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South Africa’s telecommunication provider Telkom SA SOC Ltd has since October discontinued Netflix Inc. from its phone and internet set-top box, said a Bloomberg report. Telkom’s Content Executive Wanda Mkhize said in a statement that the partnership between the two firms would not be renewed and declined to provide further details, Bloomberg reported. We have

As competition for creator talent heats up, Snap today introduced a series of new tools, programs, and features that will enable creators on its platform to generate revenue. These include the expansion of a Gifting feature to worldwide creators, the expansion of the Creator Marketplace to include Snap Stars (top creators with verified accounts), the

Insurance in Kenya and Africa at large remains a marginal product, with levels of penetration across the continent half the world average as a percentage of GDP, and premiums per capita 11-fold lower than the world average, according to a recent report by McKinsey and Co. (and that’s including the outsized market of South Africa;

Pinterest is launching a new “Pinterest Havens” mental health support initiative in honor of World Mental Health Day, which is October 10th. In a blog post, the company called the initiative “an online and offline space for community-driven inspiration.” Pinterest notes that it’s essentially creating space on its platform to explore the relationship between mental

Bradley Tusk Contributor More posts by this contributor A California judge just struck down Prop 22: Now what? When regulation presents a (rare) opportunity Let’s be really generous to Facebook and assume that 50% of what Frances Haugen just testified to before Congress was misconstrued in some way. Regardless, Facebook will argue their case (as

Google announced Thursday that it would no longer allow ads or monetization for content that promotes climate change denialism. The policy change will apply to publishers, advertisers and YouTube creators, who will no longer be able to make money from content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.” Google

Sean Herman Contributor Sean Herman is the CEO of Kinzoo, a kid tech company based in Vancouver, BC, and is the author of “Screen Captured: Helping Families Explore the Digital World in the Age of Manipulation.” In a blog post announcing plans to temporarily stop developing a new app targeted at children, Instagram head Adam

If you’ve ever tweeted something innocuous that went on to kick off a firestorm of unwanted attention, you know full well that people on Twitter will fight about anything and everything — it’s the internet’s premier destination for high-speed, low-information opinion slinging, after all. Twitter has been working on ways to tone down the toxicity

Twitter announced Wednesday that it would offload MoPub, the mobile ad platform it bought back in 2013, selling the company to mobile game and marketing software maker AppLovin. Twitter paid around $350 million for MoPub back in 2013 and will sell the company for $1.05 billion in cash. MoPub helped Twitter bring in around $188

Video sharing platforms that offer a service in the UK have to comply with new regulations intended to protect users and under 18s from harmful content such as hate speech and videos/ads likely to incite violence again protected groups. Ofcom, the country’s comms, broadcast and — in an expanding role — Internet content regulator, has

Facebook’s hours-long outage on Monday may have hurt the company, its founder, shareholders, and many businesses that rely on the social juggernaut’s services. But for its instant messaging rivals, it was a very good day. Telegram founder and chief executive Pavel Durov said on Tuesday that his instant messaging app added a staggering 70 million

Snapchat is rolling out a new ‘Run for Office’ in-app tool to encourage young adults to run for local office. The company says the new Run for Office tool is designed to help younger users engage with democracy in an easy way. The goal of the tool is to tackle common barriers that young people

Global users are experiencing outages on Facebook, including all social networks the company owns, which include Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. When navigating to these websites, a server error will appear — Instagram shows a “5xx server error,” which indicates that this is an issue with Facebook’s servers. Users are also unable to send messages or

Facebook’s stock took a dive Monday as the site suffered one of its worst outages of the past decade with services across its entire suite of products going offline while the tech company struggled to even bring its own internal services back online. The stock ended the day down nearly 5%, with Facebook shedding tens

“We believe that a thriving community is a company’s most valuable asset,” Community-led writes in its Declaration. “Community scales your business, resources and presence in ways that traditional marketing or advertising channels can’t. When done right, community enables and improves customer acquisition, streamlines support and success, bolsters retention, and provides crucial product insights. Community is

