social media – The News Desk

Airchat Is Silicon Valley’s Latest Obsession

16Apr

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Technology

Airchat Is Silicon Valley’s Latest Obsession

Ravikant said most of the funding for Airchat has come from his own fund, as well as from Jeff Fagnan, a founding partner at Accomplice Ventures. “[OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman threw in a check, kind of blindly,” Ravikant said. He communicated all of this to me in a public response on Airchat, after politely declining to respond to my DMs and insisting our conversation should happen in public. “It can’t be a side-channel, DM-based interview. That’s the old world that we are leaving behind,” he told me. (In the old world, as in the new world, conducting an interview synchronously is almost always … preferable.)So far the Airchat feed appears to be filled with tech enthusiasts, early adopters, venture capitalists, and journalists. There’s lots of Bitcoin posting. Winefluencer Gary Vaynerchuk is o...

Donald Trump Poses a Unique Threat To Truth Social, Says Truth Social

15Apr

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Technology

Donald Trump Poses a Unique Threat To Truth Social, Says Truth Social

Trump Media & Technology Group, the Truth Social parent company majority-owned by former president Donald Trump, filed a document with the Securities and Exchange Commission this morning that helpfully details all of the ways Trump himself poses a threat to the company and its shareholders. While the company generated just over $4 million in revenue in 2023, Trump Media’s valuation has fluctuated wildly since going public in March, at one point reaching more than $7 billion. As of this morning, the company was valued at $3.7 billion. Trump Media has become a meme stock, where the stock price is governed more by vibes than traditional financial performance.The SEC document filed by Trump Media this morning, which announced the public stock offering of 21.5 million shares, also detailed...

Bluesky now allows heads of state to join the platform

14Apr

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Technology

Bluesky now allows heads of state to join the platform

Now that Bluesky has opened itself up to the public and , the team’s decided it’s finally time to allow world leaders on board, too. A post from the official account on Friday notified users, “By the way... we lifted our ‘no heads of state’ policy.” The policy has been in place for the last year as Bluesky worked through all the early growing pains of being a budding social network.Bluesky remained an invite-only platform from its launch in February 2023 until February of this year, when it finally ditched the waitlist. had said last May that it wasn’t ready for heads of state to join, and even asked users to give its support team notice “before you invite prominent figures.” It’s since grown to more than 5 million users, alone in the day after it stopped requiring invite codes. ...

12Apr

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Entertainment

The Dumbphone Boom Is Real

Will Stults spent too much time on his iPhone, doom-scrolling the site formerly known as Twitter and tweeting angrily at Elon Musk as if the billionaire would actually notice. Stults’s partner, Daisy Krigbaum, was addicted to Pinterest and YouTube, bingeing videos on her iPhone before going to sleep. Two years ago, they both tried Apple’s Screen Time restriction tool and found it too easy to disable, so the pair decided to trade out their iPhones for more low-tech devices. They’d heard about so-called dumbphones, which lacked the kinds of bells and whistles—a high-resolution screen, an app store, a video camera—that made smartphones so addictive. But they found the process of acquiring one hard to navigate. “The information on it was kind of disparate and hard to get to. A lot of people w...

Meta tests new auto-blur tool and other features on Instagram designed to fight sextortion

11Apr

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Money

Meta tests new auto-blur tool and other features on Instagram designed to fight sextortion

Meta is trying out new tools on its Instagram platform to combat the sexual extortion of teens, including a feature that will automatically blur photos containing nudity in direct messages.The social media company announced in a blog post Thursday that new features, including the auto-blur technology, are part of a campaign to fight sexual scams and make it tougher for criminals to contact teens. "This feature is designed not only to protect people from seeing unwanted nudity in their DMs, but also to protect them from scammers who may send nude images to trick people into sending their own images in return," the company said. Meta also owns Facebook and WhatsApp but the nudity-blur feature won't be added to those platforms.Sexual extortion, or sextorti...

