Browsed by
Category: Social media

Whistleblower Arturo Béjar: ‘You just cannot trust Mark Zuckerberg with kids’

Whistleblower Arturo Béjar: ‘You just cannot trust Mark Zuckerberg with kids’

Steve Rose writes: The Social Reckoning hits cinemas this Friday, but the real world has already been working on a sequel – or rather, a threequel. Directed by Aaron Sorkin, the movie is a follow-up to The Social Network, detailing the further misadventures of Mark Zuckerberg and his social media empire, and in particular Frances Haugen, the employee who in 2021 leaked internal documents that appeared to show Facebook was aware of the harms its products had inflicted. It’s no…

Read More Read More

YouTube, TikTok and Meta are all rejecting paid ads for Alex Gibney’s ‘Musk’ documentary

YouTube, TikTok and Meta are all rejecting paid ads for Alex Gibney’s ‘Musk’ documentary

  The Hollywood Reporter reports: So much for free speech. The studio releasing Alex Gibney’s new Elon Musk documentary Musk is finding itself unable to buy an ad on the biggest social platforms. YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram and Facebook owner Meta are all declining to run the trailer for Musk, along with X itself, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. That last one is perhaps understandable, given its owner. But the rejection by the other platforms has taken distributor Bleecker Street…

Read More Read More

MAGA podcasters are ditching Trump en masse

MAGA podcasters are ditching Trump en masse

Mediaite reports: A bombshell deep dive into nearly 70,000 hours of political podcasts found that MAGA podcasters are increasingly avoiding mentions of President Donald Trump — with references to his name down nearly 70% from their peak ahead of the 2024 election. The Wall Street Journal analyzed 147 political podcasts using their own AI tool. While liberal shows have continued discussing Trump at roughly the same rate, conservative podcasts have moved sharply in the opposite direction. And that shift has…

Read More Read More

An army of paid creators is carpeting the web with political content

An army of paid creators is carpeting the web with political content

The New York Times reports: Judging from his TikTok feed, Drew was struggling to get by as a young man living near Dallas. Grocery bills were skyrocketing, he said, and he was looking for thrift stores to help keep costs down. In reality, according to his LinkedIn profile, Drew was a man from Utah named Alex Forrester, who said he was now in Florida. “All of it was paid for,” he said in a video posted in late June, which…

Read More Read More

‘Literally state-run TV’: Trump launches YouTube channel amid boycott by networks

‘Literally state-run TV’: Trump launches YouTube channel amid boycott by networks

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump’s previous television career centred on his role on The Apprentice, but the US president’s latest media venture is a rather lower-budget affair: the launch of Trump TV in the wake of his ban on several outlets from covering the White House. With major US networks agreeing to not cover the president while the dispute continues, on Monday the White House announced the new 24/7 YouTube live stream, which it promised would feature “top past moments,…

Read More Read More

Elon Musk told ex-girlfriend he needed ‘a legion of children before the civil war’

Elon Musk told ex-girlfriend he needed ‘a legion of children before the civil war’

The Guardian reports: Elon Musk is sowing “deliberate division” via his social media platform X that will be catastrophic unless regulated, the mother of one of the 14 confirmed children fathered by the world’s richest man has warned. In Musk, a new documentary by veteran film-maker Alex Gibney, former Maga influencer Ashley St Clair says Musk told her in a text message he wanted to have a child with her because he needed to have “a legion of children before…

Read More Read More

Study outlines the five-stage pipeline Clavicular used to spread ‘diagnostic masculinity’ and looksmaxxing

Study outlines the five-stage pipeline Clavicular used to spread ‘diagnostic masculinity’ and looksmaxxing

PsyPost reports: A recent study explores how an extreme male self-improvement trend known as looksmaxxing moved from obscure internet forums into mainstream public awareness. The research suggests that this spread relies not just on social media algorithms, but on a coordinated system of controversy, short-form video clips, and mainstream media coverage. The findings were published in Journal. Media. Looksmaxxing revolves around the intense, systematic attempt to maximize a person’s physical attractiveness. Participants often scrutinize their own facial features, such as…

Read More Read More

Meta has accepted, for the first time, that much of its business model is unacceptable for children

Meta has accepted, for the first time, that much of its business model is unacceptable for children

Nathaniel Lubin writes: For almost two decades, social-media companies have avoided legal consequences for the negative effects of exposure to their products. Damage to users’ mental health, the facilitation of crimes including sexual abuse—outcomes like these have been the subject of public protest, but were never successfully challenged through legal action. Then, about four years ago, prosecutors across America began to focus on companies’ business and design decisions, rather than, as they had in the past, on companies’ promotion of…

