A look at the increased use of celebrity deepfakes in advertising, with or without their permission, raising legal and ethical questions (Patrick Coffee/Wall Street Journal)

Brian Heater / TechCrunch:
Amazon unveils AWS SimSpace Weaver, a spatial computing service for developers to run real-time city-sized simulations across multiple instances  —  At this morning’s Re:Invent keynote in Las Vegas, Amazon unveiled AWS SimSpace Weaver, a computing service that allows developers to run city-sized simulations at scale in the cloud.

Wall Street Journal:
General Mills and Audi paused Twitter ads, and sources say Pfizer and Mondelez have as well, as concern over content moderation grows  —  Advertisers are concerned about a flurry of executive departures at Twitter and new owner Elon Musk’s plans for content moderation

Patrick Coffee / Wall Street Journal:
OpenWeb, which helps publishers target readers with ads and manage comments, has raised a $170M Series F at a $1.5B valuation, up from $1.1B in November 2021  —  The firm, now valued at $1.5 billion, plans to move further into ad sales and eventually go public, its CEO says

Emily Baker-White / Forbes:
Web novel apps backed by ByteDance and Tencent are running hundreds of Facebook and Instagram ads showing sexual assault, violent erotica, and acts of self-harm  —  Some of the ads include descriptions of sexual violence, paired with images of battered women and photos of male fitness influencers, which were used without permission.

Jay Peters / The Verge:
Hands-on with Netflix’s Basic with Ads: while most shows have pre-roll ads, mid-roll ads are more unpredictable; many popular shows are locked to higher tiers  —  Clicking into something on Netflix’s new ads tier is a roll of the dice: you never know how many ads you might have to sit through.

Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Elon Musk says Apple has “fully resumed” advertising on Twitter, after claiming on November 28 that Apple had “mostly stopped” Twitter ads  —  Elon Musk said Apple Inc. has “fully resumed” advertising on Twitter Inc., further de-escalating a brewing war between two of the world’s most influential tech companies.