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Private social networking is making a comeback. Gratitude Plus, a startup that aims to shift social media in a more positive direction, is expanding its wellness-focused, personal reflections journal to include support for families who want to stay in touch even when physically distant.  The star

Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), technewss’s regular newsletter that recaps the week that was in tech. This edition’s a tad bittersweet for me — it’ll be my last (for a while, anyway). Soon, I’ll be shifting my attention to a new AI-focused newsletter, which IR

In an effort to capture more ad dollars, despite the looming U.S. ban, TikTok is introducing new advertising products and opportunities that will allow marketers to better control what sort of content their ads appear against. The company says it will use generative AI to curate trending, brand-saf

TikTok may be routing around the App Store to save money on commissions. According to new findings, the ByteDance-owned social video app is presenting some of its users with a link to a website for purchasing the coins used for tipping digital creators. Typically, these coins are bought via in-app

The European Union said on Tuesday that it suspects Meta’s social networking platforms, Facebook and Instagram, of breaking the bloc’s rules for larger platforms in relation to election integrity. The European Commission (EC) has opened formal infringement proceedings to investigate Me

Finally, something that both sides of the aisle can agree on: social media companies are too powerful. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, 78% of American adults say social media companies have too much influence on politics — to break it down by party, that’s 84% of surve

Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder, is among those who have joined the board of directors of Mastodon’s new U.S. nonprofit, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko announced over the weekend. Mastodon’s service, an open source, decentralized social network and rival to Elon Musk’s X, has gained in

Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), technewss’s regular newsletter covering this week’s noteworthy happenings in tech. TikTok’s fate in the U.S. looks uncertain after President Joe Biden signed a bill that included a deadline for ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to

President Joe Biden signed a bill on Wednesday that could ban TikTok — for real this time. After so many false starts and stops, some creator economy founders and their clients are rolling their eyes. They've been through this before. “I think two years ago, this would have been devastating

Meta’s move into the open social web, also known as the fediverse, is puzzling. Does the Facebook owner see open protocols as the future? Will it embrace the fediverse only to shut it down, shifting people back to its proprietary platforms and decimating startups building in the space? Will i

Social media platform TikTok says that a bill banning the app in the U.S. is “unconstitutional” and that it will fight this latest attempt to restrict its use in court. The bill in question, which President Joe Biden signed Wednesday, gives Chinese parent company ByteDance nine months t

President Joe Biden signed the bill this week that could ban TikTok from the U.S. if its parent company ByteDance doesn't sell the platform. According to young political content creators, the ban could decimate Gen Z's access to political news and information. “An unfortunately large amou

Social networks Bluesky and Mastodon may soon be accessible from within a single app — at least, that’s what Bluesky hopes. The new decentralized social network, originally incubated inside Jack Dorsey-run Twitter, is backing a project that would connect — or “bridge” — Mast

Meta’s tracking ads business could be facing further legal blows in the European Union: An influential adviser to the bloc’s top court affirmed Thursday that the region’s privacy laws limit how long people’s data can be used for targeted advertising. In the non-legally bind