the agency, claiming the FCC's 2018 rules takes away their leverage and autonomy in deciding how the telecom industry can install "small-cell" antennas to build 5G networks. The FCC maintains that its rules -- which prohibit excessive fees and permitting delays by municipal governments -- will speed up the deployment of 5G networks throughout the country by removing burdensome barriers to telecom providers. "The wind is at our backs: With the FCC's infrastructure policies now ratified by the court, along with pathbreaking spectrum auctions concluded, ongoing and to come, America is well-positioned to extend its global lead in 5G and American consumers will benefit from the next generation of wireless technologies and services," said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in a statement.

In T-Mobile's Q2 2020 earnings call today, the company says that it has surpassed AT&T in total branded customer count to become the second biggest carrier in the U.S., trailing only Verizon. PhoneDog reports: In Q2 2020, [which is the first quarter that includes Sprint following the merger of the two carriers] T-Mobile added 1.245 million customers, giving it a total subscriber count of 98.3 million. To compare, AT&T finished Q2 2020 with 93 million postpaid and prepaid customers.

T-Mo also shared some good news regarding its 5G network today. The magenta carrier's 2.5GHz mid-band 5G is now live in Atlanta, Dallas, and Washington DC. That 2.5GHz 5G coverage is also live in parts of Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, and Philadelphia. T-Mo touts that its average download speeds on 2.5GHz 5G is around 300Mbps with peak speeds of 1Gbps.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: President Trump's re-election campaign has accused Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile of "suppression of political speech" over the carriers' blocking of spam texts sent by the campaign. The fight was described Wednesday in an in-depth article by Business Insider and other reports. "The Trump campaign has been battling this month with the biggest US cellphone carriers over an effort to blast millions of cell users with texts meant to coax them to vote or donate," Business Insider wrote. "President Donald Trump's adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, didn't appreciate it when AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile blocked mass campaign texts to voters. He called the companies to complain, setting off the legal wrangling."

When contacted by Ars, a Trump campaign spokesperson said that "any effort by the carriers to restrict the campaign from contacting its supporters is suppression of political speech. Plain and simple." The Trump campaign statement also said it "stands by the compliance of its texting programs" with the US Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and Federal Communications Commission guidelines. Business Insider wrote that "the showdown got serious at the start of July when Trump's team sent a blast of texts to people who hadn't signed up for them," and "a third-party firm hired to screen such messages for the major cellphone companies blocked the texts." The article said that campaign lawyers and the carriers "are still fighting over what kinds of messages the campaign is allowed to send and what the companies have the power to stop." Politico wrote about the dispute on Monday. "People familiar with the chain of events said Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T flagged potential regulatory problems with the peer-to-peer messaging operation, which differs from robo-texting in that texts are sent individually, as opposed to a mass blast," Politico wrote. "But within Trump's orbit, the episode has further fueled suspicions that big tech companies are looking to influence the election." The Trump campaign has not explained why the texts are legal and shouldn't have been blocked. They also didn't say how many people they tried to send the texts to, or whether the texts were unsolicited or sent to people who had signed up for campaign communications.

Carriers "viewed the texts as a possible violation of federal anti-robocall laws and Federal Communications Commission rules that come with hefty fines," Business Insider reported, citing information provided by "two Republicans familiar with the effort." Trump "campaign operatives" contend that its texting "exists in a legal gray area that allows campaigns to blast cellphone users if the messages are sent manually," Business Insider also wrote.

Having launched preliminary 5G services using millimeter wave hardware in late 2018, AT&T has technically been operating a 5G network for a year and a half -- but between the "5G+" network's few connection points and extremely limited hardware support, most people in the U.S. couldn't actually use it. Today, AT&T says its low band 5G network is officially available nationwide, reaching a potential 205 million customers across 395 coverage markets. From a report: The carrier is also making 5G service available to a wider range of customers at no additional charge. On a positive note, AT&T is now the second U.S. carrier with a nationwide 5G network, joining T-Mobile, which launched a similarly large offering in December 2019 using long distance but slow low band towers. But T-Mobile's low band 5G peaks at speeds around 225Mbps, nowhere near the 2Gbps peaks seen in Verizon's all but unusably small 5G network, while promising only a 20% improvement over 4G speeds on average. AT&T's low band 5G network is expected to deliver comparable performance but is using a technology called DSS to dynamically split prior 4G spectrum between 4G and 5G phones as user demand fluctuates.

An anonymous reader quotes the Verge: Disney has significantly reduced its spending on Facebook and Instagram ads amid concerns about the social media platform's enforcement of its content policies, The Wall Street Journal reported. It joins a list of large companies that have cut back on Facebook ads as part of an effort to compel Facebook to change how it handles hate speech and misinformation on its platforms.

The monthlong #StopHateforProfit boycott organized by a coalition of civil rights organizations including the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Color of Change, and Sleeping Giants kicked off July 1st and includes companies like Hershey, Honda, Ben & Jerry's, and Verizon. Other companies not part of the formal boycott that have pulled ads from Facebook and other social platforms included Coca-Cola, Lego, Starbucks, and Unilever. And Microsoft suspended its advertising on Facebook and Instagram through August.

