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Showing posts from May, 2024

Social media users are blocking celebs to support Palestine

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Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images Every Met Gala has some sort of controversy, whether it’s about the dress code and theme , the guest list , or a now-infamous brawl in an elevator at an afterparty. Because this is 2024, it’s only fitting that the outrage began this year because of a TikTok audio track. In a now-deleted video, an influencer named Haley Kalil shows off her elaborate floral dress and headpiece as she prepares to host a pre-Met Gala red carpet event. Her misstep was using an audio snippet in the background taken from the 2006 film Marie Antoinette , in which the titular character smirks and delivers one of the most famous (and spurious) one-liners of history: “Let them eat cake.” The sound has been circulating on TikTok for months, mostly used in makeup tutorials, fashion videos, and things of that nature. The backlash was swift and brutal. Audiences compared the event to The Hunger Games , a dystopia where the wealthy sit back a

Instagram and Facebook under EU investigation for causing child addiction and harm

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The EU is concerned that Meta’s algorithms may cause “behavioral addictions in children.” | Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge The European Union has opened a formal investigation into Meta over concerns that it isn’t doing enough to safeguard the mental and physical health of children who use its Facebook and Instagram social media platforms. The probe announced by the European Commission on Thursday will assess whether Meta has breached rules under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), noting that Facebook and Instagram’s UI and algorithms may cause “behavioral addictions in children” and create “rabbit-hole effects.” The EU is also concerned that Meta isn’t doing enough to prevent minors from accessing inappropriate content, and that its age-verification tools may not be “reasonable, proportionate, and effective.” Today we open formal #DSA investigation against #Meta . We are not convinced that Meta has done enough to comply with the DSA obliga

Instagram’s co-founder is Anthropic’s new chief product officer

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Mike Krieger has a long history in tech and AI. | Photo by Jerod Harris / Getty Images for Vox Media As Anthropic tries to take on the AI giants, it has a new big-name executive on board: the company announced this morning that Mike Krieger is its new chief product officer. Krieger, of course, was one of the co-founders of Instagram and spent the last few years working on Artifact , an AI news-reading app that was recently acquired by Yahoo . Krieger will oversee all of Anthropic’s product efforts going forward. It’s an important moment for the company to push hard on product, too: it recently released the Claude app for iOS, long after a bunch of its competitors were available on mobile, and just announced support for use in Spanish, French, Italian, and German. Anthropic, which was founded by ex-OpenAI employees, has been seemingly primarily focused on building out its core technology for the last few years but seems to understand that it needs to turn all

Instagram introduces new interactive stickers for Stories

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Image: Instagram Instagram announced a handful of new features to Stories , including new interactive ways to share music, photos, and videos. The most intriguing new feature is called Reveal and, when applied, blurs the contents of a story post. The only way viewers can see the post is by DMing the person who shared it. Instagram head Adam Mosseri has said that direct messages are an increasingly important part of the platform and that stories and DMs account for most of Instagram’s growth. Requiring a DM to view content is the next evolution of that — and will no doubt be used as an engagement hack by creators hoping to boost their stories’ engagement. Image: Instagram Another feature, Frames, puts a Polaroid overlay on to images that start out gray. When users shake their phone, a photo appears — like what many people do with actual Polaroid pictures. Which is amusing, because you’re actually not supposed to shake Polaroids, and th

EU probe targets Facebook and Instagram amid spike in Russian disinformation

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The EU is assessing whether Meta violated its obligations under the Digital Services Act. | Image: The Verge The European Commission has targeted Meta with a formal investigation to assess whether it’s doing enough to moderate political content, illegal content, and disinformation on Facebook and Instagram. The probe comes amid a spike in online pro-Russian propaganda in the run-up to EU elections in early June. In a press release on Tuesday , the European Commission claims that Meta may have breached its obligations under the Digital Services Act (DSA) , a set of EU rules that aim to protect users by fostering safer online environments. The potential violations being investigated cover Meta’s approach to tackling disinformation campaigns and “coordinated inauthentic behavior” in the EU, alongside the lack of effective third-party tools for monitoring elections and civic discourse in real time — with particular concern that Meta is deprecating CrowdTangle w