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A new bill seeks to dramatically reshape the online advertising landscape to the detriment of companies like Facebook, Google and data brokers that leverage deep stores of personal information to make money from targeted ads. The bill, the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act, introduced by Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) in the House

Snapchat has faced increasing criticism in recent years as the opioid crisis plays out on social media, often with tragic results. In October, an NBC investigation reported the stories of a number of young people aged 13 to 23 who died after purchasing fentanyl-laced pills on Snapchat. Snapchat parent company Snap responded by committing to

Istanbul has become a city to watch when it comes to casual gaming startups, boosted by the likes of Peak (acquired by Zynga for $1.8 billion) and Dream (valued at $1 billion in a funding round last year). Now, a new startup is announcing a major round of funding to make its own mark on

Meta is shutting down a video speed-dating service it had tested over a good part of last year, the company informed the service’s users via a recent email. Last April, the company formerly known as Facebook confirmed it was testing a new dating service called Sparked, which was developed by its in-house incubator, the NPE

The creator of one of the earliest and most enduringly iconic virtual worlds is returning to his roots. Second Life’s founder Philip Rosedale will rejoin the company he founded in 1999 as a strategic advisor after High Fidelity, the spatial audio company Rosedale co-founded in 2013, invested in Second Life’s developer Linden Lab. The deal

Following news that the FTC’s antitrust suit against Meta cleared a critical hurdle earlier this week, the agency is apparently also taking a sharp interest in the company’s VR business. Bloomberg reports that the FTC and multiple state attorneys general are probing Meta’s virtual reality division for “potential anti-competitive practices.” New York reportedly leads the

Steve Alexander Contributor Steve Alexander is SVP and CTO of Ciena, a networking systems and software company that works with operators and content providers across the globe. Meta’s stated mission is to seamlessly connect disparate environments like work, social media and gaming so it can allow people to effectively live and work in the virtual

A competition legal expert, backed by a powerful litigation fund, is set to mount a multibillion-dollar class action suit against Facebook/Meta for breach of competition law on the basis that it abused its dominance of social networking in the U.K. for several years. If successful, the action would see Facebook having to pay $3.1 billion

The House committee leading the investigation into the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol issued subpoenas to four major tech companies Thursday. Jan. 6 select committee chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) sent letters to YouTube parent company Alphabet, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, Reddit and Twitter demanding for those companies to provide additional

A group of more than 80 prominent fact checking organizations around the world is pressing YouTube to take action against Covid misinformation, which still prevails on the platform now two years into the pandemic. “As an international network of fact-checking organizations, we monitor how lies spread online — and every day, we see that YouTube

The Nigerian government has lifted the suspension of Twitter operations more than six months after it first declared a crackdown on the social media giant in the country. Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, the director-general of Nigeria’s tech agency, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), made this announcement via a statement today. He was put in charge,

Twitter has been working on Spaces Recordings, a feature that will let hosts share tweets with audio recordings of past Spaces. Now, when hosts share the recordings, they’re able to see how many listeners joined live, as well as how many people replayed the recording after the fact. we’ve been working on Spaces Recordings and

The conservative social media platform Parler has raised $20 million in funding, according to an SEC filing that was signed and submitted on January 6, the anniversary of last year’s domestic attack on the Capitol. The app, which claims to have 16 million-plus registered users, describes its mission as one focusing on protecting “against the authoritarian

Meta, formerly Facebook, is tinkering around with how it tells users about their privacy options. The company has switched up where this information lives and how it’s explained a number of times over the years and now appears to be centralizing some privacy FAQs and controls in one place across its family of apps. The

Founder Alán Jaime Misrahi grew up devoted to soccer, eventually playing in Mexico’s third division. While he didn’t necessarily make it to the “big leagues” playing the sport, his new company Draftea aims to win over the 350 million sports fans in Latin America, Jaime Misrahi told TechCrunch in an interview. Draftea, which calls itself

