Technology

Facebook is suffering from a massive bug in its News Feed spam filter, causing URLs to legitimate websites including Medium, Buzzfeed, and USA Today to be blocked from being shared as posts or comments. The issue is blocking shares of some but not all coronavirus-related content, while some unrelated links are allowed through and others are not. Itnot clear what exactly is or isn&t tripping the filter. Facebook has been trying to fight back against misinformation related to the outbreak, but may have gotten overzealous or experienced a technical error.

A source tipped us off and provided numerous examples of blocked links. We reached out to Facebook for comment and a company spokesperson told us &We&re looking into this right now and working as quickly as possible to share information. [I] can confirm at this point that we&re looking into the matter, can&t confirm what might be happening just yet.&

FacebookGuy Rosen later tweeted that &We&re on this & this is a bug in an anti-spam system, unrelated to any changes in our content moderator workforce. We&re in the process of fixing and bringing all these posts back. More soon.& Facebook sent home its content moderators this week and announced it would be relying more on its artificial intelligence systems, warning it could make &more mistakes&.

Upon sharing certain links, users are seeing a warning from Facebook stating &Your post goes against our Community Standards on spam&. It goes on to explain that &No one else can see your post. We have these standards to prevent things like false advertising, fraud and security breaches.&

Earlier this month, Facebook banned ads for protective face masks in an effort to prevent price gouging during the outbreak. Facebook has also been sharing contagion prevention tips atop Instagramhome screen, sending misinformation to fact-checkers for review, and providing data to researchers.

Facebook has grown into a fundamental communications utility, holding special importance during the COVID-19 crisis. News organizations are sharing life saving tips while non-profits are raising money for artists and businesses impacted by widespread quarantine orders. That means itmore critical than ever that Facebook keep information flowing properly.

Fox Corp., the broadcast news and entertainment company holding what remains of the Murdoch Familytelevision and cable sports and media assets after the sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney, has agreed to acquire the streaming service Tubi TV for $440 million.

Tubi, once of a now-dwindling number of free ad-supported streaming services, will bring a new digitally native consumer offering to Fox with younger-skewing audience that consumes roughly 160 million hours of entertainment on the platform, according to a statement.

Available on over 25 digital platforms in the U.S. and featuring 20,000 titles and 56,000 hours of film and television from 250 content partners — including major studios — will now be able to pull from Foxstable of news and sports programming in addition to all that licensed television and film.

Fox said that it will integrate its digital advertising, direct-to-consumer features, and personalization technology into Tubiadvertising platform. Fox watchers can now expect to see a deluge of Tubi ads flood their appointment watching of Neil Cavuto and Fox and Friends.

&Tubi will immediately expand our direct-to-consumer audience and capabilities and will provide our advertising partners with more opportunities to reach audiences at scale,& said Fox Corp. chief executive, Lachlan Murdoch in a statement. &Importantly, coupled with the combined power of Foxexisting networks, Tubi provides a substantial base from which we will drive long-term growth in the direct-to-consumer area.&

Tubichief executive, Farhad Massoudi, will continue to lead Tubiefforts and said that Foxrelationships with advertisers and distributors would be a big boost to the companygrowth.

Fox is paying for the Tubi acquisition with money earned from its sale of the 5 percent stake it held in Roku — another ad-supported streamer. The company said it was basically exchanging a passive minority investment in Roku for full ownership and control of a leadership position in the free ad-supported streaming market.

It&ll be interesting to see how Fox adjusts programming on the service which primarily comes from Warner Bros., Paramount, Lionsgate and NBCUniversal .

With the acquisition, Fox becomes the second big old-line network to buy into the ad-supported streaming business. In January, Viacom bought the streaming service PlutoTV for $340 million.

Fox was advised by Allen - Co. on the deal, while Qatalyst Partners served as Tubisole financial adviser.

While few things may me feel more like social distancing than suiting up in a haptic feedback suit and strapping a computer to your face, location-based virtual reality startups have begun closing up shop alongside a host of other entertainment businesses.

The closures came quickly Monday as city governments began announcing far-reaching measures.

Disney-backed VR startup The Void announced Monday that they would be closing all of their locations in North America. LATwo Bit Circus closed their doors yesterday because of Covid-19. Dreamscape Immersive announced yesterday that it has temporarily closed all of its VR entertainment centers across Los Angeles, Dallas, Columbus and Dubai.

&As much as we enjoy sharing virtual reality worlds with you, we cannot ignore whathappening in the real world,& a post on Dreamscape Immersivesite read in part.

