Earlier this month I complimented a friend on her new Bottega Jodie bag. She had recently got a promotion at work, and is now a senior manager at a respectable record label earning six figures. The bag was a celebratory gift, she told me, only it wasn’t Bottega—it was a …
Read More »The Viral ‘Goodbye Meta AI’ Copypasta Will Not Protect You
“Goodbye Meta AI” is the most recent Facebook copypasta to go viral online. A chunky wall of text pasted against a hazy orange-yellow gradient background, it’s complete with all the trend’s hallmarks: vague references to the legal system and unilateral declarations of personal protection. It almost feels nostalgic, a blast …
Read More »Elon Musk's X is losing users in the U.S., UK, and EU. X's own data proves it.
Elon Musk‘s social media platform X is losing users in two of its most important markets: the U.S. and UK. According to a new report from the Financial Times, Musk’s X has lost nearly one-fifth of its daily active user base in the U.S. and a whopping one-third in the …
Read More »X’s First Transparency Report Since Elon Musk’s Takeover Is Finally Here
Today, X released the company’s first transparency report since Elon Musk bought the company, formerly Twitter, in 2022. Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter would release transparency reports every six months.These largely covered the same ground as the new X report, giving specific numbers for takedowns, government requests for information, and content …
Read More »TikTok’s Defense Strategy Involves Throwing Shein and Temu Under the Bus
TikTok went all out to defend itself in a court hearing last Monday, to block a law that could force TikTok to be sold or banned in the United States. That included using one surprising strategy: to bring other Chinese apps down with it. Earlier this year, the Protecting Americans …
Read More »Your Dumb Memes Revived One of Butt Rock's Biggest Bands
Creed is having a moment. Actually, if we’re being precise, it’s having innumerable moments, over and over again, all across the internet. On Instagram, the band has been repurposed as a comedic device for dunking on President Joe Biden; on TikTok, shitposters imagined what it would be like to explain …
Read More »Xavier Niel, a Driving Force of French AI, Is Now Shaping TikTok
I wait to meet Xavier Niel in a room that feels fitting for one of France’s richest men. Gold-encrusted walls frame a boardroom table the size of a small swimming pool. And beyond the large windows, a lily pond. Niel is the original French internet mogul, of the generation before …
Read More »Moo Deng Is More Than a Meme
Everyone, it seems, wants a piece of Moo Deng. The baby pygmy hippo is barely two months old and already famous. So beloved on TikTok, Instagram, and X is Moo Deng that workers at Khao Kheow Open Zoo, the place in Thailand where she was born, are doing all they …
Read More »Why Threads Is All the Rage Bait
One surefire way to go viral on Threads—the Meta-owned Instagram-spinoff social network with more than 200 million users—is to ask a ridiculous question that enrages your followers so much, they just have to chime in to answer you, mock you, or berate you. When it first launched last summer, Threads …
Read More »An Avalanche of Generative AI Videos Is Coming to YouTube Shorts
Eli Collins, a vice president of product management at Google DeepMind, first demoed generative AI video tools for the company’s board of directors back in 2022. Despite the model’s slow speed, pricey cost to operate, and sometimes off-kilter outputs, he says it was an eye-opening moment for them to see …
Read More »