• AI-generated recipes are popping up all over Facebook — and real people are making them.
• Some people don't realize they're making a dish from a recipe written by a robot.
• I had to try making one myself, just to see how it would turn out.

AI-generated recipes are popping up all over Facebook — circulating from pages that pump out eerie-looking images of food by the hour.

Unlike the "Shrimp Jesus" type of AI-generated slop, this food-centered stuff flies under the radar because it looks so much like an existing genre that's already all over social media: gooey cheese-pull style food porn.

So, while an image of an old woman standing next to a crocheted tank is obviously fake, no one is going to bat an eye at a recipe for a healthy weeknight dinner.

I looked into a few Facebook pages that are posting what appear to be AI-generated recipes with AI-generated images. (How'd I come to suspect? The images had telltale signs of AI, like disappearing tines on a fork or weirdly shaped fingers or distorted edges.)

What I found most surprising: People are actually cooking these AI-generated recipes. Sometimes, they're even enjoying the results.

So I had to get in on the kitchen action myself. I made one of the salmon dishes — let's call it "SalmonGPT."

One popular Facebook page pumps out recipes each hour

I focused on Lora Chef, a Facebook page with more than 150,000 followers. It's one of many similar recipe pages with some telltale AI features that are proliferating across the platform. The page's profile picture features an attractive brunette woman. It also links out to a website, which offers a signup for an email recipe newsletter.

The phone number on the Lora Chef Facebook page didn't work when I tried multiple times over several days. I emailed the contact address listed and initially got a reply— "hi, how can I help you?" — but the account didn't respond to subsequent emails with my questions, like who was behind the page and to confirm it was using AI. I also sent a Facebook direct message and didn't get a reply. According to the page's "about" section, its managers are located in Morocco and Turkey.

In theory, AI-generated images are supposed to be labeled on Meta platforms, but it's a tricky task, and let's be honest: AI chicken parm isn't going to destabilize democracy. Meta pointed to this policy and declined to comment further.

Lora Chef has lately been posting a new recipe to Facebook about once an hour, which means there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of recipes. (I gave up scrolling when I got as far back as December, but the page was created in July 2024.)

The images all have a similar appearance. Specifically, almost all the dishes have the same beige sauce oozing out over the food — usually from a spoon, fork, chopsticks, or some other utensil that only AI could dream up. The sauce looks oddly similar in all the dishes, but in their titles, the recipes refer to it as a garlic sauce, white sauce, cream sauce, garlic aioli dipping sauce, etc. (Even the desserts have the same-looking sauce.)

The dishes look reasonably appealing, and a lot of them have comments from real people expressing things like "yummy!" or saying they'd like to try it. Very commonly, people tag a friend in the comments — perhaps suggesting it to a spouse for dinner.

A food writer in Omaha, Nebraska, told me that AI recipes are latching onto something.

"I can see the interest people have in the recipes, which all feature trendy ingredients like cottage cheese — or heavily featuring protein, and all with very bright, appealing photos," said Sarah Baker Hansen, who runs a food website and writes for the nonprofit Flatwater Free Press. "It seems designed for clicks, shares, and comments."

Still, she said, when looking at recipes across lots of different Facebook pages, "I think it's pretty obvious which posts are computer-generated and which are actual recipes made by humans, with photographs taken by humans."

These people actually cooked the recipes

In the comments on the Lora Chef page for a vegetables and tzatziki dip, Lizzy Mimzy said the sauce ended up tasting exactly like ranch. When I chatted with her, she said she had made several other dishes from the page but hadn't realized it was AI. "I was wondering why the pictures looked like all similar colors and textures," she said.

"AI-generated kinda takes away from the real love people put in their food," Mimzy said.

Jacq Dolittle commented that her boyfriend had made the "grilled chicken and broccoli bowl with creamy garlic sauce" — one of the page's most popular posts, with more than 2,600 comments and 25,000 shares on Facebook. She told me it turned out a little bland but still good. "I have heard AI recipes are always a bit off, LOL," she wrote.

Other dishes seemed to have some problems.

On a popular Parmesan-crusted chicken recipe, several comments mentioned that the chicken needed to be pan-fried, not baked, to achieve the kind of brown crust in the image. One comment read: "I didn't realize this was AI-generated until after I made it, and I'm disappointed in myself. The sauce isn't too bad aside from being watery, and the chicken itself tastes like nothing LOL."

I made AI salmon with avocado crema and lime

I had to test out one of these recipes for myself. I'm no stranger to trying AI-suggested food — I once made pizza with glue in the sauce because Google's AI answers suggested it.

From the Lora Chef page, I picked a recent recipe for salmon with a — you guessed it — white sauce because it seemed relatively easy, and I needed it easy because I am a very, very bad cook.

The cream sauce called for a food processor, which I wasn't entirely happy to have to drag out of the cupboard, but OK.

The salmon called for some spices on top and then pan-frying in olive oil. My husband, the chef of the family, remarked that canola oil would typically be preferred because of its higher smoke point. (Perhaps this was an AI mistake.)

In the end, I served it over rice, and it was ... fine. Somewhat bland, both the fish and the sauce. But I ate the AI food and lived.

AI, it seems, is capable of generating acceptable recipes for common dishes. This makes sense — there's a lot about cooking that is replicated over and over, and the same steps tend to follow each other in the process. This is perfect for AI.

But even though generative AI can do some things capably, it doesn't always do things well. Real recipe writing is nuanced and difficult work — cooks test out each step and use their knowledge to avoid pitfalls. For example, my salmon called for sesame seeds on top (I skipped them), but those seeds probably would've burned in the pan (although they would have been good for baked or roasted salmon). A human recipe writer would've intuitively known this.

On the scale of what harm AI-generated content flooding Facebook might do, recipes are certainly not like political misinformation or a financial scam.

But unlike other AI-generated stuff, which might just elicit a comment or a "like" from an unsuspecting person, there are actually people out there spending their evenings cooking and eating these recipes.

• General Mills and other brands are launching high-protein versions of their products.
• This trend mirrors past health fads like low-carb and low-fat diets, with new influences.
• Social media and health influencers are amplifying the protein craze and other diet trends.

Protein is having a moment, and big packaged food brands like General Mills are keeping up.

An article I read that fascinated me on New York Magazine's Grub Street looks at how big brands synonymous with carbs — Wheaties and Cheerios, for example — are trying to muscle their way into the latest craze for more protein.

