Social

If you’re having problems accessing Instagram today, you’re not alone. The social media giant is currently experiencing some problems, according to reports on third-party web monitoring service Downdetector. The website indicates that issues began at around 12:30 PM ET. NetBlocks, which tracks global internet usage and disruptions, has also noted that Instagram is facing intermittent

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s time at the company has come to an end. Dorsey stepped down from Twitter’s board of directors Wednesday, a change that’s effective as of the company’s shareholders meeting. Dorsey had already begun to distance himself from the social media platform he co-founded, leaving Twitter’s chief executive role late last year

Shares of Twitter are sharply higher in after-hours trading in the wake of a new U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing detailing changes to how Elon Musk is approaching buying the company. In short, Musk initially indicated that he would execute a margin loan of $12.5 billion against other holdings to help finance his

Only a handful of “whales,” or big spenders, still own the majority of NFTs. While the digital assets have piqued widespread consumer interest, the user experience associated with actually minting or purchasing an NFT is still complex and oftentimes intimidating. DJ Gabeau, one of Snapchat Stories’ earliest engineers and founder of web3 social network Primitives,

Roblox has picked up a key hire to help grow its ecosystem of user-generated content for the metaverse. Nick Tornow is joining the company as VP of Engineering for its developer team, leaving his former post as Twitter Platform Lead. Tornow also spent a decade at Zynga and served as the company’s CTO from 2013

Twitter announced today that it has rebranded its Twitter Media website to “Twitter Create.” The social media giant says the website is a new hub for creators to access resources, product information and tips for getting the most out of Twitter. With this new rebrand, the company says it wants to make it easier for

So you want to know what’s going on with Elon Musk and Twitter, but you thought maybe it’s a little too late to ask your tech-obsessed buddies for the low-down. You’ve come to the right place. Last month, in perhaps the year’s biggest tech news story yet, Elon Musk announced his intent to buy Twitter

Instagram is rolling out a “visual refresh” for its branding this week, the company announced in a blog post on Monday. The company is introducing a slightly tweaked brighter new logo, typeface and full-screen marketing layouts. Instagram says the refresh is designed to embrace continued evolution and to help it “create more immersive and inclusive

TikTok is ramping up its competition with Twitch, YouTube, and others with this week’s launch of TikTok LIVE subscriptions, a new program that will allow creators to generate recurring revenue via payments from their top fans. Similar to the offerings from rival streaming sites, the new service will offer subscribers a range of perks including

The District of Columbia has just announced fresh litigation targeting Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, for his role in the Cambridge Analytica Facebook data misuse episode — alleging it has evidence the Facebook founder was personally involved in the failures that led to the incident. The District is alleging breaches of the Consumer Protection Procedures Act

BUD, a nascent app taking a shot at creating a metaverse for Gen Z to play and interact with each other, has raised another round of funding in three months. The Singapore-based startup told TechCrunch that it has closed $36.8 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital India, not long after it

TikTok announced today that it’s launching a new ad product called “Branded Mission” that will allow creators to connect with brands and possibly receive rewards for videos. With the new ad product, advertisers can crowdsource content from creators and turn top-performing videos into ads. Advertisers can launch branded campaigns and encourage creators to take part

After years of stolen memes and uncredited dance trends, TikTok today is introducing a new feature that it says will be the first iteration of its creator crediting tools that allow creators to directly tag and credit others using a new button during the publishing process. This button lets creators credit all sorts of inspiration

Twitter has announced that it’s rolling out Super Follows-only Spaces. Creators who offer Super Follows subscriptions can now host Spaces exclusively for their subscribers. The social media giant says this new option will give creators a way to “offer an extra layer of conversation to their biggest supporters.” Subscribers globally on iOS and Android will

Snapchat is preparing to introduce a new parental control feature dubbed “Family Center,” which will allow parents to see who their teen is friends with on the app as well as who they’ve been messaging with over the past seven days, and more. Snap’s CEO Evan Spiegel first teased the planned offering during an interview

