As TikTok stares down an impending federal ban, Donald Trump’s win in the presidential election could be a lifeline. It’s a plot twist for the embattled, Chinese-owned social media company. During Trump’s last presidency, the president-elect had been the one to initiate the calls to ban TikTok, which only petered out because he didn’t win […]

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An effort to bring a broader news ecosystem to the open social web, also known as the fediverse, is now in the hands of the social magazine app Flipboard. Press.coop, a service that created mirrored accounts of top news publishers (including Reuters, AP, WSJ, NYT, BBC, CNN, and even yours truly), has transferred its collection […]

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TikTok on Thursday debuted a new feature that will more closely connect its app, which already influences which songs top the charts, to the streaming services where users discover and play their favorite music. With the launch of a new “Share to TikTok” feature, music fans will be able to directly share tracks from both […]

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With all eyes on how a new Trump administration in the U.S. will interface with China Tech in the years ahead, its neighbor to the north has leveled a blow to one of the biggest apps to come out of the country. Canada has ordered the closure of ByteDance’s operations in Canada — specifically the […]

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Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Wednesday announced plans in the country to ban social media for children under 16, saying that “social media is doing harm to our kids, and I’m calling time on it.” The proposed legislation will enter parliament this year, taking effect a year after lawmakers ratify it, said Albanese, adding […]

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“For You” algorithms that promote the most interesting content across a social network, personalized to the individual user, offered a disjointed, outdated, and nearly unusable experience on election night in the U.S. as they highlighted hours-old posts that no longer reflected the current state of the race. Frustrations were particularly high on Threads, Meta’s X […]

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Meta announced Tuesday that it is extending its restriction on political ads until later in the week, though it did not specify which day the ban would be lifted.  When asked for more information, a Meta spokesperson pointed TechCrunch to the announcement about the company working to “protect the integrity of elections on Facebook and […]

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Meta has added another privacy sanction to its extensive collection: South Korea’s data protection agency fined the social media giant around $15.7 million for processing sensitive user data and passing it to advertisers without a proper legal basis, Reuters reports. Seoul’s Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) found Facebook’s parent collected information from about 980,000 users, […]

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Veteran entrepreneur Rakesh Mathur stepped down as CEO of the college social network Fizz, handing over the reins to 22-year-old founder Teddy Solomon. It’s full circle for Fizz, the anonymous platform that Solomon started with his Stanford classmate Ashton Cofer before they dropped out to work on the app full-time. Mathur has been working with […]

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WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg, speaking on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Wednesday, said he’s not worried that the recent legal drama between his company, Automattic, and WordPress host WP Engine may lead to a fork of the open source WordPress software. In fact, he said, he’d welcome it. “There might be […]

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Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg says the company is “very short-staffed” amid WordPress’s ongoing drama with WP Engine, which hosts websites built on WordPress. The WordPress co-founder took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Wednesday. The saga began when Mullenweg called WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.” Mullenweg called out WP Engine, claiming that they […]

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Elon Musk-owned social network X made changes to its API pricing and limits today and also announced annual plans with a discounted rate. The company raised the prices of the basic API tier from $100 to $200 and said it would introduce higher limits and new endpoints for this subscription plan. In a post on […]

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LinkedIn, the social platform used by professionals to connect with others in their field, hunt for jobs, and develop skills, is taking the wraps off its latest effort to build artificial intelligence tools for users. Hiring Assistant is a new product designed to take on a wide array of recruitment tasks, from ingesting scrappy notes […]

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