(Wheaties Protein Maple Almond offers 22 grams of protein, up from 3 grams in the classic Wheaties flavor. That's some swole flakes.)

Big supermarket brands launching high-protein versions of their stapes (I await protein Oreos, personally) feels like the absolute peak of a food/health trend cycle. As Grub Street points out, this isn't so far off from the Atkins low-carb craze of the 2000s or the low-fat fad of the 1990s. (I will forever remember the taste and texture of the SnackWell low-fat brownie.)

Underlining the trend, General Mills said in December, when it launched a high-protein version of Cheerios, that its research showed 71% of consumers were trying to get more protein in their diets, and their new products were looking to "meet people where they are."

Of course, there are new factors at plan now, too, like patients on Ozempic whose doctors encourage them to eat diets high in protein to aim to prevent muscle loss, which can be a side effect of GLP-1 inhibitors.

Health food fads come and go — for example, gut health drinks seem to be the latest version of antioxidant-rich beverages. (Remember Pom Wonderful?) Olipop, a line of canned beverages marketed as a healthy version of soda, just raised $50 million in a funding round that valued it at $1.85 billion, Bloomberg reported.

MAHA movement and others help push health trends on social

I have a theory that social media of this moment has supercharged protein mania.

There seems to have been a vibe shift that exhibits itself in more nontraditional health crazes lately: Think the MAHA movement, raw milk influencer moms, the Liver King, and other carnivore diet enthusiasts. Then there's the popularity of pop science gurus like Andrew Huberman espousing diet and exercise ideas.

This kind of stuff has always existed — and I'm not a health expert, so some of these things might or might not be for you — but I do know a lot about the culture of the moment, and it feels like these ideas about optimization and macros and an obsession with protein have gone — forgive the obvious metaphor — on steroids.

There's real science behind how getting more protein in your diet is (probably) a good idea. I have even found myself influenced to try eating more protein (although with these egg prices, I'm not sure I can afford to).

Still, maybe don't take things as far as Grub Street writer Chris Gayomali did, when he did this:

I came across a category of people who drink chicken-breast smoothies. Rather than subjecting themselves to supplements or powders, they'll throw some shredded chicken breast into a blender with other smoothie ingredients.

I was curious. Maybe this concoction could offer a perfect marriage of the unprocessed simplicity of chicken breast with the convenient efficiency of a protein bar. So after picking up a pack of chicken tenderloins at the store and boiling three (150 grams uncooked, about 48 grams of protein), I tore the chunks of flesh into the blender and added a splash of water plus everything I could find in my freezer: the crumbly end of a bag of raspberries, two bananas, some blueberries, a forgotten package of açai.

The result looked like a normal berry smoothie and, on first sip, tasted like one. Then the back end arrived, coating my tongue in what I can only describe as a slick film with the viscosity and taste of a can of Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup.

I don't think I'll ever recover from visualizing that, Chris!

• We all know eggs are expensive — probably forever. And they're missing from grocery shelves, too.
• As if that weren't enough, there's other egg-related bad news: Their shells chip more often.
• When will this nightmare end? (I asked an eggspert: Probably never!)

Sorry to stress you out, but the egg situation is getting worse and worse.

According to eggsperts — no, I will not apologize for that — not only are there super-high prices and empty shelves: But we're also looking at a return to eggs with weak and unusually chippy shells.

You already know egg prices went up. They're on everyone's mind — at least egg-eating minds. A dozen eggs cost an average of $4.15 in December, according to federal statistics — up from $2.51 the previous December.

And in a true sign of the eggpocalypse: Waffle House is now adding a 50-cent surcharge for eggs — for each egg, that is!

On TikTok, Magda S. has been tracking egg prices in a spreadsheet that's online and open to the public. She didn't want to reveal her last name, but her full identity is known to BI.

Magda has gone viral for the stunt and said she plans to continue to update her spreadsheet for the next four years — to mark whether egg prices decline during Donald Trump's presidency.

"Everyone wants to talk about eggs," she told me.

If you haven't been to a grocery store lately, you might not know another part of the egg emergency: Shelves have started to run bare.

A worsening avian influenza outbreak has caused an egg shortage across the US. Viral videos of customers swarming the egg pallets at Costco are all over social media. Last weekend, thieves made off with 100,000 eggs from the Pete & Gerry's distribution center in Pennsylvania.

My local grocery store in Connecticut has put a limit on the number of cartons per customer (two). A friend who's a workout enthusiast who used to eat five protein-rich eggs every morning lamented to me that his "macros" were in disarray.

Egg prices aren't the worst of it — the chips are back

Now, things are probably going to get even worse. Because the eggs — if you can even find them, not to mention afford them — are going to start getting chippy again.

More than a year ago, I had noticed that it seemed like eggshells were chipping into the bowl or pan more often when I was cracking them. My cracking technique hadn't changed, but it seemed like I was suddenly having to fish out little bits of shell all the time — something that was previously a rare occurrence.

It turned out that I wasn't wrong — something about the quality of eggshells at the time had made them chippier than before.

So last March, I spoke to Sheila Purdum, professor of animal science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who specializes in poultry. She explained that the 2022 bird flu outbreak had a lingering effect on egg production. Because so many hens had to be destroyed, the remaining healthy hens were kept laying eggs past the typical age of their, uh, "retirement."

Hens are typically considered past their laying prime by age 2 or 3. By this age, hens can still lay eggs, but there are downsides: The eggs tend to have thinner shells, which are more prone to breaking in the container or chipping into the bowl when you crack them.

Thankfully, over the past year, I've anecdotally noticed that eggs seemed back to normal, cracking like they used to. This made sense, as chicken flocks rebounded, even if prices were going up.

But the current shortage of eggs and the avian influenza continuing have me worried. So I reached back out to Professor Purdum to see if we're in for another round of weak shells.

Unfortunately, probably so. Purdum told me she predicts that 15% to 20% of the US flock will be made up of older hens to make up for lost younger ones that were culled because of the flu.

Still, things aren't all doom and gloom.

"Scientists and nutritionists like myself are already conducting research about how to keep 'old' hens healthy and producing good eggshells!" Purdum said. "Work is being done. There is hope."

In the future, we might still be shelling out the big clucks for eggs, but we can hope that they at least won't be too chippy.

• Donald Trump's executive orders could stop cheap shipping for e-commerce orders direct from China.
• That would be bad news for Temu and Shein.
• The biggest question: What will happen to the $2.74 mousepad I ordered from Temu last week?!

