Social

Facebook said on Thursday it had shut 216 social media pages, groups and accounts in Myanmar, some tied to the army, to stymie efforts to “manipulate or corrupt public debate”. The company closed 89 Facebook accounts, 107 pages, 15 groups and five Instagram accounts, some of which had hundreds of thousands of followers, it said in a

Facebook and Twitter’s decision to crack down on fake accounts tied to China underscores how Silicon Valley’s disinformation challenges have gone global. It’s just the latest sign that more countries are embracing Russia’s playbook and exploiting social media to stoke political division. Monday marked the first time the companies have directly attributed such a campaign

The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued a notice to the Centre and others seeking their response on Facebook’s plea to transfer four cases from three High Courts to itself. The cases sought to link Aadhaar or other government authorised identity proofs to social media accounts for authentication. The responses would help the apex court decide

Users on the social bookmarking website Pinboard have slammed China-backed advertisements being run on Twitter, attacking Hong Kong protesters. The ads try to portray the protests as “escalating violence” and call for “order to be restored,” Engadget reported on Monday. “Every day I go out and see stuff with my own eyes, and then I

Aiming to help movie studios promote their latest releases, social networking giant Facebook is launching two new ad units named movie reminder ads and movie showtime ads. Moviegoers often discover a film months before its release but they often need reminders when a film they care is about to hit theatres. With movie reminder ads,

Telegram has added a slew of new features to the messaging app. The headline feature being a Slow Mode designed to combat spammers and help keep group chats more orderly. There’s also the option to send silent messages and add custom titles for admins. Telegram Competes With Messenger and WhatsApp While Telegram cannot compete with

Facebook users suing the world’s largest social media network over a 2018 data breach say it failed to warn them about risks tied to its single sign-on tool, even though it protected its employees, a court filing on Thursday showed. Single sign-on connects users to third-party social apps and services using their Facebook credentials. The lawsuit,

Democratic US Senator Gary Peters on Thursday asked Facebook Inc’s chief to answer questions about his April 2018 congressional testimony in light of reports that Facebook captured audio from users and sent it to a vendor to be analyzed and transcribed. “I asked you specifically if Facebook uses audio obtained from mobile devices to enrich personal

Facebook has unleashed its Spark AR platform onto the public, opening it up to Instagram users. Spark AR gives you all the tools you’re need to create and upload augmented reality filters on Instagram. However, you’ll still need to provide the skills. At F8 2019, Facebook announced that it would soon be allowing Instagram users

Not just people, Twitter is now testing a way to let users follow topics including sports teams, celebrities and TV shows. Topics will be curated by Twitter, with individual tweets being identified through machine learning, and for now, only sports-related interests can be followed, The Verge reported on Wednesday. “Our desire is to be a

People generally use LinkedIn to search for a new job. The social media site has a well-deserved reputation for being one of the best places to go to find a new job. However, you don’t need to be actively searching for a new job to get some use out of LinkedIn. And in this article

Millions of people love Stranger Things, and happily binge a new season as soon as it’s released on Netflix. Season 3 was no exception, and as soon as the show debuted, fans started posting Stranger Things memes. In this article, we list the best Stranger Things memes, and explain how and when to use them.

Ahead of India’s 73rd Independence Day on August 15, Twitter on Wednesday launched a customised Independence Day emoji of the Ashoka Chakra. The emoji will be live until August 18 and will be available in English and several Indic languages, such as Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali and Oriya, Twitter said.

