CNN – Social Media/Technology

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business Thousands of previously banned Twitter users, including members of the far-right and users sharing blatant misinformation, have begun to have their accounts restored to the platform, according to an independent analysis. The mass restoration of accounts comes after new owner Elon Musk said late last month that he would offer

By Brian Fung, CNN The Biden administration has told the US Supreme Court that social media platforms ought to be potentially liable for recommendations made by their AI-driven content algorithms, weighing in against Google in a pivotal case on digital speech and content moderation. In a filing to the Court Wednesday evening, the administration argued

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Fans of the popular first-person shooter game “Call of Duty” may soon have more options for where they can play it. Microsoft said late Tuesday it has reached a 10-year deal to bring the 19-year-old game franchise to Nintendo after its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which makes the game,

By Jennifer Korn, CNN Ridehailing giant Uber is now offering Las Vegas riders the option on its app to hail a self-driving taxis developed by another company, according to a press release Wednesday. While the autonomous vehicles are currently only available for ride hailing in Las Vegas, there are plans to expand to Los Angeles

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Apple has been sued by two women who allege their previous romantic partners used the company’s AirTag devices to track their whereabouts, potentially putting their safety at risk. The proposed class action lawsuit was filed in federal court in San Francisco on Monday on behalf of one woman from

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business After a yearlong review, Meta’s Oversight Board on Tuesday said the company’s controversial system that applies a different content moderation process for posts from VIPs is set up to “satisfy business concerns” and risks doing harm to everyday users. In a nearly 50-page advisory, including more than two dozen recommendations

By Juliana Liu, CNN Business Apple supplier Foxconn says it is “gradually” restoring production capacity at its sprawling campus in central China, which has been hit by Covid-19 restrictions and worker protests since October. The “epidemic situation” at the facility, known as iPhone City and normally home to hundreds of thousands of workers, has been

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business In 2015, the same year Apple introduced its smartwatch, a Kickstarter campaign launched for a very different kind of wearable device: a wellness-tracking gadget called the Oura Ring. Seven years later, the Apple Watch is the most popular wearable device while other similar products from Google and Samsung also

By Brian Fung, CNN For days, Twitter owner Elon Musk had teased a massive bombshell disclosure based on internal company documents that he claimed would reveal “what really happened” inside Twitter when it decided to temporarily suppress a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden and his laptop. But on Friday, instead of releasing

By Oliver Darcy, CNN New Twitter owner Elon Musk declared last month that “hate speech impressions” had dramatically fallen on the platform since he took over. It was a remarkable claim, given that Musk has executed mass layoffs and chased away hundreds of employees, draining the company of much-needed resources to enforce content moderation policies,

By Rob McLean, CNN Business Kanye West’s Twitter account was suspended early Friday morning after Elon Musk said it violated the platform’s rules on inciting violence. “I tried my best. Despite that, he again violated our rule against incitement to violence. Account will be suspended,” Musk tweeted in a reply. CNN could not confirm which

By Jackie Wattles, CNN Elon Musk — the SpaceX founder, Tesla CEO, and, most recently, Twitter owner — hosted a flashy event on Wednesday night for yet another one of his companies: Neuralink, the startup proposing implants that connect your brain to a computer. The event showcased a video that Musk said showed a monkey

By Brian Fung, CNN Business Twitter owner Elon Musk’s dictatorial management style risks driving the company headlong into unforced business blunders, content moderation disasters and the degradation of core platform features that help keep vulnerable users safe, according to a former top Twitter official who led the company’s content moderation before abruptly resigning this month.

By Nicki Brown and Sabrina Souza, CNN Two victims injured when a car drove into an Apple store filed lawsuits Tuesday morning claiming various development companies failed to protect people by not installing barriers near the store. One person died and at least 19 others were injured after an SUV drove through an Apple store

By Donie O’Sullivan, CNN Business Twitter said it will no longer enforce its longstanding Covid misinformation policy, yet another sign of how Elon Musk plans to transform the social media company he bought a month ago. In 2020, Twitter developed an extensive set of rules that sought to prohibit “harmful misinformation” about the virus and

By Brian Fung, CNN Business Twitter searches for the widespread Covid-19-related protests in China are returning a flood of spam, pornography and gibberish that some disinformation researchers say at first glance appear to be a deliberate attempt by the Chinese government or its allies to drown out images of the demonstrations. Beginning late last week

By Catherine Thorbecke, CNN Business Sunday officially marks one month since the world’s richest man took the helm at Twitter. In that time, Elon Musk initiated mass layoffs and gave remaining staffers a cryptic ultimatum, reinstated the accounts of controversial figures including former President Donald Trump, and launched — then punted — a plan to

By Juliana Liu, CNN Business A violent workers’ revolt at the world’s largest iPhone factory this week in central China is further scrambling Apple’s strained supply and highlighting how the country’s stringent zero-Covid policy is hurting global technology firms. The troubles started last month when workers left the factory campus in Zhengzhou, the capital of

