CNN – Social Media/Technology

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business Elon Musk is set to join Twitter’s board of directors, a move that potentially boosts his influence over the social media platform and which comes one day after it was disclosed that he had become the company’s largest individual shareholder. Twitter said in a regulatory filing Tuesday that it plans

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business After Christian Smalls was fired two years ago from an Amazon warehouse in New York City following his participation in a walkout over its pandemic response, an executive at the company suggested undercutting his organizing efforts by painting him as “not smart, or articulate.” When Smalls’ newly-established organization garnered

By Jennifer Korn Swedish electric car maker Polestar is selling up to 65,000 electric vehicles to Hertz over the next five years, the companies announced Monday. The move follows an order Hertz placed for 100,000 electric cars made by Tesla in October 2021. Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath previously told Automotive News Europe that stretch goal

By Chris Isidore, CNN Business A House committee will investigate how Amazon treats its workers, following the death of six employees in December when the distribution center they were working in was struck by a tornado. The House Oversight Committee sent a letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy Thursday demanding documents about company practices. It

By Brian Fung, CNN Former senior national security officials, including two ex-CIA directors and a past NSA director, are backing Apple’s app store practices as the iPhone maker fights a critical antitrust case. The nearly two-dozen security experts and former US officials argued Thursday in a court filing that proposals to force open Apple’s mobile

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business The right-to-repair movement has scored another win. Samsung is the latest tech company giving customers the ability to repair their own mobile devices amid pressure from consumers, regulators and even US President Joe Biden to ease restrictions on fixing products. The company announced on Thursday a new program that

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business The results of a do-over vote for a milestone union election at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, were too close to call on Thursday. A total of 875 workers at the Bessemer facility voted for joining a union and 993 voted against it, marking a much closer split

By Jackie Wattles, CNN Business Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin just launched its fourth successful space tourism mission, putting yet another feather in the cap of the company that hopes to make these supersonic joyrides a mainstay of pop culture. The six passengers, which include a Blue Origin engineer and five paying customers, boarded their New

By Brian Fung and Clare Duffy, CNN Business Apple users could soon install apps outside the App Store. WhatsApp users could message or video call friends using Telegram, and vice versa. And the search results users see on Google could change, with potentially major repercussions for smaller online businesses. These are just some of the

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business TikTok has been hit with another lawsuit from former content moderators who claim the job traumatized them. Ashley Velez and Reece Young, former contract content moderators for TikTok, allege that their work involved reviewing “unfiltered, disgusting and offensive content,” including “child sexual abuse, rape, torture, bestiality, beheadings, suicide, and murder,”

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business Instacart’s valuation doubled twice to $39 billion in the first year of the public health crisis, fueled by a pandemic boon to its on-demand grocery delivery business. Now it’s falling back to earth. On Thursday, the decade-old, privately-held startup informed its 3,000 corporate employees that it is revising its

By Brian Fung, CNN European officials have reached agreement on a sweeping set of competition rules for Big Tech that could mark a global turning point for technology regulation. The proposed framework, known as the Digital Markets Act, could label large companies such as Facebook-parent Meta or Google as “gatekeepers,” and subject them to new

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business After going 27 years without a US union, Amazon now faces a test from elections at not one but two of its warehouses. A union reelection at the company’s Bessemer, Alabama, facility concluded Friday after a nearly two-month voting period by mail. Beginning that same day, thousands of workers

Catherine Thorbecke, CNN Business Uber once waged a fierce battle against the taxi industry. Now it’s teaming up with New York’s iconic yellow cabs. Uber on Thursday announced a new partnership in New York City that will let its users hail the city’s taxicabs through its app, and let drivers of these traditional taxis accept

By Scottie Andrew, CNN James Van Der Beek sobbing. The guy who blinks in disbelief. That disturbing dancing baby. For these and millions more GIFs, we have Stephen Wilhite to thank. GIFs, those looping animated images, are a universal language — when words fail, a clip of a cool cat spinning beats on a turntable

