But many of them encountered difficulties steering aging tech companies. Of those women, only Ms. Catz, Ms. Hood and Ms. Porat remain in their roles.

“The snail’s pace of progress for women leaders in Silicon Valley is worse than disappointing,” said Nicole Wong, a deputy chief technology officer for the Obama administration and a former Twitter executive. “It makes the commitments that tech leaders made around racial and gender diversity in 2014 look performative.”

In 2017, stories of sexual harassment by powerful men in Silicon Valley became part of the #MeToo movement. That year, a group of female investors created All Raise.

In 2018, California passed a law requiring publicly traded companies to have at least one female board director, leading to scores of women joining corporate boards. (A California judge struck down the law last month; the state has said it will appeal the ruling.) Another new law, passed last year, the Silenced No More Act, provides legal protection for people who speak publicly about discrimination or harassment they experienced at work.

Women in tech have continued speaking out about unfair treatment. In 2020, Ms. Brougher reached a $22.5 million settlement with Pinterest for discrimination and retaliation. A discrimination lawsuit by Emily Kramer, a former chief marketing officer at the financial start-up Carta, is working its way through the courts.

There have been some signs of progress. Over the past five years, Katrina Lake of Stitch Fix, Julie Wainwright of The RealReal, Jennifer Hyman of Rent the Runway and Whitney Wolfe Herd of Bumble took the companies they founded public. And following in Ms. Sandberg’s footsteps, female chief operating officers are now more common in tech. They include Ms. Choi at Coinbase, Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX and Jen Wong at Reddit.

At Meta, Ms. Sandberg hired and promoted women, such as Marne Levine, the chief business officer, and Lori Goler, the head of human resources and hiring. The percentage of women in Meta’s management with titles of director or higher increased to 35 percent in 2021, from 30 percent in 2018, according to the company’s data.

Meta also developed women who now lead other tech companies, including Ms. Simo, who oversaw the main Facebook app before becoming Instacart’s chief executive last year.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/technology/sheryl-sandberg-women-in-tech.html

Mr. Depp’s argument was that the case had nothing to do with the First Amendment’s broad protections for speech. Instead, he insisted, it was about the credibility of the accuser. “The First Amendment doesn’t protect lies that hurt and defame people,” Mr. Depp’s lawyer told the jury as the trial came to a close.

Several lawyers said they were surprised by the outcome, especially because Mr. Depp lost a similar case in Britain, which has much lower legal standards for public figures who sue for defamation. A key difference, said George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center and a former lawyer for The New York Times, was that a judge decided the matter in Britain whereas a jury sided with Mr. Depp in the United States.

“A jury decides what a jury decides, and there’s often no further explanation,” Mr. Freeman said.

The outcome was all the more curious, Mr. Freeman added, because the jury also sided with Ms. Heard on one count in which she claimed that Mr. Depp’s lawyer had defamed her by blaming her for damaging the couple’s penthouse.

“When one side is false, then the other is true,” Mr. Freeman said. “It seems kind of inconsistent to give awards to both.”

One implication of the split jury decision is that the law, because of its complexities, may not do what people expect it to do: be an arbiter for the kinds of he said/she said disputes that arise from allegations like sexual assault.

In other similar defamation cases, the publisher has also been part of the lawsuit. First Amendment experts who are concerned about the use of defamation suits in an increasingly polarized climate — especially against news organizations — said the fact that The Post was not named as a party in Mr. Depp’s case probably made his victory easier.

Had The Post been sued, the trial would probably have been more focused on the ways defamation laws can be abused, said RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/business/media/depp-heard-journalism-metoo.html

Mr. Depp may have won a victory in court, but it may take more than that to revive his career, or for Walt Disney Studios, which has cast Mr. Depp in several starring roles, to get back into business with him.

The studio declined to comment, but two Disney executives privately pointed to his box office track record as the primary reason: None of his Disney movies have succeeded outside of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise since “Alice in Wonderland” in 2010. “Alice Through the Looking Glass” was a misfire in 2016, taking in 70 percent less than its predecessor worldwide. “The Lone Ranger” was a big-budget bomb in 2013. Except as Captain Jack Sparrow in the “Pirates” films, he has not been a box office draw recently.

As for the “Pirates” franchise, Disney decided long before the trial to part ways with Mr. Depp and reboot the series, which, while still formidable at the box office, had been in decline in North America, falling 20 percent to 30 percent with each installment. Mr. Depp also wore out his welcome with tardiness and other issues that came out at the trial, where a former talent agent testified that he wore an earpiece on set so that his lines could be fed to him.

