Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of building a metaverse — an all-encompassing online world— gathered momentum this week when the company announced its intention to hire 10,000 workers in the European Union…
Parler Just Part of Social Media Whack-a-Mole, Unless US Takes Big Steps
Parler, a social media platform popular with racists, homophobes and conspiracy theorists, has been cut off by Amazon, Google and Apple, and some believe the firm may be taken offline as a…
WhatsApp Hopes its Misinformation-Busting Feature Will Help Democracy
Social media platform WhatsApp has launched a new feature it hopes will make discourse more truthful. “Search the web” allows users to click on a small magnifying-glass image next to posts shared…
ASKfm CEO Janis Grivins: “The Essence of the Product Has to be Simple”
Janis Grivins rose from product designer to become chief executive of ASKfm, a social network where users can ask and answer questions. Since its 2010 foundation ASKfm has amassed over 200 million…
TikTok vs. Facebook: Could the U.S. Really Ban TikTok?
With over 800 million active users worldwide, TikTok’s growth since its $1 billion rebrand of Music.ly in 2018 — a number thought to have been bolstered by the coronavirus pandemic — has…
Is The Facebook Giphy Buy a Disaster for Privacy?
Facebook is buying gif-searcher Giphy for around $400 million. That’s no drop in the ocean. But it is a 50% drop on Giphy’s most recent valuation: even gif-sharing has been picked off…
In 2019, Tech Must Win Back Public Trust – Or Sink
From revelations that Twitter, Facebook and YouTube helped Russian intelligence manipulate western elections, to Google’s record $5 billion antitrust fine for misusing Android, 2018 has been a year of scandal for tech’s…
“Family Tech” Startup Kindaba Wins Seed Funding from Skyscanner Founder Williams
Scottish startup Kindaba, whose secure messaging service is aimed at families, has won a seed funding round ahead of a crowdfunding campaign, from Skyscanner founder Gareth Williams. The undisclosed sum will help…
Twitter’s Refusal to Axe Alex Jones is Evidence of its Western Bias
Infowars, the bonkers, conspiracy-littered website owned by Texas-based diet pill salesman Alex Jones, has for years peddled falsehoods, paranoia and outright lies. A recent gutter-scraping controversy, for example, was in calling the…
Slow Growth and a European Exodus – But Don’t Ring Facebook’s Death Knell Yet
Facebook is having a week to forget. On Wednesday the social media giant revealed that revenue growth would “continue to decelerate in the second half 0f 2018” – and that it had…