The Senate will hold a hearing on Oct. 26 with TikTok, YouTube and Snap’s Snapchat to examine the platforms’ impact on young users’ safety, the Senate Commerce consumer protection subcommittee said Tuesday. “Recent revelations about harm to kids online show that Big Tech is facing its Big Tobacco moment — a moment of reckoning,” Sen. …
Read More »
Netflix added 4.28 million subscribers in the most recent quarter, riding an unexpected wave of global interest thanks to its breakout hit Squid Game that helped turned the company’s biggest region — the US and Canada — back to growth and that recruited another wave of members in Asia. Netflix’s global reach, allowing creators access to broad audiences, had “no better example …
Read More »
Instagram said it’s rolling out new features, including a way to co-author posts and short videos, underscoring the Facebook-owned social network’s effort to double down on retaining and attracting creators. Instagram’s Collabs tool lets you invite another user to co-author a post or short video. Facebook Starting this week, Instagram is testing a tool called Collabs that will allow a …
Read More »
Facebook whistleblower Sophie Zhang gave UK lawmakers her perspective on how best to implement the pending Online Safety Bill in a hearing in Parliament on Monday. The former Facebook data scientist used her inside knowledge of moderation practices to answer questions from the Draft Online Safety Bill joint committee about how to ensure that tech companies comply with upcoming legislation that would see them …
Read More »
Facebook will be building its metaverse out of Europe — at least in part. The company announced in a blog post Monday that it will be hiring around 10,000 people from within the EU to fill highly skilled roles working on Horizon Worlds, a 3D virtual play space, over the next five years. The idea of a metaverse — a …
Read More »
Facebook on Sunday responded to a news report that its artificial intelligence program has had little effect at curbing and removing violent content from the social network. The Wall Street Journal cited internal documents from 2019 in its reporting that the social network’s engineers estimated the company’s algorithms remove only a small fraction of problematic content that violate rules. “The problem …
Read More »
Microsoft on Thursday said it will shut down the localized version of LinkedIn in China amid a “significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements.” The company said its new strategy in China will focus on matching professionals with jobs. LinkedIn plans to launch a new standalone jobs app, called InJobs, later this year in China. The app won’t …
Read More »
Facebook envisions a future in which you’ll learn to play the drums or whip up a new recipe while wearing augmented reality glasses or other devices powered by artificial intelligence. To make that future a reality, the social network needs its AI systems to see through your eyes. “This is the world where we’d have wearable devices that could benefit …
Read More »
It has been six years since HTC made its first VR headset. But the company’s latest product, the Vive Flow, takes a totally new approach. The phone-connected VR glasses, coming later this year for $500, can make their own prescription adjustments. That means you don’t need to wear glasses at all, provided the Flow’s prescription-adjusting range fits your eyes. And, …
Read More »
A year after Facebook released its Oculus Quest 2 VR headset, and weeks before Facebook’s VR and AR-focused Connect conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook CTO-to-be Andrew Bosworth showed off prototype VR headsets on social media. Whether these are anything related to products to come remains to be seen. I spent the day with the Facebook Reality Labs research team in …
Read More »