A few days ago, I noticed I needed a new mousepad. The cloth covering was starting to peel away from the rubber. So I went to Temu — more on that in a minute.

Mousepads are some of those things that — in theory — you should never buy; they just come into your life like cheap umbrellas or Mason jars.

But due to decades of repetitive motion from typing, my weary wrists need the kind of mousepad with the ergonomic padded blob at the end, not the plain, flat ones you accumulate for free.

So, spend my own money I must.

Now, I personally have conflicted feelings about shopping on Temu, but a mousepad is kind of a perfect Temu item: quality doesn't really matter, and a $3 one is the same as a $10 one — at least to the human eye. As a price-sensitive shopper, I went for it.

I found a plain, gray mousepad with a wrist rest on Temu for $2.74 and ordered it.

Well, it wasn't quite that simple — Temu requires a $15 minimum for an order to ship, so I threw in a few other items — a squishy elbow rest pad, a new phone case, some hair scrunchies.

Then, disaster struck. Shortly after my order was placed, President Trump declared an end to the "de minimis" exemption. There's still some discussion as to exactly what his executive order will mean, but de minimis is the law that allows orders under $800 to ship directly from China to US customers without encountering duty and tax. It's a big part of how Temu and Shein have operated in the US so successfully.

Then, things went apocalyptic for my mousepad: Tuesday evening, the USPS stopped taking inbound parcels from China to the US. By Wednesday morning, the USPS had reversed that decision, resuming service.

What all of this means for Temu and similar sellers like Shein isn't exactly clear, but let's just assume it's not good. (Temu didn't respond to a request for comment.)

Still, both e-commerce platforms have advanced beyond only shipping direct from mainland China, and now many of their sellers have warehouses in the US to ship orders domestically.

On the homepage of Temu, the top promoted section is for "local warehouse stores" — sellers from warehouses in the US.

Shein's website has a less prominent tab for "QuickShip" items that ship from the US, which isn't visible at all on its mobile app.

While relations with one of our largest trade partners are up in the air, I have great news about my mousepad (which I'm sure you were worried about).

My Temu order appears to be still moving along in processing to be shipped.

• Researchers at Notre Dame studied news coverage of teens using their phones and social media.
• They found the news stories lacked one key perspective: teens themselves.
• The stories focused on the potential harms — not on any positives.

As a parent, I'm consumed with worry about the potential harms of the so-called phone-based childhood. Sometimes I wish I could put my own kids in a Faraday cage.

Still, as a tech journalist who has covered this topic, I know it's more complicated than just phone + social media = bad.

So I was intrigued when I came across a study by researchers at Notre Dame that found that media narratives on the issue tended to be one-sided. In other words, the stories often didn't include potential positives.

It's important to look at how news organizations might be shaping public opinion about kids and phones. Headlines drive discussions in Congress, in local governments, and on the playground. Right now, the resounding takeaway seems to be: Screens and social media are terrible for kids.

To analyze media coverage, the researchers searched 10 large news outlets for articles from 2020 to 2024 that mentioned the Kids Online Safety Act or other search terms around youth online safety. They found that all the coverage focused on potential harms, like issues with mental health, self-harm, sextortion, or screen addiction.

They also found that articles tended to focus on restrictive methods as solutions — taking away phones completely or banning phones in schools, for example.

This doesn't surprise me. Sure, there's more coverage of the harms because, frankly, there are harms! For example, a recent Pew survey found that about four out of 10 teens said they felt they spent too much time on their phones, and the US surgeon general suggested adding warning labels to social media for young people. Even TikTok discussed internal research about how quickly teens could become addicted to its platform.

But what struck me most about the Notre Dame study was a third finding: that most of the media coverage the researchers analyzed failed to include youth voices. In other words, the articles about teens often didn't quote any teens.

Stories often exclude teen voices

Karla Badillo-Urquiola, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Notre Dame, and Ozioma Oguine, a doctoral student focusing on human and computer interaction, talked to me about the paper.

Oguine said media outlets should strive for more teen perspectives.

Having written some of these stories myself, I'm guilty of this, especially when an article is about something specific in the news related to social platforms or lawmakers. But I do appreciate getting to actually hear from teens, as my colleague Kelly Burch did when she interviewed high schoolers about the TikTok ban.

Oguine said their research suggested that online safety was being viewed from a "one size fits all" kind of bucket. It also largely didn't include perspectives out of the mainstream, like from gay or minority youth.

"I think news outlets might probably want to take a look at how can we include marginalized perspectives into this conversation? What are the lived experiences of youth from marginalized backgrounds, and are there any benefits of online technologies to them?'"

As a result, the main narrative in the news about the dangers of phones and teens can lack nuance.

This doesn't mean Badillo-Urquiola doesn't believe that social media or phones can be harmful. (She does.) But their assessment of more than 150 news articles uncovered something surprising: They were all about the risks and harms, not potential benefits, of online experiences. (Their research, which focused on news items about policy, didn't include some positive stories, such as social media's ability to be a "lifeline" for LGBTQ+ youth.)

One thing the researchers observed was that coverage mainly focused on controlling screen time — taking away phones in school, for example — instead of more holistic approaches.

"A lot of the work that I am doing is sort of how do we move beyond parental mediation strategies to look at more community-based practices and creating more social and ecological supports for these youth," Badillo-Urquiola said. "That's what we wanted to look at: Is any of that coming out in any of these articles? For the most part, it's not, right? It's still very parent-focused."

This is a theme I've heard before — that putting the onus on parents to be in charge of their kids' online safety isn't fair to parents, some of whom might not have the time or knowledge to navigate a bunch of in-app controls and settings.

"The idea isn't to take away parents out of the equation," she said. "The idea is to actually give more support to parents so that they are able to make decisions."

As a journalist who's written about this stuff, I found myself slightly defensive. It's not always our job to suggest solutions to the problems we're reporting on, after all — and the idea that the media writes only about "bad news" is overly simplistic.

But there's something here — the public understanding of the topic of teens and social media is somewhere between an unprecedented public health crisis and a fake moral panic, depending on your viewpoint. This study certainly will be in my mind when thinking about how to frame future coverage.

• A new bill introduced in Connecticut would force movie theaters to list a movie's "real" start time.
• This would mean you could time your visit to skip the ads and trailers before finding your seat.
• Boo! Hiss! Trailers are part of the magic of moviegoing.

Imagine you're Nicole Kidman, wearing a sparkling dark suit, entering an empty theater. You take your seat with your big soda, the flickering light illuminating your face. Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this. The joy and thrill of seeing a movie in the theater always comes with a moment of anticipation: the trailers that come before the movie.

