Google has shut down the Tenor API, breaking GIF pickers in services that still relied on it and forcing platforms such as X to migrate elsewhere. 9to5Google notes that the library itself remains available at Tenor.com and "integrations within Google products are also still active, including Gboard, Google Messages, and more." From the report: The Tenor API has been rejecting new API sign-ups in January of this year, but existing integrations remained in place. This week, though, they're shutting down, and any integrations that remain in place will stop working on July 1. The support page adds details that "any API or Ads Distribution Agreements" with Tenor will be terminated on June 30, while "current integrations" will be "fully decommissioned" as of June 30.

One of the most notable examples here is Twitter/X, which has relied on Tenor for its GIF picker for years. Twitter/X Head of Product Nikita Bier confirmed that the platform has migrated elsewhere, which is why the "recently used" section was purged, and why you might notice fewer GIF options when posting. Other platforms affected include Discord, WhatsApp, and Bluesky.

In an exit interview with The Financial Times (paywalled), former Disney CEO Bob Iger says the company seriously considered buying Twitter, explored a potential merger with Apple, and pursued the James Bond franchise during his tenure. The Verge reports: According to Iger, Disney came close to buying Twitter from co-founder Jack Dorsey "at a very attractive price," sometime prior to Elon Musk buying the social media platform in 2022 and changing its name to X. Iger had plans to turn Twitter into a global distribution platform for Disney, but walked away on the morning of the deal over concerns that it would be "a horrible distraction."

Disney was also at one point involved in early conversations regarding a potential merger with Apple, something Iger thinks would have been "truly transformational." In the end, Iger says these conversations "never went anywhere," and that "Apple didn't show that much interest." The two companies have a mixed history -- Iger was an Apple board member from 2011 to 2019, and notably a driving force behind Disney acquiring Pixar in 2006, which was led by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs at the time. According to Iger, his first call with Jobs resulted in an almost immediate deal to put Disney content on the first video iPod. "All of a sudden, I'm now someone Steve likes and respects," Iger told The Financial Times. "The old Disney that he knew was lumbering in terms of bureaucracy. And so he thought, this is a new day."

The Pixar acquisition spurred Iger to find more companies to bring under Disney's wing, though not every attempt was successful. "We felt unstoppable. We put together a list of acquisition targets," said Iger. "Marvel was one, Star Wars was another, James Bond was one. We had a list and I figured let's just tick them off and buy them all." Iger provides no details about Disney's attempt to buy the James Bond franchise, but we know it obviously failed -- Amazon bought the 007 distribution rights when it acquired MGM in 2022, and later paid more than $1 billion to take full creative control of the franchise in February 2025.

PC Gamer reports: The UK government is considering an Australia-style ban on social media for under-16s, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer saying that the ban could take effect as soon as spring next year. As for the much nearer future, Science and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall told BBC Breakfast earlier this week, "We will make further statements in July about VPNs and further restrictions."

To be clear, no specific restrictions have yet been announced and Kendall sounded somewhat cautious about an outright ban during a parliament debate that took place the same day. "I have commissioned further research about their usage. There are really important issues to balance here," she says. "Many people want to use VPNs for privacy — that is important — but we know that some children use them to get around restrictions. I will come back to that in July in our response to the consultation." So, we'll have to wait until next month for anything definite, but it's hard not to feel like a full ban on VPNs is already on the table. If that does come to pass, more than the contents of my Bluesky inbox will be at stake.

Utah in the US has already tried to implement a full VPN ban (though this was postponed until September after Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub, challenged the law in court)... [T]he UK could just be the next domino after Utah, potentially setting off a chain reaction that affects users around the world.
The article also argues that age checks can also be a privacy nightmare "with the security breach that exposed the personal info of 70,000 Discord users last year being one case in point."

Here's the complete statement from UK Technology Secretary Kendall. "I'll come back in July with a further statement around VPNs but also additional measures that we want to look at, further restrictions on AI chatbots that parents have found very worrying, more about overnight curfews or breaks in doomscrolling for 16- and 17-year-olds."

