A lawsuit blaming Snapchat for a series of drug overdoses among young people can proceed, a Los Angeles judge ruled this week.
A group of family members related to children and teens who overdosed on fentanyl sued Snapchat maker Snap last year, accusing the social media company of facilitating illicit drug deals involving fentanyl, a synthetic opioid many times deadlier than heroin.
In the ruling on Tuesday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff rejected Snap’s effort to get the case dismissed.
Riff did dismiss four counts against Snap but overruled the company’s efforts to throw out more than 10 others, including negligence and wrongful death.
The depth of disagreement is revealed by the parties’ inability jointly to label Snap’s social media presence and activities: “service,” “app,” “product”, “tool,” “interactive course of conduct,” “platform,” “website,” “software” or something else.
TikTok is looking to grow the size of its TikTok Shop U.S. business tenfold to as much as $17.5 billion this year, according to a new report from Bloomberg.
As Bloomberg previously reported, TikTok was on track to amass around $20 billion in global gross merchandise value last year.
In addition, the report says the company is planning to launch TikTok Shop in Latin America in the coming months.
The report indicates that during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday season in November, more than 5 million new U.S. customers purchased something via TikTok Shop.
TikTok Shop has also started to reduce some subsidies for merchants.
Claim, a platform that is both a rewards app and a social network, has raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital.
With Claim, users and their friends can earn cash back, exchange rewards and even redeem them together.
The platform is a social network that aims to focus on real-world value and communal experiences rather than manufactured content and reposts.
“We started Claim because we were really interested in what it meant to own something online,” Stephenson told TechCrunch in an interview.
They then decided that users should be able to use the rewards with their friends or exchange them.
And it’s going to look really familiar to former users of Zenly as Amo’s third app is a location-sharing app — just like Zenly.
With its second app Capture, Amo is creating a social camera app.
Amo’s new app, Location, is probably the easiest one to describe and understand.
Brought to you by the original team behind location-sharing app Zenly.
•… pic.twitter.com/y8uIRAINQG — amo (@amoamoamo) December 19, 2023Location is both a utility app and a social app.
Today, the social magazine app Flipboard is announcing it has also now integrated with ActityPub.
That changed this year, when Flipboard shifted its Twitter integration over to Mastodon and another alternative social app, Bluesky.
All this was in the lead-up to making Flipboard itself a federated social app, a process that’s kicking off today.
As this rolls out, all Flipboard users will have one Flipboard.com account connected to the fediverse, even if they host numerous Flipboard magazines.
Today, Flipboard has over 10,000 publishers of social magazines on its app and over a quarter million individuals who are curating content using Flipboard’s app.
The location-based social network, which launched earlier this year in March, wants to help people focus on real-life connections and make friends.
Jagat is somewhat similar to Snap-owned Zenly, a social map app that shut down last year.
Your social map is what you see when you open Jagat, as it’s where you see your friends’ locations in real-time.
“We want to bring back social in social apps – focusing on social networking and not media,” Beagen said.
Around 85% of Jagat users are part of GenZ.
More importantly for Mastodon, Meta committed to integrating Threads with ActivityPub, meaning users would be able to find and follow both Mastodon and Threads users across both services.
While many expected that integration wouldn’t arrive until early 2024, Meta surprised everyone by announcing yesterday that it would begin testing ActivityPub integration.
I’m pretty optimistic about this,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a post on Threads.
Threads users’ profiles on Mastodon weren’t backfilled with their older posts before the integration went live.
With Threads’ integration into Mastodon’s ecosystem, users will have more choice in how they want to engage with Threads users and content, including by accessing those accounts from an app of their choosing.
Threads is finally available to users in the EUFive months after its launch in July, Meta’s social network Threads is now finally available to people living in the European Union.
At launch, the company restricted access to the new social network in the EU to become compliant with various rules of the bloc.
In July, days after Threads’ launch, Meta had to take “additional” steps to prevent EU-based users from using a VPN to access the social network.
The official launch comes after the Wall Street Journal’s report last month indicated that Meta planned to launch Threads in the EU in December.
The social network’s launch in the EU will help the company cross that mark.
Maka, an African fashion and beauty e-commerce platform, has raised a $2.65 million pre-seed round led by Pan-African venture capital firms 4DX Ventures and Janngo Capital.
She said launching Maka began during the pandemic when she was in Ghana and struggled to find inclusive fashion inspiration.
To address the trust element, Maka leverages videos as a means to connect users with trusted creators.
Notably, the platform offers a review option, allowing customers who make purchases to share their feedback through video reviews, usually between 30 and 60 seconds long.
Furthermore, creators can download their reviews from Maka and share them on other social media platforms, earning additional points for each share.
With two large-scale elections in the U.S. in India next year, Threads aims to introduce a fact-checking checking program to the social network.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that the social platform currently matches ratings from Facebook or Instagram to similar content.
Separately, Meta shared in a blog post that soon U.S-based Threads users will be able to increase, decrease, or maintain the same level of demotion on fact-checked posts.
Meta and Threads haven’t been keen on bolstering news on the platform.
And while Threads has stayed away from news until now, with fact-checking programs it will have to get involved.
