Whenever I’m bored and open up TikTok, it fills huge portions of my day with lip syncing videos, celebrity gossip and clips of animatronic cats dancing to saxophone music. You’d think that in an airplane, thousands of feet above the ground, we’d finally be able to break free of the clutches of the addictive video-sharing …
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Facebook continues to attract users even as lawmakers and regulators increase pressure on the world’s largest social network to crack down on misinformation, but it warned that it expects revenue growth to slow down in the third and fourth quarters. Facebook said Wednesday that 2.9 billion people visit the social network every month, a rise of 7% from the second …
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Facebook said on Tuesday that it is launching a tool called Sensitive Content Control on Instagram. The feature is designed to give people more control over how much sensitive content appears in the Explore part of Instagram’s app. “You can think of sensitive content as posts that don’t necessarily break our rules, but could potentially be upsetting to some people — …
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Facebook’s double ambitions in virtual and augmented reality could be meeting in the middle with the Oculus Quest 2. A new developer toolkit for the Quest allows blending of passthrough cameras with VR graphics, enabling mixed reality. Mixed reality has been bubbling up on the Oculus Quest for a while: In addition to the headset’s way of scanning the world …
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Facebook on Friday released cloud games on Apple devices through a web app for the Safari browser, a sign that the social network is continuing to double down on gaming even as it clashes with Apple over new rules. People can play cloud games instantly on a mobile device or web browser without having to download them. Facebook’s move comes after …
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Face filters on Instagram and Snapchat are far and away the most mainstream use of what we call augmented reality. We’ve already spent years contorting our faces, surrounding them with butterflies or pinning stuff to our heads to find out which Disney villain best represents us. However, it wasn’t until I got my hands on the new iPad Pro and played …
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WhatsApp is rolling out a limited public beta test for its updated multidevice capability. The Facebook subsidiary plans “to initially test the experience with a small group of users from our existing beta program,” according to a Wednesday post on Facebook’s engineering website. With the beta, first teased in June, users will be able to use WhatsApp on a phone …
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Facebook is creating new programs that’ll dole out more than $1 billion to creators who make content for the social network and for its photo-focused service, Instagram, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post Wednesday. “We want to build the best platforms for millions of creators to make a living, so we’re creating new programs to invest over $1 …
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TikTok has become the first non-Facebook mobile app to surpass 3 billion downloads globally, according to a Tuesday analysis from Sensor Tower. The milestone makes TikTok the fifth nongame app to cross the threshold, following WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook and Instagram, which are all owned by Facebook. In the first half of 2021, TikTok became the most downloaded nongame app globally, boasting …
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Facebook will label group experts. Queenie Wong/CNET Facebook said Tuesday it’s giving users who manage groups a way to designate experts in the online spaces, a tool that’s partly meant to help the social network combat misinformation. The social media company has been trying to direct users to more authoritative sources as false information spreads online about the coronavirus, vaccines …
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