And yes, sometimes now, even ads. But watching these, that's just part of the experience, right? We go in knowing that there will be a few minutes before the movie starts. As a chronically late person, I find this buffer of an extra 10 or so minutes useful.

One lawmaker from Connecticut is trying to change this.

State Sen. Martin M. Looney, a Democrat representing New Haven in the Connecticut State Senate, has proposed a bill that would require movie theaters to list the real start times of a movie — not when the trailers start.

This means that a theater's website would have to list both the time the ads or trailers begin and the time the actual film begins — something like:

"A Complete Unknown" 7:00 p.m. (film starts at 7:08 p.m.)

Looney did not respond to a request for comment from BI, but he told the Register Citizen, which first reported on the bill: "It seems to be an abuse of people's time. If they want to get there early and watch the promos, they can. But if they just want to see the feature, they ought to be able to get there just in time for that."

Sure, we've all been slightly frustrated having to sit through not just trailers but also regular advertisements when we paid for a ticket just to see a movie. But to me, sitting through the previews feels like a small price to pay for the pleasures of moviegoing.

(Although like much in politics, it's a divisive issue. Several of my colleagues love the idea of knowing a movie's true start time.)

Ads and trailers also are a part of revenue for some theaters at a time when movie ticket sales have not recovered from the start of the pandemic, and as streaming has eaten into their business.

A spokesperson for the National Association of Theatre Owners declined to comment about the bill.

The trailers before the main attraction also allow movie lovers to learn about new movies. An EMARKETER report based on a YouGov poll from late last year found that in-theater trailers or ads were the No. 3 most likely way people saw promotions for new movies in the US and Canada — after TV and social media.

Some theaters aren't thrilled by the idea.

Ryan Wenke, CEO of the Prospector Theater in Ridgefield, Connecticut, which is a nonprofit that employs adults with disabilities, told Business Insider that their movies typically start about five minutes after listed showtimes.

"I hope the 2025 legislative session prioritizes more pressing issues like disability rights and employment opportunities for underrepresented populations," Wenke said.

• Sometime in 2023, public perception of Mark Zuckerberg warmed up.
• But the tide has turned after Meta's big fact-checking changes and Zuck's Joe Rogan appearance.
• Want proof? It's not an exact science but just look at Meta's own AI summaries on Zuckerberg.

RIP the Zuckermoon.

Thus concludes a brief window of time when Mark Zuckerberg got to enjoy a honeymoon of sorts in the public eye — when he was both cool and beloved.

As a semi-professional Zuckologist, I'd peg the start of the Zuckaissance as July 2023 when Elon Musk tried to challenge the Meta CEO to an MMA cage match, and Zuckerberg posted a shirtless (jacked) selfie. This was around the same time Threads launched. It offered a new place for people disillusioned with changes on X — and Zuckerberg himself started posting playfully there.

But the warmth of the lingering "Hot Zuck Summer" seemed to abruptly go ice cold this month when Meta announced changes to its content policies and Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan's podcast.

Now, it seems that the new Zuck 3.0 lost some of the fans that the CEO had won over.

Still, we can't rely on just my own personal vibes-based assessment of how public perception of Zuckerberg has seemed to turn. Which is why it's great that Meta — which declined to comment on this story — has its own sentiment analysis of sorts: Meta AI, which writes summaries of the comments people make beneath Facebook posts.

Zuck's getting roasted in the comment section

Let's look at Zuckerberg's own Facebook page and the AI-generated summaries below pictures from key points in Zuck's transformation.

For instance, take this photo he posted with his wife, Priscilla Chan, on January 1:

The AI summary of the comments is largely positive — commenters, the AI says, have wished the couple a happy new year:

(Of note: I think the "daddy robe" thing may be a reference to a photo of Priscilla wearing a fashionable robe in a photo of Zuckerberg gifting her a statue of herself — itself a moment that brought a lot of positive attention for being a cool Wife Guy.)

Now let's look at a similar photo of the couple, all dressed up for the inauguration earlier this month:

Meta's AI summary of the comments beneath the photo isn't quite as kind. It says commenters accused Zuck of "selling out," among other things:

Ouch.

The evolution of Mark Zuckerberg's image

I ask you now to think purely about Mark Zuckerberg's public image, not the realities of the human or the nuances of the company.

For a long time, public perception of Zuckerberg was focused on him being awkward and robotic, with his closely cropped hair and nervous mannerisms, like the widely memed 2018 congressional hearings where he appeared impossibly parched.

Sometime in the spring of 2023, things changed. Zuckerberg started posting more relaxed, personal things to Facebook and Instagram. He seemed to even be having fun on his new platform, Threads.

You know the rest — his new hairdo, hobbies, physique, and clothes all made him look like a fun, cool guy. He wore custom shirts with his own name! Someone paid $40,000 for his used chain! He seemed self-aware with a sense of humor about himself. And compared to his fellow tech billionaires, Zuckerberg seemed, frankly, pretty normal.

Whether his personal image shift was purely self-propelled or shaped by some of Meta's PR people or other advisors, we'll never know and are free to make our guesses. It's true that his PR people have some control over his public output, but it's also worth noting that he routinely has gone over their heads to post things they didn't want him to, like posting a joke about surfing in the midst of a scandal.

We know from emails that former Meta board member Peter Thiel advised him not to act like a boomer-pleasing millennial (like cringey Pete Buttigieg) and instead present himself in a way that would be embraced by his age-group peers. Whether that advice played into his sartorial choices, we can only guess.

Whether purely organic or not, the image makeover worked.

It also helped that during this time, Meta was enjoying a nice moment: record profits and a respite from any major public controversies.

That is, until now.

Controversial new policies at Meta lost him some fans

The decision to get rid of the fact-checking program and replace it with community notes and new loosened rules on speech on controversial topics, like allowing slurs for transgender people, rubbed some people the wrong way.

Changes at Meta itself, like removing tampons from the men's room in its corporate offices, didn't go over so well with all employees. And then there was Zuckerberg's appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast where he spoke about a desire for more "masculine energy," which raised more eyebrows.

All of this has seemed to lead to at least some of the people who had warmed up to Zuckerberg over the last couple years now starting to get the ick.

Now, to be clear, we need to put this possible vibe shift on Zuckerberg in context: There have always been millions — billions! — of people around the world who love and admire Mark Zuckerberg.

There are still big fans today — some people in the US were thrilled by Meta's CEO aligning himself more with the Trump administration.

