Good morning. It’s a new week and it’s time for more tech news. It’s a social media-heavy edition today.
1. More Musk
Starting off in Musk Land, and two big things happened over the weekend. Firstly (via The Verge): Musk claimed that Twitter would fund the legal fees of anybody who is treated unfairly by their employee “due to posting or liking something on this platform”, which is pretty rich considering the guy fired employees at Twitter who personally criticised him… On Twitter. The other thing that happened: Musk bought the AI.com domain, which now redirects to x.ai, Musk’s new AI company that is totally not just chasing a tech trend. Oh, and the cage fight with Mark Zuckerberg is still TBA.
2. TikTok users in Europe get to opt out of the personalised feed
Mashable is reporting that TikTok is rolling out a feature in Europe that allows users to opt out of the personalised algorithm-based feed, in compliance with the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which requires social media platforms to give users the option of not having personalised content streams. With the personalised feed disabled, users will now receive For You and LIVE feeds with content sourced from around the world and their local country. Additionally, the following and friends feeds will become chronological when a user opts out.
3. Influencer to face charges for allegedly inciting a riot
As reported by Pedestrian, influencer and Twitch streamer Kai Cenat will face charges in the U.S. after allegedly inciting a riot in New York City. Cenat announced on social media that he’d be doing a giveaway in Union Square, including PlayStation 5s, computers, and other gadgets. Over 60 people were arrested, and about 1,000 police officers were sent to the scene.
4. Reddit wins the Reddit wars
The last major holdouts in the massive protest against Reddit’s controversial API pricing have relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the beloved TV host in certain dissident subreddits. It marks the end of months of fighting, which included site-wide blackouts. Now it seems the battle has come to a close. For a while, the subreddits stood strong, but r/videos was the first to backpedal, dropping the John Oliver rule but requiring all posts to feature profanity. Soon that rule was abandoned as well. Last week, the moderators of r/aww announced the John Oliver rule was over, and over the weekend r/pics quietly gave up the protest as well, as reported by the Verge. “More than a month has passed, and as things on the internet go, the passion for the protest has waned and people’s attention has shifted to other things,” an r/aww moderator wrote in a post about the rule change.
5. Threads interest is waning
We’re only a month out since Meta released its Instagram-tied Twitter-killer app Threads. Since then, the time users spent on the app has tanked. Now, two separate data analysis firms say that the number of users logging in each day on the app has similarly flatlined just a month after its release. Threads were far more successful than Meta seemingly anticipated out of the starting gate, so a sudden, sheer drop in overall users was likely expected. The hard part about so many people diving into an early app that was clearly meant as a starting point is now getting those former users to return once the platform is more feature-rich.
BONUS ITEM: The U.S. lost last night’s Women’s World Cup match against Sweden… By a millimetre.