14 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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Broadway’s K-pop musical showed how hard it is to create internet fame

A Broadway musical tried to court extremely online fans of artists like BTS and Blackpink. It didn’t quite succeed.

Monica Chin
Nilay Patel
Nilay Patel
Mark Zuckerberg says Reels is about half as big as TikTok.

Zuck is speaking at The New York Times’ DealBook conference today, and said that Reels is growing, according to Meta’s internal metrics.

It’s hard to track how we’re doing against TikTok, but metrics suggest Reels is half the time of TikTok globally, outside of China. We don’t aspire to be half of anything but that’s better than we were a year ago.

That’s quite a bit different than the picture painted by The Wall Street Journal in September: it reported on internal Meta docs that indicated Reels usage on Instagram was less than one-tenth the size of TikTok.

Alex Cranz
Alex Cranz
Social media managers rejoice! Instagram is finally letting you schedule posts.

Business and creator accounts can now schedule posts up to 75 days out in the app itself. Scheduling tends to be the number one feature people managing social accounts ask for—as they don’t really want to be working on Christmas just to post that cute Reel they recorded weeks ago. Hopefully one day this feature will arrive for the rest of us.

Jacob Kastrenakes
Jacob Kastrenakes
Instagram improved its blocking tools.

When you block someone, you can now block all accounts they currently have (or may make in the future). Meta says this should lead to just a bit less manual blocking... like, say, 4 million fewer manual blocks per week.

Instagram’s word blocking feature is also getting updated to catch more intentional m1ssp3llings of words meant to avoid filtering. Plus, they’ll catch story replies now, too.

The black market for blue checksThe black market for blue checks
Shubham Agarwal
Mitchell Clark
Mitchell Clark
Who’s behind those deeply upsetting Facebook ads?

Forbes has done a deep-dive into the sometimes explicit and disturbing Facebook and Instagram ads for erotic fiction apps, and the connections those companies have to ByteDance and Tencent.

The piece also looks into how Meta’s failing to uphold its guidelines. Some of the examples in the report are very disturbing, and it’s hard to believe they were ever allowed to run.

How platforms turn boringHow platforms turn boring
Russell Brandom