Social

A new flurry of tweets from President Trump is pushing the limits of social platform policies designed explicitly to keep users safe from the spread of the novel coronavirus, both online and off. In a series of rapid-fire messages on Friday morning, Trump issued a call to “LIBERATE” Virginia, Minnesota, and Michigan, all states led

As a lot of us continue to stay indoors, Facebook has become a go-to platform for many people to check in with their friends, family and neighbours during the current coronavirus pandemic. Today, to give us another way of showing support and presence in its apps, the company said it would add a new reaction

TikTok is introducing a new set of parental controls to its platform to users worldwide, including in the U.S. The features, collectively referred to as “Family Pairing,” will allow parents to set controls on Screen Time Management, Restricted Mode and Direct Messages for their teen users. It also will now disable direct messaging for users

On his personal Facebook account, Mark Zuckerberg offered an update on the company’s roadmap for bringing employees back to work in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. In the post, he acknowledged that while it might be possible for a small portion of “critical employees” unable to do their work remotely to return sooner, the

Houseparty, the popular video chat application acquired by Fortnite maker Epic Games in 2019, has seen massive growth due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With government lockdowns keeping people from being able to visit friends and other loved ones in person, consumer demand for video chat apps has skyrocketed. This has resulted in the video conferencing

Adriel is a South Korean startup bringing automated ad tools to small businesses — and in recent months, it’s been expanding into the United States and the United Kingdom. This might seem like exactly the wrong time to be growing an ad-buying platform, since we’re at the beginning of what’s likely to be a tremendous

Facebook’s internal R&D group has today launched a new app that lets you keep up with your close friends via your Apple Watch. The app is called Kit, or Keep in Touch, and works using a combination of QR codes and Facebook’s existing Messenger service. According to Kit’s App Store description, you get started with

The coronavirus outbreak has forced millions of U.S. employees to work from home — many for the first time. But remote work can be lonely and isolating, as people feel disconnected from their team and co-workers due to the lack of face-to-face conversations. That’s where the new startup, Hallway, aims to help. The service re-creates

It takes either audacious self-confidence or reckless hubris to build a completely asocial video app in 2020. You can decide which best describes Quibi, Hollywood’s $1.75 billion-funded attempt at a mobile-only Netflix of 6 to 10 minutes micro-TV show episodes. Quibi manages to miss every trend and tactic that could help make it app popular.

Facebook today is launching a new feature called “Quiet Mode” that will allow you to minimize distractions by muting the app’s push notifications for a time frame you specify. The company announced the change as an update on its COVID Newsroom post, describing it as a way for users to set boundaries around how they

Facebook’s ad review system is failing to prevent coronavirus misinformation from being targeted at its users, according to an investigation by Consumer Reports. The not-for-profit consumer advocacy organization set out to test Facebook’s system by setting up a page for a made-up organization, called the Self Preservation Society, and creating ads that contained false or

LinkedIn has no plans to make COVID-related layoffs until at least the end of June 2020, the professional network has confirmed to TechCrunch. This announcements comes after Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s pledge last month to have no significant layoffs for the next 90 days. Other business leaders such as Bank of America’s CEO Brian Moynihan

WhatsApp is imposing additional restriction on how frequently a message can be shared on its platform in its latest effort to curtail the spread of misinformation. The Facebook -owned instant messaging service said today that any message that has been forwarded five or more times will now face a new limit that will prevent a

Voice-based social networks and gaming as a new form of identity were amongst the top emerging trends in consumer social startups, according to an Extra Crunch survey of top social tech investors. Meanwhile, anonymity and dating apps with a superfluous twist were spaces where investors were most pessimistic. Extra Crunch assembled a list of the

Today, Facebook quietly released a new app for couples. Called Tuned, the new release is a multimedia messaging app designed to help significant others communicate. The app is available for download in the U.S. and Canada, app analytics firm Sensor Tower tells us. Tuned was developed and released by Facebook’s New Product Experimentation (NPE) team.