Prerna Gupta Contributor Prerna Gupta has launched mobile entertainment apps, like Hooked and Smule, reaching over a billion people. She is currently working on a stealth project in the NFT space. As the debates on Twitter rage on, most tech founders and VCs have by now chosen a side: Web 2.0 or web3. Proponents of

Everybody wants a little of that TikTok magic. To that end, Twitter is rolling out a new test feature that invites people to post video reactions to tweets instead of quote-tweeting the old-fashioned way. It’s a very un-Twitterlike choice, but the company has been actively experimenting with new products for a while now, including the

LinkedIn, now with more than 800 million people listing their professional profiles to build out their careers, is taking its next steps to get them to spend more time on the platform. The company is rolling out a new events platform, where it will be listing, hosting and marketing interactive, virtual live events. It is

Instagram has started testing private likes on Stories as part of a limited test. The Meta-owned company confirmed that the feature is not broadly available and is currently only visible to a small group of people globally. The company also explained that only the person who has posted the Story can see the total number

Jonathan Martinez Contributor Jonathan Martinez is a former YouTuber, UC Berkeley alum and growth marketing nerd who’s helped scale Uber, Postmates, Chime and various startups. More posts by this contributor 5 common growth marketing mistakes startups make In growth marketing, signal determines success It’s been a crazy year in growth marketing, what with the meteoric

Instagram is making good on the promise it made last month to bring back the chronological feed. In a tweet Wednesday, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced that the platform is rolling out some big changes to the way the core feed experience works, letting users choose between three different feeds. Two new options, Favorites and

Ghanaian health tech startup mPharma is building a network of community pharmacies across Africa as it plans to be the go-to primary healthcare service provider for millions of people residing in the region. mPharma plans to grow its community (Mutti) pharmacies across eight markets in Africa to be the first point of care for patients.

TikTok is testing its own version of Twitter’s retweet with the addition of a new “Repost” button which allows users to amplify videos on the platform by sharing them with their own followers. The new Repost button is found in the “Share” menu where you could otherwise send the video to friends through messages, texts,

Twitter has permanently suspended the personal account of Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-GA) “for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” according to the company. Her official government account remains active. Rep. Greene has been prolific in the posting of articles and statistics supposedly pertaining to the pandemic but often are misleading or flat-out wrong. This

Technology has come a long way in 2021. There’s widespread mRNA vaccines! An asteroid-deflecting space mission! A very powerful laptop with a very controversial notch! But it’s unfortunately easier to think about the cringiest moments of the year than it is to remember times when we marveled at indoor farming robots.  So hop aboard the choo-choo-cheugy

Ten years ago, if you were a scrappy kid somehow making a living off of YouTube ad revenue and brand deals, you were probably told you didn’t have a real job. Now, if monetizing your creative output is how you pay your rent, you’re part of the creator economy, a buzzy new industry. An often-cited

Hide your “Tony the Tiger”/”Eugene Levy” fan fiction — those phrases, along with hundreds of others, are now banned from Tumblr’s iOS app. Now, any personal blog that flags itself as “mature” is not accessible on the iOS app — users will see a pop-up explaining that the content has been hidden because of “potentially

A TikTok moderator has sued the social media platform and its parent ByteDance over trauma caused by graphic videos, Bloomberg has reported. In a proposed class-action lawsuit, moderator Candie Frazier said that she has screened videos showing violence, school shootings, fatal falls and even cannibalism. “Plaintiff has trouble sleeping and when she does sleep, she

This is a quiet period for marketing: End-of-year campaigns are already underway, teams are on holiday vacations and there’s little to do until after the new year. Setting aside the holiday spirit, this has been a difficult year for growth professionals. Most are still adapting to pandemic-driven changes to consumer habits, but Apple’s new privacy

Rick Song Contributor Rick Song is co-founder and CEO of Persona. More posts by this contributor The next era of moderation will be verified It’s time for social media and dating apps to face the music and curb fraud, deception and disinformation on their platforms once and for all. In the beginning, social media and