Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You […]
The Digital Death of Collecting
How platforms mess with our tastes. In the era of algorithmic feeds, it’s as if the bookshelves have started changing shape on their own in real time, shuffling some material to the front and downplaying the rest like a sleight-of-hand magician trying …
Ex-Apple designer’s ultra-premium audio hardware startup Syng raises $48.75 million
Audio startup Syng has been building on quite a bit more hype than the average fresh hardware startup, largely because of the team behind it. Founder and CEO Chris Stringer was Jony Ive’s first hire at Apple and worked at the company for 21 years. In an interview, Stringer referred to the first time he […]
Study finds half of Americans get news on social media, but percentage has dropped
A new report from Pew Research finds that around a third of U.S. adults continue to get their news regularly from Facebook, though the exact percentage has slipped from 36% in 2020 to 31% in 2021. This drop reflects an overall slight decline in the number of Americans who say they get their news from […]
Teenage girls, body image and Instagram’s ‘perfect storm’
The suffering of the photo-sharing app’s users came into focus this week with the leak of Facebook’s internal research‘I felt my body wasn’t good enough’Emily started using Instagram when she was in her mid-teens and found it helpful at first. She used…
Facebook knows Instagram harms teens. Now, its plan to open the app to kids looks worse than ever
Facebook is in the hot seat again. The Wall Street Journal published a powerful multi-part series on the company this week, drawing from internal documents on everything from the company’s secretive practice of whitelisting celebrities to its knowledge that Instagram is taking a serious toll on the mental health of teen girls. The flurry of […]
Facebook revamps its business tool lineup following threats to its ad targeting business
Facebook today is announcing the launch of new products and features for business owners, following the threat to its ad targeting business driven by Apple’s new privacy features, which now allow mobile users to opt out of being tracked across their iOS apps. The social networking giant has repeatedly argued that Apple’s changes would impact […]
MP calls for Facebook to be punished if it holds back evidence of harm to users
Social media giant is under pressure over revelations it knew Instagram was harming girls’ mental healthFacebook should be punished with substantial fines, potentially running into billions of pounds, if it withholds evidence that its social media plat…
The FDA should regulate Instagram’s algorithm as a drug
Instagram’s unwillingness to do what is right is a clarion call for regulation: The FDA must assert its codified right to regulate the algorithm powering the drug of Instagram.
Tell us: how has Instagram affected young people’s body image?
We’d like to hear from parents and young people about how they feel Instagram has affected the body image of younger usersNewly revealed secret internal research by Facebook has found that its Instagram app makes its younger users, particularly teenage…