Tag Archives: social media

Florida Politics reports: Florida’s Governor is taking to social media to decry social media censorship, after a SCOTUS ruling said Louisiana, Missouri and social media users lacked standing to sue over the federal government’s push for platforms to remove COVID misinformation at the height of the pandemic. “The Court majority has rubber-stamped a way for the federal government to censor …

Bloomberg News reports: A major plank of Elon Musk’s plan for expanding X into an “everything app” has been grafting a payments network onto its main social networking service. The details of this project have remained blurry, but dozens of documents the company has submitted to state regulators—which have not previously been made public—give a new view of the business. …

NBC News reports: YouTube has a pattern of recommending right-leaning and Christian videos, even to users who haven’t previously interacted with that kind of content, according to a recent study of the platform’s suggestions to users. Researchers created accounts and built mock user personas by searching for content, subscribing to channels and watching videos using those accounts. After having built …

US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy writes: The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency — and social media has emerged as an important contributor. Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms, and the average daily use in this age group, as of the summer …

Salt Lake City’s ABC affiliate reports: The State of Utah is accusing TikTok of allowing “virtual strip clubs” on its platform, leading to the sexual exploitation of minors, according to a new lawsuit. The lawsuit, filed on Monday by the Utah Division of Consumer Protection, accuses TikTok’s live-streaming feature called TikTok LIVE of letting adults give virtual currency to young …

TechCrunch reports: The internet has been home to all kinds of content for a long time, so it was no surprise to anyone when people started tweeting porn at each other. X (formerly Twitter) has long had many active NSFW (not safe for work) communities, and though the social network unofficially allowed people to post adult content, its rules have …

Reuters reports: TikTok is working on a clone of its recommendation algorithm for its 170 million U.S. users that may result in a version that operates independently of its Chinese parent and be more palatable to American lawmakers who want to ban it, according to sources with direct knowledge of the efforts. The work on splitting the source code ordered …

Reuters reports: Fake accounts posting about the U.S. presidential election are proliferating on the social media platform X, according to a social media analysis company’s report shared with Reuters exclusively ahead of its release on Friday. Analysts from Israeli tech company Cyabra, which uses a subset of artificial intelligence called machine learning to identify fake accounts, found that 15% of …

The Hill reports: TikTok is restricting state-affiliated media accounts, broadening the platform’s efforts to foster “authenticity” and limit their influence heading into elections later this year. The social media platform announced Thursday that accounts “that attempt to reach communities outside their home country on current global events and affairs” will not pop up in the personalized feeds of users. TikTok …

Bloomberg News reports: Steven Mnuchin, the former US Treasury Secretary, said he’s still interested in buying TikTok’s US operation from its Chinese owner, and believes the social media app’s critical video recommendation technology could be replicated. “I’ve actually spoken to a lot of tech companies on working about rebuilding this,” Mnuchin said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “I …

The Wall Street Journal reports: TikTok said it filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday challenging the constitutionality of a new law that requires a sale or ban of the popular social-media app, setting up a court showdown over national security and free speech in the age of global information wars. The suit, filed directly with a federal appeals court in Washington, …

The Independent reports: On Saturday, Reclaim Party leader Laurence Fox – who failed to submit the right paperwork to run for mayor and then failed to get elected in the London-wide assembly vote – penned a tweet in which he fumed that a number of elected individuals are all Muslim (even when some of them aren’t). Fox appears to have …

CNN Business reports: Truth Social’s average number of daily active US users on iOS and Android dropped by 19% year over year in April to about 113,000, according to data shared exclusively with CNN from Similarweb, a data intelligence company. The Similarweb data, which captures the first 29 days of April, showed that the average number of users dipped 4% …

Miami’s ABC affiliate reports: Two individuals have been taken into custody following an incident at a Southwest Miami-Dade day care, where they allegedly caused a panic by brandishing rifles in the vicinity of the day care center. Miguel Ruiz and Estrella Pereira are accused of removing two rifles from the trunk of a Corvette in the Devon Aire Kiddy College’s …

NBC News reports: TikTok CEO Shou Chew said Wednesday that the company would go to court to try to remain online in the United States. In a video posted on the app, Chew denounced a potential ban signed into law by President Joe Biden. The law has a built-in delay of nine months, giving TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, a …

The Verge reports: A bill that would force China-based company ByteDance to sell TikTok — or else face a US ban of the platform — is all but certain to become law after the Senate passed a foreign aid package including the measure. It now heads to President Joe Biden, who already committed to signing the TikTok legislation. Once signed …

The Insider reports: The House advanced legislation on Saturday that could lead to a TikTok ban in the United States. The bill forces TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to secure American ownership in about a year or face a domestic ban. Earlier versions of the legislation gave ByteDance just six months to find a new owner. To fast-track the bipartisan legislation, …

The Verge reports: Post News, a Twitter alternative that emerged in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover, is shutting down. Noam Bardin, the platform’s founder and former CEO of Waze, writes that Post News “is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform.” The Andreessen Horowitz-backed platform launched in a closed beta in November 2022, …

NBC News reports: NBC News found that at least 150 paid “Premium” subscriber X accounts and thousands of unpaid accounts have posted or amplified pro-Nazi content on X in recent months, often in apparent violation of X’s rules. The paid accounts posting the content all consistently posted antisemitic or pro-Nazi material. Examples included praise of Nazi soldiers, sharing of Nazi …

TechCrunch reports: Elon Musk is planning to charge new X users a “small fee” to enable posting on the social network and to curb the bot problem. While replying to another user, Musk later added that new accounts would be able to post after three months of creation without paying a fee. As is the case with a lot of …