Social Media

The Tech Transparency Project identified several Iranian government agencies and officials enjoying the perks of X Premium accounts. Normally, Premium requires a paid subscription, which could violate US sanctions. Suspiciously, when Wired flagged some of those accounts to X, they were stripped of their blue checkmarks:

The new mandate is one of several changes to India’s 2021 IT rules announced on Tuesday, TechCrunch reports. The updates also include requirements for “synthetic audio and visual content” to be labeled and traceable, and a ban on “deceptive impersonations, non-consensual intimate imagery, and material linked to serious crimes.”

Cross-platform social web tool Bridgy Fed can already send you notifications about DMs it can’t bridge back across platforms, and starting today, Bridgy Fed lets respond to those DMs right inside Bridgy Fed.

Finally! This has annoyed me for a long time.

The removals — which follow the Trump administration’s previous data purging efforts — target all posts prior to the president returning to office in January 2025, with a goal to “limit confusion on US government policy,” A spokesperson told NPR that the department’s X accounts “are one of our most powerful tools for advancing the America First goals.”

I like to think you can usually tell the difference between a Verge headline and an Onion one, but these days the lines are getting blurry.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced plans for the ban on Tuesday, vowing to protect children “from the digital wild west,” the New York Times reports. The policy would bar users under 16 from social media platforms, mirroring Australia’s ban, and would require platforms to have “effective age-verification systems.”

The app began restricting access to users under 16 in compliance with Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age law. Though Snapchat says it will continue complying with the regulation, it argues that app store-level age verification is a better solution, helping to “ensure that young people encounter appropriate protections no matter where they go online.”

After suffering multiple issues last month, X is down again to kick off February. Downdetector and NetBlocks both confirmed the outage. Users are reporting that the most recent posts they’re able to see are from an hour ago.

Sorry to Zuck-dunk two days in a row, but it’s fair to say that when the Meta CEO predicts AI is the next big thing in social media, you should take it with a grain of salt.

It follows Snap in reaching an agreement to resolve the first of several cases slated to go to trial this year about social media’s alleged harm to users, an attorney for the 19-year-old plaintiff confirmed. That leaves Meta and YouTube as defendants in the case going to jury selection today.

Despite claims floating around social media, the truth is a bit more complicated, not least by the fact that TikTok in the US is still largely down, about a day and a half after its data center power outage problems started.

Similar to starter packs on Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon, X’s take on the feature will provide you with lists of accounts to follow based on what they post about, such as sports, video games, food, and more. Starter packs will roll out to all users in “the coming weeks.”

It’s been a long, confusing, and at times tiresome saga, but according to Semafor, the Chinese and U.S. governments have given the green light for ByteDance to sell TikTok’s American arm. The target closing date set back in December was today, January 22nd, 2026.

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.