Social Media

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.

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...

Bluesky already blocked users in Mississippi over the state’s age verification law. Now Mastodon has told TechCrunch it doesn’t “have the means” to comply with the law, leaving its future in the state, and others considering similarly restrictive age verification laws, in doubt.

Your collection of artworks looted by the Nazis could end up in the news. A Dutch newspaper recently spotted what appears to be a missing painting that belonged to a Jewish art dealer during World War II — in an online real estate listing for a home in Argentina. A second missing painting was reportedly seen in a social media post by one of the daughters of a Nazi official.

Bounce, the social web tool announced in June that lets you move from Bluesky to Mastodon without losing your followers, is now available in beta.

Bibliome is a new platform that lets you use your Bluesky account to create and share reading lists. You can can even explore lists from other people without an account.

The new and improved social news aggregator of the early 2000s that already returned to the web in beta is now available as an app for both iOS and Android. It requires an invite from a groundbreaker. Get it!?

I love this description of falling into the rabbit hole of TikTok Live streams of farm workers and other manual laborers, calmly and quietly going about their work. It’s competence porn that highlights the divide between those of us making stuff, and those of us watching from our phones.

Up from 350 million in April.

We’ve known WhatsApp is working on chats with other apps for some time, in order to comply with EU rules on interoperability, but Meta is also working on chats without any app at all.

In director Uta Briesewitz’s upcoming thriller American Sweatshop, a social media content moderator (Lili Reinhart) can’t move on from a gruesome murder she’s forced to watch as part of her job. The movie’s trailer makes it look like a smart way to focus on the real horrors people have to endure to keep the internet running, which might make it a surprise hit when it hits theaters on September 19th.

Actor Sydney Sweeney is currently embroiled in a days-long “discourse” cycle about a campaign she shot with American Eagle. The ad — and whether it’s a eugenics dog whistle — is one thing. But I liked this Atlantic piece that zoomed out and put the outrage and online content cycle into perspective. Chat, is discourse cooked?

I appeared on On the Media to discuss our story about the Anime Nazi who allegedly hacks universities. I explain why the identity of the alleged hacker is important, why the Times’ obfuscation of its sources is troubling, and what’s at stake in the Republican war on higher education: upward mobility.

Online Safety Act rules are now in effect that require online platforms to have “strong age checks” in place to prevent children from accessing pornographic materials and other “harmful content.” Bluesky, Reddit, and Discord, for example, have all introduced age verification tools that require users to upload a selfie or a picture of their government ID.

Vine was shut down eight years ago, along with its vast archive of iconic short-form video memes. Twitter owns its corpse, and Musk has been considering reviving it since 2022.

Reportedly in testing since June, I’ve now been served three of these unskippable “Ad break” ads over the last two days. It’s jarring, and has accelerated my desire to quit the platform that’s increasingly less fun and flooded with AI slop.

We’ve talked before about the funhouse-mirror-alternative-reality that Trump (and Musk) have built. JP Brammer, who watches much more YouTube than I do, notes something weird is going on in content land — it seems Donald Trump has lost control of the plot. NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny, writing from a more anxious angle, seems to agree. Content has now outpaced reality. I guess we’re going to find out by how much.

In recent years the newsletter platform has tried to expand to micro-blogging, TikTokers, and full websites. Now the company is inching towards something its leadership has long criticized: advertising and social networks.

Meta appears to be testing the option to sign up for its X rival with a Facebook account, as it slowly separates Threads from its Instagram origins, with a support page but no official announcement yet. It opens up a new audience for the app, which is closing in on X’s daily active user numbers.

According to Similarweb data reported by TechCrunch, the Threads mobile app reached 115.1 million daily active users in June, compared to the 132 million daily actives for X and 4.1 million for Bluesky. But while X’s growth declined by 15.2 percent year-over-year on mobile, Threads has increased by 127.8 percent during the same period.