But Mr. Depp’s victory — which a lawyer for Ms. Heard said she would appeal — may seem attractive to accused litigants who are desperately seeking a similar redemption arc, said Andrew Miltenberg, a lawyer whose firm regularly defends people accused of sexual misconduct. Right after the Depp-Heard verdict was announced, Mr. Miltenberg said, he received about a dozen emails from clients asking him if it would benefit their cases.

“I can see people saying, ‘I need that kind of victory to get my life back on track,’” said Mr. Miltenberg.

Several big defamation cases are still pending. E. Jean Carroll, who sued former President Donald J. Trump after he said that she had lied about his raping her. The actress Ashley Judd’s defamation lawsuit against the producer Harvey Weinstein has been on hold during his criminal proceedings in California. She sued after reading that a director said that Mr. Weinstein’s studio, Miramax, had described her as a “nightmare to work with.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/arts/depp-metoo-defamation.html

Mr. Shapiro and Mr. West were executive producers of “Man on the Moon” (1999), which starred Jim Carrey as Mr. Kaufman. (Mr. Kaufman died in 1984 at 35.) Danny DeVito, a producer of the film, played Mr. Shapiro, and Mr. Shapiro had a role as a club owner who had once fired Mr. Kaufman.

Early in the film, Mr. DeVito tells Mr. Carrey, “You’re insane, but you also may be brilliant.”

Mr. Shapiro’s other clients included Robert Wuhl and the producer and writer Bill Lawrence, who is known for the TV series “Spin City” and “Scrubs.”

George Larry Shapiro was born on May 18, 1932, in the Bronx. His father, Ira, was a furrier. his mother, Sylvia (Lebost) Shapiro, was a social activist. George’s time at P.S. 80 in the Bronx, where he met Mr. West, was the subject of two documentaries, “The Bronx Boys,” in 2003, and “The Bronx Boys Still Playing at 80,” 10 years later.

As a youngster, he loved comedies, including those made by Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello. “I sat in the theater and felt like someone was tickling me,” Mr. Shapiro said in a Television Academy interview in 2007.

He got a stronger whiff of show business as a teenager while working as a summer lifeguard at the Tamiment, a resort in the Poconos, where writers like Neil Simon; actors like Dick Shawn, Carol Burnett and Pat Carroll; and the director and choreographer Herb Ross created revues and other shows. Agents traveled from Manhattan to scout talent on weekends — the sort of future that appealed to Mr. Shapiro.

“I said, ‘This is your job?” he said in the Television Academy interview. “To watch the show, to have a nice dinner, to come to a resort with a lake? I have to look into that.”

After graduating in 1953 with a bachelor’s degree from what is now New York University’s College of Business and Public Administration, Mr. Shapiro served in the Army for two years. He considered a career in social work and sales — his older brother, Don, was a salesman in Texas and offered him a job — but got a mailroom position at the William Morris Agency in Manhattan with help from Mr. Reiner, his uncle.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/obituaries/george-shapiro-dead.html

Because he’s a man. Celebrity and masculinity confer mutually reinforcing advantages. Famous men — athletes, actors, musicians, politicians — get to be that way partly because they represent what other men aspire to be. Defending their prerogatives is a way of protecting, and asserting, our own. We want them to be bad boys, to break the rules and get away with it. Their seigneurial right to sexual gratification is something the rest of us might resent, envy or disapprove of, but we rarely challenge it. These guys are cool. They do what they want, including to women. Anyone who objects is guilty of wokeness, or gender treason, or actual malice.

Of course there are exceptions. In the #MeToo era there are men who have gone to jail, lost their jobs or suffered disgrace because of the way they’ve treated women. The fall of certain prominent men — Harvey Weinstein, Leslie Moonves, Matt Lauer — was often welcomed as a sign that a status quo that sheltered, enabled and celebrated predators, rapists and harassers was at last changing.

A few years later, it seems more likely that they were sacrificed not to end that system of entitlement but rather to preserve it. Almost as soon as the supposed reckoning began there were complaints that it had gone too far, that nuances were being neglected and too-harsh punishments meted out.

This backlash has been folded into a larger discourse about “cancel culture,” which is often less about actions than words. “Cancellation” is now synonymous with any criticism that invokes racial insensitivity, sexual misbehavior or controversial opinions. Creeps are treated as martyrs, and every loudmouth is a free-speech warrior. Famous men with lucrative sinecures on cable news, streaming platforms and legacy print publications can proclaim themselves victims.

