Do you prefer recording a quick video to writing a text? If so, you'll really like what Reddit just unveiled.

Reddit announced the launch of video comments for all of its users on Thursday. The feature allows any Redditor to upload or record a short-form video reply right in the comments of any post in Reddit communities or subreddits. 

Reddit users were already able to comment with text, images, and GIFs. Now, they can reply with video too.

“We are continually evolving Reddit to deliver a more immersive and authentic human experience," said Reddit's Chief Product Officer Maria Angelidou-Smith. "The ability to reply with video gives users more creative ways to engage in communities they love."

With the new feature, Reddit users will see a video icon alongside the existing image and GIF icon options in the comment box. Clicking on the video icon will allow users to either upload an existing video or record a new video right there in the comment box.

According to Reddit, videos in comments will not play automatically. Reddit's safety systems will also check video comments before they are posted.

The company says a community must be listed as public and "suitable-for-work (SFW)" to be eligible for video comments.

Unlike other social platforms, Reddit has a large number of users that prefer complete anonymity. However, there's no requirement that the video posted in a comment be created by a user — so the feature can easily become simply yet another way to post a meme response, this time in video form.

As an example, Reddit shared a link to a video AMA with Mel C. from the Spice Girls that was conducted two months ago on the platform. The AMA utilized the video in comments feature before it rolled out to all users. In other words, Reddit is promoting at least one way they hope the feature is used.

An orange and blue fever has been spreading through the city of New York, as hometown team the Knicks compete in the NBA finals for the first time in 27 years.

Donning jerseys and custom airbrushed Knicks merch bought outside their local corner store, residents have been flooding the streets, jumping on top of taxis, and partying in subway cars like they've already won.

All in all, New Yorkers are getting hot, so what better way to starve out the fever than with the shocking ice bath that was President Donald Trump's arrival at Madison Square Garden (MSG), in attendance for what would become a devastating third match-up for the Knicks against the Spurs.

After the Knicks' Game 2 win, the nation's leader announced he would be the first sitting president to attend an NBA finals game, prompting online derision and city-wide concern that the unfavorable leader would bring bad luck to the famed arena. And, if you're a superstitious sports fan or prone to making connections with the universe, they may have been correct.

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Ahead of the game, U.S. Secret Service barricaded sidewalks around the venue and cancelled a public watch party being held that night outside MSG. In response, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who was in attendance for the game, coordinated a separate viewing event at Manhattan's Bryant Park. Users online began preparing themselves for his appearance, including a viral tutorial on how to properly boo the President, with the caption "How to ward off the curse coming for the Knicks in game 3 of the finals."

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So as the national anthem ushered in the start of the game and cameras panned to Trump in his private box, the crowd was ready and loud. Even the Brant Park watch party attendees joined in the chorus, which ricocheted across the city. But it wasn't enough to fend off the Spurs, who would go on to win the match up in a nail-biting game.

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Speaking to reporters outside of Air Force One that night, Trump said, "I mean, I thought it was amazing, actually. You mean when they had the camera on me? I thought it was very good. Yeah. It was certainly amazing. It was, I think, mostly cheers. It was loud and it was very enthusiastic."

Trump has previously criticized the league for its "liberal" player politics, and continued the sentiment in his Game 3 comments: "It tends to be a little left wing, but it’s great entertainment. It’s great."

Dua Lipa has become a very specific kind of modern pop star. Yes, she’s famous. Yes, she is smart with incredible taste. Yes, she’s beautiful and rich. Yes, she is constantly on vacation. But her version of celebrity leisure doesn’t read as empty in the way a lot of celebrity leisure does.

Lipa's Instagram is basically a mood board for a dream version of adulthood: travel, food, dancing, friends, books, outfits, activism, beaches, museums, a really, really hot fiancé. She doesn’t really seem to be selling luxury, but she does seem to be selling the idea that pleasure is a perfectly fine end-goal. And not just through Instagram — Lipa's editorial platform Service95 positions itself as "the ultimate cultural concierge" through its website, newsletters, podcast, and popular book club.

Right now, the internet is obsessed with a certain fantasy of living beautifully without turning every single part of your life into work. Think Euro summer mood boards. Think Anthony Bourdain nostalgia. Think "it girl" reading culture. Think travel TikTok. Think the creator economy fantasy that your life could be both your job and your art.

Writer Madison Huizinga called this "the Dua Effect": a brand built around abundance and being a student of life. And Lipa's building it at the right time. Because for a lot of young people, the fantasy is to just have enough time, money, and emotional space to pursue curiosity. To read, travel, go to dinner, learn a language, make art and be social. Ultimately, to have a life that doesn’t feel completely consumed by productivity. Gen Z is less likely to be interested in hustle culture than previous generations — "the grind" is losing its appeal. That's not to say Lupa doesn't work extremely hard (she does) — it's just not visible on her Instagram feed.

Lipa's leisure feels different from, say, an influencer posting a sponsored hotel stay or a billionaire giving a tour of their closet — and that's despite Lipa partnering with tech giants like Google for sponsored, curated restaurant lists around the world. Her life is obviously excessive, but it’s framed as enrichment. Of course, that’s also the tension. Lipa's life is not replicable for most people. Most of us cannot casually build an international existence out of beaches, books, parties, and perfectly lit dinners. And the obsession with her probably won’t last — it never does. 

Teens on Snapchat frequently encounter unwanted or dangerous content on the platform, according to a new survey.

A third of the poll's 1,016 respondents said they'd seen or received unsafe content or messages in the past week. More than half said they'd had at least one such experience in the past year.

The findings suggest that Snapchat, a platform where messages vanish once viewed by the recipient, is far less safe than parents may assume, said Sarah Gardner, CEO of The Heat Initiative, the advocacy group responsible for the research.

Top dangerous experiences on Snapchat

The top three types of dangerous experiences reported by up to a third of teens were unwanted contact, bullying, and sexually suggestive content and messages. Roughly 1 in 6 respondents said they'd seen content related to hate speech and drugs or alcohol. Smaller percentages of teens confirmed they'd encountered graphic violence and self-harm on the platform.

More than 40 percent of respondents who'd received unwanted messages believed the sender was an adult.

Gardner said the survey results contradict Snap's assertion that its safety features prevent strangers from sending minors unsolicited messages.

"These findings directly go against that claim and show that it is absolutely not happening," Gardner said.

A Snap Company spokesperson contested the report's findings.

“We share the goal of keeping young people safe online and continuously invest in protections designed to reduce potential harmful interactions on Snapchat," the spokesperson said in a statement to Mashable. "While we respect the role of advocates in raising important issues, we believe this report does not fully reflect the significant investments Snap has made to help protect young people."

Legal action against Snap

Last December, the Heat Initiative, which focuses on online safety and corporate accountability, surveyed Snapchat users between the ages of 10 and 17. The advocacy groups Anxious Generation, ParentsTogether Action, and Design It 4 Us partnered with Heat Initiative on the research.

As major social media companies scramble to defend their youth safety record, the survey results illustrate the prevalence of harmful content on one of the most popular platforms in the U.S. In 2024, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said in Congressional testimony that more than 20 million American teens use Snapchat.

In January, Snap settled a lawsuit brought by a teenager who claimed that Snapchat's design features, like algorithmic recommendations, led to addictive use and mental health harms. Soon after, Snap introduced new parental controls for teens.

A separate poll of teens conducted last fall by the Pew Research Center painted a different picture of Snapchat as a platform that strengthened their friendships and didn't negatively affect their mental health. The Snap Company spokesperson described the poll as independent research showing that Snapchat supports user well-being and helps them stay connected with close friends and family.

How teens handle harmful content on Snapchat

Snapchat's community guidelines prohibit many of the experiences reported by teens in the survey, including the sale and glorification of illicit drugs, the depiction of graphic violence, hate speech, and bullying.

Forty-four percent of survey respondents said they had not seen unsafe content or messages in the past year.

Two in 5 of teens who did responded by closing the app or ignoring the experience, according to the survey. More than half of those who did so said they'd grown "used to it."

Gardner told Mashable that she finds it "alarming" that so many minors have become desensitized to these encounters.

"Right now, Snap is putting the onus on the kids themselves to navigate a minefield of unwanted content," Gardner said. "What you see in the poll is that kids have sort of succumbed to it."

While Snapchat allows users to block and report content they deem harmful or unsafe, teens were far more likely to block a user than report them to the platform. Past research conducted by the nonprofit organization Thorn has found that minors typically prefer to block instead of report a user after a harmful online experience.

Dr. Mitch Prinstein, co-director of the Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Mashable that the survey should be a wake-up call for parents.

"It’s really important for parents to know that kids’ social media looks very different from their own," said Prinstein. "The survey tells us what kids have been informally telling us about for a long time: social media is not simply a safe place to hang out with friends."

Prinstein has served as a witness in cases against Meta and other social media companies, though not Snap. He was not involved in the Heat Initiative's research.

Adults may be contacting teens on Snapchat

Dr. Brian Levine, director of the UMass Cybersecurity Institute, told Mashable that the survey results are concerning but not surprising, provided the research sampled a representative set of teens who use the platform.

Levine, who has consulted for The Heat Initiative in the past but was not involved in the new survey, said that it's questionable for major social media platforms to recommend adults and children to each other via an algorithm.

Levine, an expert in preventing child exploitation who has testified for the state in New Mexico's child safety case against Meta, argued that Snapchat could do more to prevent adults from mixing with teens.

Snapchat says it makes all accounts private by default and that users can only communicate with mutually accepted friends or people in their contacts. Users may, however, need to manually turn off showing up in the platform's "Find Friends" feature. One in 6 survey respondents said that the feature recommended accounts of strangers that appeared to be run by adults.

"Nobody's looking for a perfect score here," Levine said. But, he added, "where else in society do we liberally mix kids and adults in an algorithmic way?"

Levine said platforms can generally improve youth safety by enacting policies and practices like high-quality age assurance, providing end-to-end message encryption for adults only, and prohibiting children from connecting to their service through a virtual private network.

He also questioned Snapchat's specific design features, including vanishing messages, which prevent minors, parents, and authorities from gathering evidence in cases of sexual exploitation and sextortion: "To erase all the messages – is that really the safest product for children?"

UPDATE: Jun. 3, 2026, 3:40 p.m. PDT This story has been updated to include a statement from the Snap Company.

Like many people, Joy Taylor first discovered Shirley Raines and her nonprofit organization, Beauty 2 The Streetz, on social media. 

Taylor, a TV, radio, and sports personality, was captivated by Raines’ Instagram and TikTok posts that intimately documented her work feeding the hungry and providing free clothes, makeup, hair services, and hygiene products to the beleaguered Skid Row community of downtown Los Angeles. 

"I was looking for a place to volunteer," Taylor says. "There are a lot of different ways that you can give back, but I really wanted to be boots on the ground. I reached out to [Raines] on DM and was like, 'Can I come help?’ She was gracious enough to say, 'Yes.’ So I went down to Skid Row, and the experience of working with her is spiritual in a way."

For nearly a decade, the Compton, California-born Raines dedicated her time and energy to serving LA's unhoused communities. After experiencing homelessness in her younger years, the mother of six was inspired to donate and distribute food and hygiene kits to Skid Row. Raines, along with volunteers, also applied makeup and styled the hair of people who hadn’t been to a salon in years.

Livestreaming her efforts on TikTok and Instagram, Raines amassed 7 million followers, many of whom were drawn not just to her philanthropy but also her beautiful smile and dynamic personality. Gregarious, quick to compliment, and as prone to break into dance as she was to hand out groceries or gift cards, Raines bewitched the screens and streets.

The affection online was so deep that her followers helped fund her mission — one even purchased an abandoned Vegas building for Raines' homelessness outreach. What started as Raines' impromptu effort to give back eventually became Beauty 2 The Streetz, one of the West Coast's most beloved charitable groups. 

Through her work, Raines, affectionately known by many as Ms. Shirley, was named a CNN Hero of the Year in 2021, placed on the 2025 Time100 Creators list, and won 2025 Outstanding Social Media Personality at the NAACP Image Awards Creative Honors.

Credit: Image Credit: Ian Moore/Mashable/Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

When 58-year-old Raines died suddenly in January from hypertensive heart disease, it felt like LA lost its matriarch.

Taylor, who developed a friendship with Raines and eventually became a board member of Beauty 2 The Streetz, spoke at Raines’ celebration of life. 

"It is such a great and impactful loss," Taylor said at the February service. "The impact that she had on the homeless community is immeasurable. And I hope that she can see the impact that she had on so many others by helping to heal through service, which is why she started Beauty 2 The Streetz in the first place; to heal from grief."

Taylor was referring to the accidental death of Raines’ young son in 1990, a tragedy that both decimated and, eventually, galvanized Raines. Instead of sinking fully into the hole of her depression, Raines channeled her energy into giving back and restoring confidence to those who needed it most. 

Credit: Image Credit: Ian Moore/Mashable/Beauty 2 The Streetz

Even when she began working with the homeless community in 2017, Raines recognized that people need more than just the most basic necessities. When someone gets a much-needed haircut or shampoo, "You can see the light come back in people," Taylor says, "There's also something to human touch."

Most Americans take it for granted that they can have a hot shower or blow-dry their hair, Taylor says. When you feel good about yourself, "that flows over into how you treat other people, how you feel, how you look, your motivation to go to work." 

Even with the absence of Raines, Beauty 2 The Streetz’s mission continues, Taylor says. The organization continues to address the humanitarian crisis of poverty and homelessness through regular outreach efforts in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, including a recent Mother’s Day Restoration Brunch that featured volunteer estheticians and nail techs.

Credit: Image Credit: Ian Moore/Mashable/Robin L Marshall/Getty Images

Raines will be awarded another honor soon, serving as the posthumous Icon Grand Marshal for LA Pride in June. Her image and story will be featured and heard during the parade and festival, now in its 56th year. Lawrence Carroll, the board president of LA Pride, worked with Raines during the pandemic and, like many, felt an instant bond with her.

"She just reminded me of family," Carroll says. 

When Carroll heard of Raines’ passing, he drew inspiration from her and turned his pain into action, naming Raines as one of Pride’s three grand marshals for 2026, alongside attorney and civil rights activist Mia Yamamoto and Emmy-winning Somebody Somewhere actor Jeff Hiller.

"[Raines] is somebody who literally woke up every single day to give of themselves to others," Carroll says. "When we’re talking about being of service to a community and the world — I’m starting to get emotional about it, because Shirley embodied all of that. She was just so real, so much of herself. She saw the humanity in folks, just the fact that she was calling people 'kings’ and 'queens.' We need more Ms. Shirleys, right?"

Besides Raines’ family and philanthropy, part of her legacy will be in how she reached people, Taylor says. With so much forgettable and empty content on our feeds, social media can feel like a cesspool of wasted time. Raines, on the other hand, used it for good, recruiting new volunteers and highlighting the needs of people often forgotten by the city around them.

"Social media can be a very terrible place," Taylor says. "And people like Shirley used it perfectly to showcase how dark the world is — and how you can bring light to it."

Carroll sees a parallel in how Raines lived her life and his own intentions to bring people together through Pride. 

"No matter how much technology influences our day-to-day, you can't substitute human connection," Carroll says. "We are social beings by nature. So getting out there like Ms. Shirley and actually being able to talk to somebody, to listen to them in real time, see their facial expressions, and read their body language is such a unique opportunity to connect to somebody. [It’s something] that a device, a phone, and social media could never do."

It's fitting that the gray hoodie has become nearly synonymous with comedian Josh Johnson. The look is familiar and unpretentious, the kind of casual aesthetic choice that immediately puts you at ease. The same can be said for his comedy. A story branches into another story, then a smaller observation, then a tiny detail that doesn't seem important until suddenly it is. He takes his time getting to the point, but you never feel like he's wandering. Every turn feels intentional.

Which is why I have a hard time believing him when he insists the hoodie was accidental.

"You're about to be disappointed," the 36-year-old — in, naturally, a gray hoodie — tells Mashable. After a cab ride through gridlocked Manhattan traffic, he lounges on a couch in Mashable's studio, head resting in one hand, holding eye contact as he settles into the story.

The hoodies started as a comfort thing, mostly vintage and thrifted finds Johnson accumulated over the years before fans began gifting him more: customized ones, tour-inspired ones, even cashmere versions he jokes he's "too scared to sweat in." Somewhere along the way, without Johnson really noticing, the gray hoodie became part of the persona people recognized on sight.

"Even when people see me out on the street, they're like, 'Oh, you really wear this?' That's the good and bad part of doing a thing; if you genuinely like it, it just becomes how you look all the time."

For someone who once famously joked that "the internet was a bad idea," Johnson has become one of the internet's most recognizable comedians. And not just for his attire. His stand-up clips regularly rack up millions of views across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, where his winding stories and observational humor somehow thrive on platforms designed to reward speed, outrage, and immediacy. But Johnson doesn't talk about the internet like someone trying to beat an algorithm. If anything, he sounds more like someone trying to preserve the version of the internet he once hoped it could become.

"It depends on the day," Johnson says when I ask whether he still believes the internet was a bad idea. "I think incredible good and connection have come from it. But there's also this level of cruelty online that's very hard to pull off in person. It's difficult for people to be as hateful face-to-face, eye-to-eye, as they can be online."

He then launches into a sprawling meditation on the strange contradictions of modern internet culture: misinformation, algorithms, performance, loneliness, and the ways people retreat deeper into themselves online instead of toward one another. Talking to Johnson, it becomes obvious that his comedy is informed by the fact that he reads widely and thinks deeply. Some people are chronically online; Johnson is thoughtfully online. 

Credit: Image Credit: Ian Moore/Mashable

"Back in the day, debate used to mean something," he says. "Now it feels like everybody is saying the most outrageous thing possible for the click. There are people who aren't even trying to debate anymore. They're trying to get clipped."

Johnson makes a sharp observation about the economics of online attention, where longer formats like podcasts, livestreams, interviews, and comedy sets are increasingly mined for viral fragments, designed to spread as quickly as possible. Entire social distribution strategies now revolve around clipping, extracting the most provocative or outrageous moment, and repackaging it for the algorithm.

And yet, even at his most critical, Johnson still talks about the internet with the cautious optimism of someone who believes a better version of it is still possible.

"I think we are so close," he says, describing the possibility of an internet that feels genuinely connective instead of extractive. "It's crazy how close we are."

After getting his start in stand-up in Louisiana and later sharpening his voice in Chicago's comedy scene, Johnson, now based in Brooklyn, built a reputation as a curious storyteller with an unusually patient style of comedy. He wrote for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon before joining The Daily Show in 2017, where he eventually became both a writer and a regular hosting correspondent alongside Jon Stewart, Desi Lydic, Ronny Chieng, Jordan Klepper, and Michael Kosta. But outside traditional late-night television, Johnson has steadily built one of comedy's most devoted digital audiences. Just look at his following: 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube, 2.7 million followers on TikTok, and 2.4 million on Instagram.

His stand-up weaves together politics, internet culture, personal stories, and observational tangents. Some of his most recognizable bits — stories about catfishing the Ku Klux Klan as a teenager, proving he was Black to a blind man, explaining the Drake vs. Kendrick beef to white people, or unpacking celebrity scandals and presidential debates — spread online because audiences seem willing to follow Johnson through every detour. Call it the performance of getting there. A raised eyebrow, a perfectly timed pause, the slight disbelief in his voice when he doubles back to clarify a detail, even the in-between moments feel calibrated toward the laugh. 

Johnson tells stories with the loose rhythm of someone thinking out loud, but underneath that sense of freedom is a controlled, sharp-witted performer who knows exactly when to pull tension tight and when to let it breathe. It's a style he’s refined across projects, including his Peacock special Up Here Killing Myself, several comedy albums, and now Symphony, his HBO special that premiered on May 22.

In some ways, the storytelling instincts that make Johnson so compelling online now were shaped by the internet itself.

Credit: Image Credit: Ian Moore/Mashable

Long before he was building an audience on social media, Johnson spent afternoons as a kid at his local library waiting for his mother to finish work. He'd use the computer to read Dragon Ball Z fanfiction while waiting for new episodes to air on Cartoon Network's late-night Toonami block, wander message boards, and lose hours reading short story competitions hosted on obscure websites. 

He talks nostalgically about those early-2000s online writing competitions and remembers submitting stories of his own, even if they never won. He also wrote fanfiction himself — mostly Dragon Ball Z, plus at least one attempt at Yu-Gi-Oh, despite, by his own admission, barely understanding the actual plot. "The story's bad not just because the structure is bad," he jokes. "I didn’t know what I was talking about."

While other kids were customizing their MySpace pages or talking to classmates on AIM, Johnson was mostly interested in forums and fictional worlds built collaboratively by strangers online. 

"Everything about being on the internet was about engaging with and learning about other people," he says.

It's impossible not to hear echoes of that internet in the way Johnson approaches comedy now. His storytelling style feels deeply shaped by early online communities where conversations sprawled naturally and personality mattered more than polish. Even the structure of his jokes often resembles a message board thread: one observation leading to another, details stacking until a larger emotional truth slowly comes into focus.

That curiosity about people still drives much of Johnson's work. During our conversation, he repeatedly circles back to the idea of connection. Not in the vague, overused way creators often talk about "community," but as something tangible and deeply necessary. When I ask how he decides what gets clipped for TikTok versus Instagram or YouTube, he shrugs off the question almost entirely, despite the fact that his stand-up is uploaded to YouTube with relentless regularity. Full, hour-long episodes are posted weekly. "It's for everybody," he says simply.

The live show comes first. The internet, in his mind, is just an extension of the conversation already happening in the room. Johnson speaks far more enthusiastically about fans connecting with one another in YouTube comment sections than he does about metrics or growth strategy. He lights up while describing viewers checking in on strangers having a rough day in the comments, small interactions that remind him of the internet he first encountered as a kid.

Credit: Image Credit: Ian Moore/Mashable

"The more that you can build that," he says, "the better overall a place the internet is."

There's something refreshingly sincere about the way Johnson talks about all of this, especially in an era where irony often feels like the dominant language online. Even his skepticism about the internet stems from the belief that people deserve better from it. Similarly, Johnson's feelings about AI are less anti-technology than anti-dehumanization. He's fascinated by the possibilities of artificial intelligence, especially in medicine and scientific research, but deeply wary of an industry that often frames automation as innovation while depending almost entirely on human labor to function.

"You scraped the internet and stole from us just to tell us you were going to replace us because we aren't worthy," he says. "If we're not worthy, why didn’t your AI make everything itself?" 

It's a joke, but also not really. Beneath Johnson's humor is a very genuine belief in the value of human perspective, in the importance of lived experience. That belief is what gives his comedy its weight. The details matter because people matter.

Which, in a way, brings everything back to the hoodie.

Johnson's signature garment works because it reflects the same qualities audiences respond to in Johnson himself. Nothing about it feels overly curated, even as it's become instantly recognizable. Like his comedy, Johnson's casual hoodie gives the impression that what you're seeing is the real person, not a polished performance of one.

And maybe that's why his work resonates so deeply online. When everything on the internet feels driven by optimization and outrage, Johnson still approaches storytelling like someone trying to talk to another person on the other side of the screen.

"I would hope to be part of the good parts of the internet," he shares. Some would argue he already is. 

Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — continues to integrate AI across its platform. Unfortunately, it appears the company overlooked a major flaw: Meta's AI support chatbot could apparently be tricked into providing unauthorized users with login access to any Instagram account.

Over the past few days, a number of highly followed Instagram accounts were hacked. The Obama White House Instagram account, with 2.4 million followers, was compromised and posted a caption on Sunday that stated: "The White House is under Shiites' control." Other accounts, such as the official Instagram account belonging to the Chief Master Sergeant of Space Force, were also hacked.

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Soon after, sleuths on social media began sharing the news of these hacked accounts along with screen captures showcasing the alleged method used to take them over. 

The hackers say they weaponized an exploit that tricked Meta's AI support chatbot into simply handing over account access. The bad actor would simply tell the AI chatbot that it needed to reset a targeted Instagram account's password. However, the hacker would also inform the chatbot that they needed the password reset email, which includes the verification code to change the password, sent to a new email address. 

The email address, of course, belonged to the hackers, not the true account holder. The chatbot would apparently oblige the hacker's request and provide them with the password reset page for the account.

In effect, the hackers were using a widely known social engineering tactic against an AI chatbot.

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Some of the screen captures walking through the process were pulled from Telegram channels where hackers sell their exploits on black markets. Other screen captures were taken by users who say they replicated the hack.

This vulnerability is especially concerning because there's nothing that the targeted Instagram account holders could do to prevent it. The AI chatbot was seemingly bypassing two-factor authentication measures to abide by the hacker's requests.

Since news of the hacked accounts went public on social media, Meta appears to have acknowledged and fixed the vulnerability.

Mashable contacted Meta with questions about this incident, and we will update this story if we receive more information. However, on social media, Meta VP of Communications Andy Stone acknowledged the Meta AI support exploit.

"This issue has been resolved and we are securing impacted accounts," Stone said in a reply to a user on X.

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It's unclear how many accounts were impacted by this exploit.

The New York Knicks are headed back to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999, and that sentence still doesn't feel real.

Think about the timeline: A kid born the last time the Knicks played for a championship is now 27 years old. An entire generation of Knicks fans, including Oscar nominee Timothée Chalamet, reached adulthood having never once watched their team play meaningful basketball in June.

Now here they are. Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns, Josh Hart, Mikal Bridges, and OG Anunoby are four wins away from a championship. Four wins from ending a 53-year title drought. Four wins from becoming the first New York men's team in one of the Big Four sports to win it all since 2011, with the New York Liberty championship banner in 2024 still very much acknowledged and respected.

The strangest part of it all is the vibe. Knicks fans are known for their "passionate" feelings toward their team and other teams around the league (ex. Trae Young). As one X post bluntly states, if the Knicks win it all, "the city might actually become ungovernable."

For right now, at least, New York City just seems happy. Genuinely, quietly, almost disbelievingly happy. Like an immense weight has been lifted off everyone's shoulders, and the city that never sleeps is legitimately just relaxing right now.

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After sweeping the Cavaliers, Knicks fans filled the streets of New York, which was fair enough. While the Thunder and Spurs are legit going to war out West, there's no anxiety in New York. Just fans who are genuinely enjoying being fans of their team for maybe the first time in their lives.

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Even the city's politics have gotten swept up in it. The city's recently elected mayor, Zohran Mamdani, was seen at Game 2 last week in the nosebleeds at Madison Square Garden, rooting for the Knicks.

After the Game 4 win, Mamdani tweeted NYC Sanitation to report a sweep. It's the kind of corny, earnest post that makes you like a politician more. It also helps that he's been a lifelong fan of England's Arsenal football team, which also just recently broke a championship drought after years of choking allegations.

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It's the exact right energy. Meanwhile, former mayor Eric Adams, never one to miss a moment, marked the occasion by posting what appeared to be an AI-generated video of dancing brooms, which somehow perfectly summarizes where his relationship with the city stands right now.

There's a decent comparison to be made with Detroit over the last few years. The Lions finally got good after decades as one of the NFL's favorite punching bags, and something shifted in the city alongside them. Detroit's violent crime dropped to its lowest levels in 60 years in 2023 — the same season the Lions went 12–5 and won their first playoff game since 1991.

Now, criminologists will tell you causation is complicated, and sure, they're right. But there's a kind of magic in an entire city having a team worth believing in again.

On Elon Musk's X, Bookmarks are a popular way for users to keep track of posts they want to refer back to at a later time.

However, the Bookmarks feature requires users to actively pick what posts they want to bookmark when they come across it. Then, those posts are saved to the Bookmarks tab.

In a new update that's slowly rolling out to users, X is renaming the Bookmarks tab to History. With that change, users will not only see what posts they've bookmarked, but they'll also see an archive of articles and videos that they've read and watched on the platform.

X head of product Nikita Bier announced the product change this week in a post. 

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"We're rolling out a new History tab on iOS to help you keep track of all your favorite content on X," Bier said. "Bookmarks, Long Videos, Articles and Likes will live here — so you can always come back and continue watching or reading. The Timeline moves fast, so we hope this creates a better place for catching up on long-form content."

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The History feature is currently only available on X for iOS. History appears to work much like a web browser's history feature does. As Bier said, users will be able to see bookmarks, likes, and their article and video history within the History tab. 

With the closure of popular read-later apps like last year's sunsetting of Pocket, it does seem like such a move makes sense for specific platforms to implement. Facebook, for example, has long let users view their activity within the mobile app. This includes videos watched and links clicked through the platform and viewed within the Facebook app.

Some X users have reportedly seen their Bookmarks tab updated to History already. Others are still waiting for the update to roll out to their account.

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Meta is bringing its AI chatbot to Threads in a way that should feel familiar to anyone who has spent time on X.

According to Engadget, the company is testing a new feature that gives Meta AI a dedicated Threads account — @meta.ai — that users can tag in posts and replies to add additional context to the discussion. The premise is essentially the same as Grok on X, where tagging the bot to fact-check or contextualize a viral post has become its own genre of reply-guy behavior.

The feature is currently in early beta and rolling out first to users in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Argentina, and Singapore, per Engadget.

Meta's own blog confirms the broader rollout ambitions, noting that @meta.ai mentions in Threads posts and replies are part of a wider push to bring its new Muse Spark model across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and Threads — showing up in search bars, group chats, and posts.

For users who would rather not have an AI bot surfacing under their posts uninvited, Meta says the @meta.ai account can be muted and its replies hidden.

The Threads feature is part of a larger set of announcements around Meta's revamped AI push. The company is also testing "side chats" on WhatsApp, which let users privately query Meta AI for context on what's happening in a group conversation without the response being visible to the rest of the group — a meaningful distinction from the Threads version, where Meta AI's replies are public.

The Grok comparison is an obvious one, and not entirely flattering.

Grok has had a rough run on X, generating pro-Nazi content, producing sycophantic output about Elon Musk, and surfacing child abuse material. Meta has generally maintained tighter guardrails on its AI products than X has with Grok, but giving any AI chatbot this kind of public-facing visibility on a social platform invites the same potential for bad behavior, and it's worth watching as the rollout expands.

Instagram has a new feature that lets you share an unedited photo dump with your pals that disappears once viewed. Yes, we have questions.

The Meta-owned social media platform announced Instants on Wednesday, a tool that lets you send a batch of snaps to Close Friends or mutual followers. You can't edit the photos, which might throw some folks off, but you can add captions.

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Notably, Instants will disappear after being viewed or after 24 hours. In this capacity, the feature sounds exactly like Instagram's existing disappearing messages, as well as similar options on Snapchat, Signal, Telegram, and WhatsApp. Plus, there's an undo button if you want to take back a sent photo.

Credit: Instagram / Mashable

Instants will appear in your Instagram DMs inbox appearing like a pile of photos. Once you've sent a glut of Instants, the recipients can react with emoji, reply like a regular DM, or send their own collection of Instants, as you both throw mountains of unedited snaps back and forth until the comet finally hits. Recipients cannot screenshot the photos (more on that below), and your Instants will be saved in a folder only you can access — you can repost them from here to Stories.

Now, for the important caveats.

Firstly, if you use a tool like disappearing messages, I cannot stress this enough but your recipient can always record the screen or take a photo with another device. Though Instagram's Instants cannot be screenshotted, that doesn't mean the person you're sending the image to can't capture it.

Secondly, Instagram monitors Close Friends content even if you think it's some kind of incognito mode. It is not.

Next, all posts will need to comply with Instagram's nudity guidelines, which run a fine line between protection and censorship. Something tells me this won't be the last we talk about this when it comes to Instants.

Finally, Instagram has officially pulled end-to-end encryption on DMs, so the security of your Instants is under standard encryption.

Mashable has reached out to Instagram for comment.

Vine is back. Sort of. Which is a strange sentence to say in 2026.

Almost a decade after the popular short-form video app had its doors shuttered by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, it has been relaunched as Divine, funded by the very same man who killed it.

Divine serves as both a new host for Vine's famous six-second videos and an archive of 500,000 videos from OG Vine, which are also hosted on the app. Additionally, one of the stated mission goals with the relaunch of Vine is "freedom from AI slop."

So, on top of the archive of old Vines, new videos must be human-made, and there's even a filter for that specifically in the app.

Credit: Mashable screenshot / Divine

To enforce the no-AI rule, Divine requires users to either record videos directly within the app or run them through a human verification tool before posting, according to The Guardian. The verification tool is powered by the human rights nonprofit, the Guardian Project.

The project is being led by Evan Henshaw-Plath, a former Twitter employee known online as Rabble, who originally set out to give old Vines a permanent home. Funding flows through Dorsey's nonprofit, and Other Stuff, which backs open-source social media projects. Dorsey acknowledged the original platform's shortcomings in a statement to The Guardian, saying a core principle of the relaunch is that creators will always own their content and followers, while also being able to build their own revenue off of them.

Divine had a test launch back in November of last year that we covered at the time. In an interview with TechCrunch during the 2025 test launch, Henshaw-Plath told the outlet that the goal was to recapture an era of social media built around real people, algorithm control, and authentic content. Not unlike what Vine represented before it was sent to an early grave.

Vine peaked at 100 million monthly active users and helped launch the careers of creators like Logan Paul before Twitter pulled the plug in 2017. Its DNA lives on pretty visibly in TikTok, and Elon Musk once floated the idea of rebooting Vine to compete it. That never happened, and now Dorsey has beaten him to it, ironically enough.

Still, Divine enters a short-form video landscape that looks nothing like 2013. TikTok is entrenched. Instagram Reels is entrenched. YouTube Shorts averages more than 200 billion daily views. Six seconds of human-made video is a bold proposition against that backdrop — but maybe that's exactly the point.

Divine is available now at the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

It seems like every week another app or digital platform shuts down unexpectedly, and this time social media app Threads may be experiencing an outage.

On the morning of May 5, multiple Mashable editors were unable to access the Threads app.

DownDetector showed a spike in user error reports for Threads beginning around 8:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday morning. (Disclosure: DownDetector and Mashable are both owned by the same parent company, Ziff Davis.)

A majority of DownDetector users reported problems accessing the Threads app.

Threads, Meta's answer to X, reported having more than 400 million monthly users in 2025.

Mashable reached out to Meta for comment, and we'll update this story if we receive a response.

This is a developing story...

Amid the second phase of a high-profile child safety trial in New Mexico, Meta is announcing new measures designed to ensure teens on its platforms are subject to age-related protections.

Meta announced in a blog post Tuesday that parents in the U.S. on two of its social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, will receive a notification with details about how to check and confirm their teens' ages on the company's apps.

All users that Meta has identified as a parent, not just adults who supervise a Teen Account, will receive the notification. The notification will include a link to a blog post Meta published a year ago on how to talk to teens about the importance of providing their correct age.

Meta hopes to raise parent awareness of age confirmation on Instagram and Facebook. Credit: Meta

Meta also announced that age-detection technology will roll out to 27 countries in the European Union and Brazil. Additionally, the technology will apply to U.S. Facebook users for the first time.

In April 2025, Meta began using AI to identify teen users who listed an adult age in their account. The technology re-assigns those users to Meta's Teen Account product, which the company says has more stringent safety protections.

In the fall, independent experts who tested Teen Accounts published a report alleging that the product doesn't work as advertised. Among their findings, the researchers documented instances in which the guardrails failed to prevent inappropriate contact with strangers.

On Tuesday, Meta said that its AI technology would begin to analyze user profiles for "contextual clues" of their age, simplify the process for reporting suspected underage accounts, and strengthen its ability to stop underage users from opening new accounts.

Meta noted in its blog post that it believes lawmakers should require app stores to verify user age and provide that information to apps and developers.

Meta back on trial

Meta lost the first phase of the New Mexico trial in March when a jury found the company liable for misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms and endangering children. The suit was filed by the state's attorney general.

Meta has been ordered to pay the maximum penalties for each violation of New Mexico’s consumer protection laws, amounting to $375 million. The company has said it plans to appeal the decision.

In the bench trial, New Mexico's Department of Justice is seeking injunctive relief requiring Meta to pay additional damages of $3.75 billion and implement specific changes to protect children.

The proposed policies include effective age verification, blocking children under 13, limits on end-to-end messaging encryption for minors, and permanent bans for adult users who engage in or facilitate child exploitation.

Last week, Meta threatened to shut its platforms down in New Mexico in response to the state's demands.

"Many of the requests are technologically or practically infeasible and would essentially force Meta to build entirely separate apps for use only in New Mexico," the company said in its court filing, according to The Guardian. "Therefore, granting onerous relief could compel Meta to entirely withdraw Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp from the state as the only feasible means of compliance."

In court on Monday, Meta's counsel Alex Parkinson reiterated that stance, arguing that granting the state's injunctive relief in full would "genuinely make it untenable to continue offering Meta's products" in New Mexico.

State Attorney General Raul Torrez said that Meta is putting advertising revenue and profit ahead of the "safety of children."

"We know Meta has the ability to make these changes," Torrez said in a statement. "This is not about technological capability."

Do you remember Friendster?

The early-2000s social networking platform has now returned roughly 24 years later with a whole new gimmick: Users can only connect with real-life friends.

The founder of the new Friendster, Mike Carson, is promoting the relaunched social media platform as being free of any ads and algorithms. But, that's not all that's missing either.

