Wes Davis
Three-letter word for “X follower, perhaps.”
My colleague Elizabeth Lopatto spotted a bit of shade thrown at Elon Musk’s X by yesterday’s New York Times crossword puzzle.
It got me wondering: What other answers would work here?
Social Media
The internet has been transformed by social media, and the many platforms are now critical to how we communicate online. The Verge keeps a close eye on everything that’s happening in the social media landscape, covering key players like Meta, X, and TikTok, reporting on new features, following cultural moments, and breaking down the policies that shape how the platforms work.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Surely nothing weird is going on here!
Tether, one of crypto’s longstanding mysteries, is dropping more than three-quarters of a billion dollars on Rumble, the far-right video sharing platform. Do click through for the statements from both companies’ CEOs, which definitely sound like normal human speech.
Victoria Song
We Americans are late to the viral ‘split the G’ challenge.
Guinness beer is having a moment, thanks in part to a social media challenge where folks chug the stout until the foam hits the middle of the ‘G’ on the pint glass. However, our esteemed UK colleagues want everyone to know that while Americans and our media are just now glomming onto the trend, across the pond this is old news.
‘Everybody Is Drinking Guinness.’ We Know Why.
[The New York Times]
Jay Peters
Bluesky is “prioritizing” building its own payment platform.
Bluesky COO Rose Wang, in an interview with Buffer:
Where we want monetization to go is to align our incentives with our users, creators and developers. And so as they’re making more money, we should be making money, but if they’re not making money, we shouldn’t be making money. And so our goal is: let’s build a payment system so that it enables these payments to work on the app and across other apps on the ecosystem much easier. And then we’ll increase the volume of those transactions, and the creators and folks take home most of it, and we just take a percentage of the transaction fee.
It might take awhile before they arrive, Wang says. The planned subscription is also set to launch early next year.
Jay Peters
Bluesky is getting link click metrics.
They’re apparently coming “in the very near term,” Bluesky’s Emily Liu reportedly said on a call with the Online News Association.
Cory Bergman, the co-founder and VP of product at Factal, covered other tidbits from the call. Some, like Bluesky’s planned subscription and that it’s looking into enhancing account verification, aren’t totally new.
We didn’t all flock to a new platform or build on a thrilling new protocol. We went everywhere, and did everything, all at once.
David Pierce
Jay Peters
Mark Zuckerberg clarified Threads’ DAU tracking.
Just seeing a Threads post on Instagram doesn’t count toward Threads’ more than 100 million daily active users, Zuckerberg tells Hank Green. “You’d have to tap on the post and open Threads while logged in to be counted for DAU,” Zuckerberg says.
Media critic Matt Pearce on ‘Lessons on media policy at the slaughter-bench of history’
Nilay Patel
Tom Warren
Bluesky now has more than 25 million users.
Bluesky has been growing quickly in recent weeks, after hitting the 15 million users mark exactly a month ago. Now, the Bluesky API is showing that there are more than 25 million users, despite the app dropping out of the top 10 on the App Store. If you’re looking for people to follow on Bluesky, I’ve heard this bunch are worth a follow.
Gaby Del Valle
Gaby Del Valle
Gaby Del Valle
John Fetterman has posted his first Truth.
Fetterman appears to be the first Democratic senator to join Trump’s social media site, Politico reports.
And in his first post, he called Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s hush money case against Trump “total bullshit.” As Politico notes, Fetterman has been calling for Trump to be pardoned for the hush money conviction since President Biden issued a pardon for his son, Hunter.
Image: John Fetterman (Truth Social)
Alex Heath
Threads is asking people if it moderates too much.
I was just asked to complete a survey at the top of my feed that asked if I thought the app is too aggressive about taking down stuff. This tracks with Meta’s policy chief recently saying that the company wants to roll back its aggressive content policing.
Mia Sato
You can now swipe between your Threads feeds.
An update to the Threads app lets users switch between their various feeds on the home screen, similar to what Bluesky allows.
Over the last few weeks, Threads has rolled out a string of updates that crib from Bluesky, including adding custom feeds.
Mia Sato
Will Bluesky get a blue check?
The insurgent social platform that’s giving Threads a run for its money says it’s “exploring” additional ways to show that an account is legitimate.
Users currently can verify their accounts to weed out scammy doppelgangers by linking their website with their Bluesky account. But it gets complicated fast.
Jess Weatherbed
Richard Lawler
Bluesky won’t use your posts for AI training, but can it stop anyone else?
Today, a Hugging Face employee published data from 1 million Bluesky posts scraped from its API to the AI repository. He’s removed it and apologized, but 404 Media notes the set was “trending” all day.
Bluesky says it’s looking into ways to “specify consent (or not) for AI training.” but acknowledges that “It will be up to outside developers to respect these settings.”
Richard Lawler
Who actually owns your social media accounts? (Not you.)
As 404 Media and others note, Elon Musk’s X has inserted itself into The Onion’s acquisition of Infowars, arguing that neither Alex Jones nor the estate handling his bankruptcy owns the associated social media accounts.
Since X simply grants a license for their use, the lawyers say that can’t be transferred without permission.
Wes Davis
Bluesky is working on addressing the EU’s DSA complaints.
Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu confirmed in an email to The Verge that the platform is “actively working” with its lawyers to ensure Bluesky’s compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act’s information disclosure rules, as Bloomberg reports.
Yesterday, the European Commission called out that Bluesky has no page listing “how many users they have in the EU and where they are legally established,” as required by the DSA.
Update November 26th: Updated with confirmation from Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu.
Wes Davis
The Bluesky firehose, tunnelized.
Theo Sanderson created a visualizer that sends you through a tunnel of Bluesky posts as they happen. Maybe it’s pointless, like watching users bust cusses in real-time, but it’s also fun that the platform enables this sort of thing to be made.
Jay Peters
Threads has landscape video now.
Saw this news on 9to5Mac. I honestly didn’t know landscape video wasn’t previously possible.
