Marko Elez, a 25-year-old engineer, is the first of Elon Musk’s DOGE crew to lose their job. Elez resigned from his post at Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE, on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal uncovered that Elez had published racist statements on an anonymous account that once bore his name. …
President Donald Trump boasted that he would save the popular social media platform TikTok from a ban in the U.S. And that still could happen. However, according to those close to the talks, negotiations between the U.S. and TikTok’s parent company, the China-based ByteDance, have stalled. In a new report from the Washington Post, sources…
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally addressed his employees’ concerns around recent changes within the company. Zuckerberg on Thursday discussed a range of issues during a meeting, most noticeably the dismantling of Meta’s fact-checking policies and diversity programs. Zuckerberg made it clear that the company was abandoning both in order to curry favor with the Trump…
When I called Gabriela Nguyen, the 23-year-old founder of APPstinent, she picked up on her Cat S22 flip phone. Technically, because it runs the stripped-down operating system Android Go, you could consider it a rugged smartphone. But because of its style, size, and configuration, Nguyen can’t easily or enjoyably spend the day using social media…
You’ve heard the outrage, you’ve read the reports, and you’ve seen the headlines: social media may be harming your child. What now? You gave your child a phone years ago and nothing short of the jaws of life could extract that thing from your kid’s grip now. You’d like to keep your child safe, but…
“Hi, are you doomscrolling? Our bodies were not designed to be anxious and stressed for this long.” Back in the very anxious year of 2021, a friendly little bot on Twitter — the Doomscrolling Reminder Bot — came along to offer mindfulness reminders like this. Created just after doomscrolling became the 2020 word of the…
In the wake of Trump’s sweeping promises to “reform” the country’s immigration processes, crackdown on “illegal immigrants,” and repeal birthright citizenship (among several other terrifying promises to deport people en masse), the internet is arming their undocumented community members with the power of constitutional knowledge. After signing multiple executive orders and shutting down the CBP…
Making an online dating profile can feel like creating a Sim for yourself. You list your hobbies, whether you want kids, if you drink or smoke, and other personal details about yourself to be scrutinised by a pool of potential partners. But once the chat turns from getting to know each other, to setting a…
If the U.S. government wants to ban TikTok, Americans might flock to a different Chinese social media app. About a week before the potential ban, TikTokkers are posting about moving to RedNote, known in China as Xiaohongshu. So many are migrating to the app that it hit No. 1 on Apple’s U.S. App Store on Monday.…
Meta is ending its efforts specifically known as diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, according an internal memo obtained by Axios. Like other recent moves Meta has made, the change reflects an apparent rightward political and cultural shift within the company, according to Axios. Authored by Janelle Gale, Meta’s vice president of human resources, the…