The US Justice Department and eight states sued Alphabet's Google, calling for the break up of the search giant's ad-technology business over alleged illegal monopolization of the digital advertising market. From a report: "Google abuses its monopoly power to disadvantage website publishers and advertisers who dare to use competing ad tech products in a search for higher quality, or lower cost, matches," the Justice Department said in the complaint, which was filed in federal court in Virginia. New York, California and Virginia were among the states that signed on to the complaint.

The lawsuit represents the Biden administration's first major case challenging the power of one of the nation's largest tech companies, following through on a probe that began under former President Donald Trump. It also marks one of the few times the Justice Department has called for the breakup of a major company since it dismantled the Bell telecom system in 1982. Google is the dominant player in the $278.6 billion US digital-ad market, controlling most of the technology used to buy, sell and serve online advertising. A resolution in the case could be years away. The lawsuit marks the DOJ's second antitrust suit against Google and the fifth major case in the US challenging the company's business practices.

The partisan divisions we've become used to on Capitol Hill are if anything even more stark in the new 118th Congress. But so far, there is one thing Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate seem to agree on: Ticketmaster is a problem. From a report: "In terms of their monopoly power, I'm concerned about it," Senator Josh Hawley told The New Republic in December. "I think we should look into it." Finally, the Senate is going to. Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mike Lee, the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Judiciary Committee's subcommittee that oversees antitrust issues, jointly announced a hearing for Tuesday that will be assisted by committee Chair Dick Durbin and ranking member Lindsey Graham. "I look forward to hearing more about how we got here, and identifying solutions," said Graham in a statement.

Ticketmaster has a dark history of confronting political rivals within the music industry. Pearl Jam was the last major live act to challenge the company in Congress in 1994. Pearl Jam filed a complaint with the Justice Department accusing Ticketmaster of being a monopoly. In an obscure House subcommittee, the complaint became an open airing of grievances on MTV by the band and its music industry allies against Ticketmaster CEO Fred Rosen, who, in turn, wrecked the Seattle grunge band's subsequent tours with last-minute ticketing shenanigans. The government all this time has done nothing to rein in the company. In fact, quite the opposite: In 2010, the Justice Department approved Ticketmaster's merger with Live Nation Entertainment, the company that owns the venues (and therein the concessions) where live music acts Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny perform for millions of adoring fans. For the world's biggest acts, Live Nation offers an all-in-one vendor that can pack stadiums for the artist who, in turn, doesn't have to deal with a galaxy of local players in the live events space, like venue owners, concert promoters, food and beverage vendors, public officials, and other hometown luminaries looking to dictate terms for the show.

Much ink has been spilled of late about the tremendous promise of OpenAI's ChatGPT program for generating natural-language utterances in response to human prompts. The program strikes many people as so fresh and intriguing that ChatGPT must be unique in the universe. Scholars of AI beg to differ. From a report: "In terms of underlying techniques, ChatGPT is not particularly innovative," said Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, in a small gathering of press and executives on Zoom last week. "It's nothing revolutionary, although that's the way it's perceived in the public," said LeCun. "It's just that, you know, it's well put together, it's nicely done." Such data-driven AI systems have been built in the past by many companies and research labs, said LeCun. The idea of OpenAI being alone in its type of work is inaccurate, he said.

"OpenAI is not particularly an advance compared to the other labs, at all," said LeCun. "It's not only just Google and Meta, but there are half a dozen startups that basically have very similar technology to it," added LeCun. "I don't want to say it's not rocket science, but it's really shared, there's no secret behind it, if you will." LeCun noted the many ways in which ChatGPT, and the program upon which it builds, OpenAI's GPT-3, is composed of multiple pieces of technology developed over many years by many parties. "You have to realize, ChatGPT uses Transformer architectures that are pre-trained in this self-supervised manner," observed LeCun. "Self-supervised-learning is something I've been advocating for a long time, even before OpenAI existed," he said. "Transformers is a Google invention," noted LeCun, referring to the language neural net unveiled by Google in 2017, which has become the basis for a vast array of language programs, including GPT-3. The work on such language programs goes back decades, said LeCun.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ArsTechnica: Google is still reeling from the biggest layoff in company history last Friday. Earlier cost cuts over the past six months have resulted in several projects being shut down or deprioritized at Google, and it's hard to fire 12,000 people without some additional projects taking a hit. The New York Times has a report about which divisions are being hit the hardest, and a big one is Google's future OS development group, Fuchsia. While the overall company cut 6 percent of its employees, the Times pointed out that Fuchsia saw an outsize 16 percent of the 400-person staff take a hit. While it's not clear what that means for the future of the division, the future of Fuchsia's division has never really been clear.