Bluesky's chief operating officer believes teen social media bans "risk entrenching Big Tech's dominance," reports CNBC: Rose Wang, Bluesky's chief operating officer, told CNBC on the sidelines of SXSW in London on Wednesday that the smaller open-source platform isn't opposed to regulation but that smaller players in the industry should be protected. "I support the protection and the safety of youth... The question that we have then is at what cost? Because essentially what I'm scared of is in the long term, we're headed to a world where there's about three to five platforms, and extreme heavy regulation of those platforms...

"Basically the whole compliance teams of these platforms are 10 times the size of our entire team," Wang said. "So, basically, we're living in a world where it's almost impossible for smaller entrants to come in and build healthier spaces."
The article notes Bluesky had grown to 43 million users as of March, "which is still only around 10% of X's estimated 450 million users. Bluesky has struggled to maintain popularity, and by the end of October last year, it had reportedly seen a 40% drop in daily mobile active users over the past 12 months."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Bloomberg: More than three years after acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk says he's nearing his long-stated goal of turning it into an "everything app" with a new financial services tool that he pledged to launch for the public this month... Early users testing the service have touted competitive perks, including 3% cash back on eligible purchases and a 6% interest rate on cash savings — the latter of which is roughly 15 times the national average. Musk's new product is also expected to offer free peer-to-peer transfers, a metal Visa debit card personalised with a user's X handle, and an AI concierge built by Musk's xAI startup that tracks spending and sorts through past transactions, according to reports from users with early access.

Musk, who first rose to prominence in Silicon Valley by co-founding PayPal Holdings Inc, sees payments as crucial to creating a so-called super app similar to social products that have flourished in China. WeChat, for example, lets users hail a ride, book a flight and pay off their credit card... If it works, X Money would sit at the intersection of social media and finance in a way no American product has attempted at this scale... Creators who currently receive payments from X for engagement will be switched from Stripe to X Money as their payment platform, according to early users — a move that guarantees an initial base of active accounts. Some have already been testing X Money to send payments to one another through the app's chat feature or directly through their profiles, according to early participants in the rollout...

X currently holds licences in 44 states, according to its website, and likely won't be able to operate in states where it hasn't obtained a licence.

It's "the curious case of... the Pokémon Go pro who celebrated too hard," reports the gaming news site Aftermath. It all started on the first weekend in April... Firestar73, a competitive Pokémon Go player who placed seventh at last year's world championships, managed to narrowly cinch a game-five finals win at the 2026 Pokémon Orlando Regional Championships after battling his way out of the dreaded losers' bracket. As stress and adrenaline gave way to relief, Firestar73 stood up from his chair, threw off his headphones, raised his arms in a sort of victorious flexing motion, and then fist pumped for good measure. Immediately afterward, he politely shook his opponent's hand... [T]he tournament's staff went on to deem Firestar73's conduct "unsportsmanlike" and stripped him of his win.
"After weeks of fans flooding The Pokémon Company's social channels to demand a repeal of the ruling, the company has finally issued a statement," reports Kotaku. "Spoilers: It will not be reverting its decision." Their official statement? "[D]uring game one of the bracket reset series, a player was issued a Warning for the action of hitting and shaking the table during gameplay. Actions such as these can have a negative impact on the experience of participants and disturb the match in progress. Then, during game five, this same player's behavior continued to be disruptive, including shaking the table to the point that there was a disruption to the broadcast experience. These repeated infractions resulted in a penalty that was escalated to Game Loss. "
Meanwhile, Aftermath now reports, Firestar73 "has disputed Play! Pokémon's account of events entirely "The 'incident' you are now, for the first time, claiming was the basis of the decision did not affect the gameplay at all, yet decided the whole tournament," he wrote on Twitter. "Section 2.1 requires a 'clear explanation of any infraction and its penalty,' and I was never given this as the basis at all."

