Meta announced today that it will offer people a tool called AI Studio to build virtual characters with custom personalities, traits, and interests—including ones based on their own personalities. If you're a creator, you'll also be able to have your digital doppelgänger interact with fans in the DMs. “Every creator …
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Militia and anti-government groups across the United States are using the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump as an opportunity to organize, recruit, and train. “An attack on President Trump was an attack on us, people like us—like-minded American patriots,” says Scott Seddon, the Pennsylvania-based founder of the American …
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For the past eight months, Europeans uncomfortable with the way Meta tracks their data for personalized advertising have had another option: They can pay the tech giant up to €12.99 ($14) per month for their privacy instead. Launched in November 2023, Meta introduced its “pay or consent” subscription model as …
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Today, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that the plaintiffs who'd sued the US government for allegedly violating the First Amendment—by communicating with social media companies about misleading and harmful content on their platforms—did not present enough evidence to prove that they had standing to sue. The case …
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In R. C. Sherriff’s novel The Hopkins Manuscript, readers are transported to a world 800 years after a cataclysmic event ended Western civilization. In pursuit of clues about a blank spot in their planet’s history, scientists belonging to a new world order discover diary entries in a swamp-infested wasteland formerly …
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In 2004, a month before Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room, another social media site landed on the internet with a splash of hot pink. If you were online in the mid-2000s, you might remember Orkut, with its lurid logo, fingernail-sized profile pictures, and text-heavy, pastel-blue feeds. …
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In a couple of short years, the Integrity Institute, a think tank founded by former Facebook employees, has become an influential voice on how to make social media safer. Its research on issues like election misinformation and online bullying have influenced European Union regulators and US lawmakers, and have become …
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Earlier this month, a German court ruled that the country’s nationalist far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), was potentially “extremist” and could warrant surveillance by the country’s intelligence apparatus. Campaign ads placed by AfD have been allowed to appear on Facebook and Instagram anyway, according to a new report from …
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In 2017, Pratik Sinha and Mohammed Zubair cofounded the fact-checking website AltNews in India. Almost immediately, the pair were targeted with persistent and vicious attacks from the far-right news website OpIndia. Many of the attacks claimed that Zubair was a Rohingya Muslim who illegally migrated to India and that his …
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The European Union has opened an investigation into Facebook and Instagram for the platforms’ potentially addictive effects on children, echoing two similar probes opened into TikTok earlier this year. Meta-owned platforms will be investigated for their addictive and “rabbit hole” effects, and whether young users were being fed too much …
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