Friend currently exists as an iOS app. And once a user downloads the app and sets up their account, they'll see completely blank space. Friendster doesn't show users any posts. In fact, there are no suggestions about who to follow at all.

The new Friendster is built for users to strictly follow people they know in real-life. And the platform makes sure it's being used that way too. In order to follow someone on Friendster, the two users need to physically tap each other's phones while the app is open. This is the only way to connect with someone on the platform.

What happened to Friendster

Before even MySpace took off, there was Friendster. 

Friendster was officially launched in March 2002 by its founder Jonathan Abrams and is largely considered to be the first major online social networking platform. However, shortly after its launch, other social networks like MySpace quickly took off and Friendster was unable to maintain a foothold with American users.

The platform did find a significant user base in Asia and was eventually sold to a Malaysian company, before Friendster pivoted to become a social gaming website in 2011. Eventually, however, Friendster was completely shut down in 2015.

Carson, the new owner, said he noticed that the Friendster.com domain was once again resolving to a website filled with pop-up ads in 2023. Carson reached out to the new owner of the domain and found out that they had won Friendster.com at an expired domain auction one year earlier for just $7,456. Carson eventually struck a deal with the domain owner, purchasing Friendster.com for $20,000 in Bitcoin along with another domain Carson owned that generated $9,000 per year.

In a blog post discussing his journey acquiring the Friendster domain, Carson said he has plans to enable a Friends of Friends feature, that will allow users to connect solely online if they are already connected to another friend that one of the users have actually met. 

In addition, Carson would like to roll out a Fading Connection feature which nudges users when they haven't been in the same room with one of their Friendster connections for more than a year.

"Not a punishment — a gentle nudge that real friendships are kept alive in person, not online," Carson explains.

After downloading the app, I must point out that all the nothingness makes it feel daunting to use the app. However, the new Friendster seems like a very interesting idea – if it can take off. The real challenge seems to be getting users on there to begin with, because they too will see an app with empty space until they start making real-life connections.

Last year, DJI's Mic Mini was one of our favorite microphones for content creators. It just got a sequel — though you may have to wait to see it.

The miniature microphone array is back in the form of DJI Mic Mini 2, first spotted by The Verge. It's available now in most markets around the world, with pricing starting at €59 for a bundle that has a charging case, a wireless receiver, and a mic transmitter.

You can also get some more expensive bundles, such as a €99 version with a bigger receiver, a couple of transmitters, and a larger charging case.

Look at what you can't have, America. Credit: DJI UK

You may have noticed the lack of a U.S. dollar sign there. That's because this product, like some other DJI products, is not available in the U.S. right now, and we don't know if it will be any time soon.

All DJI products are facing long delays when it comes to launching in the U.S. — here's why.

U.S. users can take heart with the fact that none of the improvements in the Mic Mini 2 seem that big of a deal. The major upgrade is a series of magnetic, swappable mic covers that come in different colors, which could be useful for making the mics either blend in with something or stand out, depending on what you want.

There are also new voice presets, which could be handy for some content creators.

It's a good thing those sweaters exactly match the colors of the mic covers. Credit: DJI

Last year, Mashable found that the original Mic Mini made for a great option for anyone who wanted to record audio in a portable fashion and without breaking the bank. The audio quality was solid and they interface with a mobile app for easy settings adjustment.

Unfortunately, U.S. customers will have to get more than a little creative if they want to get their hands on the new version.

I've never been a Nintendo person. And yet, I've never been this completely captured by one of its games until the company's latest release, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream.

My rapturous attention to it is equal parts FOMO and genuine amazement at the unhinged ways people are playing this game. It's taken over my timeline and is slowly dismantling my will to resist buying a Switch.

For context, Living the Dream is the third entry in Nintendo's series of casual social simulators — think The Sims or Animal Crossing — in which you oversee and manage an island populated by Miis, Nintendo's customizable avatars (a portmanteau of Wii and me). It shares Animal Crossing's DNA in that you're tending to an island and its residents, but unlike that game, you actually get to create the islanders yourself. Thus, no need for housing discrimination and forced migration to phase out the "ugly villagers."

A massive part of the game's appeal is its creation suite, which lets you draw virtually anything and drop it into the game as an interactive item for your Miis to use. Uncensored, mind you. On top of that, like its predecessors, Living the Dream features a text-to-voice modulator that has Miis speaking in a robotic, Vocaloid-adjacent cadence. Also uncensored. You can even make the TV shows they decide to watch. Big news for fans of yaoi.

It is, in short, the perfect game for post-COVID, chronically online Gen Z. Just ask poor Charlie Kirky what happens when they get hold of your likeness.

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The result is near-infinite replayability and, for those of us without a Switch, near-insufferable FOMO. I want to create an island where my characters bicker over a pack of Marlboro Reds. I want a Mii to dream about him and his friends worshipping the unregistered firearm I left sitting on the beach. The memes and playthroughs circulating online are so genuinely unhinged that I'm not sure a "normal" playthrough of this game is even possible. Plus, in a resounding win for Big Tobacco, cigarettes are practically a staple item at this point, and I've lost count of how many islands I've seen with one.

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We've got a tiny Obama doing a freaky little shimmy. Jennifer Coolidge is enjoying a bottle of Hennessy. Kitty White is getting rejected by Leon S. Kennedy, then immediately harassed on the beach by Miss Piggy and John Pork. I want to be clear that those are all real sentences describing real videos that exist on the internet right now.

My personal favorite, though, is a Mii cast video edited to the theme from Living Single, featuring a roster of Black cultural figures like Steve Harvey, Madea, the Smokestack Twins from Sinners, just living their lives on this little island together. Delightfully, irreverently unserious.

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Yes, it's a bummer that the game still lacks real online functionality and built-in Mii- and screenshot-sharing. For a title that has thrived almost entirely on user-generated content going viral, that feels like a conspicuous oversight. Nintendo, we are begging.

But the internet, as always, persists. My FOMO is real, and it is winning. I want my own island. I want to see what my created characters fight over and who they fall in love with. I want to create something deeply questionable and watch the social fallout unfold in robotic text-to-voice. I want in on this. The internet is having the time of its life on a little island somewhere — and I intend to join them.

Omegle is in the ground, and Thundr is dancing on its grave. Since Omegle's demise in late 2023, the internet has been introduced to a number of Omegle alternatives, from the tame to the explicit. Thundr is a random video and text chat service that's emulating Omegle the most in 2026. Think of it as Omegle with actual guardrails, offering far more ways to get your exact match through tags, country selection, and AI moderation. Thundr prides itself on being one of the safer random cam connection sites, claiming to instantly block nudity, spam, and hate speech.

But what is Thundr, and is it really Omegle's best replacement? And is the site as safe as it claims to be?

How does Thundr work?

Like Omegle, Uhmegle, Flingster, DirtyRoulette, and the like, Thundr matches users to random strangers across the globe through video or text chat. Like most alternatives, Thundr has a customizable matching process designed to help users find better matches, faster. Add up to 33 tags, select your preferred countries, and Thundr will do its best to connect you accordingly. Note: Thundr is one of the only cam sites that allow users to choose multiple countries without payment.

While this doesn't affect matching, Thundr also offers a number of color themes for a better visual experience, including Dark, Light, Pink, Brat (neon green, likely inspired by Charli XCX's hit 2024 album), and more.

Thundr requires every user to create an account before connecting with strangers, with options to sign up via Google or Apple. This is a safety measure, which is a breath of fresh air in this space since most similar sites don't bother — but it's very easy to create an anonymous account even without an email, so it's difficult to say how safe this requirement is.

On the home page, Thundr claims to be different from nearly every other cam site out there: "Thundr uses a match-making algorithm that is designed to give you an amazing experience from the first match, and it only gets better with time." In our experience, this is half true. You can add tags and select countries, but the country filter works noticeably better than the tag filter. You'll find someone with a similar tag maybe every 20ish people.

Where it gets interesting is how the algorithm actually learns. It seemingly sorts users based on nudity and sexually explicit conversation more than anything else. Match with hundreds of faces, take your dick out once, and suddenly, everyone Thundr pairs you with is there for the same thing. While that works great for NSFW users, the algorithm will occasionally misfire and place users who did nothing wrong into NSFW matches, pigeonholing people who are otherwise there for connection. Outside of the SFW versus NSFW divide, we haven't seen much evidence that the algorithm is doing anything more sophisticated than that.

Is Thundr free?

Yes, Thundr is free to use, including all the aforementioned filter options. The only form of payment Thundr offers is something called Boosts. A Boost is a one-time purchase that puts you at the front of Thundr's match queue from 10 to 60 minutes, making it more likely you'll be paired with higher-quality users. Thundr doesn't say much about Boosts on the site itself, but when they launched, the creator of Thundr took to Reddit to explain: "All that happens is that when a user is boosted, they are temporarily at the top of the match queue. This means they're more likely to be matched to what the platform thinks is the highest quality users."

When it comes to pricing, here's what you're looking at as of April 2026, according to a Thundr pop-up:

• Small Boost: $3.99 for 10 minutes

• Normal Boost: $7.99 for 30 minutes

• Super Boost: $16.99 for 60 minutes

But, do Boosts on Thundr work? We're unsure. We haven't tested this ourselves, but users on Reddit claim the answer is a big, fat "no".

Is Thundr available on mobile?

Thundr is browser-only and does not currently have a dedicated app, but you can use it on your phone through your mobile browser. It's worth noting that the mobile version works slightly differently from the desktop one. On desktop, the experience mirrors classic Omegle, with a skip button in the corner of your screen near your camera feed to move on to the next person. On mobile, that button still exists, but users can also swipe up to skip. 

Is Thundr NSFW?

Yes, Thundr is NSFW. Although the site prides itself on its AI moderation, nudity and explicit content slip through more often than you'd expect. You must be 18+ to use Thundr.

Is Thundr safe?

A hard question to answer. Thundr claims to have end-to-end encryption (meaning Thundr and other third parties cannot see messages), zero data-sharing, and AI moderation, and seemingly does its best to keep explicitly-minded users in their own corner of the site. But this doesn't always work. You have to actively do something Thundr deems sexual to end up in the NSFW zone, meaning someone can expose an unsuspecting user to explicit content just to trigger the algorithm.

Here's something else we take issue with. In Thundr's FAQ section, the question "How does Thundr's free video chat let me chat with strangers safely?" is answered like this:

"Every live video or text session is end-to-end encrypted and protected by real-time AI that instantly blocks nudity, hate speech, and spam. You can report, skip, or mute any stranger with one tap, so you enjoy free video chat without compromising safety."

This is false. Just because Thundr separates explicit users into their own corner doesn't mean nudity is blocked. It just means that it's pushed elsewhere. When you get to this side of Thundr, you will know by the amount of penises that appear on screen over and over and over again, which wouldn't happen as much prior. That's not blocking nudity, that's just doing something else with it.

Adding a mandated sign-in requirement is an excellent step, but anyone can have an email without confirming their age (or make an anonymous account without an email and do the same). Children under 18 can access Thundr just as easily as adults, and given what can slip through the moderation, that's a serious problem.

Final thoughts on Thundr

Thundr is doing something many other sites are not doing: requiring users to sign in. Although Thundr does not say it explicitly, this holds people accountable in a way. This will push away a number of bad actors who intend on using Thundr for the wrong reasons, ultimately making Thundr safer than a lot of Omegle alternatives. Like always, when using Thundr or any other cam site that connects users to strangers from around the globe, use caution. The internet has always been a weird place. Thundr is no exception.

In a post-Omegle world, there are many one-on-one cam sites to consider. Thundr, OmeTV, Uhmegle — but none of these scratch the itch that a lot of users went to Omegle for: online sex. While most of these sites do have a large community of people utilizing them to bust a nut on the internet, they aren't marketed for that. DirtyRoulette is.

After its launch in 2010, DirtyRoulette quickly became a popular Omegle alternative for those looking to waste less time. Omegle became saturated with people who just wanted to chat, which was the site's intended use. Some just wanted to jerk off, which is why DirtyRoulette became a great space to do exactly that. And since its launch, DirtyRoulette has cemented itself as one of the most visited adult webcam sites on the internet.

But what is DirtyRoulette, and does it actually deliver on what it promises? It's time to find out.

How does DirtyRoulette work?

DirtyRoulette connects people from all over the world with one common desire: to get naked with strangers on webcam. The site doesn't pretend otherwise, either. Everything is branded for sex, which is honestly quite refreshing in comparison to other sites like Flingster, whose "About Us" section states the opposite when everyone on the site uses it for sex.

Funny enough, DirtyRoulette is actually powered by Flingster, so the format will feel familiar if you've ever used that site. Choose your gender, add tags if you want, and hit start. DirtyRoulette will pair you with a random stranger from around the world. And nine times out of ten, it will be a penis.

Because it is powered by Flingster, DirtyRoulette runs ads every few people. These ads aren't annoying and are easy to skip. You can sign up via Gmail or email, which, like Flingster, does nothing. If you want more, DirtyRoulette offers a paid VIP tier (found when you click the "Upgrade" button in the chat), the same account and pricing as Flingster:

• One week: $7.99/trial (rebills monthly at $29.99)

• One month: $19.99/month

• Six months: $14.99/month (rebills every six months at $89.94)

That said, accounts on DirtyRoulette are essentially pointless. The only change is that you will be able to filter by gender and country, which honestly doesn't change the game at all.

What gives DirtyRoulette the edge over Flingster is that this site is not intended for anything aside from sex. There's nothing confusing about it. Like, it's called DirtyRoulette. You'd have to live under a rock to not understand the context there.

Is DirtyRoulette free?

Yes, DirtyRoulette is free aside from the aforementioned service through Flingster VIP. DirtyRoulette works just as well without paying, and there's no real need to do so.

Is DirtyRoulette available on mobile?

Unlike Flingster, there is currently no way to download DirtyRoulette as an app on your phone. DirtyRoulette is fully accessible through your smartphone's browser, with everything available that you'd find on your desktop.

Is DirtyRoulette legal?

In the United States, yes, DirtyRoulette is legal for adults over the age of 18. That said, if you are trying to access DirtyRoulette in a different country, check your local laws first, as DirtyRoulette is not legal everywhere.

Keep in mind that although DirtyRoulette is an adult cam site intended for adults over the age of 18, there's a significant problem worth noting. DirtyRoulette prides itself on anonymity, meaning that there is no ID verification needed prior to accessing the site. Anyone can get on DirtyRoulette, and that's worth taking seriously. DirtyRoulette's FAQ states that if you suspect someone is underage, you can report it by clicking on the flag icon in a chat.

Is DirtyRoulette safe?

Generally, no, not really. But, when comparing DirtyRoulette versus Flingster, we'd say it has a slight edge over Flingster in that department. Why? As mentioned, DirtyRoulette is not trying to trick you into saying it's something else. It is an adult cam site. Essentially, it's porn. It doesn't pretend to be anything different, as Flingster does.

We have to reiterate that there is no ID verification, which keeps the site anonymous but does leave the door open for bad actors. You can be speaking to anybody.

Final thoughts on DirtyRoulette

Like any cam site, sexually-inclined or not, DirtyRoulette is to be accessed by those who are using their judgment. It's a simple site with a simple purpose, and for what it is, it does its job well. But the anonymity that makes it appealing is the same thing that makes it worth approaching with some common sense. If something feels off, it's off. Skip to the next person and continue having the fun you came there for. Just don't forget that there's a real person on the other side of that camera, for better or worse.

Social media app X rolled out a new custom timeline feature earlier this week, and so far, user reactions have been positive.

The new feature is reminiscent of TweetDeck, the popular feature that recently rebranded as X Pro. Using the new custom timelines feature, X users will be able to create custom feeds for specific topics.

The new feature, powered by the xAI tool Grok, is now available to Premium subscribers on iOS devices. Nikita Bier, head of product at X, announced the rollout in a post on X and said that Android support would be coming soon.

"It's powered by Grok's understanding of every post with the algorithm's personalization — meaning every timeline is made just for you. And it works even better when it's a topic you already engage with. This was a huge undertaking across many months, so we're excited for you take it for a spin," Bier wrote.

X also released a short video showing how the feature works.

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Podcaster Aakash Gupta noted that the update lets users create up to "75 custom timelines powered by Grok." Gupta also speculated that the feature would give xAI a lot of new data for AI training."

In general, X users were excited to try the feature, though there was some confusion, which is typical with new-feature rollouts like this.

In response to a user lamenting the lack of an option for a Catholicism-focused custom feed, Bier reminded users to update the X app to try the new feature.

"Update your app," Bier wrote. "That’s the old experimental feature. We’re working on supporting religions in the next 2 weeks. We had it earlier, but the quality/content didn’t meet our bar yet.

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To a user who asked if it was possible to prevent topics from appearing in a feed, Bier pointed users to another new feature — the snooze topics feature, which rolled out at the same time as the custom feeds. That feature is available now for iOS and web Premium users.

Credit: X / @nikitabier

Most other comments on Bier's post were from users requesting specific topics, such as Ukraine, manufacturing, Bitcoin, and memes.

Finally, some X users are skeptical of the feature but willing to try it.

"Using it since morning, tbh it's okay," wrote X user @syssignals. "I saw overlapping in between AI, Software and Tech. Also seeing same content again and again on these timelines. I am still on my For you timeline. But hope this custom timeline will be mature as time goes by."

User @Hoxygo shared a similar sentiment: "Finally a way to separate tech from sports without building a whole new account. The real test is whether the algorithm respects the timeline boundaries instead of bleeding the main feed into it."

Want to learn more about getting the best out of your tech? Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories and Deals newsletters today.

Have your Instagram posts been turning black and white without your consent? You're not alone.

According to Engadget, some users on Facebook and presumably elsewhere (though I wasn't able to find a lot of complaints on X) have complained that photos uploaded to the Instagram app in color were being automatically and unintentionally turned black and white at some point in the uploading process.

It was enough of a problem that Instagram confirmed its existence to Engadget, explained what the problem was, and claimed it had already been fixed.

"Earlier today, a technical issue caused some HDR photos to appear incorrectly as black-and-white for a subset of accounts,” Instagram told Engadget, before saying the problem was already being fixed.

According to the Instagram spokesperson, anyone still experiencing the problem should simply wait a few hours for the photos to automatically go back to their original, intended state.

In the meantime, if you want to avoid anything like this happening in the future, there's a way to turn off HDR photos on an iPhone. By default, your iPhone will turn on HDR automatically when it's called for, but if you go to Settings, then Camera, then turn off Auto HDR, you can avoid any HDR-related mishaps going forward.

Bluesky, the social media app popular with X expatriates, suffered a widespread outage on Thursday, April 16.

And in a thread posted on the official Bluesky profile, the app's leaders revealed the cause of the outage — a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

"Our team received a report of intermittent app outages at about 11:40pm PDT on April 15, 2026," the post read. "They worked through the night to mitigate a sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which intensified throughout the day."

Fortunately, Bluesky also said there was no evidence that any user data had been compromised in the attack, which affected the Bluesky app, feeds, notifications, and search. The company said it would provide further information by 1 p.m. ET Friday.

The Bluesky status page indicated the app was fully online as of this writing; the app reports a 99.983 percent uptime over the past 90 days.

A DDoS attack is relatively simple and low-effort for cybercriminals. In this type of attack, hackers send a massive number of requests to overwhelm servers. DDoS attacks have been around since the early days of the World Wide Web, and as the Bluesky outage shows, they can still cause problems.

The Bluesky outage began affecting users in the early morning hours, with the service DownDetector recording thousands of user error reports. (Disclosure: DownDetector and Mashable are both owned by the same parent company, Ziff Davis.)

Bluesky saw massive growth after Elon Musk took over Twitter, and again following the second election of President Donald Trump. However, its growth has stalled more recently, and data shows that daily active users on Bluesky have declined.

Mashable reached out to Bluesky with questions about the attack, and we'll update this story if we receive a response.

UPDATE: Apr. 16, 2026, 11:40 a.m. UTC Bluesky appears to be working again, both on the app and web, though we're still seeing loading issues.

UPDATE: Apr. 16, 2026, 2:28 p.m. UTC Bluesky is operational again, according to the company's status page. Bluesky told Mashable via email, "We are experiencing some service interruptions and our team is working on the issue."

Bluesky went down on Thursday, with users reporting issues with the social media platform.

Often seen as the alternative to Elon Musk's X, Bluesky was not working as usual in the early hours, with Downdetector identifying a thousand-strong spike in reported issues with the app and site around 6:30 a.m. ET. (Disclosure: DownDetector and Mashable are both owned by the same company, Ziff Davis.)

Credit: Downdetector

At 6:42 a.m., Bluesky's own service status page reported acknowledgment of the issue, saying it was "investigating an incident" and confirming "some systems down."

"We are starting to see some early recovery, but many users and services are still impacted," a post read.

Credit: Bluesky

At the time of first publishing, Mashable could not access the site properly, and we reached out to Bluesky for further information.

"We are experiencing some service interruptions and our team is working on the issue," a Bluesky rep told Mashable via email. "You can find the latest updates at status.bsky.app or the Bluesky Server Status account."

A few hours later, Bluesky's status page reported that the site was fully operational, though did not detail the issue that affected it.

I can't quite figure out what year we are living in.

Let me more clear. I can't pin down what year the chronically online are living in. We are in an unprecedented time of tech advancement, what with artificial intelligence taking over our lives and astronauts literally going back to the moon. But everywhere I turn, I see remnants of the past: People are yearning for 2010s hipster aesthetics. Avatar: The Last Airbender fan cams are all over my FYP. Celebrities are skeletally thin again, and thinspo pages and eating disorder content are taking over TikTok.

But most confusing: Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff are once again the talk of the town.

Dunham (actor, writer, and director) and Antonoff (Bleachers frontman and pop-girl collaborator) dated from 2012 to 2016. Their relationship was quintessentially of the era. It was a bit messy. Then came "The PowerPoint."

Responding to swirling rumors after the release of Lorde's 2017 hit Melodrama, a former Twitter user by the name @buzzkillary put together a thesis. In her account and the accompanying 29-slide PowerPoint, Buzzkillary claims that Lorde and Antonoff were lovers and that the singer's breakout hit "Green Light," among others, was about him.

The conspiracy acted as all online conspiracies do, lying in wait in the dark corners of niche fandoms until a relevant Hollywood news item — like Lorde's 2025 album Virgin, Antonoff's marriage to actor Margaret Qualley, or Dunham's latest show about a young woman who was cheated on — wrenched it out from the shadows. But then Dunham's new memoir, Famesick, dropped, and everything got a little more real.

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In Famesick, Dunham describes the full fallout of her relationship with Antonoff for the first time, regaling the intimate details of an emotionally complicated relationship he had with a certain "teen pop star"(the internet, and PowerPoint, have long surmised it's Lorde).

Dunham says this artist and her partner spent hours "ensconsed together" and that she called her "Aunt Lena" during a period of time Dunham was using a walker due to chronic illness. One quote was particularly damning in the eyes of the internet. She describes the star in question "sprawled across our sectional couch, weeping into Jack's lap as he told her that ‘your teens are for experimenting’ in a tone so comforting, it almost brought tears to my eyes." She goes on to say, "It had been so long since he'd spoken to me with that kind of expansive generosity."

Then, Dunham admits to her own faux pas: She cheated on Antonoff once it all became too much. The internet, of course, had many thoughts. Which cheating scandal was worse, Antonoff's or Dunham's? Who was the victim here?

Even Tumblr chimed in.

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There are those who have taken Dunham's as full-fledged confirmation of a torrid affair, reinforcing the knotted web outlined in the PowerPoint. Many felt sympathy for Dunham, who has been at the center of several controversies since the 2010s.

To some, this was an opportunity to visit other connections, including Taylor Swift. Could her songs have actually been about the Antonoff/ Dunham debacle this whole time, an observer and one of their closest friends?

Then there were others who, in a real throwback to the old internet, only had cruel words for the women involved in the emotional love triangle. Dunham and Lorde — both of whom have been targets of vitriolic comments related to their appearance and art — were transgressors, or were pitiful, or just simply ugly. Antonoff was...there.

Lorde, who would have been in her late teens and early twenties during the peak of her collaboration with then 32-year-old Antonoff, is just one of many young pop women who have collaborated with the producer. And Antonoff wasn't the only older Hollywood man with whom she was associated. As users tried to spot the Antonoff/ Dunham parallels in Lorde's discography, others rightfully pointed out the more probable muse, a Universal Music promotions director named Justin Warren who Lorde was linked in 2015. He was 17 years older than her.

Dunham's quote, taken in its full context in Famesick, acknowledges a larger problem: That Antonoff was extremely close to a lot of his collaborators and that they had a bond she wasn't invited to join.

These are layers that not even the internet's most infamous PowerPoint can sum up.

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Amid all the internet discourse, I ask: What outcome would soothe the masses the most? Do they need to see a mass cancellation of Lorde? Or Antonoff or Dunham, both of whom have been villains of the internet for years? Or is this just a big "I told you so!" moment for the PowerPoint truthers? What, ultimately, do we gain from theorizing about any of it online?

Dunham herself has acknowledged the conspiracy during the press cycle for Famesick, an honesty about her checkered past that the internet has come to respect about her as she's aged and embraced her cultural legacy — that's certainly not a vestige of the Old Internet. Dunham says she saw the presentation years ago and that it was "so convincing they had me rethinking events that I myself had been present for." She even admitted that she reached out to the PowerPoint's creator during a "low moment."

Dunham, through Famesick, is still processing what happened during the nascent years of internet rumor and cancellation, just like every other social media denizen who was online at the time. And we still don't know what to take from it.

If 2016 really was "the last good year," as many TikTok videos suggest, 2026 is trying really hard to reheat its nachos — right down to linking to Buzzfeed articles about Lena Dunham PowerPoint theories.

For U.S. teens who use TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, one of the apps stands out as more of a distraction than the others, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center.

More than a quarter of teens shared that they spend too much time on TikTok, while more than a third said the app negatively affects their sleep. Twenty-nine percent of respondents said TikTok hurts their productivity. Smaller shares of teens reported similar feelings about Instagram and Snapchat.

Still, eight in 10 teens said they turned to TikTok specifically for entertainment. While respondents also considered Instagram and Snapchat reliably entertaining, teens were more likely to use those apps to keep up with friends and family, compared to TikTok.

Despite acknowledging TikTok's negative impact on their sleep and productivity, 71 percent of teens said the app neither hurt or helped their mental health. Three-quarters of teens said the same of Instagram and Snapchat. Nineteen percent of respondents shared that TikTok actually improved their mental health.

In general, about seven in 10 teens said their experiences on TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat are mostly positive. Only three percent reported largely negative experiences. The remaining teens characterize their engagement on the platforms as a mix of both good and bad.

The findings are based on Pew Research Center's survey of 1,458 U.S. teens and their parents last fall.

Critics have argued that social media companies are facing a "Big Tobacco moment" following a landmark court case against Meta and YouTube, which alleged that both platforms were negligently designed in ways that harmed a young user's mental health. TikTok and Snapchat settled with the plaintiff prior to the jury trial. A separate trial against Meta found the company liable for misleading consumers about child safety.

The Pew Research Center survey, which was conducted well before the trials ended, suggests that teens may feel less negative about TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat than expected.

Regardless, a quarter of parents surveyed by Pew Research Center said that social media hurt their teen's mental health while only eight percent of the teens said the same. Parents were also more likely to say their teen spent too much time on social media.

When it came to TikTok, only 28 percent of teens characterized their use in this way, but that figure increased to 44 percent when parents answered the same question.

Justin Bieber did not spend his Coachella headlining set pretending the past was behind him. Instead, he opened a laptop, pulled up YouTube, and sang directly to it.

Midway through his 90-minute set on Saturday, the Day Two headliner began streaming old clips of himself performing snippets of songs like "Baby," "Favorite Girl," "Never Say Never," and "Beauty and a Beat," duetting with the floppy-haired, younger version of himself that first made him famous. "I feel like we gotta take you guys on a bit of a journey... How far back do you guys go?" Bieber asked the crowd. "Do you guys really go back, though? Like for real, for real?"

The most striking moment came when the 32-year-old pulled up the grainy 2007 YouTube video of 12-year-old Justin singing "So Sick" by Ne-Yo, one of the clips that helped get him discovered in the first place. That particular video was uploaded nearly 20 years ago, back when YouTube still felt like a place where anyone could stumble across a talented kid singing in a local competition, not an endless scroll optimized by algorithms, and before the internet regularly produced its own stars.

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It was a deeply meta moment: Bieber was singing along with YouTube while YouTube streamed his performance live to millions of viewers worldwide. He'd occasionally talk to the audience watching from home, looking into the camera like a friend FaceTiming from his living room, not from the Main Stage at Coachella.

But it also felt bigger than a nostalgia play. Bieber is one of the last true pop superstars whose mythology is inseparable from an earlier version of the internet, one where a kid uploading covers from his bedroom could still plausibly become one of the biggest artists on the planet. The internet still produces stars, but they are different now — more fragmented, more niche, more algorithmically siloed. Platforms produce creators, influencers, and a rotating cast of micro-celebrities, but few Justin Biebers.

Justin Bieber opens his Coachella set in a hoodie. Credit: Kevin Mazur / Getty Images for Coachella

That is what made the performance feel unexpectedly emotional. Bieber was not just revisiting old clips; he was revisiting the child the internet turned into Justin Bieber. Many former child stars look back at old footage, and it feels a bit silly or even sad. Here, though, Bieber seemed genuinely at peace with it. He smiled at the videos. He harmonized with his younger self, treating him less like a brand asset and more like someone worth meeting again.

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That intimacy was reinforced by the set's understated nature. Most Coachella headliners are expected to deliver a giant spectacle: elaborate stage design, pyrotechnics, dancers, and some sort of viral visual moment engineered for social media. Bieber, dressed in a hoodie, mostly gave the crowd a laptop, a camera feed, a few guests (the Kid LAROI, Dijon, Tems, Wizkid, Mk.gee), and his voice.

For some viewers, that made the set feel underwhelming, especially in a festival slot that usually expects excess — Day One headliner Sabrina Carpenter rolled out five Dior costume changes and complex Hollywood-inspired sets on the same stage. There is also probably a fair conversation to be had about whether a female pop star delivering Bieber's style of sparse, emotionally inward performance would have been criticized more harshly for doing too little. But part of what made his set so fascinating was its refusal to play by those expectations at all.

Instead of building some futuristic world around himself, he turned the stage into something closer to a bedroom computer circa 2009: YouTube tabs open, old videos surfacing one after another. His voice has arguably never sounded better, and the lack of elaborate staging made the set feel more confident, not less. Bieber didn't need spectacle. The emotional reveal was the point.

Even the stranger, more meme-heavy moments of the set fit into that framework. Bieber recited along to his own "standing on business" paparazzi rant, pulled up unrelated viral clips like "Deez Nuts," and turned the stage into something that looked less like a traditional concert and more like a browser window with too many tabs open. Call it his version of "gay guy music video night" — an intimate, almost devotional evening spent pulling up pop hits, deep cuts, and formative internet ephemera for 100,000 of his closest friends in the Indio desert.

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That is what celebrity looks like in 2026: less like a polished narrative and more like a living archive that anyone can revisit anytime, where each version of you exists fossilized in digital amber. Old interviews, paparazzi clips, memes, viral moments, performances, scandals, and forgotten uploads all live side by side online, waiting to resurface. What Bieber did at Coachella felt like walking through that archive on his own terms, choosing which versions of himself to revisit, which memories to reclaim.

In that sense, the set was not really about nostalgia at all. It was about what it means to live long enough online to have multiple versions of yourself floating around the internet at once. At Coachella, Bieber did something stranger and more moving than a greatest hits set: He logged into his own internet history, smiling at the screen as though he was finally making peace with the kid inside it.

Some things can feel so specific, so perfectly engineered in a lab to appeal directly to me. Today, that thing is the members of BTS singing "Butter-Fly" by Kōji Wada, the iconic opening theme to Digimon Adventure, during an appearance on Hot Ones.

The members approached the hot wings challenge with wildly different strategies. V called it quits a few wings in — smart! — and spent the rest of the episode slamming pints of milk. Jin attempted to expel the chili demons from his body through a series of guttural screams, while j-hope tried to walk it off. RM kept his tears hidden behind his sunglasses, while Jimin and Jung Kook mostly played it cool, rallying themselves every round with an enthusiastic "come on, wing!" And then there was Suga: the silent wing assassin, who only showed his weakness at the very end.

As the wings got hotter, the conversation only got more charming. Jin talked about his love of fishing, Jung Kook shared his perfect tteokbokki recipe, and the group reflected on their latest album, Arirang, and the world tour that just kicked off in Seoul.

Even through sweat dabbing, milk chugging, and increasingly desperate reactions to the wings, the episode doubled as a reminder of why spending time with BTS is always such a delight: No matter how chaotic things get, they never stop being deeply themselves — especially when it comes to their favorite anime OSTs.

Remi Cruz Parsons has spent more than a decade inviting viewers into her life. What began with room makeovers and lifestyle vlogs has evolved into a deeply loyal audience of millions that has followed her through every era, from YouTube uploads filmed in her parents' house to podcasts, live tours, and now, her first cookbook.

With her new cookbook, Let's Get Cooking: Everyday Meals, Tipsy Favorites and Comfort Food Cravings, the 31-year-old creator is bringing one of the most beloved parts of her content into readers' homes. Filled with comfort food, Korean recipes inspired by her family, easy weeknight dinners, and dishes longtime viewers will instantly recognize from her vlogs, the book feels like a natural extension of the world she has built online.

We spoke with Remi about building a career online, finding longevity as a creator, protecting your privacy, and why cooking has become one of the most intimate ways she connects with her audience.

Credit: Zooey Liao/Mashable/Remi Cruz Parsons/Getty Images/YouTube/Instagram

I feel like I've really grown up with you, which you probably hear all the time.

Remi Cruz Parsons: I mean, I feel like I've grown up with everybody. We've all grown up. It's been fun to grow up with everyone and go through similar experiences together.

I was looking at the very first video on your YouTube channel, posted 13 years ago. It was a room tour.

There were more, but they're all private, so I need to go back and private them.

In it, you're talking alking about Pretty Little Liars. That was my life.

I love meeting people my age because it feels like we were all doing the same things at the same time. Obviously, the internet has changed tremendously, but I'm still doing room tours.

Cooking has really become a big part of your content for many years. But at what point were you like, "OK, this is what people are connecting with"?

It was probably right around before COVID or during quarantine. At the time, I was making so much lifestyle content — room tours, beauty, fashion, all of that — and I still genuinely love those things. But I remember feeling like I was at a crossroads creatively. I didn't feel as inspired by some of the lifestyle content anymore, and I wanted to challenge myself in a different way.

So I sat down and thought, "What do I really love doing?" And the answer was cooking. I loved cooking, I loved posting about it, and I realized I wanted to explore that more seriously. I still wanted to keep doing everything else because I genuinely enjoy it, but I also wanted to see what it would look like to really dive into the cooking world.

2020 really was the year so many people realized they wanted to turn their hobbies into something bigger.

And also, pretty much all I did was cook all day. I was like, well, if I'm vlogging too, this is perfect.

And people were really connecting with it.

Yeah, that’s why I feel really lucky. Throughout all the different journeys of my life and all the content that I’ve made, I’ve just been able to show what I’m genuinely doing and fall in love with it on camera. Whether it was DIY room decor or cooking, it wasn't even a conscious thought. It was just, this is what I’m doing at the time, and people happen to be in similar places in their lives.

It's because your audience really gravitates toward you.

That’s the dream for a content creator, though. So I feel very lucky.

When you were deciding which recipes should be in the book, what was that process like?

I sat down and thought about the fact that I vlog pretty much every day of my life, even if it’s just little moments here and there. I also dedicated the book to my viewers because I wouldn't have any of these opportunities without them.

So I wanted the book to feel really authentic to the content I make, where viewers could pick it up and feel like there are little “if you know, you know” moments. But I also wanted it to appeal to people who are just walking through a bookstore.

I ended up laying it out almost like a Remi Life vlog. The chapters are split up based on the kinds of things you see in my content. There's a grab-and-go breakfast chapter because I’m always running late or driving to the podcast studio and eating in the car. There’s a Korean chapter, which is really where I found my love for my culture and learned how to cook. There's a weeknight dinner chapter because sometimes I come home after a long day and I don't want to cook, but I still need to eat. I also love hosting. In my vlogs, I'm always posting holiday content, family gatherings, or any excuse to throw a party. So it’s nice because there’s variety, but it also feels really true to my life and my audience.

"Let's Get Cooking: Everyday Meals, Tipsy Favorites and Comfort Food Cravings" Credit: Simon & Schuster

If someone picked up this book in a bookstore and had never watched your content before, what's the one recipe that feels most like you?

My gut reaction is the cheesy potato casserole. I’m actually making it tomorrow on the Today Show, which makes me so happy because I think it might have been the first recipe I learned to make. My mom always made it growing up, and every holiday, my brother and I would skip the turkey and just eat piles of that. Eventually, my mom was like, "I need help in the kitchen. You can take over this recipe." That felt like such an honor.

Now, every Thanksgiving, Christmas, or family gathering, it's always on the menu. Even my husband asked if we should start doing mac and cheese for holidays, and I was like, no — this is our thing. It's comforting, everyone loves a casserole, and it’s honestly really easy to make.

