Social Networks

Twitter held talks with Clubhouse around a potential acquisition of the live drop-in audio networking platform, with a deal value somewhere around $4 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Twitter has its own product very similar to Clubhouse - Spaces, a drop-in audio chatroom feature that it has been rolling out gradually to its user base over the past few months.

While we aren't privy to the specifics of these talks between Twitter and Clubhouse, it does seem like an awfully high price tag for the social network to pay for the audio app, especially given its own progress with Spaces.

Unlike the Clubhouse rivals being built by Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn believes its audio networking feature will be differentiated because it will be connected with users' professional identity, not just a social profile. This focus on creators puts LinkedIn on a competitive footing in terms of expanding its own Clubhouse rival, compared with other efforts by Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, or Discord - all of which have their own audio-based networking features in various stages of development at this time.

Facebook has frozen the page of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, a company spokesperson said, after the leader was accused of violating the platform's policies about the spread of Covid-19 misinformation.

A spokesperson for the company also told the AFP news agency that a video from Maduro's page had been removed "for violating our policies against misinformation about Covid-19 that is likely to put people at risk for harm".

Linktree, one of the most popular “link in bio” services with more than 12 million users, announced today it had raised $45 million in Series B funding. The Sydney, Australia-based startup latest funding will be used on tools that make social commerce easier.

Founded in 2016, Linktree is used for bio links by Shopify, Facebook, TikTok, YSL, HBO and Major League Baseball, and celebrities like Jonathan Van Ness, Jamie Oliver and Pharrell.

Twitter is testing a new way to crop images in the timeline. The new tool will give users a preview of what an image will look like before publishing it.

Twitter also plans to show more full images. The company has been criticized for having a racial bias in the way it crops images.

Russia's media regulator says it will block Twitter if it does not remove 'illegal' content. The measures will only apply to images and video, not text. The regulator cites 2,569 cases of users inciting minors to commit suicide and 149 cases of child pornography.

In December, the Russian Parliament's lower house passed two bills that would give the state greater power to punish Facebook and Twitter companies.

Social media maven Jane Manchun Wong has shared the first look at an "Undo Send" timer for tweets that lets you take back your hot take or erroneous comment before it's out in the wild.

The interface shows Twitter’s familiar “Your Tweet was sent” dialogue above a new “Undo” button. The undo button doubles as a progress bar, which appears to show you how long you have to undo a tweet before it gets sent.

Last year, Twitter told investors it was considering a subscription service, and one of its exclusive options would be an "undo send" feature.

Twitter Spaces, the company's answer to Clubhouse, is now available on Android. Until now, the audio chat rooms were iOS-only. Other Spaces features are being shared in public as they're designed and prototyped, including things like titles and descriptions, scheduling options, support for co-hosts and moderators, guest lists, and more.

This fast pace has now led Twitter to beat its rival Clubhouse - the app currently leading the "social audio" market - to offer Android support. But now, a separate beta app won't be required - when live Spaces are available, they'll appear at the top of the Twitter timeline for Android users to join.

Four people were arrested on Monday morning for 'Barçagate' so far, including the club's former president Josep Maria Bartomeu, former board member Jaume Masferrer, Barça's current CEO Òscar Grau and the head of legal services, Román Gómez-Ponti.

In February 2020, Spanish broadcaster Cadena Ser revealed a scheme in which then-president Bartomeu hired the company I3Ventures, which specialises in mass dissemination of offences and misinformation on social media.

Next Sunday, on March 7, FC Barcelona will hold an election to designate the new president for the coming six years, with three candidates: former president Joan Laporta, Víctor Font and Toni Freixa.

Twitter announced new features: With the so-called Super Follows, exclusive content is coming to the platform for which users can pay money. But that is not all.

Until now, Twitter has been a fairly public platform - anyone and everyone can read everything, regardless of whether they have an account themselves. At this year's Virtual Analyst Day, the short message service has now announced a partial departure from this course. In addition, a communities feature is being planned that is reminiscent of the well-known Facebook groups.

Reddit, which announced a $250 million Series E earlier this February, has added over $118 million to the financing event. The current round total is now $367 million, according to a new SEC filing. The filing shows that Reddit is aiming to raise $500 million in this round.

The Series E, which came from investors such as Tencent, Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia, valued the firm at $6 billion, double its last valuation from two years ago.