NiteTimeClasher, who won the tournament by disqualification, doesn't seem pleased either. "Was not my decision," he appears to have written in a Pokémon Discord. "Firestar is the Orlando regional champion. Hope you all understand." Others have attempted to divine what the company meant by a "disruption to the broadcast experience," and what they've found doesn't look all that severe.

Not long after Play! Pokémon handed down its edict, one judge who was not involved in this particular match, Professor Rex, publicly voiced his outrage. "As a judge I'm not supposed to discuss ruling[s] publicly," he wrote. "However, I also believe that as a judge my job is to give players a fair space to compete. If a player in a high stakes battle can lose out on thousands of dollars for shaking the table, what kind of space have we built? If the table can't handle the intensity of the competition, that's not the players' fault. I've judged multiple Go regionals, [and] I just can't support how this was handled."

After posting internal correspondence meant for judges and asking "some questions they didn't like" in the Discord for those who judge and otherwise help out at Pokémon events, Rex was banned from the Discord. That's when, to the extent they had not already, things spun out of control. Rex went on to share judges' personal information in a perhaps-misguided attempt at forcing transparency, which caused other judges — some of whom mostly agreed with him — to call him out and take issue with his conduct. As of now, almost no one is happy.

After nearly 20 years on the platform, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says it is leaving X. "This isn't a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue," the digital rights group said. "The math hasn't worked out for a while now." From the report: We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago. [...]

When you go online, your rights should go with you. X is no longer where the fight is happening. The platform Musk took over was imperfect but impactful. What exists today is something else: diminished, and increasingly de minimis.

EFF takes on big fights, and we win. We do that by putting our time, skills, and our members' support where they will effect the most change. Right now, that means Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and eff.org. We hope you follow us there and keep supporting the work we do. Our work protecting digital rights is needed more than ever before, and we're here to help you take back control.

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down after overseeing the platform's growth from a Twitter research project into a 40-million-user alternative to X. "As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things," Graber wrote in a statement.

She will be transitioning to a new Chief Innovation Officer role while Venture capitalist Toni Schneider will serve as interim CEO until the board searches for a permanent replacement. Wired reports: Graber joined Bluesky in 2019, when it was a research project within Twitter focused on developing a decentralized framework for the social web. She became the company's first chief executive officer in 2021, when it spun out into an independent entity. She oversaw the platform's remarkable rise and the growing pains it experienced as it transformed from a quirky Twitter offshoot to a full-fledged alternative to X. Schneider tells WIRED that he intends to help Bluesky "become not just the best open social app, but the foundation for a whole new generation of user-owned networks."

Schneider, who will continue working as a partner at the venture capital firm True Ventures while at Bluesky, was previously CEO of the Wordpress parent company, Automattic, from 2006 to 2014. He also served as its CEO again in 2024 while top executive Matt Mullenweg went on a sabbatical. During that time, Schneider met Graber and became an adviser to Bluesky's leadership. In a blog post announcing his new role, Schneider said he plans to emphasize scaling, describing his job as "to help set up Bluesky's next phase of growth."

This isn't the end for Graber and Bluesky. She will transition to become the company's chief innovation officer, a role focused on Bluesky's technology stack rather than its business operations. The position was created for her. Graber, who began her career as a software engineer, has always sounded the most enthusiastic when discussing Bluesky's technology rather than its revenue streams. Bluesky's board of directors will appoint the next permanent CEO. The members include Jabber founder Jeremie Miller, crypto-focused VC Kinjal Shah, TechDirt founder Mike Masnick, and Graber. (Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was originally part of the board but quit in 2024.) This means Graber will have input on her successor. The talent search is still in early stages.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei is not happy -- perhaps predictably so -- with OpenAI chief Sam Altman. In a memo to staff, reported by The Information, Amodei referred to OpenAI's dealings with the Department of Defense as "safety theater." "The main reason [OpenAI] accepted [the DoD's deal] and we did not is that they cared about placating employees, and we actually cared about preventing abuses," Amodei wrote.