And although some people made gestures toward quitting Meta platforms over the recent changes — Zuckerberg called that "virtue-signaling" — there's been no real dent to the company.

It's entirely possible that after a while, the recent news cycle will be forgotten and people will go back to enjoying his relatable Wife Guy antics.

• Theo Vonn fell out of a broken folding chair at the Trump inauguration and blamed Logan Paul.
• Logan denied tampering with the chair, and eventually, the beef was squashed.
• I wish I never knew any of this.

Inauguration Day for Donald Trump was a time of heightened emotions for a nation healing from a contentious election. For one man, this was tumultuous not just in the soul, but literally: Podcaster Theo Vonn fell out of his folding chair in the audience at the inaugural ceremony.

Here's what happened:

Vonn's folding chair seemingly collapsed, and Logan Paul, who was sitting right behind him, posted a video of it to X.

For some context, Trump appeared as a guest on both of the men's separate podcasts during his 2024 campaign.

Trump's various podcast appearances were considered a cunning strategy to appeal to young male voters that helped him win the election.

Vonn, Paul, and other podcasters like Joe Rogan were invited to attend the inauguration.

After Vonn fell out of his chair, he accused Paul and his brother Jake of somehow tampering with the chair as a prank, quote-tweeting his post with: "thought we was past the pranks boys."

In a reply to a fan, Vonn had some harsher words about the Paul brothers:

Logan Paul denied that he was involved. He suggested that Vonn was to blame as he sat in a chair that he knew had a structural flaw.

But thankfully, two days later, the two podcasting giants had worked out their beef.

(Vonn and Paul did not respond to requests for additional comment, and to be fair, we can't say for 100% certain the chair mishap wasn't a stunt, although it does look real.)

As a side note, I'd like you to please observe in Paul's video that you can see OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang looking on first in apparent shock and then amusement.

I know what you're thinking: Why should I care about this, and in fact why should I even know about this? You're desperate to rewind to two minutes ago before you knew any of this ever happened because now you are forever cursed to walk this earth until your dying day with the sentence "Theo Vonn and Logan Paul squashed their beef over inaugural chairgate" rattling around in your brain.

But you can't go back. You have this knowledge now. You know that Theo Vonn fell out of his chair and blamed Logan Paul (who denied it), but now they have made up. Don't look away from this. Accept that you are now changed. This is who you are. You're someone who knows all the details of a feud that started in the overflow audience room at the presidential inauguration.

Like the folding chair, our nation and our democracy can be unstable. But like the bonds of friendship between two men who podcast, our nation can always heal.

• Instagram Reels has added a new feature that shows you a feed of videos that your friends liked.
• It's meant to help you bond with friends over videos, Insta says — but it could get weird.
• The "With friends" feed is designed to minimize embarrassment — but be careful out there.

I come with great news for anyone whose Instagram activity might suggest their carnal impulses: The new "With friends" feature on Instagram Reels is (probably) not going to expose you as a cartoon wolf with your eyeballs bulging out. Here's why:

The new feature in the Reels tab shows you a feed of videos that your friends have liked, with a message box at the bottom that lets you send a direct message to the friend who liked them. The idea accelerates a practice that was already common: DMing your friends Reels that you think they'd like. Now, Instagram is doing some of that work for you.

"We want Instagram to not only be a place where you consume entertaining content, but one where you connect over that content with friends," wrote Instagram head Adam Mosseri in his announcement of the new feature.

I know. You're worried. The idea that suddenly your friends will see all your liked videos is giving you sweaty flashbacks to the now-defunct "Following" tab in the Activity Feed that showed all the likes, comments, and follows your friends were making on other people's Instagram posts.

The Following tab was notorious for awkwardly outing embarassing behavior, most commonly men getting caught liking a bunch of Instagram models' photos. Instagram got rid of this feature in 2019, and when I reported on it going away, people told me all sorts of horror stories: seeing their boyfriend or even dad liking photos from bikini models, or a priest catching a fellow priest replying to thirst traps.

But the new "With friends" feature for Reels will work slightly differently. A spokesperson for Meta confirmed to Business Insider a few key factors that make it different from the old "Following" tab.

First of all, you only see likes from mutuals — in other words, someone you follow who follows you back — not just anyone you follow, like celebrities or other creators. You won't see what Kim Kardashian likes on Reels (unless Kim happens to follow you back).

Secondly, it only will show Reels videos that are eligible for recommendation. That means they have to be from public accounts in good standing. (Some accounts that have had a content strike against them, for example, might not have their videos eligible to be recommended to strangers.) For a while, political accounts weren't eligible for recommendations, although Meta has announced it is changing that.

Crucially, the "With friends" feed still is algorithmic — serving content it thinks you will like. The old "Following" tab was a chronological list of everything that everyone liked. The new feature targets videos it thinks you and your friend will like in common.

Here's a generic heteronormative example: If a husband is liking a bunch of bikini babe videos, it's unlikely his wife will see those videos in the "With friends" feed because Instagram knows she's not interested in that content. However, he's not totally out of the woods — his activity might show up in the "With friends" feeds of his buddies who also like bikini babes.

I spent some time looking through the "With friends" feed on my own account — and I didn't see anything embarrassing or weird from my friends. (And I 100% believe my friends are capable of weird and embarrassing activities.)

Three friends liked a video of a cute baby bat from the Oakland Zoo. Two friends liked an interview clip of Hugh Grant from Vanity Fair. A friend who has been learning to surf liked a surfing video. A friend who is a volunteer firefighter liked multiple meme videos about firefighters. A bunch of people liked Spencer Pratt videos, but who doesn't these days? Several people liked a vintage clip about the '80s band The Lounge Lizards. (Honestly, the most surprising part of this whole exercise was that so many people from very disparate parts of my social world all seem to care so much about The Lounge Lizards.)

The only time it felt too invasive was seeing someone I know only professionally liking a video from what I assume was their kid's local Girl Scout troop talking about their cookie sale.

Still, algorithmic stuff is never 100% clear on what it serves you and why. So you might have a very different experience from me, and it's possible your friends might see more of your activity in ways you don't expect.

As always, stay say vigilant and safe out there, people! Trust no one.

• TikTok might go away. (Or not? Probably not? Who knows!)
• Whatever its fate, TikTok changed how people consume and post to social media.
• The TikTokification of American life isn't going anywhere — even if the app disappears.