I love any kind of one-pot meal situation.

Truly. Minimal cleanup, and it’s all basically done in maybe an hour and a half.

You've been on the internet for a long time and shared your life with millions of people, but cooking is its own form of intimacy. What has it been like to share this part of yourself?

I love the idea of cooking being intimate because it’s so true. To me, the kitchen is sacred. It’s the heart of the home. So for people to bring the book into their kitchens and hopefully incorporate these recipes into their holidays or weeknights or family traditions — that's really special. Even seeing people recreate my recipes is so nerve-wracking because I want them to love it as much as I do. But it's also incredibly rewarding. I saw someone on TikTok who got the book early and made my chocolate cookies, which I developed after having a Levain cookie years ago and thinking, "This is the best cookie I've ever had." I wanted to figure out how to make a thick, cakey cookie like that. Now I keep the dough in my freezer all the time so I can make one whenever I've had a bad day or a good day. Watching her make them and react to them felt so intimate. I was sitting on the edge of my seat watching her review the recipe. She said she had to go for a walk because she ate the whole plate. It made me so happy.

It must be surreal to see something you created take on new lives when people start making it themselves.

Totally. My dream is for someone to make the potato casserole or another recipe from the book and have it become part of their family tradition.

You've been creating content for more than a decade now. When you look back at those older videos, do you see something that you instinctively understood about building an audience?

I do. The old content was definitely very of its time, and I cringe a little sometimes, but I’m also so grateful for that younger version of myself. I wouldn’t be sitting here if it weren’t for those videos and the courage it took to post them. It's also really fun seeing creators who are just starting out now because the creator environment is so different.

When I started, it wasn’t a real job. I had to spend so much time convincing my parents to let me post videos in the first place, and then convincing them to let me take a break from school to pursue it full-time. Now it feels so much more accepted. I remember my first PR package. It was from ColourPop, and I was so excited. My dad was like, "Do not give our address to strangers." But I was like, "No, you don’t get it. This is going to be my life." And I was right.

I see that a lot with first- and second-generation kids, too. Your parents came here with one idea of success in mind, and then you've built something completely different.

Totally. Both of my parents immigrated from Korea. My mom always wanted me to go into medicine, and my dad was more like, "Do what you want, but still go to school." Getting them to let me take a break from school was such a huge conversation. But now they're my biggest supporters. My mom is in the book, her recipes are in the book, her photos are in the book. I posted a vlog this morning where I showed my parents the book for the first time, and my mom was hysterically crying before I even pulled it out. It was really sweet.

Remi Cruz Parsons and her husband Credit: Courtesy of Remi Cruz Parsons

You mentioned how much the internet has changed. How have you had to rethink your strategy as a creator now versus when you first started?

When I started, it was basically just YouTube. Then Instagram came along, then TikTok, and I'm sure there will be more platforms in the future. One of the biggest things I’ve learned is how to adapt and evolve with those changes. For a long time, I was so used to long-form content, and I'm still teaching myself how to do short-form. It’s funny because when I talk to shortform creators, they’re like, "How do you do longform?" It's like your brain works one way or the other. If I post a 10-minute vlog on TikTok, it's not going anywhere. You have to learn hooks and make things short and punchy.

But beyond the platforms, I think I've also learned to be more thoughtful about what I share. I've always been very open about my life, and that's one of my strengths because people really connect to it. But it can also be a weakness. I think doing podcasts and other projects has taught me to be more aware of the audience and to think carefully about what I want to share and what I want to keep private.

That's really important. I see so many younger creators sharing everything — where they live, posting from their location in real-time — without realizing how much they're revealing.

Absolutely. Years ago, I did a full empty-house tour when I moved, and now things feel different. The internet feels scarier. People are smarter. People can figure things out more easily. Now I’m much more careful about not posting in real-time or giving too much away.

It's also about protecting your mental health.

Exactly. Everything you do online gets put under a microscope. So it becomes a question of, what am I willing to share if it’s going to be scrutinized, perceived, or discussed by strangers? That applies to relationships, family, all of it.

You've built this incredible relationship with your audience, and now you have the cookbook, the podcast, and multiple channels. How do you expand without making it feel like you're just selling something to your followers?

I never want anything to feel like a cash grab. I only want to do things that feel authentic and that I genuinely want to do. At the end of the day, I’m the one showing up and writing the recipes and making the content. There are things people always tell me I should do, like merch, but if I’m not ready, I’m not ready. With the book, I learned early on that it’s such a long process. It took almost three years. At first I thought, "I'm not ready right now," but then I realized, "That’s OK, because I’ll be ready by the time it comes out."

I think newer creators feel a lot of pressure to capitalize on everything immediately.

Totally. Alisha [Marie] and I talk about this all the time. We feel really lucky to have had longevity because we never expected any of this. But I see so many creators going nonstop, and I just don't think there's longevity in that. That's how you burn out. At the end of the day, even if you have a team, you're still the person who has to show up, film, post, and keep going. I wish people talked about that more.

What do you think is the key to longevity?

I think it's just being yourself, as cliché as that sounds. For me, it never feels like work because I’m not playing a character. I can be talking to you right now, turn the camera on, and be the exact same person online. I think that’s what makes it sustainable.

I'm sure the launch of this cookbook is making you think differently about success. What does success mean to you now versus when you first started?

When I was younger, success was numbers. Subscribers, views, all of that. Now I really try to focus on my core community — whether that’s people who have watched my videos since day one, people who found me through the podcast, or people who are newer to my content. I focus on the people who are genuinely excited about what I make and who inspire me to keep creating. It's easy to just see numbers on a screen and forget there are actual people behind them.

That's why meetups and tours are so meaningful. Alisha and I went on tour last summer, and seeing people in real life changes everything. Sometimes people tell me, "I only get 500 views on my videos," and I’m like, 500 people is still a lot of people. You have to think about them as actual individuals.

Those interactions matter more to me now than anything else.

I interview a lot of musicians, too, and it's similar. Maybe they're never going to sell out a stadium, but they can fill a theater with people who know every word.

Exactly. I'd rather have a small theater full of people singing every lyric than a stadium where people got free tickets and barely know who I am.

What excites you most about creating content these days?

Honestly, it’s the feedback and the community. I love the inside jokes, the comments that make me laugh, and seeing how people interact with everything. It feels like such a close-knit community between the podcast listeners, vlog viewers, TikTok audience, all of it. I'm always excited to post and see what people are saying.

So you do read comments?

I do. Unless I'm having a bad mental health day, then maybe not. But for the most part, yes. I've been doing this long enough that I know what to expect. And because we post so much content, especially with the podcast, it creates such an active community. We post two one-hour podcast episodes every week, which naturally leads to many conversations and much community-building.

Now, being a podcast host really means being a content creator too.

Totally. Alisha and I started our podcast eight years ago, and at the time, we were among the first YouTube creators to do so. Our agent called and said, "What do you think about podcasts?" and we were like, "What? Why would anyone want to hear us talk?" We did audio-only for the first three years, and now everything is video. Most people watch podcasts instead of just listening to them. It's wild seeing how much it's changed.

I usually listen while I'm working, but I also see podcast clips everywhere on my social feeds.

Same. We’re constantly recording and thinking, "Clip that. That’s a good clip."

Do you feel like each platform has a different audience?

A little bit, but honestly, I see a lot of the same people everywhere. I'll see inside jokes from the podcast show up in TikTok comments or YouTube comments. People will say things like, "I saw this in the vlog first." I'm sure there are people who only watch TikTok or only listen to the podcast, but for the most part, it feels like a really loyal audience that follows me everywhere.

And with the cookbook, you'll probably bring in a whole new audience.

That's what I’m hoping for. Maybe some aunties, too.

Obviously, all the recipes are your favorites, but if you had to pick one?

I have to go back to the Korean chapter. The tteokbokki recipe is really special to me. I remember moving out on my own and craving it, but not knowing how to make it. I FaceTimed my mom, and she walked me through it step by step.

Growing up, there was always a crockpot of tteokbokki at family parties. That's my ultimate comfort food. Whenever I go to Korea, if it's on the menu, I'm ordering it. That recipe just has so much history and meaning for me.

As NASA's Artemis II crew made history today by traveling farther from Earth than any humans ever have, another unexpected passenger quietly drifted into frame: a jar of Nutella.

During NASA's livestream of the mission, the hazelnut spread could be seen floating around the Orion spacecraft cabin just minutes before Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen broke the distance record previously set by Apollo 13 in 1970.

The moment immediately went viral online, with users joking that Nutella had now technically traveled farther from Earth than anyone else in history.

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Others joked that Ferrero, the company behind Nutella, had just received the most valuable product placement imaginable — a free ad from space. (You could also say the same about Apple's iPhone 17 Pro Max.)

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NASA, however, shut down any suggestion that the floating jar was part of a brand deal. In a statement to Futurism, agency press secretary Bethany Stevens said NASA "does not select crew meals or food in association with brand partnerships" and clarified that the Nutella appearance "was not a product placement."

The Artemis II crew has reportedly brought a surprisingly stacked menu into space, including barbecue beef brisket, cauliflower, macaroni and cheese, broccoli au gratin, tortillas, hot sauce, and coffee. The Nutella, naturally, seems destined for mid-flight snacking.

Yes, the mission is one of the most significant moments in modern space travel. But even astronauts breaking records on the way around the moon still want snacks.

For the first time in decades, astronauts are heading back toward the moon. And for the first time ever, they are doing it with their iPhones.

NASA's Artemis II crew — Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen — are not only documenting one of the most historic missions in modern spaceflight, but also turning it into social media content.

Over the weekend, Wiseman and Koch shared a photo of Earth taken from inside the Orion spacecraft, reportedly using the selfie camera on an iPhone 17 Pro Max. The images, which show the two astronauts gazing back at the planet through Orion's window, feel both futuristic and strangely intimate — a moon mission captured through the same front-facing camera millions of people use every day.

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NASA has said Artemis II astronauts were allowed to bring smartphones aboard the mission, with four iPhone 17 Pro Max devices traveling alongside the agency's more traditional camera equipment. The phones have been used to capture photos and videos from inside Orion as the crew travels deeper into space, and cannot connect to the internet or Bluetooth, the New York Times reports.

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But one of the mission's most viral moments so far has been an Instagram Reel.

On NASA's Instagram account, the Artemis II crew recently introduced themselves in a Reel styled like a cheesy '90s sitcom, complete with the theme song from Full House. The video leans into quick cuts, exaggerated frames, and astronauts who seem fully aware that a moon mission can also be memeable.

The Reel has already racked up more than 13 million views, underscoring how much NASA's relationship with the internet has evolved. Space missions were once experienced through grainy television broadcasts and carefully controlled press conferences. Artemis II is unfolding on social media, with astronauts posting zero-gravity updates, behind-the-scenes cabin moments, and cinematic images of Earth that look almost too beautiful to be real.

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That shift feels intentional. NASA has spent years building a more personality-driven social media presence, understanding that younger audiences are more likely to connect with astronauts as people rather than distant symbols of American achievement. Artemis II is still a deeply serious scientific mission — the first crewed flight to lunar space since Apollo 17 in 1972 — but the social content makes it feel accessible in a way earlier space programs never could.

There is something fitting about that. Artemis II is, in many ways, about ushering in a new era of space travel. The spacecraft may be state-of-the-art, but so is the instinct to document everything, post it, and turn even the most surreal experience imaginable into a Reel.

NASA's recent Artemis II images, including several photos of Earth taken from deep space, have already gone viral across social media. Their lunar flyby on April 6 will be livestreamed on Netflix. If Apollo belonged to television, Artemis II belongs to the feed.

There's a moment, familiar to anyone who has spent time in basketball corners of the internet, where someone drops a name into the chat — Kosta Koufos, Sundiata Gaines, Jamario Moon — and the room either goes electric or shakes its head in disappointment. On social media, this is called "ball knowledge."

The term has evolved from casual sports-bar shorthand into something closer to a culture and a game of one-upmanship. However, in the hands of a growing class of basketball content creators, it's become a thriving niche on social media. But ask three of the people who've helped shape that culture what ball knowledge actually means, and you'll get three different answers.

More than a name drop

The most common misconception about ball knowledge is that it's just trivia, i.e., name a player nobody remembers and look cool in front of your friends for your esoteric wisdom on early 2010s Detroit Pistons benchwarmers.

Nicholas Harrell, a writer who helps run the basketball media account halfpast*noon, pushes back on that immediately. "I wouldn't necessarily limit it to being able to name a specific role player from whatever era," he says. "I think it's got to be a recognition of how the system as a game works in its entirety, and the individual roles that those players play."

So, for example, you're in a circle with a friend, and you name-drop Nik Stauskas as "elite ball knowledge." That's table stakes, the bare minimum. Explaining why Stauskas worked — or why he didn't — is the real test.

Nick Coutracos, who has built a following under the name Nick Knows Ball, takes a similar but slightly more democratic view. For him, ball knowledge is "not only knowing players that the average basketball fan wouldn't know, but it's also just understanding how the game of basketball is played." He's careful to add that "you can't just know a random role player that you saw once and remember his name and say, oh yeah, that's ball knowledge."

The distinction matters to him. Coutracos, who was already running a successful basketball media account, didn't start posting about ball knowledge to gatekeep — he started because he was frustrated watching posts celebrate knowing names like Brandon Jennings and Kirk Hinrich and calling it elite ball knowledge. "I remember scrolling through these comments, reading them like, this is a joke, right?" He started posting ball-knowledge-specific videos, including stories about obscure players and reactions to other pages' "elite pulls," and quickly found that his audience felt the same quiet indignation. Ball knowledge was getting too casual, and people wanted a higher standard.

Ethan Ward, the New Zealand–born, Australia-based creator behind ForgottableNBA, came at it from a different angle. His page — which he started in September 2024, hitting 10,000 followers within two months — is built around short clips and literary captions about players on the fringes of NBA history. He describes ball knowledge the way a connoisseur might describe wine: There are levels, the bar is always rising, and what counts today might not count tomorrow.

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"If they started for a full season, it's probably not ball knowledge," Ward says. "Especially with the way this kind of genre has ballooned — the threshold is being raised every three months."

Ward's origin story is more accidental. He was thinking about what he calls "a gap in the market" — the fact that he had near-infinite access to play-by-play clips from any NBA season going back years from his freelance work. He started with a single clip, a missed Cory Joseph floater. The post read "Forgettable NBA Moment No. 1: Cory Joseph tries to beat the clock but fails." People liked it. As more clips got posted, someone asked for a box score. Then the write-ups got longer. Six months in, Ward was doing full long-form posts, and the responses started coming in within hours of posting.

"I didn't realize there was such an appetite for it," Ward says.

What is ball knowledge?

Every culture has its own vocabulary, and the ball knowledge community is no exception. Over hours of conversation, a surprisingly nuanced taxonomy emerged.

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There is, first, the question of what makes someone a "pull" — a term for a player whose name earns respectable nods from your friends when dropped in conversation, for a relative combination of obscurity and nostalgia. Coutracos, Ward, and Harrell agree that the best pull is what the latter calls "obscure and recognizable at the same time." He considers Chris Copeland a good example: a six-foot-nine forward who had one memorable run with the 2013 Knicks, could get hot from three, and left enough of an imprint that real watchers of the game remember him fondly. Arnett Moultrie, by contrast, was a process-era 76er who was miscast as a PF who couldn't shoot in an evolving NBA. He's a respectable pull for only the most hardened of zealots.

Then there is the question of the baseline — the floor of ball knowledge, the name that separates people who genuinely follow the game from people who are just adjacent to it. Every creator has one, and the differences reveal just how personal and relative that floor really is.

For Coutracos, the marker is Kosta Koufos. "[He] is the differentiating factor between ball knowledge and not ball knowledge," he says. "He's the most common ball knowledge player, in my opinion."

Harrell's threshold is a bit more sentimental. He mentions Sundiata Gaines, who hit a game-winner with the Utah Jazz and had a memorable run at Georgia in the SEC tournament. Gaines isn't famous, but he's not buried, either. "If people did recognize him, their eyes are going to light up right away," Harrell says. "That's sort of the fun part of it."

Ward, who spent his teenage years watching G League games out of New Zealand, sets the floor considerably deeper, depending on how you look at it. For him, the baseline is simply anyone with a reason to exist in memory: "Someone who has a reason to be remembered. Someone who played a couple years. That would be my current parameters for someone starting out." What that baseline actually looks like, though, shifts constantly.

There is also a category of "overused pull." These are names that became so widely circulated they've lost their value. All three agree without much deliberation: Shaun Livingston's mid-range jumper. Brandon Bass. J.R. Smith reverses dunks. These names have been laundered through so many posts that knowing them signals that you're chronically online, not that you know basketball.

The rules, unwritten and otherwise

A few informal laws of ball knowledge have emerged from the community's ongoing self-governance.

Draft position matters. A lottery pick — even a catastrophic bust — carries an asterisk. Anthony Bennett, the infamous 2013 number-one overall pick who never lived up to his draft position, falls in a gray area: Coutracos thinks he should count because the average fan has probably forgotten him, but acknowledges the logic isn't clean. Alex Len, a top-five pick from that same draft, gets an easy veto. "Top five pick within the last 10 or 15 years — no," Harrell says flatly.

Visibility also counts against you. Kirk Hinrich was a solid NBA role player for roughly a decade, which means he showed up on too many screens to qualify as obscure. College prominence doesn't help either, as a player like Trey Burke gets docked by Ward for his Wooden Award–winning career at Michigan, his deep March Madness run, and his my-player-mode appearances in NBA 2K. That's too much cultural footprint. So players like Shabazz Napier, Jimmer Fredette, or Carsen Edwards wouldn't count as ball knowledge on account of their legendary college runs.

But the most interesting rule is the one about relativity. Ball knowledge, all three creators acknowledge, is context-dependent. Coutracos put it simply: "My 11-year-old cousin comes up to me and talks about Ramon Sessions — whoa, that is very impressive. But if you label yourself an all-knowing ball knower and you're 25 years old and you say Ramon Sessions, it's like, OK, that's not that crazy."

"It's relative," he says. "There are levels."

What's it done for the game

The rise of ball knowledge as a genre has had a measurable effect on how NBA history gets consumed online. Players who spent their careers as footnotes are suddenly the subjects of highlight compilations, long-form write-ups, and spirited comment-section debates.

Ward's ForgettableNBA page is perhaps the clearest expression of this shift. His audience isn't just nodding along. They're asking for box scores. They're pulling up Wikipedia tabs. They're arguing, respectfully, about whether a given player qualifies. A Jason Maxiell compilation went viral within a day of posting. A Rodney Hood write-up got people talking about a player who'd been largely forgotten.

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"I kind of bridge the gap between the totally obscure players and the role players that everybody likes," Ward says. He describes a sort of natural selection at work: The players with "verve," with a distinct shot or move or storyline, age better in the culture than the workhorses without it. A player with a reliable midrange is more memeable than a screen-setter. A player with a compelling backstory — like Royce White, the first-round pick who never played due to an anxiety disorder affecting his ability to fly — edges toward ball knowledge even as his career stats don't demand it.

"There's something [where] you go, 'I remember him for a reason,'" Ward says.

Harrell points to what the trend has done for fandom broadly, creating a shared language for the kinds of conversations that used to happen only between lifelong fans at sports bars or on the couch during rain delays. "The general basketball community on TikTok started pushing forward this sports-bar kind of conversation," he says. "Naming role players with your friends almost."

Coutracos has watched it become something even more personal. He gets recognized at pickup gyms. He gets tagged in posts about players he's never covered. His comment sections have become arenas where people prove their knowledge or cheerfully get corrected. "I don't want to give off the vibe of gatekeeping the sport," he says. "My main goal is for them to learn about basketball and laugh a little too."

Raising the bar

There's one thing all three creators seem quietly anxious about: saturation.

Names that were genuinely obscure six months ago now have compilation videos and Reddit threads. The posts that used to require actual recall are getting gamed by people who've simply been online long enough to absorb the canon.

"The goalposts are going to keep moving," Ward says. He imagines a near future where Gigi Datome — the Italian forward who had a brief cup of coffee with the Detroit Pistons — stops being an elite pull and becomes a baseline. "Unless it reaches a point of saturation where it doesn't quite get there. I hope Austin Daye stays Detroit-specific knowledge."

Harrell frames it as an authenticity problem. "If your single memory of Shaun Livingston is the mid-range and not everything that came before in his career — which is even more interesting — that's a good example of fake ball knowledge versus real ball knowledge."

But here, too, there's consensus: The solution isn't exclusion, it's depth. All three push back on the idea that ball knowledge should become a velvet rope, a way to dismiss people who aren't sufficiently obsessed.

"I don't want people to be discouraged by learning about the sport of basketball," Coutracos says. "Just because you don't know a random player from 2012 who played seven games doesn't mean you shouldn't continue to learn about the sport."

Harrell is even more direct: "I wouldn't want it used as a barrier to entry for certain conversations. I don't want it to become a status symbol, necessarily."

What they want, it turns out, is for more people to go down the rabbit hole. To look up Sundiata Gaines. To find out how Kosta Koufos actually played. To discover that Jamario Moon had a dunk package that holds up, and that he played seventy-something games with the Raptors before losing games for Michael Jordan's Bobcats.

That's the core of it, really. Do you know ball? You could.

The problem with announcing any kind of news on April 1 is that absolutely nobody will believe you.

Case in point: On Wednesday morning, KitKat announced that customers could use a special online tracking tool to figure out if their purchased confectionery goods were part of the massive 12-ton KitKat heist that's gotten the internet's attention over the past few days.

The KitKat heist tracker was advertised on the official KitKat X account, and whoever runs the account is ardently insisting, both in the original post and in the replies, that this is real and not an April Fool's joke.

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Taking a look at the tracker itself, it's hard to parse fiction from reality. It appears to be a pretty straightforward tracker with a text input for an 8-digit batch code on the back of each KitKat package. I don't personally have any KitKats on hand to test this out with, but I typed in a random 8-digit number and was told that it wasn't part of the stolen batch.

So, at the very least, the tracker is actually checking for something. It's just impossible to say what would happen if you happened to type in a "correct" batch code.

Whether or not the tracker is a hoax, the heist was very real. More than 400,000 KitKat bars were stolen from a delivery truck going between Italy and Poland, prompting plenty of The Fast and the Furious memes (and some genuine concerns for the public supply of KitKats ahead of the Easter holiday).

For what it's worth, the company, Nestle KitKat, says there is no threat to the chocolatey supply chain at this time.

Maybe it says something profound about the human condition that a series of AI-generated talking fruits ripping off reality TV can rack up tens of millions of views. Or maybe it says nothing at all, and we just have to sit with that.

What I'm talking about is Fruit Love Island — a series of TikTok videos starring AI-generated anthropomorphic fruit recreating its IRL namesake. As the intro to episode one breathlessly announces: "Welcome to Fruit Love Island, where eight single fruits flirt, fight, and tryst" (tryst? trust? the AI narrator is doing its best). The page, run by an account called Ai Cinema, went obscenely viral, amassing three million followers in nine days flat. It even had a fan out of pop singer Zara Larsson, who posted about her obsession with the show before (sort of) backtracking after fan outrage.

Whether those followers are real humans making conscious choices or bots almost doesn't matter at this point. Enough actual, warm-blooded people are watching that multiple outlets have now published earnest reported articles asking what Fruit Love Island means, why it exists, and perhaps most troublingly, why so many of us apparently enjoy it.

We may not have the answers here, but we can certainly try.

What is Fruit Love Island?

As reported by CBC, Fruit Love Island is one of many creations likely spawned by Object Talk, a custom GPT built inside ChatGPT by a group called AI Century, which generates scripts that can be fed directly into AI video generators. It's a slop pipeline, essentially, and Fruit Love Island isn't even where this started.

AI fruit content has been quietly populating TikTok for a while now, beginning innocuously enough as educational videos, according to CBC, before someone inevitably made it worse with the cheating romance stories.

The genre quickly metastasized into a reliable formula involving some combination of interracial (inter-botanical?) fruit infidelity, surprise pregnancies, and a frankly alarming amount of domestic violence. The most popular example — and I cannot stress enough that these are real words in a real order — involves different variations of a Strawberry woman cheating on her Strawberry husband with her Eggplant boss. She becomes pregnant. The husband is thrilled. The baby is an eggplant. The husband is now upset, having been cucked by daddy eggplant (the racial coding is not subtle).

The absurd, scandalous appeal seems to be the point, with videos basically ripping off the most threadbare daytime soap opera tropes. My least charitable reading — which, given that the eggplant (sometimes a watermelon) is, in my opinion, meant to represent a Black man, is not very charitable at all — it's AI being used to produce racial cuckoldry content for mass consumption. Plus, with many of these videos involving a pregnancy of some sort, it's almost reminiscent of the Elsagate drama that dominated YouTube several years back.

For those too young to remember, Elsagate was a YouTube and YouTube Kids scandal in which algorithmically-optimized channels churned out millions of videos featuring beloved children's characters (like Spider-Man, Elsa, and the Peppa Pig cast) in increasingly disturbing, violent, or sexual scenarios, apparently designed to slip past content filters and autoplay their way into children's feeds.

AI fruit slop isn't quite the same. But generally, reactions on X are very negative, with people making fun of those who enjoy this content or pointing out its weirdness.

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Fruit Love Island, to its limited credit, operates a little differently than the cheating-eggplant pipeline. It's still AI slop — nobody's arguing otherwise — but it's at least trying to be a coherent show, which puts it one rung above its fruit-adjacent peers on a ladder that starts pretty low to begin with.

The problem is that "coherent show" is doing a lot of heavy lifting when your coherence comes from directly lifting someone else's content. Fruit Love Island has been straight-up raiding Love Island USA for plotlines and dialogue, most notably recreating — line for line — the breakout moment from Season 7 when Huda Mustafa tells Nic Vansteenberghe that she's a mom. A genuinely sweet, viral television moment, now retold by a Cherry named Cherrita and an Orange named Orangelo. And that's not even getting into the Watermelon character having a blaccent. I literally can't right now.

Why are people watching AI fruit slop?

So why are tens of millions of people actually watching this? Escapism, mostly. As content creator Caroline Deery told the New York Times, the fruit videos offer a momentary off-ramp from doomscrolling — it's either AI strawberries having affairs or going to bed convinced the world is on fire.

The Wall Street Journal noted that the fandom has grown, with spinoffs, recap accounts, fan communities, and human-made parodies, which is the clearest possible sign that something has crossed from novelty into actual cultural foothold. Justine Moore, a partner on the investing team at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, told the Journal that the viewership numbers were the inflection point AI entertainment investors (like herself) had been waiting for, and that demand for this kind of content would only grow.

Meanwhile, over on Reddit's r/DefendingAIArt, the show's supporters are less philosophical about it: one commenter pointed out that many people had never even heard of Fruit Love Island until others started loudly complaining about it, which, as always, is a very effective promotional strategy. However, over on r/antiai, the top-voted response to the question of why anyone watches this was simply "because some people are morons." Other commenters offered more measured takes, suggesting that a significant chunk of those millions of views are just short-form swipes that count as views after three seconds, or bots watching bot content in an ouroboros of synthetic engagement.

After its improbable rise to millions of followers, TikTok deleted Ai Cinema's account — for reasons that remain officially unclear, though bot followers and copyright violations are both on the table. The account has since been reinstated, which means Cherrita and Orangelo live to flirt another day.

Make of all that what you will.

Mere days after Bluesky announced its new AI product, Attie, the coding helper has already become the second most blocked account on the platform.

The Attie profile was given the cold shoulder by 125,000 users already, TechCrunch reported. With just 1,500 followers, that means 83 times more users blocked Attie than followed it — that number is higher than the official White House account, the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) profile, and is second only to Vice President JD Vance, according to open source data.

Attie was announced at the Bluesky-sponsored ATmosphere AT protocol conference by former CEO and now chief innovation officer Jay Graber. As Graber and co-host Paul Frazee, Bluesky CTO, explained, Attie is an agentic app that lets users "vibe code" their own social feeds. It's a tool that the platform believes will help cut down on low-quality, AI-generated slop and misinformation that is proliferating across the internet.

Following widespread derision from Bluesky users, who denounced Bluesky's investment in generative AI products and flatly rejected Attie's integration on the open source platform, Graber posted a response:

"We hear the concerns about AI. Our goal is to use this technology to give people greater control, not to generate content. Attie uses AI to help you create custom feeds without having to know how to code.

We’ll look into ways to take into account the preferences expressed by people who’ve blocked @attie.ai. The team has been making progress towards private accounts. There was a lot of good feedback on the tech at ATmosphereConf this week, and we’ll have more to share soon."

If you haven't already blocked Attie and instead have an open mind toward the app's vibe coding possibilities, you'll probably have to wait a bit longer. It's still in invite-only closed beta. Sign up for the waitlist on the Attie website.

I don’t remember much of my life before social media. It took over in seventh grade and my individual style started bending toward whatever the algorithm pushed to the top.

My wants were no longer my own but reflections of what Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube algorithmically advertised as desirable. Sleepovers that used to be chaotic with pillow fights and hide‑and-seek were replaced by late‑night scrolling sessions, my friends and I quietly measuring ourselves against everyone else. Social media was supposed to give my generation a lifeline: A way to stay close, to find community, to express ourselves. Instead, tech executives created digital nicotine instead of real digital communities, engineered to tap into our insecurities and keep us coming back.

By the time we realized what it was doing to us, it already felt impossible to put it down. Infinite scroll, autoplay that makes stopping feel like an interruption, notifications calibrated to pull us back at our most vulnerable moments — these weren’t accidents. They were design decisions. Decisions meant to keep us hooked.

Now, for the first time, Big Tech executives have been forced to defend those design decisions in court, and a jury has made something clear: This harm was real and not accidental. The verdict marks a turning point, a signal that the era of Big Tech operating without consequence is beginning to crack.

But even before that verdict, something bigger had already started to shift. Inside that courtroom, one young plaintiff was barging through doors that were never meant to open. She made visible what millions of us lived through silently.

And she is not alone.

We see ourselves in her. We see our friends. We see the filtered selfies, the 2 a.m. scrolling, the comparison spirals, the quiet shame. These are not edge cases. They are not outliers. Big Tech’s platforms don’t discriminate. When a platform is designed to manipulate, everyone is vulnerable.

Because what we grew up with was not neutral technology. It was technology designed for maximum engagement at any cost.

Evidence from these cases shows that Big Tech followed Big Tobacco’s playbook: Addict them young to create lifelong consumers, no matter the cost to their lives. Their business model didn’t just deprioritize young people’s wellbeing — it depended on our lack of it to sell products.

I recently read whistleblower Sarah Wynn‑Williams’ memoir, Careless People. She revealed that Meta could detect when teen girls deleted a selfie, reading it as a moment of low self‑esteem, and then prompt beauty brands to target them with ads at that exact moment. It wasn’t an accident. So I have to wonder how many Instagram ads I was served when I felt the worst about myself. Was the face serum, lip kit, or lip filler I bought with my limited income exactly what Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri designed?

I came out as gay before Caitlyn Jenner came out as trans. When she publicly debuted her transition, I didn’t have the words for why it hit me so hard. It wasn’t jealousy. It wasn’t resentment. It was that overnight, she became my Kendall Jenner — the glossy, perfected, impossible image of womanhood that a closeted trans girl like me was supposed to aspire to.

Girls my age were drowning in Kendall’s edited photos and endless beauty ads. I was drowning in a trans version of the same thing. Caitlyn appeared effortlessly beautiful, and I bought product after product trying to chase even a fraction of that feeling. Every time I took a selfie and got called a slur, Instagram responded by pushing more beauty ads at me instead of community or creators who could’ve helped me understand myself.

Sarah Wynn‑Williams’ revelations make the pattern clear: Meta saw our lowest moments and treated them as sales opportunities. They could have protected us. They could have connected us. Instead, they monetized the wound.

We were children when we first downloaded these apps. Our brains were still developing. Our sense of self was still forming. And yet we were placed inside systems engineered to override self-control and exploit social validation.

That’s why these trials matter.

They aren’t just about one young plaintiff or one tragic story. They’re about thousands of families demanding accountability — and now, with this verdict, proving that accountability is possible. They’re about internal documents that companies tried to hide now becoming public. They’re about executives being forced to answer questions under oath rather than hide behind PR statements.

The verdict is a milestone — but it’s not the finish line. The truth being exposed is what makes lasting change possible. The courtroom doors finally being open is what ensures this doesn’t stop here.

Every day, more cases are filed. Every day, more children are harmed. Pressure will not let up until Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap fix their addictive products.

People need to understand that this isn’t an attack on social connection or creativity. The problem is that Big Tech built the digital equivalent of nicotine instead of designing ways for people to enjoy short‑form media without being trapped by it. I don’t need endless scroll or autoplay to enjoy fan edits of my favorite shows. I don’t need an algorithm to serve me a sad dog video because it knows I’ll need a mood booster before closing the app. I’m not trying to get rid of the joy — I’m trying to get rid of the traps.

There is a future without the bad stuff — and this verdict is proof that we can start to build it.

This article reflects the opinion of the writer.

Lennon Torres is a former Dance Moms performer now fighting for young people’s safety online. A trans activist and University of Southern California alum, she uses her pop‑culture fluency and lived experience to power her work at the Heat Initiative, taking on tech giants and demanding platforms to protect and empower the next generation.

Less than 4 months ago, Australia banned social media for kids under 16, sparking a wave of similar proposals from governments around the world. The latest effort to ban social media for children now comes from Austria. In a press release, the Austrian government announced that a bill will be introduced by the end of June to ban social media use for children under 14.

According to the press release, a mandatory minimum age of 14 for social media would only be one part of the bill seeking to address child safety online. The bill would also introduce media literacy in schools to help young people "recognize disinformation and radicalization."

The Austrian government said these measures would be taken in order to address the issues children have faced as a result of social media, such as cyberbullying, addiction, and mental health problems.

While the press release doesn't provide many details, it does mention that any bill introduced would address data privacy concerns related to age verification methods, ensuring that users' information is protected.

Many social media platforms have policies requiring users to be a certain age to join. However, these rules are implemented by companies themselves, with little to no incentive to uphold them. At the government level, however, as in Australia's first such bill, these bills slap social media companies with hefty fines for allowing users under age to join their platforms. The U.S. may be joining soon, as a bipartisan group of Senators proposed a bill earlier this year that would ban social media for children under 13.

The U.S. also recently saw social media companies like Meta and YouTube lose two separate trials regarding social platforms harming young people's mental health. It will be interesting to see how U.S. lawmakers go forward with their age limit proposals following those verdicts.

Among passionate TikTok communities, BookTok, may be the most influential.

BookTok is where book lovers and e-reader obsessives to come together to discuss their favorite books and device hacks. For readers who use e-readers, Kindle, Kobo, and Boox lead the charge as the most popular devices, so it's notable when a new device goes viral. "Mini Kindles" appear to be the latest device to cause a stir on BookTok, with hundreds of videos showcasing the tiny e-readers.

On TikTok, searching for "mini Kindle" (or "mini Kindle pods") brings up dozens of user videos showing someone walking into a Barnes & Noble or Target and then cutting to an unboxing of a so-called "mini Kindle". As someone who tests e-readers for a living, this confused me.

I have no reason to believe these e-readers are actually being purchased at Barnes & Noble, nor do they have any apparent affiliation with Amazon Kindles.

In fact, the devices being hyped in these videos appear to be sold by the users who post them.

In a since-deleted video, user @aurealeaf directs viewers to the website NovaLeaf, where the "NovaLeaf Mini Kindle" is listed. (Editor's note: As of this writing, the @aurealeaf account is no longer available.) Another user, @hydro_scope, directs viewers to their website with a listing for a NOVA Mini Pink Kindle. Both devices claim to be pocket-sized e-readers under the Kindle name, despite no affiliation with Amazon.

We reached out to both @aurealeaf and @hydro_scope, and we'll update this post if we receive a response.

Are mini Kindle pods actually Kindles?

These mini Kindles do not seem to be actual Kindle e-readers or associated with Amazon at all, nor does Amazon sell any mini version of the Kindle e-readers. We reached out for comment from Amazon and have not heard back at the time of publication.

By performing reverse image searches on Nova and NovaLeaf websites, I found that the "mini Kindles" listed for sale there are visual matches for devices manufactured by a company called Oilsky. They appear to be 4-inch touchscreen MP3 and 1080p video players. With built-in access to the Google Play store, the Kindle app is available to download onto the device; however, that appears to be the only connection to Amazon.

The Oilsky MP3 player and copycat versions are currently listed on Amazon. These TikTok-based sellers have their mini Kindles listed for $79.99, about $10 more than the direct Oilsky listing on Amazon. Oilsky MP3 players are not listed for sale at Barnes & Noble or Target.

In short, the viral TikTok videos are using the word "Kindle" to refer to any e-reader-like device and may be at risk of legal action from Amazon.

As of this writing, the @aurealeaf TikTok account is no longer available.

Thirty-five years ago, British author J.K. Rowling was commuting from Manchester to London when she was struck by divine creativity: She imagined the tale of a young, orphaned wizard who was key to unraveling a magically violent authoritarian uprising. In what would become Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (for American readers), the young mother found her pot of gold. 

