Social
Is Facebook preparing to launch a serious competitor to TikTok? If so, the company just picked up some key talent to make that happen. Last week, Facebook announced plans for a new division, called the NPE Team, which will build experimental consumer-focused apps where it will try different ideas and features, then see how people […]
Two years have passed since Snap Inc. first struck a deal with Baidu that authorized China’s largest search engine to be a reseller of Snapchat ads for companies in Greater China, as well as Japan and South Korea, where Baidu runs a portfolio of mobile apps. This week, the pair announced they have renewed the […]
Facebook will only build its own Calibra cryptocurrency wallet into Messenger and WhatsApp, and will refuse to embed competing wallets, the head of Calibra David Marcus told the Senate Banking Committee today. While some, like Senator Brown, blustered that “Facebook is dangerous!,” others surfaced poignant questions about Libra’s risks. Calibra will be interoperable, so users […]
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 can subscribe here. 1. Highlights from Facebook’s Libra Senate hearing David Marcus, the head of Facebook’s blockchain subsidiary Calibra, testified before the Senate Banking Committee […]
At first glance launching a new social app may seem as sensible a startup idea as plunging headfirst into shark-infested waters. But with even infamous curtain-ripper Facebook now making grand claims about a ‘pivot to privacy’ it’s clear something is shifting in the commercial shipping channels that contain our digital chatter. Whisper it: Feeds are […]
Twitter today is beginning its test of a radical and controversial change to its service with the launch of a new “Hide Replies” feature. Effectively, this option gives users the ability to wrestle back control over a conversation they’ve started by hiding any replies they feel aren’t worthy contributions — for example, replies that are […]
Would the internet be a better place if we all paid a little less attention to fake internet points? Instagram is still trying to figure it out. Just a few months back, Instagram started testing a design tweak that would no longer show the total number of “likes” other users’ posts had received. You could […]
Prepare your best * unsurprised face *: Facebook is being accused of contradicting itself in separate testimonies made on both sides of the Atlantic. The chair of a U.K. parliamentary committee that spent the lion’s share of last year investigating online disinformation, going on to grill multiple Facebook execs as part of an enquiry that […]
Instagram this morning announced several changes to its moderation policy, the most significant of which is that it will now warn users if their account could become disabled before that actually takes place. This change goes to address a longstanding issue where users would launch Instagram only to find that their account had been shut […]
Twitter’s self-service tool for blocking content you don’t want to see (as well as a growing tendency for users to delete a lot of the content they post) is making some of the conversations on the platform look like Swiss cheese. The company says in the next few weeks it will introduce added “context” on […]
