Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Alphabet transparency tools are a ‘disappointment’ ahead of election, new study shows

Published

12 months ago

April 16, 2024

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Heading into the 2024 election in the U.S. and major political contests around the world, internet companies are unprepared for the onslaught of misinformation that’s coming.

That’s according to research out Tuesday from Mozilla and CheckFirst, which concludes that leading tech platforms are lagging in their ad transparency tools. The study, conducted between December and January, tested Alphabet’s Google Search and YouTube, Apple’s App Store and Microsoft’s Bing and LinkedIn, as well as services from Meta, Pinterest, Snap, TikTok, X and others.

None of the results were great, and some were “a major disappointment,” according to the researchers.

The ad transparency tools were mandated by the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which required that large tech platforms maintain ad libraries and other tools, such as application programming interfaces (APIs), to be used by researchers and the public. The DSA’s deadline was Jan. 1.

People should be able to use the tools to search for information about ads they see or specific companies’ ad campaigns, including ad content, target audience, the ad’s reach and the call to action.

“This is now no longer something that’s voluntary,” Claire Pershan, EU advocacy lead at Mozilla, told CNBC. “It’s something these companies have to do.”

No platforms passed the test with the “ready for action” designation. Instead, results ranged from lacking vital data and functionality, to “still has big gaps” in data and functionality. Some had the “bare minimum,” according to the study.

It’s troubling news as the major platforms prepare for a huge year of elections that affect upward of 4 billion people in more than 40 countries.

“It is important right now for the platforms to really collaborate, and important for us to push right now, because of the election year,” Amaury Lesplingart, co-founder and technology chief of CheckFirst, told CNBC in an interview.

The rise of artificial intelligence and AI-generated content has led to serious election-related misinformation concerns, with the number of generated deepfakes increasing 900% year over year, according to data from machine learning firm Clarity. Election-related misinformation has been a major problem dating back to the 2016 presidential campaign, when Russian actors sought to deploy cheap and easy ways to spread inaccurate content across social platforms.

Lawmakers are currently even more concerned with the rapid rise of AI.

“There is reason for serious concern about how AI could be used to mislead voters in campaigns,” Josh Becker, a Democratic state senator in California, told CNBC in a February interview.

The new research determined that the tools offered by X were a “major disappointment,” as the company offered only a CSV file instead of a web interface, making it hard to search for ads. Lesplingart told CNBC that users had to know the advertiser name, targeted country and date of the advertisement in order to export to an ad file.

“We are perhaps most disappointed to see X (formerly Twitter) make such a minimal effort, considering that it remains a central space for civic discourse,” the researchers wrote. “This may be why the European Commission has included X’s ad repository in its formal proceedings against the platform under the DSA.”

Bing, Snapchat, Alibaba’s AliExpress and Zalando also received the lowest marks. Alphabet, Pinterest and Booking.com received the second-lowest designations. Apple’s App Store, LinkedIn, Meta and TikTok received higher marks, though they were graded as still having “big gaps” in data and functionality.

“Our main takeaway is that even the best approaches don’t meet our baseline,” the researchers wrote.

Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Snap, TikTok, Pinterest, X, Alibaba and Zalando did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In regards to Alphabet’s transparency tools for Google Search and YouTube, the researchers said “it’s been six years and we still can’t search by keyword.” They reported accuracy issues and missing data on Pinterest and TikTok. On Bing’s tools, users can’t search words with special characters, they found.

For Apple’s App Store tools, users and researchers can’t see ad campaigns broken down by targeted country, which is an important feature for tracking election-related disinformation, according to the study.

“The effectiveness of these tools depends on their usefulness for researchers in practice,” the researchers wrote. They added, “But we’d also like to consider the glass half full, and look forward to further improvements.”

Technology

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are ‘not good’

Published

3 hours ago

April 4, 2025

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are 'not good'

President Trump’s new tariffs on goods that the U.S. imports from over 100 countries will have an effect on consumers, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told CNBC on Friday. Investors will feel the pain, too.

Microsoft’s stock dropped almost 6% in the past two days, as the Nasdaq wrapped up its worst week in five years.

“As a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good,” Ballmer said, in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin that was tied to Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration. “It creates opportunity to be a serious, long-term player.”

Ballmer was sandwiched in between Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and current CEO Satya Nadella for the interview.

“I took just enough economics in college — that tariffs are actually going to bring some turmoil,” said Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014. Gates, Microsoft’s first CEO, convinced Ballmer to join the company in 1980.

