Social Media

The company told Wired it removed Blued and Finka, two of the country’s most popular gay dating platforms, to comply with an order from the government’s cyberspace watchdog. Most international LGBTQ+ dating apps are already blocked on Apple’s Chinese storefront, including Grindr.

Bluesky was the best place on the internet during the World Series last weekend. I wrote yesterday about how the matchup between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays was a feast for fans old and new, and now we have some numbers to illustrate that: Bluesky says at least three percent of all posts on Saturday (Game 7) were about baseball, and the site had a 30 percent surge in traffic.

It’s been added to the list of social media sites that will be required to block under-16s in the country, alongside Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, X, Facebook, and Instagram. Local Twitch rival Kick has also made the cut. The ban kicks in December 10th, the next stage in age-gating the internet.

Few would accuse Fox News of being a bastion of quality journalism. But even for them, this is pretty shocking. The site ran a story under the headline “SNAP beneficiaries threaten to ransack stores over government shutdown,” with outrageous quotes like, “It is the taxpayer’s responsibility to take care of my kids.” Of course, the videos weren’t real. Fox updated the article, with an alarmingly blasé correction note:

While no cause of death has been announced yet, Naroditsky’s passing is being investigated as a possible suicide. Many have pointed their fingers at disgraced former world champion Vladimir Kramnik, who has waged an online bullying campaign against Naroditsky. Defector has a detailed report of Kramnik’s behavior and its effect on Naroditsky:

The survey offers a fascinating look at the modern landscape of news creators and influencers. It offers a taxonomy of news creators, breaking them down into four types of content: commentary, news/investigation, explanation, and specialism. Unsurprisingly, it also found that younger generations have shifted away from traditional media, towards creators and personalities, and that partisan content often outflanks more balanced approaches.

It’s testing a few new features, like changing how the reply button works to open into a thread instead of directly into the composer, that are “all aimed at improving the quality of conversation and giving people more control over their experience.”

61-year-old Larry Bushart is out of jail after a month for posting a meme on Facebook. In the wake of Kirk’s killing, ordinary people were doxed, harassed, and even jailed for comments made online about the right wing influencer. According to the Washington Post, Bushart is now celebrating his freedom and building his legal case — and is back to posting.

My beloved Blue Jays are currently up 3-2 in the World Series, in part due to an outstanding performance from 22-year-old Trey Yesavage, who apparently uses doomscrolling as a way to prepare mentally. Professional athletes: they’re just like us!

As Meta published its quarterly earnings yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg promised that AI would soon bring to social media the one thing we’ve all been waiting for: a “huge corpus of content.”

The platform is testing a way for users to indicate what topics they want to see in content, beginning with Reels. Instagram said previously that this was in the works. The topics appear to be extremely specific — things like Bad Bunny, “Japanese artisan menswear,” “vintage Patek,” and so on. In other words: help Instagram improve its algorithm.

After adding AI last month, Zillow now has DMs too. But we won’t rest until its social media-ification democratizes the process of throwing shade at soulless millennial house flips.

The social media giants have agreed to boot users under 16 from their platforms by the December 10th deadline, but are still voicing skepticism about the policy’s enforcement and effectiveness.

It’s rare I come across a truly novel social media moderation quandary these days, but I’ll admit this one’s new to me. (A little context.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Essentially, Bluesky is promising not to enforce any of its patents in the future unless someone else sues first.

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.

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.

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.