Experts say dangerous injuries can occur as videos of people falling off precariously stacked crates go viral on social mediaThe latest challenge to take the internet by storm involves milk crates, balance and some painful falls.In the milk crate chall…
Messenger celebrates its 10th anniversary with new features and a plan to become the ‘connective tissue’ for real-time experiences
To celebrate its ten year anniversary, Messenger today announced a handful of new features: poll games, word effects, contact sharing, and birthday gifting via Facebook Pay. But beyond the fun features, Facebook has been testing a way to add voice and video calls back into the Facebook app, rather than on Messenger. “We are testing […]
NBA All-Star Chris Paul joins digital media startup Greenfly’s growth round
Greenfly is building a workflow to provide sourcing, creation and automated distribution of short-form photos and videos created for social media.
Substack acqui-hires team behind subscription social app Cocoon
Subscription newsletter platform kingpin Substack shared today that they’ve acqui-hired the team behind Cocoon, a subscription social media app built for close friends. We covered the Y Combinator-backed startup’s initial $3 million seed raise led by Lerer Hippeau back in November 2019, shortly before the pandemic dramatically reconfigured how people used social media to communicate […]
TikTok is building its own AR development platform, TikTok Effect Studio
Both Facebook and Snap offer tools that allow developers to build out augmented reality (AR) experiences and features for their own respective family of apps. Now, TikTok is looking to do the same. The company recently launched a new creative toolset called TikTok Effect Studio, currently in private beta testing, which will allow its own […]
Love Island and the concerns about psychological distress that won’t go away
Contestants get more support after Caroline Flack and two islanders took their own lives but experts remain uneasy over formatIt has been a series full of drama, dumpings and more than a few heads turning at Casa Amor. But, after eight weeks, Love Isla…
Constant craving: how digital media turned us all into dopamine addicts
According to addiction expert Dr Anna Lembke, our smartphones are making us dopamine junkies, with each swipe, like and tweet feeding our habit. So how do we beat our digital dependency?Dr Anna Lembke, a world-leading expert on addiction, is concerned …
As ‘finfluencers’ spread through social media, beware the pitfalls
YouTube, Instagram and TikTok are full of finance ‘experts’ promising riches to the young and credulousDepending on where you look on social media, making money seems to be straightforward. Learning how to buy a property in the UK with no money, or get…
The party’s over: China clamps down on its tech billionaires
The startling rise to wealth of the nation’s entrepreneurs has been an affront to Beijing’s political philosophy and increasingly, a threat to the communist partyIn a Politburo group study session on 23 November 2015, China’s president, Xi Jinping, rec…
Social platforms wrestle with what to do about the Taliban
With the hasty U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan underway after two decades occupying the country, social media platforms have a complex new set of policy decisions to make. The Taliban has been social-media-savvy for years, but those companies will face new questions as the notoriously brutal, repressive group seeks to present itself as Afghanistan’s legitimate […]