social media

Dozens of popular figures on the app have traveled to Washington to urge lawmakers to oppose a bill that could result in the platform being blocked in the United States.

Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says he wants to pull together a group of investors to buy TikTok. Mnuchin, who also has connections to Hollywood, announced his plans on CNBC Thursday morning.

Even though legislation is moving forward, the video social media app isn’t disappearing from smartphones any time soon.

House passage of the bill is only the first step. The Senate would also need to pass the measure for it to become law, and lawmakers in that chamber indicated it would undergo a thorough review. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he’ll have to consult with relevant committee chairs to determine the bill’s path.

The Taliban-run government is fostering a thriving community of YouTube influencers and video bloggers in Afghanistan, seeking to shape a positive narrative about the country by rewarding those who have welcome viewpoints with access to stories that can draw millions of views online.

The House plans to vote on Wednesday on a bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese parent to sell the popular social media app.

Reddit Inc. and its investors disclosed further details of what is set to be one of the year’s biggest initial public offerings in which they are seeking to raise as much as $748 million. The social media platform said in a filing Monday that it and its investors are planning to sell 22 million shares for $31 to $34 each. About 15.3 million those shares will be sold by the company and the rest by investors and Reddit employees.

WWE, a sports entertainment company that is part of TKO Group, is also among the top 10 most subscribed YouTube channels globally, with no professional sports leagues currently in that mix. Others in the top 10 include Indian record label and film production company T-Series, Sony Entertainment Television and social media personalities MrBeast and PewDiePie.

Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads went dark Tuesday morning, leaving users unable to load and access the apps. The tracking website Down Detector showed outages on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger on Tuesday with worldwide outages identified. Some users also experienced issues logging in to their Meta Quest headsets. Meta initially acknowledged the issue on its status page with a message timestamped 10:17AM ET: “We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”

In nearly four hours of arguments Monday, several justices questioned aspects of laws adopted by Republican-dominated legislatures and signed by Republican governors in Florida and Texas in 2021. But they seemed wary of a broad ruling, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett warning of “land mines” she and her colleagues need to avoid in resolving the two cases.

Katie Puris, who was the Global Head of Brand & Creative at TikTok, alleged in a lawsuit filed this week in a Manhattan federal court that she was fired in 2022 after making internal complaints about gender and age discrimination linked to what she called a preference among company executives for hiring young people.

Tucker Carlson released his two-hour interview with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president whose military is deep into its second year of the Ukraine invasion, marking an unprecedented sitdown between an American journalist and adversarial head of state during wartime. The Putin interview in its entirety was offered for free and unedited, Carlson said.

The Elon Musk-owned social platform, previously known as Twitter, has signed a two-year deal with the WWE for a new exclusive weekly video series. Called WWE Speed, the concept will feature timed matches meant to be completed in five minutes or less.

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in a video posted to X on Tuesday that he is in Moscow to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin rarely gives interviews, particularly to Western journalists. Carlson, however, is cited frequently on Russian state TV because of his opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine’s war effort, embrace of other Russian-friendly narratives and criticism of President Biden. Carlson said the interview would air “unedited” on his website and on X. He also accused the mainstream media of a pro-Ukraine bias and unwillingness to cover Putin’s point of view.

The Meta Oversight Board urged the social media company on Monday to reconsider its current policy on manipulated media ahead of the various elections set to be held in 2024. The board, which is run independently of Meta and funded through a grant by the company, described the policy as “incoherent, lacking in persuasive justification and inappropriately focused on how content has been created, rather than on which specific harms it aims to prevent.”

The cuts at Snapchat’s parent company come after layoffs across Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

Realistic-looking shampoo bottles and seltzer cans are popping up on videos from digital creators on TikTok and YouTube in a new form of old advertising. Pictured: A screenshot of a recent TikTok from the dancer Melissa Becraft that used AI to digitally superimpose a poster for Bubly, the sparkling water brand owned by PepsiCo, onto the wall of her apartment.

Universal Music Group, one of the largest music companies in the world, said it failed to reach new deal terms with TikTok over issues including artist compensation and AI — and that TikTok tried to “bully” UMG into a deal worth less than its previous pact. As such, Universal Music said it will no longer license content to the app.

Elon Musk’s X, the company formerly known as Twitter, is planning to build a new “Trust and Safety center of excellence” in Austin, Texas, to help enforce its content and safety rules. The company aims to hire 100 full-time content moderators at the new location, according to Joe Benarroch, head of business operations at X. The group will focus on fighting material related to child sexual exploitation, but will help enforce the social media platform’s other rules, which include restrictions on hate speech and violent posts, he added. The company did not specify when this new center will be operational.

