Facebook has inked a deal with Major League Baseball for exclusive rights to stream 25 afternoon games in the U.S. Terms of the deal, which is the first time a major U.S. league has agreed to stream games exclusively on the social platform, were not disclosed. In addition to exclusive streaming rights for 47 college basketball games this year, Facebook has struck deals with Fox Sports to stream the UEFA Champions League and with Univision to broadcast live games from Mexico’s top soccer league. It streamed 20 non-exclusive MLB games last season.
Apple Inc. is acquiring digital magazine service Texture, which Rogers Communications has had a stake in since 2013. The deal means the end of Rogers’ ownership in the service, which is also partly owned by Condé Nast, Hearst Corp., New York-based equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and Meredith Corp. Texture will continue to carry Rogers Media publications like Maclean’s, Chatelaine, Today’s Parent and Hello! Canada.
Twitter has funded a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that finds false information on the social media network travels six times faster than the truth and reaches more people. MIT looked at more than 126,000 stories tweeted millions of times between 2006 and the end of 2016, calculating that the average false story takes about 10 hours to reach 1,500 Twitter users, versus about 60 hours for the truth. On average, false information reaches 35 per cent more people. While true news stories were retweeted to reach about 1,000 people, the top one per cent of fake news reached as many as 100,000 users.
