Bobby Allyn
Bobby Allyn is a business reporter at NPR based in San Francisco. He covers technology and how Silicon Valley's largest companies are transforming how we live and reshaping society.
He came to San Francisco from Washington, where he focused on national breaking news and politics. Before that, he covered criminal justice at member station WHYY.
In that role, he focused on major corruption trials, law enforcement, and local criminal justice policy. He helped lead NPR's reporting of Bill Cosby's two criminal trials. He was a guest on Fresh Air after breaking a major story about the nation's first supervised injection site plan in Philadelphia. In between daily stories, he has worked on several investigative projects, including a story that exposed how the federal government was quietly hiring debt collection law firms to target the homes of student borrowers who had defaulted on their loans. Allyn also strayed from his beat to cover Philly parking disputes that divided in the city, the last meal at one of the city's last all-night diners, and a remembrance of the man who wrote the Mister Softee jingle on a xylophone in the basement of his Northeast Philly home.
At other points in life, Allyn has been a staff reporter at Nashville Public Radio and daily newspapers including The Oregonian in Portland and The Tennessean in Nashville. His work has also appeared in BuzzFeed News, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
A native of Wilkes-Barre, a former mining town in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Allyn is the son of a machinist and a church organist. He's a dedicated bike commuter and long-distance runner. He is a graduate of American University in Washington.
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The civil rights group Muslim Advocates has filed a consumer protection lawsuit against Facebook, demanding the social network start taking anti-Muslim activity more seriously.
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Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said social media companies are "sufficiently akin" to a common carrier, like a telephone company, and should be "regulated in this manner." -
The group-chatting platform Discord is growing by leaps and bounds — and it doesn't sell targeted ads. Could it be a model for other social media?
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Following Apple's move, Google has slashed commissions by half on purchases made on its mobile app stores. Those fees attracted criticism from small developers, lawmakers and other Big Tech critics.
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After Amazon took Parler down over violent messages on the site, no tech services firm would help it come back online. Then an obscure Los Angeles-based company offered to help.
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The market for a "non-fungible token" is the talk of Silicon Valley. Collectors spent from $3 to millions for what amounts to digital art: a clip of Lebron dunking; a cat meme; and cartoon CytoPunks.
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TikTok will still undergo a national security review by federal officials, but any outright ban, or pressure to sell to an American company, will not be a priority of the Biden White House.
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CEOs, influencers, even the White House Chief of Staff are turning to this audio-only social media app to chat with a select few. But questions over the rules of engagement have stirred controversy.
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NPR's Bobby Allyn speaks with Rob Monster, who sees his domain-registrar company Epik as a counter to Big Tech. He welcomes views banned on most other parts of the internet.
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John Matze was ousted as the social media company struggles to find a way back online, with Big Tech companies cracking down on the site after the riot at the Capitol.
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We meet two followers of the Reddit thread WallStreetbets, who helped push stock of struggling retailer GameStop to new heights.
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U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein sided with Amazon, which argued that Parler would not remove posts from its site that threatened public safety in the wake of the Capitol riot.
