Tag Archives: social-media

It no longer makes sense to speak of free speech in traditional terms. The internet has so transformed the nature of the speaker that the definition of speech itself has changed. The new speech is governed by the allocation of virality. People cannot simply speak for themselves, for there is …

After a year of carefully limiting sign-ups to those with invites, the Twitter-style social app Bluesky this week threw open the doors for anyone to join. It’s a make-or-break moment. Remember when the live-audio app Clubhouse went from the most hyped-up social startup when it was hard to snag an …

Rachel Lambert, a product manager at Meta, started her company’s journey towards interoperability by breaking Adam Mosseri’s Threads account. In December, Meta activated a test where users could follow the head of Instagram’s Threads feed on an open-source social media platform, Mastodon. But when users tried to view Mosseri’s posts …

Before I sit down to talk to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, he apologizes for the noise. The evening’s guests have been doing sporadic sound checks all day: Peso Pluma running through his opening number, Offset ad-libbing over a backing track. I passed by throngs of One Direction fans to …

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, since rebranded as X, his favorite letter of the alphabet, he went on a firing spree. Chief among those ejected were people working on trust and safety, the work of keeping bad content, from hate speech to child exploitation, off the platform. In front …

The mobile app BeReal has taught us that we are all essentially the same: unkempt, unscripted, and a little boring. Now it wants us to see that celebrities and brands are just like us too. The social media platform announced this week that, beginning February 6, celebrities and brands will …

For Android smartphone owners, it’s about to become a bit of a headache to save backups of your WhatsApp messages. Users have enjoyed free backups of WhatsApp messages on Android for the past five years, but soon those users will need to start paying to preserve their collections of heartfelt …

In 2024, social media will get small. Not small in influence, of course. As the US weathers an election likely to be both divisive and often divorced from reality, social media will again be a battleground for public opinion and perception. But the platforms on which these conversations will take …

Last February, when researchers at London-based nonprofit Reset found that Meta was allowing Ilan Shor, a Moldovan oligarch with links to the Kremlin, to run an ad campaign on Facebook, the company promised to stop him. But Shor, whom the United States sanctioned for illegally financing political parties in Moldova …

For researchers, social media has always represented greater access to data, more democratic involvement in knowledge production, and great transparency about social behavior. Getting a sense of what was happening—especially during political crises, major media events, or natural disasters—was as easy as looking around a platform like Twitter or Facebook. …