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business Instacart wants to help grocery stores get in on the ultra-fast delivery craze. The on-demand grocery delivery company on Wednesday announced several new services for retail partners, including one called Carrot Warehouses, which promises to help grocers build out the infrastructure to support 15-minute deliveries. That would cut Instacart’s

By Jennifer Korn, CNN Business Mackenzie Scott said Wednesday she has donated more than $3.8 billion to 465 organizations since June. In a Medium post, Scott said her team’s focus in the past nine months continued to be helping underrepresented people from various backgrounds and communities. The billionaire philanthropist gave money to Planned Parenthood locations

By Rishi Iyengar, CNN Business As Russia’s war in Ukraine and its diplomatic conflict with the United States both continue to escalate, the warnings that Russian hackers could go after US businesses have gained new urgency. US President Joe Biden on Monday urged business leaders to strengthen their online defenses, warning that his Russian counterpart

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Instagram is bringing back a version of its news feed that sorts posts in reverse chronological order rather than ranked according to the platform’s algorithms. However, the company said it will leave its algorithm ranking method on by default. The new option, which rolls out to users globally on

By Sean Lyngaas, CNN A January cybersecurity incident at popular identity authentication provider Okta may have affected hundreds of the firm’s clients, Okta acknowledged late Tuesday amid an ongoing investigation of the breach. “[W]e have concluded that a small percentage of customers — approximately 2.5% — have potentially been impacted and whose data may have

By Matt Egan, CNN Business Former Trump national security adviser H.R. McMaster is calling on Congress to swiftly fund investments in American computer chip manufacturing, a plan championed by the Biden administration to address global semiconductor shortages. “It’s absolutely critical,” McMaster, a retired Army lieutenant general, told CNN in a phone interview. “If China has

By Brian Fung, CNN Business The attorney general of Washington, D.C. announced Monday he is suing Grubhub, alleging that the company harmed consumers during the pandemic by charging hidden fees and by misleading consumers about them using so-called “dark patterns” — along with a battery of other claims. The food-delivery service, which grew in prominence

By Jackie Wattles, CNN Business Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, said it will replace Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson with a long-time employee on the company’s next supersonic jaunt to the edge of space. The company announced Monday it will replace Davidson with its chief architect of its suborbital rocket, Gary Lai. Davidson,

By Catherine Thorbecke, CNN Business A number of Apple services were hit by a short-lived outage for some users on Monday afternoon. Reports began to swirl online of users experiencing issues with iMessage, iCloud and more of the tech giant’s tools starting around 1 p.m. ET. Apple eventually acknowledged at least 11 outages on its

By Anna Cooban, CNN Business A South African judge has put the brakes on a $270 million real estate project that includes a regional headquarters for Amazon, saying that indigenous people who consider the land to be sacred must be consulted. Judge Patricia Goliath said in a ruling on Friday that Liesbeek Leisure Properties Trust

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Match on Monday rolled out a new service called Stir that aims to remove some of the barriers around dating as a single parent. The dating services company said Stir focuses on meeting the specific dating needs of single parents that aren’t typically addressed on mainstream dating apps. With

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Barely a week after Apple unveiled its first budget 5G smartphone, Samsung announced a competing model that rivals it on price. At a brief virtual event on Thursday, Samsung showed off its new Galaxy A53 5G smartphone, which packs much of its higher-end flagship line into a more budget-friendly

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business For many gig workers, their vehicles are how they make a living. And as independent contractors, they’re solely responsible for keeping them clean, running and full of gas. In recent weeks, the latter part has gotten much more burdensome. In response to soaring gas prices, Uber and Lyft recently

By Rachel Metz, CNN Business Facebook and YouTube said Wednesday that they removed uploads of a deepfake video of Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky that purported to show him yielding to Russia. The deepfake spread widely online Wednesday, as noticed earlier by Vice’s Motherboard. In the video, which CNN Business has reviewed, Zelensky appears to stand

By Jennifer Korn, CNN Business Forget the stereo. Your next car could come with a virtual reality entertainment system. Holoride, a tech startup whose promise is “turning vehicles into moving theme parks,” recently announced at the SXSW festival in Austin that it is bringing VR headsets to select Audi SUVs and sedans this summer. With

