CNN – Social Media/Technology

By Rachel Metz, CNN Business Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has a new feature aimed at cutting down on harassment and assault in virtual reality: It will give avatars in its Horizon Worlds social app and Horizon Venues events app an invisible “personal boundary” of four feet to stop others from getting too close.

By Sean Lyngaas News Corp suffered a “persistent cyberattack,” the company said Friday, and investigators believe Chinese spies may be responsible. Dozens of journalists at the News Corp-owned Wall Street Journal were targeted in the hack, which appeared to focus on reporters and editors covering China-related issues, two people familiar with the matter told CNN.

By Diksha Madhok, CNN Business The historic collapse in Meta’s shares this week has wiped $31 billion off Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth, taking him down three places on Bloomberg’s list of the world’s richest people. He now stands in 10th place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, behind Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and just a few

By Hannah Ritchie and Jill Disis, CNN Business Billionaire mining magnate Andrew Forrest is taking legal action against Facebook in Australia after he claims the company failed to remove scam advertisements that used his image. Facebook was “criminally reckless” because it did not take “sufficient steps to stop criminals from using its social media platform

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business Amazon is raising the price of its annual Prime subscriptions from $119 to $139 per year in the United States, the company announced along with its earnings report Thursday. The price of a monthly subscription will also increase from $12.99 to $14.99. The company said it is increasing the price

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business Wag, a dog-walking startup that once received $300 million from a single investor only to stumble in executing its strategy, is set to go public in a deal valued not much higher than that one investment. Wag said Thursday that it has entered an agreement to go public through

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business Meta Platforms, the company formerly known as Facebook, just had its worst trading day in its history as a public company. The company’s shares closed down more than 26% Thursday, shaving off nearly $240 billion from its market value, after a rough earnings report released after trading hours on Wednesday.

By Jennifer Korn, CNN Business Melinda French Gates may be shifting her approach to how she gives away her vast wealth following her high-profile divorce last year from Microsoft founder Bill Gates. French Gates is said to have decided not to give the bulk of her estimated $11.4 billion fortune to the Bill & Melinda

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business Facebook rattled investors on Wednesday by posting a rare profit decline, driven by the company’s heavy spending on its vision for a so-called metaverse while simultaneously confronting advertising challenges on its existing services. The company, formerly known as Facebook, posted net income of nearly $10.3 billion in the final three

By Jessie Yeung and CNN’s Beijing Bureau, CNN Business A Chinese subway system’s attempt to spread some Lunar New Year cheer backfired over the weekend, as panicked passengers mistook seasonal red QR codes for positive Covid tests. Chinese social media users reported Sunday that the Shanghai metro’s QR code — which passengers scan when they

By Brian Fung, CNN Business A few days after Christmas, Aaron Worley and his wife began feeling ill. Fearing they may have contracted Covid-19 over the holidays, Worley, a 32-year-old quality assurance tester from Las Vegas, joined millions of other Americans in a desperate search — “rush mode,” he called it — for rapid test

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Just a day after Spotify agreed to remove Neil Young’s music from its service, Apple Music trolled its streaming rival by giving the musician some rock star treatment. In a tweet sent late Thursday, and later pinned to the top of the official Apple Music Twitter account, Apple called

By Matt McFarland, CNN Business Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday that he believes the company’s goal of a humanoid robot is the most important thing it’s working on. The electric vehicle manufacturer first announced its robot plans at its AI Day last year. Instead of showing off any sort of prototype, a person in

By Brian Fung, CNN Business From canceled flights to dire warnings of a stalled shipping economy, this was not how the rollout of 5G networks was supposed to go. Despite having years to prepare, the United States last week had to scramble to keep the launch of new, next-generation wireless technologies from disrupting air transportation

By Charles Riley, CNN Business UK companies and organizations have been urged to bolster their defenses against potential Russian cyberattacks as Moscow masses military forces on the Ukrainian border. Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre has directed organizations to take action “in response to the malicious cyber incidents in and around Ukraine,” saying recent attacks are

By Diksha Madhok, CNN Business Google is investing up to $1 billion in a major Indian telecom company, a move it hopes will drive down the cost of smartphones in a huge and rapidly expanding market. Google said in a statement Friday that it would invest $700 million in Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator,