By Michelle Toh, CNN Business Hikvision, a leading Chinese surveillance company, has denied suggestions that it poses a threat to Britain’s national security after the UK government banned the use of its camera systems at “sensitive” sites. The restrictions, announced Thursday, will prevent authorities from installing technology that is produced by companies subject to China’s

By Michelle Toh, CNN Business Two European chip deals have run into trouble over their links with China, a sign of concern spreading in the West over potential Chinese control of critical infrastructure. Last week, the new owner of Britain’s biggest chipmaker was ordered to unwind its takeover, just days after another chip factory sale

By Brian Fung, CNN House Republicans say TikTok may have misled congressional staff in private briefings about the company’s handling of US user data, in a new letter to the short-form video app this week. The letter dated Tuesday and addressed to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew reflects the latest escalation by US lawmakers as

By Catherine Thorbecke, CNN Business While much of Silicon Valley is grappling with hiring freezes and job cuts, at least one social media company is still planning to keep hiring: TikTok. The short-form video app remains committed to its goal of hiring nearly 1,000 engineers at its Mountain View office, a person familiar with the

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business Len Edgerly, a 72-year-old podcaster from Cambridge, Massachusetts, has spent the last 14 and a half years talking about his favorite tech product of all time: the Kindle. Edgerly, who records a weekly podcast called “The Kindle Chronicles,” has spoken to authors, readers, publishing industry experts and Amazon executives

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business Elon Musk on Friday said Twitter plans to restore several controversial accounts that had previously been banned or suspended, but added that the company has not yet made a decision about the account of former President Donald Trump. The announcement came as a follow-up to a tweet in which Musk

By Clare Duffy, CNN Business On Thursday night, following another exodus of Twitter employees, the outage detection site Down Detector showed a spike in users reporting issues accessing the social media platform. A chart of the sharp increase in outage reports was shared by some users on Twitter, appearing to validate a growing fear that

By Clare Duffy and Oliver Darcy, CNN Business Another employee exodus appears to be underway at Twitter as many workers rejected Elon Musk’s terms for staying with the company, choosing instead to depart, according to multiple current and former employees. As the deadline approached for Twitter employees to respond to Elon Musk’s ultimatum to commit

By Natalia V. Osipova and Catherine Thorbecke, CNN Business As US wildfires have grown larger and deadlier in recent years, one company is using drones and fire-starting “dragon eggs” to help prevent extreme blazes and save firefighters’ lives. Drone Amplified, a Nebraska-based startup, is using unmanned aerial technology to improve one of the oldest and

By Brian Fung, CNN Business With Republicans projected to take control of the House as a result of the midterm elections, tech giants such as Amazon, Google and Meta, who’ve been in the crosshairs of Democrats in recent years, are soon set to face a very different — but no less hostile — political climate

By Rachel Metz, CNN Business Elon Musk has been saying for months that he wants to stamp out spam and fake accounts on Twitter, but a subtle change he’s planning to make to the platform could complicate that goal. In a tweet this week, Musk said Twitter will stop showing notations such as “Twitter for

By Michelle Toh, CNN Business The UK government has ordered a Chinese-owned company to unwind its takeover of Britain’s biggest chipmaker, citing national security concerns. Nexperia, a Dutch subsidiary of Shanghai-listed semiconductor maker Wingtech, was told to sell “at least 86%” of its stake in Newport Wafer Fab by UK Secretary of State for Business,

By Donie O’Sullivan and Clare Duffy, CNN Business Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk has given employees until Thursday evening to commit to “extremely hardcore” work or else leave the company, according to a copy of a late-night internal email sent by the billionaire and obtained by CNN. “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0

By Clare Duffy, Oliver Darcy and Donie O’Sullivan, CNN Business Elon Musk has publicly clashed with a growing number of Twitter employees about the state of the platform, and fired at least one of them in a tweet, in an unusually visible sign of corporate chaos after his $44 billion takeover of the influential company.

By Catherine Thorbecke, CNN Business Amazon is planning to lay off some 10,000 employees in corporate and technology jobs, the New York Times reported on Monday, citing anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter. The job cuts could start as early as this week, and will likely include staff working on Amazon devices (such as

By Catherine Thorbecke, CNN Business While a number of major brands have announced advertising pauses on Twitter in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition, the platform has scored a new ad buy from one notable billion-dollar business: Musk’s SpaceX. Musk confirmed on Twitter Monday that his aerospace company, SpaceX, bought a package to advertise its

By Samantha Murphy Kelly, CNN Business A little over a year ago, social media companies were put on notice for how they protect, or fail to protect, their youngest users. In a series of congressional hearings, executives from Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram faced tough questions from lawmakers over how their platforms can lead younger

By Brian Fung, CNN Two weeks after Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter, the future of the company has never looked less certain. In the past week alone, one of the world’s most influential social networks has laid off half its workforce; alienated powerful advertisers; blown up key aspects of its product, then repeatedly

By Steven Jiang and Juliana Liu, CNN Apple has limited the use of the AirDrop wireless file sharing function on devices in China, just weeks after reports that some protesters had used the popular feature to spread messages critical of the Chinese government. Users of iPhones in mainland China who updated their iOS software this