Originally founded in 2005, Reddit has long existed on the nerdy side of the internet, where its text- and image-focused forums have devoted themselves to a wide variety of topics, everything from video games and GIFs to cute pets and cigarettes to Donald Trump and sports.

Austrian Green Party politician Sigrid Maurer - herself a victim of vicious insults on the internet - was to stand trial for defamation because she had made the obscene messages to her public via Twitter. Now the trial is over.

As reported by ORF, among others, a landlord has withdrawn his private accusation against the politician "in its entirety". The judge then formally acquitted Maurer. However, the acquittal will only become legally binding when the landlords lawyer "officially withdraws his appeal with a written statement", according to the spokeswoman. If the landlord waives further legal remedies, he will have to bear the costs of the proceedings.

Reddit announced on Monday that it had raised $250 million in new funding, valuing the social news start-up at $6 billion. This is the company's Series E round of financing, and it comes hot on the heels of renewed public attention on the site that has dubbed itself 'the front page of the Internet,' owing to the role the subreddit r/WallStreetBets played in the recent meteoric rise (and subsequent steep fall) of the value of GameStop stock.

The company celebrates in 2021 its 16th year of operation, and, so far, has raised around $800 million. The latest round included financing from “existing and new investors,” Reddit noted in a blog post in which it announced the funding.

Thousands of Chinese users suddenly found themselves unable to access Clubhouse on early Monday evening as the country prepared to start the week-long Lunar New Year holiday.

Over the weekend, several large Chinese-language chat rooms were set up on the invite-only audio app, where guests talked about politically-charged topics such as the ongoing crackdown against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, democracy in Hong Kong and the sovereignty of Taiwan.

Clubhouse has faced criticism at home in the U.S. for its lack of effective moderation and abuse-prevention practices, so it's hardly a surprise that it has fallen afoul of China's rather more strict enforcement of measures designed to stifle the spread of information the government deems inappropriate for discussion.

Italian prosecutors have opened an investigation into the accidental death of a 10-year-old girl who allegedly took part in a "blackout challenge" on the video-sharing network TikTok.

TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, said on Friday it had not managed to identify any content on its site that could have encouraged the girl to participate in any such challenge, but was helping the authorities in the probe over possible "incitement to suicide".

Medical experts have warned about the danger of the challenge being taken up by some young people, who refer to it as "scarfing" or "the choking game" in which restricted oxygen to the brain results in a high.

Russian authorities are warning social networks, especially the video platform TikTok, popular with young people, to stop advertising for jailed opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

"We request that you immediately take comprehensive measures to prevent the dissemination of such unlawful information on the TikTok platform," reads a statement from telecommunications regulator Roskomnadzor.

Specifically, the authority refers to calls disseminated via TikTok to participate in a demonstration for Kremlin critic Navalny that had been announced for Saturday but had not been approved.

After Amazon, Google, and Apple forced Parler offline, the social network managed to make an online comeback on Sunday, even if not fully operational.

Parler's CEO John Matze wrote a post on the platform saying: "Our return is inevitable due to hard work, and persistence against all odds."

The social networking site went dark when Amazon stopped providing it cloud hosting services after it was revealed the platform was used to help organize the Capitol Hill attack on Jan. 6, which left five people dead.

Takahiro Shiraishi, who admitted to the murder of nine people he had befriended on Twitter, has been sentenced to death in Japan. Shiraishi strangled and dismembered eight women and one man over the course of three months. All of his victims had expressed suicidal thoughts prior to their death on Twitter, but "none of the nine victims consented to be killed, including by silent consent" so the the judge, Naokuni Yano, found.

In an effort to avoid the EU's privacy laws, Facebook will move all of its users in the United Kingdom into user agreements with the corporate headquarters in California. Google has done a similar move in February. 

"Like other companies, Facebook has had to make changes to respond to Brexit and will be transferring legal responsibilities and obligations for UK users from Facebook Ireland to Facebook Inc. There will be no change to the privacy controls or the services Facebook offers to people in the UK," so Facebook's UK arm.

Reddit said in a statement on Sunday that it has acquired TikTok rival Dubsmash. It did not disclose the financial terms of the deal. Dubsmash allows users to create and share video content, and it's especially popular with young, diverse audiences.

Dubsmash's three co-founders, Suchit Dash, Jonas Drüppel, and Tim Specht, will be joining Reddit with immediate effect.