Which is just what Depp did. And while he accused Heard of doing terrible things to him in the course of their relationship and breakup, the lawsuit wasn’t about those things. It was about words published under her name, none of which were “Johnny Depp.” In a sentence the jury found false and malicious, after describing herself as “representing domestic abuse” Heard wrote that she “felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out.” This time she surely has.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/arts/depp-heard-trial-malice.html

Moreover, the streaming gold rush is slowing down. At the very least, it is becoming harder to navigate. “The current marketplace for streaming services is noisy, with major streaming services spending millions to grab consumers’ attention, and niche services don’t have that kind of budget,” said Brett Sappington of Interpret, a media consultancy.

“Niche services are often at the mercy of aggregators such as smart TVs, streaming boxes or online platforms,” Mr. Sappington continued. “They have little negotiating power for revenue sharing, they are often last in line for developer support and they often can’t afford to have the prime, front-page spots on websites or app stores.”

More than 300 streaming services are available in the United States, according to Parks Associates, a consulting firm. The eight largest accounted for an estimated 88 percent of original content demand from January through March, according to Parrot Analytics. Niche services fought for the balance — outfits like Revry, for the L.G.B.T.Q. community; Bloody Disgusting, focused on horror fans; kweliTV, dedicated to Black culture; and little Passionflix.

But Ms. Musk is not about to give up.

“It’s just not in my genes,” she said, with a broad smile. “Our family motto could be: Keep trying, keep trying, keep trying.”

Elon Musk, of course, is the founder of SpaceX, the chief executive of Tesla and the planet’s wealthiest person; he struck a $44 billion deal in April to buy Twitter. Ms. Musk’s other older brother, Kimbal Musk, is a restaurant entrepreneur and farm-to-table food activist who sits on the boards of SpaceX and Tesla. Their force-of-nature mother, Maye Musk, is a model who recently published the memoir “A Woman Makes a Plan.” (For a time, Maye ran the Passionflix Instagram account.)

Ms. Musk described the typical Passionflix subscriber as “voraciously engaged” with the site, and that may be an understatement if Jan Edwards is any indication. Widowed in 2015 and retired from her human resources job in January, Ms. Edwards, 65, lives in Tuckerton, N.J., and has been a Passionflix subscriber since 2018. “I’m just putting laundry in the dryer — it’s an exciting day over here, let me tell you — so it’s a fine time to talk,” she said when a reporter phoned.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/business/media/tosca-musk-passionflix.html

Ms. Sandberg flirted with leaving Facebook. In 2016, she told colleagues that if Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, won the White House she would most likely assume a job in Washington, three people who spoke to her about the move at the time said. In 2018, after revelations about Cambridge Analytica and Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, she again told colleagues that she was considering leaving but did not want to do so when the company was in crisis.

Last year, Mr. Zuckerberg said his company was making a new bet and was going all in on the metaverse, which he called “the successor to the mobile internet.” In his announcement, Ms. Sandberg made only a cameo, while other executives were more prominently featured.

As Mr. Zuckerberg overhauled the company to focus on the metaverse, some of Ms. Sandberg’s responsibilities were spread among other executives. Nick Clegg, the president of global affairs and a former British deputy prime minister, became the company’s chief spokesman, a role that Ms. Sandberg had once taken. In February, Mr. Clegg was promoted to president of global affairs for Meta.

Ms. Sandberg’s profile dimmed. She concentrated on building the ads business and growing the number of small businesses on Facebook.

She was also focused on personal matters. Dave Goldberg, her husband, had died unexpectedly in 2015. (Ms. Sandberg’s second book, “Option B,” was about dealing with grief.) She later met Mr. Bernthal, and he and his three children moved to her Silicon Valley home from Southern California during the pandemic. Ms. Sandberg, who had two children with Mr. Goldberg, was focused on integrating the families and planning for her summer wedding, a person close to her said.

Meta’s transition to the metaverse has not been easy. The company has spent heavily on metaverse products while its advertising business has stumbled, partly because privacy changes made by Apple have hurt targeted advertising. In February, Meta’s market value plunged more than $230 billion, its biggest one-day wipeout, after it reported financial results that showed it was struggling to make the leap to the metaverse.

In the interview, Ms. Sandberg said Meta faced near-term challenges but would weather the storm, as it had during past challenges. “When we went public, we had no mobile ads,” Ms. Sandberg said, citing the company’s rapid transition from desktop computers to smartphones last decade. “We have done this before.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/01/technology/sheryl-sandberg-facebook.html

But even as other independent outlets were shut down or co-opted under the government of Vladimir V. Putin, Novaya Gazeta survived, observers said, thanks in part to Mr. Muratov’s longstanding connections and willingness (criticized by some factions of the country’s fractured opposition) to make some strategic compromises, including holding back on investigations of wealth held by family members and suspected romantic partners of Mr. Putin and his inner circle.

