Homosexuality is illegal in a third of the planet, and in eight countries, it is punishable by death. In the febrile atmosphere of today’s politics, hate crime incidents in the US increased by 17% between 2016 to 2017, according to the FBI. Over 20 of those incidents were crimes against an individual’s ******-orientation — the ...

In addition to testing out a new format for conversations within a prototype app called twttr and other features like a “Hide Tweet” button, Twitter today confirmed it’s also developing a feature that would allow users to subscribe to individual conversations taking place on its platform. The new option was first spotted by Jane Wong, ...

Facebook on Friday announced a new artificial intelligence-powered tool that it says will help the social network detect revenge **** — the nonconsensually shared intimate images that, when posted online, can have devastating consequences for those who appear in the photos. The technology will leverage both AI and machine learning techniques to proactively detect near-**** ...

Today in a short blog post, Slack announced that it had removed 28 accounts with a “clear affiliation with known hate groups.” Few details were provided about the accounts or how Slack identified them, but we have reached out to the company for more information. The announcement, brief as it is, comes as a surprise. ...

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage In a message sent to his Telegram channel, founder Pavel Durov wrote, ...

Messaging platform Telegram claims to have had a surge in signups during a period of downtime for Facebook’s rival messaging services. In a message sent to his Telegram channel, founder Pavel Durov’s just wrote: “I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours.” It’s probably not a coincidence that ...

James Williams may not be a household name yet in most tech circles, but he will be. For this second in what will be a regular series of conversations exploring the ethics of the technology industry, I was delighted to be able to turn to one of our current generation’s most important young philosophers of ...

Wattpad is further expanding into Asia with a new partnership and undisclosed strategic investment from Times Bridge, the global investment arm of the Times Group in India. The deal aims to help the storytelling community establish a larger presence in the country where it already counts over 2.6 million monthly users who have shared more ...

Twitter’s video streaming app, Periscope, is cracking down on spam and, specifically, fake engagements. The company says it’s updating its policies around how it enforces its anti-spam rules, and is making improvements in terms of how those rules are enforced. This means users will see increased enforcement actions, Periscope notes – and these may even ...

Twitter is rolling out the redesign to its camera feature TechCrunch reported on a month ago that’s designed to let you capture photos, videos, and live footage and connect them to global conversations. Starting today when you swipe left from the Twitter timeline, you’ll get the new camera that’s no longer buried in the tweet ...