social media
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Time Warner will spend $100M on Snapchat original shows and ads
Time Warner and Snap Inc. have announced a new deal that will bring increased ad spending and the development of new made-for-Snapchat shows. People familiar with the deal tell TechCrunch that it is valued at about $100 million spent over the next two years. The newly created shows will span a variety of genres, including scripted drama, daily news shows, documentaries and comedy. The shows… Read More
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Google to ramp up AI efforts to ID extremism on YouTube
Last week Facebook solicited help with what it dubbed “hard questions” — including how it should tackle the spread of terrorism propaganda on its platform. Yesterday Google followed suit with its own public pronouncement, via an op-ed in the FT newspaper, explaining how it’s ramping up measures to tackle extremist content. Read More
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Crunch Network
Advertising giants leave little room for adtech startups, and VCs are noticing
Since the earliest days of the commercial web, there was a Faustian bargain struck between users and content publishers: Users got free access to online content in exchange for tolerating ads sold by the very same publishers delivering the latest words, images, and videos. And, by and large, it’s a bargain that’s worked out well for digital advertisers. According to data published… Read More
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Instagram’s archive feature goes live, letting you hide photos indefinitely
Last month we noted that Instagram was testing a new feature called “archive”, which lets users hide any of their posts from anyone else – either permanently or indefinitely. Today this will roll out to everyone on Instagram, meaning you can start hiding photos today. You can archive any photo or video on your profile by tapping the “…” three-dots button in… Read More
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UK and France to jointly pressure tech firms over extremist content
The leader of the UK’s new minority government, Theresa May, is in France today for talks with her French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, and the pair are slated to launch a joint crack down on online extremism. Read More
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Social media giants making progress on illegal hate speech takedowns: EC
The European Commission is trumpeting what it dubs “significant progress” on hate speech takedowns by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft vs their performance six months prior. Though it also cautions some challenges remain. Read More
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Miso Happy is a 3D selfie app that rocks the uncanny valley
Move over duckface. Shove off rainbow spew. There’s a new selfie game in town and it wants to turn your 2D visage into uncannily accurate 3D — then splice that axiomatic piece of you into animated cartoon suits that rock out, strut their disco stuff, skateboard, look coy, relaxed or laugh manically. Read More
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UK eyeing fines for social media content-moderation failures
A U.K. minister has suggested the party is open to bringing in financial penalties or otherwise changing the law in order to encourage social media firms to improve their content-moderation processes. Read More
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UK wants G7 to take collective action on online extremism
The UK Prime Minister is using the annual G7 summit of seven of the world’s major industrialized democracies to push for more to be done about online extremism, including co-ordinating on ways to force social media platforms to be more pro-active about removing and reporting extremist content to authorities. Read More
Latest Crunch Report
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Facebook fined $122M in Europe over misleading WhatsApp filing
Facebook’s 2014 acquisition of messaging app WhatsApp cost $19 billion when it was announced. Now the price tag has been bumped up a little more after European regulators slapped the company with a €110M (~$122M) fine for providing “incorrect or misleading” information at the time of the deal. Read More
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The Shade Room is profitable and not interested in acquisition
Angelica Nwandu, creator of The Shade Room, joined our own Anthony Ha on the stage of TechCrunch Disrupt to discuss the growth of her Instagram-first gossip blog. Despite growing The Shade Room to 9.3 million Instagram followers and profitability, Nwandu says she has no interest in an acquisition. Nwandu attributes her success to meme culture — the ability for large groups to effect… Read More
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Using tech to uproot systemic racism
Rejecting the backlash against hashtag activism, Brittany Packnett defended the work of the armchair activists on Twitter and other social media who have brought needed attention to social justice issues. Read More
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Dataminr announces new tool to assist first responders
This is the age of the citizen journalist where people on the street armed with a smartphone and a Twitter account are often the first on the scene of an accident, fire or other emergency. These folks know about an incident that requires emergency services well before first responders. Dataminr introduced a new product on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt today in New York City that… Read More
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Mya raises $11.4M Series A to streamline recruiting for retail, warehouse and call center jobs
Recruiting is miserable. The experience lacks so many things: transparency, fairness, timeliness and so on that solutions to date have only addressed part of the problem. LinkedIn made the resume digital and put people in (mostly) one place. Others have created labor marketplaces and educational resources to “fix” hiring, but last time I checked hiring was still broken. With… Read More
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Hear Dataminr and NYC officials talk about using social media in emergency situations
These days, it’s probably more common to hear about news breaking on Twitter or Facebook than from a broadcast news network or the radio. In an age where eyewitness news has taken on a whole new meaning thanks to social media, public officials like police, fire departments, and other government agencies (more on that in a bit) are looking for new tools to get up to speed on emergencies… Read More
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Facebook’s fastText library is now optimized for mobile
This morning Facebook’s AI Research (FAIR) lab released an update to fastText, its super-speedy open-source text classification library. When it was initially released, fastText shipped with pre-trained word vectors for 90 languages, but today it’s getting a boost to 294 languages. The release also brings enhancements to reduce model size and ultimately memory demand. Read More
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Social media firms should face fines for hate speech failures, urge UK MPs
Social media giants Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have once again been accused of taking a “laissez-faire approach” to moderating hate speech content on their platforms. Read More
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Crunch Network
Tech and politics clash in Cameroon as government restores internet
The government of Cameroon ended its internet blackout of parts of the country last week, according to news reports and confirmation from the country’s Ambassador to the U.S. The three month outage forced the hand of Africa’s largest telecom, halted operations of its leading e-commerce startup, and created digital refugees. Read More
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Jack Dorsey just spent $9.5M buying more Twitter stock
Jack Dorsey is at it again — after purchasing $7 million in Twitter stock back in February, the Twitter CEO bought another $9.5 million today. After making his purchase, Dorsey posted the news on Facebook Twitter, sparking a one percent gain in the company’s share price in after-hours trading. According to an SEC filing, Dorsey purchased 574,002 shares of Twitter stock… Read More
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