Last week, Anthropic and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) failed to come to an agreement over the military's request for unrestricted access to the AI company's technology. Anthropic, which already had a $200 million contract with the military, insisted the DoD affirm that it would not use the company's AI to enable domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry. Instead, the DoD -- known under the Trump administration as the Department of War -- struck a deal with OpenAI. Altman stated that his company's new defense contract would include protections against the same red lines that Anthropic had asserted.

In a letter to staff, Amodei refers to OpenAI's messaging as "straight up lies," stating that Altman is falsely "presenting himself as a peacemaker and dealmaker." Amodei might not be speaking solely from a position of bitterness, here. Anthropic specifically took issue with the DoD's insistence on the company's AI being available for "any lawful use." [...] "I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAI's deal with the DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes (we're #2 in the App Store now!)," Amodei wrote to his staff. "It is working on some Twitter morons, which doesn't matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn't work on OpenAI employees."

India's IT services giants have spent decades deploying, customizing, and maintaining the world's largest enterprise software platforms, putting hundreds of thousands of engineers in daily contact with the business logic and proprietary architectures of vendors like SAP and Oracle. None of them have built a competing product that gained meaningful traction against the U.S. incumbents, HSBC said in a note to clients, using this history to argue AI-generated code faces the same structural barriers.

The bank's analysts contend that enterprise software competition turns on factors that have little to do with the ability to write code -- sales teams, cross-licensing agreements, patented IP, first-mover lock-in, brand awareness, and go-to-market infrastructure. If a massive, low-cost, domain-expert workforce couldn't crack the market over several decades, HSBC argues, the idea that AI-generated code will do so is, in the words of Nvidia's Jensen Huang that the report approvingly cites, "illogical."

"We will make the new ð algorithm...open source in 7 days," Elon Musk posted Saturday on X.com. Musk says this is "including all code used to determine what organic and advertising posts are recommended to users," and "This will be repeated every 4 weeks, with comprehensive developer notes, to help you understand what changed."

Some context from Engadget: Musk has been making promises of open-sourcing the algorithm since his takeover of Twitter, and in 2023 published the code for the site's "For You" feed on GitHub. But the code wasn't all that revealing, leaving out key details, according to analyses at the time. And it hasn't been kept up to date.
Bloomberg also reported on Saturday's announcement: The billionaire didn't say why X was making its algorithm open source. He and the company have clashed several times with regulators over content being shown to users.

Some X users had previously complained that they were receiving fewer posts on the social media platform from people they follow. In October, Musk confirmed in a post on X that the company had found a "significant bug" in the platform's "For You" algorithm and pledged a fix. The company has also been working to incorporate more artificial intelligence into its recommendation algorithm for X, using Grok, Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot...

In September, Musk wrote that the goal was for X's recommendation engine to "be purely AI" and that the company would share its open source algorithm about every two weeks. "To the degree that people are seeing improvements in their feed, it is not due to the actions of specific individuals changing heuristics, but rather increasing use of Grok and other AI tools," Musk wrote in October. The company was working to have all of the more than 100 million daily posts published to X evaluated by Grok, which would then offer individual users the posts most likely to interest them, Musk wrote. "This will profoundly improve the quality of your feed." He added that the company was planning to roll out the new features by November.

A founder of Twitter and a founder of Pinterest are now working on "social media for people who hate social media," writes a Washington Post columnist.

"When I heard that this platform would harness AI to help us live more meaningful lives, I wanted to know more..." Their bid for redemption is West Co. — the Workshop for Emotional and Spiritual Technology Corporation — and the platform they're testing is called Tangle, a "purpose discovery tool" that uses AI to help users define their life purposes, then encourages them to set intentions toward achieving those purposes, reminds them periodically and builds a community of supporters to encourage steps toward meeting those intentions. "A lot of people, myself included, have been on autopilot," Stone said. "If all goes well, we'll introduce a lot of people to the concept of turning off autopilot."