Last year, The Information reported that CNN was working on a new digital news service to compete with the likes of Apple and Facebook. Today, some of those plans are taking shape. The Turner-owned news broadcaster has acquired Canopy, an all-purpose content personalisation that uses human curation, on-device machine learning and differential privacy to help

Starting today, some U.S. Facebook users will see a new pop-up on the app asking them to complete a survey about COVID-19. The survey, from Carnegie Mellon University’s Delphi epidemiological research center, is one of many new symptom mapping projects that seek to anticipate where the next wave of the virus will hit as COVID-19

Social distancing requirements amid the COVID-19 pandemic may have canceled kids’ birthday parties, but parents are finding new ways to take the celebrations online. While video chat apps like Zoom, Google Hangouts or FaceTime are an option for gathering kids together in the virtual space, there’s still the challenge of what to do once there.

Since 2016, social media companies have faced an endless barrage of bad press and public criticism for failing to anticipate how their platforms could be used for dark purposes at the scale of populations—undermining democracies around the world, say, or sowing social division and even fueling genocide. As COVID-19 plunges the world into chaos and

Facebook’s WhatsApp is in the midst of a lawsuit against Israeli mobile surveillance outfit NSO Group. But before complaining about the company’s methods, Facebook seems to have wanted to use them for its own purposes, according to testimony from NSO founder Shalev Hulio. Last year brought news of an exploit that could be used to

Zoom is making some drastic changes to prevent rampant abuse as trolls attack publicly-shared video calls. Starting April 5th, it will require passwords to enter calls via Meeting ID, since these may be guessed or reused. Meanwhile, it will change virtual waiting rooms to be on by default so hosts have to manually admit attendees.

Facebook first launched its Community Help feature in 2017, to give users a way to offer assistance, search for and receive help in the wake of a crisis. The feature has since been used to connect Facebook users after man-made, accidental, and natural disasters, like terrorist attacks or weather events, for example. Today, Facebook is

Facebook Messenger is finally getting desktop apps almost 9 years after its debut. After seeing over a 100% increase in desktop browser audio and video calling, Messenger today releases its Mac and Windows desktop apps. They bring the same features as the browser version, but make it easier to keep your chat threads handy than

What do you do if you’re an event discovery startup and suddenly it’s illegal to attend events? You lean into the cultural shift and pivot. Today, $11 million-funded calendar app IRL is morphing from In Real Life to In Remote Life. It will now focus on helping people find, RSVP for, plan, share, and chat

Google is shutting down Neighbourly, a Q&A social app that it launched in select parts of India two years, the company has informed users. The app, developed by company’s Next Billion Initiative, aimed to give local communities an outlet to seek answers to practical questions about life, routine and more. At the time of the

Many TikTok videos don’t start from scratch, so neither can its competitors. TikTok is all about remixes where users shoot a new video to recontextualize audio pulled from someone else’s clip, or riff on an existing meme or concept. That only works because TikTok’s had time to build up an immense armory of content to

Like many other websites at the moment, the career-oriented networking platform LinkedIn has seen a big boost in traffic as a result of people being asked to work from home and stay indoors overall to slow the spread of the coronavirus, with a bump of 55% more conversational activity between existing connections in recent weeks.

YouTube has been criticized for continuing to host coronavirus disinformation on its video sharing platform during a global health emergency. Two US advocacy groups which campaign for online safety undertook an 18-day investigation of the video sharing platform in March — finding what they say were “dozens” of examples of dubious videos, including videos touting

There’s a joke* being reshared on chat apps that takes the form of a multiple-choice question — asking who’s the leading force in workplace digital transformation? The red-lined punchline is not the CEO or CTO, but: C) COVID-19. There’s likely more than a grain of truth underpinning the quip. The novel coronavirus is pushing a

Houseparty has been a smashing success with people staying home during the coronavirus pandemic who still want to connect with friends. The group video chat app, interspersed with games and other bells and whistles, raises it above the more mundane Zooms and Hangouts (fun only in their names, otherwise pretty serious tools used by companies,