I'm working on a YouTube mini series explaining the Fediverse!! Who are the most knowledgeable people in this realm who I should definitely talk to? What do you think is important to include in my series? I want to hear thoughts!!

With all the tiktok drama I have been telling people Mastodon is still here and kicking!! I love this app and I really think the decentralized model is the best for social media. Still, people don’t want to join! What do you think Mastodon’s biggest barriers are to courting new users? What could be done to improve the product and grow the user base in a positive way?

Kids with smartphones have better mental health, study finds. Inside the Bop House, Tariffluencers, Gen Z's safe space, the latest meme stock, Grok dunking, India's Netflix, Ashton Hall and the rise of isolationist masculinity, and MORE -- all in today's newsletter

Kids with smartphones have better mental health, study finds

+ Inside the Bop House, Tariffluencers, Gen Z's safe space, the latest meme stock, Grok dunking, India's Netflix, and Ashton Hall and the rise of i...

I need to log off for a while and sleep and stop getting upset over the internet.

I went deep on the Peterverse(!) and wrote about what the rise of thousands of Peter Griffin-themed AI generated niche educational accounts run by children tells us about the future of the internet and online community

A deep dive into the Peterverse

Thousands of Peter Griffin-themed Instagram accounts are educating teenagers and providing a new form of community.

"We cannot continue to participate in the social network feed of a man who proclaims the death of the media and therefore of journalists... X is a platform that no longer serves the public interest at all, but the special ideological and financial interests of its owner and his political allies"

The London Economic

European Federation of Journalists to stop posting content on X

The EFJ represents over 295,000 journalists in 44 countries.

I wrote about how Senate Democrats are spearheading an effort to brief online influencers on key policy initiatives instead of relying on traditional media. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/07/30/democratic-senators-influencers-laws-initiatives/

Amid bipartisan support for restricting teenagers’ access to social networks, despite zeeo scientific evidence showing such restrictions would help the younger generations mental health, young queer people who rely on social platforms as a lifeline are threatened with isolation and loss of connection

the Guardian

‘Blunt-force approach’: LGBTQ+ advocates say proposed teen social media ban overlooks benefits

Amid bipartisan support for restricting teenagers’ access to social networks, young queer people fear isolation and loss of community

TikTok executives proposed giving the Biden administration control over its U.S. operations and a kill switch if things went south. The Biden administration declined, forfeiting potential influence over one of the world’s most popular apps in favor of shutting it down. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/29/tiktok-cfius-proposal-rejected/

The 25 most-cited news organizations in the U.S. lost 75% of their total user engagement on Facebook and 58% of interactions on Instagram between 2022 and 2024. "Where will people go for this information? Or will they just go without?" https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/21/social-media-trump-biden-politics-instagram-facebook/

NYC's AI weapon scanners produce 85% false positives

Hell Gate

NYC Has Tried AI Weapons Scanners Before. The Result: Tons of False Positives - Hell Gate

Mayor Eric Adams announced his intention to put weapons scanners on the subway system, but a 2022 pilot at a NYC hospital showed that the technolog...

"Maybe the most significant effect of that Russian op was to give American elites what Kevin Baker calls 'psy-op brain' -- the belief that any online political expression with which they are uncomfortable must be the product of a foreign psychological operation. ... Israel, portrayed badly? Gotta be a psy-op!"

Four unpersuasive arguments against TikTok

The TikTok ban, the de-professionalization of MrBeast, and what happens in the sequels to Dune

Facebook made a UI tweak to bring back the "Poke" button, and found that use of Pokes went up 13x -- mostly among users 18-29, who had probably never even used Poke the first time around

Business Insider

Facebook is reviving one of its earliest features after hiding it for years

Meta says Facebook Pokes surged after it quietly resurfaced the Poke button. And more than half of new Pokes are coming from users ages 18 to 29, t...

I sat down with Chaya Raichik of LibsofTikTok to talk about Nex's death, her role in Oklahoma politics, her beliefs on gender, the great replacement theory, sex education, her false accusations against the Uvalde shooter, why she and Seth Dillon cut ties and more: Read my latest story on her impact in Oklahoma: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/24/libs-tiktok-oklahoma-nonbinary-teen-death/

Mainstreaming Covid denialism/Covid denialists is now leading to the mainstreaming of full on AIDS denialism. This is what happens when the media and public boost Covid denying conspiracy theorists

VICE

Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein Promote AIDS Denialism to an Audience of Millions

Weinstein repeated discredited theories to Rogan about HIV not being the cause of AIDS, alarming and infuriating public health experts.

Chicago-area Tesla charging stations are lined with dead cars and have essentially turned into car graveyards as temperatures have dropped to the negative double digits: “A bunch of dead robots out here” https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chicago-area-tesla-charging-stations-024817227.html

Screenshotting this post 👇🏻 in order to quote post it! I don’t know where people get the idea that quote posting = dunks, personally I feel that that opinion is just Twitter brain. Every major social platform from Tumblr, to Facebook, to LinkedIn and more has the ability to natively quote post. This is because the primary use of such a feature is to amplify information w added context or to open a new line of discussion. Replies are used far more often for harassment but we don’t ban replies!

"Why do we Palestinians have to film our own country getting bombed and our own people getting killed, just for the world to watch silently?” asked Plestia Alaqad, a 22-year-old freelance journalist whose Instagram account has 4.6 million followers

TIME

Inside the Israel-Hamas Information War

Horrific scenes from Oct. 7 and the attack on Gaza fuel a global fight for public opinion.

“Meta’s policies and practices have been silencing voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights on Instagram and Facebook in a wave of heightened censorship on social media”

Human Rights Watch

Meta’s Broken Promises

The 51-page report, “Meta’s Broken Promises: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content on Instagram and Facebook,” documents a pattern of undu...

The IDF operates a Telegram channel called "72 Virgins – Uncensored" that posts sadistic images of Israelis murdering Palestinians & mutilating their bodies: “Burning their mothers…exterminating the cockroaches” Videos show Israelis rampaging through a hospital hunting for more Palestinians to kill https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2023-12-12/ty-article/.premium/graphic-videos-and-incitement-how-the-idf-is-misleading-israelis-on-telegram/0000018c-5ab5-df2f-adac-febd01c30000