By Anna Cooban, CNN Business Intel plans to invest up to €80 billion ($89 billion) over the next decade to build up Europe’s supply chain for semiconductor chips. The tech giant said on Tuesday that it will spend an initial €17 billion ($19 billion) to create two new chip factories in Germany. Construction on the

By Clare Duffy and Rachel Metz, CNN Business Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is unfolding online like no war in history, providing a real-time stream of information on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook and TikTok. But with that unique view into the conflict comes a flood of misinformation that’s especially hard to root out — effectively

By Jackie Wattles, CNN Business NASA said Monday that NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei will return from the ISS later this month aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft as previously planned. The space agency sought to reaffirm Monday that it’s still working closely with Russian space agency Rocosmos on the International Space Station, despite mounting geopolitical

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business Lyft on Monday said it plans to add a small fee on rides to help drivers deal with rising gas prices across the country, days after Uber laid out its plans to do the same. Lyft did not specify how much extra passengers will pay or when the surcharge

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business More than two months after Theranos founder and former CEO Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty on four of 11 charges in her criminal fraud case, the trial of her ex-boyfriend and second-in-command at the failed blood testing company is set to begin. Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, who served as Theranos’

By Brian Fung, CNN Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, issued a reminder on Sunday that it prohibits calls on its platforms for the assassination of high-ranking world leaders, following intense scrutiny of the company’s decision last week to relax hate speech policies in Ukraine. In an internal post to employees, Meta President

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business Fridge No More, a startup that offered fast delivery with no fee regardless of size order, told employees this week that it was shutting down after a deal with a potential buyer fell through. The closure was the second in the span of a week by an ultra-fast delivery

By Rishi Iyengar, CNN Business Big tech platforms have joined the global backlash against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, with Facebook, Google, Twitter, Spotify, Netflix and others placing at least partial restrictions on Russian content — if not exiting (or getting themselves blocked) altogether. In the past week, however, the severing of Russia from

By Brian Fung, CNN House lawmakers who spent much of 2019 and 2020 probing Amazon for possible antitrust violations now accuse the tech giant of lying to Congress and want the Justice Department to investigate “potentially criminal conduct” from the company and some of its executives. In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland dated

By Rishi Iyengar, CNN Business Spotify and Discord experienced disruptions to their services on Tuesday. Several Spotify users reported being automatically logged out of their accounts. “Something’s not quite right, and we’re looking into it,” the company tweeted. At roughly the same time, messaging platform Discord reported a partial outage. “We’re aware of an issue

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business At its first product event of the year on Tuesday, Apple unveiled an upgraded iPad Air, a new desktop computer and a powerful new Mac chip. But the standout product was a new budget iPhone with access to 5G networks. Apple’s new iPhone SE, only the third version since

By Rishi Iyengar, CNN Business Like much else about the country, Russia’s internet has long straddled East and West. Russian citizens, unlike their Chinese counterparts, have been able to access US tech platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Google, though they have been subject to censorship and restrictions — the defining feature of China’s internet

By Rachel Metz, CNN Business In mid-February, privacy and digital rights activists were buzzing about a recent victory: Earlier in the month, the Internal Revenue Service said it would back away from a controversial plan to force taxpayers to use facial-recognition software before they could log in to its website. “This has definitely been a

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business WeWork said Monday that it is planning to divest its operations in Russia, one week after its CEO said the real estate company’s “assets do incredibly well” there and he didn’t think it would need to pull out of the country. “Together with our colleagues, members, and landlords, we

By Anna Cooban, CNN Business Netflix and TikTok are suspending all or part of their services in Russia, adding to a long list of companies boycotting the country over its war in Ukraine. Netflix said on Sunday that it would stop streaming its content in Russia, though it did not specify what would happen to

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Apple is about to hold its first big product event of 2022 and the focus will be on performance. That likely means faster chips, more devices with 5G connectivity and more powerful cameras. At a virtual event on Tuesday, which has the tagline “peek performance,” Apple is expected to