Even if TikTok goes away, part of it will be with us forever: It's impossible to erase the TikTokification of the entire internet — or the effect the app has had on, well, everything.

Sure, there are several possibilities now that the Supreme Court has upheld the TikTok ban: One possibility is that TikTok actually goes away in the US on Sunday, existing in history as a strange several-year blip — replaced by either incumbent apps like Instagram and YouTube Shorts, or something new. (RedNote? Probably not, but who knows!)

In the last week, when things were looking pretty dire for TikTok, I started talking to colleagues about what TikTok actually meant — what its legacy meant. And we all realized that, essentially, there were almost no aspects of American life that had been untouched by TikTok. OK, well maybe not EVERYTHING — I'm being a little dramatic here, but it's very easy to rattle off a bunch of industries and corners of culture that were massively changed by TikTok.

Book publishing is one of the perfect examples of a fusty old thing — an industry that's existed for centuries and one that you'd think would be threatened by people's free time being sucked up by a video app. But instead, BookTok became this juggernaut force for selling and marketing books.

The beauty industry, homebuying, restaurants, the customization of Starbucks drinks, the music industry, sorority recruitment — all changed by TikTok.

Still, those various activities had already been disrupted by social media platforms that came before TikTok: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter — even MySpace. But TikTok represented something even more — an entire cultural shift.

TikTok changed us to the online core

As someone who has spent most of my career trying to observe how people act online, I've come to believe there are a few things about TikTok that have changed humans on an almost molecular level. It's changed the way we interact online — which is much bigger than just how lipstick is marketed.

TikTok's algorithmic feed upended all that we had previously understood or enjoyed about social media.

Social media has long been about followers and a direct relationship with the person whose content you're viewing. Before TikTok, follower count was important — and it was rare that a single post would go viral on its own.

TikTok flipped this completely.

It's almost hard to remember now that most other social apps have copied TikTok's "For you page," but this way of organizing your feed was new and almost confusing at first.

Sure, there were still some big creators who had massive followings, but there was a democratization of virality: Suddenly, every high school had a kid who had gone viral at least once on TikTok.

As TikTok grew to be more than just teens dancing, it became understood to everyone using it that if you posted, there was a chance lots of strangers might see your content — even if you weren't a big influencer or famous person. Almost Warholian — in the future, everyone will get 10,000 views on a random TikTok post. "I didn't expect my last post to blow up," is one of the most common intros to a TikTok you'll see.

As people accepted the idea that you might actually be perceived by others on the app, something strange happened. Instead of an Instagram effect where people felt pressure to look their best and put forth an idealized version of their life, people — especially young women — were more willing than I'd ever seen before on social media to post images of themselves looking, uh, not-so-perfect. Lying in bed with unbrushed hair, no makeup, unflattering angles — things you'd never, ever see on Pinterest or Instagram. As a millennial woman raised on Instagram, I admired Gen Z's daring to look like crap on the internet — it was refreshing and honest.

Those changes are here to stay, no matter whether TikTok shuts down for a day, or forever, or is saved by some executive order.

TikTok uncorked something in the way we consume and the way we post — and that's not going back in the bottle.

• A Chinese app known as RedNote is surging with new users from the US.
• I downloaded it and found users posting gleefully about giving away their data to China.
• The frenzy around RedNote might be short-lived, however.

I spent time on the Chinese app Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, which Americans are flocking to — a phenomenon that could become even more interesting after the Supreme Court upheld the TikTok ban on Friday.

It was an amusing and utterly confusing experience.

The app is flooded with posts deriding the US government when I visited it earlier this week. It seems impossible to parse what's potentially propaganda, what's ironically pretending to be propaganda, and what are earnest complaints about the US government — or earnest welcome messages from Chinese citizens.

What's clear, however, is that many Americans are furious, and they're doing what angry Americans do best from their couches: make memes. One video with over 30,000 likes shows a scene from the movie "Brokeback Mountain" where the two main characters reunite and hug, with the caption, "Me being reunited with my Chinese spy."

Many users joked — using the hashtag "TikTokrefugee" — about giving all their data to the Chinese government. One speculated that RedNote users were being assigned a new Chinese spy to watch them.

My feed, overall, was chock full of dark humor about being fine with giving data to China or using the app "just to say FU to our govt," as one user put it.

Many posts expressed anger toward the US government, or at least joy in what people perceived to be the government's embarrassment when it discovered that young people were signing up for an app that could be even worse of a national security issue than TikTok.

Sure enough, RedNote and Lemon8, an app owned by TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, hit the top two spots on the Apple App Store rankings on Monday. I mean, yes, it is pretty funny!

Admittedly, I also chuckled at another genre of memes, about how people would rather sign up for a dubious Chinese app than switch to Instagram Reels. One video I saw showed a cat labeled "Americans" loudly rejecting a cup of yogurt with the Instagram logo on it.

The RedNote frenzy may be short-lived, however. The app is difficult to navigate for English speakers, and some new users have reported it barred them (though it's possible these issues relate to the phone-verification system, which I also found to be buggy).

It's also possible that users are downloading RedNote and other Chinese apps not to replace TikTok but to send a signal to the US government.

"It really is just retaliation towards the government in the simplest way but in a way that feels very native to Gen Z," Meagan Loyst, the founder of the investor collective Gen Z VCs, told my colleagues Dan Whateley and Sydney Bradley.

Who knows what will happen with TikTok after the Supreme Court's ruling. It's likely going to go dark on Sunday, but it could get a reprieve from the incoming Trump administration.

One way or the other, for at least a few days this week, there was some level of cathartic steam being released — the frustration that millions of TikTok users feel that the app they enjoy is likely going away — at least for a little while.

• Mark Zuckerberg wants more "masculine energy" at Meta. There's some disconnect with the user base.
• In the US, 61% of men use Facebook — while 78% of women do.
• Academic studies suggest men and women view frequent posting to social media as a less masculine trait.

Mark Zuckerberg said he thinks Meta needs more "masculine energy" and that the company's culture has been "neutered" in the last few years.

There might be a disconnect between Zuckerberg's ambitions — which he shared on Joe Rogan's podcast last week — and the actual social platforms he runs. In the US, more women use Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp than men. (Global numbers aren't available.)

Facebook — still the most popular social network — is where the gender divide gets even more obvious. A 2024 Pew Research Center report on social media use showed that 61% of adult men in the US used Facebook "at all," while 78% of adult women did. That 17-point difference is greater than the divide between men's and women's use of any other social network except Pinterest.