Civil rights lawyers and Democrats are sounding alarms about Mr. Musk’s claims about voting. The Biden campaign called his posts “profoundly irresponsible.”

Matthew P Bergman’s firm has filed cases against Snap, TikTok and others, with a novel argument – that the products are harmful by design.

TikTok, the social media platform turned short-form video into a global sensation, is further encroaching on YouTube’s long-form video territory. On Tuesday, social-media consultant Matt Navarra shared a screenshot from TikTok that shows TikTok testing the option for users to upload 30-minute long videos to the app. “TikTok is coming for your long form YouTube videos,” Navarra posted on Threads after spotting the new uploading time in the beta version of the video-sharing app.

Meta, Spotify and other companies are weighing new options for customers as Apple makes changes to comply with a new European law.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced the company’s next steps toward investing in artificial intelligence — highlighting plans to open-source the emerging technology; build an infrastructure; fuse the company’s two leading AI research groups; and connect Meta’s efforts to its ongoing metaverse development vision. “Our long term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit,” Zuckerberg posted on Threads.

A federal judge in Ohio has issued an emergency restraining order blocking enforcement of a new state law that would have required some large tech platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and YouTube, to ban minors under 16, without parental consent.

The tech industry group NetChoice is suing to block an Ohio law that requires a wide swath of platforms — including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Threads, X and YouTube — to obtain parental consent before allowing access to minors under 16. In a federal complaint filed late last week in the Southern District of Ohio, NetChoice says the law violates the First Amendment for several reasons, including that it wrongly restricts minors’ rights to express themselves and access others’ speech, and only applies to certain social platforms.

The Supreme Court has scheduled oral arguments on what tech companies are billing as their version of a challenge to “must-carry” laws, statutes that they say are unconstitutional threats to their First Amendment freedom. The high court’s decision could determine the future of social media and other edge providers to moderate their content.

X, formerly known as Twitter, has lost over 71% of its value since April 2022, when Elon Musk bought the microblogging app, according to mutual fund Fidelity, a shareholder in X Holdings. Fidelity — which contributed over $300 million to Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover — originally marked down the company’s valuation in October, which decreased the value of its investment by nearly 65% over the first 11 months of Musk’s ownership.

Entertainment marketers promoting new shows and movies can now use Samba TV measurement to understand viewership conversions generated by Snapchat campaigns.

News headlines are back on X, formerly known as Twitter, nearly three months after the platform cut them, forcing users and news outlets alike to manually write them on articles shared to X — although the return of the feature comes with smaller, slimmed down headlines for reposted articles.

X argued that the law improperly compels speech in violation of the First Amendment and is meant to pressure social media companies to remove content the government deems objectionable.

Here’s a look back at some of the biggest stories in social media in 2023 — and what to watch for next year. Pictured: Characters removed from a sign on the Twitter headquarters building are piled on a street in San Francisco on July 24, 2023. (Godofredo A. Vásque/AP)

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researchers say their study’s findings show a need for government regulation of social media since the companies that stand to make money from children who use their platforms have failed to meaningfully self-regulate. They note such regulations, as well as greater transparency from tech companies, could help alleviate harms to youth mental health and curtail potentially harmful advertising practices that target children and adolescents.

A federal judge on Friday gave the go-ahead to a lawsuit against the social media company X, formerly known as Twitter, in which workers claim that the company promised but never paid millions of dollars in bonuses. (Noah Berger/AP)

New Jersey lawmakers are considering a bill that would prohibit social media companies from allowing minors under 18 to have social media accounts without parental permission. The measure, which advanced Monday in New Jersey’s Assembly Health Committee, also would require social platforms to verify all users’ ages. Lawmakers in Utah and Arkansas recently passed similar laws, but those measures are currently facing court challenges.

The tech industry organization NetChoice on Monday sued to block a Utah law that requires social media companies to verify users’ ages, prohibits those companies from allowing minors under 18 to have accounts without parental permission, and bans the companies from serving ads to minors. (Henry Wang/Pixabay)

In both cases, Meta ended up reinstating the posts — one showing Palestinian casualties and the other, an Israeli hostage — on its own, although it added warning screens to both due to violent content. This means the company isn’t obligated to do anything about the board’s decision.