Discord members are biting their nails. As reports swirl that the social media company is planning an initial public offering this year and increasingly leans on advertising revenue, there's fear that Discord will become engulfed in the enshittification that has already scarred so many online communities. Co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy claims he's worried about that, too.

In an interview with Engadget published today, Vishnevskiy claimed that Discord employees regularly discuss concerns about Discord going astray and angering users.

"I understand the anxiety and concern," Vishnevskiy said. "I think the things that people are afraid of are what separate a great, long-term focused company from just any other company."

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Reddit says it's rolling out an update that will introduce a "Content and Activity" setting that allows users to decide which content from the subreddits they participate in will appear on their profiles. This includes both their posting and commenting history.

Meta says loosening its enforcement policies earlier this year led to fewer erroneous takedowns on Facebook and Instagram—and didn’t broadly expose users to more harmful content.

WhatsApp users can make video and audio calls with up to 32 people.

Employees are awaiting “difficult decisions” being made by TikTok.

Meta thinks there's no reason to carry on with its defense after the Federal Trade Commission closed its monopoly case, and the company has moved to end the trial early by claiming that the FTC utterly failed to prove its case.

"The FTC has no proof that Meta has monopoly power," Meta's motion for judgment filed Thursday said, "and therefore the court should rule in favor of Meta."

According to Meta, the FTC failed to show evidence that "the overall quality of Meta’s apps has declined" or that the company shows too many ads to users. Meta says that's "fatal" to the FTC's case that the company wielded monopoly power to pursue more ad revenue while degrading user experience over time (an Internet trend known as "enshittification"). And on top of allegedly showing no evidence of "ad load, privacy, integrity, and features" degradation on Meta apps, Meta argued there's no precedent for an antitrust claim rooted in this alleged harm.

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The billionaire's social media site is awash in extremist content from sanctioned terrorist groups, a report claims.

The vast majority of people these days use some form of social media, but some develop what's known as problematic social media use (PSMU). It's not yet deemed a clinical addiction, but it does share some symptoms with addiction and substance abuse disorders. And according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE, someone who exhibits PSMU is also more likely to believe in—and share—fake news online, contributing to the rampant spread of misinformation that is the bane of the 21st-century Internet.

"If someone struggles with a substance dependency, it's the decision-making process in their brain where they have difficulties stopping," co-author Dar Meshi of Michigan State University told Ars. "They take their drug and have a negative outcome: get a DUI or crash their car. Most people learn from a bad outcome and don't do it again, but someone with a substance use disorder continues to do that action."

In the case of PSMU, someone might feel bad if they are unable to access social media for an extended period (withdrawal), or their use of social media might lead to losing a job, poor grades, or mental health issues.

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The moment the white smoke appeared above the Sistine Chapel, I immediately turned on my television, because I wanted to see who the new pope would be, and then hopped on social media, because I knew that the internet could tell me more about the new pope faster than television could. That, and the memes would be good.

The memes came first, naturally, flying in harder and faster than they ever did with Pope Francis, because the new pope was American. Not just that - Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, was from Chicago, with a bio full of cultural touchstones that the American meme economy grasped immediately: Did the pope ever drink Malort? Was the pope a Cubs or a Sox fan? Was God going to intercede on behalf of the Knicks in the NBA playoffs because the pope graduated from Villanova? The next wave of information was, I'd suspected, going to be news and articles about his upbringing, pastoral history and religious stances - things that would tell the world what sort of leader this new pope would be.

And then someone I followed posted a screenshot from an X account with the handle @drprevost: three retweets, over the past three months, that linked to articles harshly cri …

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The high usage has attracted brands to the Promoted Places feature within Snap Map.

TikTok is launching a series of nationwide initiatives designed to support, spotlight, and boost entrepreneurs.

Pinterest is using AI to try and help you find the fashion accessories you’re looking for, even if you can’t describe them in your own words. The company is using a “Visual Language Model” to generate descriptive words of styles and the overall “vibes” of image Pins on its site, and will let you click into them to discover and refine your personal taste.

The new tool breaks down and decodes images to make it easier to search for specific details in outfits across the site, in turn making it easier for you to shop. So, if you like a skirt someone is wearing in a Pin on the site, you can view the image to see a description of the color palette, fit, aesthetic, and more. You can then refine the style by asking to change the colors and fabric — or even the occasion — so you can find a version that fits in elsewhere, like in a work environment.

The new visual search features are launching for women’s fashion content first and are available starting today in the US, Canada, and the UK. Pinterest plans to launch the feature to other categories and countries “over time.”

It turns out that decentralized social networks can go down, too. On Thursday evening, the decentralized social network Bluesky experienced a significant outage, leaving users unable to load the app on both the web and mobile devices for roughly an hour. According to a message on Bluesky’s status page, the company was aware of the […]

Travelers are bound to experience at least one vacation nightmare—but Hilton is trying to change that. The hotel chain launched a three-part social media series called “Hilton Saved My Stay,” […]

YouTube just turned 20. This is how it changed everything.

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When it comes to upholding human rights, Meta embodies everything that a company shouldn't.

When Linda McMahon called AI "A.1." at a summit, Kraft Heinz and Mischief turned the viral blunder into a spicy social media moment, even getting a shoutout from John Oliver.

TikTok is testing a system called Footnotes that will let its community attach helpful notes to posts that could use some additional context.

Some countries have passed strict new laws dictating youth access to digital platforms.

After X (formerly Twitter) announced it would be killing its "Support" account, disgruntled users quickly roasted the social media platform for providing "essentially non-existent" support.

"We'll soon be closing this account to streamline how users can contact us for help," X's Support account posted, explaining that now, paid "subscribers can get support via @Premium, and everyone can get help through our Help Center."

On X, the Support account was one of the few paths that users had to publicly seek support for help requests the platform seemed to be ignoring. For suspended users, it was viewed as a lifeline. Replies to the account were commonly flooded with users trying to get X to fix reported issues, and several seemingly paying users cracked jokes in response to the news that the account would soon be removed.

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