Clubhouse Mania Drove $6 Billion to This Loss-Making Chinese Startup Bloomberg 2/11/2021 Zheping Huang and Ellen Huet
(Bloomberg) Clubhouse has in just two months become the venue of choice for luminaries like Elon Musk or Drake to expound on everything from telepathic monkeys to stock market valuations. But the real winner of the audio-chat app’s stratospheric rise is a loss-making Shanghai startup called Agora Inc.
Agora, known mostly within tech circles as an industrious but low-profile provider of software tools, has soared more than 150% since mid-January when online chatter began to circulate about how it powers the world’s hottest new social media forum. That’s because the little-known company now worth almost $10 billion provides developers with all they need to build real-time voice and video functions within applications: a template known as a software development kit.
Who gets to control the freedom of expression?
Muzzled: the “fearless girl” statue in lower Manhattan, New York. Keystone / John Angelillo
After the storming of the US Capitol in January and the banning of former President Trump by several social media platforms, debate has flared about the democratic role of Big Tech firms. How are authorities in the US, Europe, and Switzerland reacting?
This content was published on February 8, 2021 - 09:00
February 8, 2021 - 09:00
Renat Kuenzi
Studied history and politics at University of Bern. Worked at Reuters, the newspapers Der Bund and Berner Zeitung, and the Förderband radio station. I am concerned with the Swiss practice of modern direct democracy in all its aspects and at all levels, my constant focus being the citizen.
Facebook Oversight Board overturns four content-removal rulings, says platforms rule on misinformation was inappropriately vague
The four overturned decisions included a post that asserted that France lacked a health care strategy and included claims that a cure for Covid-19 exists.
Jan 29, 2021 11:58:46 IST
Facebook s newly-launched oversight board issued its first rulings on Thursday, overturning four of five decisions to remove controversial posts from the platform. The initial batch of rulings did not include
Facebook and
Instagram after the storming of the US Capitol, but the board said last week it agreed to consider that case. The four overturned decisions included a post that asserted that France lacked a health care strategy and included claims that a cure for Covid-19 exists.
This hasn t stopped other platforms like Gab from growing as it seemed to target disillusioned conservatives by similarly calling itself the free speech social network. Nothing in U.S. law makes it explicitly illegal to give a certain group a platform, even at the risk of hosting smaller, domestic extremist groups, said Alex Stamos, director of the Cyber Policy Center’s Internet Observatory and former chief security officer at Facebook. You re going to continue to see the separation from the companies that are trying to go after the (extremist) groups versus those that aren t, which is not something I think we actually have a good history of or demonstration of what s going to happen, he said.