Read More Read More

Meta’s $18 billion child-safety deal hinges on age-verification tech that doesn’t work well

Meta’s $18 billion child-safety deal hinges on age-verification tech that doesn’t work well

TechCrunch reports: Meta reached an $18 billion settlement on Wednesday over a lawsuit brought by 29 U.S. states concerning children’s safety. The settlement is historic in scale as Meta agrees with a group of 52 attorneys general to implement sweeping changes to how minors use Instagram and Facebook. The settlement “gives the AGs what they want, which is the political story that they’ve extracted a huge amount of benefit for the public from this settlement, including the platform changes,” Jessica…

Read More Read More

How a false nuclear claim about Iran ricocheted from India to Washington, bolstering Netanyahu

How a false nuclear claim about Iran ricocheted from India to Washington, bolstering Netanyahu

The New York Times reports: On the morning of Aug. 5, an anonymous account on X in India posted seemingly sensational news. The commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had vowed that his country would never give up its nuclear weapon ambitions as long as Israel and the United States possessed those weapons, the account said. It was not true, and there’s no evidence that the commander made the remark or that Iran has developed nuclear weapons. The claim…

Read More Read More

SpaceX’s earnings show Elon wiped out two-thirds of Twitter’s ad business

SpaceX’s earnings show Elon wiped out two-thirds of Twitter’s ad business

Mike Masnick writes: When SpaceX filed for its IPO, we went through the S-1 to point out just how far off the mark Elon Musk’s predictions about his Twitter takeover turned out to be. Indeed, the failure of Twitter as a business was so catastrophic, Musk had to hide it by merging all his Xs together: he had xAI buy X (formerly Twitter), and then had SpaceX buy xAI. But when Musk was buying Twitter and needed investors, he made…

Read More Read More

Meta ordered to pay almost $1 billion over social media harm to children

Meta ordered to pay almost $1 billion over social media harm to children

  Fortune reports: A New Mexico court has ordered Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta to pay $567 million to address harms to young people from its platforms in the second phase of a landmark trial. Judge Bryan Biedscheid said in a ruling late Thursday that the bulk of the money — $420 million — will be used for treatment services for young people. The rest will go toward awareness and prevention, screening services and other costs over the next…

Read More Read More

ICE built a $258 million social media surveillance machine to monitor its online critics

ICE built a $258 million social media surveillance machine to monitor its online critics

Gadget Review reports: A critical Reddit comment about immigration enforcement can, four months later, bring plainclothes agents to a poster’s door carrying a printout of the post — a scenario no longer hypothetical. According to the Wall Street Journal, ICE has built a funded, contractor-powered surveillance operation that monitors social media around the clock — not just for credible violence, but for speech that challenges the agency’s mission. Since early 2025, DHS has fired off hundreds of administrative subpoenas to…

Read More Read More

From a Ukrainian bomb shelter, Laura Loomer explains her shift on Russia’s war

From a Ukrainian bomb shelter, Laura Loomer explains her shift on Russia’s war

The Associated Press reports: Laura Loomer became infamous for spreading conspiracy theories online. Now, as she travels across Ukraine to see the damage inflicted by Russia in its yearslong war, she wants to admit that she fell for some falsehoods of her own. A close ally of President Donald Trump, Loomer has completely reversed her longtime criticism of Ukraine and is urging fellow conservatives to be wary of Moscow’s propaganda, which she blames for duping large swaths of the American…

Read More Read More

War has turned Trump’s social media posts into nothing more than noise

War has turned Trump’s social media posts into nothing more than noise

Charlie Warzel writes: If President Trump has one true skill, it is conjuring up alternate realities and getting his supporters to accept them. The examples are everywhere: dismissing stories he doesn’t like as “fake news” from corrupt media, casting the January 6 rioters as victims, election denial. After he baselessly insisted that there had been rampant mail-in voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, 11 states made mail-voting access more restrictive. His repeated false claims in 2024 that Haitians in…

Read More Read More

France becomes first EU country to ban social media access for under-15s

France becomes first EU country to ban social media access for under-15s

The Guardian reports: France’s parliament has approved a bill banning social media access for children under 15, making it the first EU country to bar children from apps such as TikTok. The president, Emmanuel Macron, has championed the ban as a key reform of his final term in office and pledged to enforce it by September. “France is leading the way in Europe when it comes to protecting our children and teenagers,” Macron said in a video posted on social…

Read More Read More