Silicon Valley can’t agree on which Democratic presidential candidate to get behind. The Federal Election Commission’s first fundraising snapshot came out Monday, and it shows that money from Silicon Valley’s tech leaders is spread across multiple candidacies. Kamala Harris, the senator from California, has garnered donations from former Facebook exec Alex Stamos, Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, and venture capitalist Ron Conway. Meanwhile, Cory Booker, the senator from New Jersey (and Stanford alum) has secured funding from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, among others. As Recode’s Teddy Schleifer writes: “There is no clear frontrunner among the donor class.”
[Theodore Schleifer / Recode]
Recode Daily: Silicon Valley can’t decide which Democrat to endorse
Plus: Twitter claims it’s improving when it comes to fighting spam and abuse, and Netflix has nearly 150 million subscribers.
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Twitter claims it’s improving when it comes to fighting spam and abuse. CEO Jack Dorsey announced at TED on Tuesday a few new metrics about the company’s abuse-fighting efforts. Among them: Using technology, the company now catches 38 percent of the abusive content it takes action on, which means it doesn’t have to wait for humans to report those tweets to the company. A year ago, Twitter didn’t catch any abusive content proactively. Given the massive size of social media platforms like Twitter, which has hundreds of millions of monthly users, automating these abuse efforts is key to cleaning up the service.
[Kurt Wagner / Recode]
More internal Facebook documents leaked show the company used its massive trove of personal user data to hurt certain competitors and help partners. NBC News got its hands on 4,000 internal documents tied to a Facebook lawsuit, papers that were part of the same set of leaked documents made public last fall by British lawmakers. The documents are further proof that Facebook used people’s personal data to strengthen its business relationships. “Facebook gave Amazon extended access to user data because it was spending money on Facebook advertising and partnering with the social network on the launch of its Fire smartphone,” NBC reported Tuesday.
[Olivia Solon and Cyrus Farivar / NBC News]
Netflix has nearly 150 million subscribers, but investors are concerned that the streaming service’s growth may be slowing down in the US. During the company’s first-quarter earnings call on Tuesday, Netflix projected it will add around 300,000 subscribers next quarter, which is less than the 650,000 analysts had hoped (and much less than the 1.7 million it added in Q1). The stock fell, then rebounded in after-hours trading. Still, Netflix is growing like crazy outside the US, and CEO Reed Hastings shared some viewership details about some of the company’s high-profile titles, something it started doing at the end of last year. A new Ben Affleck movie, Triple Frontier, was watched in more than 52 million households, Hasting said. Netflix’s Fyre Festival documentary, which showed the grim reality of a disastrous music festival, had more than 20 million viewers.
[Peter Kafka / Recode]
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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