#social-media

#social-media

Meta is the largest social media company in the world, boasting close to 4 billion monthly active users worldwide. The firm's "Family of Apps," its core business, consists of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. End users can leverage these applications for a variety of different purposes, from keeping in touch with friends to following celebrities and running digital businesses for free. Meta packages customer data, gleaned from its application ecosystem and sells ads to digital advertisers.

Sky Sports pundit Gary Neville will not face any disciplinary action after comments he made following the recent Manchester synagogue attack. The former Manchester United defender posted a three-minute video on his social media account last week, insisting that hatred and division in the United Kingdom is being fuelled by 'angry white men'. Neville has been heavily criticised for doing so by members of the public and MPs, with some suggesting he should be sacked by Sky for doing so.

We are being bombarded by information from many sources in our daily lives. Some of it is helpful, some is challenging, and some is anxiety-provoking. The many avenues available to get information may help or harm our efforts to get factual, evidence-based, believable information. Misinformation is just as prevalent as information and sometimes feeds into our desires rather than meeting our needs for reliable facts.

I'm sure the guys who came up with [social media] thought it was a great idea and, yeah, congratulations on your billions, but it has taken down a huge portion of humanity.

You know the celebrities - their blockbuster movies, hit reality TV shows, and chart-topping songs. But do you know their pets? From leading men everyone's suddenly obsessed with, to rising starlets who dominate red carpets, to music icons with fan bases as big as stadiums, these stars all share one thing: a serious love for their four-legged friends. Some of these fur babies are so beloved they've even become mini-celebrities themselves, popping up on Instagram and stealing the spotlight from their famous owners.

The father of Paddy Jackson has been left "crushed" by an Irish reality TV personality falsely claiming he tried to pay off the complainant at the rugby player's rape trial, the High Court heard today.

They had that picture, right? Of me side-eyeing him,

Historically-like other cultural forms-architecture has been documented, shared, and promoted primarily through print. Books, journals, and magazines carried the discipline's arguments and images, and because architectural practice relies so heavily on visual communication, printed journals created a bridge between academic publications and commercial magazines. Through the postwar decades, beautifully produced volumes curated a collective point of view, signaling what the field broadly considered discussion-worthy or exemplary.

Vee Whitaker - a mother in Georgia - took her 8-month-old daughter Montana to a café when the little girl started screaming. A customer asked Whitaker to leave, saying the baby's screams were hurting his sensitive ears. He told Whitaker if she couldn't keep her infant quiet, she should leave.

We've been working on a new show for the last few months, called Version History, and the first episode is now live! It's called "Hoverboards: so hot right now," and it's an hour-long tour of the biggest rideable gadget of the 2010s. Hidden inside the history of this weird two-wheeled scooter is a crucial inflection point in Chinese tech manufacturing, some hugely influential social media stars, a referendum on self-driving cars, and so much more.

As we descend towards slop-based social media, where the videos are fake and the people are bots, we might be rounding up our time with algorithmically generated feeds. For Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch shows time spent on social media over the past decade. The key signal seems to be in young people's usage. It looks like usage plateaued for 16- to 24-year-olds and has been inching its way down. Although usage over two and a half hours per day is still a lot. Also when

The 32-year-old man, from the Bronx, New York, surrendered to New Jersey authorities on Friday and was charged with third-degree terroristic threats, the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office said in a statement. The Mahwah Police Department contacted county prosecutors on Sept. 27 reporting that a township resident was threatened by someone on a social media app. Detectives investigating the incident later traced the online activity to the Bronx man, authorities said.

So I was intrigued when two new social networking experiences debuted in rapid succession in late September: Meta's Vibes and OpenAI's Sora. Thanks to the fact that both focus on letting people share AI-generated imagery, they compete directly with each other. But their all-AI format also sets them apart from existing social networks, where generative AI is most often a distraction from human contact, not the main attraction.

Forget everything you thought you knew about making money as a DJ. The old playbook - club gigs, wedding bookings, and selling CDs at shows - is about as relevant as a flip phone at a Tesla convention. Jean-Claude Bastos, who's successfully navigated this economic earthquake, puts it bluntly: "If you're still thinking like a traditional DJ, you're already extinct." His journey through both old-school and new-school monetization reveals a landscape where creativity and business savvy matter more than ever.

Space agencies say the comet, 3I/ATLAS, poses no danger, despite viral conspiracy claims. Rumours across social media platforms that a huge comet is on a collision course with Earth have been circulating, with some users describing it as a major threat to humanity. Others are debating how the comet known as 3I/ATLAS and detected by NASA's ATLAS telescope on July 1 might be diverted from the Earth.

Following his death, hundreds of people who criticized Kirk's ideology have been fired, disciplined or doxxed had their private information posted online to stoke harassment. Other states have seen far more teachers fired or disciplined for Kirk-related comments. In California, state laws protecting free speech and strong union contracts have so far kept the numbers relatively low. Texas, for example, is investigating at least 280 teachers for criticizing Kirk.

Instagram Threads, Meta's X rival that now has over 400 million monthly active users, is officially launching a new feature that could redefine how its app is used: Communities. On Thursday, Meta said it's introducing over 100 communities to the app, where users can have casual conversations around topics like basketball, television, K-pop music, books, and more. The idea, explains Meta, is to give users dedicated spaces within the app where they can delve deeper into conversations on topics that matter to them. The communities users have joined will display on their Threads profile, and each community has its own custom "Like" emoji available to members who engage with the discussions.

I have no idea what exactly is going on with Facebook these days. I'm seeing precisely nothing of my actual friends; one friend had to do something drastic and get on the actual phone to tell me some good news she had posted about a few weeks previously. So I'm seeing no friends, but plenty of random Facebook groups and ads.

It's almost impossible to consider what it was before it established a stranglehold on us, but there was a time when the internet seemed destined to be a beacon for technology's positive potential. Before we truly understood the dangers posed online, there was the optimistic belief that it would connect humanity for the better, democratize knowledge and information, and confront us with perspectives that we might otherwise have never encountered.

If you're an Instagram or TikTok user, chances are you're finding it increasingly hard to differentiate between genuine images and videos and AI-generated content in your feed. But OpenAI now has a solution: what if we make it all AI slop? The company behind Chat GPT is entering the social media space with Sora, an iOS app named after its generative AI video model.

Lea Veloso, 26, has an ever-growing ick list. If he spits on the ground, can't cook, lies about his height, identifies as apolitical or doesn't travel enough. If he's weird about other men wearing makeup (like, K-pop idols), says he wants a slightly autistic woman, has no skincare routine or only likes songs that got famous on TikTok. It's an ick if he doesn't call his parents, sniffs every five seconds, is an unsuccessful DJ or is embarrassed to do karaoke.

OpenAI has a new version of its Sora AI video generator, and it's being launched alongside a new social video app, also called Sora, on iOS. The app, currently invite-only, resembles TikTok. But instead of encouraging people to stitch together duets, it asks you to record short videos that anyone can spin into new AI-generated deepfakes - with your consent.

Our culture embodies mutually exclusive beliefs in tribalism and individual exceptionalism. Tribalism used to depend on family; over the past millennium, it increasingly has come to depend on wealth and status, with new elite groupings developing every day-now they're called "lifestyles." The economic stratification of America isn't dissimilar to the caste system of India, the main distinction being that Americans believe they have the opportunity to gain more and more status if they put their shoulders to the grindstones and employ good ol' fashioned industriousness.