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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A former Israeli combat soldier runs a nonprofit out of his in-laws' front yard that fact-checks posts on social media about the Israel-Hamas war in real time. -
More than 40 states filed legal actions against Meta on Tuesday, alleging that the company intentionally designed features that hooked a generation of young people. -
FakeReporter, which has been leaning on its thousands of volunteers scattered across the world to try to bring some clarity to the pace of war-related claims being made on social media.
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The Irish entrepreneur stepped down as leader of one of the world's largest tech conferences following remarks he made about Israel and war crimes. -
As Hamas-Israel misinformation spreads, EU digital chief says social media platforms have to quickly remove content featuring hate speech and disinformation or face big fines under new laws. -
A startup called PimEyes allows anyone to identify a stranger within seconds with just a photo of the person's face. The technology has alarmed privacy advocates worldwide. -
A crop of startups are deploying tools that let you search for people based on their faces, worrying privacy advocates and elected officials that the end of publicly anonymity is around the corner.
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For years, a secretive group has been purchasing land in Solano County, Calif., to create a utopian city for the tech elite. Locals are telling the techies to take their plan someplace else.
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When Hurricane Idalia slammed into the Florida coast, it decimated several small beach towns and fishing villages. Now, those communities are beginning the task of rebuilding. -
Now tropical storm Idalia came ashore in the Big Ben region of Florida. The storm hammered low-lying areas and brought a massive storm surge. Power is out for scores of residents.