Social

Meta Platforms on Friday launched its subscription service in the US, which would allow Facebook and Instagram users pay for verification in the same vein as Elon Musk-owned Twitter. The Meta Verified service will give users a blue badge after they verify their accounts using a government ID and will cost $11.99 (nearly Rs. 990) per

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Thursday issued orders to eight social media and video streaming firms including Meta Platforms, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube seeking information on how the platforms screen for misleading advertisements. Snap, Amazon.com-owned Twitch, Pinterest and Instagram are the other companies which are all required to provide information such as ad revenue

Britain is set to announce a ban on TikTok on government phones on Thursday, PA Media reported, a move that would follow other Western countries who have barred the Chinese-owned video app over security concerns. TikTok has come under increasing scrutiny due to fears that user data from the app owned by Beijing-based company ByteDance

The chair of a US House of Representatives panel wants TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew to address questions next week about the popular Chinese-owned video app’s efforts to protect children from inappropriate content and potential exploitation. Chew will be appearing for the first time before Congress when he testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee

WhatsApp has rolled out updates for iOS users that add new features to the popular messaging application. One of the features allows users to post voice status updates for contacts customised with privacy settings. Meanwhile, a subsequent update has added support for detecting text directly from images on WhatsApp for iOS. Even though both of

Instagram is reportedly testing improvements to how users can search for and rediscover previously shared Reels in Direct Messages (DM). In the future, Instagram could feature an additional row in the DM page, with avatars of the friends with whom you shared a reel, making it easier to access and reshare previously shared reels with

Facebook-parent Meta Platforms said on Tuesday it would cut 10,000 jobs, just four months after it let go 11,000 employees, the first Big Tech company to announce a second round of mass layoffs. “We expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t

Koo, an India-based social media app that aims to rival Twitter, has integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help users more easily create posts, the company’s co-founder told Reuters. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence bot that can create prose in response to prompts and has set off a tech industry craze over generative AI. Koo users will

WhatsApp, the Meta-owned instant messaging platform, is rolling out a new set of emojis to make conversations even more interesting. The app has reportedly brought the Unicode 15.0 emojis to select beta testers. As many as 21 new emojis have been added to the app’s latest beta update on Android. WhatsApp beta for Android 2.23.5.13

Instagram was down for thousands of users globally on Thursday, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com. More than 46,000 users reported issues with accessing the photo-sharing platform in the US at the peak of the outage, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources including user-submitted errors on

China’s government could use TikTok to control data on millions of American users, FBI Director Christopher Wray told a US Senate hearing on Wednesday, saying the Chinese-owned video app “screams” of security concerns. Wray told a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on worldwide threats to US security that the Chinese government could also use TikTok to control

Belgian federal government employees will no longer be allowed to use the Chinese-owned video app TikTok on their work phones, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said on Friday. De Croo said the Belgian national security council had warned of the risks associated with the large amounts of data collected by TikTok, which is owned

Facebook-parent Meta Platforms is planning additional layoffs to be announced in multiple rounds over the next few months, which could match the 13 percent job cut tally from last year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday citing people familiar with the matter. Meta let go of 11,000 employees four months ago and would be

The US Federal Trade Commission is expected to vote next week on whether to send demands for information about deceptive advertising to eight social media and video streaming companies, the agency said on Thursday. The agency did not say which social media companies would receive the demands but said that the information would be used

Meta is exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates, a company spokesperson said on Friday, in what could be a direct competitor to billionaire Elon Musk’s Twitter. “We’re exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates. We believe there’s an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures

TikTok’s latest sensation is a real-time filter called Bold Glamour that sashays right past debates over toxic beauty standards on social media, going all in on giving users a new face. Quietly released to the app’s more than a billion users, Bold Glamour convincingly blends a user’s real face with an AI-generated ideal of a

WhatsApp, the popular cross-platform instant messaging app run by Meta, is reportedly working on a new feature for iOS that will bring more options to drawing tool. The service was recently spotted working on a text editor feature for the drawing tool in the latest beta update available on TestFlight for iOS. This upcoming text

Meta Platforms’ oversight board said on Thursday it would review the moderation of the Arabic word “shaheed”, which means “martyr” in English, as it accounts for more content removals on its platforms than any other single word or phrase. Meta has asked the board for advice on whether it should continue to remove posts that