If you look back at a similar 2013 Pew report, 66% of men and 72% of women used Facebook. However, the most current metric is slightly different, measuring internet-using adults, not all adults. But even a decade ago, there was still a noticeable gap between the genders — and it's gotten bigger.

Quite simply, Facebook is in some way a women's platform — or at least it leans that way.

Now, of course, it's an exaggeration to say that men "don't" use Facebook — a majority of them say they use it or have an account.

But that doesn't tell us how they're using it, exactly — if they're frequently posting or engaging or just checking in once a month. I don't have data about which gender actually uses Facebook more, but I have some ideas based on both research and my own anecdotal experience that suggest that women are driving the daily conversations on the platform.

It's important to note that these stats are for US users, which makes up only a fraction of the 3 billion-plus users. Globally, the gender breakdown may be quite different; Meta doesn't release its own statistics on gender and declined to comment for this story.

So why don't more men use Facebook?

Why do more women than men use Facebook? I have some theories, some of which are sweeping generalizations about gender — like that some men don't find as much value or pleasure in keeping up with old acquaintances as women do.

You can see in the Pew study that other platforms like X (Twitter) and Reddit have more male users. This doesn't seem surprising at all, and you can probably come up with some easy theories in your mind right now as to why.

For our purposes, we're talking about traditional gender roles here. (I recognize the irony in talking about gender this way when Meta has just changed its content rules to allow for more hateful rhetoric about trans people). I am sure that there are many people out there — perhaps even you, dear reader — who don't use Facebook this way and can't relate to any of this. That's OK.

Frequent posting on social media is perceived as "feminine"

There is some interesting academic research that can help us try to make sense of this female energy. A study published last year looked into perceptions of masculinity and the use of social media. Participants were to rate the masculinity or femininity of a person who posts either frequently or infrequently. What they found was that consistently, people rated men who post frequently as being less masculine.

Andrew Edelblum, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Dayton, who authored the paper, and his coauthor tried different "bias-breakers" in their surveys: What if the man wasn't posting about himself but posting about other people? Or what if the man was posting not as a regular person but as a professional influencer who was doing it for work? They found that the perception remained the same — frequent posting was viewed as feminine.

Perhaps men, sensing this perception, stop themselves from being active on Facebook.

"What we found is, and we're drawing on, what at this point is kind of a well-known phenomenon of 'precarious manhood,'" Edelblum told Business Insider. "It's essentially the idea that 'man card' credentials are really hard to gain but very easy to lose."

Anecdotally, I have noticed that Facebook seems to be predominantly used by women. My male friends rarely use Facebook, and as I poke around many corners of the platform, either for professional or personal reasons, I tend to see fewer men posting in groups or even listing things on Marketplace.

I'm incredibly active on Facebook — I spend hours there a week, mainly in groups that are nearly all women — groups for parenting, fans of "Vanderpump Rules," shopping, or decorating (now that I think about it, perhaps Facebook being a matriarchal society is why I have more unregretted user seconds spent on there than, say, X).

I also see some well-worn gendered division of household labor dynamics play out: For example, my kid's school has an active Facebook Group, but it's almost all moms. Same with a group for hiring local babysitters. Even a non-gendered general local town group or a Buy Nothing group seems to be mainly used by women.

My husband deactivated his own Facebook account in 2009 after deciding it was "uncool," but I recently whined to him that it was unfair that I had to be the sole Facebook admin for the family. (He made a new account with a fake name so he can browse Marketplace at least.)

So what does this mean?

Mark Zuckerberg's comment about wanting more "masculine energy" was about his company's internal culture and the need to be more aggressive instead of accommodating external critics.

This has seemed to play out in some ways that appear boorish, like removing the tampons in the men's bathrooms that were meant to accommodate a handful of trans or nonbinary employees and visitors.

I do wonder if part of Zuckberg's apparent personal King of the Bros rebrand is hoping to entice younger men back to Facebook, trying to demonstrate that you can be both masculine and a frequent Facebook poster.

It seems that his comments and his actions aren't really meant for the nosy housewives who are among the biggest users of his platforms. His peacocking, new politics, and Joe Rogan appearances are meant for Silicon Valley workers who work at or invest in his products — and many of them seem to love it.

But somewhere, I do worry that people have forgotten something that seems clear to me: Facebook is powered by feminine energy.

• Polymarket lets people bet on a variety of things, like election outcomes and pop culture events.
• It's also taking bets on the Palisades fire in California — with at least nine different wagers.
• Polymarket says the wisdom of the crowd can lend "unbiased forecasts for the most important events impacting society."

As the Palisades fire is still tearing through parts of the Los Angeles area on Wednesday, Polymarket — the prediction market platform — is allowing people to place wagers on certain elements of the disaster.

There were at least nine different predictions you could place money on as of Wednesday afternoon that were related to the fire. The topic had its own trending module on the site.

One question asked: "Will the Palisades fire be contained by Friday?" Only 2% of bets said yes. (California officials said Wednesday morning that the fires raging through California are "zero percent" contained. Two people have been reported dead in the wake of the disaster.)

Each wager has its own page on the site — and on those pages with bets related to the fire was a disclaimer from Polymarket.

The disclaimer reads:

Note on Palisades Wildfire Markets: The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events impacting society. The devastating Pacific Palisades fire is one such event, for which Polymarket can yield invaluable real-time answers to those directly impacted in ways traditional media cannot.

Note: There are no fees on this market.

On its site, Polymarket says that users can submit suggestions for markets, but a new prediction market, like the ones about the fire, can only be created by Polymarket.

A spokesperson for Polymarket told Business Insider: "Polymarket charges no fees — and generates no revenue — from these markets and provides them as a service to those looking for unbiased and up-to-date information during fast-moving events."

Other wagers available as of Wednesday:

• "Palisades fire burns 10,000 acres by Friday?" (Bettors said this was 99% "yes.")
• "Will Palisades fire spread to Santa Monica by Sunday?" (Bettors gave this a 14% chance.)

So far, it appears the markets have drawn only small bets, with one question drawing a little more than $8,000 and another drawing more than $30,000, according to tallies on the site.

Polymarket, where bets are placed in crypto, became popular during the 2024 election. It showed the odds of Donald Trump winning far above what traditional polls were showing.

In addition to politics and sports, Polymarket offers bets on news and pop culture topics like Oscar nominations or the odds of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce getting engaged this year.

• Content moderation has always been a nightmare for Meta.
• Its new content-moderation policy is a huge change — and it could be an improvement.
• Mark Zuckerberg's "apology tour" from the past few years seems to be officially over.