But will all go well? The entrepreneurs have been at it for two years, and they've scrapped three iterations before even testing them. They still don't have a revenue model. "This is a really hard thing to do," Stone admitted. "If we were a traditional start-up, we would have probably been folded by now." But the two men, with a combined net worth of at least hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, had the luxury of self-funding for a year, and now they have $29 million in seed funding led by Spark Capital...

[T]he project revolves around training existing AI models in "what good intentions and helpful purposes look like," explained Long Cheng, the founding designer. When you join Tangle, which is invitation-only until this spring at the earliest, the AI peruses your calendar, examines your photos, asks you questions and then produces "threads," or categories that define your life purpose. You're free to accept, reject or change the suggestions. It then encourages you to make "intentions" toward achieving your threads, and to add "reflections" when you experience something meaningful in your life. Users then receive encouragement from friends, or "supporters." A few of the "threads" on Tangle are about personal satisfaction (traveler, connoisseur), but the vast majority involve causes greater than self: family (partner, parent, sibling), community (caregiver, connector, guardian), service (volunteer, advocate, healer) and spirituality (seeker, believer). Even the work-related threads (mentor, leader) suggest a higher purpose.
The column includes this caveat. "I have no idea whether they will succeed. But as a columnist writing about how to keep our humanity in the 21st century, I believe it's important to focus on people who are at least trying..."

"Quite possibly, West Co. and the various other enterprises trying to nudge technology in a more humane direction will find that it doesn't work socially or economically — they don't yet have a viable product, after all — but it would be a noble failure."

Artist Keith Thomson is a modern (and whimsical) Edward Hopper. And Apple TV says he created the "festive artwork" shared on X by Apple CEO Tim Cook on Christmas Eve, "made on MacBook Pro."

Its intentionally-off picture of milk and cookies was meant to tease the season finale of Pluribus. ("Merry Christmas Eve, Carol..." Cook had posted.)

But others were convinced that the weird image was AI-generated.

Tech blogger John Gruber was blunt. "Tim Cook posts AI Slop in Christmas message on Twitter/X, ostensibly to promote 'Pluribus'." As for sloppy details, the carton is labeled both "Whole Milk" and "Lowfat Milk", and the "Cow Fun Puzzle" maze is just goofily wrong. (I can't recall ever seeing a puzzle of any kind on a milk carton, because they're waxy and hard to write on. It's like a conflation of milk cartons and cereal boxes.)
Tech author Ben Kamens — who just days earlier had blogged about generating mazes with AI — said the image showed the "specific quirks" of generative AI mazes (including the way the maze couldn't be solved, expect by going around the maze altogether). Former Google Ventures partner M.G. Siegler even wondered if AI use intentionally echoed the themes of Pluribus — e.g., the creepiness of a collective intelligence — since otherwise "this seems far too obvious to be a mistake/blunder on Apple's part." (Someone on Reddit pointed out that in Pluribus's dystopian world, milk plays a key role — and the open spout of the "natural" milk's carton does touch a suspiciously-shining light on the Christmas tree...)

Slashdot contacted artist Keith Thomson to try to ascertain what happened...

A startup called Operation Bluebird is petitioning the US Patent and Trademark Office to strip X Corp of the "Twitter" and "tweet" trademarks, hoping to relaunch a new Twitter with the old brand, bird logo, and "town square" vibe. "The TWITTER and TWEET brands have been eradicated from X Corp.'s products, services, and marketing, effectively abandoning the storied brand, with no intention to resume use of the mark," the petition states. "The TWITTER bird was grounded." Ars Technica reports: If successful, two leaders of the group tell Ars, Operation Bluebird would launch a social network under the name Twitter.new, possibly as early as late next year. (Twitter.new has created a working prototype and is already inviting users to reserve handles.)

Michael Peroff, an Illinois attorney and founder of Operation Bluebird, said that in the intervening years, more Twitter-like social media networks have sprung up or gained traction -- like Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. But none have the scale or brand recognition that Twitter did prior to Musk's takeover. "There certainly are alternatives," Peroff said. "I don't know that any of them at this point in time are at the scale that would make a difference in the national conversation, whereas a new Twitter really could."

