Taylor Hatmaker
TechCrunch
Portland, OR, United States
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Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
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Recent articles by Taylor:
Google will start erasing location data for abortion clinic visits
As concerns mount over data that tech companies acquire, Google is taking at least one step to mitigate some potential harm related to location tracking. → Read More
Twitch’s new Guest Star mode will let anyone turn their stream into a talk show –
Twitch wants to make it easier for creators to pull guests into their livestreams, talk show-style — and everybody gets to be a creator. The company is announcing Guest Star, a new feature that will tie into existing streaming software, allowing stream hosts to bring up to five guests into a stream and swap them […] → Read More
YouTube will disable hidden subscriber counts to fight comment spam
Spam isn’t a new problem for social media, but everyone seems to agree that it’s gotten a lot worse lately. YouTube is chipping away at its own spam woes with a few feature changes designed to make it harder for fake accounts to impersonate real ones. Beginning on July 29, YouTube channels will no longer […] → Read More
Facebook and Instagram are removing posts offering to mail abortion pills
With the aftershocks of the Supreme Court's Roe decision beginning to reverberate, prescription abortion pills are poised to be a topic of extreme controversy. → Read More
Robinhood almost imploded during the GameStop meme stock chaos
Robinhood was blindsided by the surge in interest from the first big "meme stock" after investors rallied around $GME and sent its price into the stratosphere. → Read More
Juul can keep selling vaping products in the US for now –
A federal appeals court froze the FDA's ban on Juul products Friday after the company sought an emergency administrative stay. → Read More
FDA orders Juul to stop selling its vaping products in the US
The axe has fallen for e-cigarette maker Juul. The FDA ordered the company to stop selling and distributing its ubiquitous vaping devices in the U.S. Thursday, a dramatic end for a company that dominated the e-cigarette market and was valued at $38 billion at the top of its game. Juul will no longer be able […] → Read More
The Oversight Board’s annual report tracks how often Meta follows its advice
The advisory group reviewing Facebook and Instagram’s content moderation decisions issued its first annual report Wednesday, capping off its first year in operation. The Oversight Board apparently received over one million appeals from Facebook and Instagram users in 2021. Most of those requests asked the board to overturn content on Meta apps that were removed […] → Read More
Reddit is buying machine learning platform Spell –
Reddit announced Thursday that it would buy Spell, a platform for running machine learning experiments, for an undisclosed amount. Spell was founded by former Facebook engineer Serkan Piantino in 2016 to provide a cloud computing solution to allow anyone to run resource-intensive ML experiments without the high end hardware that would normally be necessary. The […] → Read More
Discord gives servers a way to intercept spam and harmful content, will expand premium memberships
Discord is introducing a native way for servers to preemptively detect and block harmful messages and spam. The tool, called AutoMod, is available today and will allow anyone who moderates one of Discord’s server-based communities to create a custom list of words that the new bot can scan for and intercept. When one of the […] → Read More
Meta adds voice controls for Horizon Worlds, which defaults to live chat with strangers
Meta might soon want everyone to hop into its playful virtual realms, but some users are set up for a shock. In the service of pushing people to socialize in Horizon Worlds, the virtual social network has voice chat enabled by default. As anyone — particularly any woman — who’s played an online multiplayer game […] → Read More
Adobe releases open source tools to counter visual misinformation
Adobe has a vision for an internet peppered with photos and videos packaged up with extra data about where they came from. The company’s central aim is to mitigate the spread of visual misinformation, but the system could also be a boon for content creators keen to keep their names attached to their work. First […] → Read More
Instagram’s ‘sensitive content’ controls will soon filter all recommended content
Last year, Instagram added a way for users to filter some kinds of “sensitive” content out of the Explore tab. Now, Instagram is expanding that setting, letting users turn off that content in recommendations throughout the app. Instagram doesn’t offer much transparency around how it defines sensitive content or what even counts. When it introduced […] → Read More
Echoing Elon Musk, Texas AG is investigating Twitter over bots
As Elon Musk tries to squirm out of his commitment to buy Twitter, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is running interference for the newly-minted Texan. Paxton just announced that his office is investigating how Twitter may be “misleading Texans” about the number of automated bots on its platform. “It matters not only for regular Twitter […] → Read More
Sheryl Sandberg will step down as Meta COO –
Sheryl Sandberg announced today on Facebook that she is leaving Meta after more than a decade as the company’s chief operating officer. Sandberg joined Meta, then Facebook, as COO in 2008. Over the course of 14 years, Sandberg steered the company through an IPO, an unprecedented period of explosive industry growth and its at-times rocky […] → Read More
Discord is giving voice channels their own text-based chat rooms
Discord is giving its voice channels text-based chat too. The company announced Wednesday that it would roll out text chat for the platform’s voice-based chat rooms, adding a way for anyone hanging out out loud to easily share links and other text without having to channel hop to go find it. The feature will roll […] → Read More
Supreme Court pauses controversial Texas social media law –
The Supreme Court blocks a law that allows Texas residents and attorney general to sue social media companies over their content-moderation decisions. → Read More
After buying Bungie, Sony goes all in on live service games
Sony plans to launch 12 different live service games, integrating technology and expertise from its acquisition of Destiny developer Bungie. → Read More
Twitter investors sue Elon Musk over acquisition shenanigans –
A suit was filed in federal district court for Northern California and argues that Musk intentionally drove down the company's stock to secure a better deal. → Read More
Meta consolidates its privacy policy to appease regulators
In an effort to make its notoriously dense user agreements less labyrinthine, Meta has rewritten and redesigned how that information is presented. The company insists that the changes are in form, not function, bolding some lines, adding subheaders and illustrations instead of presenting that information as a giant wall of text. The result is still […] → Read More