The US Senate passed a bill late Tuesday that allows the government to ban TikTok within a year if it doesn’t make meaningful progress toward separating from its China-based owner, ByteDance. President Joe Biden said in a statement after the vote that he would sign it into law on Wednesday.The …
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In 2022 I wrote an op-ed for NBC News Think about leg hair, of all things. The piece detailed a monthlong experiment during which I stopped shaving. Aside from one paragraph about bodily autonomy and Roe v. Wade, I thought it was a mild article. Boring, even. The internet disagreed. …
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A TikTok ban is back on the table after the House approved a new bill on Saturday addressing the issues that stalled it out in the Senate. The bill would allow the Biden administration to ban TikTok nationwide if it doesn’t divest from its China-based owner, ByteDance, within a year. …
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Fashion influencer Lauren Holifield opened up Instagram one day in February and was soon fighting the urge to throw up. “I was so nauseous,” she says. The account she uses to bring in a six-figure annual salary from marketing products to more than 100,000 followers had been banned—shutting off income …
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Music consumption and discussion in 2024 bears little resemblance to fandom from one decade ago, let alone three or four. Old songs gain new life on TikTok; AI creates original music trained on data from the world’s most popular artists; drill rappers post a song on YouTube on Tuesday, and …
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On Thursday morning, Meta released its latest artificial intelligence model, Llama 3, touting it as the most powerful to be made open source so that anyone can use it. The same afternoon, Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, said an even more powerful successor to Llama is in the works. …
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Silicon Valley tech types love their edgy new social media startups. The latest is Airchat, an audio-first social app that lets its users express their every thought by posting short snippets of audio. All of these snippets are served in a never-ending feed, à la Twitter. There are replies, there …
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As AI tools become increasingly sophisticated and accessible, so too has one of their worst applications: non-consensual deepfake pornography. While much of this content is hosted on dedicated sites, more and more it’s finding its way onto social platforms. Today, the Meta Oversight Board announced that it was taking on …
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Trump Media & Technology Group, the Truth Social parent company majority-owned by former president Donald Trump, filed a document with the Securities and Exchange Commission this morning that helpfully details all of the ways Trump himself poses a threat to the company and its shareholders. While the company generated just …
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At some point this weekend, Airchat cofounder Naval Ravikant had to close off new sign-ups to his app. After releasing a new version Friday, Airchat was quickly overloaded with people thirsting for a glimpse—or an audio snippet—of Silicon Valley’s newest fad. Ravikant had given a small number of users unlimited …
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