The idea behind Harry Potter would scale into a 7-book and 8-movie series, a Broadway show, and amusement park franchise, and eventually a media behemoth valued at tens of billions of dollars. Its latest venture, a multi-season HBO television adaptation, is set to premiere Christmas Day 2026.

The young wizard boy would forever transform the worlds of children's publishing, entertainment, and fandom, birthing multiple generations of fervent readers and a new model for mega-franchises. Similarly, over the next two decades, the woman who was merely filling the hours of a delayed commute would become the preeminent young adult author of her time — and then, to the chagrin of many, morph into the celebrity face of an unrelenting anti-transgender campaign.

J.K. Rowling's pop culture takeover 

The first book in the Harry Potter series was released to UK markets in 1997, with a limited run of just 500 copies. As one rumor attests, Rowling's publisher, Bloomsbury, encouraged the author to change her byline from Joanne to the more gender-neutral "J.K." just before going to print as a way to appeal to young male audiences. Rowling later told the Belfast Telegraph the move was decided long before publishing, to protect against any fallout from her previous marriage.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, as it was titled in Britain, won several publishing awards and garnered critical praise in the UK before being introduced to U.S. readers. With the American debut and its translation to global audiences, the book's popularity skyrocketed even further. The first Harry Potter novel occupied the number one spot on the New York Times' bestseller list for two straight years, toppling even adult fiction on the at-the-time combined list. It cumulated in more than 11 million worldwide sales by 2001 and set the record as the fastest-selling children’s book in history. The saga is considered the best-selling fantasy series of all time — the fourth book's audiobook even won a Grammy. First editions of the UK printing of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone have been auctioned off for tens of thousands, even millions, of dollars.

Beyond the dollars and cents, Harry Potter also ushered in modern internet fandom. Avid fans (known as Potterheads) pioneered new digital spaces in the wake of a Y2K transformation and the dot-com bubble, generating the "Potterverse," hotbeds of fan creation and discourse that spilled Rowling's creation onto the internet.

Ten years later, the last novel in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, hit shelves, setting yet another record as the fastest-selling new release fiction book of all time. Fans lined up for midnight release parties worldwide, decked out in full costume to celebrate and mourn the end of an era (or so they believed). In reality, Potterheads had, perhaps unknowingly, gifted Harry Potter an eternal legacy: The largest fan-powered media conglomerate in the world.

Harry Potter — the entertainment tentpole, not just the children's series — was just getting started. Rowling sold the books' movie rights to Warner Bros. Entertainment, which turned the series into eight blockbuster films released between 2001 and 2011. They netted more than $7 billion, nabbing 12 Academy Award nominations and numerous BAFTA noms. She sold the theme park rights to Universal Studios, which runs several Harry Potter-themed Wizarding Worlds. 

Fans gather at King's Cross railway station in London to celebrate the 2007 release of the final Harry Potter book. Credit: Getty Images / Stringer / Getty Images Entertainment

Five years after the films ended, Rowling published the novel adaptation of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a theater spinoff of the Harry Potter series co-created with director John Tiffany and playwright Jack Thorne. It was fully produced for audiences on both the West End and Broadway; it's still running. Rowling then turned a series of in-universe Harry Potter textbooks into the three-part Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them film series.

And then there were the numerous Harry Potter video games, including Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery and the popular RPG Hogwarts: Legacy.

Rowling also published numerous books unrelated to the Harry Potter Universe, under both the J.K. Rowling name and her masculine pen name, Robert Galbraith. Books with the Galbraith moniker have consistently ranked on UK top-selling books lists since the author's true identity was revealed. Most recently, the Harry Potter franchise launched a series of celebrity-narrated audiobooks and released the first teaser for its HBO-backed Harry Potter TV series.

Rowling, the owner of a $150 million superyacht, has a current net worth of $1.2 billion.

To try to list the full amount of merchandising and licensing endeavors Rowling signed off on to garner that wealth would be impossible. Let's just say she has her own Rule 34: If it exists, there's probably a Harry Potter version of it. For most of her career, Rowling was simply the monarch of this vast magical empire.

Rowling's image sours

The beloved children's book author waded into new waters in the 2010s, dipping her toe into political commentary via her popular X (formerly Twitter) account. Her most circulated posts, shared to 14 million followers, decried racist Brexit campaigns and compared leaders like President Donald Trump to Harry Potter villain Voldemort.

Shortly after, Rowling's political stances became more complicated. She publicly donated to the Better Together campaign against Scotland's proposed independence from the UK, comparing pro-independence rhetoric to Harry Potter's Death Eaters in a remark that generated social media backlash. In 2015, she received pushback for refusing to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, although she denounced Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's policies against Palestinian communities. 

Rowling and the team behind the Fantastic Beasts films faced criticism in 2018 for not depicting a romantic relationship between two male main characters, according to Business Insider, despite Rowling having confirmed that the two men were canonically in love. The series weathered several more controversies involving its star-studded cast, including the hiring of alleged abuser Johnny Depp, whose role was recast with Mads Mikkelsen for Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore.

The scandals continued, but bigger, with Rowling at the center of the tempests.

In a series of X posts in 2019, Rowling attached herself to a group of highly visible and vocal political commentators who target so-called LGBTQ identity politics, specifically trans activism. Responding to criticism, Rowling denied she was part of any far-right movement.

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Rowling, in fact, describes herself as a liberal feminist. But the author has repeatedly criticized what she sees as a culture of "woke," a movement allegedly being forced on the masses by leftist leaders and activists — talking points also adopted by the far right.

Credit: Andrew Aitchison / In pictures via Getty Images

By association, Hollywood icons have become mired in Rowling's political controversy, despite her having little creative input in many of the upcoming projects. Though the Harry Potter franchise is long behind her, Hermione portrayer Emma Watson has been publicly reckoning with Rowling's comments. Celebrities that have more recently signed on to upcoming projects — like the aforementioned audiobooks and upcoming TV series — have waded in, seemingly unprepared, to the discourse.

Keira Knightley, who voices the villain Dolores Umbridge in the 2025 audiobooks, said she was unaware of any fan boycott and hoped we could all "find respect" for people with different opinions. Many fans were incensed at what they felt was her downplaying Rowling's controversial stance. The show's cast, including actor and new Dumbledore John Lithgow, have had to face the music, too.

The Potterverse wasn't prepared for its matriarch to make such a turn. Navigating half a decade of transphobia from Rowling, fans continue to grapple with the issue, including organizing various boycotts of Rowling's beloved properties. Some have divorced themselves only from things that actively generate money for Rowling, like new merchandise, games, and media. Others have rejected it all, fan-made creations included, to try and force Rowling's hand.

Rowling has not yet lost her massive online following, with nearly 14 million followers on X. The world of Harry Potter is nowhere near its end.

A full timeline of Rowling's transphobia

2019 - "#IStandWithMaya"

In Dec. 2019, Rowling publicly announced her support, via Twitter, for Maya Forstater. Forstater was a critic of the UK's Gender Recognition Act — which allows trans people to legally change their listed sex via a Gender Recognition Certificate — and was let go from the Center for Global Development following a series of transphobic comments. (Forstater later sued her employer for discrimination and lost, but was later awarded £100,000.) The author said she didn't agree with forcing "women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real."

Rowling's pro-Forstater tweet gained traction after fans recalled Rowling had previously liked and unliked a post referring to trans women as "men in dresses," in addition to other offhanded reposts of transphobic language over the years. The author had also recently followed late YouTuber Magdalen Berns, co-founder of For Women Scotland, a women's rights organization that demonizes trans women.

Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe issued a statement in support of trans and gender non-conforming communities in the post's aftermath. (Radcliffe later became an ardent supporter of the Trevor Project, a suicide prevention organization focused on the LGBTQ community.)

2020 - "Accusations of TERFery"

In mid-2020, Rowling doubled down on her posts with even more X tweets. She criticized an article on menstruation that used the term "people who menstruate" instead of "women." Rowling continued to reiterate her belief in an essential, biological sex in a series of replies.

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Many online called her out for repeating problematic talking points from trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs). Rowling held her stance in a now infamous blog posted to her official website (coinciding with the start of Pride Month), writing that she had "followed the debate around the concept of gender identity" for years and wasn't surprised she was the latest victim of "cancel culture."

Rowling wrote that she believed trans women (but only those who medically transitioned) were vulnerable and deserved protection, but that she wasn't willing to support them at the risk of "making natal girls and women less safe." She rejected the portrayal of TERF ideology among activists, and included her reasons for supporting "gender critical" discussions and not adhering to "woke virtue-signaling."

"Gender critical" activists believe that gender identity is immutable — they often argue that acknowledging trans or nonbinary identities is a threat to women's safety. Rowling began using her support for women's rights and charitable causes, and her fears regarding medical transitioning, as justification for her comments.

While conservative leaders commended her "bravery," many more in Rowling's circles came out against her, including Watson; Bonnie Wright, who played Ginny Weasley in the Harry Potter movies; and Fantastic Beasts lead Eddie Redmayne. Other franchise stars, including Ralph Fiennes (Voldemort), Helena Bonham Carter (Bellatrix Lestrange), and Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid) spoke in her defense.

A group of employees at Rowling's publisher Hachette UK then refused to work on her new children's book, The Ickabog, forcing the publisher to respond in a statement that its clients have the "right to express their own thoughts and beliefs." Four authors then left the literary agency that also represented Rowling, citing the company's lack of action against the author.

Later that year, Rowling was criticized for transphobic plot lines in her new Robert Galbraith novel, according to the Los Angeles Times. She had previously said researching this novel had been the reason she was looking into "gender critical" spaces in the first place. More than 1,500 UK creatives signed and published a letter in support of trans rights following these events.

Rowling repeatedly shared dangerous misinformation about hormone replacement therapy (HRT), youth intervention, and gender dysphoria across her social media platforms throughout this year.

2021 - "Ignorance is Strength."

Rowling leaned further into her online crusade against trans people, specifically criticizing the way trans people are covered in the media, including the use of chosen pronouns. In one X post, for example, Rowling riffed on the political doublespeak found in George Orwell's 1984, adding a new line to mock the way she interpreted news organizations' use of gender-inclusive language.

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She accused trans activists of doxxing her personal address by posting photos outside her home with protest signs — publications, including LGBTQ site Them, reported that the addresses of her historical residences were actually listed online. Following an investigation, Scottish police found there was “no criminality” to the posts featuring her residence, Them reported.

Following continued social media pushback, Rowling repeated her views from 2020, reiterating she was empathetic to trans rights but that she believed in the "sanctity" of a biological sex.

2022 - "She never dropped her flag."

Rowling came out against a Scottish reform bill that would make it simpler for trans people to change their listed gender and obtain new legal documents in 2022, stating that it would "erode women’s sex-based rights."

She posted support of lesbian gender-critical activist Alison Bailey — who sued the UK's Stonewall organization after creating a trans-exclusionary splinter group — and other anti-trans activists.

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The author also responded to a fan boycott of the soon-to-be-released Hogwarts: Legacy game, saying that the action represented the same level of hypocrisy as historic book burnings. At this time, Rowling posted a picture of herself with leaders of the anti-trans lobbying group Get The L Out UK, writing #RespectMySex.

In response to Rowling's postings, the official Quidditch sports league, which organizes more than 600 teams across 40 countries, rebranded to Quadball.

Meanwhile, Russian president Vladimir Putin vocalized his support for Rowling's stances and compared criticism of Russian cultural leaders to those critiquing Rowling. The author tweeted her support of Ukraine in response, refusing to affiliate herself with the world leader.

Rowling then launched a new Edinburgh-based support center for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault that specifically excludes trans women, hoping to silo such support from "political agendas." 

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2023 - "I don't care about my legacy."

Rowling ushered in 2023 by alluding to trans women being "violent, duplicitous rapists."

She was quoted in an episode of The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling podcast, saying that the modern trans rights movement is "powerful, insidious, and misogynistic" and akin to Harry Potter's Death Eater cult. The podcast was produced by anti-Free Press cofounder and current CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss — herself accused of transphobia by sites like Them — and hosted by former Westboro Baptist Church member Megan Phelps-Roper.

Rowling said she doesn't care or think about her legacy, dismissing fan backlash.

Credit: Wiktor Szymanowicz / Future Publishing via Getty Images

2024 - "Out and proud cheat."

Rowling's online crusade reached new heights in 2024. 

She trained her rage upon Scotland's Hate Crime and Public Order Act, which broadened existing protections to include "age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity, and variations in sex characteristics." In a series of X posts, the author attempted to goad Scottish authorities into prosecuting her for online hate crimes, repeatedly misgendering prominent trans figures. She then donated tens of thousands of dollars to Scottish lobbies campaigning against trans-inclusive language in discrimination law. 

She tweeted in support of those accusing Olympic athlete Imane Khelif, a cisgender woman (who would go on to sue the author) of being a biological man who enjoys punching women, according to Yahoo News. She also condemned actual trans athletes, a pattern that would continue over the next year.

She posted numerous threads on single-sex public spaces and protecting women from "predators."

In late 2024, Rowling said she didn't believe that children are born trans and said gender-affirming care for children is worse than performing lobotomies. 

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She attempted to clarify her political stances in a response to an X user who referred to her as a far-right conspiracy theorist:

"I am a left-leaning liberal who's fiercely anti-authoritarian… My values haven't changed; what's changed is the political landscape. What was once my natural home (a pragmatic centre-left party focused on dealing with economic disparity, championing social liberalism and equal rights) is now dominated by an illiberal, identity-based strain of politics I consider elitist, harmful and out of touch with the day-to-day concerns of regular people, particularly women… The reality is that there's currently an assault on women's rights unparalleled in my lifetime, and it's coming from both left and right. If ever there was a time for women across the political spectrum to come together, it is now."

The internet also turned Rowling's new X profile picture into a meme after users pointed out that the yellow wallpaper behind the author's selfie appeared to be infested with mold, which they jokingly contended could be the source of her fixation on trans issues.

"A transphobic mycelium entity corrupting her mind for the past few decades would explain everything," one user wrote.

2025 -"TERF VE Day"

Throughout 2025, Rowling shared criticism of pro-trans legislation and trans inclusivity, arguing that supporting the rights of biological women is a feminist crusade while scoffing at public disavowals of her and her work — including those from Harry Potter stars and directors. 

She celebrated a UK Supreme Court decision limiting Britain's Equality Act to biological sex definitions ("TERF VE Day," she wrote, posting a picture of her smoking a cigar). She posted support for anti-trans writer Graham Linehan after he was arrested on suspicion of inciting violence in a series of transphobic X posts, calling the action "totalitarianism."

On Oct. 30, Rowling lambasted Glamour UK's Women of the Year cover highlighting the "Protect the Dolls" slogan, a phrase advocating for the safety of trans women. "I grew up in an era when mainstream women’s magazines told girls they needed to be thinner and prettier," she wrote. "Now mainstream women’s magazines tell girls that men are better women than they are."

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The author started the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund and said she would personally give money to women whose sex-based rights are "violated."

She said she would continue to criticize "unevidenced medical experiment on minors," eschewing evidence-based research that proves gender-affirming care saves lives — she joined others in protesting a clinical puberty blocker trial. The author spent the final months of the year debating X users about whether trans women are "real" women and posting repeatedly about campaigns for single-sex bathrooms and changing rooms, writing, "I want my daughters to live in a country where their right to single-sex spaces isn’t under attack from their own government."

On Dec. 18, she posted, "Merry Terfmas everyone 💜🤍💚" and later replied, "Personally I prefer Boxing Terfmas, when all the hard work’s done and you can put your feet up and watch re-runs of classics like 'what about clownfish?' and 'you are committing literal genocide.'"

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Calling her posts "the truth," Rowling denied that she peddles hate, even as experts cite an epidemic of violence against trans women. On the heels of the Human Rights Campaign's declaration of a "national state of emergency" for LGBTQ Americans, GLAAD tracked 2.5 incidents of anti-LGBTQ hate every day in the U.S alone. U.S. leaders have proposed more than 1,000 anti-transgender bills in 2025. UK police reported more than 3,800 transgender hate crimes that same year Globally, those numbers are larger, predominately targeting Black trans women and, increasingly, trans activists and movement leaders. Due to rampant underreporting, the numbers are likely even higher that that.

2026 - "Never give up on your dreams."

Although her posting has become less frequent in the year leading up to the new Potterverse show, Rowling has continued to reshare generally anti-trans sentiments on her public social media pages. More directly, she posted misleading statements about puberty blockers and transitioning youth, and platformed campaigns of Keira Bell, a UK-based detransition activist and gender-affirming care critic.

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Rowling celebrated the verdict of a recent medical malpractice lawsuit, which awarded $2 million to a young person who said she was pressured by therapists and doctors into a double mastectomy. Wrote Rowling in a Feb. 3 X post:

"As more and more detransitioners arrive in court, the public will learn the full extent of the harm done to kids in the name of an ideology. Clinicians performing these 'treatments' will go down in history as barbarous activists who betrayed a sacred oath: to do no harm. But we should never forget how many people outside the medical profession urged these young people on, gleefully assuring them that anyone advising caution was an evil bigot."

The author has remained consistent in platforming trans-exclusionist accounts and brands, too, like sportswear brand XX-XY Athletics. She rejoiced being blocked by India Willoughby, the country's first trans national television newsreader and co-host of Loose Women.

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For fans, Rowling's dogged efforts to demonize trans people have been harrowing. The rift between the universe's creator and its unofficial caretakers has turned into a chasm. There doesn't appear to be an end, nor a bridge, in sight.

In Rowling's second novel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the wizarding world's evil is growing stronger. The villains, believers in magic-based eugenics, are getting louder. Even the titular young wizard is being enticed to agree with their bigoted beliefs by the specter of a charismatic young Voldemort.

As the serpentine words slither through his mind, Harry turns to the wise Albus Dumbledore, the master of a fantasy world he has emphatically embraced — until now. The man slips him a simple truth, one that the Harry Potter fandom clings to tightly: "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman caused a stir when he told a tech show that the platform was considering some form of ID verification to combat bots. Now Huffman has officially addressed the issues in a message to Reddit users posted right on the platform itself.

Huffman says Reddit isn't looking to identify its anonymity-loving user base. The company just wants to make sure its users are human.

"Reddit works because it’s human – and we want to keep it that way," a Reddit spokesperson told Mashable in a statement, just as Huffman wrote in another post last year.

Huffman's latest post is summarized in its title, "Humans welcome (bots must wear name tags)." Going forward, the CEO wrote, "good bots" on Reddit will now be labeled as "Apps."

Automation is allowed in certain use cases on the platform, Huffman noted. But bot accounts must not impersonate a human being. Developers will be able to officially register their automated accounts with Reddit; details on how to do so will be shared soon. 

What about ID verification? According to Huffman, Reddit will approach this as "human verification." The platform is not looking to identify specific individuals, just confirm that they are an actual person and not a bot.

There will not be any sitewide verification process for Reddit, in other words. Human verification will be performed on a case-by-case basis, if an account is using automation or engaging in other suspicious bot-like activity. Reddit will use a third-party service for human verification.

"If we suspect a user is running an automation, they’ll encounter a verification prompt," a Reddit spokesperson told Mashable. "This will affect a small number of users. Any verification service we use will not have access to your Reddit activity and username, and we will not have access to your real-world identity."

The company says it has successfully been able to detect and remove bots for more than 20 years — and believes these new moves will provide better visibility and transparency to its user base.

As for AI on the platform — including AI slop — Reddit is taking a wait-and-see approach. "For better or worse, using AI to write is part of how people will communicate in the future (albeit annoying), so our current focus is to ensure there is a real, live human behind the accounts you’re seeing," Huffman wrote.

Subreddit communities will able to make their own rules regarding AI, however — and users can always downvote AI content on the platform.

But Huffman isn't closing the door on a sitewide approach to AI in the future. "Things are changing quickly, and we’ll adapt as best we can," he wrote.

The first thing BTS ask for on Arirang, the group's long-awaited fifth studio album, is simple: "Put your phone down."

It sounds almost cliché in an era of screen fatigue, but coming from BTS, it lands with a strange kind of dissonance. This is, after all, a group that didn't just benefit from social media but helped define how K-pop stars are expected to exist within it.

For over a decade, BTS have lived not just on the internet, but through it, building a global audience by turning screens into something intimate. Their practice room videos and late-night livestreams didn't just document their rise — they changed what proximity between artist and fan could feel like. It didn't matter that BTS were thousands of miles away or spoke Korean; the screen bridged the distance. It made every post, every update, feel immediate, like a digital exchange between friends.

Credit: BIG HIT MUSIC

Their fandom moved with that same fluency. Fans didn't just watch. They organized, amplified, and pushed BTS into spaces that had long felt inaccessible, bringing the group to historic heights on the U.S. music charts.

So what does it mean for BTS to ask listeners to step away from the very device that made them global? That connected them to millions of fans at once?

On its surface, Arirang reads as a reflection, maybe even a correction to the glossy, outward-facing pop of "Dynamite," "Butter," and "Permission to Dance" — a recalibration after years spent scaling themselves for a global audience. In the lead-up to the album, BTS promised a return to their roots. The framing makes that expectation almost inevitable. Arirang takes its name from a defining Korean folk song, a cultural touchstone long associated with longing and return. On paper, it signals a homecoming: a project that re-centers BTS within a specifically Korean tradition after years of global expansion.

But the return isn't quite that literal. If Arirang moves back toward anything, it's not just heritage but foundation — a renewed emphasis on the hip-hop sensibilities that first defined BTS's sound and sharp lyricism. That grounding shapes the album's early stretch, before it opens into something more overtly pop.

Long before they were filling stadiums, their music and presence were built on forging direct, emotional links with listeners across language, geography, and vastly different lived experiences. BTS offered a version of digital intimacy that felt genuine, even revolutionary. Their early Twitter posts and V Lives didn't carry the polish that now defines idol content. They felt loose. Personal. At times, almost accidental. The internet made that connection scalable. It allowed BTS to collapse distance in a way that felt unprecedented.

But on Arirang, that connection takes a different form. It no longer has to be engineered or maintained. Instead, it's embedded in the music itself, no longer needing to be mediated to feel real.

On the bouncy, frenetic "Body To Body," where RM first delivers that opening line, closeness is framed as something immediate. "Put your phone down, let's get all the fun," he insists, pushing against a concert culture where even live moments are filtered through screens, optimized for capture and circulation. In K-pop, especially, where the clip economy drives visibility, presence is often secondary to documentation. The song resists that instinct. The moment only exists if you're in it.

But Arirang doesn't romanticize disconnection. It reframes the internet as something sharper, more volatile, a space where connection and harm coexist at the same speed. Suga makes that explicit: "Guns, knives, keyboards, put all that away." The keyboard is not metaphorical. It's a recognition of how language travels now — instantly, globally, and often without care for what it lands on.

That duality defines much of the album. On "Normal," BTS give language to the instability of constant visibility: "Show me hate, show me love, make me bulletproof / Yeah, we call this shit normal." Fame here isn't a fixed state; it's a condition of perpetual exposure, where affirmation and critique arrive simultaneously and with equal force. The song doesn't resolve that tension so much as sit inside it.

Credit: BIGHIT Music / Netflix

Elsewhere, Arirang turns its attention to the systems that produce that visibility. On the frenetic "FYA," the language of the dance floor collapses into the language of the feed: "Club go psycho / Might take you viral." For BTS, virality is no longer an outcome; it's an atmosphere. Every space they move through is already primed for capture, flattened into something that can be looped, shared, and consumed in fragments.

BTS are not rejecting the internet, nor are they fully embracing it. They are negotiating with it, acknowledging both its role in their ascent and its limitations as a space for sustaining something real.

You can hear that negotiation in the album's structure. Since BTS's hiatus, short-form video has reshaped not just how music is promoted, but how it's made. Songs are shorter, hooks arrive faster, moments are engineered for virality. TikTok has become central to the lifecycle of a song, creating an ecosystem that favors loops over progression.

BTS are acutely aware of this change. They've spoken about the "Shorts generation," about songs becoming shorter, more immediate. "People don't listen to long songs anymore," Jimin told Bloomberg in March 2026. In that same interview, RM noted that after returning to Korea from their Los Angeles sessions, tracks were trimmed by "maybe 15, 20 seconds" in final production.

You can hear it in the album's pacing, its sharp transitions, and the way certain sections feel designed to land quickly. Its opening stretch is restless, pulled in multiple directions — hip-hop, club beats, tonal pivots that never quite settle. It mirrors the churn of the feed: constant motion, constant escalation, nothing held in place for long.

Then, abruptly, it stops.

"No. 29" arrives as a single, resonant toll. The Sacred Bell of Great King Seongdeok rings out, unaccompanied, uninterrupted. No build. No transition. Just sound, sustained until the reverberation stills into silence. It refuses optimization. It can't be clipped into a trend or condensed into a loop. It simply exists, asking you to sit with it.

What follows shifts the album's center of gravity. If the first half contends with external forces, the second turns inward. "Swim," the lead single, arrives like the tide, not in crashing waves but in a slow, steady pull. The repetition of “swim” on the hook feels less like motion than suspension, like treading water in a vast, open ocean. "Under here, we don’t chase the time," j-hope sings, as the track settles into something slower, drifting into focus rather than announcing itself.

And yet, time lingers as a quiet pressure. On "Merry-Go-Round," Suga names the feeling directly: "Every day the same routine, merry-go-round or hamster wheel." It's a striking image for a group returning at full scale, one that frames success not as forward motion, but as repetition. Even growth loops back on itself. Even momentum feels cyclical.

On "Like Animals," the album's standout track, distance gives way to instinct. The production turns hazy, grunge-leaning, less polished, more atmospheric. Connection is no longer abstract or symbolic. It's physical, carnal. "None of us are tameable," j-hope reminds the listener. The line lands as release, stripping away the layers of performance and translation that define so much of digital interaction. "There's beauty outside control," RM sings.

That kind of freedom feels harder to come by now. The internet that once made BTS feel close is no longer the same one they're returning to.

Intimacy now registers as expectation. The access that fueled BTS's rise has hardened into something more transactional in the years since their last group release. Visibility becomes currency. Presence starts to look like performance. Even authenticity begins to feel orchestrated.

At times, Arirang pushes against the noise, searching for clarity beneath it. But it never fully steps outside the system it's questioning. It moves through the same cycles of virality and discourse that helped elevate BTS in the first place. Asking listeners to "put your phone down" becomes its own paradox, a message designed to spread as widely as possible online.

BTS are not stepping outside the system that made them global. They're trying to understand what it has become.

In the four years since their last release as a group, the digital ecosystem that amplified BTS into a global phenomenon has fractured into something faster, noisier, and harder to hold onto. Songs arrive as snippets before they're heard in full. Moments peak and disappear in the same breath. Fandom disperses across platforms and timelines that rarely overlap. What once felt shared now feels scattered.

There was a time when BTS existed at the center of a kind of digital monoculture, when discourse around the group moved in waves, unified and overwhelming. Praise and criticism alike traveled at scale. To express dissent meant risking being swallowed by it. The internet seemed, if not singular, then at least synchronized.

That coherence has thinned. The slow dissolution of platforms like Twitter (now X under Elon Musk's ownership) as a central "town square" has fractured conversation into smaller, more insulated spaces. What used to play out in public now disperses across group chats, private communities, and algorithmically sorted feeds. You are now more likely to exist in a version of the internet that reflects you back to yourself.

The online response to Arirang reflects that change. BTS releases have typically been met with near-total consensus — whether celebratory or defensive — in which dissent was often drowned out or met with swift, overwhelming pushback from fans. The conversation around this album feels more varied, more open, and even more critical. Not quieter, but less unified. The intensity hasn't disappeared; it's just been redistributed.

And crucially, BTS no longer seem to need that consensus.

They return not as artists trying to be seen, but as the biggest band in the world. Attention is already guaranteed. The question now is what that attention means and how they choose to move forward under its glare.

The tension never fully resolves. Instead, Arirang begins to imagine a different relationship to it — one less defined by acceleration, more by duration. Not connection as something broadcast outwardly, but something held in place.

That instinct traces back to the album's title. "Arirang," a beloved Korean folk song, endures not because it spread quickly, but because it has been carried across generations, borders, and time.

BTS have long been positioned as a bridge between Korea and the global pop landscape, between tradition and reinvention. But that role has historically required a constant expansion toward new audiences. Arirang feels like a re-evaluation of that impulse. Not a retreat from the world, but a shift in how they move through it. What once felt like expansion now feels like proximity.

Credit: BIGHIT Music / Netflix

That becomes most tangible on stage, where BTS have long described concerts as the center of what they do. After years apart, performance becomes the place where connection is shared in real-time, carried between bodies, and not just transmitted through screens. Their live comeback concert was broadcast on Netflix, but its meaning was rooted in the physical. In central Seoul, BTS shut down streets and performed in front of Gwanghwamun Gate, turning a historic public square into a site of shared experience for tens of thousands of fans. Not just something to watch, but something to be inside, together.

In that context, Arirang reads less like a resolution and more like preparation. A way of reorienting, not away from the internet, but beyond its limits. It turns toward a form of connection built to be felt rather than consumed.

Or, as j-hope puts it on "Body To Body," drawing a line between experience and mediation: "You could see about it, or you read about it." For BTS, that distinction feels newly urgent.

In an internet that flattens everything into moments, Arirang reaches for something else. Not what travels across timelines, but what lingers. Not what's seen, but what's actually there.

Reddit has a real bot problem on its hands.

And, in order to deal with this problem, Reddit is considering turning to the latest go-to solution for the tech industry: ID verification.

On the tech show TBPN, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman spoke about how AI has caused issues for the platform and discussed potential solutions.

Hoffman explained how the solutions would look to answer the question "Is there actually a human using Reddit right now?"

"Reddit is for humans," Hoffman said, before discussing various verification processes that the company is looking at. 

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

"The most lightweight way is something like face ID or touch ID or broadly the family of technology that's called passkeys," Hoffman continued. "Every platform wants to know 'is this is a person?' Now Reddit's version is 'is this a person but we don't want to know which person this is.'"

That's a pretty important distinction for Reddit, which has based its platform on users' ability to maintain anonymity. Hoffman explained that there are "heavier versions" of ID verification, like "ID checking services," which the company already complies with where required by government regulations. However, it doesn't sound like they are looking to implement something like this more broadly to fight the platform's bot problem.

Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit who resigned from the company's board in 2020, posted a message of support for trying to solve the bot problem, but also pointed out how tricky it will be to do so without alienating Reddit users.

"RDDT requiring Face ID was not something I had on my bingo card but something has got to be done about all the fake / botted content — I just don't know how to sell face-scanning to redditors or even lurkers," Ohanian said.

In his TBPN interview, Hoffman expressed support for real AI use cases on the site, such as auto-translation bots. However, Hoffman said that even with good AI bots on the platform, the company needs to be sure a real human is behind the bot.

Reddit has long had issues with automated accounts and content farms submitting posts and gaming the upvote system. However, with the rise in AI, Reddit has become inundated with AI bots attempting to mimic real users and replying to real user posts and comments with spam.

Since 2024, Google has drastically increased Reddit's visibility in search results. As a result, spammers have flocked to Reddit as a search engine optimization (SEO) technique.

It'll be interesting to see which ID verification method is chosen by Reddit. Regardless of what it is, it'll very likely receive blowback from the platform's very opinionated and privacy-oriented user base. 

If you've spent any time consuming dating content lately, you've almost certainly encountered the vocabulary: high value, alpha, body count, Chad. Terms that, not long ago, were esoterically confined to misogynistic, racist incel ("involuntarily celibate") forums and have now migrated wholesale into mainstream culture — repackaged as self-improvement content, dating advice, and meme language for Twitter-poisoned 20-somethings. The far right "manosphere," as we've reported multiple times before, is no longer a fringe phenomenon. It's in your For You Page.

Incel communities first took root in the early 2000s on 4chan and Reddit, largely invisible to anyone outside their orbit. They gained their first brush of mainstream notoriety in the mid-2010s — when Reddit banned r/incels in 2017, and a string of high-profile domestic terror attacks carried out by self-identified incels forced the broader public to reckon with what had been quietly festering online. When "incel" entered the popular lexicon, its accompanying vocabulary was considered icky at best and flatly dehumanizing at worst.

But the language never went away. Chad, alpha male, high-value man, Stacy — these terms didn't disappear when the subreddits got banned. They dispersed, seeping into fitness content, dating advice, meme pages, and self-help guides.

Studies from the University of Portsmouth and reporting from The Guardian show how gaming and social media content focused on dating advice, hustle culture, and gym tips can often serve as a gateway to exposing young boys to incel and right-wing content.

So, just like our Looksmaxxing glossary, consider this your field guide to the terms, communities, and ideologies infiltrating the way a generation talks about dating — and themselves.

80/20 rule

In the context of dating, incels believe that 80 percent of women are only romantically available to the top 20 percent of men — leaving the remaining 80 percent of men to compete for whatever's left.

The theory is borrowed from the Pareto Principle, a power law originally used in business management, which states that roughly 80 percent of outcomes stem from 20 percent of causes.

Alpha Male

A domineering, aggressive man who is perceived to sit atop the male social hierarchy. The concept draws on animal behavioral science — specifically, studies of captive wolf packs — as a framework for understanding male dominance. The term is borrowed from the Greek alphabet, where alpha (α) denotes the first and highest rank.

The researchers behind that original work have long since walked it back, calling it an oversimplification that doesn't hold up to scrutiny, let alone translate cleanly to human behavior.

AWALT ("All Women Are Like That")

An acronym for "All Women Are Like That." The assumption that "all women" are driven by the same hypergamous, self-serving instincts.

In red pill and incel spaces, AWALT is a thought-terminating cliché to preemptively dismiss any evidence that complicates their worldview, and that any woman who appears otherwise is either an exception to the rule (like moms or sisters) or simply hasn't been tested yet.

Becky

The general population of women who are below the status of Stacy's — highly attractive, hyperfeminine women who have sex with Chads. Whereas a Stacy is seen as unattainable to an incel, the community feels owed sex and attention from Becky's for their perceived lower status in the SMV (see below).

Beta Male

Unremarkable men who are subservient to alphas. Believed to lack the physical presence, charisma, and confidence of the Alpha male.

Beta Orbiter

A man who circles a woman he's attracted to — attending to her emotionally, defending her online, laughing at all her jokes — in the hopes of getting into a romantic relationship. Incels use the term as a pejorative to describe a man so deep in the "friendzone" that he's essentially providing all the benefits of a relationship for none of the rewards.

Betabux

A derogatory term for men in relationships with women who have settled and seek financial stability. Also known as a "beta provider," the term expresses the belief that women have their fun with Chads in their prime, and now that she's hit "the Wall" (see below), she's traded down to a financially stable but romantically unexciting beta to foot the bill.

The term itself is 4chan leetspeak (internet slang originating in early hacker and gaming communities that substitutes numbers and symbols for letters) — a compression of "beta" and "bucks," distilled from the phrase "alpha fux, beta bux." Meaning women sleep with Chads and spend a beta's money.

Black Pill

Blackpilling is a nihilistic offshoot of incel ideology and the manosphere that believes that, in the heterosexual dating market, physical attractiveness is the only thing that matters.

This worldview is propped up by pseudoscientific frameworks and cherry-picked data. It's the ideological bedrock from which practices like looksmaxxing grow. To "take the black pill" is to accept this as truth.

Blue Pill

A willful refusal to acknowledge what incels believe is the observable reality — that modern society is structurally rigged against men. Borrowed from the famous choice in The Matrix, "swallowing the blue pill" means choosing comfortable ignorance over the hard truth.

Body Count

A person's total number of sexual partners. Incels use this as a measure of a woman's long-term relationship viability — the higher the number, the lower her perceived value.

Briffault's Law

Credited to French surgeon and social anthropologist Robert Briffault, it states: "The female, not the male, determines all the conditions of the animal family. Where the female can derive no benefit from association with the male, no such association takes place."

In the view of incels, they use Briffault's Law to assert that women are selfish and only use men for their own personal gain.

Chad

Incel slang for typically white, physically attractive, and sexually successful men. Chads represent the top 1 percent of men that women seek in the dating marketplace. Chads are often depicted in memes as a strong-jawed, blonde Übermensch. Incels have racist variations of Chad, including Tyrone (Black), Chaddam (Arab), Chang (East Asian), and Chadpreet (Indian).

Chadlite is used to describe men who are above average in looks, but not to the level of a Chad.

Cuck

In incel spaces, a cuck is any man perceived to have surrendered his masculine authority. It's a shortening of cuckold — historically, a man who derives sexual pleasure from watching his partner sleep with someone else.

ELO Score

A ranking algorithm developed for competitive chess to measure and compare player skill levels. Dating apps like Tinder have used a variation of it in the past to do essentially the same thing.

Femcel

A portmanteau of "female" and "incel" — women who claim to experience involuntary celibacy on the same terms as their male counterparts. The male-dominated incel community is largely dismissive of the category altogether.

Femoid

A portmanteau of "female" and "humanoid" (or "female humanoid organism," according to the UN), this is one of many pejorative terms incels use to refer to women. Sometimes shortened to Foid.

Friendzone

A metaphorical relationship purgatory in which a man pursues romantic interest in a woman who wants to keep things strictly platonic.