Fuchsia has been a continuous mystery inside Google since it first saw widespread press coverage in 2017. Google rarely officially talks about it, leaving mostly rumors and Github documentation for figuring out what's going on. The OS isn't a small project, though -- it's not even based on Linux, opting instead to use a custom, in-house kernel, so Google really is building an entire OS from scratch. Google actually ships the OS today to consumers in its Nest smart displays, where it replaced the older Cast OS. The in-place operating system swap was completely invisible to consumers compared to the old OS, came with zero benefits, and was never officially announced or promoted. There's not much you can do with it on a locked-down smart display, so even after shipping, Fuchsia is still a mystery.

The world's largest rail vehicle manufacturer has rolled out a zero-emissions train running on hydrogen fuel cells with a supercapacitor buffer. The four-car train is capable of 100 mph (160 km/h), making it the fastest hydrogen train to date. New Atlas reports: Jointly developed by state-owned industrial monolith CRRC and Chengdu Rail Transit, this is China's first hydrogen-powered passenger train, offering a range of 373 miles (600 km), and emitting nothing but water. It's capable of self-driving, with 5G communications, automatic wake-up, start and stop, and return to depot functionality. Germany is ahead on this kind of thing, with some 14 hydrogen-fueled Alstom trains already in service as of last year. The CRRC machine can beat the German trains for speed by around 20 km/h (12 mph), but the German trains currently offer a much greater range at ~620 miles (1,000 km). According to Information Trends, there are just over 1,000 hydrogen stations in the world -- one-third of them being in China.

Turnitin, best known for its anti-plagiarism software used by tens of thousands of universities and schools around the world, is building a tool to detect text generated by AI. The Register reports: Turnitin has been quietly building the software for years ever since the release of GPT-3, Annie Chechitelli, chief product officer, told The Register. The rush to give educators the capability to identify text written by humans and computers has become more intense with the launch of its more powerful successor, ChatGPT. As AI continues to progress, universities and schools need to be able to protect academic integrity now more than ever. "Speed matters. We're hearing from teachers just give us something," Chechitelli said. Turnitin hopes to launch its software in the first half of this year. "It's going to be pretty basic detection at first, and then we'll throw out subsequent quick releases that will create a workflow that's more actionable for teachers." The plan is to make the prototype free for its existing customers as the company collects data and user feedback. "At the beginning, we really just want to help the industry and help educators get their legs under them and feel more confident. And to get as much usage as we can early on; that's important to make a successful tool. Later on, we'll determine how we're going to productize it," she said.

Turnitin's VP of AI, Eric Wang, said there are obvious patterns in AI writing that computers can detect. "Even though it feels human-like to us, [machines write using] a fundamentally different mechanism. It's picking the most probable word in the most probable location, and that's a very different way of constructing language [compared] to you and I," he told The Register. [...] ChatGPT, however, doesn't have this kind of flexibility and can only generate new words based on previous sentences, he explained. Turnitin's detector works by predicting what words AI is more likely to generate in a given text snippet. "It's very bland statistically. Humans don't tend to consistently use a high probability word in high probability places, but GPT-3 does so our detector really cues in on that," he said.

Wang said Turnitin's detector is based on the same architecture as GPT-3 and described it as a miniature version of the model. "We are in many ways I would [say] fighting fire with fire. There's a detector component attached to it instead of a generate component. So what it's doing is it's reading language in the exact same way GPT-3 reads language, but instead of spitting out more language, it gives us a prediction of whether we think this passage looks like [it's from] GPT-3." The company is still deciding how best to present its detector's results to teachers using the tool. "It's a difficult challenge. How do you tell an instructor in a small amount of space what they want to see?" Chechitelli said. They might want to see a percentage that shows how much of an essay seems to be AI-written, or they might want confidence levels showing whether the detector's prediction confidence is low, medium, or high to assess accuracy. "I think there is a major shift in the way we create content and the way we work," Wang added. "Certainly that extends to the way we learn. We need to be thinking long term about how we teach. How do we learn in a world where this technology exists? I think there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Any tool that gives visibility to the use of these technologies is going to be valuable because those are the foundational building blocks of trust and transparency."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Mac: Apple's first AR/VR headset could be unveiled sometime this spring, and rumors continue to offer more information about what Apple has in the works. A wide-ranging new report from Bloomberg now offers a slew of details on Apple's "Reality Pro" headset, including that the "eye- and hand-tracking capabilities will be a major selling point" for the product. Using external cameras, the headset will be able to analyze the user's hands, while internal sensors will be used to read the user's eyes.

