Meta just agreed to make sweeping changes for teens as part of a child safety settlement reached with attorneys general across the US. Under the agreement, Meta must apply new safeguards across Instagram and Facebook that will change how teens interact with the social media platforms, as well as restrict their use during certain times.
My colleague Paresh Dave and I each spent a day in federal court in Oakland, California, this week, monitoring the latest Meta child safety trial. In case you missed it in the spring, Meta (along with YouTube) lost a landmark social media case in California, in which a jury found the companies liable for harming
In her opening arguments Megan O’Neill, a lead attorney for California, relied heavily on information found in millions of documents provided in the case from Meta. They included internal research, employee emails, and chat logs that went all the way up to Zuckerberg. One piece of internal research on Instagram stated: “Teens have an addict’s
Today I’m talking to Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor. Everywhere you go, people say they don’t trust the media — and yet they’ve never consumed more of it. Audiences have moved on from legacy names in favor of Substacks and podcasts and TikTok news influencers that seem to be everywhere in our feeds. Why
“Like” counts, for instance, have been part of Meta since its early years, when it was still called Facebook and that was its only platform. Today, likes are omnipresent on social media platforms. It is the main way in which people engage with text, photos and videos they see online. Yet, likes are increasingly viewed
Depending on your perspective, Zyzz can be regarded as the original “looksmaxxer”—though the term had yet to be coined—or one of the earliest forefathers of the manosphere as we know it today. “I really see this as a cautionary tale,” Poster Boy’s director, Selina Miles, tells WIRED. She notes that Shavershian’s meteoric rise and untimely
