<p>Bankers are reportedly gearing up to offload debt used to fund Elon Musk’s social network, for which he paid $44 billion in 2022, including $13 billion in financing. Morgan Stanley is leading the charge, hoping to sell senior debt at between 90 and 95 cents on the dollar, reports the WSJ.  As notes the outlet, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>X has started expanding its dedicated vertical video feed to users outside the U.S., TechCrunch has exclusively learned and confirmed with the company.</p>

<p>The developer behind Pixelfed, Loops, and Sup, open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp, respectively, is now raising funds on Kickstarter to fuel the apps&#8217; further development. The trio is part of the growing open social web, also known as the fediverse, powered by the same ActivityPub protocol used by X alternative Mastodon. The [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The European Union will give tech and social media companies a &#8220;stress test&#8221; to see how they handle misinformation ahead of Germany&#8217;s election next month. European Commission officials have invited tech companies, including X, Meta, Snap, TikTok, Google, Microsoft, and LinkedIn, to a meeting on January 31, according to multiple news outlets. During this meeting, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>In the days leading up to the TikTok ban in the U.S. on Sunday, U.S. users flooded the Chinese app RedNote, which offered a similar experience to their favorite short-form video app. The app, which is listed in the U.S. App Store under its Chinese name Xiaohongshu, quickly became the No. 1 free app in [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Flip is a social commerce app that lets shoppers become creators. They can share honest reviews and earn cash based on engagement on the platform. As Flip competes with TikTok Shop and other platforms in a highly competitive market, it has introduced a new creator fund that offers a unique opportunity to help it stand [&hellip;]</p>

<p>While Meta lures TikTok creators to Instagram and Facebook with cash bonuses, its X competitor Instagram Threads is now making things easier for creators, brands, and others who need more professional tools to manage their presence on the app. On Thursday, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced a small handful of new features coming to Threads, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Substack on Thursday announced the launch of its Creator Accelerator Fund, which provides a $20 million funding guarantee aimed at helping creators grow their audience and move their paid subscribers from another subscription-based platform (Patreon, Supercast, and others) to Substack. The company says the fund is designed to ensure that creators will retain all of [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Social network X has grown its in-app revenue over the past year, despite a decline in active users, new data shows. Global consumer spending in the X mobile app across both iOS and Android has climbed by 76.3% year-over-year, when comparing two similar periods in January, according to data from app intelligence firm Appfigures. However, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Snap announced on Thursday that it&#8217;s introducing a new &#8220;Challenge Tags&#8221; rewards program for AR developers to win cash prizes for submitting Lenses. The company also announced that it&#8217;s launching educational pricing and a student discount for Spectacles, its developer-focused AR glasses. The theme of the first Challenge Tag is humor and is open through [&hellip;]</p>

<p>An Indian tribunal on Thursday suspended restrictions that would have barred WhatsApp from sharing user data with its parent company Meta, delivering a significant victory for Mark Zuckerberg&#8217;s social media empire in its largest market by users. The ruling by the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal temporarily lifts a five-year ban imposed by India&#8217;s antitrust [&hellip;]</p>

<p>In 2015, the blogging site Tumblr launched a GIF discovery feature called Tumblr TV as an experimental product. Now, with the U.S. TikTok ban leaving the fate of the short-form video app uncertain, Tumblr has decided it&#8217;s finally time to launch Tumblr TV, which has since evolved to support video, to all its users as [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Streaming service Plex has long since grown beyond its original focus of being a home for personal media to offer a more comprehensive solution for discovering, streaming, and sharing content across services, including Plex&#8217;s own ad-supported free TV and movies. More recently, the company added social networking features, which it&#8217;s today expanding with its rollout [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Billionaire Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are fighting on X about Stargate, the enormous infrastructure project to build data centers for OpenAI across the U.S. Stargate, announced Tuesday during a press conference at the White House, would funnel as much as $500 billion from investors including SoftBank and Middle East AI fund MGX [&hellip;]</p>

<p>This month, drama unfolded across mainstream social media platforms like TikTok, which briefly went dark in the U.S. before a rapid return. Instagram recently faced backlash after ending its third-party fact-checking program.&nbsp; At the same time, startups like Favorited are attracting attention from investors, creators, and viewers. On Wednesday, the livestream app announced its $1.3 [&hellip;]</p>

<p>This month, drama unfolded across mainstream social media platforms like TikTok, which briefly went dark in the U.S. before a rapid return. Instagram recently faced backlash after ending its third-party fact-checking program.&nbsp; At the same time, startups like Favorited are attracting attention from investors, creators, and viewers. On Wednesday, the livestream app announced its $1.3 [&hellip;]</p>

<p>TikTok is back online in the U.S. for the time being, but its future remains uncertain. While many apps have been scrambling to attract TikTok users and creators, a bookmarking backup service called Dewey has launched a solution that saves your favorite TikTok videos and allows you to access them at any time &#8212; even [&hellip;]</p>

<p>TikTok is back online in the U.S. for the time being, but its future remains uncertain. While many apps have been scrambling to attract TikTok users and creators, a bookmarking backup service called Dewey has launched a solution that saves your favorite TikTok videos and allows you to access them at any time &#8212; even [&hellip;]</p>

<p>President Donald Trump has said he would be open to Tesla CEO Elon Musk or Oracle chairman Larry Ellison buying TikTok as part of a joint venture with the U.S. government. Trump was asked at a press conference on Tuesday if he was open to &#8220;Elon buying TikTok.&#8221; He responded that he would be, and [&hellip;]</p>

<p>President Donald Trump has said he would be open to Tesla CEO Elon Musk or Oracle chairman Larry Ellison buying TikTok as part of a joint venture with the U.S. government. Trump was asked at a press conference on Tuesday if he was open to &#8220;Elon buying TikTok.&#8221; He responded that he would be, and [&hellip;]</p>