The report explains: "The headset will have several external cameras that can analyze a user's hands, as well as sensors within the gadget's housing to read eyes. That allows the wearer to control the device by looking at an on-screen item -- whether it's a button, app icon or list entry -- to select it. Users will then pinch their thumb and index finger together to activate the task -- without the need to hold anything. The approach differs from other headsets, which typically rely on a hand controller."

More details on the hardware of the headset include that there will be a Digital Crown similar to the Apple Watch for switching between AR and VR. The VR mode will fully immerse the wearer, but when AR mode is enabled the "content fades back and becomes surrounded by the user's real environment." This is reportedly one of the features Apple hopes will be a "highlight of the product." To address overheating concerns, the Reality Pro headset will use an external battery that "rests in a user's pocket and connects over a cable." There will also be a cooling fan to further reduce the likelihood of the headset overheating. "The headset can last about two hours per battery pack," Bloomberg reports. The battery pack is "roughly the size of two iPhone 14 Pro Maxes stacked on top of each other, or about six inches tall and more than half an inch thick." Another tidbit from the report is that the headset will be able to serve as an external display for Mac. "Users will be able to see their Mac's display in virtual reality but still control the computer with their trackpad or mouse and physical keyboard," reports Bloomberg. Apple is also "developing technology that will let users type in midair with their hands."

Additionally, FaceTime on the headset will "realistically render a user's face and full body in virtual reality."

A team of more than 1,000 people have been reportedly working on the first version of the device for the past seven years. It's slated to cost "roughly $3,000" when it debuts sometime this spring.

Google's chief executive officer told employees that cuts were made in a bid to act decisively as the company's growth slowed. From a report: In an internal meeting, Sundar Pichai, who is CEO of Google parent Alphabet, said he had consulted with the company's founders and board in making the decision for 6% cuts, according to remarks reviewed by Bloomberg. "If you don't act clearly and decisively and early, we can compound the problem and make it much worse," Pichai said. "These are decisions I needed to make." Further reading: An engineer laid off after over 16 years at Google says 'faceless' tech giants see staff as '100% disposable'.

Amazon and Stripe have signed an agreement that will see the two companies increase their use of each others' services, the companies said. Amazon plans to increase its use of Stripe's payments processing services, whereas Stripe will expand its use of Amazon Web Services.

Big banks are teaming up to launch a digital wallet that people can use to shop online. Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and four other banks are working on a new product that will allow shoppers to pay at merchants' online checkout with a wallet that will be linked to their debit and credit cards. From a report: The digital wallet will be managed by Early Warning Services, the bank-owned company that operates money-transfer service Zelle. The wallet, which doesn't have a name yet, will operate separately from Zelle, EWS said. EWS, whose owners also include Capital One, PNC Financial, U.S. Bancorp and Truist Financial, plans to begin rolling out the new offering in the second half of the year.

One goal of the new service is to compete with third-party wallet operators such as PayPal and Apple's Apple Pay, according to people familiar with the matter. Banks are worried about losing control of their customer relationships. Apple, in particular, poses a big threat. The tech giant has moved further into financial services and is working on a savings account with Goldman Sachs and a buy now, pay later offering.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this month, OpenAI said it was exploring ways to monetize its AI chatbot ChatGPT, giving users the opportunity to sign up for early access to "ChatGPT Professional." Now, some users say they've been granted access to a pro tier which costs $42 a month. OpenAI hasn't confirmed this is an official test or made any announcements. As OpenAI said earlier this month: "Please keep in mind that this is an early experimental program that is subject to change, and we are not making paid pro access generally available at this time." With that in mind, what does $42 a month get you? According to screenshots shared by users given early access, you get faster response speed, more reliable access (because ChatGPT is down a lot), and "priority access to new features" (whatever they turn out to be).