The concept broke into mainstream culture largely through shows like Friends and has since become a fixture of how people talk about unrequited attraction. For incels, the term expresses the belief that women are exploiting emotionally available men for attention while reserving genuine interest exclusively for Chads.

Game

A term for techniques used by Pick Up Artists to hit on women. These techniques include negging (backhanded compliments to undermine a woman's confidence), peacocking (dressing loudly to invite attention), and push-pull (alternating interest and withdrawal to manufacture tension).

High Value Man

A man deemed desirable by society at large and, more specifically, by women. These values range from some combination of wealth, status, physical dominance, and social clout.

High Value Woman

The female counterpart to the High Value Man (see above), though the criteria are considerably narrower. Where a man's value is assessed across wealth, status, physique, and social clout, a woman's value in manosphere spaces is evaluated almost exclusively on physical attractiveness, hyperfemininity, youth, and sexual history.

Hypergamy

The belief that women are hardwired to date and marry up — gravitating toward men of higher status, wealth, and physical dominance than themselves.

Incel

Short for "involuntarily celibate," the incel community has its origins in a niche blog created in the late 1990s. Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project began as a genuine support group for people of all genders struggling to find romantic connections.

Over time, the male incel community grew more extreme, placing the blame for their struggles squarely on women. These groups migrated to 4chan and Reddit — first to r/incels, then to r/Braincels after the former was banned in 2017. In the 2020s, the ideology was associated with various terror attacks carried out by self-described incels.

Looksmatch

To date someone at a perceived level of equal attractiveness.

Manlet

A pejorative for a short man — typically any male under 5'10", though the cutoff shifts depending on who you ask.

Manosphere

A loosely connected ecosystem of online communities, forums, podcasts, blogs, and influencers united by a shared pro-male, anti-feminist, and misogynistic ideology. The through line is a belief that men are the aggrieved party in modern society, and that feminism, dating culture, and mainstream institutions have been rigged against them.

MRA

Short for Men's Rights Activists. A subset of the manosphere focused on advocating for issues they believe disproportionately harm men, like custody battles, military conscription, and male suicide rates. MRA spaces frequently devolve into anti-feminist grievance politics, treating any advancement of women's rights as a direct attack on men.

Nice Guy

Nice Guy or "Nice Guy Syndrome" is a label for a man who believes basic acts of kindness and decency entitle him to a romantic partner.

Normie

Average-looking, boring person. One who doesn't participate in the incel community or interact with the manosphere.

NPC

Short for Non-Player Character. Used in the context of video games to refer to background characters encountered in the game that are not controlled by the player.

Used by incels to describe someone who is devoid of any original thought or individuality. The term is now popular as Gen Z/Alpha internet slang to refer to inoffensive, mindless trend followers.

Pink and Blue roles

The association of pink and blue with traditional heteronormative gender roles in a relationship. Pink for domestic and emotionally supportive roles like cooking, cleaning, and childcare. Blue for provider roles like financial support, physical protection, and household maintenance.

Proximity principle

A psychological theory suggesting that people in close physical proximity are more likely to form interpersonal relationships. The principle has a more cynical standing in incel circles as it's reframed as relationships made out of convenience.

PSL rating

A pseudoscientific attractiveness ranking system built by the looksmaxxing community to put an empirical number on your face. The acronym is an amalgamation of three defunct incel forums — PUAhate, SlutHate, and Lookism.

The scale runs from 0.25 to 8 (some versions go from 1 to 8), though in practice, no one actually scores an 8. It measures facial features like eye shape, canthal tilt ("the angle or slant of the outer corners of the eyes"), nose angles, jaw size, and lip thickness. Proponents of the scale can be found on sites like Looksmax.org and on Reddit, in r/rateme and r/truerateme.

PUA

"Pick Up Artist." The ecosystem and community of grifters and self-appointed coaches who sell self-help content to sexually inexperienced young men. Originally, the term was a self-applied label for members who treated seducing women as a learnable skill set.

At its peak in the mid-2000s, the PUA community built a cottage industry of boot camps, forums, and bestselling books.

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Purple Pill

Used derogatorily by incels for those who have a neutral stance towards "the truth" of gender relations.

r/MGTOW

MGTOW stands for "Men Going Their Own Way." r/MGTOW is a now-banned subreddit and broader online subsection of the manosphere built around the philosophy of male self-prioritization in what its members view as an inherently "gynocentric" — the belief that society is structurally organized around female interests at the direct expense of men. In practice, that philosophy manifests as a deliberate withdrawal from romantic relationships, marriage, and fatherhood altogether.

Red Pill

The central ideological pillar of the manosphere. To "swallow the red pill" is to reject the mainstream social narrative and accept that modern society is structurally discriminatory toward men.

Roastie

A derogatory term for sexually active women.

Sexual Market Value

An individual's measure of sexual attractiveness is scored on a decile scale of 1 to 10. The formula shifts depending on gender. For women, SMV is almost entirely physical. For men, the calculus is broader: physique, income, career status, social clout, and personality can all push the number up or down.

Sigma

Introverted, solitary alpha males. The term borrows from the lowercase Greek letter σ, used in mathematics and statistics to denote standard deviation — a measure of how far something falls outside the norm.

The concept is taken seriously in some corners of the manosphere, though it has been so thoroughly absorbed by meme culture that it's become nearly impossible to deploy without irony.

Simp

A man who performs excessive deference toward a woman in hopes of romantic return. In incel spaces, any visible effort is enough to earn the label.

Soyboy

A pejorative for men perceived as soft, effeminate, or insufficiently masculine. Typically applied to liberal, progressive, or emotionally expressive men. The "soy" refers to a debunked theory that soy products lower testosterone levels.

Stacy

The female equivalent of a Chad (i.e., physically attractive, sexually successful men). A Stacy is hyperfeminine, attractive, socially popular, and — crucially, to the incels — sexually active.

The term carries an implicit resentment: Stacy's represent everything incels want and, by their own logic, everything they'll never have access to.

The Wall

The age (usually 25 to 27) at which a woman's physical attractiveness is believed to peak and then begin to decline. In incel spaces, hitting the Wall is when women supposedly lose access to high-value men and begin settling for betabux (see above).

Trad Wife

Short for traditional wife. A woman who embraces conventional domestic gender roles — homemaking, childcare, deference to a male partner — either by personal conviction or ideological alignment with the manosphere's preferred social order.

White Knighting

The act of defending a woman (or women's rights) online or in-person typically attributed to ulterior romantic motives rather than genuine principle. Viewed by incels as simps in armor.

Following the Australian government's social media ban for kids under 16, governments around the world are looking into the possibility of similar style bans. 

These governments considering these social media bans now have at least one unlikely supporter: The CEO of Pinterest.

In a piece published for Time, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready has come out in full support for government bans on social media for users under the age of 16.

"Children today are living through the largest social experiment in history," Ready writes. "For years, kids around the world have been given unfiltered access to social media platforms. The companies building these platforms gave insufficient forethought about the consequences, the worst of which include exposing them to unknown strangers and fueling screen addictions."

Ready goes on to list additional effects that social media has had on children as "rising anxiety and depression, eroding concentration, and classrooms competing for attention."

The Pinterest CEO says that social media as it is today is not safe for children and blames tech companies for that. Ready says social media is designed to "maximize view time" of kids and pays little attention to their actual well-being. Ready likens the tech CEOs of today to the tobacco industry executives of decades ago.

Now, it might seem hypocritical of Ready to say this as Pinterest's own policies allow kids as young as 13 to sign up for the site. However, as Ready points out, Pinterest has made changes to its platform and removed all social features from Pinterest for users under the age of 16. Their profiles aren't discoverable, and these users can't receive messages, comments, or likes from strangers on Pinterest.

Interestingly, Ready says removing these features did not hurt Pinterest with that demographic.

"When Pinterest removed social features for teens and made every account under 16 private…people said we’d lose the next generation of users," Ready writes. "But Gen Z says the opposite. Today, they make up over 50 percent of our users. Our experience shows that prioritizing safety and well-being doesn’t push young people away; it builds trust."

Ready goes on to say that if tech companies don't want more governments instituting these bans, they need to step up and prioritize kids' safety on their platforms. The Pinterest CEO also expressed support for a proposed bill in the U.S., the App Store Accountability Act. Under this bill, app stores would be required to verify users' ages when downloading apps.

"The cost of inaction is a generation of young people overwhelmed by anxiety and depression," the Pinterest CEO writes. "It’s time to raise the bar on safety and well-being for kids. We need clearer rules, better tools for parents, and stronger accountability for platforms and social media apps."

Have you ever heard that ol’ country song “Who gets the family bible when two grownups lose heart?”

Well, we may need a new version for the Gen Z era, because according to a litigation strategist I met at SXSW 2026, it’s actually the family TikTok account creators should be worried about.

That's right, TIL that creators should consider adding TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram accounts to their prenups.

Attorney Michelle May O’Neil said exactly that during a SXSW panel she hosted, “Who Owns Me? Legal War Over Identity in the Creator Economy.” O’Neil is a nationally recognized lawyer and expert on NIL (name, image, likeness) topics, and she warned creators to take proactive steps to protect their identities, including prenuptial agreements.

This isn’t a hypothetical situation, either.

O’Neil highlighted the case of Kat and Mike Stickler, married influencers who ended up in a bitter custody feud, not over their children, but over their followers — all 4 million of them. In covering the case, the Wall Street Journal asked, “Who Gets the TikTok in the Divorce?” (FWIW, Kat ultimately retained ownership of the original TikTok account and has gone on to amass an even larger following as @katstickler.)

And if your TikTok or Instagram accounts do become the subjects of a contentious divorce like the Sticklers, don’t expect family court to provide a solution, O’Neil said during her SXSW panel.

“We don't have case law authority. There's no legal doctrine for this. So their individual identity became joint property, and nobody thought about what it looked like to divide it.”

Here’s another worrying scenario: What if you’re romantically involved with a creator and appear occasionally in their content? Eventually, you break up or get divorced. Does your ex then retain the right to keep using your likeness however they see fit?

“I think it's a really good idea to have a clause in prenups that says that each spouse maintains the exclusive right to their name, image, likeness, and does not, by virtue of marriage, transfer their rights over to the other spouse because of marriage. And the reason for that is my experience representing high-profile people."

So, what else can creators and public figures do to protect their digital likeness?

In addition to creating a prenup, O’Neil advised creators to create an LLC or other legal entity to protect their core asset — their identity.

“This is another reason to have an entity structure before marriage, but if you're making money on your image, name, likeness, voice, whatever, before you get into a marriage, it's a pretty good idea to put that in the prenup…And I don't really know of a lot of lawyers that actually do this in prenups,” O’Neil said at SXSW.

Prenups are the kind of safeguard you hope you never have to use. But if you and an ex ever get into a legal battle over social media assets or NIL issues, you might be glad you have it, O'Neil said.

"That one clause in a prenup that says I have license, I have the rights, I own my name, image, likeness, my voice, my writings, everything that comes from me. I still own it, it's my property, and just because I marry you, I'm not giving you license to use it."

This article and the quotes in it are not legal advice. Talk to your own legal representative before making any decisions.

UPDATE: Mar. 18, 2026, 12:28 p.m. EDT It appears that the brief outage of X has been resolved. DownDetector reports are slowing down and Mashable reporters have since been able to access feeds and search on the platform.

Is X down? That's the question thousands of social media users are asking on Wednesday morning, as an X outage causes problems with the app.

The platform DownDetector showed a spike of tens of thousands of user error reports beginning around 10:30 a.m. ET. As of this writing, the platform has received more than 33,000 error reports from X users. (Disclosure: DownDetector and Mashable are both owned by ZiffDavis.)

Mashable reporters were unable to access the X feed, search, and bookmark tools on the X mobile app, suggesting the outage is ongoing.

The search tool is not working. Credit: Timothy Werth / Mashable

A NASA livestream is no longer working. Credit: Timothy Werth

Massive internet outages have been a recurring problem over the past year, with major cloud services such as Cloudflare, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure experiencing outages recently.

Mashable reached out to X for comment, and we'll update this story if we receive a response.

This is a developing story...

Is the dislike button on replies coming back to Elon Musk's social media platform X? It seems like it, according to posts from X head of product Nikita Bier.

Last night on X, Bier hinted that the dislike button on replies may be making its return and even shared a screen recording of the feature on the platform. The feature would inform the platform's algorithm of what type of content a user doesn't want to see on their feed.

"they should have a dislike button on twitter too" posted one X user on Tuesday.

"Give me 60 seconds," Bier replied.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

A few hours later, Bier posted about the spam problems on X, an issue Musk originally pledged to fix when acquiring the company in October 2022.

"The financial incentive to spam on X will decline enormously over the next 30 days and soon be negative," Bier said.

Like clockwork, a spammer sent a seemingly AI-generated reply to Bier's post. Bier responded with a screen recording showing how the dislike button will work on mobile.

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The dislike button in Bier's video appears as a thumbs-down icon. The icon is visible on a reply between the "like" and bookmark buttons. Upon pressing the dislike button, a "Reply feedback" prompt pops up asking a user for more information.

"Tell us what is wrong with this reply," the prompt states. "Your feedback is private."

The user is then given five options to choose from: Not interested in this post, incorrect or misleading, AI-generated, spam, or report post.

X's dislike button does not have a public dislike counter. The purpose of the button appears strictly to inform the platform of the type of content you'd prefer not to see.

"Are you actually shipping the dislike button it looks great," replied one user to the screen capture.

"I’m afraid that there is only one path forward," responds Bier.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

A dislike button on X does not currently exist, but it may seem familiar. Much like Community Notes and X Premium, Musk's social media platform is taking ownership of yet another feature that was built by the old Twitter prior to Musk's acquisition of the company.

In 2017, then-Twitter rolled out a system that allowed users to tell the platform if they didn't like a tweet. Then, in 2020, Twitter first started exploring the implementation of a proper dislike or downvote system on the platform.

A version of a dislike button was previously rolled out as a global test feature in February 2022. Instead of a thumbs-down button, though, this test version utilized a downvote arrow similar to what appears on Reddit. However, the feature test was eventually discontinued, and the feature faded away. 

In July 2024, an app researcher discovered code in X's iOS app that pointed towards a potential revival of the downvote system.

It appears that X is now flirting with the idea again. Unlike last time, the company's head of product is publicly talking about it, so it seems likely some version of the dislike button will roll out eventually.

The beauty of live television is that absolutely anything can happen, and nowhere is that more reliably, terrifyingly true than at the Oscars. The Academy Awards like to present themselves as the pinnacle of Hollywood elegance, and yet the ceremony has an almost proud history of producing moments that range from the benignly chaotic like the the La La Land / Moonlight Best Picture debacle to the genuinely unhinged, like Will Smith walking up on stage and slapping the hell out of Chris Rock in front of every famous person on earth.

The point is: Something is always going to happen. This year, however, was a relatively quiet night, the biggest event being the seventh-ever tie in Oscars history for Live-Action Short Film.

Kevin O'Leary is placing bets on Kalshi

To kick things off, Kevin O'Leary, the Shark Tank businessman and supporting star of Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme, arrived on the red carpet and let everyone know he put a $1,000 bet on Timothée Chalamet winning Best Actor through the infamous prediction market site Kalshi. Unsurprisingly, this has now led to a snowball effect of people betting against Chalamet.

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Conan O'Brien as Aunt Gladys

In what can only be described as a bit that had absolutely no business working as well as it did, Oscars host Conan O'Brien took the stage dressed as Aunt Gladys from Weapons — the scene-stealing villain that earned Amy Madigan her Best Supporting Actress win — and somehow made it funnier than it had any right to be.

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The Live-Action Short Film Oscar is a tie??

In a moment that sent genuine shockwaves through a ceremony that has been running for nearly a century, the Live Action Short Film category produced just the seventh tie in Academy Awards history, with Two People Exchanging Saliva and The Singers.

The chaos that followed was, frankly, perfect — when the crew from Two People took the stage for their turn at the microphone, the Academy apparently decided they had heard enough and physically retracted the mic while they were still mid-speech, which is either a massive technical blunder or the most passive-aggressive move in Oscars history.

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'Golden' Oscar speech gets cut off and sent to commercial

The Academy's increasingly aggressive relationship with the clock claimed another victim when KPop Demon Hunters' "Golden" took home Best Original Song and the accepting team, mid-speech, got unceremoniously cut off and sent immediately to commercial without so much as a courtesy pause — a noticeably harsher fate than the Live Action Short situation earlier in the night, where at least the affected parties were eventually allowed to finish their thoughts.

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Timothée Chalamet is now a four-time Best Actor loser at the Academy Awards, adding another near-miss to his growing collection after failing to take home the trophy for his role as Marty Mauser in Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme.

Marty Supreme, with nine nominations, did not take home any Oscars.

The competition was stiff, but Michael B. Jordan's electric dual performance in Sinners took home the award.

For a very vocal corner of the internet, the loss was cause for celebration.

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Chalamet has been in the crosshairs lately, largely thanks to comments he made in an interview with Matthew McConaughey, in which he dismissed ballet and opera as arts "no one cares about." The full context of the remarks is more nuanced than the viral clip, but the backlash wasn't really about ballet anyway.

It was the breaking point after years of Chalamet oversaturation, some say, driven by back-to-back blockbuster press cycles for A Complete Unknown and Marty Supreme, leaving large swaths of the internet completely exhausted by his existence. As a reminder, Dune: Part Three is slated to release in December.

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The show itself was also not kind to Timmy over his ballet and opera comments, and host Conan O'Brien made it known.

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But it's surely not Chalamet's last Best Actor nomination. In fact, the internet should prepare to see more of Timmy next awards season after Dune 3 hits theaters.

Mashable covered all things Oscars 2026, from Academy Awards live updates and winners announcements to red carpet style and the wildest moments from the show.

The internet has spent weeks debating Timothée Chalamet's now-viral comments about ballet and opera. The latest voice to enter the discourse: Steven Spielberg.

During a live podcast conversation at SXSW on March 13, the legendary director was reflecting on the communal power of moviegoing when he suddenly shouted out two of the oldest performing arts institutions. "It happens in movies. It happens in concerts. It happens in ballet and opera!" Spielberg said, prompting cheers and whoops from the audience.

Spielberg was describing what he sees as the uniquely communal experience of the arts — the feeling of gathering together with strangers in a dark room and emerging united after the story ends.

"The real experience comes when we can influence a community to congregate in a strange, dark place," he told Sean Fennessey, host of The Big Picture podcast. "At the end of a really good movie experience, we are all united… There’s nothing like that."

The moment immediately echoed the online controversy surrounding Chalamet, who sparked backlash earlier this year after dismissing ballet and opera in a recent interview.

While promoting Marty Supreme at a February town hall hosted by Variety and CNN alongside Matthew McConaughey, Chalamet joked about the challenge of keeping movie theaters alive in a changing entertainment landscape.

"I don't want to be working in ballet or opera, or things where it's like, 'Hey, keep this thing alive,' even though it's like, no one cares about this anymore," Chalamet said at the event, before adding, "All respect to the ballet and opera people out there."

The comments quickly went viral and drew pushback from across the performing arts world. New York City Ballet principal dancer Tiler Peck wrote on Instagram that the idea "no one cares about ballet or opera anymore" couldn’t be further from the truth, highlighting the artists, musicians, and stage crews who dedicate their lives to the craft.

Ballet star Misty Copeland also weighed in, noting that while opera and ballet may not dominate pop culture in the same way films do, their cultural impact has endured for centuries. "There’s a reason that the opera and ballet have been around for over 400 years," she said.

So when Spielberg praised those same art forms during his SXSW keynote conversation — and the crowd erupted in approval — the moment landed as more than just a passing comment. In the context of the internet's ongoing Chalamet saga, it felt like a gentle correction.

At a moment when the internet feels like a constant stream of bad news alerts, many people online have found a surprisingly gentle escape: Pokémon Pokopia.

Even if you're not a gamer, it's hard to miss. I don't own a Nintendo Switch — let alone the new $500 Switch 2 — and yet cute clips from Pokopia keep appearing on my feeds anyway. Thanks to my algorithm, I'm vicariously living through them. Honestly, I want a cozy Pokémon island of my own to maintain, a little Eevee to befriend. Across platforms like TikTok, Reddit, and X, players are sharing snapshots and videos of the game's miniature towns, peaceful gameplay, and unexpectedly tender character stories.

In Pokopia, the stakes are low, the world is soft and colorful, and even its Pokémon seem more interested in helping their neighbors than battling anyone.

Credit: Nintendo

In other words, Pokopia is exactly the kind of game the internet seems to need right now. On social media, some users say they even bought a Nintendo Switch 2 just to play the $70 game exclusive to the device. (According to reports, it's more than worth it.)

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Pokopia trades the traditional Pokémon formula of gyms, battles, and elite trainers for something far slower and softer. Set in a tiny town where Pokémon live together in a close-knit community, the game puts players in the role of a shapeshifting, human-like Ditto. Instead of traveling the world to catch them all, your job is much simpler: help neighbors around town, complete small tasks, and slowly build relationships with the Pokémon who live there. You can even ask the Pokémon to live with you, which is how you end up with this roommate situation:

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The pace is intentionally relaxed, drawing easy comparisons to Animal Crossing. There's less pressure to compete and more encouragement to simply exist in the world: talking to neighbors, exploring cozy corners of the town, and watching the daily routines of its Pokémon residents. It's less about becoming a champion and more about becoming part of a community.

Credit: Nintendo

Much of Pokopia's viral attention has centered on its characters, particularly a small, pale Pikachu whom players online have quickly embraced as the game's emotional mascot. I barely know her, and I would die for her.

Credit: Nintendo

According to her Pokédex entry, Peakychu once shared much of her electricity with her friends to help them recover from an illness. The effort permanently altered her body, leaving her unable to generate electricity on her own. She can still manipulate electricity if another source charges her, but the story has resonated widely with players as a surprisingly tender moment in the game's world. And it's a perfect example of the game's emphasis on community.

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Pokopia's rise also reflects a broader pattern in internet culture: when the world feels overwhelming, people gravitate toward softer, more comforting media.

The "cozy game" boom has been building for years. Games centered on farming, decorating, community building, and slow daily routines — from Animal Crossing: New Horizons to indie hits like Stardew Valley and Unpacking — have drawn millions of players looking for a gentler alternative to competitive shooters or high-stakes RPGs. On TikTok alone, the hashtag #cozygames has amassed hundreds of millions of views, with creators sharing everything from title recommendations and relaxing gameplay loops to aesthetic virtual town tours.

Pokopia taps directly into that mood. Its tiny world feels safe. Its conflicts are small. Most importantly, its characters care about each other.

And lately, that softness feels especially appealing. Scroll through social media for more than a few minutes, and it's easy to feel swallowed by the constant churn of headlines: political tension, economic anxiety, climate disasters, the rapid rise of AI, war. Pokopia offers the opposite emotional experience — a place where the biggest problem might be helping a neighbor fix something around town.

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That sense of repair is baked into the game's premise, too.

Beneath its pastel towns and cozy routines, Pokopia carries a surprisingly reflective setup. The game takes place in a post-human world, where the ruins of an old civilization dot the landscape. Players slowly restore the environment by crafting, building, and farming their way through abandoned spaces with the ultimate goal of creating a new utopia for Pokémon. There's something quietly hopeful about the idea of building connection amid structural collapse.

Credit: Nintendo

For decades, Pokémon games have been about adventure — leaving home, battling rivals, and becoming the very best. Pokopia quietly flips that formula.

Here, the goal isn't to conquer the world. It’s simply to live in it together. And for many people scrolling through their feeds right now, that small, cozy vision of community might be exactly the kind of fantasy that feels most comforting.

Bluesky, the popular alternative social media platform that rose to prominence following Elon Musk's acquisition of X, is looking for a new CEO to guide it through a growth phase.

In a post on Bluesky's website, Bluesky's now-former CEO Jay Graber announced that she was stepping down from the role. Graber noted that she's stepping back to build new products, not leaving Bluesky.

Graber will be staying with the social network as the organization's first Chief Innovation Officer — while a more experienced CEO is found. Bluesky now has more than 40 million users.

Venture capitalist Toni Schneider, a partner at the VC firm True Ventures, will step in as temporary CEO while Bluesky searches for its next head. Schneider previously served as CEO of Automattic, the parent company of the popular blog and CMS platform Wordpress.  

Graber has been with Bluesky since its early beginnings in 2019. Back then, it was a project being worked on from within Twitter, the social media platform now known as X. Bluesky eventually spun off into a standalone organization working on a decentralized platform.

She cited "several intense and incredible years building Bluesky from the ground up," and the need for "a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things."

Bluesky gained traction as an alternative to Elon Musk's X after Musk acquired then-Twitter in October 2022. Bluesky's user base surged following the 2024 election as more liberal and progressive social media users looked for less far right online spaces, which was what Musk's X was transforming into.

As CEO, Graber seemingly became the reluctant face of Bluesky. As Wired points out, Graber started her career as a software engineer and always seemed more enthusiastic about the tech aspects of running Bluesky, as opposed to the business side of the endeavor.

Despite this, and unlike many other tech CEOs, Graber enjoyed broad support from Bluesky's users. For example, a shirt that Graber wore at SXSW last year that poked fun at Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg quickly sold out on Bluesky's online store.

Graber will also play a role in choosing her successor. While the search is just beginning, Bluesky’s board of directors will ultimately appoint the social media platform's next CEO. Members of the board include Jabber founder Jeremie Miller, TechDirt founder Mike Masnick, and Graber who will also remain on the board while also in her new role.

Indonesia just announced a ban on social media for anyone under 16, following a similar ban in Australia.

On Friday, Indonesia's minister of communication and digital affairs, Meutya Hafid, said in a speech shared online that the ban will begin on March 28. The rationale, according to a translation by the New York Times, is due to perceived threats of pornography, cyberbullying, online fraud, and social media addiction.

On March 28, children's accounts on "high-risk" platforms — including X, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Roblox, and livestreaming app Bigo Live — will begin to be deactivated. There aren't many details about how this will take place.

The announcement comes after Indonesia lifted a ban on Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok at the start of February. The country initially blocked Grok due to safety concerns and said it will continue to monitor its guardrails.

This is also happening after Australia banned social media for children under 16 last year. Elsewhere, such as in the U.S. and UK, age-verification laws have been enacted in an attempt to restrict minors' access to content "harmful to minors," namely pornography. A landmark trial about social media addiction is also underway in the U.S.

Every so often, a word or phrase claws its way out of a cultural underground and into the mainstream lexicon. More often than not, it's African American Vernacular English (AAVE) that gets co-opted by TikTokkers before landing on Good Morning America, say. Slightly cringe, mostly harmless.

But some slang breaks containment in ways that aren't so benign.

Case in point: looksmaxxing. This term, which has recently been explained to viewers of NBC News, refers to the practice of maximizing your physical attractiveness — methodically, relentlessly, and by any means necessary. But it's no fashion-world portmanteau. The word actually hails from incel forums in the 2010s.

And it's not just looksmaxxing. Incel terminology that once festered in the dark corners of obscure boards has gone mainstream, while its proponents are viral. Influencers like Clavicular have amassed millions of views for unhinged takes involving the dangerous practice of bonesmashing. And unless you're in the know, you won't always know these terms when you see them.

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If you're scratching your head at tweets like this, or wondering what your kids or friends are suddenly all talking about, you're in the right place. Here's your field guide to the people, terms, and corners of the internet you never knew you needed to know.

Acension

The moment an incel successfully escapes their condition, crossing over from involuntary celibacy into an active romantic or sexual life.

Androgenic

An Australian looksmaxxing influencer locked in an ongoing battle with Clavicular and others for the title of #1 Chad — a term that broadly means a sexually successful male, but in looksmaxxing circles means winners of an online leaderboard.

ASU frat Leader

The influencer seen in a video that went viral on campus at Arizona State University. IRL, he's fitness influencer Varis Gilaj.

BIMAX

Short for bimaxillary osteotomy, BIMAX is a double-jaw surgery typically performed as a corrective procedure for conditions like an open bite. In medical contexts, it's reconstructive. In looksmaxxing circles, the procedure is sought out as an extreme cosmetic upgrade.

Blackpill

No, this isn't the red or blue pills of The Matrix. Blackpilling is a nihilistic offshoot of incel ideology and the manosphere, It refers to a bleak thesis: in the heterosexual dating market, physical attractiveness is the only thing that matters.

This worldview is propped up by pseudoscientific frameworks and cherry-picked data. It's the ideological bedrock from which practices like looksmaxxing grow. To "take the black pill" is to accept this as truth.

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Chad

Incel slang for physically attractive and sexually successful men. In incel culture, Chads represent the top 1% of men that women seek in the dating marketplace. Chads are often depicted in memes as a strong-jawed, blonde Übermensch.

Chadlite

A portmanteau of Chad (see above) and lite (to be lesser). Used to describe men who are above average in looks, but not to the level of a Chad.

Chud

A forgettable 1984 sci-fi horror film set in New York City, C.H.U.D. — which stands for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller — has found new relevance. It's a pejorative lobbed at incels and adjacent communities like the manosphere, comparing their communities to sewer creatures.

Clavicular

A Kick streamer, real name Braden Peters. His online username is a reference to the clavicle, which is very important in the looksmaxing community.

Mashable's Anna Iovine has an excellent piece on everything you'd need to know about the now-viral internet influencer.

Cortisol spike

Cortisol is a naturally produced steroid in the adrenal gland; it's better known as the stress hormone. In incel spaces, "cortisol spike" means getting visibly flustered or stressed out over something embarrassing.

Foid

This is shorthand for the incel term "Femoid." A portmanteau of female and humanoid, this is one of many pejorative terms incels use to refer to women.

Framemogged

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When your upper body simply overwhelms the competition. This refers to having wider shoulders, a bigger back, and a silhouette that makes the guy next to you look narrow by comparison.

Incel

Short for "involuntarily celibate," the incel community has its origins in a niche blog in the late 1990s. The Involuntary Celibacy Project began as a genuine support group for people struggling to find aromantic connections.

Over time, the male community grew more extreme, placing the blame for their struggles squarely on women. These groups migrated to 4chan and Reddit — first to r/incels, then to r/Braincels after the former was banned in 2017. In the 2020s, the ideology was associated with various terror attacks carried out by self-described incels.

Jestermaxxing

On the surface, this just means someone who leans hard into being the funny one. But in incel spaces, it's a pejorative aimed at men who use humor to get attention from women.

Kick

A Twitch alternative, backed by crypto casino Stake. Kick has carved out its niche through looser content moderation, with a lighter touch on copyrighted material, hate speech, and on-stream gambling.

That permissiveness has made it a natural home for several right-wing manosphere influencers, including Sneako, xQc, Aidan Ross, and Clavicular.

Limb Lengthening Surgery

A reconstructive procedure that gradually elongates the bones of the arms or legs, typically performed on patients with skeletal dysplasia or other genetic bone growth conditions. The process is lengthy, painful, and intensive — bones are surgically broken and then slowly separated over months, allowing new bone tissue to fill the gap.

Nevertheless, you guessed it, the surgery has gained traction online as a way to make oneself taller.

Looksmaxxing

We explained it up top, but what does Looksmaxxing look like in practice? On the tamer end, it's standard self-improvement: skincare routines, hitting the gym, and upgrading your wardrobe.

But the rabbit hole goes deep for some, particularly men of color, who face an added layer of racialized beauty standards within these spaces. Skin whitening treatments, anabolic steroid abuse, and increasingly extreme body modification have all found a home here. And then there's influencer Clavicular, who has become the poster child for bonesmashing.

Looksmax.org

One of many online forums for people in the looksmaxxing and incel community. According to a 2023 BBC investigation, the site was created by Lamarcus Small, a Black man living in Alabama. Small is also the creator of a sanctioned suicide forum that the BBC links to 50 deaths in the UK.

-maxxing

To understand looksmaxxing, you first need to understand the suffix it borrows from. "-Maxxing" means doing something with maximum, obsessive effort — and it traces back to min-maxing, a concept from tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons. It refers to players putting all their points into high-value stats like strength while deliberately neglecting others — faith, intelligence, charisma.

Mewwing

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A pseudoscientific oral training technique that claims that proper tongue posture — pressed firmly against the roof of the mouth — can reshape your jaw structure over time. The science doesn't back it up, but that hasn't slowed the spread of this odd practice.

Mogging

To undermine another man by eclipsing him in physical appearance. The term is derived from the acronym AMOG, or "Alpha Male of the Group."

PSL Scale

A pseudoscientific attractiveness ranking system built by the looksmaxxing community to put an empirical number on your face. The acronym is an amalgamation of three defunct incel forums — PUAhate, SlutHate, and Lookism.

The scale runs from 0.25 to 8, though in practice, no one actually scores an 8. It measures facial features with an almost clinical specificity: eye shape, canthal tilt, nose angles, jaw size, and lip thickness. Proponents of the scale can be found on sites like Looksmax.org and on Reddit, in r/rateme and r/truerateme.

Sexual Market Value

An individual's measure of sexual attractiveness scored on a scale of 1 to 10. The formula shifts depending on gender. For women, SMV is almost entirely physical. For men, the calculus is broader: physique, income, career status, social clout, and personality can all push the number up or down.

Slaymaxxing

To have lots of sex.

Stacy

The female equivalent of a Chad. A Stacy is attractive, socially popular, and — crucially, to the incel mind — sexually active.

The term carries an implicit resentment: Stacy's represent everything incels want and, by their own logic, everything they'll never have access to.

Stake

An online crypto casino and parent company of Twitch-alternative Kick. Stake has become infamous for one of the laziest — and most effective — ad strategies on the internet: paying meme pages and content aggregators to slap its watermark onto viral images before reposting them.

Thinking of verifying your LinkedIn account so you can get that coveted blue checkmark badge?

You may want to hear this first. 

One observant anonymous user is warning other LinkedIn users that the Microsoft-owned social network for professionals utilizes a third-party verification service that, in turn, shares users' data with other companies.

Inc highlighted a story posted on The Local Stack, a blog that covers "surveillance capitalism" from an individual who simply goes by the name "rogi."

According to the report by rogi, after going through the LinkedIn verification process to confirm his identity, he took a deeper look into the privacy policy and terms of service for the process, which is carried out by a third-party vendor called Persona.

Persona may sound familiar if you've been following the ongoing controversies around age and ID verification policy. For example, both Roblox and Discord also use Persona for their age verification process.

According to rogi, what concerned him was exactly what Persona could do with his data. Persona accessed rogi's full name, passport photo, selfie, facial biometric data, NFC chip data (or the info stored on the chip inside his passport), his nationality, sex, birthday, age, email, phone number, physical address, IP address, geolocation, device type, MAC address, browser, OS version, and language.

But that's not all. Persona also reportedly utilized "hesitation detection," which tracked just how long it took rogi to complete the process and where he paused, as well as copy and paste detection.

What's more, Rogi claimed that this data not only gets shared with LinkedIn and Persona, but also with Persona's “global network of data partners,” which includes further third-party vendors, also known as subprocessors. If requested, Persona may even hand over data to law enforcement, according to their terms of service. Persona's subprocessors include Amazon's AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and even a few AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

After rogi's The Local Stack post on LinkedIn and Persona went viral, the co-founder and CEO of Persona Rick Song addressed the report in a comment on LinkedIn.

"No personal data processed is used for AI/model training," Song said in a comment. "Data is exclusively used to confirm your identity."

Song also said that all biometric data is deleted right after processing, and all other personal data is deleted within 30 days. Song also denied that AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic were subprocessors used to verify a user's identity, even though those companies are included on a Persona webpage that lists the company's subprocessors.

"The referenced subprocessor list is the superset of subprocessors used across all customers which is unfortunately misleading," Song said. "Our customers select which products are used which determines which subprocessors are used. We are adding a clarification to this list to make this clearer in the future."

In other words, just because a company is listed on this page, that doesn't necessarily mean that LinkedIn user data in particular will be shared with them.

Persona's growing usage among some of the internet's most popular platforms is certainly putting the company under a microscope. Another recent report on Persona from a security researcher claims that the company performs "269 individual verification checks" on Discord users.

Further causing concern for many privacy watchdog groups? Peter Thiel, the controversial co-founder of surveillance firm Palantir, is a major investor in Persona as well.

Mashable reached out to LinkedIn and Persona for comment, and we'll update this story if we receive a response.

The internet has fallen in love with Punch, the 7-month-old macaque who clings to a stuffed animal for comfort. So when a video (since deleted) surfaced showing him being dragged across the ground by another monkey inside his enclosure at the Ichikawa City Zoo in Japan, people online panicked.

Clips spread rapidly across social media this week, with viewers accusing the other monkeys of abusing him. People demanded answers. Some accused the zoo of negligence. Others declared the other monkeys bullies.

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But according to Ichikawa City Zoo, what people saw wasn’t cruelty. It was socialization.

In a statement published to X on Feb. 20, first in Japanese and then translated to English, the Ichikawa City Zoological and Botanical Gardens addressed the viral video directly.

Zoo keepers said Punch had approached another baby monkey in an attempt to interact. The baby avoided him. An adult monkey — likely the baby's mother — then intervened, dragging Punch away.

The behavior may look harsh to human eyes. But for macaques, it's part of establishing boundaries.

