Social

Wattpad, the online storytelling community that’s home to some 80 million monthly users, has successfully tapped into the power of crowdsourcing to help uncover the next potential hits for media companies including Netflix, Hulu, NBCU, Sony Pictures Television, and others worldwide. It even launched its own YA book line to bring its online stories to

Just under a month ago Facebook switched on global availability of a tool which affords users a glimpse into the murky world of tracking that its business relies upon to profile users of the wider web for ad targeting purposes. Facebook is not going boldly into transparent daylight — but rather offering what privacy rights

A significant majority of Americans have lost faith in tech companies’ ability to prevent the misuse of their platforms to influence the 2020 presidential election, according to a new study from Pew Research Center, released today. The study found that nearly three-quarters of Americans (74%) don’t believe platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google will be

In Part 1 of our Virtual Worlds series, we look at how games have already become popular social platforms Eric Peckham @epeckham / 9 hours Video games are only getting more popular. Roughly 2.5 billion people around the world played games last year, double the number of players in 2013. Gaming is a $149 billion

Facebook’s Creator Studio has added a mobile companion. The insights dashboard for creators and publishers, which debuted globally in August 2018, is now available as a mobile app for both iOS and Android. Similar to the desktop hub, the Creator Studio app allows users to track how their content is performing across Facebook Pages, as

Rallyhood says it’s “private and secure.” But for some time, it wasn’t. The social network designed to help groups communicate and coordinate left one of its cloud storage buckets containing user data open and exposed. The bucket, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), was not protected with a password, allowing anyone who knew the easily-guessable

Before it was worth $7.6 billion, the original idea for Robinhood was a stock trading social network. At my kitchen table in San Francisco in 2013, the founders envisioned an app for sharing hot tips to a feed complete with a leaderboard of whose predictions were most accurate. Once they had SEC approval, they pivoted

Twitter is rolling out a “continue thread” button, ViacomCBS has big plans for its streaming service and Morgan Stanley acquires E-Trade. Here’s your Daily Crunch for February 20, 2020. 1. Twitter adds a button so you can thread your shower thoughts Twitter is adding a new feature for mobile users to make it easier to

Hold that tweet — and add another one. Twitter is adding a new feature for mobile users to make it easier to link dispersed ‘shower thoughts’ together — and another thing styleee. Per 9to5Mac, the feature — which Twitter tweeted about yesterday — is slowly rolling out to its iOS app. (At the time of writing

TikTok announced today the introduction of a new set of parental controls, called “Family Safety Mode,” designed to let parents set limits on their teenage children’s use of the TikTok mobile app. The suite of features includes screen time management controls, limits on direct messages, and a restricted mode that limits the appearance of inappropriate

Facebook may make it easier to escape its ranking algorithm and explore the News Feed in different formats. Facebook has internally prototyped a tabbed version of the News Feed for mobile that includes that the standard Most Relevant feed, the existing Most Recent feed of reverse chronological posts that was previously buried as a sidebar

“I don’t feel good about that. That sucks” Chrys Bader-Wechseler reflects when asked about the bullying that went down on the anonymous app Secret he co-founded in 2013. After $35 million raised, 15 million users, and a spectacular flame out two years later, the startup was dead. “Since I left secret I feel alive and

It’s suspiciously convenient that Facebook already fulfills most of the regulatory requirements it’s asking governments to lay on the rest of the tech industry. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in Brussels lobbying the European Union’s regulators as they form new laws to govern artificial intelligence, content moderation, and more. But if they follow Facebook’s suggestions,

“Not gonna lie. This f*cking sucks. This is the last HQ ever!” yelled host Matt Richards . And it just got crazier from there.The farewell game of HQ Trivia before it shut down last night was a beautiful disaster. The hosts cursed, sprayed champagne, threatened to defecate on the homes of trolls in the chat

HQ Trivia is dead. Today the company laid off its full staff of 25 and will cease operation of its trivia, sports, and word guessing games, a source close to the company confirmed. HQ Trivia had a deal in the works to be acquired, but they buyer pulled out yesterday and investors aren’t willing to

