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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Two families are suing AI chatbot company Character.AI for allegedly encouraging harm after the kids became emotionally attached to the bots. One chatbot allegedly exposed a child to sexualized content. -
Australia's Parliament has passed one of the strictest social media crackdowns in the world. Under the new law, anyone under 16 years old will be banned from opening a social media account.
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A panel of three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has upheld a federal law Congress passed in April mandating that TikTok will be banned in the United States unless its sold.
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TikTok has been facing down a January divest-or-be-banned deadline. The company filed a lawsuit challenging the law, which was heard before a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. -
Yet again, TikTok may be up for sale. During Trump's first term, resistance from China and company executives complicated any potential acquisition. But that may change in Trump's next term.
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Will TikTok be sold? The question has been asked before, during Trump's first term. But now, the situation has changed considerably. -
If a judge orders Google to sell Chrome, it could dramatically upend the multibillion-dollar online search business. -
Social media site Bluesky is exploding with growth, adding more than 1 million users a day. New interest is being driven by users fed up with Elon Musk's X. We talk to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber.
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Unlike other social media sites, Bluesky allows users to create their own algorithm. The site does not have ads, nor harvest data for artificial intelligence training. But it is still very small, and it does not make money. -
Tech platforms have stepped back from many of the more aggressive measures they took to curb the spread of election rumors and falsehoods four years ago. But some platforms still have safeguards.