Not all location-based VR startups have fully scaled back operations stateside. A16z-backed Sandbox VR has temporarily closed locations in Los Angeles and San Francisco (where city officials have mandated closures for most entertainment venues), though the rest of their U.S. locations appear to remain open for reservations on their website. We&ve reached out for more details.

The broader closings are an unsurprising development as more governments across the country push to temporarily shutter non-essential public businesses, something that has swiftly impacted entertainment venues. AMC and Regal announced yesterday that they would each be closing down all of their US theaters temporarily.

Location-based VR startups have been some of the more resilient companies in the face of what has been a years-long slog for the virtual reality industry. Sandbox VR has raised more than $82 million from investors, Dreamscape Immersive has raised over $36 million, while The Void has raised $20 million.

Most of these startups create or license gaming content and allow consumers to book appointments to try out the title. Their success has largely been tied to their independence from broader consumer VR headset sales which have largely failed to meet early expectations by wide margins.

The novel coronavirus pandemic has rapidly moved companies into a remote-first world.

Nearly all of the worldlargest events have been canceled, put on pause or pivoted to online-only. In the tech world, event cancellations thus far have included SXSW, GDC, Mobile World Congress, Google I/O, Facebook F8, E3 and others.

As more and more hosts consider staging fully remote events as possible alternatives, we decided to take a deeper look into the venture-backed startups focused on supporting large-scale virtual gatherings, like Hopin and Run The World. To further understand the impact of COVID-19, we asked five leading VCs who have invested in or have knowledge of startups focused on remote events to update us on the state of the market and to share where they see opportunity in the sector:

• Sarah Cannon, Index Ventures
• Connie Chan, Andreessen Horowitz
• Andrei Brasoveanu, Accel
• Ryan Kuder, Techstars Anywhere
• Paul Murphy, Northzone

Sarah Cannon, Index Ventures

Which trends in remote events/conferencing excite you the most from an investing perspective?

In another example for the farreaching effects of the coronavirus outbreak, the FAA today said that it is temporarily closing the tower at Midway Airport, the second largest airport in the Chicago area. In a statement, the FAA says that that several technicians at the facility tested positive for COVID-19. For a while, there was a ground stop in effect for Midway and no flights could take off to land at the airport.

In its statement, FAA notes that the airport remains open and that operations will continue at a reduced rate.

&The air traffic system is a resilient system with multiple backups in place. This shift is a regular execution of a longstanding contingency plan to ensure continued operations. Each facility across the country has a similar plan that has been updated and tested in recent years,& the FAA says in a statement. How exactly the airport will operate without a working control tower is unclear, though. Smaller airports often revert to being uncontrolled fields after the tower closes at night and have procedures in place for this. Thatnot typically the case for large airports like Midway, though, which are staffed 24/7.

Update (4:55pm PT): the airport has now clarified how it will keep the tower staffed.

The largest airline at Midway is Southwest Airlines, though Delta Air Lines also flies there.

In a separate statement, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the labor union for aviation safety professionals, asks that all who work at the tower should be tested for the disease. &NATCA is adamant that the testing must occur immediately and is hopeful there will be no additional COVID-19 infections. We are encouraged that the FAA is pursuing the rapid testing of all personnel at [Midway] Tower,& the organization writes.

Hello TechCrunch friends and family, tomorrow morning at 9 am Pacific Time we&re gathering on Zoom for an in-depth chat about our favorite startups from the latest Y Combinator Demo Day. This yearinstallment of the twice-yearly startup event happened yesterday, a week early and online only.

Like many other things, Demo Day was adapted to a new format in the face of COVID-19 disruptions. Despite that, TechCrunch wrote a host of posts on the companies that presented (you can see our notes here), dug into a number of the startups individually (here and here, for example), and sat down with Y CombinatorCEO for an interview.

We&re wrapping all of that with a group chat about the entire affair. We&d host this from the office in more regular years, but, it2020, and so we&re all gathering on Zoom which means that everyone is invited to listen in.

Here are the details:

• What? TechCrunch team chat about YC 2020 and all the coolest companies
• When? 9 am Pacific Time
• How long? About 30 minutes, give or take
• Where? Here, on Zoom
• Should I not mute myself and annoy everyone tuned in? No, please mute yourself

We&re recording the chat, and plan to make it available to Extra Crunch subscribers shortly after we&re done. But the main call is open to everyone, so add it to your calendar and we&ll see you there.