Social Media News | TechCrunch

Founder behind social media app IRL charged with fraud

Kirsten Korosec — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 02:14:08 +0000

While venture capitalists and the rest of the technorati are off on holiday or attending the Paris Olympics, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and its staff attorneys are keeping busy this summer. For the second time this week — and at least the fourth time in the past several months — the SEC has […]

Date Like Goblins, a new dating platform, allows users to virtually date and play video games

Lauren Forristal — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 13:04:10 +0000

Date Like Goblins is geared toward the gaming community and allows users to connect through voice chat while playing video games.

Threads now highlights relevant trending topics above posts

Ivan Mehta — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 11:04:16 +0000

Threads users in the U.S. can now see a label that highlights related trending topics above posts.

Controversial internet bill KOSA passed by Senate

Amanda Silberling — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 18:14:31 +0000

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) has passed in the Senate after Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) pushed the internet bill to a vote. Proposed in 2022, KOSA requires that online platforms take reasonable steps to protect users from harm, and could become the most significant children’s online safety legislation to take effect since COPPA. […]

Disinformation may ‘go nuclear’ rather than ‘go viral,’ researchers say

Devin Coldewey — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 15:01:00 +0000

We say something “goes viral” because we tend to think of rumors and disinformation spreading the way that an infection spreads. But these days it may be more accurate to say something “goes nuclear,” according to a new paper that models disinfo as a form of fission reaction. As common wisdom had it even before […]

TechCrunch Minute: Doomscrolling probably isn’t great for your mental health

Anthony Ha — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 16:05:00 +0000

It turns out that maybe, just maybe, spending a lot of time staring at your phone and reading bad news isn’t great for your outlook on life or humanity. That’s the finding of a recent study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports, which linked doomscrolling to existential anxiety, despair, distrust and suspicion of others. […]

MatPat, the first big YouTuber to successfully exit his company, is lobbying for creators on Capitol Hill

Amanda Silberling — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 17:00:00 +0000

Though MatPat retired from YouTube, he’s still pretty busy. In fact, he’s been spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill.

OpenAI comes for Google with SearchGPT

Cody Corrall — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 17:05:00 +0000

OpenAI is testing SearchGPT, a new AI search experience to compete directly with Google. The feature aims to elevate search queries with “timely answers” from across the internet and allows the user to ask follow-up questions. The temporary prototype is currently only available to a small group of users and its publisher partners for testing […]

Privacy watchdog says it’s ‘surprised’ by Elon Musk opting user data into Grok AI training

Natasha Lomas — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 17:34:46 +0000

The language is ambiguous, so it's not clear whether X is helping itself to all user data for training Grok or whether this processing refers only to user interactions with the chatbot.

TechCrunch Minute: Meta’s new ‘Imagine me’ feature lets you generate AI selfies

Amanda Silberling — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 16:00:00 +0000

Meta’s AI integrations into apps like Instagram and Facebook have felt pretty useless so far. If I’m just trying to find my friend’s Instagram, why do I have to navigate around a Meta AI interface that is desperately trying to tell me the top five vegetarian protein sources? But with the release of Meta’s new […]

Oversight Board wants Meta to refine its policies around AI-generated explicit images

Ivan Mehta — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 10:00:00 +0000

The Board wants Meta to change the terminology it uses for labeling explicit, AI-generated images from "derogatory" to "non-consensual."

TikTok Lite exposes users to harmful content, say Mozilla researchers

Annie Njanja — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 15:19:21 +0000

TikTok Lite, a low-bandwidth version of the video platform popular across Africa, Asia and Latin America, is exposing users to harmful content because of its lack of safety features compared to the flagship version of the app, according to a new report from Mozilla. The researchers said that TikTok Lite Save Data lacked “proactive user […]

Mark Zuckerberg imagines content creators making AI clones of themselves

Kyle Wiggers — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 02:22:00 +0000

Content creators are busy people. Most spend more than 20 hours a week creating new content for their respective corners of the web. That doesn’t leave much time for audience engagement. But Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, thinks that AI could solve this problem. In an interview with internet personality Rowan Cheung, Zuckerberg laid out his […]

There’s a lot more to the Kamala Harris memes than you think

Amanda Silberling — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 15:34:39 +0000

“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” says Vice President Kamala Harris in a now infamous clip. An overlay of the lime green album art for Charli XCX’s “Brat” flashes on the screen, while a remix of “Von Dutch” scores increasingly frenetic clips of Harris hysterically laughing and confessing her love of […]

Meta AI gets new ‘Imagine me’ selfie feature

Kyle Wiggers — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Meta AI, Meta’s AI-powered assistant across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the web, can now speak in more languages and create stylized selfies. And, starting today, Meta AI users can route questions to Meta’s newest flagship AI model, Llama 3.1 405B, which the company says can handle more complex queries than the previous model underpinning Meta […]

Meta given weeks to tell EU consumer protection authorities how it’ll fix ‘pay or consent’

Natasha Lomas — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 14:46:35 +0000

Meta has been given until September 1 to respond to consumer protection concerns in the European Union. The Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) Network, a network of authorities responsible for the enforcement of EU consumer protection laws, is concerned about a binary choice Meta has forced on regional users of Facebook and Instagram since last November. […]

Google’s Jigsaw open sources Altitude to help online platforms weed out extremist content

Paul Sawers — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 16:36:30 +0000

Nine months on, and Jigsaw is now formally handing Altitude over to Tech Against Terrorism, which will continue its development and maintenance.

CrowdStrike’s update fail causes global outages and travel chaos

Cody Corrall — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 20:15:00 +0000

This week saw one of the most widespread IT disruptions in recent years linked to a faulty software update from popular cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. Businesses across the world reported IT outages, including Windows “blue screen of death” errors on their computers, impacting airlines, banks, retailers, brokerage houses, media companies and railway networks. OpenAI released GPT-4o […]

From the Sphere to false cyberattack claims, misinformation runs rampant amid CrowdStrike outage

Amanda Silberling — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 15:28:48 +0000

This serves as an example for how easy it is to spread inaccurate information online during a time of immense global confusion and panic.

Communia bets social media can be good for you

Amanda Silberling — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 16:18:40 +0000

Olivia DeRamus is flipping the script: What if scrolling through social media didn’t make us miserable? What if, especially for women, social media could actually make us feel more supported? “It’s certainly not what mainstream social platforms have been built for,” DeRamus told TechCrunch. But with her social platform Communia, DeRamus is daring to try […]