Social

Shares of Snap sank about 25 percent before the bell on Friday, after the owner of photo messaging app Snapchat forecast zero revenue growth for the current quarter, triggering a slide in other social media stocks dependent on advertising revenue. YouTube-parent Alphabet, Facebook-parent Meta Platform, Pinterest and Twitter all slid between 1.7 percent and 9.2

Snap rolled out several new features for the members of its Snapchat+ premium subscription service on Thursday. These features include Custom Story Expiration, which enables users to manually select the time limit for the duration a story stays publicly visible. There are also new custom notifications, story borders, and more now available to Snapchat+ members.

E-commerce giant Flipkart announced the launch of Flipverse, a metaverse shopping platform for its consumers, on October 17. Flipkart has collaborated with Web3 companies such as eDAO and Polygon for the launch. The first phase of Flipverse is available only for Android users, and will be live till October 23. Flipverse can be accessed through the

Facebook on Thursday added a method for people running groups to automatically sift out claims that have been debunked since being posted. The ability for group administrators to send misinformation to a “quarantine queue” comes ahead of midterm elections in the US and as Facebook-parent Meta continues to fend off critics who say it doesn’t

Meta Platforms’ independent oversight board said on Thursday that starting this month, it can decide on applying warning screens, marking content as “disturbing” or “sensitive”. The board, which already has the ability to review user appeals to remove content, said it would be able to make binding decisions to apply a warning screen when “leaving

Instagram will enhance features that help users block the accounts of abusers and trolls on the social media platform, the Meta Platforms-owned company said on Thursday. All the Instagram users will now be able to block all existing accounts of a person, expanding a feature launched last year that only allowed the blocking of any

Elon Musk on Wednesday said he was excited about his pending acquisition of Twitter, although he and other investors were overpaying for the social media company. Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, was answering a question during a call after the electric vehicle maker’s quarterly report. The world’s richest person is pursuing the Twitter purchase

A Russian lawmaker on Wednesday urged state institutions to stop using WhatsApp messenger and the industry ministry sought to promote domestically produced software as Russia tries to wean itself off Western technology. WhatsApp owner Meta Platforms was found guilty of “extremist activity” in Russia in March and later added to financial monitoring agency Rosfinmonitoring’s list

Meta on Wednesday said that it built an artificial intelligence system that translates Hokkien into English even though the Taiwanese language lacks a standard written form. The Silicon Valley tech titan that owns Facebook and Instagram billed the work at its Universal Speech Translator project as an effort to enable users from around the world

Twitter has frozen equity award accounts for employees days ahead of the deadline to close its deal with Elon Musk, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, a sign that the social media firm hopes the deal will consummate. The report sent Twitter shares up 1.8 percent at $51.6 (roughly Rs.4,300), still lower than Musk’s offer price

A UK competition regulator on Tuesday re-issued its order for Facebook owner Meta to sell animated graphics startup Giphy in a final decision after a failed appeal. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said in a statement that Giphy must be “sold off in its entirety”, having already ruled last year that the acquisition would

Germany announced Monday that it is issuing fines of EUR 5.125 million (roughly Rs. 41 crore) against the operators of the messaging app Telegram for failing to comply with German law. The Federal Office of Justice said Telegram FZ-LLC hasn’t established a lawful way for reporting illegal content or named an entity in Germany to

Parler parent Parlement Technologies said on Monday that it will be acquired by rapper Kanye West, who legally changed his name to simply Ye last year. A popular app among conservatives, Parler said it expects the deal to close during the fourth quarter of 2022. It did not give a deal value. “In a world where

Elon Musk is being investigated by federal authorities over his conduct in his $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3.6 lakh crore) takeover deal for Twitter, the social media company said in a court filing released on Thursday. While the filing said he was under investigations, it did not say what the exact focus of the probes was

Ephemeral messaging app Snap had employee data exposed by a breach at a third-party document analysis firm, according to a document reviewed by Reuters on Thursday. Snap said it had been told by document analysis company Elevate that an unauthorized party had accessed some of Elevate’s computer systems in March 2022, according to a September 13

Twitter is reportedly developing a feature that would allow users to control public mentions of their accounts on the platform. The social media platform allows users to tag and address public accounts by typing “@” followed by the unique username the user wishes to mention in their tweets, replies, or quote tweets on the platform.

The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed the pleas by Meta Platforms, the parent company of social media platforms Facebook and WhatsApp, challenging the probe ordered by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) into WhatsApp’s updated privacy policy of 2021. A bench of Justices M R Shah and Sudhanshu Dhulia said CCI is an independent authority

We often hear about the negative impacts of social media on our wellbeing, but we don’t usually think of it the other way round – whereby how we feel may impact how we use social media. In a recent study, my colleagues and I investigated the relationship between social media use and wellbeing in more

Alphabet’s Google has approved former US President Donald Trump’s social media app Truth Social for distribution in the Google Play store, a company spokesperson said on Wednesday. Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), which operates Truth Social, is expected to make the app available in the Play Store shortly, Google said. “It’s been a pleasure

For companies playing with virtual reality as disparate as plane-maker Boeing and online-gaming platform Roblox, forays into the so-called “metaverse” have come with equal parts promise and peril. The U.S. aviation giant is looking to digital technology to accelerate production of new aircraft, said Susan Doniz, Boeing‘s chief information officer, at the Reuters Momentum conference