Tag: Instagram Inc

Does the Mormon Church Empower Women? A Social Media Storm Answers.

On Sunday night, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints encouraged women around the world to gather to celebrate the Relief Society, a women’s organization in the church that was observing its 182nd anniversary. In a video produced for the event, J. Anette Dennis, a leader in the Relief Society, spoke glowingly about women’s […]

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Princess Kate’s Photo, The Royal Family, and a Conspiracy Obsessed Internet

Trace back the digitally altered photograph of Catherine, Princess of Wales, and its roots lie in a tragedy of another Princess of Wales, Diana, whose death in 1997 predated the creation of Facebook by nearly seven years. Diana’s fatal car accident, after a high-speed pursuit by photographers in Paris, left a lasting imprint on her […]

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Could Donald Trump Save TikTok?

Trump’s TikTok U-turn TikTok users have continued to flood the social media platform — and lawmakers’ inboxes — with pleas to halt a bill that would force its Chinese owners to divest or face a ban in the U.S. That effort to keep TikTok online has now attracted some unlikely backers, including Donald Trump. A […]

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Tarte Island: Bora Bora Influencer Campaign Met With Online Backlash

A group of influencers are on a private jet to Bora Bora. They sip Veuve Clicquot, sample caviar and dance in their seats to Fergie’s “Glamorous.” Welcome to Trippin’ with Tarte, a promotional extravaganza sponsored by the beauty brand Tarte Cosmetics, a company known for regularly inviting social media influencers on lavish trips. For those […]

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Supreme Court to Decide How the First Amendment Applies to Social Media

The most important First Amendment cases of the internet era, to be heard by the Supreme Court on Monday, may turn on a single question: Do platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and X most closely resemble newspapers or shopping centers or phone companies? The two cases arrive at the court garbed in politics, as they […]

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How TikTok Took The Pink Stuff, a Cleaning Paste, From Obscurity to Viral Sensation

In 2018, The Pink Stuff was little more than a home cleaning product with a cute name. “The miracle cleaning paste,” as it said on every container, was sold by just two retail chains in Britain. At a factory near Birmingham, The Pink Stuff line operated for about two hours every month. That was plenty. […]

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Meta Reports Profits More Than Tripled and Issues Its First Dividend

Meta on Thursday reported a 25 percent increase in quarterly revenue while profit more than tripled, a rise fueled by its ads business after a shaky 18 months of layoffs and a rocky digital advertising market. The Silicon Valley company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, also said it would issue its first dividend, of […]

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Will Lawmakers Really Act to Protect Children Online? Some Say Yes.

In the final minutes of a congressional hearing on Wednesday in which tech chief executives were berated for not protecting children online, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, urged lawmakers to act to safeguard the internet’s youngest users. “No excuses,” he said. Lawmakers have long made similar statements about holding tech companies to account […]

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Senators Denounce Tech Companies Over Child Sex Abuse Online

Lawmakers on Wednesday denounced the chief executives of Meta, TikTok, X, Snap and Discord for creating “a crisis in America” by willfully ignoring the harmful content against children on their platforms, as concerns over the effect of technology on youths have mushroomed. In a highly charged 3.5-hour hearing, members of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee […]

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Silicon Valley Battles States Over New Online Safety Laws for Children

Last summer, Ohio enacted a social media statute that would require Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube to get a parent’s consent before permitting children under age 16 to use their platforms. But this month, just before the measure was to take effect, a tech industry group called NetChoice — which represents Google, Meta, Snap, TikTok […]

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How Do You Respond to Kids Dealing With Racism and Bullying at School?

The sixth-grade boy who raised his hand was wiry and small. “People at my school make racist jokes,” he said, when I called on him. His voice had yet to change. “How do I get them to stop?” I was sitting on a high school stage in Piedmont, Calif., where I had finished a conversation […]

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Top Social Media Trends 2023: Roman Empire, Grimace Shake, Keith Lee and More

Ozempic Mania Weight loss drugs made their way to the online set this year, with some influencers casting stigma aside and unabashedly proclaiming their Ozempic use. Djerf Dupe Drama Matilda Djerf, a popular Swedish influencer and a founder of the fashion brand Djerf Avenue, irked fans when her team started reporting TikTok videos that mentioned […]

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Migrants Crossing the Darién Gap Find Success on Social Media

Much of the content about the Darién and the rest of the journey is aspirational, featuring everyday people overcoming great odds, sometimes accompanied by religious music. One TikTok video of a disabled person making his way through the jungle on the back of another man has more than 10,000 comments. Even a Darién parody subgenre […]

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TikTok Quietly Changes User Terms Amid Growing Legal Scrutiny

Parents, schools and even attorneys general have increasingly been raising concerns about how TikTok may be hooking children to the app and serving them inappropriate content. But some lawyers say bringing legal action against the company could be more difficult after TikTok quietly changed its terms of service this summer. In July, TikTok removed rules […]

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At Meta, Millions of Underage Users Were an ‘Open Secret,’ States Say

Meta has received more than 1.1 million reports of users under the age of 13 on its Instagram platform since early 2019 yet it “disabled only a fraction” of those accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint against the company brought by the attorneys general of 33 states. Instead, the social media giant “routinely […]

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Are TikTok and X Amplifying Antisemitic Content? It’s Increasingly Hard to Know.

