Facebook fears no FTC fine
Reports emerged today that the FTC is considering a fine against Facebook that would be the largest ever from the agency. Even if it were 10 times the size of… Read more »
Category: Social
Facebook is secretly building LOL, a cringey teen meme hub
How do you do, fellow kids? After Facebook Watch, Lasso, and IGTV failed to become hits with teens, the company has been quietly developing another youthful video product. Multiple sources… Read more »
Facebook finds and kills another 512 Kremlin-linked fake accounts
Two years on from the U.S. presidential election, Facebook continues to have a major problem with Russian disinformation being megaphoned via its social tools. In a blog post today the company reveals… Read more »
Facebook urged to give users greater control over what they see
Academics at the universities of Oxford and Stanford think Facebook should give users greater transparency and control over the content they see on its platform. They also believe the social… Read more »
Instagram caught selling ads to follower-buying services it banned
Instagram has been earning money from businesses flooding its social network with spam notifications. Instagram hypocritically continues to sell ad space to services that charge clients for fake followers or… Read more »
Turns out the science saying screen time is bad isn’t science
A new study is making waves in the worlds of tech and psychology by questioning the basis of thousands of paper and analyses with conflicting conclusions on the effect of… Read more »
A first look at Twitter’s new beta app and its bid to remain ‘valuable and relevant’
Twitter has made a name for itself, at its most basic level, as a platform that gives everyone who uses it a voice. But as it has grown, that unique… Read more »
Daily Crunch: Bing has a child porn problem
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you… Read more »
Twitter gives events a boost with new publisher tools
As Twitter continues to look for ways to monetize its platform beyond basic advertising, it is building more tools for businesses that turn Twitter into more of a utility that… Read more »
Instagram now lets you regram your posts to multiple accounts
Instagram is swaying the balance toward simplicity but away from originality. It’s adding the ability to publish feed posts to different accounts you control at the same time by toggling… Read more »
Facebook is the new crapware
Welcome to 2019 where we learn Facebook is the new crapware. Sorry #DeleteFacebook, you never stood a chance. Yesterday Bloomberg reported that the scandal-beset social media behemoth has inked an unknown… Read more »
LinkedIn now requires phone number verification for all users in China
LinkedIn’s China site looks and functions just like LinkedIn everywhere else, except now it asks users in the country to verify their identities through phone numbers. The American company is… Read more »
Facebook and PayPal pull pages of far right British activist filmed intimidating public figures
Facebook has confirmed it has removed the pages and profiles of a far right political activist in the UK after concerns were raised in parliament about aggressive intimidation of politicians… Read more »
Zuckerberg’s 2019 challenge is to hold public talks on tech & society
Rather than just focus on Facebook’s problems like his 2018 challenge, this year Mark Zuckerberg wants to give transparency to his deliberations and invite the views of others. Today he… Read more »
People lost their damn minds when Instagram accidentally went horizontal
Earlier today, when Instagram suddenly transformed into a landscape-oriented Tinder-esque nightmare, the app’s dedicated users extremely lost their minds and immediately took to Twitter to be vocal about it. As… Read more »
My product launch wishlist for Instagram, Twitter, Uber and more
‘Twas the night before Xmas, and all through the house, not a feature was stirring from the designer’s mouse . . . Not Twitter! Not Uber, Not Apple or Pinterest!… Read more »
The Yule Log Channel
My aunt and uncle lived up the hill from Martins Ferry, Ohio, high above the river. My uncle ran a used car lot – Snezek’s – and so it was… Read more »
China’s WeChat is the latest to get Snap-like ‘Stories’
WeChat, the Chinese messaging giant with over 1 billion monthly active users around the world, just added a Snap-like ephemeral video feature as part of its biggest overhaul since 2014. The… Read more »
How Juul made vaping viral to become worth a dirty $38 billion
A Juul is not a cigarette. It’s much easier than that. Through devilishly slick product design I’ll discuss here, the startup has massively lowered the barrier to getting hooked on… Read more »
Facebook’s fact-checkers toil on
Facebook is fielding so many problems, oversights, scandals, and other miscellaneous ills that it wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that its fact-checking program, undertaken last year after the network was… Read more »
Twitter stock down after analyst calls it ‘Harvey Weinstein of Social Media’
Twitter was down 11 percent today after a Citron Research report called the platform, the “Harvey Weinstein of social media” and set a low target price of $20. As of publishing… Read more »
WhatsApp makes group calls easier, but calls still limited to four people
WhatsApp is making group calls easier with a change to the way its mobile app works. Before, users would have to start a 1:1 video call, then add participants –… Read more »
Crew, a Workplace and Slack messaging rival for shift workers, raises $35M, adds enterprise version
When it comes to shift workers communicating with each other in the workplace when they are not face-to-face, gone are the days of cork announcement boards. Now, the messaging app… Read more »
Twitter’s support form leaked phone number country codes to IPs in China & Saudi
Twitter accidentally exposed the ability to pull an account’s phone number country code and whether the accounts had been locked by Twitter. The concern here is that malicious actors could… Read more »
HQ Trivia and Vine co-founder Colin Kroll found dead of suspected overdose
Colin Kroll, the 35-year-old co-founder and CEO of the HQ Trivia app, has been found dead of an apparent drug overdose in his apartment, TechCrunch has confirmed. A spokesman for… Read more »
The limits of coworking
It feels like there’s a WeWork on every street nowadays. Take a walk through midtown Manhattan (please don’t actually) and it might even seem like there are more WeWorks than… Read more »
Jack Dorsey and Twitter ignored opportunity to meet with civic group on Myanmar issues
Responding to criticism from his recent trip to Myanmar, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said he’s keen to learn about the country’s racial tension and human rights atrocities, but it has… Read more »
Google CEO admits company must better address the spread of conspiracy theories on YouTube
Google CEO Sundar Pichai admitted today that YouTube needs to do better in dealing with conspiracy content on its site that can lead to real world violence. During his testimony on… Read more »
FB QVC? Facebook tries Live video shopping
Want to run your own home shopping network? Facebook is now testing a Live video feature for merchants that lets them demo and describe their items for viewers. Customers can… Read more »
Seized cache of Facebook docs raise competition and consent questions
A UK parliamentary committee has published the cache of Facebook documents it dramatically seized last week. The documents were obtained by a legal discovery process by a startup that’s suing the… Read more »