By Brian Fung and Laura He, CNN Business The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday voted to ban China Unicom, a state-owned Chinese telecommunications carrier, from offering telecom services in the United States. The decision marks the regulators’ latest move to lock down US networks against the risk of Chinese espionage, a threat that national security

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Apple posted record revenue during the all-important holiday quarter even as it continued to grapple with supply chain shortages. The company on Thursday reported $123.9 billion in revenue for the final months of the year, an 11% increase from the year prior, fueled by demand for its latest lineup

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business Microsoft’s nearly $70 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard could make it a leader in gaming. But it also risks creating a new headache for the tech giant in a key part of its operations: corporate culture. For months, Activision Blizzard has been under pressure to overhaul its workplace

By Rachel Metz, CNN Business Jeremy Bailenson has studied virtual reality for decades. But it wasn’t until last year that the Stanford professor felt the technology was good enough that he could actually teach a class in VR. Over the summer and again in the fall, Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction

By Michelle Toh, CNN Business Apple has once again become the top-selling smartphone brand in top market China, along with the rest of the world. That’s according to findings from two separate research reports, which come just before the tech giant is set to release its earnings for the most recent quarter on Thursday. A

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island have shown enough support to hold a union election, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) confirmed on Wednesday. For months, a grassroots group called Amazon Labor Union led by former Amazon employee Chris Smalls has worked to collect signatures from employees

By Laura He, CNN Business China’s top cybersecurity regulator is vowing to crack down on “illegal” online content as part of a campaign to clean up the internet ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympics and one of the country’s most important annual holidays. The Cyberspace Administration of China announced Tuesday that its month-long internet “purification”

By Brian Fung, CNN Business A bipartisan group of attorneys general sued Google on Monday, alleging that the technology giant has used “dark patterns” and deceptive practices to track users’ physical location even when those users have made efforts to block Google from doing so. The parallel lawsuits by the District of Columbia, Texas, Indiana

By Angus Watson, Jill Disis and Yong Xiong, CNN Business Australia has accused WeChat of taking down Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s account and redirecting his followers to a site that claims to provide information for Chinese Australians. The removal of the account was first confirmed Monday by James Paterson, chairman of Australia’s Parliamentary Joint Committee

By Kara Fox, CNN In the west of Ireland lies a medieval market town, its roots steeped in legend. Beyond the labyrinth of narrow streets of the center are the chimney stacks of housing developments that still puff coal and peat. Past those homes, on the outskirts of Ennis, is an unremarkable but huge plot

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Many mobile device users in the United States now have access to blazing-fast internet speeds stemming from the rollout of Verizon and AT&T’s new C-band 5G networks earlier this week. While telecom companies have rolled out 5G networks to various locations across the country over the last few years,

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business Workers at an Activision Blizzard-owned game studio announced plans on Friday to form what would be the first union at the troubled gaming company. A group of quality assurance workers at Raven Software who largely work on the wildly popular “Call of Duty” series said they have garnered enough

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business Twitter on Thursday began rolling out a feature that will let some users set NFTs that they own as their profile picture to signal their investment in the emerging digital art space. The move makes Twitter one of the best-known tech platforms so far to launch a feature for the

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business The next-generation of wireless technology is now even faster for 5G users in some parts of the country. Telecom companies have rolled out 5G networks to various locations across the United States over the last few years, delivering an experience that’s arguably only a notch above what 4G offers.

By Jordan Valinsky, CNN Business The CEO of Better.com, best known for firing 900 employees over Zoom just before Christmas, is coming back to work. Vishal Garg is returning to his “full-time duties” as CEO, according to a letter sent to employees Tuesday from the company’s board of directors. The letter noted that Garg used

By Pete Muntean, CNN Business AT&T and Verizon announced Tuesday that they would delay activating 5G on some towers around certain airports. The wireless technology’s rollout near major airports had been scheduled for Wednesday, but airlines warned of dire consequences for transportation and the economy. AT&T made the announcement as it works with the aviation

