Snap is channeling Asia’s messaging giants with its move into gaming
Snap is taking a leaf out of the Asian messaging app playbook as its social messaging service enters a new era. The company unveiled a series of new strategies that… Read more »
Category: Social
Daily Crunch: The lonely death of Google+
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 »
Foursnap? Snapchat tries ‘Status’ location check-ins
Today’s teens missed the Foursquare era, so Snapchat is giving them another shot with a new feature to aid in-person meetups. Snapchat is now testing Status, an option to share… Read more »
German LinkedIn rival Xing is rebranding as ‘New Work’ acquires recruitment platform Honeypot for up to $64M
Xing, the business networking platform that has been described as Germany’s answer to LinkedIn, has made an acquisition to beef up its recruitment business ahead of a rebrand of the… Read more »
Mark Zuckerberg actually calls for regulation of content, elections, privacy
It’s been a busy day for Facebook exec op-eds. Earlier this morning, Sheryl Sandberg broke the site’s silence around the Christchurch massacre, and now Mark Zuckerberg is calling on governments… Read more »
Facebook’s handling of Alex Jones is a microcosm of its content policy problem
A revealing cluster of emails reviewed by Business Insider and Channel 4 News offers a glimpse at the fairly chaotic process of how Facebook decides what content crosses the line…. Read more »
HUD hits Facebook with housing discrimination charges over ad targeting
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development this morning hit Facebook with charges of housing discrimination. The filing states that the the online giant has violated the Fair Housing… Read more »
Apple TV+ makes Facebook Watch look like a joke
Apple flexed its wallet today in a way Facebook has scared to do. Tech giants make money by the billions, not the millions, which should give them an easy way… Read more »
PicsArt hits 130 million MAUs as Chinese flock to its photo editing app
If you’re like me, who isn’t big on social media, you’d think that the image filters that come inside most apps will do the job. But for many others, especially… Read more »
Morphin instantly Deepfakes your face into GIFs
Want to star in your favorite memes and movie scenes? Upload a selfie to Morphin, choose your favorite GIF, and your face is grafted in to create a personalized copy… Read more »
YC-backed Basement is a social network for close friends only
The past few years have been a bit of a dark age for budding social media startups. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snap and messenger apps took up all the time of… Read more »
After Christchurch, Reddit bans communities infamous for sharing graphic videos of death
In the aftermath of the tragic mosque massacre that claimed 49 lives in Christchurch, New Zealand, tech companies scrambled to purge their platforms of promotional materials that the shooter left… Read more »
Facebook says its new AI technology can detect ‘revenge porn’
Facebook on Friday announced a new artificial intelligence-powered tool that it says will help the social network detect revenge porn — the nonconsensually shared intimate images that, when posted online,… Read more »
The adversarial persuasion machine: a conversation with James Williams
James Williams may not be a household name yet in most tech circles, but he will be. For this second in what will be a regular series of conversations exploring… Read more »
Wattpad gains strategic investment from Times Bridge to further expand in India
Wattpad is further expanding into Asia with a new partnership and undisclosed strategic investment from Times Bridge, the global investment arm of the Times Group in India. The deal aims… Read more »
Periscope cracks down on inauthentic behavior, including fake hearts, follows, chats and more
Twitter’s video streaming app, Periscope, is cracking down on spam and, specifically, fake engagements. The company says it’s updating its policies around how it enforces its anti-spam rules, and is… Read more »
A first look at Twitter’s new prototype app, twttr
Yesterday, Twitter rolled out its much-anticipated prototype application to the first group of testers. We’ve now gotten our hands on the app and can see how the current version differs… Read more »
Instagram founders say losing autonomy at Facebook meant “winning”
Rather than be sore about losing independence within Facebook, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom told me it was an inevitable sign of his app’s triumph. Today at South By South West,… Read more »
Online platforms need a super regulator and public interest tests for mergers, says UK parliament report
The latest policy recommendations for regulating powerful Internet platforms comes from a U.K. House of Lord committee that’s calling for an overarching digital regulator to be set up to plug… Read more »
Twitter’s new prototype app ‘twttr’ launches today
Twitter’s new prototype application is rolling out to the first group of testers starting today, the company announced this afternoon by way of a tweet. The app, which Twitter is… Read more »
Instagram prototypes video co-watching
The next phase of social media is about hanging out together while apart. Rather than performing on a live stream or engaging with a video chat, Instagram may allow you… Read more »
Zuckerberg wants messages to auto-expire to make Facebook a ‘living room’
On feed-based “broader social networks, where people can accumulate friends or followers until the services feel more public . . . it feels more like a town square than a… Read more »
Twitter debuts new analytics tools for publishers focused on improving video engagement
In January at CES 2019 in Las Vegas, Twitter announced that it was developing new tools that would make it easier for publishers to better understand what sort of content… Read more »
Barstool Sports founder reportedly blames company ‘idiots’ for copyright controversy
In a recent Twitter thread, comedian Miel Bredouw recounted some shady behavior by Barstool Sports’ legal team. In fact, even Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy isn’t trying to defend it,… Read more »
UK Far Right activist circumvents Facebook ban to livestream threats
Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a Far Right UK activist who was permanently banned from Facebook last week for repeatedly breaching its community standards on hate speech, was nonetheless able to use its… Read more »
Facebook admits 18% of Research spyware users were teens, not
Facebook has changed its story after initially trying to downplay how it targeted teens with its Research program that a TechCrunch investigation revealed was paying them gift cards to monitor… Read more »
TikTok is launching a series of online safety videos in its app
On the heels of news that TikTok has reached 1 billion downloads, the company today is launching new initiative designed to help inform users about online safety, TikTok’s various privacy… Read more »
Twitter co-founder Ev Williams to step down from the company’s board
Ev Williams, a co-founder of Twitter and the social media business’s former chief executive officer, is stepping down from its board of directors effective at the end of the month,… Read more »
Pinstagram? Instagram code reveals Public Collections feature
Instagram is threatening to attack Pinterest just as it files to go public the same way the Facebook-owned app did to Snapchat. Code buried in Instagram for Android shows the… Read more »
Instagram’s fundraiser stickers could lure credit card numbers
Mark Zuckerberg recently revealed that commerce is a huge part of the 2019 road map for Facebook’s family of apps. But before people can easily buy things from Instagram etc., Facebook… Read more »