No More Third-Party Fact-Checking Organizations for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today, 1/7/25 that the social media company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, would stop working with third-party fact-checking organizations.  Repeating talking points long used by President-elect Donald Trump and his allies, in a video Zuckerberg said the company's content moderation approach resulted too often in "censorship".

Well we can kiss censorship goodbye folks.  Anything goes now.  We are prioritizing free speech - any speech.  

Seriously, What Does Metaverse Mean?

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Mentally replace the phrase “the metaverse” in a sentence with “cyberspace.”  That's what the folks at Wired magazine wants you to do.

Ninety percent of the time, the meaning won't substantially change. That's because the term doesn't really refer to any one specific type of technology, but rather a broad (and often speculative) shift in how we interact with technology. And it's entirely possible that the term itself will eventually become just as antiquated, even as the specific technology it once described becomes commonplace. 

CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg or Satya Nadella talk about the metaverse as the future of the internet. Or it's a video game. Or maybe it's a deeply uncomfortable, worse version of Zoom?

So, with all this in mind.  Seriously, what does Metaverse mean?

Today in Global Small Business: Staying Apart to Stay Healthy

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What's affecting me, my clients, my colleagues and other global small business owners:

• Visit The World Bank website to see what they are doing to treat – sustain economies and protect jobs – during the COVID-19 outbreak.
• Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are working together to fund research for COVID-19 treatments as the pandemic continues to spread.
• Quote of the week relating to the COVID-19 outbreak: “It’s very tough to say to people, ‘Hey keep going to restaurants, go buy new houses, ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner, we want you to keep spending because there’s some politician that thinks GDP growth is what counts,’” Gates said. “It’s hard to tell people during an epidemic … that they should go about things knowing their activity is spreading this disease." – Bill Gates
• New OECD outlook on the global economy.
• A national defining moment – what historians will say about COVID-19.
• Staying apart to stay healthy during the COVID-19 crisis.

I Wasn't Trying to Build a Global Company

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In a recent opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "I wasn't trying to build a global company."

Instead, he just realized you could find almost anything on the internet—music, books, information—except the thing that matters most: people.

And that was the beginning of Facebook (2004), which currently has more than 2.7 billion monthly users worldwide (Q3 2018, most recent report available).

Learn more about Mark Zuckerberg's business model and read the opinion piece here.

Today in Global Small Business: The Rise of the Global Small Business

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What's affecting me, my clients, my colleagues and other global small business owners:

• What is neural machine translation and what is it used for?
• Want to source a product but don't know how?  Start here (free webinar 6/7).
• Mark Zuckerberg's speech for Harvard's Class of 2017 (listen).
• Mark Zuckerberg and how he should listen to himself (via Wired).
• Can we make the world safe for diversity?
• The rise of the global small business (GSB) and authored in 2011.

Happy Memorial Day.

Bringing Global Attention to Egypt’s Growing Technology and Entrepreneurship Ecosystem

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Egyptian entrepreneur Mai Medhat, founder of the Eventtus online platform, got to sit on stage with US President Obama and Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) held recently in Silicon Valley. Why?

Find out here:  Egyptian Entrepreneur Mai Medhat:  'I Dreamt Big From Day One'

But we cannot contain ourselves by holding back on Mai's comment:

“I did not imagine that one day I would have a discussion with the US president, but from day one I dreamt big and that my company would become global,” she said in an interview with the Egyptian Mail newspaper.

Bringing Internet Access to Everyone in the World

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The big, bold solution:  "How to deliver basic internet services to everyone by working to decrease the costs of connectivity, building more efficient services that use less data, and by partnering with mobile operators on new models for access that can help the industry grow while also bringing more people onto the internet." - Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, on the challenges and opportunities of a new generation of connectivity platforms.

Read the paper:  Connecting the World From the Sky

Projects:  Internet.org

On the Biggest Day in IPO History, Wear Your Best Hooded Sweatshirt

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All eyes will be on the Facebook IPO.  I think it will hit U.S. $150 billion.  What do you think?

Facebook IPO:  Everything You Need to Know

Posted by:  The Global Small Business Blog