Technology

Elon Musk boasted that his rebranded site X has hit its highest user totals – as rival Mark Zuckerberg scrambles to add new features to halt the massive dropoff in interest in his “Twitter-killer” app. Musk, who acquired the app formerly known as Twitter for $44 billion last fall, posted a graph on Friday which claimed that X had 541,562,214 …

Master of horror Stephen King sent a chilling tweet about Elon Musk’s controversial decision to rebrand the social media platform as X. “Twitter Twitter Twitter Twitter Twitter,” the “It” author wrote in a post on Thursday. He repeated the Musk-owned app’s former name 14 times before adding, “And in case you didn’t get that: Twitter.” Musk — who changed his …

Meta executives are heavily focused on boosting retention on their new Twitter rival Threads, after the app lost more than half of its users in the weeks following its buzzy launch, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Thursday. Retention of users on the text-based app was better than executives had expected, though it was “not perfect,” said Zuckerberg, speaking at an …

Facebook removed content related to COVID-19 under pressure from the White House, including posts claiming the virus was man-made, according to internal company communications leaked to The Wall Street Journal. “Can someone quickly remind me why we were removing — rather than demoting/labeling — claims that Covid is man made,” Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs, asked in a …

The fired Twitter executive who went viral for sleeping on the office floor last year has broken her silence on mercurial boss Elon Musk — describing him as a brilliant but cold leader with a “painful” lack of empathy. Esther Crawford, whose rapid rise and fall from Musk’s good graces drew intense scrutiny over the last year, gave her most …

Jack White, the White Stripes rocker who once hailed Elon Musk as “the Henry Ford of the 21st century,” is dumping his 2013 Tesla Model S months after he lashed out at the mogul for reinstating the Twitter account of former President Donald Trump. White, the guitarist whose riffs on the hit song “Seven Nation Army” are played in sports …

TikTok has flooded millions of Europeans with ads from Chinese state propaganda outlets on topics like COVID-19 and tourism in the troubled Xinjiang region, according to an analysis of a recent ad library conducted by Forbes. The ads echoed messages pushed by China state media, including one that touted Xinjiang as a sought-after tourist destination by showing adorable cats playing …

Teyo Johnson, the former NFL star who filed a $1.9 million lawsuit alleging that his tech boss subjected him to sexual harassment, has agreed to a settlement that will pay him barely more than $50,000, according to the company. The former Oakland Raiders tight end alleged in court papers that Everyrealm co-founder Janine Yorio, 47, urged him to sleep with …

Senators Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, and Lindsey Graham, a Republican, said Thursday they would push for an ambitious bill to create a new government regulator empowered to rein in Meta Platforms’ Facebook, Alphabet’s Google, Amazon and other Big Tech platforms. For several years, bills intended to clip the wings of Big Tech companies have fallen short in Congress even as federal agencies wage …

A House committee called off a vote Thursday on a recommendation that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg be held in contempt of Congress for failing to fully supply documents related to an investigation into supposed censorship by tech companies of conservatives. Rep. Jim Jordan, a Republican and chair of the Judiciary Committee, tweeted shortly before the committee was to meet that, …