Social

In just 22 hours, the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI has racked up 85 million views, breaking a MrBeast video’s record for most YouTube views in 24 hours. That ranking excludes music videos, but the hype around this long-awaited game could smash past those records too — right now

Recent efforts by Meta to grow Threads’ install base have been working. According to a new analysis of app store trends, Instagram Threads is now outpacing X, formerly Twitter, at least in terms of new downloads. App intelligence firm Apptopia indicates that, although Threads’ daily dow

Hi, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), technewss’s newsletter that highlights some of the more noteworthy moments in tech over the past few days. The holiday season is nigh upon us, but the tech industry waits for no one — on the horizon are IBM, AMD and Intel conferences, plus th

Your move, Linda. Elon Musk said “go fuck yourself” to advertisers who recently paused spending on X after he endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory on the platform. Onstage at the DealBook conference, Andrew Ross Sorkin asked the X owner about these pauses in advertising. Musk repli

If you weren’t already buying the Reddit IPO rumors, the internet’s beating heart of deeply niche microcultures just introduced a rebrand, refreshing its iconic logo and rolling out some new visual vibes. Reddit’s most obvious visual update is a new design for Snoo, the anthropomo

After introducing an in-app shop that invited premium subscribers to buy digital decorations for their profiles, Discord now wants everybody to get in on the goods. Discord is expanding access to its virtual shop, first launched in October, allowing users who don’t pay for a monthly Nitro sub

In one of the largest studies ever on mental health and internet use, the Oxford Internet Institute has declared that there is no “smoking gun” linking the internet with psychological harm. Professors Andrew Przybylski and Matti Vuorre studied data from two million people aged 15 to 89

Social media giant Reddit is once again reportedly testing the IPO waters. Bloomberg reported on Monday that Reddit “is holding talks with potential investors for an initial public offering.”  The San Francisco-based company, co-founded by Steve Huffman, Aaron Swartz and Alexis

A newly unredacted version of the multi-state lawsuit against Meta alleges a troubling pattern of deception and minimization in how the company handles kids under 13 on its platforms. Internal documents appear to show that the company’s approach to this ostensibly forbidden demographic is far

Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), technewss’s regular recap of the past few days in tech. The headlines have been dominated — nay, overwhelmed — by the drama unfolding at AI startup OpenAI, but plenty else happened in the half-week leading up to Thanksgiving. So much f

India is drafting rules to detect and limit the spread of deepfake content and other harmful AI media, a senior lawmaker said Thursday, following reports of proliferation of such content on social media platforms in recent weeks. Ashwini Vaishnaw, India’s IT Minister, said the ministry held m

Mastodon’s latest update is tackling a problem Twitter users know all too well: the scourge of the “reply guys.” A colloquial term for the men who regularly reply to women’s posts in an overly familiar fashion, often to “mansplain,” tone police, offer unsolicited

Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, has filed a lawsuit alleging defamation by a news organization over claims that major companies had ads appear next to antisemitic content. But the suit appears to confirm the very thing it claims is defamatory. Media Matters last Thursday published an article

After 14 years online, Omegle shut down as part of a settlement in a $22 million sex trafficking lawsuit. If anything was a surprise, it was that the anonymous, randomized chat site was still operational. In a time when multibillion-dollar companies nitpick the rules about “female-presenting nip