Tag: Social

February 12, 2021

We take an in-depth look at TikTok usage in Russia, Facebook’s Oversight Board looks beyond Facebook and Sesame Workshop backs an edtech fund. This is your Daily Crunch for February 11, 2021. The big story: TikTok becomes a political battleground […]

February 5, 2021

Myanmar’s new military government has ordered local telecom operators, internet gateways, and other internet service providers to block Twitter and Instagram in the South Asian country days after imposing a similar blackout on Facebook service to ensure “stability” in the […]

January 7, 2021

Today’s historic and terrifying coup attempt by pro-Trump extremists in Washington, D.C. played out live the same way it was fomented — on social media. Once again Twitter, streaming sites and other user-generated media were the only place to learn […]

December 23, 2020

Instant messaging app Telegram is “approaching” 500 million users and plans to generate revenue starting next year to keep the business afloat, its founder Pavel Durov said on Wednesday. Durov said he has personally bankrolled the seven-year-old business so far, […]

November 18, 2020

French startup Yubo is the biggest social media app you’ve never heard of — unless you’re a teen. With a focus on young people under 25, the company has managed to attract 40 million users. A fraction of them hang […]

November 13, 2020

Just over a week after the U.S. elections, Twitter has offered a breakdown of some of its efforts to label misleading tweets. The site says that from October 27 to November 11, it labeled some 300,000 tweets as part of […]

October 19, 2020

Facebook’s lead data regulator in Europe has opened another two probes into its business empire — both focused on how the Instagram platform processes children’s information. The action by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), reported earlier by the Telegraph, comes […]

August 7, 2020

Facebook has joined Google in saying it will allow employees to work from home until the middle of next year as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. “Based on guidance from health and government experts, as well as decisions drawn […]

August 6, 2020

Twitter is introducing new labels for accounts and tweets tied to government officials and “state-affiliated media.” “Twitter provides an unmatched way to connect with, and directly speak to public officials and representatives,” the company wrote in the blog post announcing […]

January 6, 2020

More details are emerging about the scale and scope of disgraced data company Cambridge Analytica’s activities in elections around the world — via a cache of internal documents that’s being released by former employee and self-styled whistleblower, Brittany Kaiser. The […]

October 30, 2019

Facebook has reached a settlement with the UK’s data protection watchdog, the ICO, agreeing to pay in full a £500,000 (~$643k) fine following the latter’s investigating into the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal. As part of the arrangement Facebook has […]

September 6, 2019

New York Attorney General Letitia James announced this morning that she’s leading an investigation into Facebook over antitrust issues — in other words, whether Facebook used its social media dominance to engage in anti-competitive behavior. In a statement, James said: […]

June 28, 2019

Facebook has produced a report summarizing feedback it’s taken in on its idea of establishing a content oversight board to help arbitrate on moderation decisions. Aka the ‘supreme court of Facebook’ concept first discussed by founder Mark Zuckerberg last year, […]

January 30, 2019

In the wake of TechCrunch’s investigation yesterday, Apple blocked Facebook’s Research VPN app before the social network could voluntarily shut it down. The Research app asked users for root network access to all data passing through their phone in exchange […]

December 14, 2018

Reset the “days since the last Facebook privacy scandal” counter, as a Facebook has just revealed a Photo API bug gave app developers too much access to the photos of up to 5.6 million users. The bug allowed apps users […]

November 13, 2018

Facebook has fixed a bug that let any website pull information from a user’s profile — including their ‘likes’ and interests — without that user’s knowledge. That’s the findings from Ron Masas, a security researcher at Imperva, who found that […]

March 26, 2018

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has confirmed it’s investigating Facebook’s privacy practices in light of the data misuse scandal currently engulfing the company. In a statement regarding reported concerns about Facebook’s privacy practices today, Tom Pahl, acting director of the […]

November 1, 2017

Russian information troll farm the Internert Research Agency spent just 0.05% as much on Facebook ads as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s campaigns combined in the run up to the 2016 US presidential election. Clinton and Trump spent $81 million, […]

January 13, 2017

Aiming for the stars and not quite making it, the ambitious App.net has finally officially shut down. Its timely rise and fall comes as highly symbolic as its once rival, Twitter, continues to struggle, years later, with monetization, content management […]

November 14, 2016

When you have a billion people using your service, you have an obligation to keep your users secure, even when they behave in unsafe ways. Alex Stamos, Chief Security Officer (CSO) at Facebook, speaking at Web Summit last week, told […]