Latest from Amanda Silberling
The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) has passed in the Senate after Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) pushed the internet bill to a vote. Proposed in 2022, KOSA requires that…
Featured Article
MatPat, the first big YouTuber to successfully exit his company, is lobbying for creators on Capitol Hill
Though MatPat retired from YouTube, he’s still pretty busy. In fact, he’s been spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill.
Meta’s AI integrations into apps like Instagram and Facebook have felt pretty useless so far. If I’m just trying to find my friend’s Instagram, why…
Today’s story takes us to a high school on the outskirts of Essex, which has ended up on the wrong side of the U.K.’s GDPR…
This weekend, President Biden announced that he would suspend his campaign for president, and he endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris. We still don’t know…
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There’s a lot more to the Kamala Harris memes than you think
“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” says Vice President Kamala Harris in a now infamous clip. An overlay of the lime green album art for Charli XCX’s “Brat” flashes on the screen, while a remix of “Von Dutch” scores increasingly frenetic clips of Harris hysterically laughing…
There’s a man in Florida right now who wants to propose to his girlfriend while they’re on a beach vacation. He couldn’t get the engagement ring before he flew down…
Security
From the Sphere to false cyberattack claims, misinformation runs rampant amid CrowdStrike outage
This serves as an example for how easy it is to spread inaccurate information online during a time of immense global confusion and panic.
Olivia DeRamus is flipping the script: What if scrolling through social media didn’t make us miserable? What if, especially for women, social media could actually make us feel more supported?…
What do MrBeast, John Oliver and The Wall Street Journal have in common? The transcripts of their YouTube videos have been scraped to train the…
If you play Wordle every day but also happen to enjoy chess, we’ve got great news for you. Echo Chess, a game built by a…
Trouble could be on the horizon for OpenAI. A group of whistleblowers accused OpenAI of requiring its employees to sign illegally restrictive non-disclosure agreements, or…
Featured Article
Hank Green reckons with the power — and the powerlessness — of the creator
Hank Green has had a while to think about how social media has changed us. He started making YouTube videos in 2007 with his brother, novelist John Green, at a time when the first iPhone was in development, Myspace was still relevant and Instagram didn’t exist. Seventeen years later, posting…
It’s a big day in the Samsung universe. At Samsung’s Unpacked 2024 event, the company debuted new phones, headphones and even a wearable ring. As…
Not gonna lie, things aren’t looking great for NGL. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is banning NGL from serving minors or advertising to them, marking…
Fast-food chain Whataburger’s app has gone viral in the wake of Hurricane Beryl, which left around 1.8 million utility customers in Houston, Texas without power. Hundreds of thousands of those…
Social
Talky social app Airchat gets a major overhaul, making it more like an asynchronous Clubhouse
The concept of Airchat is fun, especially if you’re someone who loves to send voice memos instead of typing out long paragraphs on your phone keyboard.
Florida man is back with a vengeance, and this time, he’s going after Walmart delivery drones. Yes, really. Walmart was demonstrating its delivery drone technology…
Two of my friends died within the last three years. By some coincidence, both of their birthdays fall in the beginning of July. So, twice this week, Facebook has reminded…
Teddy Solomon just moved to a new house in Palo Alto, so he turned to the Stanford community on Fizz to furnish his room. “Every time I show up to…
It’s easier than ever to make a deepfake of another person’s voice or face, but at least YouTube is making some small changes that make…
President Joe Biden’s administration is doubling down on its interest in the creator economy. In August, the White House will host the first-ever White House Creator Economy Conference, which will…
Photographers are claiming that Meta is tagging their real photos as “Made with AI.” Meta introduced this automated tag to help people understand when what…
X still has a verified bot problem. Also, grass is green. We knew it would be a bad idea to let anyone pay for a…
A former Snap engineer created an uncanny valley for social media, and it’s an app called Butterflies. Butterflies looks like Instagram, except it’s a platform…
OpenAI rival Anthropic released its newest generative AI model this week, Claude 3.5 Sonnet. While Sonnet is an improvement over Anthropic’s last release, it’s not…
If death and taxes are inevitable, why are companies so prepared for taxes but not for death? “I lost both of my parents in college, and it didn’t initially spark…
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A social app for creatives, Cara grew from 40k to 650k users in a week because artists are fed up with Meta’s AI policies
Artists have finally had enough with Meta’s predatory AI policies, but Meta’s loss is Cara’s gain. An artist-run, anti-AI social platform, Cara has grown from 40,000 to 650,000 users within the last week, catapulting it to the top of the App Store charts. Instagram is a necessity for many artists,…
Welcome to Elon Musk’s X. The social network formerly known as Twitter where the rules are made up and the check marks don’t matter. Or do they? The Tesla and…
Ms. Rachel isn’t a household name, but if you spend a lot of time with toddlers, she might as well be a rockstar. She’s like Steve from Blues Clues for…