Spotify said on Monday it plans to cut 6% of its workforce and would take a related charge of up to nearly $50 million, adding to the massive layoffs in the technology sector in preparation for a possible recession. From a report: The tech industry is facing a demand downturn after two years of pandemic-powered growth during which it had hired aggressively. That has led firms from Meta to Microsoft to shed thousands of jobs. "Over the last few months we've made a considerable effort to rein in costs, but it simply hasn't been enough," Chief Executive Daniel Elk said in a blog post announcing the roughly 600 job cuts. "I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth," he added, echoing a sentiment voiced by other tech bosses in recent months. Spotify's operating expenditure grew at twice the speed of its revenue last year as the audio-streaming company aggressively poured money into its podcast business, which is more attractive for advertisers due to higher engagement levels.

Microsoft is making a multibilllion-dollar investment in OpenAI, the pioneering artificial intelligence research lab behind ChatGPT and DALL-E, as the software giant looks to more closely tie these text and image-generating programs to its offerings. From a report: The news comes less than a week after the company said it's laying off 10,000 workers as a weakening economy crimps software demand. Microsoft noted in that announcement that it will still invest and hire in key priority areas. The software maker reports fiscal second-quarter earnings on Tuesday. Microsoft, which plowed $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019, is seeking an inside edge on some of the most popular and advanced artificial intelligence systems as it competes with Alphabet, Amazon and Meta Platforms to dominate the fast-growing industry. OpenAI needs Microsoft funding and cloud-computing power to crunch massive volumes of data and run the increasingly complex models that allow DALL-E to generate realistic images based on a handful of words, and ChatGPT to create astonishingly human-like conversational text in response to prompts or queries.

Ken Griffin's Citadel made $16bn profit for investors last year, the biggest dollar gain by a hedge fund in history and a haul that establishes his company as the most successful of all time. Financial Times: Citadel, which manages $54bn in assets, made a 38.1 per cent return in its main hedge fund and strong gains in other products last year, equating to a record $16bn profit for investors after fees, according to research by LCH Investments, run by Edmond de Rothschild. The profit, which was driven by bets across a range of asset classes including bonds and equities, surpasses the roughly $15.6bn made by John Paulson in 2007 through his bet against subprime. Last year's huge sell-off in government bonds provided a highly attractive trade for many macro managers, helping them to their biggest gains since the onset of the global financial crisis.

Citadel, which Griffin set up in 1990, made a total gross trading profit of about $28bn last year, meaning that it charged its investors -- one-fifth of whom are its own employees -- roughly $12bn in expenses and performance fees. The huge fee highlights how many investors tolerate hefty so-called pass through expenses -- variable charges covering a range of items including trader pay, technology and rent -- if net returns are high. Such charges tend to be higher during periods of strong returns because traders' pay is linked to performance.

Last summer GNOME invited people to voluntarily run the tool gnome-info-collect on their systems to send back (non-sensitive/non-identifiable) data about their system configurations. 2,560 people ran the tool, and they're now releasing the data.

Here's the distribution of distros for all 2,560 respondents:

Fedora: 1,376 (54.69%)
Arch: 469 (18.64%)
Ubuntu: 267 (10.61%)
Manjaro: 140 (5.56%)
EndeavourOS: 66 (2.62%)
Debian: 44 (1.75%)
openSUSE: 38 (1.51%)
Pop! 38 (1.51%)
Other: 78 (3.10%)


And the breakdown of hardware manufacturers (top four):

Lenovo: 516 (23.54%)
Dell: 329 (15.01%)
ASUS: 261 (11.91%)
HP: 223 (10.17%)


The site OMG! Linux pointed out that 90% of systems had Flatpak installed — (though it's enabled by default on Fedora, which was 54.69% of all the respondents). Some other interesting stats they noticed: - Most common default browser: Firefox (73.14%), Chrome (11.64%), Brave (4.76%). [Microsoft Edge was the default browser on 37 systems (1.51%) ]

- 83% of users have at least one (non-default) GNOME extension installed
- 'App Indicator' is the most popular extension (by 43% of those using extensions)

- GSConnect, User Themes, and Dash to Panel/Dock also widely used

- Most popular desktop apps: GIMP (58.48%), VLC (53.71%), Steam (53.40%)


[...] The popularity of GNOME extensions will surprise no-one. It is a solid indicator that the existing GNOME extension system is good at doing what it's there to: let users augment and extend their system in the ways they want.
GNOME's report adds that "it's exciting to see the popularity of new GNOME apps like Flatseal, To Do, Bottles, and Fragments."

