Meta Layoffs Halt Development on Facebook Fact-Checking Project (Report)

An undisclosed number of the company’s 17,000 employees will be let go and certain game projects will be paused or outright terminated, along with other efficiency and overhead-reduction efforts that will take place in phases between now and March 2024, Wingefors said Tuesday.Embracer published an open letter explaining the news alongside a standard press release.“I am asking all our managers to lead and act with compassion, respect, and integrity,” Wingefors wrote in the open letter, following the layoff announcement. “Throughout each phase and wherever possible, we will work to ensure that affected team members receive information first.

Layoffs and closures are imminent at Lord of the Rings IP owner Embracer Group as the Swedish outfit unveils a restructure that will focus on “cost savings, capital allocation, efficiency and consolidation.”

The Information. An interim rule by the Department of Defense, NASA, and the General Services Administration, established last week, prohibits contracts necessitating TikTok use.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Apple this week announced Vision Pro, its augmented-reality and VR headset priced at a cool $3,500, seven times the price of Meta’s upcoming Quest 3 headset. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, apparently, was not blown away by the Apple reveal. “From what I’ve seen initially, I’d say the good news is that there’s no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws and physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of,” Zuckerberg told employees at an all-hands meeting Thursday, per a report by the Verge. Apple’s Vision Pro will use a higher-resolution display than Meta’s Quest 3, Zuckerberg noted. The Vision Pro will deliver 23 million pixels across two displays, more pixels for each eye than a 4K TV. However, with the high-end display “and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more” than a Quest 3, slated to ship in the fall of 2023, and “requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design tradeoff and it might make sense for the cases that they’re going for,” Zuckerberg said.

scathing open letter to the newspaper’s management over its plans to lay off dozens of editorial staff without advance notice. “The company has blindsided us with proposed layoffs — which we will begin bargaining over today — and [executive editor] Kevin Merida and newsroom leadership initially only planned to speak with us on Monday, five long days after announcing their intention to upend many of our lives. This is deeply insulting,” the letter reads.

BBC Breakfast was thrown into chaos on Thursday morning as television host Naga Munchetty had to put a halt to the programme to check on the safety of her co-star during a live interview.

in the email. “Collectively, we have done a vast amount of work as a company to meet the budget and revenue challenges head on. But that work will need acceleration and we will need more radical transformation in the newsroom for us to become a self-sustaining enterprise.”The company restructuring will get rid of 74 roles, with 500 people remaining according to spokeswoman Hillary Manning, who told the New York Times.Reporting positions will remain intact, but other full-time and temporary workers will be cut.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor The Los Angeles Times, facing declining ad revenue and readership, is eliminating 74 editorial jobs, representing about 13% of the total newsroom staff. Staffers at the paper learned of the cut in a memo sent Wednesday from executive editor Kevin Merida, wrote wrote that the decision was “made more urgent by the economic climate and the unique challenges of our industry, the L.A. Times reported. The L.A. Times Guild, an affiliate of Media Guild of the West, issued a statement that it was “outraged” by the job cuts and that it was “blindsided by this news.” “We are outraged by management’s announcement this morning that it plans to lay off 57 Guild members across several departments, amounting to roughly 15% of our entire newsroom membership, including several Guild leaders,” Reed Johnson, LAT Guild Unit council chair, said in a statement. “This list of targeted layoffs is not final. Under our contract, management is required to bargain with the Guild over proposed layoffs. Management also so far has failed to offer buyouts to staff as is required by our contract.”

Among the layoffs that took place at the Walt Disney Company were job cuts at Pixar that included the director and producer of Lightyear, Deadline has confirmed.

Canadian Press Thursday. The blocks, which the company says will last through the month of June, are the test version of a program Meta is threatening to make permanent if Canadian Bill C-18, known as the Online News Act, becomes law. The act would require large tech companies like Meta to pay publishers for linking to or otherwise repurposing their content online.

March, after the company’s analysis “suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely.” He encouraged staffers to “find more opportunities to work with your colleagues in person” at the time.One Twitter user’s reaction to the new mandate mocked the company’s now abandoned metaverse: “Can they send their avatars?”The Information first reported the story.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Meta — still trying to make the metaverse happen — unveiled its next-generation VR and mixed-reality headset, the Meta Quest 3, which will ship this fall for a price point starting at $500. Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg announced the Quest 3 in an Instagram post Thursday. The headset is “the first mainstream headset with high-res color mixed reality” capabilities, according to Zuckerberg. It’s 40% thinner than the Quest 2 and “more comfortable” than its predecessor, he added. Meta’s announcement comes ahead of Apple’s 2023 Worldwide Developers Conference next week, where Apple is expected to introduce its own mixed-reality headset.

pic.twitter.com/ssgk1vSryBThe bill in question would require sites such as Facebook to pay a fee to news providers in exchange for those providers’ work appearing on the platforms. Said platforms’ existing setup is largely predicated on news providers voluntarily posting rather than expecting payment for providing content.Meta argued the bill won’t serve its supposed purpose and will aid out-of-state companies, essentially positing that the bill is misguided and not worthy of Meta’s cooperation.

Jessica Kiang Director Kim Ki-yeol (Song Kang-ho) only needs two more days of reshoots to craft a new ending to his latest film, and it will no longer be the trashy potboiler everyone thought he was making. It will be, he declares frequently, “A masterpiece!” Director Kim Jee-woon does not seem to harbor similar aspirations for his meta-movie “Cobweb” — his loosest, least substantial and most slapdash film in quite some time — though it’s safe to say the gulf between it and masterpiece status is a little wider than a two-day reshoot could possibly bridge. A film containing another film; a filmmaker referring to the trials of a filmmaker: It’s a movie of many layers, all of them garish and goofy, none of them great.

Having previously won the Palme d’Or in 2001 for “The Son’s Room” and premiered the majority of his films in competition, Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti has been a mainstay at the Cannes Film Festival for several decades.

EXCLUSIVE: The layoffs impacting thousands of Disney staff in the U.S. have spread to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Developers behind controversial plans for a £40million tourist resort in Balloch have rubbished claims that new planning laws will put a halt to the plans.

Shutterstock is said today it’s buying Gipy from Meta Platforms for $53 million in cash with the deal expected to close in June.

said in a statement that Giphy draws more than 1.3 billion searches a day, and its memes and short videos generate more than 15 billion daily impressions. “Giphy’s content serves as a critical ingredient in text- and message-based conversations on platforms such as Meta, other social media platforms such as TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat and team collaboration platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, in addition to integrations with most mobile devices,” the company said.Meta inked an agreement with Shutterstock to ensure that Giphy content could be used across its platforms, the statement said.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Meta is offloading Giphy — which maintains the world’s biggest database of animated GIFs — to content marketplace company Shutterstock. Shutterstock is paying $53 million for Giphy. Three years ago, Meta (then Facebook) bought Giphy for $400 million. However, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) ruled that Meta’s acquisition of Giphy was anti-competitive — and last fall ordered Meta to sell Giphy. As part of the deal, Meta is entering into an API agreement with Shutterstock to ensure continued access to Giphy’s content across Meta’s platform. The sale is expected to close in June 2023, subject to usual closing conditions.