A handful of tweets and videos that appear to have been cited in the choice to remove Alex Jones from Facebook and YouTube vanished from Twitter on Thursday after being called out in a CNN piece focused on the company’s hypocrisy. Twitter confirmed to TechCrunch that it did not remove the tweets in question and
Social
It’s not just inciting violence, threats, and hate speech that will get Facebook to remove posts by you or your least favorite troll. Endangering someone financially, not just physically, or tricking them to earn a profit are now also strictly prohibited. Facebook today spelled out its policy with more clarity in hopes of establishing a
Facebook is shutting down Friend List Feeds sometime today, according to a message posted in the Facebook app. The feature allowed users to scroll through only those posts from one of their designated friend lists – for example, family, work colleagues, neighbors, industry peers, and so on. The end result was a much more personalized
Apple has commented on its decision to continue to allow conspiracy theorist profiteer InfoWars to live stream video podcasts via an app in its App Store, despite removing links to all but one of Alex Jones’ podcast content from its iTunes and podcast apps earlier this week. At the time Apple said the podcasts had
[Heavy sigh] Twitter is doing that thing again. That thing where it stands by an incoherent policy choice that is only consistent with its long historical record of inconsistency. Late Tuesday, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey took to the platform to defend his company’s choice to keep manic conspiracy theorist and hatemonger Alex Jones and his Infowars
Snap Inc got a fresh infusion of cash from the Saudi royal family to help it survive despite losing $353 million this quarter. Prince Al-Waleed Talal tweeted a video of him and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, noting that he’s invested $250 million in exchange for a 2.3 percent stake in Snap Inc. The investment raises
The number of tech platforms taking action against Alex Jones, the far right InfoWars conspiracy theorist and hate speech preacher, has been rising in recent weeks — with bans or partial bans including from Google, Apple and Facebook. However, as we noted earlier, Twitter is not among them. Although it has banned known hate peddlers
The removal of conspiracy enthusiast content by InfoWars brings us to an interesting and important point in the history of online discourse. The current form of Internet content distribution has made it a broadcast medium akin to television or radio. Apps distribute our cat pics, our workouts, and our YouTube rants to specific audiences of
Backlash swelled this morning after Facebook’s aspirations in financial services were blown out of proportion by a Wall Street Journal report that neglected how the social network already works with banks. Facebook spokesperson Elisabeth Diana tells TechCrunch it’s not asking for credit card transaction data from banks and it’s not interested in building a dedicated
A colleague, who shall remain nameless (because privacy is not dead), gave a thumbs down to a recent column in the NYT. The complaint was that the writer had attacked tech companies (mostly but not exclusively Facebook) without offering any solutions for these all-powerful techbro CEOs’ orchestral failures to grasp the messy complexities of humanity
Facebook Dating doesn’t plan to launch a standalone dating app, which should temper expectations about how deeply it’s diving into Tinder and Match Group’s territory. The feature will be based inside Facebook’s main app, alongside its many other utilities buried beyond the home screen. It’s not ready for the public yet, but company employees are
Facebook this morning announced the launch of a new set of educational resources focused on helping young people think critically and behave thoughtfully online. The Digital Literacy Library, as the new site is being called, is aimed at educators of children aged 11 to 18, and address topics like privacy, reputation, identity exploration, security, safety,
“I think the mistake everyone made was to think that Stories was a photography product” says Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom. “If you look at all these interactivity features we’ve added, we’ve really made Stories something else. We’ve really innovated and made it our own.” His version of the ephemeral slideshow format turns two years old
Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer since 2015, announced that he is leaving the company to take a position at Stanford University. The company has been shedding leadership over the last half a year largely owing to fallout from its response, or lack thereof, to the ongoing troubles relating to user data security and election
You can no longer automatically cross-post your tweets to Facebook . Twitter announced today that functionality is now coming to an end, and users will instead have to copy a tweet’s URL if they want to share a tweet to Facebook going forward. In a statement, the company attributed the change to a recent Facebook