The Hacking Lawsuit Looming Over Truth Social

10Apr

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Technology

The Hacking Lawsuit Looming Over Truth Social

Then, according to the Florida suit, Swider used Orlando’s stolen Mailchimp account credentials and listserv to send an email to ARC II investors in the Truth Social deal on March 5, attacking Orlando’s management of ARC II and DWAC, and his involvement in a separate lawsuit filed against DWAC the previous month.“Mr. Orlando’s leadership has guided our common interests with DWAC directly into the arms of the SEC, the DOJ, lengthy delays and costly investigations,” Swider wrote. “By filing this lawsuit against DWAC, Mr. Orlando is destroying the value that may be realized upon consummation of the business combination by the Company and its members.”Swider then invited fellow investors to join him on a series of Zoom calls to “understand our risk exposure based on leadership that continues ...

10Apr

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Technology

Pop Music Is Mad. Social Media Loves It

Not everyone is buying it. Despite the study’s findings, “I don’t believe hip-hop lyrics are more angry,” says Dame Aubrey, head of A&R for CMG Records and Management, a music label that represents rappers Moneybagg Yo, BlocBoy JB, and GloRilla. If anything, Aubrey says, what changes we do hear are a product of how music has expanded. It’s simple, Aubrey says: more people, more perspectives. The medium is more accessible now because of the technology available. “There’s just a lot more artists with opportunities to be heard because it basically became a trend to make music.”One major adjustment in all of this is the mechanics of how a song gets popular, and what its popularity generates.In the age of social media, that can often translate into more of the same kinds of sounds, althoug...

9Apr

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Technology

Welcome to the Age of Technofeudalism

The tech giants have overthrown capitalism. That’s the argument of former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who became famous trying to defend debt-laden Greece from its German creditors. Varoufakis has never quite regained the notoriety of 2015. But he has remained a prominent left-wing voice. After a failed campaign for a seat in the European Parliament in 2019, he plans to run again this June. This time, his adversary isn’t Berlin or the banks. It’s the tech companies he accuses of warping the economy while turning people against one other.Courtesy of Penguin Random HouseVaroufakis is also a prolific author; his 17th book, written as a letter to his techno-curious father, chronicles the evolution of capitalism from the 1960s advertising boom, through Wall Street in the 1980s, to...

Brazil Supreme Court investigating Elon Musk over obstruction, disinformation on X

8Apr

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Money

Brazil Supreme Court investigating Elon Musk over obstruction, disinformation on X

A crusading Brazilian Supreme Court justice included Elon Musk as a target in an ongoing investigation over the dissemination of fake news and opened a separate investigation late Sunday into the executive for alleged obstruction.In his decision, Justice Alexandre de Moraes noted that Musk on Saturday began waging a public "disinformation campaign" regarding the top court's actions, and that Musk continued the following day — most notably with comments that his social media company X would cease to comply with the court's orders to block certain accounts."The flagrant conduct of obstruction of Brazilian justice, incitement of crime, the public threat of disobedience of court orders and future lack of cooperation from the platform are facts that disrespect the sovereignty of Brazil," de Mo...

Trump’s Social-Media Potemkin Village | The New Yorker

5Apr

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Entertainment

Trump’s Social-Media Potemkin Village | The New Yorker

Last Tuesday, the day of Truth Social’s I.P.O., under the ticker symbol DJT, the social-media company co-founded by Donald Trump reached a short-lived market capitalization of more than six billion dollars. To put things in perspective, that figure puts the platform on par with such unglamorous mid-range technology businesses as Chewy, an online pet-food purveyor, and Klaviyo, an e-mail-marketing company. But even those companies have been around for more than a decade and bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. Truth Social, in contrast, is notable for the gaping incongruity between its spiking valuation and the paltry reality of its product. The concept of a Trump-driven social-media platform emerged in 2021 after he was banned from Twitter and Facebook in the wake o...