A majority of US TikTok creators don’t believe the platform will be banned within a year, and most haven’t seen brands they work for shift their marketing budgets away from the app, according to a new survey of people who earn money from posting content on TikTok shared exclusively with …
Read More »The Low-Paid Humans Behind AI’s Smarts Ask Biden to Free Them From ‘Modern Day Slavery’
AI projects like OpenAI’s ChatGPT get part of their savvy from some of the lowest-paid workers in the tech industry—contractors often in poor countries paid small sums to correct chatbots and label images. On Wednesday, 97 African workers who do AI training work or online content moderation for companies like …
Read More »Elon Musk Finally Puts Twitter Out of Its Misery
Like a venomous puss moth emerging from its hard cocoon, the social network formerly known as Twitter has fully metamorphosed into X.com. Various elements of Twitter had already embraced the rebranding, and the company has been using X.com links since early April. But now the domain has flipped over entirely, …
Read More »The Race to Buy TikTok Is On—but There Might Not Be a Winner
A potential bidding war to buy TikTok has begun, less than a month after President Joe Biden signed legislation that would force the app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest, or face a ban in the United States within a year. The latest suitor to emerge is the real estate …
Read More »Meta Faces Fresh Probe Over ‘Addictive’ Effect on Kids
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 …
Read More »Maven Is a New Social Network That Eliminates Followers—and Hopefully Stress
Mental health experts, regulators, and many internet users themselves have called out the damage that social media can do to mental health. Must it addict, inflame, and depress us? A new social network called Maven aims to offer a healthier alternative, inspired by one scientist’s work in artificial intelligence. The …
Read More »Deadspin’s New Owners Are Embracing Betting Content—but Not AI
This week, former contributors to the sports blog Deadspin noticed something alarming: Their work had vanished from the site’s archives. There was no obvious pattern to why posts on topics such as ESPN’s attempt to create a “Black Grantland” and George R.R. Martin’s work ethic had disappeared, but it struck …
Read More »I Went Undercover as a Secret OnlyFans Chatter. It Wasn’t Pretty
Because I have a deep and childish fear of being exposed as uncool, I try hard to act nonchalant when I’m around people with lives more interesting than my own. This is the tactic I employed last year when I met an OnlyFans star, a fit cosplayer and Japanophile who …
Read More »There's No Undoing Tech's Great Rewiring of Childhood
The book currently topping the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list is The Anxious Generation, a jeremiad against social media and its impact on young people. Its thesis is that apps like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have unleashed an epidemic of mental illness among children, preteens, and teenagers. Immediate and …
Read More »A Peek Inside Hulu’s New ‘Black Twitter’ Docuseries
For all the influence Twitter has had on our culture, no community there has made quite as much impact as Black Twitter. The virtual community grew from a loose online hangout to an influential cultural force that directed conversations about race and culture not only on social media, but in …
Read More »