Social Media

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:

While it’s unclear what Bluesky wants to turn into, the company is “very inspired by companies like Reddit,” COO Rose Wang tells CNBC.

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.