Week in Review: Instacart CEO heads to OpenAI

Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got lots of news for you this week: There were CEO shake-ups at Instacart and 11x; the web series is back — kind of; Threads is getting video ads; and much more. Let’s get to it! Big move: Instacart CEO Fidji Simo will become OpenAI’s CEO f

X is rolling out support for 4K video uploads

X is now allowing select creators to upload videos in 4K resolution as it seeks to boost engagement and keep users from going to YouTube or Vimeo to watch videos. The feature will be available to all premium subscribers soon, according to a post by X’s engineering account. Until now, paying

4chan is back online, says it’s been 'starved of money'

4chan is partly back online after a hack took the infamous image-sharing site down for nearly two weeks. The site first went down on April 14, with the person responsible for the hack apparently leaking data, including a list of moderators and “janitors” (one janitor told technewss they were

Week in Review: Cluely helps you cheat on everything

Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got tons of news for you this week: Slate EVs spotted in the wild; Airbnb pricing updates; a hack at Blue Shield; and much more. Let’s go! Get a clue: Cluely is an AI-based tool that helps people cheat on exams, sales calls, and even job interviews

Instagram Edits topped 7M downloads in first week, a bigger launch than CapCut’s

Instagram Edits, Meta’s newly released video creation app, had a bigger debut than its direct competitor, ByteDance’s CapCut, once did. The new app, which today helps users craft videos for Instagram Reels, stories, and other social posts, was downloaded an estimated 702,900 times on iO

Prince Harry meets, funds youth groups advocating for social media and AI safety

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, walked into the sunlit hotel conference room in Brooklyn on Thursday to meet with a dozen youth leaders working in tech safety, policy, and innovation. The young adults chatted away at black circular tables, many unaware of his presence until he plopped down at a tabl

Meta conducts layoffs in Oculus Studios, impacting VR exercise app Supernatural

Meta laid off employees on Thursday in its Reality Labs division, which encompasses various virtual and augmented reality projects. The cuts impact employees within Oculus Studios, which develops apps and games for Meta’s Quest headsets. Meta did not specify how many people were impacted by

Facebook cracks down on spammy content by cutting reach and monetization

Facebook will begin lowering the reach of accounts sharing spammy content and making them ineligible for monetization, Meta announced on Thursday. The company is also increasing efforts to remove Facebook accounts that coordinate fake engagement and impersonate others, it says. The move comes as

Burning questions (and some answers) about Bluesky’s new verification system

Bluesky’s launch of a verification system has raised a slew of questions among its user base, from who will be picked — and why — to what outside organizations might be involved and whether the self-verification process will end. technewss has some answers. After a leak last week, Blues

Social media is not wholly terrible for teen mental health, study says

We know that social media can be harmful to teens. Meta has found in its own research that Instagram makes body image worse for one in three teen girls, and Snapchat has been sued several times for not doing enough to mitigate cyberbullying. Even the former U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory o

Mark Zuckerberg once suggested spinning out Instagram as a solution to its ‘cannibalization’ of Facebook

In an internal email surfaced as part of the Meta antitrust trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg fretted about the potential that the company’s Instagram acquisition may cannibalize Facebook. Were that to happen, it could lead to the “network collapse of the more engaging and profitable prod

Uncovered emails showed how Meta struggled to keep Facebook culturally relevant

With the first week of Meta's antitrust trial behind us, documents shared by the U.S Federal Trade Commission (FTC) offered more insight into Meta's internal struggles to keep Facebook relevant. In emails from 2022, Meta executives mulled different visions for Facebook's future to boost

Week in Review: Google loses a major antitrust case

Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got tons of stuff for you this week: antitrust lawsuits against Google and Meta; Grok can now remember; Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow wants to make his mark; and much, much more. Have a great weekend! It’s over: Google violated antitrust laws in the ad tec

Read what Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook execs said about Instagram before buying it

The first week of the Meta antitrust trial brought new revelations about how the company formerly known as Facebook approached the competitive threat posed by Instagram in the early 2010s. The U.S. government is accusing Meta of violating competition laws by acquiring companies like Instagram and