"She probably felt that her baby was annoyed by Punch and got upset," the zoo wrote, describing the interaction as a form of discipline, not aggression.

Importantly, keepers said Punch was not injured. After the incident, he returned to his stuffed toy briefly — then resumed interacting with the other monkeys. "No single monkey has shown serious aggression toward him," the zoo said.

But the internet isn't watching Punch as a zoologist would. It's watching him like a fan.

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Punch's story has unfolded almost entirely online. People first met him through viral videos showing him clinging to a plush toy after being rejected by his biological mother. They projected onto him immediately: loneliness, vulnerability, resilience. They rooted for him.

So when a video appeared that seemed to confirm their worst fears — that he was being rejected again, and violently so — the reaction was visceral. They wanted to protect him. That emotional investment is part of what makes viral animal stories so powerful. And so volatile.

Online, animals often become characters in narratives that people build themselves. Every interaction becomes a plot point. Every setback feels personal. But those narratives don't always reflect reality.

Punch is still learning how to be a monkey. And according to the zoo, Punch's difficult interactions are part of a gradual process of integrating him into the troop.

He was hand-raised after his mother abandoned him. That saved his life. But it also meant he missed out on early social bonding. Now, he’s learning. That process includes rejection, correction, and trial and error.

It also includes progress. The zoo said Punch continues to communicate with other monkeys and shows resilience. Videos posted after the incident show him moving freely within the enclosure and being groomed by other adult monkeys in the troop. So instead of feeling sorry for the little guy, the Ichikawa City Zoo is asking Punch's online admirers to support his efforts.

He still carries his stuffed animal. But he doesn't always need it.

Breaking news: There are gay people in positions of power in Silicon Valley in 2026.

That not-so-surprising fact is the center of Wired's latest cover story, which hit the internet Thursday. The internet immediately reacted, in part thanks to some, uh, unusual imagery that accompanied the article.

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The handshake cover wasn't the only bizarre choice. Inside, the magazine used an image of a musclebound man with San Francisco's Salesforce Tower between his legs. California state senator Scott Weiner, a leader on LGBTQ issues, took issue with the whole premise.

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One Silicon Valley investor, a gay man who said he refused multiple requests to be interviewed, felt justified by the "gross" result:

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He wasn't the only one. Many LGBTQ tech employees felt the article could be described as "homophobic."

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Other readers noted that the article itself is, to use the magazine's lingo, tired rather than wired:

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Meanwhile, social media did what it does best: Skewering with satire.

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Grok, Elon Musk's AI chatbot, has been under investigation in France, California, the UK, India, and Brazil for allegedly creating non-consensual intimate images, including images that depict minors. Now, it's facing yet another investigation, this time in Ireland.

On Tuesday, Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced that it had opened an investigation into Musk's X, which hosts Grok, over "potentially harmful, non-consensual intimate and/or sexualised images, containing or otherwise involving the processing of personal data of EU/EEA data subjects, including children, using generative artificial intelligence functionality associated with the Grok large language model within the X platform."

X is already the subject of an EU investigation from French authorities over the actions of Grok during a nearly two-week period that began late last year and went into 2026. Ofcom, the UK's communications regulator, announced its own investigation into Grok last month, with potential fines of up to 10 percent of X's revenue. 

In the midst of these investigations, Grok is also facing potential bans in Malaysia and Indonesia.

When xAI launched Grok Imagine, a new AI image and video generation tool, last August, Mashable's reporting revealed that it lacked basic safety guardrails to prevent sexual deepfakes and non-consensual intimate imagery.

In late December, a harsh spotlight was put on Grok when a critical mass of X users noticed that the chatbot was generating sexualized images of individuals based on requests from other X users. While these nonconsensual images often depicted celebrities or private adults, some users reported finding AI-generated images that depicted minors as well.

A study from the nonprofit watch group Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that over an 11-day period, Grok had generated an estimated 3 million sexualized images, including 23,000 images of children.

Musk originally defended Grok and claimed governments like the UK were just seeking to censor free speech. Eventually, X paywalled some of Grok's image-generating capabilities behind its X Premium subscription. Shortly after, X changed its policies and outright banned the generation of sexualized imagery featuring real-life individuals.

While it does appear that X has now resolved this specific issue involving Grok, the length of time it took for Musk's company to take action, and the sheer number of images that the chatbot created, will likely be at the forefront of the ongoing investigations.

“The DPC has been engaging with XIUC [X Internet Unlimited Company] since media reports first emerged a number of weeks ago concerning the alleged ability of X users to prompt the @Grok account on X to generate sexualised images of real people, including children," said DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle in a statement. "As the Lead Supervisory Authority for XIUC across the EU/EEA, the DPC has commenced a large-scale inquiry which will examine XIUC’s compliance with some of their fundamental obligations under the GDPR in relation to the matters at hand.”

If you have had intimate images shared without your consent, call the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative’s 24/7 hotline at 844-878-2274 for free, confidential support. The CCRI website also includes helpful information as well as a list of international resources.

If you've ever heard a toddler tell a story, then you know they have a tendency to let the narrative meander. Kids often have an excess of imagination and a deficit of mental organization, leading to silly, wildly entertaining tales.

One parent has taken it upon himself to turn his 3-year-old's silly, adorable stories into cute, catchy tunes — songs he's posted online to the benefit of us all. Stephen Spencer is more than qualified; he's a songwriter, composer, and music professor, which means the somewhat silly exercise has resulted in songs that are way too good.

Listen to this ditty about the Apple Man, for instance, which has racked up millions of views.

"Apple-the-Stoola the Apple Man" is going to rattle around your head for days, I guarantee it. And just when you might think this whole thing is a one-hit-wonder — nope! Let me introduce you to "Regular Rabbit." You're simply not going to believe the regularity of this rabbit named Pippa-Tory Fripp.

Seriously, these songs are amazing. Most of Spencer's TikTok and Instagram are devoted to his daughter's masterpieces. His audience has really responded to every song he's posted. Don't sleep on "Funchy the Snow-woman," for instance. Mashable reached out to Spencer for further details but did not hear back in time for publication.

If you want to support Spencer and his daughter's work, however, you can pre-save "Regular Rabbit" before it hits the music platform of your choosing.

The internet is mourning Dawson's Creek star James Van Der Beek, who died on Wednesday, Feb. 11. He was 48 years old.

"Our beloved James David Van Der Beek passed peacefully this morning. He met his final days with courage, faith, and grace," the actor's wife, Kimberly Van Der Beek, wrote on Instagram. "There is much to share regarding his wishes, love for humanity, and the sacredness of time. Those days will come. For now we ask for peaceful privacy as we grieve our loving husband, father, son, brother, and friend."

Van Der Beek announced in late 2024 that he had been diagnosed with Stage 3 colorectal cancer.

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Van Der Beek's Dawson's Creek co-star Katie Holmes, who played Joey Potter alongside his Dawson Leery, posted a handwritten letter on Instagram.

"James, Thank you," she wrote. "To share space with your imagination is sacred — breathing the same air in the land of make believe and trusting that each others' hearts are safe in their expression...These are some of the memories, along with laughter, conversations about life, James Taylor songs — adventures of a unique youth…"

Katie Holmes, James Van Der Beek, Michelle Williams, and Joshua Jackson in "Dawson's Creek." Credit: Warner Bros. / Getty Images

Mary-Margaret Humes, who played Dawson's mother Gail on the show, also posted a tribute on Instagram.

"Rarely am I at a loss for words … today would be the exception. James, my gracious warrior, you fought a hard battle against all odds with such quiet strength and dignity. I will always love and admire you for that. Our last conversations … merely a few days ago … are forever sitting softly in my heart for safe keeping."

The internet has also reacted to the untimely passing of the beloved actor, who epitomized late '90s teen angst in his role on the WB drama. Van Der Beek also starred in the football film Varsity Blues, the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' The Rules of Attraction, and the cult sitcom favorite Don't Trust the B---- In Apartment 23.

Van Der Beek is survived by his wife and six children.

As any hardcore fan — stan — of a famous musician or actor knows, they also have haters. "Antis," if you will. As it turns out, Valentine's Day is no different.

Love Day is almost here, and your algorithm might be spitting up videos about the best restaurants to go to, recipes to try, or gifts to shower your loved one with. Or, it might be showing you the opposite: posts railing against Valentine's Day, and even events celebrating "anti Valentine's Day."

Why are some people anti-Valentine's Day?

"For a lot of people, Valentine's Day represents old or stale values, like heteronormativity, the commercialization of love, this sort of monogonormativity of it all," sex therapist and founder of therapy practice The Expansive Group, Casey Tanner, told Mashable. 

"It makes total sense to me that the sort of response to that is, 'Why not create some community around that experience, instead of only centering people who are on the relationship escalator?'" Tanner said.

According to recent YouGov data, only 37 percent of 1,114 U.S. adults surveyed plan to celebrate Valentine's Day, and only 52 percent in a romantic or sexual relationship do, too.

February 14 can be isolating if you're single, and it also props up romantic and sexual relationships as superior to platonic ones. (Maybe you celebrate Galentine's Day instead to buck this notion.)

Anti-Valentine's Day festivities

Amanda Badeau, founder of bookstore, cafe, and wine bar The Archive in South Carolina, told Mashable she puts a lot of pressure on herself to be unique and perfect, especially around holidays. Valentine's Day carries a lot of pressure, and she also mentioned it can be isolating. Instead of forcing a more "traditional" event, The Archive is hosting a "Shred Your Ex" anti-Valentine's Day night instead.

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Badeau wanted to take a lighthearted approach and create an event that felt inclusive, supportive, and relatable (and just a bit petty). "Shred Your Ex grew out of the idea of turning a moment that's often heavy or awkward into something communal, a little playful and empowering," she added.

In addition to having shredders at the ready, Badeau and the all-female staff team are also putting on "red flag bingo." 

The reaction so far has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic, Badeau said. "We've heard from customers who feel relieved to see an event that acknowledges heartbreak and singlehood with humor instead of pressure, and a lot of individuals are already planning to come with friends — which is exactly the kind of energy we hoped for."

Meanwhile, over in New York, the Bronx Zoo is holding its 15th annual Name a Roach initiative. For $15, you can symbolically name one of the zoo's thousands of Madagascar hissing cockroaches.

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Executive director of membership and digital at the Wildlife Conservation Society and the team lead for Name a Roach, Debbie Schneiderman, told Mashable that, given roaches' longevity, most people name one for someone they love, like their partner or child. "But we do get a fair number" that name a roach after their exes or people they like…less than their partner or child.

"The majority are sent with love," Schneiderman said.

But even naming a roach after your beloved isn't the same as buying flowers. In 2026, people might want to celebrate Valentine's Day differently. The day has historically been a test for relationships, Tanner said, like using the caliber of the gift to gauge how much value your partner gives you. 

Anti-Valentine's Day is "also a rejection of using any one day to make a value judgment about somebody's life, somebody's relationship," she said. 

"It's an anti-capitalist move," Tanner said of anti-Valentine's Day. "It's a rejection of the pressure to  buy into a particular script, or to be sold on the marketing of it all."

"More people start to see behind the curtain of why days like this exist, and sort of understand the ways that we've been tricked into commercializing love," Tanner continued. She compared this to how people question days like New Year's, when we now know that many cultures celebrate the beginning of a new year at different times.

If you're into Valentine's Day, there are a lot of pink and red hearts out there for you. But if your style is more black this Saturday, there's room for that as well.

Age verification is spreading on the internet. Following Roblox's implementation of the age verification process, Discord is the next platform in line to do it.

So, what is Discord's age verification process and what happens if users don't go through with it?

We'll break it down.

How to verify your age on Discord

Discord, the online chat platform that's extremely popular with gamers, has announced that it will be rolling out a mandatory age verification process for some of its users starting in March.

According to Discord, most users will not have to go through the process. The platform uses an "age inference model" that analyzes the account tenure, device and activity data, and patterns across Discord communities to place users in the appropriate age group: Adult or Teen. (Discord says they do not use any private messages or message content for this process.)

However, Discord will require additional information from some users in order to verify their age.

Discord age verification prompt Credit: Discord

Those users will be met with a prompt asking them to verify their age when the age verification system goes live worldwide next month. To begin the process, users simply need to click the Get Started button on the pop-up.

Next, users will be prompted to upload a selfie or a photo of a government ID. In some instances, if the age verification system has trouble estimating the age of a user simply from their selfie, the user will be required to submit both a selfie and ID.

Discord age verification upload Credit: Discord

According to Discord, uploaded selfie and ID photos are deleted after the verification process is complete.

Once a user submits this information, they will receive a DM on Discord informing them that they've been placed in either the teen or adult age group.

What happens if you don't verify your age on Discord?

According to Discord, all user accounts that require age verification going forward will be teen-by-default. This sounds exactly like what it is. If Discord cannot confirm an account owner's age, the account will, by default, be placed in the teen age group. Teenagers will not have to take part in the age verification process as their accounts will already be placed in the appropriate age group.

However, in order to see certain content and take part in certain platform experiences, some adults will need to verify their age to be placed in the adult age group. If an adult does not verify their age, their account will be placed in the teen group.

Teen accounts will be unable to see certain content. Sensitive content will be blurred by Discord. The only way to unblur content or change that content setting platform-wide will be to verify your age in order to be placed in the adult age group. Discord users in the teen age group will also be unable to access age-restricted channels, servers, and app commands.

When it comes to direct messages, teen age group accounts will have a separate inbox for messages from users that they don't already know on the platform. Teen age group users will also receive warning prompts when they receive friend requests from users they may not know.

Additionally, teen age group users will be unable to speak on stage in Discord servers.

Users who go through the age verification process and are deemed to be younger than the minimum age required as mandated by their country (age 13 in the U.S.) will be banned from Discord entirely.

If the age verification process incorrectly marks a user as underage, Discord has an appeal process that users can follow as well.

Discord has already rolled out the age verification process in the UK and Australia in order to comply with local laws. The company says it will further roll the process out globally in "early March."

UPDATE: Feb. 13, 2026, 3:54 p.m. EST This piece was updated to provide clarification from Discord regarding which users will need to verify their age.

There has been a lot of hype around Moltbook, the Reddit-like social media platform for AI bots where humans aren’t allowed to post. But how, exactly, does it work? Should we worry about agentic AI taking over the world, or should we worry about our data?

In this video, Mashable producer Teodosia Dobriyanova spoke to AI ethicist Catharina Doria who talked us through the latest AI hype, the importance of AI governance and data protection, and why she believes the internet is going to move on from AI-generated content into something way more human.

If you're unsure about the latter, just look at 2026 social media trends. Instead of AI content, there is a return to analogue, to offline activities, and mundane realism in most aspects of life  — offline dating, tactile experiences, or the resurgence of early 2000s tech.

If you were one of the hundreds of millions of people watching Super Bowl LX on Sunday evening, you saw Bad Bunny, all the other Halftime Show celebrities, some viral commercials, and of course the Seahawks beating the Patriots in the football game.

One of the commercials that had people talking was for a new website called AI.com. The commercial informed users to go to the website so they can reserve a username of their choice, even suggesting that names like "Elon" were available. The site went down almost immediately after the Super Bowl commercial aired as it struggled with the influx of traffic.

And, that might make sense when you find out the story behind the domain name AI.com, which sold to its new owners for a record-breaking amount shortly before the Super Bowl.

What is AI dot com?

AI.com is a new website from the co-founder and CEO of Crypto.com, Kris Marszalek.

As of right now, users can simply go to the website, sign up with a Google login, and claim their own @ handle along with a separate handle for their AI. After finding two available handles, the user must then confirm their identity with a credit card. However, the site doesn't charge users anything for the transaction confirmation. After that, users are informed that their handles are reserved.

There is a footnote on the website that says they will verify users who are a "celebrity with more than 100,000 followers" and allow them to reserve a handle that matches their X account.

Marszalek shared that AI.com will be an AI assistant platform, and it seems like there is some social media aspect, but anything more regarding AI.com unclear right now.

How much did AI dot com sell for?

Marszalek paid $70 million for the AI.com domain name, as confirmed by the domain name broker Larry Fischer of Get Your Domains. 

In March 2025, Fischer announced that AI.com was for sale with an asking price of $100 million. The domain sold for $30 million less than that price. Perhaps the seller made even less than that, as the purchase was made entirely with cryptocurrency, which has seen prices fall dramatically in recent weeks.

Regardless, $70 million is still a new record high for a sale involving nothing more than a domain name. (No website or other assets were included in the sale. Just AI.com, the domain name.)

AI.com's $70 million selling price shattered the record previously held by CarInsurance.com, which sold for $49.7 million in 2010.

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Marszalek first publicly announced the acquisition of the domain on his X account last week, saying he acquired the domain in April. The site went live, however, on the same day as the Super Bowl, just hours before the AI.com commercial aired.

Marszalek is no stranger to big acquisitions regarding domain names or even naming rights. The Crypto.com domain name was reportedly acquired for his crypto company's use in 2018 for between $10 and $12 million. And, in 2012, Crypto.com acquired the naming rights for the Staples Center for a whopping $700 million.

Mashable previously reported on a prior sale of AI.com in 2021, after it became public knowledge in 2023. It first appeared as if OpenAI acquired the domain name, as the URL forwarded to ChatGPT's website. However, AI.com later was updated to forward to Elon Musk's xAI website, further muddying the waters surrounding its ownership.

With the latest $70 million sale to Marszalek, it appears that the mystery around the previous acquisition has been resolved. Early Bitcoin investor Arsyan Ismail is the current seller and appears to have been the person who last acquired the domain name for $10 million from domain name portfolio company Future Media Architects.

The messaging platform Discord announced Monday that all user accounts will default to teen safety settings beginning in March. The policy, meant to create a safe environment for teens, restricts adult content and spaces without verification or assurance of a user's age.

Following significant criticism from users skeptical of the platform's age-assurance efforts, Discord updated its announcement Tuesday to clarify that the "vast majority of people can continue using Discord exactly as they do today, without ever being asked to confirm their age."

Discord, which has more than 200 million global monthly active users, said that it's relying on an inference model with hundreds of signals, like account tenure and activity data, to detect the age of an account holder. Users identified as adults will not need to go through an age assurance process.

New and existing users who aren't assessed as adults must verify their age to access adult spaces and content.

Discord will use facial scans to help establish age, and the third-party verification service k-ID for age and identification checks.

"We would like the experience to feel more like you are on Main Street," Savannah Badalich, head of product policy at Discord, told Mashable. "If you're going into an adult space, you do ID verification or something like that, whereas the Main Street itself is built for just generally [everyone]."

Badalich suggested to Mashable that users will not be able to circumvent the safety measures by relying on a virtual private network, or VPN, that conceals their location, since the default settings will be universal.

Discord under pressure on teen safety

The new policy arrives in the wake of sustained pressure on social media platforms to improve safety for minors.

A 2025 lawsuit filed against Discord and the gaming platform Roblox alleged that together the platforms created a "breeding ground for predators." At the heart of the complaint is an anonymous 11-year-old girl who was allegedly groomed, sexually exploited, and raped by a perpetrator who used Roblox and Discord to communicate with her.

In late 2025, the platform launched a hub that allows parents or guardians to view the top five users a teen messaged and called, the servers they messaged most frequently, their total call minutes in voice and video, and all the purchases they've made.

At the time, Haley McNamara, executive director and chief strategy officer of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, told Mashable in a statement that Discord's new safety features fell short by placing the burden of youth safety on parents rather than implementing fundamental design changes.

Age-gated content and experiences on Discord

Badalich said that though Discord will have teen safety settings for all users by default, the platform will preemptively assess accounts that seem to belong to adults and permit them to access age-gated content and features.

While Discord hopes to keep false positives to a minimum, Badalich did not share the platform's confidence in accurately predicting user age.

Beginning in March, any user whose age is unverified or whose account has been placed in teen settings will need to either submit an ID or go through the facial estimation process in order to have full access to Discord.

Only adults will be able to unblur sensitive content, or turn off the setting; access age-gated channels and servers; receive message requests directly, instead of to a separate inbox; and speak on a "stage" in a Discord server.

Badalich described the new policy as "a foundational change to how we think about Discord."

Age verification on Discord

Discord began using age assurance measures in the UK and Australia last year, though not without challenges.

In the UK, some users also initially bypassed the age check requirement by submitting a realistic-looking selfie of a video game character, which was deemed adult. Badalich told Mashable that Discord and k-ID worked "tirelessly" to patch that vulnerability, and that the experience has informed its subsequent age assurance efforts.

Discord's new age-assurance efforts will restrict adult servers. Credit: Courtesy of Discord

"[W]e know that teens are creative," Badalich said. 'They're going to try to find ways around it."

There are privacy concerns, too. In October, Discord announced a third-party customer support vendor had been hacked, breaching 70,000 government IDs provided by users.

When users submit identity documents to k-ID, the documents will be deleted quickly, if not immediately, according to Discord.

UPDATE: Feb. 10, 2026, 10:47 a.m. PST This story was updated to include new information provided by Discord on Feb. 10.

Bad Bunny promised good vibes and a whole lot of dancing during his Super Bowl halftime show, and he didn’t disappoint. But beneath the perreo-ready hits and viral clips was something deeper.

The performance unfolded as a densely layered visual essay, moving from Puerto Rico's sugar cane fields to New York bodegas, from reggaetón history to quiet political protest, and packing decades of memory, migration, and resistance into just 13 minutes of television.

From set pieces referencing the island's ongoing infrastructure collapse following Hurricane Maria to cameos honoring small-business legends and community elders, nearly every frame carried meaning. Some references were immediately legible. Others were designed for the fans who know where to look.

It was a case of storytelling: a reminder that Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio didn't just bring Puerto Rico to the Super Bowl. He brought its history with him. Here are some of the Easter eggs you may have missed.

Returning to the roots of the sugar cane fields

Before fireworks, choreography, or surprise cameos, Bad Bunny began his Super Bowl halftime show in a quiet, sunlit sugar cane field, worlds away from the stadium spectacle to come.

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Sugar cane fields are deeply woven into Puerto Rico's history, tied to colonial exploitation and the agricultural labor of generations of working-class people. By opening the performance there, Bad Bunny grounded his global moment in the island's past, honoring the people whose work and resilience built Puerto Rico long before it became a cultural export. It was a reminder that everything that followed grew from this soil first.

Bad Bunny's "Ocasio 64" jersey carries history

When Bad Bunny stepped onto the Super Bowl stage in a custom Zara jersey stitched with the name "Ocasio" and the number "64," it immediately sparked speculation. The name referenced his full surname, Martínez Ocasio. The number, however, carried a heavier weight.

On a personal level, "64" honors his late uncle, who once wore the same number as an athlete. But it also echoes the Puerto Rican government’s initial claim of just 64 deaths after Hurricane Maria in 2017 — a figure later revealed to be a devastating undercount.

Falling into YHLQMDLG

Midway through "Party," Bad Bunny plunged through the roof of the casita into a family's blue living room, a moment that felt both unexpected and deeply intentional.

The visual mirrored the aesthetic of his 2020 album YHLQMDLG, whose blue-hued visualizers defined an era fans never got to see live. The pandemic canceled that tour, making the Super Bowl moment a belated love letter to longtime listeners who’ve been riding with him since the beginning.

Toñita's surprise cameo

Among the star-studded spectacle, one of the night's most meaningful appearances belonged to someone far from the pop spotlight: Maria Antonia "Toñita" Cay, the beloved owner of Caribbean Social Club.

A fixture of Puerto Rican life in Williamsburg for decades, Toñita has been name-checked in Bad Bunny's lyrics and embraced by the Nuyorican community. Her presence in the show was about honoring the everyday institutions that keep culture alive.

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Victor Villa and the power of the side hustle

Another blink-and-you'll-miss-it guest was Victor Villa, the founder of Villa's Tacos. You'll see Benito pass a Villa's Tacos truck during "Tití Me Preguntó."

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Villa's journey — from selling tacos in his grandmother's yard to running acclaimed brick-and-mortar locations — mirrors Bad Bunny's own narrative of grassroots success. His cameo not only celebrated immigrant hustle but also spoke to Bad Bunny's larger message of believing in where you come from, a belief he made explicit when he told Super Bowl viewers that he never stopped believing in himself and that others should believe in themselves, too.

Coco frío and island street life

During "Tití Me Preguntó," Bad Bunny moved past dancers gathered around a coco frío cart, a small detail loaded with nostalgia. Fresh coconut water, sold by street vendors across Puerto Rico, is part of daily life on the island. By centering it in a Super Bowl spectacle, Bad Bunny elevated an ordinary ritual into a symbol of home.

"Gasolina" and the lineage of reggaetón

No, your ears did not deceive you. After blending "Yo Perreo Sola" and "Voy a Llevarte Pa’ PR," Bad Bunny pivoted into a snippet of "Gasolina" by Daddy Yankee, a defining anthem of the genre.

The track, inducted into the Library of Congress in 2023, helped globalize reggaetón in the 2000s. Bad Bunny's performance also sampled Tego Calderón's "Pa’ Que Retozen" and Don Omar's "Dale Don Dale," situating himself within a living musical lineage.

Concho the toad makes an appearance

Before launching into "Monaco," the camera cut to an image of Concho, the animated amphibian mascot of Bad Bunny's latest album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos. Modeled after the endangered Puerto Rican crested toad, Concho represents environmental fragility and cultural survival.

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Jíbaros, power lines, and "El Apagón"

Men in straw hats (pavas) and white clothing — jíbaros, Puerto Rico’s traditional mountain farmers — appeared climbing power lines, blending folklore with modern crisis.

Historically associated with rural life and folk music, jíbaros symbolize resilience. Here, their placement on broken infrastructure referenced post–Hurricane Maria privatization, rolling blackouts under LUMA Energy, and the economic displacement explored in the song "El Apagón." It was a visual essay on who gets left behind when "progress" arrives.

Ricky Martin's Spanish-language reclamation

When Ricky Martin joined to perform "Lo Que Pasó a Hawaii," the moment felt both nostalgic and quietly radical. For an artist long associated with English-language crossover hits like "Livin' la Vida Loca" and "She Bangs," returning to a Spanish-language ballad on the Super Bowl stage carried its own symbolism.

The song reflects on migration and loss. Singing entirely in Spanish, sitting in a monobloc chair, marked how far Latin music has pushed the mainstream. What once felt risky now feels inevitable.

The light blue flag of Puerto Rican independence

At one point, Bad Bunny held la bandera con azul celeste, the light-blue version of Puerto Rico's flag linked to the independence movement.

Once associated with calls for Puerto Rican sovereignty and traced back to pre-U.S. colonial revolts, the light-blue variant of the Puerto Rican flag has become a symbol of resistance and cultural pride. Historians identify azul celeste as the original shade tied to late-19th-century independence movements, and its use today often signals a deeper conversation about the island's identity.

Bad Bunny previously featured it in "La Mudanza," and bringing it to the Super Bowl transformed a political statement into a global broadcast.

A quiet nod to Haiti's visual history

In one of the show's most subtle visual callbacks, a woman waving Haiti's flag wore a green-and-orange ribbed knit top that closely echoed Jay Maisel's 1973 Haiti series, particularly "Haiti No. 59." The styling — easy to miss amid the spectacle — felt deliberately precise, mirroring the texture, color, and composition of Maisel's iconic image.

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Lady Gaga and the maga flower

Lady Gaga’s baby-blue dress, paired with a red floral brooch resembling Puerto Rico's national maga flower, was more than a fashion moment. Designed by Luar founder Raul Lopez, the look wove national symbolism into couture, reinforcing the night’s emphasis on Puerto Rican pride.

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"La Marqueta" and the roots of diaspora

During "NUEVAYoL," Bad Bunny walked past a New York–style streetscape featuring a storefront labeled "La Marqueta."

The real La Marqueta in East Harlem was once a hub for Latino immigrants, helping shape Spanish Harlem in the mid-20th century. Its inclusion honored the diaspora communities that carried Puerto Rican culture beyond the island — and brought it back, amplified, to the global stage.

"Together We Are America"

Toward the end of the halftime performance, Bad Bunny — notably speaking in English — said, "God Bless America." He then expanded the phrase to encompass all the countries of the Americas, not just the United States, re-framing it as a message of unity and belonging. Holding up a football emblazoned with "Together We Are America," he made the point explicit.

Then, switching back to Spanish, he added: "seguimos aquí" ("we’re still here"), before spiking the ball and launching into "DtMF." The moment crystallized the show's larger thesis: presence as resistance, visibility as power, and community as the foundation of everything.

Depending on who you ask, there’s a narrow and deeply held idea of what it means to be "American." During his Super Bowl halftime performance, Bad Bunny pushed back on that definition, making it clear that people across both halves of the Americas are American, whether or not they fit into that limited vision.

The message was made explicit at the end of the set, when Bad Bunny held up a football emblazoned with the phrase “Together we are America,” framed by the flags of Latin American countries behind him. It was a simple visual, but a pointed one, underscoring a broader idea of American identity that extends well beyond borders, language, or race.

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Much had been speculated about whether Bad Bunny would make an overt political statement during the show, especially after his more pointed remarks at the Grammys, where he capped his Best Album win with “ICE out.” Instead, the artist opted for something quieter and ultimately more powerful: a message rooted in unity and love in the face of hate.

If you've been online in the past week, then you've probably seen the ChatGPT caricatures trend. We've covered a lot of ChatGPT image trends here at Mashable, but nothing that's gone this viral since the original Studio Ghibli trend.

In the latest viral ChatGPT trend, people are going to Chat with a simple prompt: "Create a caricature of me based on everything you know about me."

You can vary the prompt to your liking, but that's the most basic version. In the best-case scenario, you should get a cute and wholesome caricature with a cartoon version of you and some artwork reflecting your hobbies or career.

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Of course, not everyone's ChatGPT caricature turns out quite the way they hoped. On Reddit and X, we've seen some particularly strange results from this simple prompt. In some cases, ChatGPT seems to be calling out the user.

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In some examples, ChatGPT includes some very questionable details. One image of Reddit user crunchy-wraps looks fairly normal at first, until you zoom in...

Left: Enhance... Credit: Reddit / crunchy-wraps

Right: Show you what? Credit: Reddit / crunchy-wraps

Other users seem to have received a more traditional caricature. Many of the caricatures being shared offer a cute and cartoonish rendering of the user, but some show the more insulting caricature style you might get from a rude and underpaid boardwalk caricature artist.

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On X, some users are using Grok Imagine to generate caricatures, and the results with Grok are especially bad. At least Grok isn't undressing people without their consent, for once.

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And at least one disgruntled X user has reported that free users of the AI chatbot are getting bad results.

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Head to ChatGPT to try creating your own caricature, or visit X to see some of the latest examples of the trend in action.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

The internet loves a comeback tour, but it adores one with puppet fleece and impeccable comedic timing. Case in point: The Muppet Show special, which returned to the Muppet Theatre on Feb. 4 for a one-night event on Disney+ and ABC — and promptly took over everyone’s feeds.

Seriously. I didn't know I needed a Rizzo the Rat cover of The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights" until I saw it, and now I don't ever want to live in a world without it.

The Muppet Show originally ran from 1976 to 1981, pioneering the variety format with a blend of vaudeville silliness, celebrity guest spots, and backstage chaos anchored by Kermit the Frog's perpetually frazzled calm. The new special revives that spirit with all the familiar faces, including Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, and Statler and Waldorf, along with a lineup of contemporary guests, from Maya Rudolph and Seth Rogen (who also serve as executive producers) to pop star Sabrina Carpenter.

But it's the clips that have really sent fans and group chats into a frenzy, proof that the Muppets understand how to play the internet better than most human celebrities.

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Leading the pack is a truly unexpected cover: Rizzo belting out The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights" on rat-infested streets. The contrast between the sleek, synth-pop hit and Rizzo's nasally bravado is instant comedy, and social media has embraced it wholeheartedly.

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Then there's Sabrina Carpenter's performance of "Manchild," which has been circulating widely for its playful integration into the Muppet universe. Rather than feeling like a standard guest slot, the performance leans into the show’s absurdity, letting Carpenter spar with the chaos around her — which includes a flock of chickens on backup vocals.

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And then there's the press run. Kermit and Miss Piggy have been popping up together in interviews (including a hilarious episode of Vanity Fair's Lie Detector Test), bantering like a couple who’ve been married, divorced, remarried, and media-trained for decades. Their chemistry feels untouched by time.

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Long before algorithms and engagement metrics, Kermit and company mastered the art of attention. So, really, the Muppets were built for virality long before the concept of virality existed. The internet is just their latest stage.

Madonna's iconic hit “Vogue" is all over the new trailer for The Devil Wears Prada 2, but a much more obscure song of hers is currently en vogue on social media: 1992's "Thief of Hearts."

The house-inflected diss track from Madonna's divisive Erotica album is making the rounds via user dances and posts on TikTok and Instagram — and the star herself acknowledged the tune’s virality. Wearing sunglasses and a leopard-print jacket, The Queen of Pop lip-synched a few bars of “Thief” on Instagram recently and captioned the post, "Hearts are meant to be broken."

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As seductive and danceable as the song is, it was never released as a single from Erotica, an album that, according to Madonna, never got its due from critics or the public, since it arrived alongside the artist’s controversial coffee table book, Sex. So, the song’s embrace by social media — it trended on TikTok and recently posted its biggest streaming day ever on Spotify — is satisfying for Madonna fans and the Queen herself, as evident in her Instagram post.

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Featuring the sound of glass crashing and angry interludes, "Thief of Hearts" takes aim at a woman who allegedly stole Madonna’s man (how is that possible?). Whether the song is truly autobiographical is not clear, though Queerty posits that a certain Oscar-nominated actress may be the tune’s intended target. 

Madonna's viral reach isn't a recent phenomenon. Songs like "La Isla Bonita" and "Frozen" have already been reborn on TikTok and Reels, fueling millions of videos and introducing her catalog to new generations.

SAVE $33.01: The Insta360 Flow 2 Pro foldable gimbal is on sale at Amazon for $126.98, down from the list price of $159.99. That's a 21% discount that matches the record low at Amazon.

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These days, you don't have to be a professional content creator to share great clips on socials. We have tons of free tools that help us capture video to share on our feeds, whether it's your dog being silly or your latest trip to Europe. If you've been grabbing these videos by holding your phone in your hand, it might be time for an upgrade. Check out this deal at Amazon.

As of Feb. 4, the Insta360 Flow 2 Pro foldable gimbal is on sale at Amazon for $126.98, marked down from the list price of $159.99. That's a 21% discount that shaves $33.01 off the normal price. It also matches the record low at Amazon.

Insta360 packed the Flow 2 Pro with features that make filming much more convenient. For starters, there's the active zoom tracking, which can follow subjects even at 15x zoom. The multi-person tracking is also great for filming several subjects, and the 360-degree Infinite Pan Tracking is a standout highlight. This function allows for continuous rotation. Of course, it can also serve as a tripod for still recording.

While it's still at a record-low price at Amazon, upgrade to the Insta360 Flow 2 Pro foldable gimbal for under $127. Your content will look smooth and pro-level with this added accessory.

The first major drama of the 2026 Winter Olympics has arrived before the opening ceremony, and the Minions are at the scene of the crime.

Spanish figure skater Tomàs-Llorenç Guarino Sabaté said Tuesday that he received last-minute clearance from Universal to use music from the Minions in his short program after copyright concerns briefly derailed his Olympic program. While the situation is ongoing, and he doesn't have all of the music cleared, it's enough to officially say: The Minions are headed to the Olympics.

Why was Tomàs-Llorenç Guarino Sabaté's Minions music initially blocked?

Just days earlier, Sabaté, 26, revealed on Instagram that he was no longer permitted to skate to the music in his Minions short program at the Milan-Cortina Games. The routine combines multiple songs and sound bites from the Minions franchise: It begins with the Universal theme sung by the Minions, includes Pharrell Williams' "Freedom" from Despicable Me 3, and ends with bass-heavy "Papaya (Vaya Papayas)," which features the Minions singing about bananas and papayas in Minion language.

Sabaté performed this program all season, and had submitted it for approval through the International Skating Union’s ClicknClear system back in August.

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Despite this, the skater said he was informed of the issue late last week, leaving him scrambling to consider reworking his routine on the eve of his Olympic debut.

"Finding this out last Friday, so close to the biggest competition of my life, was incredibly disappointing," Sabaté wrote. "Nevertheless, I will face this challenge head-on and do everything I can to make the best of this situation."

How did the Minions music get cleared for the Olympics?

The decision was reversed after people rallied online, questioning how the music could be blocked so close to the Games and urging the rights holder to intervene. (The people need their Minions — and, frankly, how dare laws and rules get in the way of whimsy?) On Tuesday, Sabaté confirmed via his Instagram Story that Universal had granted him permission to use the soundtrack for what he described as "this one special occasion."

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"Huge THANK YOU to everyone who reposted, shared, and supported," Sabaté wrote. "Because of you, Universal Studios reconsidered and officially granted the rights."

Figure skating analyst Jackie Wong, reporting from the Milan-Cortina Games, noted that while only two of the four musical cuts in Sabaté's program have been cleared so far, the most difficult hurdle has been resolved. "The Universal one at the beginning was the trickiest," he wrote on X, "and that was the one they got special clearance for."

