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Summer’s over! Welcome back from the U.S. Labor Day holiday — it’s about to get busy in the tech and media industries. Here are some of the stories we’ll be focusing on over the next weeks and months:
- The U.S. midterm elections are two months away on Nov. 6. All eyes will be on Facebook and Twitter as the platforms fight misinformation campaigns and armies of bots and trolls trying to heighten discord. Will Trump’s legislative majority survive? Will Zuckerberg emerge relatively unscathed?
- One early plot point will start to shake out this week as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testify on Capitol Hill, starting with a Senate intelligence committee hearing on “foreign influence operations’ use of social media platforms” at 9:30 am ET on Wednesday. Will regulators try to regulate Facebook and Twitter? How would they even do that?
- Fall gadget season starts with Apple’s iPhone event next Wednesday at its Cupertino headquarters. Will the new Apple Watch be this holiday season’s winner? Or something else? Will American consumers, flush with confidence, spend extra big this Q4?
- Amazon is expected to announce its highly anticipated “HQ2” winner within weeks — the city where it will invest billions into a new headquarters and “as many as 50,000 high-paying jobs.” Will it be the D.C. area? Chicago? Newark?
- Will Elon Musk get it together after a draining, obnoxious and emotional summer? Can Tesla keep up with its ambitions? Will the Securities and Exchange Commission go after Musk for his ”funding secured” tweet?
For the latest on these stories and more, we’ll see you here every weekday morning. And a reminder that if you love Recode Daily, the best way to support us is to pass it along to a colleague or friend — they can subscribe for free here.
When Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testifies before Congress tomorrow, he’ll likely be asked just who decides whether a user gets kicked off the site. Twitter relies primarily on its users to report abuses and has a consistent set of policies, but Dorsey personally weighs in on some high-profile content decisions himself, reportedly overruling his staff’s decisions to ban content by alt-right provocateurs Alex Jones and Richard Spencer. [Georgia Wells and Kirsten Grind / The Wall Street Journal]
China’s internet users are obsessed with the case of billionaire and tech mogul Richard Qiangdong Liu, who returned to China three days after Minneapolis police arrested him on suspicion of sexual assault. Liu has denied any wrongdoing; the police department hasn’t disclosed the nature of the complaint, but said the alleged assault would be a felony. Liu is the founder and chief executive of e-commerce giant JD.com, and has a net worth estimated at $7.9 billion — he and his wife, Sister Milk Tea, are among the rock stars of China’s new gilded age. [Li Yuan / The New York Times]
U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh begin today; the confirmation of the conservative justice could drastically remake the court. The White House, citing executive privilege, is withholding more than 100,000 pages of records related to Kavanaugh from his time as a lawyer in the administration of former President George W. Bush. [Sheryl Gay Stolberg / The New York Times]
As the NFL football season starts up, Nike is “throwing its weight behind one of the most polarizing figures in football, and America: former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick,” who is one of the faces of its 30th anniversary “Just Do It” campaign. “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything,” one ad reads. [Nathaniel Meyersohn / CNN]
The world’s largest advertising group, WPP, named longtime company executive Mark Read as its new leader, as the advertising agency tries to rebound from the abrupt departure of its founder in April amid a personal misconduct investigation. Read replaces Martin Sorrell, the influential ad exec who founded WPP in the 1980s and molded it in his image, but who quit this year while under investigation. [Seb Joseph / Digiday]
It may be too early to declare the death of retail. Some hard lessons — thanks to Amazon — are breathing new life into the $3.5 trillion industry, and more American are shopping in brick-and-mortar stores. But Amazon has forever changed consumer behavior, and those that have failed to evolve are in bankruptcy or on the brink. [Michael Corkery / The New York Times]
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
