Social Media

Meta has bet big on AI everything, but also has Instagram boss Adam Mosseri out there warning creators about its impact. One commenter (and occasional Verge contributor!) sums up its position nicely:

“Ads on Threads expansion to all users will be gradual, with ad delivery initially remaining low as we reach global user availability in the coming months,” Meta says. It started testing ads on the platform last year.

The settlement is happening “ahead of a landmark trial in a case that claims the social media giants engineered products to hook an entire generation of young users,” The New York Times reports. Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, who are also part of the case, haven’t yet settled. Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify.

Bridgy Fed, the open social web bridging tool, now lets users subscribe to fediverse domain blocklists to make it easier to mass block accounts. “When you add blocks or blocklists to your account on either side of the bridge, we maintain and sync those within Bridgy Fed,” according to a blog post.

TikTok will roll out new age detection technology in Europe that uses profile information, posts, and “behavioral signals” to guess if a user is under 13, then flags suspected accounts for moderators to review, reports Reuters.

Bluesky is expanding the beta of its Live Now feature, which puts a red LIVE badge on your avatar when you’re streaming on Twitch, to all users. Bluesky initially announced the feature in May.

The solution is using Bluesky, of course. Naturally, a user with a blue check next to their name told Grok to put a bikini on the butterfly and the AI did — which seems like an even stronger advertisement for Bluesky than the one Bluesky itself posted.

That’s how many Australian social media accounts were removed in just the first few days after the country’s under-16 social media ban took effect in December, according to the Australian internet regulator. We already knew 550,000 of them were from Meta, but TikTok, Reddit, Snapchat and more were also covered by the ban.

With the launch, any user can start a community on “on nearly any topic,” according to TechCrunch. That would solve one of my biggest issues with the platform when I tested it last year. The public beta rollout is live now, Digg says.

Thanks to Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies, it’s much harder for high-skilled tech workers to apply for the American H-1B visa these days. But a new type of tech worker visa is on the rise: Onlyfans creators and influencers are increasingly applying for (and receiving) O-1 visas, which were once reserved for individuals with “extraordinary ability or achievement” in fields such as the arts, motion pictures, television, sciences, education, business, or athletics.

Following Australia’s social media ban for children under 16 taking effect last month, Meta says it has now removed almost 550,000 Instagram, Facebook, and Threads accounts that it believes were run by kids under that age threshold. Despite its compliance, Meta is still voicing opposition to the law.

Seems a lot of people got password reset requests from Instagram over the last few days, including several Verge staffers and members of their family. The email might look legit. It might even have that little blue checkmark in Gmail. But, it probably came from a scammer. Honestly, it’s best practice to never click links in emails anyway.

“Prediction markets” continue to appear everywhere, including CNN and CNBC, and Polymarket is shitposting about citizen journalism.

In June, the New York state legislature passed a bill requiring social media companies to display warnings about the potential mental health harms of using their products. Now the governor has officially signed the bill into law. The announcement of the signing says that:

Meta wants Threads to be the app you open first thing in the morning, and it sounds like some of you feel about the same way I do about that idea.

The platform had blocked access to users in Mississippi due to an age verification law, but in a post on Monday, Bluesky said it has upgraded its Age Assurance system to “restore access to people over 18 in Mississippi” and to comply with “upcoming laws in Australia and other regions.”

In addition to complying with the under-16 social media ban that begins December 10th in Australia, Reddit is making changes globally for under-18s:

Your Discord Checkpoint shows how many messages you sent, your favorite servers, which friends you spent the most time with, and a whole bunch more. You can find your end-of-year stats by opening the Discord app, tapping You on the bottom-right, and selecting the Checkpoint banner.

Threads will test a feature where you can include “dear algo” in a post to add more or less content on whatever you’re writing to the algorithm about to your feed, according to Threads boss Connor Hayes.