By Jennifer Korn and Clare Duffy, CNN Business Microsoft on Tuesday announced plans to acquire Activision Blizzard in a blockbuster deal worth nearly $70 billion. It’s one of the biggest acquisitions in the tech industry in recent years, one that will boost Microsoft’s standing in the growing gaming industry but could be complicated by recent

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business The parents of Austin McEwen, one of the six victims killed after a tornado pummeled an Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, Illinois, last month, said Monday during a press conference that they are suing Amazon over the alleged wrongful death of their son. McEwen’s parents allege that the e-commerce giant,

By Pete Muntean and Gregory Wallace, CNN Business Executives from the largest US airlines asked the Biden administration for “immediate intervention” in the planned rollout of 5G technology near major airports on Wednesday, warning of dire consequences for transportation and the economy. The representatives of 10 carriers asked the administration in a letter obtained by

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business Elizabeth Holmes, the former CEO of Theranos who was convicted earlier this month on four out of 11 federal fraud and conspiracy charges, will not be sentenced until September 26, according to a new filing. The prosecution and defense had proposed September 12 for a sentencing hearing in a

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business A group of more than 80 fact-checking organizations from around the world has called YouTube “one of the major conduits of online disinformation and misinformation worldwide” and wants the platform to do more to address the problem. In an open letter to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki published Wednesday, the group

By Brian Fung, CNN Business US antitrust officials can continue their case to break up Meta, Facebook’s parent company, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday, dealing a blow to the social media giant, which had argued the complaint should be dismissed. The decision allows federal prosecutors to try to prove their allegations that Meta has

By Brian Fung, CNN Business Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is delaying its return to US offices until March 28 and will require proof of Covid-19 booster shots for workers in those offices. The company already requires that in-office workers be vaccinated. Janelle Gale, VP of Meta’s human resources department, told CNN Business in

By Rachel Metz, CNN Business Last summer, Allen Roach saw something that really disturbed him: His then-11-year-old son, Peyton, used a sword to slice off the arms and legs of characters in a virtual reality medieval fantasy game, Blade & Sorcery, then threw the dismembered digital bodies off a bridge. Sure, it all happened in

By Samantha Murphy Kelly and Clare Duffy, CNN CES, the closely-watched annual consumer electronics show, looked drastically different this year. Sure, some things were familiar: companies showed off the latest batch of flashy TVs. The onslaught of oddball gadgets got odder. And there was no shortage of next-level health trackers, including a lightbulb that tracks

By Jennifer Korn Tim Cook had a very good year. Apple’s CEO received nearly $100 million in total compensation in 2021, a sixfold increase from the prior year, according to a proxy statement filed by the company on Thursday. Cook’s $98.7 million pay package was largely made up of roughly $82 million in stock awards.

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business When Patrick Kennedy, a nightlife performer in New York City, recently was exposed to Covid-19, he was desperate to find more rapid tests to not only monitor his health but track when he’d be able to return to work. “It’s impossible to find Covid tests because of the shortage

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business January 6 was a clear turning point for major social media companies — proving that they would, under certain circumstances, be willing to deplatform a sitting US president. But some experts worry that they still haven’t done enough to address the underlying issues that allowed Trump supporters and others on

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business Inside the San Jose federal courtroom, I shifted my body forward and from side to side trying to watch Elizabeth Holmes’ face from the wooden bench I’d all but taken up residence in for the past four months. Like others in the courtroom Monday, I wanted to catch a

By Jackie Wattles, CNN Business NASA’s Artemis 1 mission, slated for take off as soon as this March, aims to send an Orion spacecraft around the moon. The cabin will be largely empty, save for an a interactive tablet that has been dubbed “Callisto,” which will sit propped up to face an astronaut mannequin. Callisto

By Brian Fung, CNN Business Google must stop attempting to intimidate US antitrust enforcers at the Justice Department, according to two congressional Democrats. On Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Pramila Jayapal wrote to Google CEO Sundar Pichai lambasting his company’s efforts to get Jonathan Kanter — DOJ’s top antitrust official — to recuse himself

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business As Elizabeth Holmes heard in real time that a jury of eight men and four women had found her guilty on four counts of defrauding investors, the former Theranos CEO remained stoic. After the jurors were discharged, Holmes, wearing a mask and seemingly emotionless, went down the line of