There has been a silly amount of drama in the run-up to Tesla‘s annual shareholder meeting on Thursday.
It will also hold a vote whether the company will change the location where it is incorporated from Delaware to Texas.
Some of Tesla’s biggest boosters are calling on the company’s “retail army” of shareholders to vote in favor of both, but with special focus on Musk’s compensation.
“A deal is a deal,” Tesla posted to its CEO’s social media platform X.
At the very least, it’s a primer for the legal battles that are sure to continue after Thursday’s vote.
iOS apps that build their own social networks on the back of users’ address books may soon become a thing of the past.
In iOS 18, Apple is cracking down on the social apps that ask users’ permission to access their contacts — something social apps often do to connect users with their friends or make suggestions for who to follow.
To give users more control over the contacts an app can and cannot access, the permissions screen has two stages.
Before that, apps like Poparazzi and Clubhouse had demanded full address book access — a growth hack that helped them quickly expand their networks.
iOS 18 will let users decide which contacts an app can access.
Voodoo, a French mobile apps and games publisher, has acquired BeReal for €500 million.
As part of the acquisition, BeReal co-founder and CEO Alexis Barreyat will leave the company after a transition period.
Aymeric Roffé, the CEO of Wizz, one of Voodoo’s social media apps, will take over as CEO of BeReal.
On BeReal, users receive a push notification each day prompting them to post they’re up within a two-minute window.
“Voodoo has a proven track record of driving significant growth in mobile apps,” said BeReal founder Alexis Barreyat, in the press release.
New York’s state legislature has passed a bill that would prohibit social media companies from showing so-called “addictive feeds” to children under 18, unless they obtain parental consent.
The Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act defines an addictive feed as one where the content is recommended or prioritized based on information about the user or the user’s device — basically, these are the algorithmic news feeds used by most social apps.
“Non-addictive feeds,” a category that includes “feeds listed in chronological order,” would still be allowed.
“New York is leading the nation to protect our kids from addictive social media feeds and shield their personal data from predatory companies,” Governor Hochul said.
It would also prohibit platforms from sending notifications related to these feeds between the ages of midnight and 6am without parental consent.
In a research note, HSBC estimates that the Indian edtech giant, once valued at $22 billion, is now worth nothing.
The write-down in its estimation makes Byju’s one of the most spectacular startup slides in recent memory and follows a very rough year for what was India’s most valuable startup not long ago.
After raising $100 million, AI mortgage startup LoanSnap is facing an avalanche of lawsuits and has been evicted from its main office.
At least seven creditors, including Wells Fargo, have collectively alleged that the company owes them more than $2 million.
Read MoreTurns out, AI models have favorite numbers: Engineers at Gramener performed an informal experiment where they asked several major LLM chatbots to pick a random number between 0 and 100.
Shopify has acquired Threads.com, the Seqiuoa-backed Slack alternative, Threads said on its website.
The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal but said that the Threads.com team will join Shopify.
It was thrown into the limelight after Meta launched Threads, its Twitter-like social network.
Notably, Meta also had another product named Threads, an Instagram companion app that started in 2019 and was shut down in 2021.
And on Android the app crossed the mark of a million lifetime downloads with just a few downloads prior to Meta launching its Threads social network.
An important step toward a more interoperable “fediverse” — the broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others — has been achieved.
Though both Mastodon and Bluesky are decentralized social media efforts, they rely on different underlying protocols.
That could shift in the future, however, to becoming opt-out for Bluesky users only.
So if my Bluesky account is @sarahp@bsky.social, then my bridged account is @sarahp.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy.
Anything from your Bluesky account that interacts with fediverse users will be bridged, including replies, @-mentions, likes, reports, and, if you have fediverse followers, your own Bluesky posts.
India’s election overshadowed by the rise of online misinformation Greater internet penetration and the rise of "cheapfakes" since the last general election in 2019 pose new challengesAs India kicks off the world’s biggest election, which starts on April 19 and runs through June 1, the electoral landscape is overshadowed by misinformation.
Misinformation is not just a problem for election fairness — it can have deadly effects, including violence on the ground and increase hatred for minorities.
“Ever since social media has been thriving, there is a new trend where you use misinformation to target communities,” he said.
The country’s vast diversity in language and culture also make it particularly hard for fact-checkers to review and filter out misleading content.
Moreover, just before the Indian election, Meta reportedly cut funding to news organizations for fact-checking on WhatsApp.
Post News, a microblogging site that emerged in the days after Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition, is shutting down just a year and a half after launching in beta.
Founder Noam Bardin, previously CEO of Waze, broke the news in a post on Friday.
“At the end of the day, our service is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform,” Bardin said.
Instead of subscribing to various different publications, Post users could purchase individual articles from certain partner outlets.
But perhaps it was too soon to try to capture this nascent movement in a social platform.
AirChat, the buzzy new social app, could be great – or, it could succumb to the same fate as ClubhouseOver the weekend, another social media platform exploded into the fray: AirChat.
Built by AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and former Tinder exec Brian Norgard, Airchat takes a refreshingly intimate approach to social media.
What I do consider a red flag is AirChat’s naive approach to content moderation.
Clubhouse’s approach to content moderation was even more permissive, since there was no way to block people for months after launch – AirChat already has block and mute features, thankfully.
With this minimalist approach to content moderation, it’s not hard to see how AirChat could get into hot water.