“He made a valiant effort to continue operating with the incredible restrictions, and the incredible risk, to try to do independent journalism inside the country,” said Ann Cooper, a former Moscow correspondent and former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Ultimately, he had to make a terrible decision.”

Everything changed after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, and the Kremlin enacted a harsh new law punishing anyone who spreads “false information” about the invasion with up to 15 years in prison, effectively criminalizing independent reporting on the war. (Under the law, for example, it could be illegal to call it a “war,” rather than a “special military operation.”)

Novaya Gazeta (a collective, majority-owned by its employees) stayed open for 34 days, as most other independent Russian outlets were shuttered, many journalists left the country and many Western news organizations suspended operations. “It was a media holocaust,” Mr. Muratov said.

And on March 28, Novaya Gazeta announced it would suspend operations, after receiving two warnings that its coverage had violated the law. To continue, Mr. Muratov said, would have put his employees at risk.

“This is wartime censorship,” he said in the interview. “Under these circumstances, we can’t publish honest material.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/01/arts/russia-ukraine-muratov-nobel.html

After that attack, New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, spearheaded an international pact, called the Christchurch Call, that saw government and major tech companies commit to eliminate terrorist and extremist content online. Though the agreement carried no legal penalties, the Trump administration refused to sign, citing the principle of free speech.

Mr. Gendron’s experience online shows that the writings and video clips associated with the Christchurch shooting remain available to inspire other acts of racially motivated violence. He referred to both repeatedly.

The Anti-Defamation League warned last year that the “great replacement” had moved from the fringes of white supremacist beliefs toward the mainstream, pointing to the chants of protesters at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., that erupted in violence and the commentaries of Tucker Carlson on Fox News.

“Most of us don’t know the original story,” Mr. Ward of the Southern Poverty Law Center said. “What we know is the narrative, and the narrative of the great replacement theory has been credentialized by elected officials and personalities to such an extent that the origins of the story no longer need to be told. People are beginning to just understand it as if they might understand conventional wisdom. And that’s what is frightening.”

For all the efforts some major social media platforms have made to moderate content online, the algorithms they use — often meant to show users posts that they will read, watch and click — can accelerate the spread of disinformation and other harmful content

Media Matters for America, a liberal-leaning nonprofit, said last month that its researchers found at least 50 ads on Facebook over the last two years promoting aspects of the “great replacement” and related themes. Many of the ads came from candidates for political office, even though the company, now known as Meta, announced in 2019 that it would bar white nationalist and white separatist content from Facebook and Instagram.

The organization’s researchers also found that 907 posts on the same themes on right-wing sites drew more 1.5 million engagements, far more than posts intended to debunk them.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/01/technology/fringe-mainstream-social-media.html

In person, Ms. Afualo seemed a stark contrast from her energetic, sharp-tongued online persona. “I’m a lot more laid back than people think I am,” she said. “I’m only like that because that’s what I do — react to that terrible content.”

At Boris and Horton, a cafe for people and their dogs, a corgi started yapping after having lost a tussle with friends. A Labrador named Callie approached, and Ms. Afualo gave the dog a scratch.

“Right now, my mom has a little maltipoo, a little crusty white dog,” she said. “I love her. I’m obsessed with her. And then we have a pit bull.”

A man wearing a backward baseball cap suddenly loomed over the table.

“So, I’m going to jump in,” he announced. Then he asked Ms. Afualo to state her view of the Supreme Court’s potential overturning of Roe v. Wade. “It’s terrible,” she replied. “It’s horrifying.” Even offline, it seemed, she couldn’t avoid being called on to give her opinion on an issue pertaining to women.

Back outside, she talked about online vitriol, an all too common hazard for women in her line of work, especially women of color. “It’s a different level of hate that I get,” she said. “I’m not afforded the same courtesy that they give many men, and other women, too. If I was a small, white woman, would you feel this strongly about what I said? Would you laugh and be like, ‘Tough, but fair’?”

At Veniero’s Pasticceria Caffé Ms. Afualo got a berry tart. Nearby, on a stoop on East 10th Street, she mentioned that she believes in daily affirmations, which have apparently helped her keep her cool amid the barrage of online criticism. “Sometimes I say them to myself in the mirror, which feels silly,” she said, “but I feel like it’s important.”

And what are the affirmations?

“I say that I’m worthy,” she said. “That I’m valid. That I’m a good person. That I’m going to be successful because I’m a good person. And that I’m worthy of all the success that I’m having.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/style/drew-afualo-tiktok.html