Twitter

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, one of his many controversial decisions was to rebrand the company and social network platform as X. He said at the time that the purchase was “as an accelerant for X, the everything app” – aka a western clone of China’s WeChat.

Part of this vision includes becoming a mobile payment platform to compete with Apple Pay, and the company’s CEO today said part of this functionality will launch later this year …

Social media apps X and Bluesky are both rolling out dedicated video feeds, in apparent attempts to take advantage of the continued uncertainty around TikTok.

With X, there’s a new play button icon launching a continuous video feed looking very similar to TikTok, while Bluesky offers custom feeds for video which you can choose to pin …

TikTok may shut down totally in the US on Sunday, with the app no longer opening at all, according to a new report. This would go well beyond the legal requirement of the ban, which would only prevent new downloads.

However, Congress may be about to throw the company a lifeline, through a proposed new law granting it another 270 days before the ban comes into effect …

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has for the first time revealed the daily number of Threads users, stating that there are now more than 100 million daily active users. It’s also been suggested that the current trajectory means that the app could catch up with the social network formerly known as Twitter.

Zuckerberg is likely aiming to fight back against the growing popularity of Bluesky, also citing a new milestone in monthly active users …

Plenty of people have tried to replace Twitter/X, but only a few new social media apps have achieved any traction, notably Threads and Bluesky.

But a new app created by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams isn’t trying to replace those, but instead do one of the things I most value about social media, and absolutely nothing else …

Note: This report contains links to reports about teenage suicides

Australia has followed France in imposing a social media ban for kids, and other countries are expected to follow. The French government is now pushing for an EU-wide ban.

Social media platforms are of course pushing back as they face losing a demographic seen as key to their future, and questions are being raised about how the ban will be enforced …

Update: Australia has now voted to ban social media use by children under the age of 16. In a 9to5Mac reader poll on the issue, the vast majority of you thought the US should do the same – see the end of the piece.

The impact of social media use by kids is perhaps one of the hottest topics in tech. There’s significant evidence that social media apps like Instagram can be harmful to the mental health of children, while others argue that it can also enable social connection.

Meta’s Threads app may be seeking to further push into the territory occupied by the app formerly known as Twitter, taking on one of Elon Musk’s favorite features.

The feature is known as Loop, and one developer who spotted the reference said that it might be similar to the Communities feature on X, or subreddits …

We reported in August that the social network X was banned in Brazil following a dispute between Elon Musk and the Brazilian Supreme Court. More than a month later, the Musk-owned company has backtracked and decided to comply with the Brazilian court, which has just ruled that X can be unblocked in the country.

Following a dispute between Elon Musk and the Brazilian Supreme Court, the social network X has been officially banned from Brazil as of this Friday evening. As a result, the court is now demanding that Apple remove X from the Brazilian App Store – something that is yet to happen.

Update: As the story unfolds, the Brazilian court has now softened the ban on X and no longer requires Apple and Google to remove the app from their respective stores. However, access to the social network is still blocked in the country. You can read the original story below.

After allowing people to buy their way to the top of the replies section by purchasing an X Premium subscription, the social media platform has now launched a new menu to allow users to sort through replies with more traditional options.

After discontinuing Twitter for Mac this week, Twitter (officially known as X) has now enabled support for running the unmodified iPad app on Apple Silicon Macs, a feature that debuted with macOS Big Sur. Although the app initially had a problem where users would get suspended for using it, it seems that the app is now safe to use.

Heads up! Elon Musk’s social platform X (formerly Twitter) has quietly added an opt-out toggle to keep its AI chatbot Grok from data scraping your posts, as well as any interactions you have with it. The setting to allow data for training is enabled by default and buried only within the web version of X. Here’s how to find it…

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X, Elon Musk’s social network formerly known as Twitter, recently implemented a change that made likes private, so that only the account owner can see the posts they have liked. However, a recent security incident allowed others to still see these private likes.

There’s been a lot going on at X recently when it comes to attempts to make more money from the platform. After Elon Musk confirmed his plans to introduce a small fee for new users, X has now confirmed that it will soon limit the ability to livestream to Premium subscribers only.

Elon Musk may have rebranded Twitter to X last summer, but one of the more notable contradictions was that URLs remained as twitter.com. That has finally changed today.

X users accessing via the web today have seen twitter.com URLs redirect to x.com. Musk announced the migration on Twi– er, X …

A court is being asked to decide whether or not Meta has a legal obligation to allow the use of Unfollow Everything – a browser tool which effectively empties your Facebook feed.

The idea behind the tool is that instead of being sucked into an effectively endless feed of posts from every friend, group, and page you have ever followed, you get to proactively choose the posts you read …

Apple’s ad transparency tools aren’t sufficient to investigate issues like paid influence, says a new report, which also scored the effectiveness of 11 other tech companies’ tools.

Five companies – including social network X and Microsoft’s Bing search engine – scored close to zero, while Apple got a yellow rating indicating “big gaps” in the information provided …

A report last year revealed that Elon Musk had plans to introduce a new charge for users who have just registered on X (formerly Twitter) on the grounds that this would be the only way to make the platform free of bots. Now Musk himself has confirmed his intentions and revealed more details about this potential fee.