A number of activists and organizers in the Washington DC area are disputing Facebook’s decision to remove a counter-protest event against a rally organized by Jason Kessler, the white nationalist figure who planned the deadly 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Facebook removed the event, “No Unite the Right 2-DC,” after discovering that one account connected
Snapchat is today launching new lenses that respond to voice commands. The company says it’s now rolling out a series of lenses that will animate when users speak simple, English words like “hi,” “love,” “yes,” “no,” and “wow,” as opposed to taking some other action – like opening their mouth or raising their eyebrows, as
Unknown midterm election attackers that Facebook has removed were hosting a political rally next month that they pinned on Black Lives Matter, Antifa and other organizations, according to third-party event websites that scraped the now-removed Facebook events. Facebook provided an image of the deleted “No Unite The Right 2 – DC” event as part of
Fabric, a personal journaling app that emerged from Y Combinator’s 2016 batch of startups, is relaunching itself as a Facebook alternative. The app is giving itself a makeover in the wake of Facebook’s closure of the Moves location tracker, by offering its own tool to record your activities, photos, memories and other moments shared with
Twitter is partnering with two groups of academic researchers to figure out how to measure the health of conversations happening on the platform. It’s all part of the company’s continuing long game for social relevance. Despite the fact that it lost 1 million users, the company also posted $100 million in profit during last week’s
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As part of Twitter’s attempted crackdown on abusive behavior across its network, the company announced on Friday afternoon a new policy facing those who repeatedly harass, threaten or otherwise make abusive comments during a Periscope broadcaster’s live stream. According to Twitter, the company will begin to more aggressively enforce its Periscope Community Guidelines by reviewing
Twitter has no intention of easing up on its fight against spam users and other factors that jeopardize the “health” of its service, despite the approach costing it three million in ‘lost’ monthly active users. Investor panic sent Twitter’s stock price down by nearly 20 percent in early trading today following its latest financial report.
After weeks of speculation around how it plans to handle conspiracy website Infowars, its creator Alex Jones and others that spread false information, Facebook finally gave us an answer: inconsistently. The company hit Jones with a 30-day ban after it removed four videos that he shared on the Infowars Facebook Page. The move is Facebook’s
Days after defending its decision to give a voice to conspiracy theory peddler Alex Jones and his Infowars site, Facebook has removed four of his videos for violating its community standards. But one of the four had already been allowed to slip through the firm’s review system. A source within Facebook told TechCrunch that one
HipChat, the workplace chat app that held the throne before Slack was Slack, is being discontinued. Also being discontinued is Atlassian’s own would-be HipChat replacement, Stride. News of the discontinuation comes first not from Atlassian, but instead from a somewhat surprising source: Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. In a series of tweets, Butterfield says that Slack
IGTV didn’t get the benefit of being splayed out atop Instagram like Stories did. Instead, the long-form video hub is a bit more distant, located in a standalone app as well as behind a static orange button on the main app’s homescreen. That means users can go right on tapping and scrolling through Instagram without
Facebook’s share price fell over 20 percent in after-hours trading today after the company announced its slowest-ever user growth rate and a scary warning that its revenue growth would rapidly decelerate. Before today’s brutal Q2 earnings, Facebook’s share price closed today at $217.50 – a record high — but fell to around $172 after the
Facebook has hit a wall. The social network succumbed to the public backlash over its handling of fake news, privacy, and digital wellbeing to miss some of Wall Street’s estimates, showing mixed results in its Q2 2018 earnings. GDPR, Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before congress, and more scandals appear to have contributed to Facebook’s weak user
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki on Friday promised the company would do a better job with communicating to creators about its experiments and tests. Today, YouTube is making good on that commitment with an update about a new feature it’s testing out: an Explore tab, aimed at offering viewers a more diverse set of video recommendations.