"Bad-actor" phone companies that profit from robocalls could be blocked by more legitimate carriers under rules approved unanimously yesterday by the Federal Communications Commission. From a report: Under the change, the FCC said carriers can block calls "from bad-actor upstream voice service providers that pass illegal or unwanted calls along to other providers, when those upstream providers have been notified but fail to take action to stop these calls." Carriers that impose this type of blocking will get a safe harbor from liability "for the unintended or inadvertent blocking of wanted calls, thus eliminating a concern that kept some companies from implementing robust robocall blocking efforts."

This expanded level of blocking -- spurred by a new law in which Congress directed the FCC to expand safe harbors -- could be implemented by companies that sell phone service directly to consumers. That includes mobile carriers Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, traditional landline companies, and VoIP providers. Carriers won't be able to block calls from just any provider. As Chairman Ajit Pai explained, the safe harbor will be available in cases when the "bad-actor" telecom has been notified by the FCC that it is carrying illegal traffic and "fails either to effectively mitigate such traffic or to implement effective measures to prevent customers from using its network to originate illegal calls."

Verizon has turned to Google Cloud's Contact Center AI to automate its customer-service phone calls and chatbot conversations. The Register reports: The Contact Center AI technology will, we're told, use natural-language recognition to transcribe on-the-fly customers as they talk down the line. This speech-to-text output will be fed into Dialogflow, a platform that parses the text and generates responses in real-time. Similarly, written conversations with online support chatbots will be processed in real-time by Google's AI. The overall aim is to allow subscribers to rant, er, complain away using natural language at the computer system, from their keyboards or over the phone, and the artificial intelligence should be able to work out what customers want, and help them out, without them having to navigate a menu or bark simple commands.

And presumably the aim is to sort out simple stuff quickly without a human operator having to come on the line and deal with it. Subscribers with trickier problems should also, we hope, be directed to a human being without having to negotiate their way through a menu or a script of irrelevant procedures. The software agents can also suggest relevant online documentation, such as information on how to view or pay a bill, based on a subscriber's request. Amusingly, if you get through to a human, or demand to speak to a person, the staffer will probably just tell you what the AI wanted to say anyway: the software will, behind the scenes, provide prompts to the call-center workers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Major Internet service providers are scheduled to end their quarantine benefits soon, once again subjecting Americans to data caps and removing protections if they are unable to pay their bills. The FCC's Keep Americans Connected Pledge is set to expire on June 30. Companies initially agreed to the pledge and rushed to add benefits. ISPs like CenturyLink, T-Mobile, Verizon, and many others said they would not discontinue service or charge late fees for those unable to pay because of the coronavirus. They also agreed to open their Wi-Fi access points for free. So far, the FCC has not publicly said that it would extend the pledge.

In some ways, ISPs face the same decision as governors in Florida and Texas: end their benefits, which encouraged users to stay home, or continue them for an indeterminate period of time. This could be the last weekend of unlimited data for Comcast Xfinity subscribers and other major ISPs. For many of those who are out of work, ISPs could begin demanding payment for outstanding broadband bills on June 30. Consumers who have been riding out the quarantine by streaming may also find that their unlimited data expires June 30. On that day AT&T, Comcast Xfinity, Mediacom, and T-Mobile are scheduled to resume normal service, and once again impose data caps. Some ISPs, like Cox, have already terminated some benefits, as its temporary unlimited data program expired in May.

Some of America's biggest brands — Coca-Cola, The Hershey Company and the Levi Strauss & Co. — "are among the latest in pledging to halt advertising on Facebook as part of a growing boycott," reports USA Today: Despite Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlining several steps the social network will take to combat hate speech ahead of the 2020 presidential election Friday, the companies joined Unilever, Honda, Verizon and others in the protest... Jen Sey, chief marketing officer of Levi's, said in a statement late Friday the company was pausing all paid Facebook and Instagram advertising globally at least through the end of July across all of its brands. "When we re-engage will depend on Facebook's response," Sey said. The ad boycott on Facebook focuses on advertising for the month of July and also includes Eddie Bauer and Ben & Jerry's... Patagonia, REI, Mozilla and Upwork in addition to about 100 smaller companies also have said they are committed.

Nearly all of the social media company's revenue comes from advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Shares of Facebook dropped more than 8% on Friday.
Business Insider notes that the 8% drop in Facebook's stock price meant that Mark Zuckerberg's fortune dropped $7.21 billion in a single day.

And then Sunday Starbucks announced they were also taking action, suspending advertising on all social media because "we believe both business leaders and policy makers need to come together to affect real change."

UPDATE: It's also now being reported that even Pepsi is joining the boycott.

As advertisers pull away from Facebook to protest the social networking giant's hands-off approach to misinformation and hate speech, the company is instituting a number of stronger policies to woo them back. From a report: In a livestreamed segment of the company's weekly all-hands meeting, CEO Mark Zuckerberg recapped some of the steps Facebook is already taking, and announced new measures to fight voter suppression and misinformation -- although they amount to things that other social media platforms like Twitter have already enacted and enforced in more aggressive ways.

At the heart of the policy changes is an admission that the company will continue to allow politicians and public figures to disseminate hate speech that does, in fact, violate the Facebook's own guidelines -- but it will add a label to denote they're remaining on the platform because of their "newsworthy" nature. It's a watered down version of the more muscular stance that Twitter has taken to limit the ability of its network to amplify hate speech or statements that incite violence. [...] Zuckerberg's remarks came days of advertisers -- most recently Unilever and Verizon -- announced that they're going to pull their money from Facebook as part the #StopHateforProfit campaign organized by civil rights groups.