Recode Daily: Huawei gets ready for a bad year

Chinese telecom hardware company Huawei could lose $30 billion in revenue this year, according to its CEO. This realization comes weeks after President Trump effectively banned US tech companies from using Huawei’s equipment, saying its hardware could potentially be exploited for Chinese government surveillance and is a threat to US national security. The action is part of a larger trade war between China and the US, and could have serious effects on Huawei’s US partner companies, which earn significant revenue selling chips and other components to the Chinese company. Huawei’s ban is also likely to delay 5G deployment in the US and elsewhere because the company makes some of the networking tech that’s needed to build out 5G.
[Sijia Jiang / Reuters]

[Want to get the Recode Daily in your inbox? Subscribe here.]

Elon Musk remains on Twitter after saying he deleted his account. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said he was leaving the social media site after he was criticized for refusing to credit video game fan artwork he posted. In the past year, Musk has gotten into a lot of trouble over his erratic and untoward behavior on the social media site. Among other incidents, Musk has used Twitter to publicly fight with reporters and to make unfounded claims that a diver trying to rescue a trapped Thai soccer team was a “pedo.” Most notably, Musk agreed last year to settle with the Securities and Exchange Commission and curb his social media use after he posted an inaccurate, market-moving tweet about taking Tesla private.
[Hamza Shaban / Washington Post]

Google’s CEO thinks YouTube is too big to completely fix. Sundar Pichai has made similar remarks before, but his comments in a recent CNBC interview are particularly noteworthy considering the company is currently being deluged with criticism for hosting content that propagates conspiracy theories and encourages radicalization. Pichai thinks the video platform can crack down on most of the harmful content uploaded to it, but not all of it. “So it’s one of those things, let’s say we’re getting it right 99 percent of the time, you’ll still be able to find examples,” Pichai said in the interview. “Our goal is to take that to a very, very small percentage well below 1 percent.” YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said something to the same effect during her interview with Recode’s Peter Kafka while onstage at Code last week.
[Todd Haselton / CNBC]

Several Instagram accounts that claim to aid people in Sudan are actually just trying to get more followers. The biggest of these accounts, SudanMealProject, asked people to repost a message — “We’re committed to donating up to 100,000 meals to Sudanese civilians” — and said that in exchange it would donate meals to children in Sudan, who are suffering amid continuing political crisis in the country. Instagram removed the accounts after the Atlantic flagged them, but a number of similar accounts have popped up. This is only the latest instance in what has been a scourge of misinformation and fraud spreading across social media, though previously Instagram had seemed more insulated. Recent updates that make Instagram stories easier to repost could cause these issues could crop up more often on the platform.
[Taylor Lorenz / Atlantic]

Top Stories from Recode

Facebook may have too many users for its cryptocurrency to fail — even if you don’t trust it. Libra, Facebook’s new virtual coin, is the most consequential cryptocurrency effort undertaken in several years.
[Theodore Schleifer]

This is Cool

You might soon be able to get pizza delivery in Houston sans driver, thanks to a Domino’s self-driving pilot.

Recode and Vox have joined forces to uncover and explain how our digital world is changing — and changing us. Subscribe to Recode podcasts to hear Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka lead the tough conversations the technology industry needs today.

Will you join us?

Our biggest supporters are our readers — and we’re so grateful to everyone who has made a contribution during our September campaign. We’re less than 1,000 contributions away from reaching our goal for the month, which in turn will allow us to say yes more often when our incredible journalists come to us with questions they want to answer and projects they want to pursue. Will you make a contribution before the month ends and support our policy coverage through 2024 and beyond?

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via