Today, the US Supreme Court will hear a case that will determine whether the government can communicate with social media companies to flag misleading or harmful content to social platforms—or talk to them at all. And a lot of the case revolves around Covid-19 conspiracy theories. In Murthy v. Missouri, …
Read More »Reddit IPO Filings Reveal the Company’s Hopes—and Fears
Reddit’s stock market debut expected on Thursday has been a long time coming. The ad-supported home of over 100,000 forums first announced its intention to go public in December 2021. Over the course of the unusual years-long delay, Reddit revised its initial investor pitch 10 times, leaving a trail of …
Read More »Reddit’s Sale of User Data for AI Training Draws FTC Inquiry
Reddit said ahead of its IPO next week that licensing user posts to Google and others for AI projects could bring in $203 million of revenue over the next few years. The community-driven platform was forced to disclose Friday that US regulators already have questions about that new line of …
Read More »No One Knows What TikTok Is
This week the internet has been awash in confusion about what TikTok is: a video-sharing app with goofy viral dances; a trove of user data, ripe for the plucking; a political football; a place where scores of creators make their livings. All of these are true. Still, that hasn’t stopped …
Read More »Can Reddit Survive Its Own IPO?
Alyssa Videlock was 11 years old when she started searching for people like her on the internet. What she found, back in the early 2000s, was not at all what she’d hoped for. “Being trans online was not really a thing,” she says. “There was fetish stuff for it, and …
Read More »There Are Dark Corners of the Internet. Then There's 764
WIRED collaborated with Der Spiegel, Recorder, and The Washington Post on this reporting. Each wrote separate stories that the news organizations agreed to publish in tandem. This story contains descriptions of abuse, self-harm, murder, and suicide. Reader discretion is advised. It sounds like a cheap true-crime conspiracy: An international network …
Read More »The House Passed the Bill That Could Ban TikTok—and It Wasn’t Close
This morning, the US House of Representatives voted to essentially ban TikTok, unless Chinese-owned Bytedance divests from the app entirely. If passed in the Senate, TikTok would have about six months to untangle itself from its China-based owner. In speeches leading up to the vote on H.R. 7521, known as …
Read More »Your Kid May Already Be Watching AI-Generated Videos on YouTube
There’s a whole new way to get rich on the internet—at least according to a rush of YouTube tutorials touting the money to be made using AI to generate videos for kids. Searching for how to create kids content or channels on YouTube now pulls up tutorials offering roadmaps for …
Read More »How to Download All of Your TikTok Videos
Like any digital platform, TikTok is always at risk of being ephemeral. Especially now, as the US House of Representatives is expected to vote this week on a new bill that, should it become a law, would force TikTok’s owner, the Chinese company ByteDance, to sell the platform or face …
Read More »Twitter’s Former Trust and Safety Chief Is Trying to Clean Up Your Dating Apps
Yoel Roth has spent the past 16 months recovering from a very bad, very public breakup. For two chaotic weeks after Elon Musk took control of Twitter in October 2022, Roth clung on to his job as the platform’s head of trust and safety. He even won public praise from …
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