In a lengthy tweet thread this morning, Daniel Ek criticized Apple’s App Store policies as a “threat to the future of the internet” — and he welcome Elon Musk to the fight.
Spotify has been critical of Apple’s policies for years, but it was only this week that the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX realized he might run into some problems with Apple now that he owns Twitter.
Elon Musk seems to think people will pay $20 per month to stay verified on Twitter. He’s directed engineers to finish building a paid verification system by next week — they’ll be fired if they don’t, per a new report from my colleague Alex Heath.
That’s the question posed by a new report from Forbes, which says that an internal security team at ByteDance — TikTok’s Beijing-based parent — ran investigations into a US-based security leader that may have contributed to his departure last month. This is the same team that Forbes reported on last week, saying they planned to monitor the location of specific American citizens.
Say you’d like to promote your brilliant tweet or painstakingly crafted Facebook meme, and you want to do it right from the main iPhone app. In the past, companies like Facebook have argued that Apple shouldn’t get a cut of these paid “boosts” on posts, since they’re a form of advertising. But today, Apple said “Nah, just give us 30 percent, it’s in our rules now.”
This all follows Apple’s app-tracking transparency changes doing a number on social media ad businesses. Apple did carve out a caveat, though: sole-purpose apps for ad buying don’t need to give Apple a cut.
Barilla is being sued in the US for allegedly misleading consumers into thinking its pasta is made in Italy, rather than New York and Iowa. Why go to court over a miscommunication around noodles? The Washington Post writes:
Rebecca Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School, ... said consumers have been steadily filing false-advertising suits against companies selling products in grocery stores because it is one of the last forums in society that is not bogged down by legal forms or contracts in which consumers sign away their rights to sue.
I have a feeling pasta boxes are about to start looking like a Dr. Bronner’s bottle.
When you block someone, you can now block all accounts they currently have (or may make in the future). Meta says this should lead to just a bit less manual blocking... like, say, 4 million fewer manual blocks per week.
Instagram’s word blocking feature is also getting updated to catch more intentional m1ssp3llings of words meant to avoid filtering. Plus, they’ll catch story replies now, too.
