It seemed like exactly the type of juicy hypocrisy that the internet lives for. On Monday, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced that in order to tackle the spam problem on its new Twitter competitor, Threads, the company was going to introduce tighter rate limits on the platform. Sounds familiar? That’s because rate limits were one…
For LGBTQ youth, social media is a double-edged sword: a digital public space that acts as both an important lifeline for identity-based community and an increasingly dangerous threat to their mental wellbeing. And a new research brief from nonprofit The Trevor Project documents just how much this dynamic affects the online behavior of LGBTQ young…
Across TikTok, side-by-side faces are portraying the present and the future: how a person looks today and how their face could possibly appear decades from now. The “aged” filter on the app is going viral for predicting the fate of one’s appearance, down to the very last wrinkle. Millions of users have turned to the…
Reddit has been a particularly strange place in recent weeks. Although puns and memes are regular currency, the ongoing protests over the website’s API changes have transformed some of the biggest subreddits into an active haven of niche in-jokes, many of which come in the (undeniably glorious) form of John Oliver-themed content. And now, these…
After Elon Musk acquired Twitter, brought back many previously banned far-right users, and removed moderation policies, many users sought out an alternative. And some found that alternative in Bluesky. Or so they thought. Over the past week, Bluesky users have been protesting on the platform after a number of accounts using racial slurs in their…
Twitter has launched yet another new feature in order to promote its fledgling paid subscription program, Twitter Blue. And in doing so, Twitter has changed the settings of every user with open DMs, blocking non-Twitter Blue subscribers from messaging them. Twitter turned your DMs into a Twitter Blue promo On Friday, Twitter began rolling out…
Elon Musk promised that creators on Twitter would start getting paid for their tweets…back in February. “Starting today, Twitter will share ad revenue with creators for ads that appear in their reply threads,” Musk tweeted on February 3. It took a little more than 5 months, but on Thursday, July 13, Twitter surprised some creators…
The Reddit blackout protests didn’t quite force the company to reverse course on its API changes that resulted in the shutdown of many popular third-party apps, but it did succeed in dominating the conversation around the platform for weeks. However, while everyone was paying attention to the protests, Reddit made some other big changes to…
A new lawsuit, filed by former Twitter employee Courtney McMillian, claims the company owes its laid off workers $500 million in severance pay. The proposed class action lawsuit was filed on Wednesday against Twitter, which is now legally known as X Corp. According to McMillian, Twitter’s severance package was created in 2019 and offered employees…
Finding a good name for a Twitter rival is harder than it seems. Might Mastodon, one of the earliest rivals, have made more of a dent in Twitter’s user numbers if it wasn’t an extinct species, or if the name wasn’t so easily lampooned by Elon Musk? Would more of us have been curious about…