Daily Crunch: Trump takes aim at social media companies

President Trump follows through on his threat to challenge the legal protections enjoyed by social media and internet companies, Magic Leap’s CEO is stepping down and China sees its biggest autonomous driving round yet.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 29, 2020.

1. Trump signs an executive order taking direct aim at social media companies

Yesterday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting the legal shield that internet companies rely on to protect them from liability for user-created content. Next, we’ll almost certainly see a court battle over whether the order is legal and enforceable.

While Trump and Attorney General William Barr have expressed interest in undermining Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act before, this week’s action was prompted by Twitter’s decision to add a fact-checking link to the president’s tweet about voting by mail. That conflict isn’t going away either, with Twitter adding a “public interest notice” to another of Trump’s tweets for glorifying violence.

2. Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz is out

Magic Leap founder and CEO Rony Abovitz announced that the company has secured a new bout of funding — but that Magic will be attempting a major turnaround without him at the helm.

3. SoftBank led $500M investment in Didi in China’s biggest autonomous driving round

As China’s largest ride-hailing provider with mountains of traffic data, Didi clearly has an upper hand in developing robotaxis, which could help address driver shortages in the long term. But it was relatively late to the field.

4. Cisco to acquire internet monitoring solution ThousandEyes

Cisco’s Todd Nightingale, writing in a blog post announcing the deal, said that the kind of data that ThousandEyes provides around internet user experience is more important than ever as internet connections have come under tremendous pressure.

5. Fintech regulations in Latin America could fuel growth or freeze out startups

Promoteo co-founder Ximena Aleman looks at what impact regulation has had so far in Latin America, and what needs to happen to strike a balance between sector growth and public trust. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Uber UK launches Work Hub for drivers to find other gig jobs during COVID-19

The ride-hailing giant rolled out a similar feature in the U.S. back in April, offering drivers the ability to respond to job postings from around a dozen other companies, as well as the ability to receive orders through other Uber units: Eats, Freight and Works.

7. Join us June 3 for a contact-tracing and exposure-notification app development and deployment forum

We’re working with the COVID-19 Technology Task Force, as well as Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, NYU’s Alliance for Public Interest Technology, Betaworks Studios and Hangar. We’ll be playing host to their live-streamed discussion around contact-tracing and exposure-notification applications, including demonstrations of some of the cutting-edge products that will be available in the U.S. to tackle these challenging, but crucial, tasks.

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