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As for Sabaté, he's just relieved that the routine's centerpiece has been saved. "I'm so happy to see that the minions hitting Olympic ice is becoming real again!!" he wrote on IG. "I'll keep you posted."

How did fans influence Universal's decision to approve the music?

Simply, the internet did what it does best and bullied Universal into relenting. Figure skating fans and those fond of joy flooded social media with posts and pleas demanding that Sabaté get his Minions music back.

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What Minions song is Sabaté skating to?

There are multiple, actually. It begins with the Universal theme sung by the Minions, which should be a familiar sound to anyone who has ever seen a Minions film. The program also features Pharrell Williams' "Freedom" from Despicable Me 3 and ends with "Papaya (Vaya Papayas)" from Juan Alcaraz and The Minions — who share artist, writing, arranging, production, and engineering credits on the song, according to EW.

Why did Sabaté choose Minions music for his Olympic program?

Sabaté has skated to songs from the Minions animated film franchise all season, performing his short program in a yellow-and-blue costume inspired by the characters. He previously said the routine was designed to bring joy and a playful style to the ice while still meeting every required technical element.

"This season I competed with my Minions short program to bring joy and a playful style to the ice," Sabaté wrote earlier this week on Instagram, adding that the program was meant to show "that skating as a male Olympic figure skater can be fun."

When will Sabaté compete at the 2026 Winter Olympics?

While the Milan-Cortina Winter Games open on Friday, Feb. 6, the six-time Spanish men's champion is set to make his 2026 Winter Olympics debut alongside the Minions during the men's single skating short program competition on Feb. 10.

The 2026 Grammys had no shortage of standout moments, from Lola Young taking home Best Pop Solo Performance to Bad Bunny winning Album of the Year for Debí Tirar Más Fotos. But nothing moved the room quite like the In Memoriam tribute honoring D'Angelo and Roberta Flack.

The segment was anchored by Ms. Lauryn Hill, who led a powerful lineup of R&B and soul heavyweights, including Lucky Daye, Raphael Saadiq, Leon Thomas, John Legend, Chaka Khan, Jon Batiste, and former Fugees member Wyclef Jean, for a carefully curated set celebrating the lives and legacies of the two artists.

The tribute quickly became one of the night’s most talked-about moments on social media, resonating far beyond the ceremony itself. All things considered, it was a wonderful kickoff to Black History Month.

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The first portion of the tribute was dedicated to D'Angelo, who passed away on October 14 of last year. Widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in modern R&B, D’Angelo helped define the neo-soul movement of the late ’90s and early 2000s, with a sound and visual style that reshaped how intimacy, vulnerability, and Black masculinity were expressed in popular music. His albums became cultural touchstones, earning both critical acclaim and a devoted fanbase that extended well beyond genre boundaries.

Ms. Lauryn Hill led the segment with renditions of several of his most beloved songs, including "Brown Sugar," "Lady," "Devil’s Pie," and "Nothing Even Matters," while Bilal delivered a soaring performance of "Untitled (How Does It Feel)," one of D’Angelo’s most iconic and enduring tracks.

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While many viewers praised the tribute, others were disappointed by the lack of focus on Angie Stone during the In Memoriam segment. Stone, who passed away in March, was a foundational figure in shaping the sound of hip-hop soul and neo-soul, genres that later reached mainstream acclaim through artists like Ms. Lauryn Hill and D'Angelo. For some fans, her omission felt particularly glaring given how deeply her influence runs through the very music being celebrated onstage.

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The second half of the tribute honored Roberta Flack, whose career reshaped pop and soul music. The Flack tribute moved through a tightly curated set of her most enduring songs: "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," "Compared to What," "The Closer I Get to You," and "Where Is the Love." Hill then covered "Feel Like Makin’ Love," before reuniting with Wyclef Jean for "Killing Me Softly with His Song," which transitioned into the Fugees’ version to close the segment.

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Some TikTok users in the U.S. have reported ‘zero views’ glitches, restrictions, and even account bans they say are related to content about Palestine, criticism of Donald Trump and ICE, and even mentions of Jeffrey Epstein’s name in private messages.

Notably, it happened days after the social media platform closed on a deal to separate its U.S. operations from its global business. In the States, the app is now owned by TikTok USDS Joint Ventures LLC – a private majority company established to oversee TikTok in the country. Immediately following the handover, TikTok suffered outages, and many U.S. users reported difficulties signing in to the platform. Once users could sign in, they were asked to agree to new Terms of Service, which raised privacy concerns among some users.

Catherine O'Hara, whose career spanned from SCTV to her Emmy-winning role on Schitt's Creek, and included beloved turns in Home Alone and Beetlejuice, has died, People confirmed on Jan. 30. She was 71.

Following news of her death, tributes to O'Hara spread quickly across social media, with fans sharing clips, quotes, and memories from her decades-long career in comedy. Many revisited scenes from Schitt's Creek, where her portrayal of Moira Rose became one of television's most easily quoted and beloved characters.

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Tributes also poured in from O'Hara's fellow actors. Pedro Pascal, who appeared alongside her in The Last of Us Season 2, shared a photo of the actress on social media, writing, "Genius to be near you... This lucky world that had you, will keep you, always." Justin Theroux, who co-starred with O'Hara in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, echoed the sentiment with his own post honoring the late star: "Oh Catherine. You will be so so missed."

Macaulay Culkin, who played her son Kevin McCallister in Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, also penned a loving tribute to the late star.

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The rest of the internet is remembering her for both her immense talent and singular onscreen presence.

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Over a career spanning five decades, O'Hara built a body of work that bridged sketch comedy, Hollywood blockbusters, cult classics, and prestige television — all while maintaining a reputation as one of comedy’s most inventive performers.

She first rose to prominence in the 1970s as a core member of the Canadian sketch comedy series SCTV, where her ability to shapeshift into dozens of characters made her a standout. Her work on the show established her as a performer who could balance absurdity with emotional truth, a quality that would define her career. She won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series in 1982 for her work on the show.

In film, O'Hara became a staple of beloved comedies, memorably playing the frazzled mother in Home Alone and its sequel, and delivering a scene-stealing performance in Tim Burton's Beetlejuice. She voiced Sally in the holiday cult classic The Nightmare Before Christmas. And she frequently collaborated with filmmaker Christopher Guest, appearing in mockumentary classics such as Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind.

Her late-career renaissance came with Schitt's Creek, in which she portrayed the extravagant and endlessly quotable Moira Rose. The role earned her an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe, and introduced her to a new generation of fans, cementing her status as a pop culture icon and one of television's most unforgettable performers.

The first official look at Sam Mendes' ambitious four-film Beatles project has landed, and the internet appears to be in rare agreement when it comes to Paul Mescal stepping into the role of Paul McCartney.

And honestly? I get the hype. It's giving less "actor playing Paul" and more "the spirit of McCartney himself briefly possessed this man," sparking the kind of collective approval that almost never happens online.

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The stills offer the public its first real glimpse at Mendes' unprecedented "cinematic event," set to hit theaters in April 2028, which will tell the story of The Beatles across four interconnected films, each centered on a different member of the band — Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr.

While anticipation has been high since the project was announced, Mescal's McCartney has quickly emerged as the early standout, fueling excitement that Mendes' high-risk, high-concept take on the most famous band in history may be striking the right chord from the very start.

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The reveal didn't just happen online. It first arrived like a scavenger hunt for fans. Ahead of the official release, the images of the Fab Four were quietly unveiled via postcards distributed on Jan. 29 at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, the school co-founded by McCartney himself. Then more postcards began popping up at other Beatles landmarks across the globe, from John Lennon's childhood home to Hamburg's storied club scene, New York record shops, and key spots in Tokyo.

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Sony Pictures officially released the stills to the wider public on Friday, Jan. 30, but by then fans were already dissecting blurry images of the character postcards posted online.

Now the only question left — after the hair, the posture, and the uncanny resemblance — is whether Mescal and co. have nailed the Scouse accent because Beatles fans will forgive almost anything, but they will hear it if they haven't.

Grow a Garden. 99 Nights in the Forest. Steal a Brainrot. If you're a parent, you've likely heard your kids talk about one of these games at some point.

They're playing Roblox. Their friends are playing Roblox. Half of all kids under the age of 16 in the U.S. are playing Roblox. But with so many kids on Roblox, predators are taking advantage of the online gaming platform.

As a result, Roblox has been hit with a slew of lawsuits over its alleged failure to keep children safe on the platform.

So, is Roblox safe for your kids? And if your kid is already on Roblox, what should you do?

As a father of three young kids, two of whom play Roblox regularly and one who will likely start playing as soon as she learns to hold a tablet, I've written this guide to help other parents navigate Roblox and ensure their kids' safety while playing the game.

What is Roblox, and should my kids play it?

Roblox is an online game where your character can explore a virtual universe and interact with other Roblox characters. The Roblox world is cartoony, with the characters resembling LEGO people.

Roblox is more like a gaming platform than a standalone game. Users create their own games in the virtual world, which other gamers can play. Roblox even has its own economy, with some developers making hundreds of thousands of dollars or more if their game gets popular. There's an in-game virtual currency called Robux, which can be used to access premium features and items.

You may already have seen Roblox received an official ESRB rating of T for Teen. However, that's just because some of the games warrant that level of rating.

If your child tells you they're playing Roblox, that really doesn't give you much information. It's the equivalent of them telling you they're playing video games. You need to know specifically what games they are playing on Roblox to get an idea of what is or isn't appropriate.

Whether your kids play it or not is up to you. I believe it's fine for my kids in the same way I let them watch their favorite shows on Netflix. There are many movies for adults available on that platform too — but with the right parental controls and monitoring, you can ensure age-appropriate content for your children.

Getting started on Roblox

So, you've decided your child can play on Roblox. Now, this is where you'll discover that Roblox actually has several parental controls in place to keep kids safe on the platform. However, parents need to actually take the time to set these things up.

First things first: Creating your Roblox accounts. 

That's right, I said "accounts" as in more than one. Your child will have an account, and you will too. Create your accounts, and then from your child's account, navigate to Settings> Parental Controls> Add a parent. Input the email for your account, and then accept the link account request in your inbox. You'll need to verify your age and identification to show you are a parent. 

Link a Parent Account Credit: Roblox

Once your account is linked, parents will need to set up a Parental PIN number to access those parental controls and prevent their kids from changing them. After that, you'll then have full access to control your child's account settings and view any pending requests your child receives.

Age Verification: How it works

Starting in 2026, Roblox rolled out an extra layer of child safety measures targeted directly at the platform's most problematic feature: Chat.

All users who want to utilize the chat features must now first have their age estimated by Roblox in order for the platform to assign the account to an age category.

Roblox age verification Credit: Roblox

The mandatory age check can be performed by pressing the Unlock Chat button on the user's account page. Following that, Roblox will access the user's camera on their device in order to scan their facial features. Using that, Roblox then places a user to one of six age categories: Under 9, 9–12, 13–15, 16–17, 18–20, and 21+.

Users cannot interact in chats with other Roblox gamers who are outside of their age cohort.

The age verification is performed by a third-party company called Persona. Roblox says the images used for age verification are deleted after the process, but you may still have privacy concerns. Users have reported being able to trick Roblox's age verification system into thinking a user is older or younger than they actually are.

The addition of the age verification system has basically turned the chat feature off for users who don't partake in the process. In short, there is now yet another barrier of protection for kids on Roblox.

Parental Controls and Content

Once your accounts are created, you'll find that Roblox offers several options to ensure your child's safety on the platform. However, you have to proactively set these things up.

In your account's Parental Controls settings, under Content Maturity, parents can set content restrictions based on the maturity level of the content itself, with levels ranging from Minimal, which means occasional mild violence, all the way to Restricted, which allows unfettered access to the most violence, scary, and crude content on Roblox. You probably don't want that last one. There are two in-between labels for older kids, Mild and Moderate, and these settings can be changed by a parent at any time.

Content Maturity settings Credit: Roblox

Blocked Experiences allows parents to block specific game titles within Roblox, even if they are technically within the Content Maturity options you set in the previously mentioned menu. As games are added to Roblox, parents may find a specific game that adheres to Roblox's content labels but still contains an attribute that makes the content inappropriate for their child. Parents can use the search bar to find these experiences and block them.

Similarly, there is a Sensitive Issues toggle to block games from your child that may be themed around social, political, or religious issues. Parents can choose to block games labeled as Sensitive Issues here, even if these titles fall within the previously set Content Maturity settings.

Sensitive Issues settings Credit: Roblox

Child safety controls

Now come the privacy controls that directly address the child safety issues for which Roblox is under scrutiny.

In the Communications section of the parental controls, parents can set who their kids can communicate with in Roblox experiences. For young children, the option is simple: turn those chats off completely by selecting 'No One'.

Experience Chat settings Credit: Roblox

However, as your kids get a bit older and want to interact with their real-life friends from school, there are additional options you'll want to set. Roblox allows users to "friend" one another through Connections. Additionally, they can create a Party or a group of friends that can join experiences together.

Parents can view and manage all of their child's connections to ensure they are only connected with individuals they know and trust in real life. Furthermore, parents can adjust their child's profile visibility so that only Connections can view when their child is on Roblox and which game they are currently playing.

Visibility settings Credit: Roblox

Furthermore, parents can control the Party settings so that their child can only create a Party with users who are their Connections. Parents can also toggle Party options off entirely for small children who won't be interacting with anyone on Roblox. 

Party settings Credit: Roblox

Private Servers are another setting that will likely be vastly different for you based on your child's age. Private Servers essentially allow users to participate in Roblox experiences with a select group of people. For small children, you'll want to likely turn this off entirely. For older kids, setting Private Servers to Connections will allow them to play with their friends.

Private Servers settings Credit: Roblox

While Roblox can always do more to protect its youngest users, the platform does have pretty robust options for child safety. The problem is that parents need to be aware of them and learn how to use them. Hopefully, this guide helps. 

UPDATE: Jan. 26, 2026, 4:37 p.m. EST Added a section on Roblox's new age verification process to access chats on the platform.

UPDATE: Jan. 26, 2026, 1:01 p.m. EST TikTok has shared more details about the cause of the outage that affected U.S. users over the past 24 hours.

TikTok has new U.S. owners (finally), but the app had a rough opening weekend, with many U.S. users unable to access the app, upload new videos, or refresh their feed. Now, TikTok has explained what went wrong.

According to TikTok, a power outage was the source of downtime on the app.

"Since yesterday we’ve been working to restore our services following a power outage at a U.S. data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate," said an official statement from TikTok posted on X. "We're working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We're sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon."

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TikTok appears to be working normally at the moment.

Over the weekend, the social media app was hit with thousands of user outage reports, with Downdetector showing spikes in users reporting problems in accessing the platform. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as Mashable.)

Credit: Down Detector

It's worth noting that TikTok has had a very busy week, however. On Thursday, the Chinese-owned platform announced that it had reached a deal to continue operating in the U.S. after years of pressure from politicians, creating the catchily named, majority U.S.-owned TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. Following the announcement, U.S. users were greeted with a pop-up asking them to read and agree to the app's new Terms of Service, causing confusion and alarm among some users.

Is it possible that the transfer in ownership, and whatever that entails behind the scenes, led to the issues users experienced on Sunday? It's difficult to say without any official word from TikTok, but the timing certainly seems notable.

Matt Binder contributed additional reporting to this story.

One of the most jaw-dropping athletic feats in recent memory happened this past Saturday, when legendary rock climber Alex Honnold free soloed the Taipei 101 skyscraper live on Netflix.

Formerly known as the Taipei World Financial Center, the building stands 1,667 feet tall, making it the 11th-tallest structure in the world. From 2004 to 2009, it actually held the title of tallest building on Earth, before the Burj Khalifa took that crown. Late Saturday night for U.S. viewers, Honnold climbed the entire thing without ropes, harnesses, or safety equipment, finishing in just over 90 minutes and becoming only the second person ever to pull it off.

It’s hard to overstate how unhinged this is. Thousands of people tuned in to watch the pure, panic-inducing spectacle of a 40-year-old man scaling a skyscraper with nothing but his hands and shoes, the kind of thing your brain immediately rejects as a bad idea. And yet, Honnold made it look almost routine.

When he finally reached the top, his first words summed up the whole experience perfectly: “Sick.”

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Naturally, social media had a field day. Clips and screenshots spread almost instantly, equal parts awe and disbelief, with people marveling not just at the physical feat but at how casually it was presented. A historic athletic achievement, broadcast live, that somehow still felt deeply ridiculous in the best way possible.

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For anyone unfamiliar with Honnold — and mild spoilers, I guess — this isn’t his first time doing a stunt like this. He’s best known for becoming the first person to free solo climb El Capitan, a nearly 3,000-foot vertical granite wall in Yosemite that has killed multiple climbers over the years. That ascent was documented in Free Solo, the 2018 film that went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary.

All of which is to say: Alex Honnold isn’t reckless. However, he is, in the most respectful way possible, absolutely out of his mind and also extremely good at what he does.

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A monster winter storm is currently barreling through roughly two-thirds of the United States, stretching across a massive swath of the country from Amarillo, Texas, to familiar winter hotspots like Boston, Massachusetts, and Buffalo, New York. Reports from outlets like CNN indicate that cities like Boston could see more than 36 inches of snow over the course of the weekend, while areas south of the snow line, including Charlotte and Atlanta, are expected to see less snow and more ice, a combination that makes road conditions especially dangerous.

The scale of the storm has also driven a surge of activity on social media in the days leading up to its arrival. Across the country, residents have been clearing store shelves in preparation for being snowed or iced in, posting photos of empty aisles and last-minute supply runs.

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At the same time, users online are fixated on the novelty of places like the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex seeing significant snowfall, a spectacle that tends to be fun for a few hours until the ice sets in and the state’s fragile power grid starts to strain.

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Or you could be in Florida and not see any snow, with cities like Orlando currently predicted to reach a high of 86°F on Sunday.

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Going all the way back up north, Minnesota, it's so cold that a user posted a video of pasta frozen in mid-air. As former Fox 9 meteorologist Jennifer McDermed writes on X, Minneapolis hit a low of -21°F on Friday, with wind chills around -45°F.

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This article will continue to be updated as more posts and news emerge throughout the storm.

Long before social media feeds or targeted ads, my mother used to say that life tends to show you the thing you're looking for. Or the thing you're afraid of. Or the thing you keep insisting you don't want.

If you were trying to get pregnant, suddenly everyone around you was pregnant. If you wanted out of your relationship, magazines on the grocery store rack were filled with tips on "spicing up your marriage." If you were single, you noticed couples everywhere.

At the time, it felt like a kind of folk psychology, an observation about attention, projection, and the stories we tell ourselves during moments of transition. Nothing mystical. Just the mind's tendency to organize the world around its current preoccupations.

But today, that feeling is no longer just in our heads — it's computational, built into the systems we use every day. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Google don't just reflect what we notice; they actively infer who we are and what comes next, based on demographics such as age and gender, as well as behavioral patterns. And once they decide what life stage you're in, they keep showing it to you, whether it fits or not.

Across social platforms, users describe being quietly ushered through a narrow, linear life script, one that often resembles something like dating → engagement → wedding → pregnancy → parenting. These systems assume users are progressing along an expected trajectory. When lives diverge from that path, for instance, after a breakup, during infertility, following divorce, or by choice, the algorithm often fails to recalibrate.

What looks like a coincidence or annoyance is something more structural: platforms building a version of identity that won't update, even as a person's life changes.

Trapped in a life phase you never chose

On social platforms, users may still encounter content they don't want, despite repeatedly muting keywords or clicking "not interested." Research shows that recommendation algorithms often rely far more on implicit engagement, such as watch time and clicks, than on explicit feedback signals, like hiding or muting, meaning the system can continue serving the life someone once searched for — or was assumed to want.

Elizabeth Losh, a media theorist, digital rhetoric scholar, and professor of English and American Studies at the College of William and Mary, said this persistence is rooted in how recommendation systems are built.

"Sites like TikTok and Instagram depend on targeted advertising and data harvesting models that emphasize demographic segmentation," said Losh, who is also the author of Selfie Democracy: The New Digital Politics of Disruption and Insurrection. "[They] slice and dice audiences by gender, age, political loyalties, and other categories, manufacturing needs and desires for each stage of life."

Those stages often reflect cultural expectations rather than real user diversity. Advertisers treat transitions like marriage, fertility, and parenting as high-value consumption moments, incentivizing platforms to sort users into life-phase categories that are difficult to exit once assigned.

"You can see how those assumptions get locked in," Losh said. "The persuasive power of the recommendation algorithms themselves continues to reinforce standardized life trajectories."

How the algorithm decides who you are

Platforms rarely explain how they infer a user's "life phase," but scrolling itself is data.

TikTok has acknowledged that time spent watching a video is weighted more heavily than most other signals in its recommendation system. Even a pause due to curiosity, confusion, or discomfort can be interpreted as interest. Once a system associates a user with a category, similar content can quickly snowball.

Lauren Klein, professor of Data & Decision Sciences and English at Emory University and co-author of Data Feminism, says these inferences reflect historic gender norms far more than neutral "user data."

"In many cases, age and gender are the only data points companies know about their users," Klein said. "In the absence of [a] meaningful signal, designers default to what they assume someone of a particular age and gender would want to see."

Those assumptions are shaped by long-standing cultural expectations about users' lives, including those around beauty, partnership, reproduction, and caregiving.

Because recommendation and ad systems are profit-driven, Klein added, there is little incentive to challenge defaults that appear to perform well.

"These companies are motivated by their own bottom line," she said. "If default life-phase content seems to generate engagement or purchases, there's no obligation to consider other desires or preferences."

When the TikTok feed contradicts reality

Emerging research suggests that algorithmic systems do more than match users with content; they're also shaping people's identities. 

Researchers describe this phenomenon as "algorithmic persistence," in which systems continue to serve content tied to a presumed identity long after it is no longer applicable. Klein notes that because recommender systems are optimized for engagement rather than accuracy, they have little incentive to recalibrate unless user behavior changes significantly, something many people don't know how to do, or even realize is necessary.

"There's an added social reinforcement mechanism," Klein said, adding that users already receive constant messages about what they should care about. "The algorithm amplifies that pressure."

Over time, this creates a kind of ambient discipline, technology nudging users toward a version of adulthood they might not want, can't access, or have already outgrown.

"The isolation of personal scrolling is a kind of 'technology of the self,'" Losh said. "It subtly encourages people to regulate themselves according to dominant social scripts."

Performance, play, and structural limits

If algorithmic persistence explains why users get "stuck" seeing irrelevant content, performance helps explain why pushing back doesn't necessarily free them.

Short-form video platforms are built around visibility and play. Users duet, stitch, parody, and perform alternative selves. Queer creators experiment with gender; others engage in what Losh calls "generation-swapping," performing exaggerated versions of parents or elders. Comedy and remix culture offer highly legible ways to critique dominant life scripts.

That visibility is not meaningless. Losh notes that these platforms have created space for experiences once considered rare or invisible: intersex parents documenting their lives, people speaking openly about ectopic pregnancy or asexuality, sex workers sharing the unglamorous realities of their labor. Other forms of relational storytelling — like content about lavender marriages or the rise of "guncles" — quietly challenge heteronormative family scripts through humor and affection rather than argument.

But visibility, Losh cautions, is not the same as structural change. Even as platforms become increasingly adept at identifying and amplifying counter-narratives, they continue to circulate within algorithms optimized to sort users into marketable categories. That means wedding content becomes queer wedding content, or family content becomes nontraditional family content. The identity may shift, but the life-phase logic remains intact. In that sense, personalization doesn't eliminate the script so much as adapt it.

Within recommendation systems, critique does not reliably trigger corrections. Because engagement itself is the primary signal — watch time, interaction, repetition — even content meant to challenge a life-cycle narrative can be absorbed as evidence of interest in it. A parody of wedding culture may still be logged as engagement with wedding content; a rebuttal to parenting norms may circulate alongside the very material it critiques.

Why is it so hard to reset your algorithm?

Algorithmic identity is not something users can update with a single click. Training data reflects the past. Profit incentives favor broad categories. And recommender systems are built to optimize engagement loops, not to reflect the complex, nonlinear lives of their users.

Designing for people who don't want children, who co-parent, who are queer or polyamorous, or who move in and out of relationships requires time, care, and a willingness to challenge default assumptions.

"It takes more work to design for users at the margins," Klein said. "But those users often reveal where systems break down."

When asked what a more feminist or equitable recommender system might look like, Klein was skeptical.

"I'm not sure there's such a thing as a feminist advertising mechanism," she said. "But one feminist principle we can take seriously is refusal."

For platforms, that would mean letting users opt out of targeted ads, allowing them to withhold their age or gender without penalty, avoiding punitive privacy defaults, and giving users ways to signal life changes without automatically triggering new assumptions.

For now, most platforms offer limited transparency and little meaningful control.

Living with the algorithmic lag

The algorithm lags behind real life. It clings to who someone was — or who it decided they were — because updating that identity is less profitable than nudging it forward.

For users, that lag often mirrors the same narrow life script society has long imposed. What's new isn't the pressure, it's the infrastructure delivering it.

The feed doesn't reflect reality. It reinforces a familiar script — whether it fits or not.

Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Thursday that several organizers of a recent anti-ICE protest at a Minnesota church had been arrested. Soon after, The White House X account shared an image of one of the protesters, attorney and activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, being led away by law enforcement officers with tears streaming down her face.

The post quickly received a Community Notes fact-check on X, which stated: "Digitally altered image. See original arrest photo here." The Community Note also included a link to the New York Post, which shows the real version of the image, in which Armstrong is clearly not crying.

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The White House’s X post includes the all-caps caption, “ARRESTED. FAR-LEFT AGITATOR NEKIMA LEVY ARMSTRONG FOR ORCHESTRATING CHURCH RIOTS IN MINNESOTA.”

Meanwhile, the X account of FBI Director Kash Patel released images of Armstrong and other arrested activists; none of them appear to be crying, though. Crooked Media journalist Matt Berg posted on X that he asked White House officials if the crying images were altered and was reportedly told, "the memes will continue."

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The memeification of serious news events is par for the course on the Trump administration's social media accounts. As Mashable has reported previously, the Trump administration uses X and social media to dehumanize and insult its perceived enemies, often using 4chan-style memes and artificial intelligence in the process.

Bondi also posted about the arrests on X, and the Post reported the protesters have been charged with "conspiracy against rights," which is a federal charge for preventing someone from exercising their constitutional rights. Right-wing commentators have also argued that the protesters violated the FACE Act. Ironically, the FACE Act (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act) is a law signed by President Bill Clinton to stop protesters from blocking the entrance to abortion clinics, but it also protects protesters from blocking the entrances of houses of worship.

The First Amendment does give Americans the right to peacefully protest; however, it does not give protesters the right to enter a church without permission and shut down a religious service. In fact, this type of behavior violates other people's First Amendment right to practice their free religion freely.

Videos of the anti-ICE protest at the Cities Church in St. Paul quickly went viral, with many viewers split between supporting the protesters and attacking them for going too far. Now, videos and photos of the protesters' arrests are going viral in turn.

As more Americans get their news from social media, the Trump administration has grown skilled at turning news into reality TV-style entertainment, with Trump as the star.

Across Instagram and TikTok, influencers and would-be content creators are churning out low-effort prank and pickup artist videos using the discreet recording features of Meta Ray-Bans and other smart glasses. Many of these clips cross from cringe into outright troubling, with creators harassing women, service workers, and the homeless. In some videos, creators pretend to be mentally disabled, trans, or gay just to provoke reactions from unsuspecting people.

All of these videos have one thing in common: They show that anyone can become the unwitting star of someone else's social media video. Consent doesn't enter into it at all.

The glasses' inconspicuous nature is used to create all kinds of content that regularly pulls in hundreds of thousands of views on Instagram and TikTok. The severity and intrusiveness vary from creator to creator. Some accounts produce more positive content, sometimes referred to as "joybait," by complimenting strangers.

Other videos cross over into outright harassment. Some focus specifically on trying to get women’s phone numbers, with comment sections often dogpiling on the women based on how receptive or unreceptive they are to the advance. The BBC recently documented multiple cases in which women were approached by men wearing smart glasses, unknowingly recorded, and later subjected to sexualized and abusive comments online. Other accounts center on smaller but deliberately irritating interactions, like saying nonsense to a drive-thru worker, trapping cashiers in circular conversations, or showing up minutes before a store closes to try and place a large order.

The general setup is largely the same: go to a public place and say or do something intentionally off-putting solely to elicit a reaction. In one recurring example, a creator has posted multiple videos approaching women in beauty supply stores like Ulta or James Avery and pretending to shop for a gift for an underage girlfriend.

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However, other accounts lean into far more socially transgressive behavior. Accounts like kemobandz1 and bootyworshipping produce sexually suggestive content involving unsuspecting women. The former records himself inside massage parlors, teasing viewers through captions that his visit will end in a sexual experience, later uploading the full videos as explicit pay-per-view content on sites like No Fans. (This has also been documented by 404 Media.) The latter account is largely self-explanatory, with the creator’s Reels page filled with videos of him non-consensually filming women’s bodies and posting the footage to Instagram for thousands of views.

While reporting this article, I contacted Meta about the ways its smart glasses are being used. After I provided multiple examples, including the two accounts mentioned above, Meta disabled the Instagram accounts for violating its policy on Adult Sexual Exploitation.

In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said that users "are responsible for complying with all applicable laws and for using Ray-Ban Meta glasses in a safe, respectful manner." It continued, "as with any recording device, people shouldn't use them for engaging in harmful activities like harassment, infringing on privacy rights, or capturing sensitive information."

According to a Reuters report, Meta has sold more than 2 million pairs of smart glasses since the product’s launch in 2023, with sales tripling in 2025.

Legal doesn’t mean ethical

Credit: Screenshot courtesy of TikTok

Crucially, these activities, whether it’s rizz accounts, hassling service workers, or pretending to be mentally disabled to exploit the kindness of firefighters, don't break the law.

"[The] law has not changed, meaning that you do not have an expectation of privacy in public spaces," said Julian Sarafian, a California-based attorney who represents online content creators. "That means you can be recorded in those spaces and have limited legal recourse, if any, against people who publish content that includes you."

According to Sarafian, even when it’s not immediately obvious that cameras are present, the focus of any legal claim is where the recording takes place. That’s why many of these videos are filmed in fast food restaurants, shopping malls, or on busy streets around bars and nightlife areas.

"Some states, like California, are also two-party consent states, meaning that recording conversations where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy is not allowed unless both parties consent," Sarafian said. "With prank videos, it comes down to context. A public park? No two-party consent required. A private dining room in a restaurant? Two-party consent required."

But for some creators and observers, the fact that this content is legal misses the point entirely.

Brad Podray, a content creator who formerly went by the name Scumbag Dad, argues that videos filmed with smart glasses rely on people, particularly women, not knowing they are being recorded. In his view, legality has become a convenient shield for predatory and exploitative behavior.

"I know it’s legal. I don’t care," Brad said. "That’s not the discussion. I think it’s weird and creepy, and it shows a very predatory mindset."

According to Podray, the issue is not whether filming in public is technically legal, but how creators extract value from people who never consented to being part of the content. He describes this dynamic as turning unsuspecting subjects into unpaid labor.

He added that creators gravitate toward women and service workers because they are more likely to produce usable reactions and less likely to push back in ways that threaten the content.

"I always thought that was very cowardly, because the women don’t know they’re on camera,” said Podray, who has made several satirical, staged videos critiquing this type of behavior. "The women would roll into the comments section once the video went viral and say, ‘I was just being nice, I wanted you to leave me alone,’ and then the comments would absolutely dogpile them."

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Podray says the appeal of smart glasses is not just their discretion, but how cheaply and efficiently they allow creators to produce content at scale. Because the people being filmed are not acting, their reactions feel more authentic, which he says makes the videos perform better with audiences.

"They want people who are good on camera, so they’re going to hit fast food employees, and they’re going to hit pretty girls,” Podray said. "A lot of random women walking around aren’t going to want to participate in a skit if you ask them to, so they remove the agency entirely by just running the glasses."

He argues that this dynamic is rarely understood by viewers, who often assume everyone on camera has agreed to participate. When those assumptions are challenged, he says the response is frequently hostile.

"The audience believes everybody on camera is an actor meant for their entertainment," he said. "Any attempt to humanize them is met with cynicism or outright aggressiveness."

For Podray, that disconnect is what makes the trend so troubling. The law allows creators to film in public, and creeps know it.

Creators say it’s just "entertainment"

Image pixelated and blurred for privacy reasons. Credit: Screenshot courtesy of TikTok

Troll content like prank channels or pickup artist videos is nothing new. For a time, prank channels were among the most popular on YouTube, starting with prank-call-focused channels like Ownage Pranks. As technology evolved and smartphones became more widespread, prank creators shifted toward street content, with channels like Roman Atwood, fouseyTUBE, and LAHWF gaining massive followings.

Over time, prank channels on YouTube began to fall out of favor as larger creators pushed increasingly outrageous stunts for views. It also became clear that many of these channels were hiring actors or staging their content, undermining the original appeal of pranks that were supposedly spontaneous and authentic.

Smart glasses have made it easier than ever to capture the kind of authentic, outlandish reactions that largely disappeared when YouTube prank channels fell out of favor. While Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses include an LED indicator meant to signal when recording is taking place, outlets like 404 Media have reported that wearers can pay third-party services to disable the light. Some creators, including accounts like minddecaycam, have openly admitted to blocking the indicator light.

A screenshot from a recent @minddecaycam video. Credit: Screenshot courtesy of Instagram

Mashable reached out to several smart glasses creators for comment. While many did not respond in time for publication, one account, HeyMetaGuy, said he views his content as entertainment first.

"Realistically, I’ve made a few other pages for things that are not in the same field, but I just saw content in this way," HeyMetaGuy said. "I was like, I want to make content like this myself, because I know how to edit and whatnot, and just generally pranking people, messing with people, getting their reactions is cool."

When asked about the ethics of filming people who may not realize they’re being recorded, HeyMetaGuy compared the practice to the everyday surveillance already present in public life.

"For the ethical standpoint, I believe no matter where we go nowadays, we’re being recorded," he said. "Whether you walk into an establishment, there’s security cameras everywhere. We’re being recorded."

HeyMetaGuy said he does not disable the LED indicator on his glasses, though he acknowledged that most people don’t understand what the light signifies when they notice it.

"It’s not really hidden," he said. "It’s just more the fact that people don’t know what’s going on. Like, when they see a light, they don’t really know what’s going on."

HeyMetaGuy added that while most people he records laugh about his trolling, he has faced at least one threat of legal action, but he states that filming in public places is clearly permitted.

A serious threat to privacy

For privacy and civil liberties advocates, that growing adoption raises deeper concerns about how easily wearable cameras can blend into everyday life. Jake Laperruque, the deputy director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the rise of prank and "social experiment" content filmed with smart glasses highlights how difficult it is to recognize these devices in use.

"It’s very concerning that these and other interactions seem to show these glasses are too inconspicuous to be recognized when they’re recording people," Laperruque said. "Being able to easily buy and use tech to secretly record people creates serious dangers."

While Laperruque does not believe wearable cameras represent a fundamental shift in surveillance culture just yet, he said pushback may come from the public rather than lawmakers.

"People and places of public accommodation might decide this isn’t the type of social engagement they want and push back," he said, adding that he would not be surprised if gyms, bars, and other businesses began banning wearable recording devices altogether.

Looking ahead, Laperruque said the biggest concern is how discreet recording could intersect with other technologies.

"I’m most worried about the risk of people wanting anonymity in sensitive situations and being doxxed," he said. "If devices are able to record secretly and combined with facial recognition, it could be a serious threat to privacy and civil liberties."

Netflix is planning to redesign its mobile app (again) amid changing priorities for the streaming giant. And you should expect — like lots of other apps — a shift toward TikTok-style vertical video.

Netflix indicated its plans during an earnings call this week. Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters noted in the call that the planned mobile redesign followed a similar overhaul of its TV user interface.

"Just as you've seen us do with the new TV UI, we're working on a new mobile UI that will better serve the expansion of our business over the decade to come," Peters said in the call. "We're gonna roll this out later in 2026. And just like our TV UI, it then becomes a starting point. It becomes a platform for us to continue to iterate, test, evolve, and improve our offerings."

At the investor earnings call, Netflix's other CEO, Ted Sarandos, also called out Instagram as a competitor to watch.

"TV is not what we grew up on. TV is now just about everything,” he said, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter. “The Oscars and the NFL are on YouTube. Networks are simulcasting the Super Bowl on linear TV and streaming. Amazon owns MGM, Apple is competing for Emmys and Oscars, and Instagram is coming next.”

The planned redesign also follows Netflix's recent push into podcasts, a medium that often creates viral vertical videos.

"You can imagine us bringing more clips based on new content types like video podcasts," Peters noted.

The exact details of Netflix's mobile redesign remain undisclosed, but you can expect an app that integrates the many ways in which the streaming giant has infiltrated our lives. That could mean clips from a podcast, an NFL highlight, or the somewhat disappointing end to a hit show.

The pressure is mounting on social media companies to enforce their rules and protect children on the platforms. Australia recently instituted a ban on children under the age of 16 from social media platforms. Gaming platforms like Roblox are now using facial recognition technology to prevent kids from interacting with adults in chats.