Similarly, Peroff's business partner, Stephen Coates, an attorney who formerly served as Twitter's general counsel, said that Operation Bluebird aims to recreate some of the magic that Twitter once had. "I remember some time ago, I've had celebrities react to my content on Twitter during the Super Bowl or events," he told Ars. "And we want that experience to come back, that whole town square, where we are all meshed in there." "Mere 'token use' won't be enough to reserve the mark," said Mark Lemley, a Stanford Law professor and expert in trademark law. "Or [X] could defend if it can show that it plans to go back to using Twitter. Consumers obviously still know the brand name. It seems weird to think someone else could grab the name when consumers still associate it with the ex-social media site of that name. But that's what the law says."

Wired published an article by California-based writer/programmer Sheon Han arguing that Ruby "is not a serious programming language."

Han believes that the world of programming has "moved on", and "everything Ruby does, another language now does better, leaving it without a distinct niche. Ruby is easy on the eyes. Its syntax is simple, free of semicolons or brackets. More so even thanPython — a language known for its readability — Ruby reads almost like plain English... Ruby, you might've guessed, is dynamically typed. Python and JavaScript are too, but over the years, those communities have developed sophisticated tools to make them behave more responsibly. None of Ruby's current solutions are on par with those. It's far too conducive to what programmers call "footguns," features that make it all too easy to shoot yourself in the foot.

Critically, Ruby's performance profile consistently ranks near the bottom (read: slowest) among major languages. You may remember Twitter's infamous "fail whale," the error screen with a whale lifted by birds that appeared whenever the service went down. You could say that Ruby was largely to blame. Twitter's collapse during the 2010 World Cup served as a wake-up call, and the company resolved to migrate its backend to Scala, a more robust language.

The move paid off: By the 2014 World Cup, Twitter handled a record 32 million tweets during the final match without an outage. Its new Scala-based backend could process up to 100 times faster than Ruby. In the 2010s, a wave of companies replaced much of their Ruby infrastructure, and when legacy Ruby code remained, new services were written in higher-performance languages.

You may wonderwhy people are still using Ruby in 2025. It survives because of its parasitic relationship with Ruby on Rails, the web framework that enabled Ruby's widespread adoption and continues to anchor its relevance.... Rails was the framework of choice for a new generation of startups. The main code bases of Airbnb, GitHub, Twitter, Shopify, and Stripe were built on it.
He points out on Stack Overflow's annual developer survey, Ruby has slipped from a top-10 technology in 2013 to #18 this year — "behind evenAssembly" — calling Ruby "a kind of professional comfort object, sustained by the inertia of legacy code bases and the loyalty of those who first imprinted upon it." But the article drew some criticism on X.com. ("You should do your next piece about how Vim isn't a serious editor and continue building your career around nerd sniping developers.")

Other reactions...

• "Maybe WIRED is just not a serious medium..."

• "FWIW — Ruby powered Shopify through another Black Friday / Cyber Monday — breaking last year's record."

• "Maybe you should have taken a look at TypeScript..."

Wired's subheading argues that Ruby "survives on affection, not utility. Let's move on." Are they right? Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments.

Is Ruby still a 'serious' programming language?

The CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, has argued that platforms like Steam should not label games that are made using AI. From a report: Responding to a post on Twitter from a user who suggested that storefronts drop this tag, the industry exec said that it "makes no sense" to flag such content. Sweeney added that soon AI will be a part of the way all games are made. "The AI tag is relevant to art exhibits for authorship disclosure, and to digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need to understand the rights situation," Sweeney said. "It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production."

Pew Research surveyed 5,022 Americans this year (between February 5 and June 18), asking them "do you ever use" YouTube, Facebook, and nine of the other top social media platforms. The results?