Meta’s recently crowned president of global affairs, Nick Clegg — who, in a former life, was literally the deputy prime minister of the U.K. — has been earning his keep in California by penning an approximately 8,000-word manifesto to promo “the metaverse”: aka, the sci-fi-inspired vapourware the company we all know as Facebook fixed on

New York Attorney General Letitia James will launch an investigation into the role that social media and online message boards played in the tragedy that unfolded in Buffalo over the weekend. On Saturday, an 18-year-old shooter opened fire at a Tops supermarket, killing 10 people and wounding three others. In online materials, the suspected shooter

Discord has provided more insight into how the shooter who opened fire in a Buffalo, New York supermarket over the weekend used its service prior to the tragic act of violence. The shooter, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, is charged with first degree murder in the mass shooting, which left 10 people dead and three injured. In

Dating app Hinge is introducing a new “Self-Care Prompts” feature that is designed to inspire initial conversations between matches about self-care priorities. Hinge’s in-app prompts are conversation starters that users answer as part of their profiles and are displayed to potential matches. The prompts are designed to allow users to showcase their personality instead of

One of the promises made by web3 entrepreneurs is putting data back in the hands of owners through decentralization. Singapore-based CyberConnect is among a handful of blockchain startups working to fulfill this vision, and it has recently closed a Series A financing round totaling $15 million. The lead co-investor of the round is Animoca Brands,

In a new tweet fired at Twitter before market open, Elon Musk has reiterated that his $44BN deal to buy the social media platform is on hold over the issue of spambots. But now he’s tacitly accusing the company of lying over the proportion of fake/spam accounts on the platform, claiming its CEO “publicly refused

When The New York Times got its hands on some of Elon Musk’s plans for Twitter, a company that he is in the process of purchasing, you would have been forgiven for thinking that Musk knew what he was buying. Per the Times’ reporting, we learned that Musk expects to bolster Twitter’s revenue to “$26.4

Twitter is full of bots, this much we know. But how full, and what kinds of bots? With estimates ranging from Twitter’s own “under 5 percent” to independent researchers suggesting 20% or more, it’s clearly a tricky number to nail down, as the company’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, explained in a thread today. Prospective buyer Elon

As a gunman wrought terror in a Buffalo, New York supermarket over the weekend, the violence was, yet again, streamed live online. The latest U.S. mass shooting left 10 people dead and raised familiar questions about how much responsibility social media companies bear in amplifying extremism that can lead to violence and in circulating footage

Twitter’s new CEO Parag Agrawal has largely remained silent through the company’s ongoing rollercoaster ride, even as its likely future owner Elon Musk continues to very much do the opposite. But Agrawal finally broke his silence following an especially tumultuous week at the company, which saw him oust two key executives, Twitter’s head of product

Twitter is testing a new “Liked by Author” label that appears when the creator of a tweet likes your reply. A reporter on the TechCrunch team spotted the new label in the Twitter Android app. A spokesperson from Twitter confirmed to TechCrunch that the company has been testing different labels to help give people context

Twitter staff must really be wishing for a quiet life… Elon Musk, the gadfly billionaire who recently decided he wants to add the social media platform to his collection of tech firms, has just tweeted that his $43BN bid to buy the company is “on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed

Facebook Pay will soon be renamed Meta Pay, according to a blog post written by Meta’s head of fintech, Stephane Kasriel. With the rebrand, the company is focusing on enhancing the payments experiences it already provides with Facebook Pay in regions where it’s seeing good adoption, as opposed to focusing on expanding to new countries.

Twitter GM of Consumer, Keyvon Beykpour, announced today he will be leaving the company after seven years. Beykpour first joined the social media platform by way of its acquisition of Periscope, which he founded, said in a tweet he was asked to leave by current CEO Parag Agrawal, who wants to take the team in

While the world continues to wonder what ‘free speech absolutist‘ and gadfly billionaire Elon Musk might mean for the future of Twitter, the European Union has chalked up an early PR win in the long game of platform regulation — extracting agreement from the Tesla founder that its freshly rebooted approach toward content policy sounds