investigated it, and thought- that there was a case to answer in terms of suppressing competition. it thought that it could limit other people using gifs, - it could extract data if other people did use those gifs. and it was also depriving| the market of a potential competitor to facebook. and so the competition authority has told meta to dispose of it. and a lot of competition - lawyers are fairly astounded at that decision. but i think it does - speak to this new mood of interventionism that a lot i of regulators i think would now accept that they were asleep at the wheel when facebook| bought instagram back in 2012. and i think they don t want to i repeat the same mistakes again. and isobel asher hamilton, what s your take on that, on a government agency in britain demanding an american company sells another american company? it is entertaining because i think the authority argues
i mean, ian, newspapers never used to play this role. really, it used to be one way traffic in a sense. the paper printed articles, the reader kept their thoughts to themselves apart from probably the odd letter to the editor. why do you need to host these debates? i mean, is it actually about the bottom line in a sense as a financial interest in this? it s not about the bottom line. obviously it s beneficial for us to be at the centre of the debate. my view on it is, if we re not hosting these comments, these discussions will take place on facebook, and i would rather people were discussing these kind of topics in an area where they re surrounded by regulated content, as our stories are. rather than off in a corner of facebook. and also, if they re discussing them on our websites, you would hope you re reaching a fully broader church and people might be challenged on their views, whereas if you re on facebook, you re going to be finding like minded people talking to yourself and creat
on our website. and you people moderating throughout, didn t you, is that how it works? we had people moderating throughout, but like most publishers, we don t have the resources to moderate every comment on every story. so we have to rely on a certain degree of self moderation from the community. people report comments to us when they overstep the mark. so, yeah. and i believe you actually tracked down some of the people that were making these comments that you saw as offensive. what did they say? we did. so, as well appearing on our website, the stories also appeared on our facebook pages, and while we can turn comments off on facebook, what we cannot do is stop people posting their reactions. and on the day that 27 people tragically died, 96 people posted a laughing face emoji on the story. so, we tracked those down. we ve gone back to them all. we spoke to them on a story that s on the website today, and we just tried to say to them, how did you get to a point in your life where y
he kind of chugged along as chair and i think exec chair for a bit as well, and then, in 2015, he did recapture the throne. he became ceo again. and, yeah, he s now announced he s resigning, and he s not really given a clear statement about where he s going, so there s a little bit of mystery around that. but, yes, he s very well known because i suppose he s one of these, like, founder ceos and also he sjust a very strange man. with his fasting, diet, his beard and all that. yeah, so i suppose he s one of these tech ceos that attained celebrity status, sort of like mark zuckerberg of facebook, now meta, orjeff bezos of amazon. just remind listeners you bring in meta how big twitter is today in comparison? in comparison with meta or facebook as we know it, or tiktok. oh, small. twitter s got about, i think,
regulators has- changed enormously. and i think on your show early this year you had someone . from the competitionl and markets authority who was making this point, that i think there is a presumption . of an action, the market should be allowed to run its course - and monopolies would be self correcting. - but i think that mood has- changed, and there is now a far more interventionist mood. and we ve actuallyjust seen that, have we not, this week with the competition and markets authority have done with meta, facebook s parent company, you know, telling them they ve got to sell giphy. but can you unpack that for us? how does a british competition and markets authority tell an american company what to sell? yeah, indeed, it s quite - an extraordinary story in a way because giphy is a new- york based lossmaking platform that provides gifs. it was bought by meta in may last year. - giphy doesn t really have any activities or employees - in the uk, but the competition and market authorit