The Berlin-based startup Periwinkle is offering a new avenue for those wanting to leave centralized social media operated by Big Tech companies. Instead of joining a decentralized, open social networking app like Mastodon or Bluesky, Periwinkle allows anyone to set up a social media account on their own domain, under …

Meta is now allowing rival AI companies to provide their chatbots on WhatsApp to Brazilian users for a fee, a day after the company confirmed a similar decision for users in Europe. Earlier this week, Brazil’s antitrust regulator CADE ruled against Meta and rejected its appeal to block an earlier …

Claude’s daily active users are on the rise on mobile devices, as are its new app installs, following the company’s fallout with the Pentagon. After Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused to allow the government to use its AI systems for mass surveillance of Americans or to power fully autonomous weapons, …

X is testing a new ad format that inserts a recommendation directly underneath a post that references the company or its products. The initial test, spotted by an X user in Europe, displayed a suggestion to “Get Starlink” beneath a post from a user that said Starlink’s satellite service works …

Roblox is introducing a real-time, AI-powered chat rephrasing feature that automatically replaces banned words with more respectful language, the company announced on Thursday. The new feature goes beyond Roblox’s current text filter, which simply replaces banned words and phrases with the “#” symbol. But Roblox says that when users encounter …

Elon Musk-owned X announced on Thursday that it’s revamping the social network’s Creator Subscriptions offering with a number of new features, including exclusive threads, a refreshed subscriptions paywall, a new dashboard, and a shareable subscriptions card, among other changes. The company believes these updates will allow creators to attract more …

Amazon is starting to roll out its redesigned Fire TV mobile app to customers, the company announced on Thursday. While you could previously only use the app as a backup remote, the updated experience lets you browse and discover content directly from your phone, manage your watchlist on the go, …

The $7 million in annual recurring revenue that Cluely co-founder and CEO Roy Lee shared with TechCrunch last summer was a lie, Lee admitted on Thursday on X. Wrote Lee, this “is the only blatantly dishonest thing i’ve said publicly online, so this is my formal retraction. ” Yet his …

TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption for direct messages (DMs) on its platform, according to a new report from the BBC. The social media giant says end-to-end encryption would make users less safe, as it believes the technology would prevent police and safety teams from accessing messages when necessary. TikTok …

X Chat’s standalone app isn’t the only new service X is testing this week. The company has also begun offering select users invites to its X Money payments service, which was previously being tested internally among X employees. These invites, however, were not doled out in the typical way. Instead, …