And now TikTok, the social media platform well known for its popularity with young people, will be rolling out its own age verification system in Europe to detect underage users on its site, according to a Reuters report.

TikTok's age-detection system analyzes a user's profile information, published videos, and behavioral signs to estimate if a user is under the age of 13. Per TikTok policy, users must be at least 13 to sign up for the platform. Once the age detect system flags an account, the user will be reviewed by specialist moderators. User accounts will not be banned automatically.

TikTok told Reuters the age-detection system will be rolled out across Europe in the coming weeks after testing the program in Britain for the past year. The system was specifically designed to comply with European regulatory requirements.

EU regulators have been pushing for social media platforms to act on child safety issues, including ensuring users are of the minimum age required for a platform. The European Parliament is looking into potentially instituting a social media ban similar to the one in Australia for children under the age of 15.

As Mashable covered earlier this week, some online platforms are discovering the difficulties with online age verification. Roblox users, for example, have been uncovering simple workarounds to the platform's age verification, which involved simply uploading animated avatars or even drawing facial hair on their image with a Sharpie.

TikTok's method is bound to pick up some false positives on users who are over 13 but mistakenly get flagged or even removed for being underage. We'll have to see just how accurate it is, and how many disgruntled users it leaves in its path once it rolls out more broadly.

After finally making moves to stop its Grok AI from creating nonconsensual sexualized images and CSAM, Elon Musk's X has announced another major platform overhaul today.

X's head of product Nikita Bier announced on Thursday that the social media platform was going to ban apps that reward users for posting on the site. Bier specifically mentioned it was going to block "InfoFi" apps and developers from accessing its API. 

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InfoFi stands for Information Finance and has become popular in the Web3 space for rewarding users for engaging with online communities and posting on social media.

Why is X banning these types of apps? According to Bier, these apps were encouraging users to post low-quality content solely to receive crypto tokens.

"We are revising our developer API policies: We will no longer allow apps that reward users for posting on X (aka 'infofi')," Bier posted on X. "This has led to a tremendous amount of AI slop & reply spam on the platform."

According to X, many users of these InfoFi apps appeared to be posting spammy, low-quality AI-generated content solely to get paid in crypto tokens by these apps. The mass posting of this kind of content on a social network harms the platform's overall quality.  

Bier went on to say that X has "revoked API access from these apps, so your X experience should start improving soon (once the bots realize they’re not getting paid anymore)." X's head of product then joked that if a developer had their account terminated, they could reach out, and X would help get them set up on competitor platforms like Threads and Bluesky.

X's Bier has recently butt heads with the cryptocurrency community on X over low-quality engagement. Earlier this month, Bier was critical of users who just mass reply "gm," a common phrase within the crypto community, and then complain that the X algorithm doesn't boost their content. 

This latest decision is likely to cause an uproar with X's crypto users as well. As Decrypt noted, the token for the popular InfoFi platform Kaito dropped by more than 15 percent shortly after Bier's announcement.

As a result of Bier's announcement, Kaito shared that it was sunsetting its Yaps app, which paid users to post on X.

Before Reddit became the de facto "front page of the internet," there was Digg. 

Digg, the crowdsourced content platform, is where "upvoting" links was popularized. However, a failed redesign wrecked the site's popularity with its user base, who fled to Reddit – and the rest was history. Digg flailed under different curated, editorial visions and Reddit became one of the internet's biggest websites.

Now, Digg's original founder Kevin Rose is teaming up with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian to relaunch the platform. Digg is back (again) and looking to take on Reddit with the help of the guy who founded Reddit. (Ohanian left Reddit in 2020.)

On Wednesday, the beta version of Digg officially launched to the public at Digg.com. Interested users can sign up for the beta now.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Rose shared his goals with the newly relaunched Digg of building trust with its user base and making sure it's not overtaken by AI bots looking to manipulate the platform. For example, a Digg community for those who own a particular piece of tech hardware could be asked to prove they own said piece of technology.

At launch, the new Digg has 21 general communities around topics such as science, funny, tech, gaming, and entertainment. Around 67,000 users were invited on the platform before the public launch.

With the public launch, anyone can now sign-up and a community could be created around any specific topic or niche. However, at the time, each community can only have one manager. Digg CEO Justin Mezzell told TechCrunch that the company wanted to launch the platform and then build and ship features weekly as Digg evolves.

Digg is also launching with an AI-created podcast called Digg Daily which recaps the biggest stories on the platform each day. According to the company, it's considering bringing in human hosts after hearing feedback from users.

Following the aforementioned failed 2010 redesign which led to the platform's downfall, Digg has been bought and sold by various entities, until Rose and Ohanian acquired the platform and subsequently announced their intent to relaunch Digg last year.

Users can sign up for the new Digg at Digg.com now.

Google Gemini — the tech giant's generative AI video model — is launching the ability to generate social media-ready vertical video. That's all well and good, but it raises the question: Does that mean even more AI slop?

Google Veo is widely regarded as the leading AI video model (different versions of Veo claim the top four spots on LMArena's text-to-video leaderboard), so the answer is almost certainly yes.

Google announced this week that Veo 3.1 — the latest version of Gemini's text-to-video generator — could now generate "social-ready 9:16 videos directly." In other words, the videos are generated with the vertical, scroll-ready format that you see on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels.

"Designed for mobile-first applications, this mode delivers faster results and optimized composition by generating full-frame vertical video rather than cropping from landscape," read a statement from Google.

The online world is increasingly populated by AI-generated vertical video, some of which is the much-maligned slop. Meta, for instance, launched Vibes, a social site entirely dedicated to generating and scrolling AI videos. AI critics call it an "infinite slop machine."

It tracks that Google would give users the ability to generate social-ready video — people want it — but it might not make your scrolling experience any better.

Is Reddit down?

The website is operating normally as of this writing, but thousands of Reddit users were asking this question on Tuesday, Jan. 13, when the popular online discussion platform appeared to suffer a brief outage. According to Downdetector, the problems started around 11:33 a.m. ET, with tens of thousands of Downdetector users reporting problems accessing the Reddit website and app. (Disclosure: Mashable and Downdetector are both owned by Ziff Davis.)

Reddit's status had returned to normal at Downdetector by 12:18 p.m. ET. Credit: Downdetector

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At the peak of the outage, Downdetector received 89,943 user error reports.

"Reddit is currently experiencing a significant internal outage causing widespread service disruptions," reads a Downdetector summary (emphasis in original). "The impact is categorized as Very High, primarily affecting mobile app access (55%) and website connectivity (39%)."

Again, as of this writing, Reddit's website and app appear to be fully operational.

Mashable reached out to Reddit for more information, and we'll update this story if we receive a response.

This is a developing story...

Instagram users had a scare over the weekend after many users were sent mysterious password reset emails that seemed to come directly from Instagram. Some users thought this might be a phishing email, but as Mashable reported earlier today, many of the emails are legitimate.

Instagram said in a weekend statement that it had fixed a bug that allowed an external party to trigger unnecessary password reset emails. The good news: no one’s accounts were actually impacted. The social media giant urged people to simply delete the emails and move on. 

Still, we thought we’d take a close look at the email that was sent to people to see if we could identify any red flags. Phishing emails can almost always be identified with a little patience and know-how, so we put that knowledge to the test to see if there was anything wrong with the email itself. If what Instagram said is accurate (spoiler: it was accurate), then we shouldn’t spot anything untoward. 

In any case, here is one of the emails in question, received by a Mashable editor on Saturday, Jan. 10, with the account information blurred out for privacy reasons. 

One of the password reset emails received by Instagram users. Credit: Mashable

Okay, so let’s go through a checklist of the most common ways to spot a phishing email and see how this one holds up.

First, a phishing email will usually come from an unknown email with no ties to the real company. In this case, the email is from security@mail.instagram.com, which is a real Instagram email address. Please note that scammers will often try to dupe legit email addresses by using variations and alternative domains, such as "instagram.password.net".

Next, I check the footer, which also looks clean. I actually signed out of my own Instagram account and had a password reset link sent to me, and I can verify that the footer is exactly identical to the one in the above email. So, we’re off to a great start. 

Phishing emails can often look legitimate, though, so the next step is to see where this email sends you if you were to click the link. However, instead of clicking the link, hover your mouse over the link to see the URL destination. In this case, hovering over the “Reset password” button does, in fact, show a real Instagram link, as seen in the screenshot below. 

Credit: Mashable

Remember: You should check every link in an email from an uknown sender before clicking. So, I checked the “let us know” link, which also shows an official Instagram URL.

Many phishing emails also contain spelling or grammar errors. However, after a close reading of the email, there aren’t any red flags, and all of the logos are correct. 

The only other thing I could think to check was if this was a user-generated password reset request. So, as I said earlier, I signed out and had one sent to me, and I confirmed the emails are identical.

There is one more step you can take to verify if the email is legitimate, but it actually doesn't work in this particular case.

In your Instagram account settings (go to your account settings, then click "Accounts Center," then "Password and security," then "Recent emails"). Normally, this section would show all recent emails from Instagram. However, for unknown reasons, the weekend's mysterious password reset emails do not show up, even though they appear to be legitimate.

This discrepancy is one reason the emails seemed so suspicious at first, and why some experts determined they were phishing emails.

When you receive a suspicious email, never click the links.

In this case, the best thing you can do is simply ignore the email entirely.

Is the Instagram email a scam?

Kind of, just not in the way you would think. The emails were sent, albeit indirectly, by a third party. However, the email our editor received was real and sent by Instagram. Clicking the links and buttons would not harm the recipient, and the worst thing that could happen is that you'd wind up with a new password.

However, if you did open this mysterious Instagram email, click the link, and change your password without verifying its authenticity, you got lucky this time.

We recommend checking out this guide on identifying phishing scams, just in case. 

Jujutsu Kaisen has entered its Culling Game arc, and its opening sequence makes one thing clear: This is not a game anyone survives unchanged.

Released online yesterday alongside the Season 3 premiere, the opening sequence abandons straightforward hype in favor of something more symbolic and, dare I say, disturbing. Set to King Gnu's "Aizo," the opening depicts the Culling Game as a curated gallery of violence and spectacle, where participation is compulsory for jujutsu sorcerers.

Its visuals draw heavily from fine art, weaving echoes of Egon Schiele, Paul Rubens, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, and John Everett Millais into its compositions. Schiele's influence surfaces in a striking image of Yuji Itadori in the womb, his tiny body distorted and compressed, while Rubens' baroque excess recontextualizes Maki and Mai Zenin as sleeping children — an image of softness already haunted by what's to come. (Don’t get me started on the tragedy of Mai as Ophelia.)

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And then there's Klimt's "The Kiss," reimagined as a slightly terrifying embrace between Yuta Okkotsu and the special-grade cockroach cursed spirit Kurourushi. IYKYK.

All of it unfolds under the shadow of Satoru Gojo, whose continued absence — still sealed — hangs over the season. The opening shifts its attention to the characters we already know, now forced to carry the weight of the Culling Game themselves, while teasing the arrival of new players manga readers will recognize instantly, and anime-only viewers are about to meet. (Kirara and Hakari fans, now is our time.) Looming over everyone is Kenjaku, leering at the chaos like pieces on a game board.

This season isn't just raising the stakes. It’s changing the rules entirely.

New episodes of Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3 premiere at 12 p.m. ET on Thursdays on Crunchyroll.

There was something undeniably weird about 2016. Not weird in the charming, "remember Vine?" sense, but weird in the way history feels right before it tips over.

It marked a slow descent into collective unease, beginning with the surreal recapture of El Chapo, winding through celebrity deaths and the mainstreaming of one particular cartoon frog, and finally cratering with the presidential election of reality TV star Donald Trump. At the time, many outlets openly wondered whether 2016 was the worst year ever.

And yet, for a certain slice of Gen Z, 2016 wasn't the beginning of the end. It was the last good summer of our lives. According to GWI, 42 percent of Gen Z respondents report feeling nostalgic for the 2010s — a sentiment especially visible on TikTok, where obsession with 2016 has become its own trend.

It's not surprising, as nostalgia is an inevitable part of life. People are already talking about how "good we had it" in 2020, even though, by some crucial metrics, that year was even worse. But for older Gen Z, 2016 — more specifically, the summer of 2016 — hits a particular part of the brain. For many of us, it was the last time we were allowed to be kids.

It was the year I graduated high school. Senior prom. My first election. The last time I saw my dad. And, inexplicably, the one brief week when I genuinely cared about Pokémon.

As Tess May writes for Rowdy, maybe it's a longing for a time before — when the internet meant Vine, Harambe memes, Snapchat dog ears, and rainbow filters. "It's Gen Z saying, 'We want the internet to feel human again,'" May writes.

Part of what makes 2016 nostalgia so sticky is how thoroughly it's been repackaged by platforms. On TikTok alone, "2016 vibes" has become its own aesthetic: filters that blur the present just enough to resemble memory, POV videos about being a teenager again, and rankings of songs that somehow sound better when they’re stripped of everything that came after.

As one breakdown of the trend notes, it’s not a coincidence that so many people are yearning for the internet before it became fully algorithmic, before every post felt like it was auditioning for engagement.

That yearning isn’t really about the year itself. It’s about what life felt like before everything became so performative and optimized; before being online meant building a brand; before politics consumed every feed; and before the future felt permanently foreclosed. In that sense, 2016 becomes a stand-in for a broader desire. A time when things still felt lighter, even if that lightness was more a product of youth than reality.

The danger, of course, is that nostalgia flattens history. As The New Republic points out, Gen Z’s longing often isn’t for a time they remember clearly, but for a version of the past they never truly experienced. That impulse can drift beyond culture and into politics, turning "things were better back then" into something more reactionary, even if it starts from a place of exhaustion rather than ideology.

Still, it’s hard to ignore why this impulse exists at all. Gen Z came of age through financial crises, mass shootings, climate anxiety, a pandemic, and now a political landscape that feels permanently stuck in reruns. Compared to that, 2016 feels like the last moment before the feed refreshed and never stopped loading. Maybe it really was the last good summer. Or maybe it was just the last time we didn’t yet know how bad things were going to get.

Either way, the nostalgia says more about now than it does about 2016. And until the present feels livable again, we’ll probably keep looking backward, scrolling through a year that felt human enough to miss. Maybe in 2036, Mashable's Gen Alpha reporter will write about how 2026 was the last good year.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is spending millions to turn the chronically online into deportation agents, according to internal communications reviewed exclusively by the Washington Post.

The agency's $100 million marketing strategy, detailed in a 30-page document distributed to ICE officials this summer, includes a massive push to flood the digital market with geo-targeted and content-based advertising. The plan even names specific platforms, like Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Substack, and Rumble, a popular "alt-tech" video platform frequented by conservatives.

Recruitment advertisements under this plan would specifically target users whose devices ping near military bases, NASCAR races, UFC fights, college campuses, or gun and trade shows, as well as listeners of "patriotic" podcasts, country music, fitness, and true crime. A significant portion of the strategy hinges on getting influencers, commentators, and live streamers on board to boost ICE's message, with $8 million allocated to a new influencer program, Washington Post reported. Online creators accepted into the program would receive around $1,500 for joining.

While analysis shows the agency has yet to reach its $100 million advertising goal, many have already noticed the aggressive push into online and entertainment spaces, including television and streaming ads, social media campaigns, and celebrity endorsements. In October, many Spotify users boycotted the app for hosting ICE recruitment slogans, as well as CEO Daniel Ek's financial ties to companies developing AI technology for the military.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told the Washington Post that the agency was “thrilled" about coverage of the "wildly successful ICE recruitment campaign, which is under budget and ahead of schedule.” She did not dispute the information presented in the document.

Officials and citizens have raised alarm bells over ICE's traditional advertising methods, too, including public campaigns and propaganda efforts that many say are stoking unnecessary fear within communities.

Under the Trump administration, federal immigration officials have pivoted to extreme, high-risk tactics to meet deportation aims set by the president, including periodically violent operations in areas far from the border. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino has said the unprecedented actions of ICE agents are a new "turn and burn" strategy that sees agents deploying tactics normally reserved for major offenders on families and individuals who haven't been suspected of violent offenses.

ICE is reportedly set to sign on tens of thousands of new agents in the coming months as a result of its "surge hiring marketing strategy," incentivized by major signing bonuses and inflated salaries allocated from Trump's Big Beautiful Bill. The agency has also reduced requirements for new hires. DHS reported that it received over 200,000 job applications in the last five months alone, with McLaughlin stating the vast majority are former law enforcement.

Former officials say the scale of raids and countrywide recruitment is unlike anything the country has seen before, according to a report in the Idaho Statesman.

For a long period during the height of the NYT Games craze of 2020, new Wordle strategies appeared on the timeline like clockwork. But in the years since, players have honed their personal strategies in ways that have made keeping up with daily streaks a piece of cake.

That doesn't mean there's not more to mine from the game. This week, social media users came across an apparently foolproof way to whittle away at incorrect letters and make use of those anagram skills.

According to a viral X post by user and Wordle strategist @rudy_betrayed, you can start by popping in these five words: CHUNK, FJORD, VIBEX, WALTZ, and GYMPS. The post has already racked up 22,000 bookmarks.

[Note: That last word is defined by Oxford Languages on Google as "twisted silk, worsted, or cotton with cord or wire running through it, used chiefly as upholstery trimming." But it's also listed as a potential derivative of a derogatory phrase. While it's a high-value Words With Friends entry, it's not valid in the Merriam Webster Scrabble dictionary. It may work for the dictionary's dupe Quordle, though.]

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The strategy makes use of 25 unique letters in the game's first five rounds, only missing the ornery letter Q, giving users just one slot to guess the winning word. But according to the alphabet math and players who use the strategy, it's nearly impossible not to spot the word among the grey tiles.

There's still a bit of brainwork needed, of course, like parsing letter groups that have multiple anagrams. It's not going to always help if you don't know the word to begin with, because that's just how Wordle works. And, as many social media users argued in the post's quotes, maybe it's sucking the fun out of thing to try to "hack" the game in the name of a higher score.

But if you're a pretty good Wordler already — and especially if it's a week like "MYRRH" — this is definitely a trick worth trying.

Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to the latest Wordle.

Among the most difficult parenting tasks, there are few as dreaded as asking a child to put down the device that's just absorbed their attention for hours.

As a parent, you feel guilty that it got this far. You're also gearing up for a potential fight, should that child throw a toddler, tween, or teen tantrum. As they say, nobody wants this.

While setting new boundaries on screen time might feel daunting, experts want you to know that a reset is possible. The new year, with its fresh beginnings and renewed optimism, is a great time to make such a move.

Think of it not as a battle, says Catherine Price, co-author of the new book The Amazing Generation: Your Guide to Fun and Freedom in a Screen-Filled World. Instead, remember that you're working toward a shared goal frequently thwarted by social media and excessive screen time.

"In reality, we really should be on the same side, because what do we want for ourselves and our kids?" says Price. "We want to have meaningful and fun lives, with strong relationships."

With that in mind, follow these four strategies to help your child reclaim their time from digital screens:

1. Don't lecture about screen time rules

Parents keen on curbing screen use often make the mistake of lecturing their child on the topic. Price says it's more effective to start a family conversation about how screen time makes each person feel, whether it's their own or yours.

This part is important, and an oft-missing ingredient in efforts to recalibrate device use, because parents must reckon with their own habits.

It's worse than you might expect. Take, for example, a recent nationally representative Girl Scouts survey of 1,000 5-to-13-year-olds which found that 52 percent struggled to get their parents' attention because they were on their own phones.

"What are you modeling currently for your kids?" says Price, who was not involved in the survey. "Because you can't expect your kids to follow your instructions if you're not following those habits yourself."

You might rely on your own memory, but that's unlikely to offer a full picture of what your kids experience. Instead, look at any screen time reports created by your personal devices.

Price recommends drilling down to time spent using specific apps. A road trip might give the impression that you spent eight hours glued to your phone when it was just using a maps app. But several hours of regular daily use on an app like TikTok or WhatsApp should be a wakeup call for parents about their own habits, and one they might not recognize without objective data.

Price also suggests treating the conversation about household screen time rules as a mini science experiment wherein both kids and parents get to track what they observe, then talk about it together. The point is to identify what aspects of parent or child screen time lead to unpleasant experiences like negative or hurt feelings and limited socializing.

Parents might also be surprised by their child's interest or curiosity in spending less time online. The Amazing Generation, co-written with Dr. Jonathan Haidt, is a middle school-aged companion book to his best-seller The Anxious Generation. Presented with graphic novel elements, it also includes regretful anecdotes from young adults who wished their childhood and adolescence hadn't been dominated by social media and screen time.

Relatedly, the Girl Scouts survey similarly found that 46 percent of girls felt pressure to be online, even if they weren't enjoying it.

2. Set and stick to rules for screen time

Dr. Jean Twenge, a psychologist and author of 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World: How Parents Can Stop Smartphones, Social Media, and Gaming from Taking Over Their Children's Lives, says parents should create new household screen time guidelines based on conversations with their kids, or return to enforcing existing rules. For help with this task, parents can consult the American Academy of Pediatrics' customizable resource for creating a family media plan.

Twenge, a mother of three teens who's conducted extensive academic research on screen time, recommends setting the same standards for every child in the household. This might include no smartphones and social media until age 16, time limits on specific devices, and prohibiting certain apps or websites. Parents should follow household expectations as well, like device-free mealtimes.

Even if the plan goes well at first, there will be moments you feel like relenting, because of inconvenience, crisis, or peer pressure. Twenge suggests having a plan for these times.

Airplane rides, for example, might be the exception to your thoughtful rules, when the 10-year-old gets unlimited time on their favorite gaming platform. It's important to be transparent about these exceptions to avoid confusion and backtracking.

Twenge also encourages parents to substitute TV time for device use at home if they really need to occupy a child. You'll know what they're watching, compared to how they might spend time on a tablet or phone, and the content is probably higher quality than watching short videos on social media.

Along with the rules you set, Twenge urges parents to use parental controls or even a third-party monitoring system. Even if your child has limited screen time, you still want to prevent them from discovering or engaging with harmful content.

Twenge says she's come to the "reluctant conclusion" that device and app-specific parental controls are so difficult to use that third-party software, like Bark or Aura, may be necessary to ensure they're staying safe and following the rules you've set.

3. Coach kids through the downsides of less screen time

Even if a child likes the idea of spending less time online, the very real tradeoffs to them can include boredom and social exclusion.

Sarah Keating, vice president of Girl Scout Experience for the Girl Scouts, says parents play an important role in coaching kids through these concerns. First, she says adults need to be comfortable with the idea of their children being bored.

To make this less painful for everyone, Keating recommends offering screen-free alternatives that help satisfy the tactile sensory experience of picking up a phone or tablet. For younger children, these could be blocks or markers. Older children might enjoy an activity book like Mad Libs or doing something with their hands, such as crocheting.

Twenge suggests asking a tween or teen to make a list of activities they can do instead of scrolling or posting. You might also discuss how screen time can worsen their boredom, a phenomenon that research suggests is real.

It's also helpful to remind teens of what they still have, Twenge says, particularly if you've given them a "dumb" phone or voice over internet protocol (VoIP) phone to communicate with friends.

Keating acknowledges that kids use technology and internet culture to create cliques that exclude others. She says it's critical to talk with your child about this dynamic and help them create a script they can use in such situation. Instead of feeling rejected, for example, the child might ask their friend with curiosity about a meme they've referenced.

4. Encourage real-world freedom over screen time

Price likes to flip the concern about missing out on its head by pointing out what offline opportunities kids will lose if they spend so much time online.

In this regard, she hopes that parents trying to set new screen time norms for their kids also offer real-world freedom that helps build confidence and independence.

"It's not just about restriction," Price says. "It's about actually making life more fun and enjoyable."

Tweens and teens might get opportunities to walk to the store or a friend's house by themselves. While younger children might need a different approach, parents can focus on ensuring they're playing with friends or at the park instead of sitting at home on a screen.

To generate more ideas, parents can ask their children what they're interested in trying or learning and then figure out ways for them to do that independently.

The way Price thinks about it, recalibrating screen time isn't just about getting kids offline, it's about bringing "kids back to life."

The state of New York has passed new legislation requiring social media platforms like X and TikTok to add warning labels to their services.

Much like the warnings found on cigarette packaging, the new law — signed by Governor Kathy Hochul — targets platforms that rely on features such as infinite scrolling, autoplay, and algorithmic feeds. These services will now be required to display labels cautioning users, particularly young people, about the potential mental health risks associated with prolonged use.

Under the law, warning labels must appear when a user first interacts with any feature deemed "predatory," and will continue to surface periodically afterward. The requirements apply whenever these platforms are accessed from within New York, regardless of the companies' locations.

The move comes amid a growing body of research linking heavy social media use to negative mental health outcomes among young people. A large, multi-year study published earlier this year found that increased social media use among tweens and teens was associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms over time, while the reverse was not true.

Researchers behind the study said the findings strengthen concerns that certain online behaviors, including excessive scrolling and algorithm-driven engagement, may actively contribute to declining mental well-being rather than simply reflecting it.

At the same time, platforms like TikTok have begun rolling out their own safety and oversight features in response to mounting pressure from lawmakers, parents, and regulators. Earlier this year, TikTok expanded its parental control tools, adding options for screen time blocking, scheduled app access, and increased visibility into teens’ followers and activity.

The company has framed those changes as part of a broader push toward mindfulness and healthier usage habits, particularly for users under 18, even as critics argue that design features like autoplay and infinite feeds continue to encourage prolonged engagement.

Spoiler warning: This story discusses major Jujutsu Kaisen manga events, including character deaths that have not yet appeared in the anime ahead of its third season premiere on Jan. 8, 2026.

Every year on Christmas Eve, I brace myself before opening my apps.

Not because of an influx of schmaltzy holiday content, but because I’m a Jujutsu Kaisen fan, and Dec. 24 is a day of collective mourning. My feed knows it. My algorithm knows it. And judging by the endless stream of edits, fan art, and softly devastating posts, so does everyone else.

For Jujutsu Kaisen fans, Christmas Eve is a holy day of remembrance.

If you’re even loosely connected to the fandom, you’ve probably noticed it by now: the sudden return of best friends–turned–diametrically opposed soulmates, Geto Suguru and Satoru Gojo, to the timeline. Side-by-side edits. Manga screenshots. Subtle references that say everything without saying too much.

The reason is simple and painful. In the Jujutsu Kaisen timeline, the real Geto Suguru dies on Dec. 24. One year later, on that same date, Satoru Gojo meets his fate in the manga. And thus, the unofficial SatoSugu Day was born.

Geto's death is already well-known to anime viewers; it has been animated, discussed, dissected, and mourned openly for years. Gojo's death, however, remains one of the manga’s most devastating and closely guarded spoilers, especially with the anime's fast-approaching third season premiere in January. That's why scrolling through my feed feels like walking into a quiet wake.

Here are just a handful of the posts I've favorited today:

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(And a special shout-out to this heartbreaking edit, which I cannot embed due to copyright restrictions, but I will link to because it's that good.)

Geto and Gojo's cursed relationship sits at the emotional core of Jujutsu Kaisen. They’re not just powerful jujutsu sorcerers or fan favorites; they’re a tragedy in parallel motion. Former best friends. Ideological opposites. Two people shaped by the same world who responded to it in completely different ways. Their bond and its unraveling are what give the story its weight long before Yuji Itadori enters the frame.

So when Christmas Eve rolls around, fans don't just mourn two characters; they mourn what could have been. The friendship that fractured. The future that never arrived. The way fate, in Jujutsu Kaisen, feels both cruel and intentional.

What fascinates me most is how specifically the fandom marks this day. It exists entirely online, sustained by fans who recall the date and return to it every year, much like muscle memory.

And maybe that’s why it hits so hard. Dec. 24 is supposed to be comforting. Instead, for fans like me, it’s a reminder of how deeply a story can burrow into your emotional life. How fictional characters can leave real marks. How shared grief, even over something imagined, can feel real when thousands of people are feeling it at once.

With the anime's anticipated Culling Game arc set to arrive in January, this Christmas Eve feels especially charged. There's an awareness that soon, the mourning won’t be confined to manga readers anymore.

It's hard to believe but some good things did happen online 2025.

Scrolling around the internet these last 12 months hasn't always been a pleasant experience — our timelines were full of AI slop, recession fears, and misinformation. But good things did manage to happen, too.

Mashable has kept tabs on uplifting digital stories with our Good Connection series. And if you need a timeline cleanse to end 2025, we've got eight online stories from this year that'll do just the trick.

1. The 'Ask an Axolotl' earworm

January feels like ages ago by now, but it was the month we were all humming along to a little ditty about an axolotl. TikTokker @doctor_waffle posted a video about the adorable amphibian. It's cute and so, so catchy.

Sure, the song was clearly intended for children but it seemed to soothe anyone with a pulse.

2. Everyone rallied for Buddies coffeeshop

When Rachel Rose, the owner of Buddies Coffee Roasters in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, sobbed on camera, there was no way she could've predicted the response. She was going to lose the place she worked so hard for, and her emotion was real and raw.

People rallied in response, absolutely flooding Buddies with business. Even celebs like Joe Jonas showed up. Lines wrapped around the block.

Buddies did close — the situation with their lease wasn't fixable — but it seems Rachel and the roasting business are both thriving.

3. The cutest Craigslist love story

Oscar season gifted us the story of how Colman Domingo met his husband. Somehow, some way, Craigslist's Missed Connection section sparked a whirlwind, decades-long love story. It's truly the sweetest thing.

4. A Yankee who simply loves burritos

New York Yankees catcher Austin Wells went viral this year for his passion project: reviewing breakfast burritos. During his travels throughout the season, he'd try breakfast burritos and rate them. That's it. Just a dude loving burritos.

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Wells does seem to be a fair reviewer, however. His top-rated burrito of the year came from the clubhouse of the Mets, the Yankees' crosstown rival.

5. The foster dog who stole our hearts

I'm a big fan of Isabel Klee, or @SimonSits on TikTok, who regularly takes in foster dogs. The internet as a whole fell in love with one of Klee's fosters, Tiki, who was rescued from pretty rough circumstances. The little pup healed with Klee from a dog that was clearly scared and scarred, to a precocious, adorable dog that got adopted.

It was such a lovely story.

6. The little niece who made the song of the summer

It's a pretty simple story: Creator @day1keenan has a niece who wanted to sing. And sing she did, making an absolute banger that many called the song of the summer.

This TikTok racked up more than 60 million views.

That little girl genuinely has talent and I could listen to that ditty all day long.

7. The NYC subway kitty

I don't know if you've ever seen a kitty ride the subway but it is freaking adorable. Look at this cosmopolitan little baby just hop right on.

As if the story couldn't get any sweeter, the commuter who scoops up the kitten in the video ended up adopting her. She's named Emmie, in honor of NYC's MTA.

8. Pop-up food pantries to the rescue

SNAP benefits were thrown into chaos amid the government shutdown this year, and neighbors came to the rescue to help one another. There were countless videos of pop-up food pantries, which appeared seemingly overnight to help neighbors.

AJ Owen (@ajpgh412) had perhaps the most viral pantry moment, when an anonymous donor dropped off a stack of cash to fund the pop-up Owen started with his children.

"The outpouring online is…overwhelming in the best way possible," Owen wrote in an email to Mashable at the time. "Seeing so many other people touched by what we are doing and deciding to do something as well brings tears to my eyes. Give people an opportunity to help and they will absolutely do it!"

So, yes, 2025 wasn't always great. But there were some truly lovely moments, too.

Louisiana's Secure Online Child Interaction and Age Limitation act, a social media law that requires social platforms to verify user ages and implement parental controls, has been struck down.

The before the buzzer decision was issued on Dec. 15, made just ahead of the act's enforcement period by Louisiana regulators. The federal judge ruled in favor of tech trade lobbying group NetChoice, which has been constitutionally challenging age verification laws across the country. In April, NetChoice successfully blocked Arkansas' Social Media Safety Act.

"The Act is at once under-inclusive and over-inclusive," wrote judge John W. deGravelles in the Louisiana decision.

NetChoice joins other free speech advocates who argue sweeping age verification laws may pose large scale privacy risks, restrict access to protected speech, and chill open expression online. Online safety advocates, meanwhile, have pushed for social media regulation in the wake of widespread child exploitation and mental health concerns.

Louisiana was the first to enact such a law in 2023, and other states quickly followed suit. Currently, 25 U.S. states have some sort of age verification law on the books, with many focused on restricting access to online pornography. Most recently, Missouri began enforcing an age-gaiting law that requires user verification on sites with "one-third or more pornographic content" — Congress has discussed more than a dozen online safety acts in this month alone.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill has said she will appeal the ruling. Murrill has made social media regulation a priority of the state, including filing the first of a wave of new lawsuits against kids gaming platform Roblox. “The assault on children by online predators is an all-hands-on-deck problem. It’s unfortunate that the court chose to protect huge corporations that facilitate child exploitation over the legislative policy to require simple age verification mechanisms,” said Murrill.

Are you a creator who shares links on Facebook? Be sure not to go over your monthly quota.

Some creators on Facebook are receiving a notification that they will be limited to posting a certain number of links in organic posts each month, unless they subscribed to Meta Verified for $14.99 per month.

Here's the Meta link-sharing limit test notification currently going out to select creators. Credit: Matt Navarra / Threads

“This is a limited test to understand whether the ability to publish an increased volume of posts with links add additional value for Meta Verified subscribers,” Meta told social media consultant Matt Navarra, who initially posted a screenshot of the notification on Meta-owned Threads.

The screenshot posted by Navarra says that creators are limited to two link shares per month; however, Meta has since stated that the number of monthly links for non-verified creators varies as part of the test. According to the notification, Meta gives creators a limited number of link shares per month, and if they go unused, they do not rollover to the next month.

Regular Facebook profiles, which the vast majority of its users have, are currently not affected by the test. Meta is limiting this link limit experiment to users utilizing Facebook Pages and Facebook profiles in professional mode. Facebook Pages and profiles set to professional mode are typically used by businesses, creators, and other public figures.

For those who are affected, links remain unlimited for URLs to Meta properties such as Instagram, WhatsApp, or other internal Facebook links. In addition, the notification also says Meta exempts links posted in the comments of a post, which means those are currently unlimited, too.

As Meta said in its statement, the company is trying to add more features to the Meta Verified paid subscription product by paywalling links on Facebook. 

However, as Navarra points out, it's likely that Meta is also trying to test the Meta Verified badge as a "trust signal" so that users come to expect a certain level of trustworthiness from profiles and pages with verified. As Mashable has reported, the company has been experiencing an uptick in scam ads on Facebook in particular. But, as many have experienced on Elon Musk's X, many scammers and disinformation spreaders are more than willing to pay a monthly fee for a verified checkmark badge.

In the evening of Dec. 14, a large crowd of people gathered on Australia's Bondi Beach to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah, and were instead met with violence, as two gunmen opened fire on the group. As of today, 15 people have been killed.

One of the assailants was taken down by bystander Ahmed Al Ahmed, whose brave decision to grapple with the shooter and take over his weapon was captured on video and shared widely across social media platforms. Informed by an epidemic of gun violence that has turned many bystanders into heroes, it's clear on camera that the man in the white shirt is potentially saving dozens of lives. The long-barreled gun is in clear view as he wrests it from the hand of a man clad in black, who then topples over and ambles away.

But X's Grok, the AI chatbot designed by Elon Musk's AI venture xAI, didn't see it as such.

As users stumbled across the harrowing video of Ahmed the following morning and asked the chatbot to explain, Grok described the scene as "an old viral video of a man climbing a palm tree in a parking lot, possibly to trim it." X users have since added a fact-check to the bot's reply. In another response, Grok mislabeled the video as footage from the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, and credited it to the Tropical Cyclone Alfred in another, Gizmodo reported.

X hasn't yet explained why this glitch occurred, or why Grok has made similar fumbles beyond queries about Bondi Beach.

But watchdogs know why, and it's very simple. Chatbots are bad at breaking news. In the wake of the killing of far-right commentator Charlie Kirk, Grok exacerbated conspiracy theories about the shooter and Kirk's own bodyguards, telling some users that a graphic video clearly showing Kirk's death was just a meme. Other AI-powered search sources, including Google AI Overview, also gave false information in the immediate aftermath of Kirk's death.

"Instead of declining to answer, models now pull from whatever information is available online at the given moment, including low-engagement websites, social posts, and AI-generated content farms seeded by malign actors. As a result, chatbots repeat and validate false claims during high-risk, fast-moving events," NewsGuard researcher McKenzie Sadeghi told Mashable at the time.

Social media platforms have also scaled back human fact-checking across the board, and chatbots may instead prioritize frequency over accuracy in real-time news responses.

AI companies know this is a glaring gap for their bots, and it's why they've courted news publications into larger and larger licensing deals to better their products. Earlier this month, Meta signed multiple commercial AI agreements with news publishers, including CNN, Fox News, and international publication Le Monde, adding to its existing partnership with Reuters. Google is running a pilot program with participating news publishers to expand AI-powered features, including article summaries, to Google News.

Hallucinations and accuracy also remain a big problem for large-language models and AI chatbots in general, which often confidently provide false information to users.