Gates, Ballmer and Nadella attended proceedings at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus on Friday to celebrate its first half-century.

Between the tariffs and weak quarterly revenue guidance announced in January, Microsoft’s stock is on track for its fifth straight month of declines, which would be the worst stretch since 2009. But the company remains a leader in the PC operating system and productivity software markets, and its partnership with startup OpenAI has led to gains in cloud computing.

“I think that disruption is very hard on people, and so the decision to do something for which disruption was inevitable, that needs a lot of popular support, and nobody could game theorize exactly who is going to do what in response,” Ballmer said, regarding the tariffs. “So, I think citizens really like stability a lot. And I hope people — individuals who will feel this, because people are feeling it, not just the stock market, people are going to feel it.”

Ballmer, who owns the Los Angeles Clippers, is among Microsoft’s biggest fans. He said he’s the company’s largest investor. In 2014, shortly after he bought the basketball team for $2 billion, he held over 333 million shares of the stock, according to a regulatory filing.

“I’m not going to probably have 50 more years on the planet,” he said. “But whatever minutes I have, I’m gonna be a large Microsoft shareholder.” He said there’s a bright future for computing, storage and intelligence. Microsoft launched the first Azure services while Ballmer was CEO.

Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that Microsoft, which pledged to spend $80 billion on AI-enabled data center infrastructure in the current fiscal year, has stopped discussions or pushed back the opening of facilities in the U.S. and abroad.

JPMorgan Chase’s chief economist, Bruce Kasman, said in a Thursday note that the chance of a global recession will be 60% if Trump’s tariffs kick in as described. His previous estimate was 40%.

“Fifty years from now, or 25 years from now, what is the one thing you can be guaranteed of, is the world needs more compute,” Nadella said. “So I want to keep those two thoughts and then take one step at a time, and then whatever are the geopolitical or economic shifts, we’ll adjust to it.”

Gates, who along with co-founder Paul Allen, sought to build a software company rather than sell both software and hardware, said he wasn’t sure what the economic effects of the tariffs will be. Today, most of Microsoft’s revenue comes from software. It also sells Surface PCs and Xbox consoles.

“So far, it’s just on goods, but you know, will it eventually be on services? Who knows?” said Gates, who reportedly donated around $50 million to a nonprofit that supported Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ losing campaign.

— CNBC’s Alex Harring contributed to this report.

WATCH: There will be many LLM winners, says infrastructure investor Morrison

Technology

AppLovin can offer TikTok ‘much stronger bid than others,’ CEO says

Published

5 hours ago

April 4, 2025

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AppLovin can offer TikTok 'much stronger bid than others,' CEO says

Piotr Swat | Lightrocket | Getty Images

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.

Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.

“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.

The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid.

“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.

AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.

Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.

WATCH: AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

Technology

Trump’s tariff rates for other countries radically larger than World Trade data

Published

6 hours ago

April 4, 2025

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Trump's tariff rates for other countries radically larger than World Trade data

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event announcing new tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, April 2, 2025.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

President Donald Trump announced an aggressive, far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy this week, leaving many economists and U.S. trade partners to question how the White House calculated its rates.

Trump’s plan established a 10% baseline tariff on almost every country, though many nations such as China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to much steeper rates. At a ceremony in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, Trump held up a poster board that outlined the tariffs that it claims are “charged” to the U.S., as well as the “discounted” reciprocal tariffs that America would implement in response.

Those reciprocal tariffs are mostly about half of what the Trump administration said each country has charged the U.S. The poster suggests China charges a tariff of 67%, for instance, and that the U.S. will implement a 34% reciprocal tariff in response.

However, a report from the Cato Institute suggests the trade-weighted average tariff rates in most countries are much different than the figures touted by the Trump administration. The report is based on trade-weighted average duty rates from the World Trade Organization in 2023, the most recent year available.

The Cato Institute says the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate from China was 3%. Similarly, the administration says the EU charges the U.S. a tariff of 39%, while the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 2.7%, according to the report.

In India, the Trump administration claims that a 52% tariff is charged against the U.S., but Cato found that the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 12%.

Many users on social media this week were quick to notice that the U.S. appeared to have divided the trade deficit by imports from a given country to arrive at tariff rates for individual countries. It’s an unusual approach, as it suggests that the U.S. factored in the trade deficit in goods but ignored trade in services.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative briefly explained its approach in a release, and stated that computing the combined effects of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in various countries “can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.”

“If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the USTR said in the release.