As the Israel-Hamas war flooded social media with violent content, false information and a seemingly limitless swell of opinions, lawmakers and users have accused platforms like TikTok and Facebook of promoting biased posts. Tech giants have denied the charges. TikTok, accused of elevating pro-Palestinian content, blamed “unsound analysis” of hashtag data. Some Instagram and Facebook […]

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Antisemitic and Anti-Islam Hate Speech Surges Across the Internet

Some of the antisemitic and anti-Islam posts have been shared and liked hundreds of thousands of times, even though they appear to violate the rules of social media platforms, many of which ban hate speech. The content has been most prominent on X, according to the Anti-Defamation League and other researchers. In an analysis by […]

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A Strategy to Treat Big Tech Like Big Tobacco

Natasha Singer contributed reporting. The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle […]

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This Is What the War in Gaza Looks Like on Instagram

When Hind Khoudary left home early in the war to report on the wounded and dead arriving at a Gaza City hospital, she didn’t realize it would be for the last time. While she was on assignment, Israel ordered the evacuation of residents from northern Gaza and her family joined hundreds of thousands of Palestinians […]

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Meta to Require Political Advertisers to Disclose Use of A.I.

Meta spent years figuring out how to handle political advertising across Facebook and Instagram. It put systems into place and developed policies for what types of political ads were and were not allowed on its platforms. But that was before the rise of consumer artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, Meta introduced a new policy to grapple […]

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This Florida School District Banned Cellphones. Here’s What Happened.

One afternoon last month, hundreds of students at Timber Creek High School in Orlando poured into the campus’s sprawling central courtyard to hang out and eat lunch. For members of an extremely online generation, their activities were decidedly analog. Dozens sat in small groups, animatedly talking with one another. Others played pickleball on makeshift lunchtime […]

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‘Hard Fork’: The People vs. Meta + Marques Brownlee on YouTube and Future Tech + DALL-E 3 Arrives

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions. kevin roose I’m Kevin Roose, tech columnist for “The New York Times.” casey newton I’m Casey Newton from “Platformer.” […]

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Meta Sued Over Features That Hook Children to Instagram, Facebook

Why the Case Matters It’s unusual for so many states to come together to sue a tech giant for consumer harms. The coordination shows states are prioritizing the issue of children and online safety and combining legal resources to fight Meta, just as states have previously done for cases against Big Tobacco and Big Pharma […]

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Hamas Hijacked Victims’ Social Media Accounts to Spread Terror

Shortly after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, friends and relatives of Gali Shlezinger Idan, who lived in a kibbutz near the Gaza border, received frantic messages to check her Facebook page. What they found shocked them. Hamas members were using Ms. Idan’s Facebook account to livestream themselves holding her and her family hostage. During […]

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As Red States Curb Social Media, Did Montana’s TikTok Ban Go Too Far?

Many of the world’s largest consumer technology companies will be closely monitoring a federal court hearing in Montana on Thursday that could decide whether TikTok will have to stop operating in the state next year. The popular video-sharing app is suing Montana to halt a first-of-its-kind state law that would ban TikTok in the state […]

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New York Seeks to Limit Social Media’s Grip on Children’s Attention

Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram have harnessed powerful algorithms to captivate millions of users with endless streams of entertaining videos and content, transforming the way new generations scroll through their screens. But critics, from policymakers to concerned parents, say those algorithms lead young people down rabbit holes of problematic content, from misinformation and […]

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Social Media Changed How Brands Talk to Us, but Are the Jokes Wearing Thin?

In the comments on a recent TikTok post by RyanAir, an exuberant traveler posted about flying the airline for the first time. In the past, the typical corporate response to this might have been something like, “We’re glad to have you!” or “Thanks for joining us!” Ryan Air went with: “Do you want a medal?” […]

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Dancers and Video Game Characters Merge in the Uncanny Valley

Watch a TikTok video by @dem_bruddaz, and you might feel a queasy mixture of recognition and disorientation. You’ll see, say, a person running down a street. But wait — is it a person? Why does he turn at such precise 45-degree angles? Why are his gestures so oddly exaggerated? And is that a Grand Theft […]

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