Tag Archives: social-media

Snail mucin, for the uninitiated, is part of a skin-care regimen that’s meant to leave faces glowing and hydrating. Yes, it’s snail slime, and it’s exactly the sort of product primed to explode on TikTok—where skin-care content is king and millions of people watch as influencers dab serums and gels …

Sometime in the summer of 2020, I noticed an occasional, searing pain shooting up my right forearm. It soon became clear this was a byproduct of a gesture that had become as commonplace as breathing or blinking that season, if not long before: scrolling. This was how I spent most …

Every night, I bury my tinnitus under brown noise, cats’ purrs, and the tap of rain on leaves. This “functional music,” as it is known, certainly serves its function—lulling me to sleep. It also accounts for a vast portion of the streaming world: Spotify recently revealed that white noise and …

Every text-centric social platform has its own way of nudging people to write the content needed to keep other users engaged. “What is happening?!” yelps the compose box on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter. Meta’s equivalent on Facebook wonders, “What’s on your mind?” No matter what the question, it’s always …

There was a brief, strange moment in 2015 when Russell Brand mattered in mainstream British politics. With an election looming, the opposition Labour Party was trailing in the polls against a coalition government that was the very definition of establishment—led by an Eton- and Oxford-educated prime minister in David Cameron …

ON THIS WEEK’S episode of Have a Nice Future, Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode talk to Cory Doctorow, a writer, internet activist, and author of The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. As the US government takes Google to court in an antitrust case this week, Doctorow …

When Grant Shapps was appointed as the UK’s defense minister this month, one of the first questions he faced was about his social media use. Shapps, previously energy minister, was one of the most prolific users of TikTok in the British government, and military experts and the media wanted to …

Facebook is done with news. First, there was a multiday standoff with the Australian government on news payments, followed by the quiet removal of a revenue-sharing News tab from Facebook in the US. And then came an all-out news link ban in Canada. And now, Meta is killing off the …

As Meta, the company behind Facebook, continues to develop its generative artificial intelligence tools, you can now request the removal of some of the personal data the company uses to train its AI model. There are a ton of caveats, though. Earlier this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to …

When fashion influencer Natalie Craig recently searched Pinterest for skorts and cargo pants, she noticed something different from her past explorations on the service: Women who looked like her were sprinkled among the results—and without adding qualifiers like “plus size” to her query. “I’m 5'2" and a size 20, so …