One other interesting stat from their report: 55% of the participants were using Online Accounts, with Google the most common one added, followed by Nextcloud and Microsoft. But "Some of the account types had very little usage at all, with Foursquare, Facebook, Media Server, Flickr and Last.fm all being active on less than 1% of systems."

California state officials "claim that the 12.5 million electric vehicles expected on California's roads in 2035 will not strain the grid," writes the nonpartisan and nonprofit news organization Cal Matters.

"But their confidence that the state can avoid brownouts relies on a best-case — some say unrealistic — scenario: massive and rapid construction of offshore wind and solar farms, and drivers charging their cars in off-peak hours...." Powering the vehicles means the state must triple the amount of electricity produced and deploy new solar and wind energy at almost five times the pace of the past decade.... Adding even more pressure, the state's last nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon, is slated to shut down in 2030.... To provide enough electricity, California must:

- Convince drivers to charge their cars during off-peak hours: With new discounted rates, utilities are urging residents to avoid charging their cars between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. But many people don't have unrestricted access to chargers at their jobs or homes.

- Build solar and wind at an unprecedented pace: Shifting to all renewables requires at least 6 gigawatts of new resources a year for the next 25 years — a pace that's never been met before.

- Develop a giant new industry: State officials predict that offshore wind farms will provide enough power for about 1.5 million homes by 2030 and 25 million homes by 2045. But no such projects are in the works yet. Planning them, obtaining an array of permits and construction could take at least seven to eight years.

- Build 15 times more public chargers: About 1.2 million chargers will be needed for the 8 million electric cars expected in California by 2030. Currently, about 80,000 public chargers operate statewide, with another estimated 17,000 on the way, according to state data.

- Expand vehicle-to-grid technology: State officials hope electric cars will send energy back to the grid when electricity is in high demand, but the technology is new and has not been tested in electric cars.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story.

Thursday Instagram launched "Quiet mode" to "help people focus, and to encourage people to set boundaries with friends and followers.... Once enabled, you won't receive any notifications, your profile's activity status will change to 'In quiet mode' and we'll automatically send an auto-reply when someone DMs you.... and once the feature is turned off, we'll show you a quick summary of notifications so you can catch up on what you missed."

A report from the Verge notes the move "comes as Instagram faces mounting criticism over its effect on the mental health of teens, especially teenage girls." Since then, the company has been making a number of changes focused on the safety of its younger users, including tightening default content settings for teens, nudging teens away from content they continuously browse through, and introducing restrictions on the ways advertisers can target teens....

Instagram will specifically prompt teen users to toggle on Quiet Mode "when they spend a specific amount of time on Instagram late at night." However, the platform doesn't state how much time teens have to spend on the app to see the prompt and also doesn't say what timeframe it considers "late at night." Meta spokesperson Liza Crenshaw tells The Verge the notification will appear after "several minutes."
Quiet mode launched Thursday in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and New Zealand, with launches in other countries planned soon. Elsewhere the Verge reports that Meta is "putting your Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger account settings in one place." The company's rolling out a new Accounts Center that lets you manage your preferences across all your Meta accounts from a centralized hub. The revamped Accounts Center will live in the settings menu on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, which means you can adjust your account settings for Facebook from Instagram — and vice versa....

Some of the settings you can toggle include personal details, passwords, security, ad preferences, and payments as well as the permissions you've given each app. It doesn't seem like Meta will put all of your accounts in the Accounts Center by default, so you'll need to add them manually.
The feature launched Thursday and will roll out gradually to all users on Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram in "the coming months."

Why hasn't America restored net neutrality protections? "President Biden's nomination to serve on the Federal Communications Commission has been stalled in the Senate for more than a year," complain the editorial boards of two Silicon Valley newspapers: Confirming Gigi Sohn would end the 2-2 deadlock on the FCC that is keeping Biden from fulfilling his campaign promise to restore net neutrality, ensuring that all internet traffic is treated equally. Polls show that 75% of Americans support net neutrality rules. They know that an open internet is essential for innovation and economic growth, for fostering the next generation of entrepreneurs....

