Social

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and current Block Head, has weighed on how he feels about Elon Musk buying Twitter. In a tweet thread that starts out with a link to Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place,” Dorsey said that “in principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to

Twitter, the platform that once helped fuel The Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street is now owned by the richest man in the world, and you have to wonder what impact it’s going to have. There are so many open questions about how the company will change under Elon Musk’s leadership. Will he make it

The company formerly known as Facebook is about to have an IRL shop. Meta will open the doors to the Meta Store (almost typed the Meat Store, that’s a very different store — really sort of the opposite) on May 9. The company’s debut shopping experience will be located on the Meta Burlingame campus, home

It’s been a wild month of news for the social network that we collectively love to hate. In early April, Elon Musk took a bite out of Twitter, coming away with 9.2% of the company and plans to exercise his influence over the company through its board. After that he backed out of his planned

Instagram is testing Templates, a new feature that will allow Reels creators to use the same format as other videos, according to Business Insider. The feature is currently only available to a small group of creators and is in beta testing. It’s similar to TikTok’s Templates, which allows users to plug in their own photos

Twitter has been spotted working on a feature that would allow users to set a status on their profiles and tweets. According to reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong, who searches the code of mobile apps to spot features and upcoming changes in development, the social media giant is working on a “set a status” feature

Twitter announced today that it’s beginning to test a “CC” button that will let users turn video captions on or off. The feature is rolling out to some iOS users and will be coming to Android users soon, Twitter notes. A video posted by the social media shows that the CC button will appear in

The internet is full of mysteries. Who really wrote “My Immortal,” and was it supposed to be a satire? Who is behind the group of hackers known as Anonymous? And why can’t Elon Musk just log off? But a new question arose about two and a half months ago, when writer and reverse engineer Steve

An app called BeReal, founded by former GoPro employee Alexis Barreyat along with Kévin Perreau, launched in December 2019 with its idea of asking users to post an unedited photo once per day after receiving a push notification. Upon receiving the alert, the user has up to 2 minutes to share what they’re up to

In an SEC filing today, Elon Musk indicated that Twitter has yet to respond to his offer to buy the company, and that he is “exploring whether to commence a tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding shares.” Recall that Twitter has itself adopted a poison-pill defense of its equity in light of Musk’s

After an era of open affection for Silicon Valley followed by an era of relative quiet, former President Barack Obama is tearing into tech. The former president spoke Thursday at an event co-hosted by Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and the Obama Foundation, and this time he didn’t mince words about the toll that social media

Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is now facing “internal scrutiny” at the company after pressuring U.K. tabloid the Daily Mail to kill a story about her former boyfriend, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. The revelations come in an explosive new report from the Wall Street Journal detailing a coordinated campaign to discourage the tabloid

Over the last few days, my WeChat has been inundated with people reminiscing about the first post they ever published on the app’s newsfeed, which marked its 10-year anniversary this week. The newsfeed feature, called Moments, is like a social network that lives within the WeChat super app. Unlike many other social networks, which either

Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced today that the company is going to tweak its ranking algorithm to highlight original content more on its platform. Following the announcement, a spokesperson for the social media giant told TechCrunch in an email that Instagram is making changes to its ranking algorithm to prioritize the distribution of original content,

Instagram is adding the ability for users to create and donate to fundraisers directly from Instagram Reels, the app’s short-form video feature and TikTok rival. The feature was announced alongside a series of updates across Meta’s platform and services designed to celebrate Earth Day, including custom stickers for Instagram and Messenger, profile frames for Facebook, conservation-focused

Instagram is removing the ‘Recent’ tab on hashtag pages for some users as part of a small test, the company announced on Tuesday. Currently, when you select a hashtag, you’re taken to a page where you can parse through the content that has been posted using that hashtag via three categories: Top, Recent and Reels.

This month, Twitter announced the ground-shaking news that it was actually going to offer users a way to edit tweets — a longtime user request. And it would have been the biggest Twitter story in years, if it weren’t for the Elon Musk takeover attempt. Now, it appears work on Twitter’s Edit button has already

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.  The move by Elon Musk to try and buy Twitter has proved polarizing. Not that we should be surprised; mega-deals are always clarifying moments. But the Musk-Twitter saga

The Twitter and Elon Musk saga is far from over as Elon Musk has made an offer to buy Twitter in an SEC filing. The billionaire has said he is willing to pay $54.20 per share to buy 100% of the company. It would be an all cash offer and would value the social network

Twitter’s board of directors announced in a press release that the company is adopting a limited duration shareholder rights plan — a “poison pill” in merger and acquisition lingo. While the company doesn’t name Elon Musk directly, Twitter is clearly trying to prevent the billionaire from buying the social network. Elon Musk currently owns 9.2%

The parent company of Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast will buy D&D Beyond, the role-playing game’s popular digital suite of tools. The company announced the news this week in a press release, disclosing that it would buy D&D Beyond from current owner Fandom in a $146.3 million cash deal. Wizards of the

Reddit announced today that it’s rolling out the ability to search comments, alongside a few other search-related features. With the new comment search function, users no longer have to click on several comments to find threads when looking for a particular conversation. You can now search for comments directly via a new “comments” tab in

Clubhouse is rolling out a new dark mode setting on its iOS and Android apps starting today, the company announced in a blog post this week. The company says dark mode was a highly requested feature and is designed to make it easier for night owls to hang out on its platform at night. Instead

—That escalated quickly. Days after the inexplicably idle mega-billionaire and chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX announced that he had bought a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter and would join its board, wait no he’s not doing that; Musk wants the whole damn thing. In a tweet, Musk disclosed that he served Twitter an offer

Good morning from the West Coast! Today is TechCrunch: Early Stage, which means that I should be doing last-minute prep for my sessions. But instead, we’re going to talk about Elon Musk, who made an unsolicited bid for Twitter that is naturally taking the technology and business media by storm. Our own Romain Dillet has

Last August, TechCrunch noted TikTok was working to build its own augmented reality (AR) development platform called Effect House, which would allow creators to build AR effects for use in TikTok’s video app. Today, Effect House has officially gone live. The platform has been operating in a close beta since last fall, where it’s so

TikTok announced today that it has started testing a way for users to identify comments that they think are irrelevant or inappropriate. Following the announcement, the company confirmed to TechCrunch that users who are part of the test will be able to flag these sorts of comments via a private dislike button. The new feature

Snapchat is introducing a new “Dynamic Stories” feature that will allow publishers to automatically create Stories on the app based on news stories they publish online, the company announced on Tuesday. Early partners include CNN, Bloomberg, ESPN and more. The new feature uses a publisher’s RSS Feed to automatically create and post Stories on a

TikTok issued an update Tuesday on its efforts to stem the flow of misinformation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the company doesn’t appear to be effectively implementing its existing policies around the war. The social network cut off new content originating in Russia in early March in response to a harsh new law in

Clubhouse is testing a new in-room gaming feature on both iOS and Android devices, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Tuesday. As part of the initial launch, the app is rolling out a game called “Wild Cards,” which presents a series of questions that are designed to spur conversation and help people get to know