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Showing posts from November, 2025

Car influencers love Chinese EVs — and China loves them back

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The first Chinese-made car Omar Rana ever drove was a gas-powered SUV that he rented while on a trip overseas in 2015. To say it didn't leave much of an impression would be an understatement. "It sucked really bad," Rana, aka OmarDrives , tells me. "A horrible experience." Flash forward nearly a decade to last year, when Rana received a DM from a company he'd never heard of called DCar Studio inviting him to check out a few Chinese EVs in Los Angeles. It wasn't surprising that DCar would reach out to Rana. With his 90,000 subscribers on YouTube and over 280,000 followers on Instagram, he's built a small but respectable following over the y … Read the full story at The Verge. * This article was originally published here

Why college students prefer News Daddy over The New York Times

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Ankit Khanal gets his news from News Daddy. More than 20 times a day, Khanal, a sophomore at George Mason University, opens TikTok to have the biggest stories of the day delivered to him by a bleach-blonde 26-year-old named Dylan Page, one of the leading faces in a growing community of news influencers. Based in the United Kingdom, Page began posting content on TikTok in August 2020 and has since grown his “News Daddy Empire,” his posts amassing over 1.5 billion likes. His content spans breaking news, politics, pop culture, and sometimes, personal workout videos — delivered in the increasingly common, enthusiastic “YouTube accent.” While Page doesn’t explicitly cite his sources in every video, News Daddy appears to get his information from a mix of conventional news outlets, social media, and other influencers.  As a computer science major, Khanal says he’s cautious of algorithms and their effects on media consumption. He even wrote and delivered a speech on the ...

Instagram slapped with cease and desist over its use of ‘PG-13’ teen accounts

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The Motion Picture Association — the trade group in charge of movie ratings — has asked Meta to stop using its “PG-13” rating when referring to the type of content that teen accounts will see on Instagram. The MPA sent a cease and desist order to Meta on October 28th, saying Meta’s use of the rating is “literally false and highly misleading,” as first reported by The Wall Street Journal . Last month, Meta announced an update to Instagram’s teen accounts that will only allow them to view content “similar to what they’d see in a PG-13 movie.” At the time, the MPA issued a statement that said it was “not contacted by Meta” before its announcement. Now it’s taking things a step further, arguing that Meta’s attempt to restrict content doesn’t follow the MPA’s “curated process” when determining ratings. “The MPA has worked for decades to earn the public’s trust in its rating system,” a copy of the letter seen by The Verge states. “Meta’s claim that its Teen Accounts will be...