Social Media

The @obamawhitehouse account briefly showed images of Iranian propaganda, which have since been taken down, as spotted earlier by TMZ. The account belonging to the US Space Force Chief Master Sergeant was also hijacked.

Links from sites that utilize the standard.site schema — which, at a high level, lets users people blog posts on the AT Protocol — will include things like the publication’s name, an estimated reading time, and a call to action in Bluesky posts. Bluesky itself is built on the AT Protocol, so this is a cool integration of initiatives.

Here’s a very fun thing I just got to do: the first-ever federated Verge quickpost! You should be able to see this on The Verge or lots of platforms, and reply here and there and everywhere. The open social future rocks. (But also, just, like, tell me if you saw this, okay? We’re testing stuff.)

Hijacked accounts include those of people who are “influential in their fields, though perhaps not famous,” like journalists and professors, according to The New York Times.

Unverified users only need to worry if they’re making more than 50 original posts and 200 replies per day, compared to the previous limit of 2,400 daily posts. This move is presumably trying to tackle bot accounts, since 50 posts is far more than most people will use.

A new investigation by the New York Times has discovered that social media influencers are collecting tens, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, to back candidates, endorse policies, and attack political enemies. But where that money is coming from isn’t clear, and campaigns are embracing the secrecy.

The reader, which already lets you track things like RSS feeds and podcasts, can now serve as a hub to track your Bluesky/AT Proto and Mastodon feeds, too. Over the second half of this month, the team is working on adding features like a shared composer to make posts across networks.

For more than an hour on Friday, many people were having trouble connecting to Discord, with the platform showing a message saying that there were “increased API errors.” Discord confirmed it was investigating issues at 3:08PM ET, and by 6:38PM ET, it reported that all “critical functionalities have recovered for all users.”

Less than two months after shutting down its open beta relaunch and downsizing its team, Digg has launched a new version at di.gg. This updated version of the platform, instead of functioning similar to Reddit, is more like an online sentiment tracker. Right now, it’s focused only on tracking AI news, but “it’s going to be all the things,” according to Kevin Rose.

Earlier this week I wrote about the social media “clippers” that get paid to semi-covertly promote podcasts, TV shows, and other media through anonymous accounts. One of the clipping campaigns was for Perplexity AI — but nobody can tell me who, exactly, is responsible for the clips:

That’s what one actor said after a micro drama she starred in was promoted using AI clips of her in underwear. Multiple actors have had similar experiences, including ads featuring nude scenes and threesomes that they never shot. In the age of The Clippening, it doesn’t always matter if the content being clipped is real or not.

Did those influencers in your Instagram feed go to Coachella, and do they even exist in real life? Creators can voluntarily add a new label to their account if they frequently post AI-generated or modified content starting on Monday.

The platform, built on the decentralized Nostr protocol and launched initially last year, “preserves archived videos from the Internet Archive” (it says it has “restored access” to about 500,000 Vines) and lets users post new ones. Despite today’s launch on app stores, it’s currently invite-only, according to a blog post.

As Reuters reports, Norwegian Prime ​Minister Jonas Gahr Støre announced plans for a bill barring teens from social media until “January 1st the year a child turns 16,” similar to Australia’s.

This hub holds certain settings that work across Meta’s apps and allows for using a single password for access across all accounts and managing passkeys.

The platform has doubled the maximum file size to 2MB, and the resolution limit has been upped to 4000x4000. There are photo carousels now, too.

When you’re in a Threads Community’s live chat, you can talk with real time with other users about what’s going on. For the NBA playoffs, the NBA Threads Community will be hosting some live chats to follow games. Live chats will come to other Community feeds in the coming months, Meta says.

As a result, users have been experiencing “intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads and search,” Bluesky says. The company first got a report of “intermittent app outages” at around 2:40AM ET this morning.

A new “Messages” tab appears in this preview of its redesigned web layout that head of Threads, Connor Hayes, posted on Thursday, as Engadget reports.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the open-source, cross-platform European Age Verification Solution it has been testing will be available publicly soon, reports Bloomberg. She said it is “completely anonymous,” using a passport or ID card to verify age for access to online services, with accuracy that complies with EU child-protection regulations.

Digital privacy non-profit the Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced it’s leaving X, citing a sharp decline in views for its posts. With EFF off the platform, some commenters agree with the organization’s thinking.

Now that a jury has ruled against Meta and YouTube in a landmark trial, the sharks are circling, and what better place to find potential clients than on those social media platforms? The only problem is that Axios reports Meta pulled “more than a dozen” such ads from firms like Morgan & Morgan and Sokolove Law on Thursday.

Outage reports have gone up and down on Downdetector today, and my feed occasionally hasn’t loaded. Bluesky says the issue, which it blamed on an upstream service provider, “appears” to have been fixed, but users have taken the problems as a chance to poke fun at unpopular comments from the Bluesky team about vibe coding.