Tina Nguyen
We’ve reached the next stage of internet-stalking the pope.
Stage one is mining Pope Leo XIV’s social media history. Stage two is his relatives posting screenshots of the family group chats.
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.
Leo XIV is the first pope with an online footprint, and it’s already defining his papacy… which is weird.
Tina Nguyen
David Nield
Jess Weatherbed
Dominic Preston
Jay Peters
Threads now has more than 350 million monthly active users.
It “continues to be on track to become our next major social app,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the company’s Q1 2025 earnings call.
Emma Roth wrote up more about Meta’s earnings call earlier today.
Trump tried to ban TikTok in 2020 — now, it’s his megaphone to Gen Z.
Tina Nguyen
Jess Weatherbed
Jay Peters
Dominic Preston
Age checks are coming to social media.
UK media regulator Ofcom has laid down the rules that social media sites and gaming apps will have to follow from July 25th under the Online Safety Act, which started coming into force last month. Sites and apps will have to offer child-safe algorithms, strong moderation tools, and any “harmful content” must be gated behind the same “highly effective” age checks required of porn sites, which can include face scans or credit card checks.
New rules for a safer generation of children online
[ofcom.org.uk]
Dominic Preston
Thomas Ricker
Teens think social media is bad for other teens, not themselves.
Pew Research surveyed a group of teens and parents about social media and mental health with predictable results. But this chart is, by far, my favorite, suggesting that Gen Alpha remains irrepressibly optimistic despite everything.
Dominic Preston
Jess Weatherbed
Bluesky creatives have no love for Adobe.
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.
Adobe Gets Bullied Off Bluesky
[futurism.com]
Dominic Preston
Jay Peters
The New Yorker profiled Bluesky CEO Jay Graber.
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.
Bluesky’s Quest to Build Nontoxic Social Media
[newyorker.com]
Wes Davis
The US told Apple to keep TikTok in the App Store.
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.
David Pierce
Richard Lawler
April Fools’ 2025: Bluesky chops its character count.
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.
Image: Bluesky
Tina Nguyen
Here’s how the State Department finds which students to deport.
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.
Nilay Patel
AI is going to make personalized ads even creepier.
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.
Dominic Preston
Instagram’s new fast-forward feature works just like TikTok’s.
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!
Image: Instagram
Dominic Preston
Grok joins Telegram.
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.
Tina Nguyen
Make Soda Great Again (sponsored by Big Soda?).
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.”
MAGA Influencers May Have Been Paid to Break With RFK
[thebulwark.com]
Wes Davis
Barack Obama has joined Bluesky.
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.
Owen Grove
Now your phone can tell you to touch grass.
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.
Jay Peters
Bluesky’s “world without Caesars” shirt sold out in 30 minutes.
The shirt, worn by Bluesky CEO Jay Graber at SXSW, was briefly on sale at worldwithoutcaesars.com.
David Pierce