Pakistan said on Tuesday it has blocked Tinder, Grindr and three other dating apps for not adhering to local laws, its latest move to curb online platforms deemed to be disseminating “immoral content”. Pakistan, the second largest Muslim-majority country in the world after Indonesia, is an Islamic nation where extra-marital relationships and homosexuality are illegal. […]

Illustration: Rahul Awasthi An average working professional in India is saving Rs 5,520 per month and 1.47 hours of travel time everyday while working from home, according to a survey by leading co-working space provider Awfis. About 74% of the respondents are willing to work remotely, which could be home or a cafe near home […]

Facebook Inc will remove or restrict users’ access to content if it becomes necessary to reduce adverse legal or regulatory impact on itself, the social media company said on Tuesday. Its updated Terms of Service, effective from October 1, has however raised alarm bells among internet and free speech advocates, who called it troubling, vague, […]

Illustration: Rahul Awasthi The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of healthy living among a wider set of consumers, brands have said. As a result, premium direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands in the health and wellness space have seen a sustained increase in orders, data shared by ecommerce firms Amazon and BigBasket, as well as the brands […]

Union IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has shot off a terse letter to Facebook founder and chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg calling for “country specific Community Guidelines” which will “respect the social, religions, cultural and linguistic diversity of India.” Currently, Facebook employs their own Community Standard guidelines to moderate content in India, including hate speech and […]

Illustration: Rahul Awasthi ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming is reconsidering his options and weighing the implications of Beijing’s involvement in TikTok sale, Bloomberg reported. The sale negotiations of the ByteDance-owned short-video app got another twist as China updated its more-than-a-decade-old export rules to include various technologies, including one “that sounded much like TikTok’s personalized recommendation engine”. […]

Facebook will block news sharing on its platforms in Australia if a proposal to force the U.S. tech giant to share revenue with local media outlets for featuring their content becomes law, the firm said in a statement published on Tuesday. Under Australia’s closely watched internet reforms, the country will become the first to require […]

By proposing to acquire the retail assets of Future Group (and not Future companies), the Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries (RIL) has ensured that rival Amazon does not become its shareholder. Amazon is a significant shareholder (49%) in a Future Group company, which owns about 10% stake in Future Retail, the largest outfit within the group […]

The Reliance Industries-Future Group deal’s impact will go beyond brick-and-mortar retail in India. It will also affect the country’s growing e-commerce economy as RIL’s chairman Mukesh Ambani eyes a bigger play online. The recently announced acquisition will accelerate scaling up of Reliance’s newly launched e-commerce venture JioMart. It will also make it harder for its […]

Officials have begun preliminary discussions on whether India should have its own guidelines on content moderation by internet and social media companies, top officials told ET. The deliberations, especially with regard to moderation of hate speech, have been sparked by the government’s concerns over the arbitrary methods employed by such platforms despite them enjoying the […]