Back in March, TechCrunch broke the news that LinkedIn was quietly testing the waters for games on its platform — word and logic puzzles similar to Wordle. Now, in an effort to attract more users and increase engagement, the platform is launching three of those games officially. Queens, Crossclimb and Pinpoint — respectively testing your […]
TikTok may be routing around the App Store to save money on commissions. According to new findings, the ByteDance-owned social video app is presenting some of its users with a link to a website for purchasing the coins used for tipping digital creators. Typically, these coins are bought via in-app purchase, which requires a 30%
Screenshots suggest TikTok is circumventing Apple App Store commissions Read More »
Instagram is introducing a few new changes to its ranking systems to better highlight content from smaller, original creators across the social network. The Meta-owned platform says that historically, creators with large followings and accounts that share reposted content have gotten the most reach on the platform. So now it’s seeking to give all creators
Finally, something that both sides of the aisle can agree on: social media companies are too powerful. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, 78% of American adults say social media companies have too much influence on politics — to break it down by party, that’s 84% of surveyed Republicans and 74% of
Social media companies have too much political power, 78% of Americans say in Pew survey Read More »
Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder, is among those who have joined the board of directors of Mastodon’s new U.S. nonprofit, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko announced over the weekend. Mastodon’s service, an open source, decentralized social network and rival to Elon Musk’s X, has gained increased attention following the Twitter acquisition as users sought alternatives to
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone joins board of Mastodon’s new US nonprofit Read More »
Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering this week’s noteworthy happenings in tech. TikTok’s fate in the U.S. looks uncertain after President Joe Biden signed a bill that included a deadline for ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to divest itself of TikTok within nine months or face a ban on distributing it
TikTok faces a ban in the US, Tesla profits drop and healthcare data leaks Read More »
President Joe Biden signed a bill on Wednesday that could ban TikTok — for real this time. After so many false starts and stops, some creator economy founders and their clients are rolling their eyes. They’ve been through this before. “I think two years ago, this would have been devastating,” Karat Financial co-founder and co-CEO
Will a TikTok ban impact creator economy startups? Not really, founders say Read More »
As part of its Q1 2024 earning release, Snap revealed that total watch time on its TikTok competitor, Spotlight, increased more than 125% year-over-year. Snapchat launched the TikTok-like feed in late 2020 as a way to compete with the rising popularity of TikTok. The company is touting the success of its short-from video feed a
Snap says total watch time on its TikTok competitor increased more than 125% Read More »
Meta’s move into the open social web, also known as the fediverse, is puzzling. Does the Facebook owner see open protocols as the future? Will it embrace the fediverse only to shut it down, shifting people back to its proprietary platforms and decimating startups building in the space? Will it bring its advertising empire to
Why Meta is looking to the fediverse as the future for social media Read More »
Social media platform TikTok says that a bill banning the app in the U.S. is “unconstitutional” and that it will fight this latest attempt to restrict its use in court. The bill in question, which President Joe Biden signed Wednesday, gives Chinese parent company ByteDance nine months to divest TikTok or face a ban on
Breaking down TikTok’s legal arguments around free speech, national security claims Read More »
