The internet has been transformed by social media, and the many platforms are now critical to how we communicate online. The Verge keeps a close eye on everything that’s happening in the social media landscape, covering key players like Meta, X, and TikTok, reporting on new features, following cultural moments, and breaking down the policies that shape how the platforms work.
Trump Media announced the plan earlier this month for paid, real-time access to its most influential accounts. Today the API went live, with subscriptions as high as $100,000 per month. Other platforms offer similar API services, but none of those count the sitting US president as its most influential user and its largest shareholder.
The Senate Commerce Committee will vote on five kids safety bills including KOSA, which passed the chamber last Congress but didn’t get a vote in the House. This year, the House has pushed its own version of the bill that stripped the key duty of care, setting up a fight.
[U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation]
Scott Carney and Taylor Lorenz posted on Substack about downward subscriber trends they’re seeing. Carney pins it on subscription fatigue and feeling like “The only way to grow is to pillage the paid subscribers from other creators.” Lorenz questions Substack’s direction, saying “more and more like this app is becoming another social media feed.”
When we recently wrote about writers who are leaving Substack, they mentioned control, pricing, and the social feature creep among their reasons for choosing competitors like Ghost and Behiiv.
How TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube copied their way to victory.
Starting next week, Meta’s Family Center will have options for parents to adjust their teens’ Threads account privacy and content settings, similar to parental controls on Meta’s other apps.
Parents will also be able to see and limit how much time their teens spend on Threads and manage who can tag their teens.
X says the new version of the app, rolling out starting today, is “faster, smoother, and more reliable,” with better scrolling, loading, and notifications. Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, called it “one of the largest engineering projects in the company’s history,” but warned users that “There are still some rough edges.”
Judge James Boasberg temporarily blocked a State Department policy restricting visas to foreign officials who “demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies.” Boasberg wrote that a group representing tech researchers could likely prove it violates the First Amendment by categorizing research as “foreign censorship” based on viewpoint.
[CourtListener]
Toni Schneider took over on an interim basis in March, but said in a blog post that “the interim part of the title is gone” now. He also said that the platform is working on “the ability to create smaller spaces and more private communities” in the AT Protocol ecosystem, aka the Atmosphere — something Bluesky has been talking about for a little while.
According to a Pew Research poll, 56 percent of American adults support banning social media for anyone under 16. A majority support it across almost every demographic — Democrats, Republicans, parents, non-parents — except among those over 65, where 49 percent of respondents agreed, but just 19 percent opposed a ban.
Any “champions” in a Threads community can now make and host live chats, and live chats can have up to three co-hosts. If you want to share a post in a live chat to your main Threads feed, you’ll be able to do that, too.
Threads launched live chats in April.
The maximum penalty for social media providers that fail to keep under-16’s off their platforms is now 99 million AUD (about $68.2 million), double the original. It follows a study suggesting more than 80 percent of under-16s are still using social media in Australia. In a statement, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said:
“It’s clear big tech are not doing enough to comply with the law – there are still too many children on social media.”
Patreon’s Jack Conte on the future of the creator economy and why he doesn’t “want to make better cigarettes.”
While on his “The World’s First World Tour” with plans to play on all seven continents, the vocalist, producer, filmmaker, and professional scooter rider was one of six people killed after two helicopters collided over Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. O Globo reports that after the crash on Sunday, one of the helicopters fell into an electric car dealership’s parking lot, sparking a fire that burned dozens of cars.
The feature is rolling out now and supports groups of up to 50 people, but you still can’t send pictures or videos in Bluesky’s DMs. Yesterday, Bluesky also announced a “communities” feature it’s planning to add later this year that will offer smaller public or private spaces with their own feeds, like a subreddit.
Kids aged 13 to 15 will only be able to create, save, and post Spotlight videos and Stories “on a dedicated profile that is visible only to their mutually accepted friends,” Snap announced on Wednesday. These more private profiles also won’t show metrics like favorite counts.
The National Gallery of Art’s social videos are outrageously Gen Z — and excellent. (They even won a Webby.)
Internal documents, which were disclosed as part of a wave of child safety lawsuits filed by school districts across the US, showed:
Snapchat sent phone alerts to adolescents during school hours, urging them to share what was going on in their classrooms.
Meta paid “teen ambassadors” to promote Instagram and hand out swag to their friends at school.
TikTok gave the National PTA millions of dollars, in part to throw school events about online safety and provide favorable comments to journalists.
While it’s unclear what Bluesky wants to turn into, the company is “very inspired by companies like Reddit,” COO Rose Wang tells CNBC.
Wang also says that Bluesky needs to “get to parity on video features” — and earlier today, the platform announced that video uploads can now be as big as 300MB.