Instagram is changing its advertising rules to require political campaigns’ sponsored posts from influencers to use its Branded Content Ads tool that adds a disclosure label of “Paid Partnership With”. The change comes after the Bloomberg presidential campaign paid meme makers to post screenshots that showed him asking them to make him look cool. Instagram

Tinder is testing a series of new social features designed to boost conversations between users on its service. One of the new features is a conversational prompt, first teased during parent company Match Group’s recent earnings. The prompt encourages users to respond to questions or finish a sentence in order to better showcase their personality

Facebook is adding another app to its group of experimental projects from the NPE Team, an initiative it announced last year focused on rapidly trying out new ideas in social to see how users react. This week, the team released its fourth app experiment with the launch of Hobbi, a photo and video sharing app

Fifty percent of families are scared they can’t cover the cost of a funeral. They end up overpaying because no one wants to comparison shop amidst a tragedy. That’s why ex-Googler Alison Johnston’s startup Ever Loved built a free funeral crowdfunding tool. Now it’s addressing one of the most expensive parts of saying goodbye: burial.

Eye-witness photos and videos distributed by news wire Reuters already go through an exhaustive media verification process. Now the publisher will bring that expertise to the fight against misinformation on Facebook. Today it launches the new Reuters Fact Check business unit and blog, announcing that it will become one of the third-party partners tasked with

Can’t afford Netflix and HBO and Spotify and Disney+…? Now there’s an app specially built for giving pals your passwords while claiming to keep your credentials safe. It’s called Jam, and the questionably legal service launched in private beta this morning. Founder John Backus tells TechCrunch in his first interview about Jam that it will

Facebook receives plenty of pointed criticism from numerous corners, including for refusing to police political speech on Facebook, its seemingly endless string of privacy breaches and its apparent coziness with the Trump administration. One of the platform’s most prominent critics, somewhat unexpectedly, is comic, writer and actor Sacha Baron Cohen. Indeed, his powerful speech to

Four senators, including Ted Cruz (R-TX), have asserted that, as a consequence of sanctions placed on Iran, Twitter must cease providing its services to Ayatollah Khamenei and other leaders in the country. “The Ayatollah enjoys zero protection from the United States Bill of Rights,” he wrote in a letter to the company. Although the move

Instagram will now show you who you interact with least frequently in case you want to unfollow them. In an effort to help you keep your feed clean and relevant, today Instagram is launching ‘following categories’ that divides the list of who you follow into batches including “most seen in feed” and “least interacted with”.

The growing market of fantasy sports in India may soon have a new and odd entrant: ShareChat . The local social networking app, which in August last year raised $100 million in a financing round led by Twitter, has developed a fantasy sports app and has been quietly testing it for six months, two sources

There is a major change ahead for LinkedIn, the social network for the working world, now with 675 million members. Jeff Weiner, who has been leading the company as CEO for the past 11 years, is stepping down on June 1, 2020. His new role will be executive chairman. Ryan Roslansky, who is currently head

Shareholders have repeatedly tried to oust Facebook’s chairman Mark Zuckerberg. The board has repeatedly rejected that demand. Outside investors are unlikely to get much help with that push from Facebook’s newest board member: Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston. The addition of Houston is the first since the departure of Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann from the

Twitter today is announcing the official version of its “deepfake” and manipulated media policy, which largely involves labeling tweets and warning users of manipulated, deceptively altered or fabricated media — not, in most cases, removing them. Tweets containing manipulated or synthetic media will only be removed if they’re likely to cause harm, the company says.

A UK government advisory body on AI and data ethics has recommended tighter controls on how platform giants can use ad targeting and content personalization. Concerns about the largely unregulated eyeball-grabbing targeting tactics of online platforms — be it via serving ‘personalized content’ or ‘microtargeted ads’ to individuals or groups of users — include the

Twitter announced today that over the holidays it identified and shut down “a large network of fake accounts,” as well as many others “located in a wide range of countries,” collectively abusing a feature that let them match phone numbers to user accounts. TechCrunch previously reported this same issue on December 24, which is also