[T]elecommunication giants such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast don't want that to happen. They favor the status quo that allows the internet companies to pick winners and losers by charging content providers higher rates for speedier access to customers. They seek to expand the cable system model and allow kingmakers to rake in billions at the expense of smaller, new startups that struggle to gain a wider audience on their slow-speed offerings. So Republicans and a handful of Democrats are holding up Sohn's confirmation, claiming that her "radical" views disqualify her....

They also object to Sohn's current service as an Electronic Frontier Foundation board member, saying it proves she wouldn't be an unbiased and impartial FCC Commissioner. The San Francisco-based EFF is a leading nonprofit with a mission of defending digital privacy, free speech and innovation....

Enough is enough. Confirm Sohn and allow the FCC to fulfill its mission of promoting connectivity and ensuring a robust and competitive internet market.

insideHPC reports that Satoshi Matsuoka, the head of Japan's largest supercomputing center, has co-authored a high-performance computing paper challenging conventional wisdom. In a paper entitled "Myths and Legends of High-Performance Computing" appearing this week on the Arvix site, Matsuoka and four colleagues offer opinions and analysis on such issues as quantum replacing classical HPC, the zettascale timeline, disaggregated computing, domain-specific languages (DSLs) vs. Fortran and cloud subsuming HPC, among other topics.

"We believe (these myths and legends) represent the zeitgeist of the current era of massive change, driven by the end of many scaling laws, such as Dennard scaling and Moore's law," the authors said.

In this way they join the growing "end of" discussions in HPC. For example, as the industry moves through 3nm, 2nm, and 1.4nm chips – then what? Will accelerators displace CPUs altogether? What's next after overburdened electrical I/O interconnects? How do we get more memory per core?
The paper's abstract promises a "humorous and thought provoking" discussion — for example, on the possibility of quantum computing taking over high-performance computing. ("Once a quantum state is constructed, it can often be "used" only once because measurements destroy superposition. A second limitation stems from the lack of algorithms with high speedups....")

The paper also tackles myths like "all high-performance computing will be subsumed by the clouds" and "everything will be deep learning."

Thanks to guest reader for submitting the article.

The Washington Post has obtained "stunning new details on how social media companies failed to address the online extremism and calls for violence that preceded the Capitol riot."

Their source? The bipartisan committee investigating attacks on America's Capitol on January 6, 2021 "spent more than a year sifting through tens of thousands of documents from multiple companies, interviewing social media company executives and former staffers, and analyzing thousands of posts. They sent a flurry of subpoenas and requests for information to social media companies ranging from Facebook to fringe social networks including Gab and the chat platform Discord."

Yet in the end it was written up in a 122-page memo that was circulated among the committee but not delved into in their final report. And this was partly because the committee was "concerned about the risks of a public battle with powerful tech companies, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the panel's sensitive deliberations." The [committee staffer's] memo detailed how the actions of roughly 15 social networks played a significant role in the attack. It described how major platforms like Facebook and Twitter, prominent video streaming sites like YouTube and Twitch and smaller fringe networks like Parler, Gab and 4chan served as megaphones for those seeking to stoke division or organize the insurrection. It detailed how some platforms bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives out of fear of reprisals, while others were reluctant to curb the "Stop the Steal" movement after the attack....

The investigators also wrote that much of the content that was shared on Twitter, Facebook and other sites came from Google-owned YouTube, which did not ban election fraud claims until Dec. 9 and did not apply its policy retroactively. The investigators found that its lax policies and enforcement made it "a repository for false claims of election fraud." Even when these videos weren't recommended by YouTube's own algorithms, they were shared across other parts of the internet. "YouTube's policies relevant to election integrity were inadequate to the moment," the staffers wrote.

The draft report also says that smaller platforms were not reactive enough to the threat posed by Trump. The report singled out Reddit for being slow to take down a pro-Trump forum called "r/The-Donald." The moderators of that forum used it to "freely advertise" TheDonald.win, which hosted violent content in the lead-up to Jan. 6.... The committee also spoke to Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, whose leaked documents in 2021 showed that the country's largest social media platform largely had disbanded its election integrity efforts ahead of the Jan. 6 riot. But little of her account made it into the final document.
"The transcripts show the companies used relatively primitive technologies and amateurish techniques to watch for dangers and enforce their platforms' rules. They also show company officials quibbling among themselves over how to apply the rules to possible incitements to violence, even as the riot turned violent."