CNN – Social Media/Technology

By Rishi Iyengar, CNN Business Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has asked the company’s board to slash his pay to the “lowest amount California law will allow” until the gaming company fixes its issues with gender discrimination and harassment, he said in a letter to employees on Thursday. If the board approves, Kotick will be

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Google is now making it easier for minors or their parents to have photos of them deleted from search results. In a blog post published Wednesday, the company said it is rolling out a tool that lets parents and kids under the age of 18 request photos be removed

By Rachel Metz, CNN Business In late 2017, Facebook had a big problem: users were commenting on, “liking” and resharing posts less than they had in the past. The declines in engagement, visualized in charts on an internal document viewed by CNN Business, looked like wiggly black-and-blue frowns. Facebook decided to make a change —

By Clare Duffy and Rishi Iyengar, CNN Business Two months after former US President Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2017, Twitter executive Vijaya Gadde was asked how she felt about his proposition that he might not have won the White House without the social media platform. “To me, there’s nothing better than having a political

By Matt Egan, CNN Business Venture capitalist Roger McNamee says Corporate America shares blame for the troubles that exist today at Facebook. “What they are doing is willfully turning a blind eye to catastrophic problems that would not exist if they were not willing to advertise on these platforms,” McNamee, an early investor in Facebook,

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business The high-profile trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was delayed multiple times before kicking off last month. Now there are questions about whether there will be enough jurors to get through the second half of the trial. When the trial started on September 8, 12 jurors and five alternates

By Donie O’Sullivan, Clare Duffy, Tara Subramaniam and Sarah Boxer, CNN Business In public, Facebook has touted the resources it has dedicated to tackling Covid-19 and vaccine misinformation, even scolding US President Joe Biden for his harsh criticism of the company’s handling of the issue. In doing so, it claimed that “more than 2 billion

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Executives from TikTok, Snap and YouTube were grilled by Senators on Tuesday about the steps their platforms are taking to protect their young users, weeks after a Facebook executive faced tough questions on the same issue. Democrats and Republicans in the Senate Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection raised concerns

By Tara Subramaniam, CNN Business Facebook is no stranger to the limelight. While the company has repeatedly come under fire over the past few years for its role in disseminating misinformation, especially related to the 2016 election, the last two months have been especially turbulent as a whistleblower and top officials have been called to

By Rishi Iyengar, CNN Business For years, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted his mission to connect the entire world — and his company has come closer than perhaps any other to fulfilling that lofty goal, with more than 3 billion monthly users across its various platforms. But that staggering global expansion has come at a

By Sean Lyngaas, CNN Business Nobelium, the Russian hacking group responsible for breaching SolarWinds, is still at it. The Russian hackers behind that successful 2020 breach of US federal agencies compromised as many as 14 technology firms since May as part of another apparent espionage campaign, Microsoft said Monday. The hackers have been hitting a

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business Facebook has for years struggled to crack down on content related to what it calls domestic servitude: “a form of trafficking of people for the purpose of working inside private homes through the use of force, fraud, coercion or deception,” according to internal Facebook documents reviewed by CNN. The company

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business One witness occupied the stand for the better part of week seven in the criminal trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. For two days straight, jurors heard testimony from former Theranos insider Daniel Edlin, who was a friend of Holmes’ brother and worked at the failed blood testing startup

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business Ridehail company Lyft on Thursday released its first ever safety report, disclosing that it received 4,158 reports of sexual assault on its platform in 2017, 2018, and 2019. The disclosure comes more than three years after Lyft and its rival Uber first pledged to release safety reports disclosing incidents

By Rishi Iyengar, CNN Business Snapchat’s parent company crossed $1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time ever, but worse-than-expected earnings and a forecast of more headwinds to come led its stock to crash on Thursday. Shares of Snap, which owns the popular photo and video app, plunged as much as 25% in after-hours

By Donie O’Sullivan, CNN Business Sen. Richard Blumenthal wrote to Mark Zuckerberg Wednesday, calling on the Facebook CEO or the head of Instagram to testify on the platform’s harms on children. Citing internal company documents leaked by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, Blumenthal wrote that Facebook “appears to have concealed vital information from us about teen