Facebook Messenger is releasing a bundle of products this morning — most notably, including cross-app group chats. Last year, the company introduced cross-app messaging between Messenger and Instagram, but now, users will be able to start group chats among Instagram and Messenger contacts. Other additions today include polls in Instagram DMs, building off the poll

Nigeria President Muhammadu Buhari announced on Friday that the ban on Twitter would be lifted, but only if the social media giant met certain conditions. The president disclosed this during his televised broadcast to Nigerians on the country’s 61st Independence Day anniversary. He acknowledged the fact that Twitter is used to disseminate information. Still, he

TikTok this week presented its new plan to ramp up advertiser investment in its video platform with the expansion of e-commerce, a new promise of “brand safety,” and the launch of several new and interactive ad formats, ranging from clickable stickers to choose-your-own-adventure ads to “super likes” and more. The additions, the company says, will

Last night, Facebook published two annotated slide decks in an attempt to contextualize the documents that The Wall Street Journal published this month, which reported evidence that the company is aware of its negative impact on teen mental health. These documents were released in anticipation of today’s Senate hearing on the mental health harms of

The NFT space has had quite the year, and while it can be difficult to separate the billions of dollars in crypto speculation from the potential infrastructure shifts, plenty of mainstream tech companies are dipping their toes into the space and signaling future interest. This time it’s TikTok’s turn. The fast-growing social media platform, which

After a decade of a handful of dominant social media companies trading what are essentially publishing tools in exchange for serving us all an endless deluge of ads, the winds of change are finally blowing — in a few different directions at once. Content creators (arguably either a special echelon of influencers or anyone who

Meesho has more than doubled its valuation in less than six months, to $4.9 billion, as a growing number of high-profile investors back the Indian social commerce startup that is reporting strong growth despite the pandemic. The Bangalore-headquartered firm said on Thursday it has raised $570 million in its Series F financing round, following a

After launching into beta tests just last month, Facebook today is rolling out Reels to all Facebook users in the U.S. on both iOS and Android. The feature, Facebook’s response to TikTok, allows creators to make and share short-form video content using a variety of editing tools, including those for music and audio, AR effects,

Peter Relan is not exactly a household name, but he has seen a lot over the course of his career and enjoyed a fair amount of success. A Stanford grad who logged time at Hewlett Packard and Oracle before becoming the CTO of the ill-fated, bubble-era company Webvan, Relan has, in more recent years, become

In the summer of 2019, Timilehin Ajiboye became intrigued with the idea of building a travel app after conversations with a circle of friends. One friend reached out to Ajiboye asking if he knew of any platform where she could find new, aesthetically pleasing places to dine in, visit and take pictures. And then, during a

Madison Schill Contributor Madison Schill is the director of marketing and communications at Livescale and is a former fashion editor and producer. Live shopping — the seamless and simultaneous combination of online shopping, livestreaming and social media — has been taking North America by storm since October 2019. Though booming to take up over 13%

The head of Instagram has just announced that it’s “pausing” a planned version of the social media software aimed at under 13 year olds. The development comes hard of the heels of critical reporting in the Wall Street Journal which unearthed internal documents that suggest the Facebook-owned company was aware the social media service caused

When it comes to online calendars and calendar apps, services like Google Calendar and Outlook from Microsoft rule the roost with hundreds of millions of users globally. Now another company is hoping to ruffle some feathers with its own move into the space. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Yahoo is working on called Day,

Twitter’s slate of new product announcements is not slowing down. The company today introduced a number of new initiatives aimed at better serving the conversations and community using its platform, including support for tipping with crypto, NFT authentication, and plans for other experiments designed to provide more context about a conversation to those just joining

Facebook today provided an update on how Apple’s privacy changes have impacted its ad business. The company had already warned investors during its second quarter earnings that it expected to feel an even more significant impact in its ad targeting business by Q3. This morning, it reiterated that point, but also noted that it had