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.
Bluesky accounts for Adobe and Photoshop were dogpiled by the creative community shortly after making their first posts on the platform, attracting hundreds of negative comments before the posts were removed. The creative software giant’s image problem is no easy fix, having long been lambasted by its own users over subscription pricing models, AI adoption, and market domination.
[futurism.com]
It’s a pretty interesting article at about Graber and Bluesky as a whole.
It also includes a nugget that Graber and Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko met about having the platforms interoperate, but “each told me that the other seemed more interested in having the rival platform migrate onto their own protocol,” author Kyle Chayka writes.
[newyorker.com]
Attorney General Pam Bondi sent Apple a letter “telling the company it should follow President Donald Trump’s executive order” extending ByteDance’s deadline to sell TikTok by 75 more days, reports Bloomberg. The outlet had reported a similar letter sent to both Google and Apple prior to their decision to restore the app to their online marketplaces in February, too.
Consider this a reminder or a PSA: a “view” on the internet means even less than you think.
Feeling like Bluesky posts are a little too long? The Twitter-like platform is cutting down allowable character counts, from 300 to... 299.
One day only.
Journalist Ken Klippensten obtained an internal memo directing employees to conduct a “social media review” of foreign students applying for visas, and must flag any online posts or screenshots “advocating for, sympathizing with, or persuading others to endorse [or] support” a terrorist organization. The directive is seemingly aimed at students who participated in pro-Palestine – or as the memo specifically characterized it, “pro-Hamas” – campus protests.
We talked about this on the Vergecast today, but Nvidia showed off fully AI-generated ads recently, something it’s been testing with big partners like Unilever. If you’re wondering why big platform companies like Meta and Google are so excited about AI video generation, it’s because the dream is to serve an infinite variety of custom personalized video ads after a brand uploads some basic creative assets and demographic targeting information. Get ready, it’s going to get weird.
You can now skip ahead in Reels by holding down on either edge of the screen, which plays the video at double speed. Reels started out with a 15-second cap but can now run for up to three minutes, so playback controls make sense.
TikTok thought the same thing when it added a fast-forward feature, which you enable by... holding down on either edge of the screen. What a coincidence!
X’s AI chatbot is now baked into the encrypted messaging app, though you’ll have to be a Telegram Premium subscriber to take advantage and chat to it.
The team-up shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. X owner Elon Musk backed Telegram CEO Pavel Durov after his arrest in France last year, and both CEOs have positioned themselves as defenders of free speech.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has ramped up his campaign against soft drinks by launching a drive to ban food stamp recipients from using them to purchase that addictive, bubbly sweetness. Meanwhile, The Bulwark’s Will Sommer has detected what looks like the latest campaign in the curious world of MAGA paid sponcon: right-wing influencers suddenly defending soda against government regulations.
“Is Mountain Dew nutritious and life-giving?” one influencer wrote in a since-deleted tweet. “No. But freedom of choice is.”
[thebulwark.com]
Bluesky COO Rose Wang confirmed the account this morning, as TechCrunch spotted. In a Threads post, Obama invited people to go to Bluesky to read stories he was sharing to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the Affordable Care Act.
This new account hasn’t recreated his record-breaking 2015 sprint to a million Twitter followers yet.
I tried out the new productivity app Touch Grass, which just came out for iOS. It blocks apps of your choosing and only unblocks them after you take a picture of your hand literally touching grass. I even tried tricking it with fake grass with mixed results. You can block two apps in the free version of Touch Grass and an unlimited number of apps in the subscription version, which costs $5.99/month or $49.99/year.
The shirt, worn by Bluesky CEO Jay Graber at SXSW, was briefly on sale at worldwithoutcaesars.com.
Mahmoud Khalil is a legal permanent resident. That didn’t stop ICE.
For those of you who don’t know Latin: Zuck’s tee is “aut Zuck aut nihil,” a play on “aut Caesar aut nihil,” which means “Zuck or nothing.” Graber’s tee is “mundus sine caesaribus,” or “a world without Caesars.” We love a woman who can shitpost IRL.
Meta AI fans on Android will soon be able to get to the chatbot more quickly via WhatsApp. A widget is in the works offering direct shortcuts to open the chat with the AI, send an image to it, or begin a voice chat. Some WhatsApp beta users already have the widgets available, though no date’s been set for an official launch.
Meta is reportedly working on a standalone AI app too.
The new State Department program, called “Catch and Revoke,” will use AI to review the social media accounts of tens of thousands of students who are in the US on visas, Axios reports. State Department sources tell Axios that officials plan on combing through internal databases to see if any international students were arrested in pro-Palestine demonstrations since October 2023 — and that the department is working with the Department of Homeland Security to ensure a “whole of government and whole of authority approach.”
Rubio, the new Secretary of State, has been calling for the revocation of student visas for pro-Palestine protesters since October 2023.
My colleague Chris Welch spotted that the tab had been pinned to the top of his home screen in the iOS app, beckoning him to stick with Threads for the latest news on the awards show, which is starting in less than an hour at 7PM ET.
I don’t have it, but it’s not unusual for Threads to test the waters before rolling features out to everyone.
Ahh MySpace. A website from simpler times when the worst you had to worry about from social media was falling out with the friend that didn’t make your Top 8. It has since puttered along morphing into something completely unrecognizable...until now. Game designer Ste Curran has created SkySpace, a website that’ll take your Bluesky profile and make it into a MySpace page complete with a customizable background, a Top 8 you can set, and even a music plugin.
The mostly free Flashes app launched today, integrating into the X expats’ favorite Bluesky and letting users publish up to four photos or a 1-minute-long video per post. Though off to a slightly bumpy start, it’s currently #9 in the Social Networking category on the Apple App Store. It even has vibrant filters, if you have no respect for your work.
[bsky.app]
The three apps join others available in the Opera One browser’s sidebar, like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Telegram — using them there keeps them from taking up precious browser tab real estate. Users can enable or disable these to keep the sidebar from being junked up with services you never use.
The new integrations are available in the latest update, which you can find here.
This Wall Street Journal reports that beyond suing an ad group for an “illegal” boycott, X lawyers and executives have indicated that brands need to spend more on the Elon Musk-owned platform “or else.”
Ruben Schreurs, the CEO of an ad consulting firm, Ebiquity, is quoted saying the reason brands are choosing the route of spending a minimum viable amount on X is “Not because they want to advertise there and run their ads adjacent to the content on X, but because they are afraid of legal and political ramifications of not doing so.”
Bluesky announced it’s rolling out an X-like “followers only” option for replies to posts, in addition to options for limiting replies to people mentioned or people you follow. To enable the feature for all of your posts by default, update your app to version 1.98 and then head over to Interaction Settings under Moderation in the app’s Settings section.
The social networking platform has also added a new “search posts” feature for user profiles.