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Smartphone design hasn’t varied much in years and customers are typically beholden to whatever decisions manufacturers make. But during a virtual press event on Wednesday, Samsung aimed to change that with a concept that makes users part of the design process. The company showed off a made-to-order version of

Walé Azeez, CNN Business The UK competition regulator has slapped Facebook with a $70 million fine for repeatedly ignoring warnings and deliberately breaking its rules. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said in a statement Wednesday that Facebook had “consciously” refused to report all the required information during an investigation of the tech giant’s acquisition

By Jackie Wattles, CNN Business Boeing’s long-awaited spacecraft, called Starliner, is still facing a long road ahead before it’ll be ready to fly astronauts, the company said on Tuesday. It is still working to address an issue with the vehicle’s propulsion system that was discovered just hours before it was slated to launch a crucial

By Kristin Fisher and Jackie Wattles, CNN Mark “Forger” Stucky, who for six years headed the test pilot program at space company Virgin Galactic before he says he was fired earlier this year, is taking a job with the company’s chief competitor, Blue Origin. Stucky said he will join Blue Origin’s “Advanced Development Programs” team,

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Apple is set to kick off its second product event of the season, a month after introducing its new iPhone 13 lineup. At a virtual event on Monday at 1 pm ET, the company is expected to unveil two high-end MacBook Pro laptops powered by its next-generation silicon chip.

By Rishi Iyengar, CNN Business An Apple employee who led organizing efforts against harassment and discrimination within the company said she has been fired. Janneke Parrish, a program manager at Apple and one of the organizers of the #AppleToo movement, was suspended late last week and terminated on Thursday, she told CNN Business in an

By Walé Azeez, CNN Business Virgin Galactic has pushed back the start of full commercial service to the fourth quarter of next year, sending shares in the space tourism company founded by billionaire Richard Branson down sharply. The stock dropped 14% in early trading on Friday after Virgin Galactic said it was making schedule changes

By Walé Azeez, CNN Business Microsoft chief digital officer Jacky Wright has been named the United Kingdom’s most influential Black person. But the US-based executive says she might not have reached the top of her profession had she stayed in Britain. Wright, who topped the Powerlist 2022 ranking from Powerful Media, told CNN Business that

By Jackie Wattles, CNN Business William Shatner, the 90-year-old actor of “Star Trek” fame, endured a 10-minute, rocket-powered ride to the edge of space, which put his body through crushing g-forces that his fellow passengers described as face-bending — only to step out of the vehicle and immediately begin waxing poetic about the experience and

By Donie O’Sullivan, CNN Business Sophie Zhang, who said she felt like she had “blood on her hands” after working at Facebook, is willing to testify before Congress about her former employer, she told CNN Sunday. She said she had also passed on documentation about the company to a US law enforcement agency. Zhang, who

By Rishi Iyengar, CNN Business Apple is asking a court to put on hold its injunction that would allow iPhone developers to direct users away from the company’s App Store for online payments. The company on Friday filed a motion with the US District Court for the Northern District of California asking it to stay

By Pamela Brown, Zachary Cohen, Ryan Nobles, Annie Grayer and Donie O’Sullivan, CNN Business The Facebook whistleblower who released thousands of documents that she says shows the company knows its platforms are used to spread hate, violence and misinformation is expected to meet with the House select committee investigating the January 6 riot at the

By Sara Ashley O’Brien, CNN Business Former Safeway CEO Steven Burd testified Wednesday during the criminal trial of Elizabeth Holmes about his company’s decision to invest heavily in a partnership with her blood testing startup Theranos that ultimately failed to get off the ground. Burd, who served as CEO of the grocery chain from 1993

By Donie O’Sullivan, CNN Hours after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before Congress about how the social network poses a danger to children and democracy, Mark Zuckerberg took to the platform he built and posted a 1,300-word screed trying to undermine her. His main argument was that Haugen was taking Facebook’s research on its impact

By Tara Subramaniam, CNN Business Facebook’s week is off to a tumultuous start. On Monday, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went down for about six hours. On Tuesday, Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, testified before a Senate subcommittee, following the release of thousands of pages of internal research and documents. Haugen, the 37-year-old former Facebook (FB)