Ride-hailing service Ola on Tuesday announced the acquisition of ‘Pikup.ai’, an artificial intelligence (AI) start-up based out of Bengaluru, for an undisclosed sum. As part of the deal, the team at Pikup.ai will join Ola. Co-founded by Inder Singh and Ritwik Saikia, pikup.ai uses autonomous technologies like AI, computer vision and sensor fusion to provides

Facebook has developed a reputation for spamming users. The smartphone app bombards you with alerts. Dozens of emails arrive every day. And every time you log into the web app you’re sure to see lots of new notifications. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. If you want to know how to delete Facebook

Social networking giants Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are set to face heavy fines in Britain for failing to filter out harmful content on their platforms, the media reported. As part of the government’s plan, Britain’s broadcasting watchdog Ofcom would be given new legal powers to monitor, investigate and fine social platforms for sharing or live-streaming

Facebook is reportedly in talks with news publishers to offer “millions of dollars” for the rights to publish their material on its site. The move follows years of criticism over its growing monopolisation of online advertising to the detriment of the struggling news industry. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Facebook representatives had told

Top officials in the Trump administration expressed interest in tools that might anticipate mass shootings or predict attackers by scanning social media posts, photos and videos during a meeting Friday with tech giants including Facebook, Google and Twitter. The technology could serve as an early-warning system for potential attacks, White House officials proposed at the

A federal appeals court on Thursday rejected Facebook’s effort to undo a class action lawsuit claiming that it illegally collected and stored biometric data for millions of users without their consent. The 3-0 decision from the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco over Facebook’s facial recognition technology exposes the company to billions

Facebook-owned Instagram has banned a San Francisco-based company from its platform on charges of improper user-data collection. Called Hyp3r, the startup scraped public data such as users’ physical locations, profile information and photos to serve better targeted ads. Information collected by Hyp3r also includes data stored in Instagram Stories that is content designed to disappear

Twitter is testing a new feature that would allow users to mute push notifications for a certain amount of time. This discovery was first made by Jane Manchun Wong, who regularly discovers unreleased features on popular social media applications. Wong found it by looking at the code underneath the social network’s Android app. She spotted

Snapchat is a versatile social media app that you can use to send pictures and videos to your friends. You can also add filters to your pictures, and/or use a feature called “Edit Photo” to create Snapchat drawings. Users have taken the Edit Photo tool beyond its original intent, and are now using it to

Discord has become one of the leading chat platforms on the web. However, the more you know about it the more you can get out of it. So here are our Discord tips and tricks. Discord started life as a service for gamers, but its impressive list of features has helped it grow into other

Facebook has open-sourced its photo and video matching technologies for people to identify harmful content such as child exploitation, terrorist propaganda or graphic violence. The two Facebook technologies can detect identical and nearly identical photos and videos. “These algorithms will be open-sourced on GitHub so our industry partners, smaller developers and non-profits can use them

Google Assistant can now read WhatsApp, Telegram, and Slack messages out loud, and even reply to them. Earlier, the tech giant’s voice assistant was restricted to reading SMS texts sent via the native messaging app only, but now that feature supports third-party communication apps as well. This includes apps like GroupMe, Discord, Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp,

Pinterest raised its full-year sales forecast and reported second-quarter revenue above Wall Street estimates on Thursday, as the online scrapbook company added more users, sending its shares up 12 percent in extended trading. The company said monthly active users rose 30 percent in the quarter to 300 million globally, significantly above estimates, and the global average revenue per

Facebook started adding its name to some screens on its Instagram photo-sharing platform this week, one of the first links it has given users to its ownership of the popular platform. The move comes as the world’s largest social media company faces greater scrutiny from regulators around the world for more transparency over data privacy

The Supreme Court has given the central bank six weeks to report on whether WhatsApp had complied with data localisation norms as the Facebook-owned messenger gears up to launch a payments service in the country, a person involved in the matter said. WhatsApp has been testing a peer-to-peer payments service for over a year in

Hike Sticker Chat, the dedicated app that was launched back in April to deliver a sticker-centric chat experience, has been updated with an Auto Backup feature. The new feature is designed to let users easily switch from one device to another — without manually backing up or restoring their data. The New Delhi-based firm that

You’ve posted several videos on TikTok, hoping to gain a following. So far, followers have been trickling in at a slower rate than you expected. Which has left you wondering, how can you get more TikTok fans and followers in a short space of time? Popular TikTok users didn’t magically gain millions of followers overnight.