YouTube	84%
Facebook	71%
Instagram	50%
TikTok	37%
WhatsApp	32%
Reddit	26%
Snapchat	25%
X.com (formerly Twitter)	21%
Threads	8%
Bluesky	4%
Truth Social	3%

An announcement from Pew Research adds some trends and demographics: The Center has long tracked use of many of these platforms. Over the past few years, four of them have grown in overall use among U.S. adults — TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp and Reddit. 37% of U.S. adults report using TikTok, which is slightly up from last year and up from 21% in 2021. Half of U.S. adults now report using Instagram, which is on par with last year but up from 40% in 2021. About a third say they use WhatsApp, up from 23% in 2021. And 26% today report using Reddit, compared with 18% four years ago.

While YouTube and Facebook continue to sit at the top, the shares of Americans who report using them have remained relatively stable in recent years... YouTube and Facebook are the only sites asked about that a majority in all age groups use, though for YouTube, the youngest adults are still the most likely to do so. This differs from Facebook, where 30- to 49-year-olds most commonly say they use it (80%).
Other interesting statistics:

• "More than half of women report using Instagram (55%), compared with under half of men (44%). Alternatively, men are more likely to report using platforms such as X and Reddit."

• "Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are more likely to report using WhatsApp, Reddit, TikTok, Bluesky and Threads."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: As generative AI content starts to fill our social apps, a project to bring back Vine's six-second looping videos is launching with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's backing. On Thursday, a new app called diVine will give access to more than 100,000 archived Vine videos, restored from an older backup that was created before Vine's shutdown. The app won't just exist as a walk down memory lane; it will also allow users to create profiles and upload their own new Vine videos. However, unlike on traditional social media, where AI content is often haphazardly labeled, diVine will flag suspected generative AI content and prevent it from being posted. According to TechCrunch, a volunteer preservation group called the Archive Team saved Vine's content when it shut down in 2016. The only problem was that everything was stored in massive 40-50 GB binary blob files that were basically unusable for casual viewing.

Evan Henshaw-Plath (who goes by the name Rabble), an early Twitter employee and member of Jack Dorsey's nonprofit "and Other Stuff," dug into those backup files to try and salvage as much as he could. He spent months writing big-data extraction scripts, reverse-engineering how the archived binaries were structured, and reconstructing the original video files, old user info, view counts, and more. "I wasn't able to get all of them out, but I was able to get a lot out and basically reconstruct these Vines and these Vine users, and give each person a new user [profile] on this open network," he said.

Rabble estimates that through this process he was able to successfully recover 150,000-200,000 Vine videos from around 60,000 creators. diVine then rebuilt user profiles on top of the decentralized Nostr protocol so creators can reclaim their accounts, request takedowns, or upload missing videos.

You can check out the app for yourself at diVine.video. It's available in beta form on both iOS and Android.

Researchers from four universities have released a study revealing that AI models remain easily detectable in social media conversations despite optimization attempts. The team tested nine language models across Twitter/X, Bluesky and Reddit, developing classifiers that identified AI-generated replies at 70 to 80% accuracy rates. Overly polite emotional tone served as the most persistent indicator. The models consistently produced lower toxicity scores than authentic human posts across all three platforms.

Instruction-tuned models performed worse than their base counterparts at mimicking humans, and the 70-billion-parameter Llama 3.1 showed no advantage over smaller 8-billion-parameter versions. The researchers found a fundamental tension: models optimized to avoid detection strayed further from actual human responses semantically.

As it nears its 30th anniversary, Pitchfork is testing user reviews and comments in a major shift from its long-standing critic-only model. The site will now let readers rate albums and leave comments, combining those into an aggregated "reader score" alongside the official Pitchfork score. The Verge reports: Pitchfork has historically been a one-sided affair. While it ran the occasional reader poll, there was no way for readers to directly voice their opinion on the site. If you thought that Jet's Shine On deserved better than a 0.0 (first off, you're wrong), there was no way to let the author know other than shouting into the void of this new thing at the time called Twitter. Now the site is considering letting users comment directly on reviews and give albums scores of their own. And then those scores will be averaged up into a single reader score for each album.