<p>Chess.com reaches a new membership milestone as it nears its 20th birthday. Chess.com, the online chess platform that was founded in 2005 and launched in 2007, has surpassed 200 million members. Of those 200 million members, 1.5 million are paying users. More than 20 million games of chess are played every day on the platform. [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Facebook will begin lowering the reach of accounts sharing spammy content and making them ineligible for monetization, Meta announced on Thursday. The company is also increasing efforts to remove Facebook accounts that coordinate fake engagement and impersonate others, it says. The move comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has promised a return to &#8220;OG Facebook.&#8221; [&hellip;]</p>

<p>TikTok is rolling out support for ALT text for photo posts to make content more accessible for users with visual and cognitive impairments. The company says creators can now provide descriptive text for photos to help users with screen readers understand the visual content through spoken descriptions. TikTok told TechCrunch in an email that creators [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Government censorship has found its way to Bluesky, but there&#8217;s&nbsp;currently&nbsp;a loophole thanks to how the social network is structured. Earlier this month, Bluesky restricted access to 72 accounts in Turkey at the request of Turkish governmental authorities, according to a recent report by the Freedom of Expression Association. As a result, people in Turkey can [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Amid rumors that the company is eyeing an IPO, Discord appointed former Activision Blizzard Vice Chairman Humam Sakhnini as CEO. Discord co-founder Jason Citron will leave his CEO role after 13 years at the company. Discord straddles the gaming and social media spaces &#8212; despite its initial emergence as a platform for online multiplayer gamers [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Months after first testing ads in select markets, including the U.S., Meta on Wednesday announced that its Instagram Threads app would now expand ads to all advertisers worldwide. The expansion will allow eligible advertisers to reach Threads&#8217; over 320 million monthly active users, and it will include access to an inventory filter to control the sensitivity level [&hellip;]</p>

<p>WhatsApp announced on Wednesday it&#8217;s launching a new feature that will allow users to add an extra layer of privacy to chats. The new &#8220;Advanced Chat Privacy&#8221; setting prevents you and the people you&#8217;re chatting with from exporting chats and auto-downloading media to their phone. The setting also prevents users from mentioning Meta AI in [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Meta&#8217;s Oversight Board, the independent group created to help Meta with content moderation decisions, on Tuesday issued its response to the social media company&#8217;s new hate speech policies announced in January. The Board says that Meta&#8217;s new policies were &#8220;announced hastily, in a departure from regular procedure,&#8221; and called on the company to provide more [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Bluesky&#8217;s launch of a verification system has raised a slew of questions among its user base, from who will be picked — and why — to what outside organizations might be involved and whether the self-verification process will end. TechCrunch has some answers. After a leak last week, Bluesky officially announced Monday the arrival of [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Meta announced on Tuesday that it&#8217;s officially launching Edits, its CapCut-like video-creation app. Releasing globally, Edits will allow creators to do things like keep track of video ideas, get inspiration for new content, and create videos with effects and AI tools. The app is available on iOS and Android. All of the app&#8217;s features will [&hellip;]</p>

<p>We know that social media can be harmful to teens. Meta has found in its own research that Instagram makes body image worse for one in three teen girls, and Snapchat has been sued several times for not doing enough to mitigate cyberbullying. Even the former U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on the risk [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Chatbots and other kinds of AI agents may feel like a dime a dozen these days. But the truth is that, for both businesses and consumers, some may be infinitely more useful (and perhaps less dystopian) than others. Today, a startup that’s built a successful business around that concept is announcing a major growth round [&hellip;]</p>

<p>In an internal email surfaced as part of the Meta antitrust trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg fretted about the potential that the company&#8217;s Instagram acquisition may cannibalize Facebook. Were that to happen, it could lead to the &#8220;network collapse of the more engaging and profitable product,&#8221; a worried Zuckerberg told other Meta executives in a [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Bluesky announced on Monday that it is rolling out blue check verification, confirming previous rumors that this feature was on its way to the platform. Like Twitter&#8217;s original blue check (RIP), Bluesky&#8217;s blue check will verify that notable accounts are legitimate, making it easy for users to trust that an account&#8217;s posts are real. In [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Popular social network and forum site Reddit reported significant outages on Monday morning.&nbsp; The connection errors started at around 11:20 a.m. ET, according to the website Downdetector, which collects anecdotal reports from impacted users globally. At its peak, more than 90,000 users logged an outage report with the downtime tracking website.&nbsp; At 11:52 a.m. ET, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Meta is using AI technology to search for kids who are lying about their age on Instagram in order to bypass safeguards, the company announced on Monday. When Meta finds an account that it suspects belongs to a teen, the platform will enroll them into a restricted Teen Account, even if the account lists an [&hellip;]</p>

<p>With the first week of Meta’s antitrust trial behind us, documents shared by the U.S Federal Trade Commission (FTC) offered more insight into Meta’s internal struggles to keep Facebook relevant. In emails from 2022, Meta executives mulled different visions for Facebook’s future to boost its success, acknowledging that its cultural relevance was decreasing.&nbsp; Fast-forward to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Welcome back to Week in Review! We&#8217;ve got tons of stuff for you this week: antitrust lawsuits against Google and Meta; Grok can now remember; Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow wants to make his mark; and much, much more. Have a great weekend! It&#8217;s over: Google violated antitrust laws in the ad tech market, a judge [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The first week of the Meta antitrust trial brought new revelations about how the company formerly known as Facebook approached the competitive threat posed by Instagram in the early 2010s. The U.S. government is accusing Meta of violating competition laws by acquiring companies like Instagram and WhatsApp that threatened the Facebook monopoly. If lawyers for [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Bluesky may soon get a new blue checkmark verification system, according to changes to the app’s public GitHub repository spotted Friday by reverse engineer alice.mosphere.at. The blue checks may have a similar look to the system pioneered by Twitter, now X, but Bluesky&#8217;s version seems like it will work quite differently. Bluesky&#8217;s blue check system [&hellip;]</p>