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.
Janko Roettgers
Victoria Barrios
Jay Peters
Zoom, enhance.
The Associated Press snapped a picture of a note from Marco Rubio to President Trump about a Truth Social post for the deal between Israel and Hamas. Trump later made the post.
Jay Peters
Bounce to Bluesky.
Bounce, a social web tool in beta to migrate your followers across platforms, will support porting from Mastodon to Bluesky starting October 20th. Initially, the tool worked the other way around: Bluesky to Mastodon.
Bounce from Mastodon to Bluesky
[A New Social]
Jay Peters
Terrence O'Brien
ICE is taking bids to build a 24/7 social media police state
Wired is reporting that the Department of Homeland Security is planing increase its surveillance of social media. The government is looking to run a “24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year” program that would turn Instagram posts and TikTok clips into leads for deportation raids.
How much should the law defer to an internet hallucination?
Sarah Jeong
Dominic Preston
Who needs microphones anyway?
Instagram head Adam Mosseri discovered this week that his “I’m not listening to you through your phone” T-shirt was raising a lot of questions already answered by his shirt. But real heads know that Instagram doesn’t need to listen to you, because it already knows everything anyway.
Nixel:
Yeah, we don’t listen to you… just endlessly track you across the internet building up so much data that it seems exactly like we do
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Jay Peters
Bluesky adopts a patent non-aggression pledge.
Essentially, Bluesky is promising not to enforce any of its patents in the future unless someone else sues first.
Emma Roth
Emma Roth and Tina Nguyen
Dominic Preston
Meta’s teen accounts reach the rest of the world.
Teenagers worldwide will now be enrolled into restricted teen accounts on Facebook and Messenger. They were already available in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada, and were global for Instagram users.
Dominic Preston
Despite crowning himself the headliner of Kirk’s memorial service, Christian nationalism upstaged the president’s vindictiveness.
Tina Nguyen
Elizabeth Lopatto
A profile of Larry Ellison and his budding media empire.
Fun tidbits here, including that if all the proposed acquisitions and mergers go through, “portfolio and power could exceed those of fabled predecessors like Hearst and Pulitzer.” This is to say nothing of the broader family’s holdings.
Larry Ellison, a Media Mogul Like No Other
[nytimes.com]
Terrence O'Brien
Some details of the TikTok deal have been worked out.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that six of the seven board seats will be held by Americans, ByteDance retain less than a 20-percent stake, and that Americans’ data will be stored in the US with no access give to China.
According to Bloomberg Leavitt said:
“So all of those details have already been agreed upon, now we just need this deal to be signed and that will be happening, I anticipate, in the coming days.”
Government officials are pledging to go after alleged left-wing organizations they believe are funding political violence.
Lauren Feiner
Elizabeth Lopatto
Director Uta Briesewitz wants her new film to make you think about the human suffering that keeps the internet running.
Charles Pulliam-Moore
Two terrorism-related charges against Mangione were dropped at a court hearing on Tuesday in the New York state case.
Mia Sato
Emma Roth
Snapchat now lets you permanently save messages.
The app has introduced a new “infinite retention” feature, allowing you to save chats in individual conversations. Snap will notify everyone in the group when you enable the feature.
Previously, Snapchat only saved messages for 24 hours after everyone in the group viewed them, or 31 days after the message was sent, whichever is sooner.
Introducing Infinite Retention and Group Streaks
[Snap Newsroom]
Jay Peters
A nice fediverse update for accounts linked across services.
Now, if you’ve bridged your fediverse account between services like Mastodon and Bluesky with Bridgy Fed, the tool can DM you if someone who hasn’t bridged interacts with one of your posts, making it easier to know about those interactions. Read more on A New Social’s blog.
Launch: Notifications from Unbridged Users
[A New Social]
Emma Roth
Bluesky adds bookmarks.
You can finally save posts for later using the new bookmark icon that’s now available on Bluesky’s mobile app and web. And, if you’ve been using the “pushpin” emoji to save posts, there’s a tool you can use to migrate them to the new bookmarks tab.
Lauren Feiner
At least a dozen people were reportedly killed during protests of Nepal’s social media ban.
Another 200 or more were injured during demonstrations, The New York Times reports based on local news accounts. Police used rubber bullets and water cannons to disperse protesters who occupied a security building, witnesses told The Times. Nepal blocked 26 social media platforms that did not register with the government.
At Least 12 Are Killed in Nepal in Protests Over Social Media Ban
[The New York Times]
Mia Sato
Threads on Threads.
Meta is tweaking how a string of posts looks on the platform, including adding labels that indicate if the post is one in a longer thread. This makes it much easier to see where the discussion continues, and is also a nice signal that someone’s thoughts go on longer than the first post. Now we need this on Bluesky...
Image: Threads