Long before social media feeds or targeted ads, my mother used to say that life tends to show you the thing you’re looking for. Or the thing you’re afraid of. Or the thing you keep insisting you don’t want. If you were trying to get pregnant, suddenly everyone around you was pregnant. If you wanted…
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Thursday that several organizers of a recent anti-ICE protest at a Minnesota church had been arrested. Soon after, The White House X account shared an image of one of the protesters, attorney and activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, being led away by law enforcement officers with tears streaming down her face.…
Across Instagram and TikTok, influencers and would-be content creators are churning out low-effort prank and pickup artist videos using the discreet recording features of Meta Ray-Bans and other smart glasses. Many of these clips cross from cringe into outright troubling, with creators harassing women, service workers, and the homeless. In some videos, creators pretend to…
Netflix is planning to redesign its mobile app (again) amid changing priorities for the streaming giant. And you should expect — like lots of other apps — a shift toward TikTok-style vertical video. Netflix indicated its plans during an earnings call this week. Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters noted in the call that the planned mobile…
The pressure is mounting on social media companies to enforce their rules and protect children on the platforms. Australia recently instituted a ban on children under the age of 16 from social media platforms. Gaming platforms like Roblox are now using facial recognition technology to prevent kids from interacting with adults in chats. And now…
After finally making moves to stop its Grok AI from creating nonconsensual sexualized images and CSAM, Elon Musk’s X has announced another major platform overhaul today. X’s head of product Nikita Bier announced on Thursday that the social media platform was going to ban apps that reward users for posting on the site. Bier specifically…
Before Reddit became the de facto “front page of the internet,” there was Digg. Digg, the crowdsourced content platform, is where “upvoting” links was popularized. However, a failed redesign wrecked the site’s popularity with its user base, who fled to Reddit – and the rest was history. Digg flailed under different curated, editorial visions and…
Google Gemini — the tech giant’s generative AI video model — is launching the ability to generate social media-ready vertical video. That’s all well and good, but it raises the question: Does that mean even more AI slop? Google Veo is widely regarded as the leading AI video model (different versions of Veo claim the…
Is Reddit down? The website is operating normally as of this writing, but thousands of Reddit users were asking this question on Tuesday, Jan. 13, when the popular online discussion platform appeared to suffer a brief outage. According to Downdetector, the problems started around 11:33 a.m. ET, with tens of thousands of Downdetector users reporting…
Instagram users had a scare over the weekend after many users were sent mysterious password reset emails that seemed to come directly from Instagram. Some users thought this might be a phishing email, but as Mashable reported earlier today, many of the emails are legitimate. Instagram said in a weekend statement that it had fixed…