The New King Of All Media

Welcome to the Tech Brew ride home for Wednesday, 03/11/2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, sources say the US government is investigating finance around Iranian sanction evasion. Meta is helping authorities worldwide to crack down on scammers. YouTube literally now is officially the biggest media entity in the world and the legal way to listen to full songs right inside of TikTok. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. The journal says that the US Department of Justice is investigating Iran's use of Binance to evade sanctions focusing on money flowing to networks backing terror groups like Yemen's Houthis. Quote, the probe follows the crypto exchange's dismantling of an internal investigation into more than $1,000,000,000 that flowed through the platform to a network funding Iran backed terror groups according to company documents and people familiar with the matter. Officials have contacted people with knowledge of the Iranian transactions to seek interviews and gather evidence, some of the people said. The Wall Street Journal couldn't determine whether the justice department is investigating Binance itself for potential misconduct or solely the customers on its platform. The inquiry puts the world's largest crypto exchange back in the legal spotlight after its founder, Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ, received a pardon from president Trump in October. Binance pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating US anti money laundering and sanctions laws, paying $4,300,000,000 in fines and agreeing to operate under US oversight. Zhao pleaded guilty to a related charge and spent four months in jail. The Treasury Department appointed Monitor overseeing the company's compliance program, also recently requested that the exchange provide information about the Iranian transactions, including about a business partner that sent much of the money according to people familiar with the request. Binance suspended the employees investigating the transactions last November, not long after they flagged $1,700,000,000 moving from Chinese clients into digital wallets used by Iran to finance its proxies, including Yemen's Houthi militants, the journal reported last month, citing internal reports submitted by the employees. Of that total, more than $1,000,000,000 was sent by the business partner, a Hong Kong based payments company called Blessed Trust. Binance's 2023 agreement with US authorities requires it to screen clients for potential terrorism financing and sanctions evasion and to report suspicious transactions to the Treasury Department. The company last year asked department officials to remove its monitor, which is scheduled to continue until 2029 and has blocked many of the monitor's earlier requests the journal has previously reported. Binance has said it was confident it complies with all reporting obligations, and it cooperates with law enforcement and regulators. A Binance spokesman said the exchange categorically did not directly transact with any sanctioned entities. He said that the company, quote, uncovered a sophisticated multi jurisdictional pattern of financial activity and that the Iranian connections were, quote, only identified and sanctioned after Binance began investigating and taking action in lockstep with law enforcement to shut down this network, end quote. Worth noting that …