On Wednesday July 29, the CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google were summoned to a hearing with the House antitrust committee. It turned out to be one of the most critical antitrust events since the 90s Microsoft case. One thing is clear—U.S. politics are finally waking up on the antitrust front after three decades…

These last few weeks have been hard for Tik Tok. The Chinese app was banned from India—one of its biggest markets—in late June. In the United States, the administration is debating whether to restrict it for fears that it could be used as a surveillance tool. Meanwhile, Facebook is taking advantage of Tik Tok's weakness…

Three months ago, the streaming service Quibi was launched with some fanfare and we devoted one of our posts to it (read Quibi, the new streaming platform for mobile devices). Its success so far has been quite limited. Its founders have blamed the pandemic for the app’s flop, but its problems may not stop here.…

Amid the pandemic, the police violence, and the riots, President Trump's executive order (EO) against social media companies may have gone unnoticed. On May 28, Trump introduced a rule to limit social media platforms' editorial power after Twitter tagged some of its tweets as "potentially misleading." Although the order will likely be challenged in court,…

The birth of online news has made information overload a problem for consumers. With news updates popping up every second, it is hard to keep up with the current events while understanding the context for those events. For that reason, the audio company News over Audio (Noa) was launched three years ago to curate the…

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown light to a trend that had gone largely unnoticed until now—a lack of medical experts on social media. Since the virus hit Western countries, citizens have turned to the Internet for solutions. But, with the rise of misinformation, most of them decided to put their trust in the few medical…

As we settle in our quarantines, we have more time in our hands to read the news—and sometimes obsessively. Thus, it’s not surprising that since the COVID-19 pandemic reached the Western hemisphere, news readership has surged dramatically. But what has also drastically changed is newspaper revenue. With businesses closing, the number of ads has plunged,…

As quarantines are implemented throughout the world, users are spending more time on the Internet looking for entertainment options. This makes it, without doubt, the golden age of streaming services and online gaming outlets. But it is also an exciting time for grassroots initiatives, which are flooding the Internet.  As the competition for the audience's…

Since early February, fake news content surrounding Covid-19 has flooded the Internet. Citizens all over the world, trying to figure out how to face the crisis and protect their families, are turning to WhatsApp, Facebook, and videos/audios shared by friends with information on healthcare. While social media giants and news outlets try to tackle the…

On March 4, Twitter made its most significant announcement since its inception, much more consequential than the 280-character extension. The tech company started to test Fleets in Brazil last week, a version of the Stories' feature already present in the other social media platforms. Fleets will consist of temporary posts that will appear on the…

We’ve heard it a thousand times—movie theaters, very much like books, are done. With their humongous fixed costs and their conservative outlook, they are just not ready to survive the online streaming era. That general assertion is true—streaming platforms, available for anyone with a laptop or a TV set, are releasing world-class pictures. But, although…

By Giulia Surace, Carmen Arroyo Last week the Swedish Publishers' Association and the Swedish Booksellers' Association released their annual Book Sales Statistics report for 2019, which covers 80% of the Swedish trade book consumer sales. The findings, in line with the previous years, are nonetheless astounding. Although the book market grew 1.1% in value, sales…

More than a year has passed since Facebook launched its Tik Tok-like platform Lasso, with mild success.  CNBC reported that during its first three months of existence—from November 2018 to January 2019,—the short-video sharing app was downloaded from the Apple App Store and Google Play by 70,000 users in the United States. The numbers sound…

Last week, The New York Times disclosed in the fourth-quarter earnings report it had broken a record of its own—its subscription numbers. The paper has added over one million digital-only subscribers in 2019, in what Mark Thompson, the Times' CEO, described as "a record-setting year for The New York Times's digital subscription business, the best…

Last week we saw the birth of Scroll, a new and unique online platform aiming to serve both readers and publishers. The subscription-based service provides an Internet experience free of ads and pop-ups for readers, while paying member publications a portion of their subscription revenue. For the past couple of years, the advertising model has…

Before January comes to an end, we must still say a word about the podcasting industry and its current striking player—Spotify. Distributing third party content will not get the company very far, and since in music is very hard for Spotify to develop original content, podcasts are the best alternative that match their streaming and…

Back in September, Facebook announced the creation of what is now known as Facebook's Supreme Court—an oversight board to review appeals to the tech company's content policy decisions. Around forty independent experts will form the committee later this year, making decisions over the company's content policy. For Facebook, the board is the perfect 'scapegoat' to…

While generalist outlets fight for survival, a new type of news brand is taking over the Internet—the verticals. Before the digital era, verticals were just called news sections. It was as simple as that. With the print product, the reader would go through the whole paper—call it New York magazine, for example—before turning its attention…

Just a couple weeks ago, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that the company was setting up a team to create a decentralized standard for social media. With it, Twitter is joining the existing efforts to develop decentralized frameworks through which the platforms themselves do not hold the information or the power to act as referees.…

If you have not checked out Tik Tok, it's about time you do. The 15-to-60-second video feel-good app has fascinated United States adolescents in a way that's only comparable to Snapchat in 2014. The Chinese app already has 1.5 billion users, and with its fun and entertaining offer, it is changing the way social media…