Mark Zuckerberg's changes to Meta's content-moderation policies are potentially huge.

To fully understand their gravity, it's useful to look at how Meta got here. And to consider what these changes might actually mean for users: Are they a bow to an incoming Trump administration? Or an improvement to a system that's gotten Zuckerberg and Co. lots of heat before? Or a little of both?

Content moderation has always been a pit of despair for Meta. In its blog post announcing the changes on Tuesday, Meta's new head of policy, Joel Kaplan, talked about wanting to get back to Facebook's roots in "free speech." Still, those roots contain a series of moderation fires, headaches, and constant adjustments to the platform's policies.

Starting in 2016, moderation troubles just kept coming like a bad "We Didn't Start the Fire" cover. Consider this roundup:

• Fake news.
• Macedonian teens.
• Russian troll farms.
• Hillary Clinton's team blaming Facebook for her loss.
• Zuckerberg responding to that idea by calling it "pretty crazy."
• Cambridge Analytica.
• Alleged manipulation by President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.
• WhatsApp inciting lynchings in India.
• Facebook Groups spouting health misinformation involving kids drinking bleach or DIY skin-cancer treatments.
• The Rohingya Muslim genocide.
• COVID-19 misinformation.
• The Hunter Biden laptop story.
• "Stop the Steal" Facebook groups used to organize January 6, 2021.
• The Facebook Files and whistleblower leaks about Instagram and teen mental health.

Whatever your political alignment, it seems like Meta has been trapped in a vicious cycle of making a policy — or lacking a policy — then reversing itself to try to clean up a mess.

As Charlie Warzel pointed out in The Atlantic, Zuckerberg has sometimes blamed external forces when he's faced with situations like some of the ones above.

That's maybe until now. As Zuckerberg posted on Threads on Wednesday, "Some people may leave our platforms for virtue signaling, but I think the vast majority and many new users will find that these changes make the products better."

Maybe the big changes were already brewing this past September when Zuckerberg appeared at a live event and said, "One of the things that I look back on and regret is I think we accepted other people's view of some of the things that they were asserting that we were doing wrong, or were responsible for, that I don't actually think we were."

In other words, as of this week, the apology tour seems to have ended.

What will Meta's changes mean for you and me, the users?

What will the changes mean? Who knows! I can make a few predictions:

The "community note" system might work pretty well — or at least not worse than the current human- and AI-led fact-checking system.

There might be more content in your feeds that you don't like — political speech that you find abhorrent, for example.

It's also possible that while certain content might exist on the platform, you won't actually come across it because it will have been downgraded. "Freedom of speech, not freedom of reach" has been X's mantra (though considering the flow of truly vile content that has proliferated in my feed there in the past year or so, I don't think that's been particularly effective).

One other piece of the announcement is that Meta will focus its AI-powered filtering efforts on the highest-risk content (terrorism, drugs, and child endangerment). For lesser violations, the company said, it will rely more on user reports. Meta hasn't given details on how exactly this will work, but I imagine it could have a negative effect on common issues like bullying and harassment.

A large but less glamorous part of content moderation is removing "ur ugly" comments on Instagram — and that's the kind of stuff that will rely on user reporting.

It's also quite possible that bad actors will take advantage of the opening. Facebook is nothing if not a place to buy used furniture while various new waves of pillagers attempt to test and game the algorithms for profit or menace — just consider the current wave of AI slop, some of which appears at least in part to be a profitable scam operation run from outside the US.

What do the changes mean for Meta?

If these changes had been rolled out slowly, one at a time, they might have seemed like reasonable measures just on their face. Community notes? Sure. Loosening rules on certain hot political topics? Well, not everyone will like it, but Meta can claim some logic there. Decreasing reliance on automatic filters and admitting that too many non-violations have been swept up in AI dragnets? People would celebrate that.

No one thought Meta's moderation before the announced changes was perfect. There were lots of complaints (correctly) about how it banned too much stuff by mistake — which this new policy is aiming to fix.

And switching from third-party fact-checkers to a community-notes system isn't necessarily bad. The fact-checking system wasn't perfect, and community notes on X, the system Meta is modeling its own after, can be quite useful. Even acknowledging that, yes, X has sometimes become a cesspit for bad content, the root cause isn't the community notes.

Still, it's impossible to weigh the merits of each aspect of the new policy and have blinders on when it comes to the 800-pound political gorilla in the room.

There's one pretty obvious way of looking at Meta's announcement of sweeping changes to its moderation policy: It's a move to cater to an incoming Trump administration. It's a sign that Zuckerberg has shifted to the right, as he drapes himself in some of the cultural signifiers of the bro-y Zynternet (gold chain, $900,000 watch, longer hair, new style, front row at an MMA match).

Together, every piece of this loudly signals that Zuckerberg either A., genuinely believed he'd been forced to cave on moderation issues in the past, or B., knows that making these changes will please Trump. I don't really think the distinction between A and B matters too much anyway. (Meta declined to comment.)

This probably isn't the last of the changes

I try to avoid conflating "Meta" with "Mark Zuckerberg" too much. It's a big company! There are many smart people who care deeply about the lofty goals of social networking who create policy and carry out the daily work of trust and safety.

Part of me wonders how much Zuckerberg wishes this boring and ugly part of the job would fade away — there are so many more shiny new things to work on, like AI or mixed-reality smart glasses. Reworking the same decade-old policies so that people can insult each other 10% more is probably less fun than MMA fighting or talking to AI researchers.

Content moderation has always been a nightmare for Meta. Scaling it back, allowing more speech on controversial topics, and outsourcing fact-checking to the community seems like a short-term fix for having to deal with this unpleasant and thankless job. I can't help but imagine that another overhaul will come due sometime in the next four years.

• Last week, people noticed (and hated) AI-generated users that were created and managed by Meta.
• But these AI bots were actually a year old, and mostly defunct. Meta has now deleted them.
• This is all totally separate from what a Meta exec described as a future with AI-generated users.

There's been some confusion about Meta's ambitions for AI-generated users. Let me clear it up for you: Meta is still, definitely, very excited about AI-generated users — despite removing a few of the ones people were complaining about last week.

Here's the backstory: Sometime last week, people discovered a handful of Instagram accounts that were "AI managed by Meta." In other words, they were Meta bots programmed to look and interact like real people — powered by AI. There was one named Liv, a "Proud Black queer momma of 2," Grandpa Brian, and a dating coach named Carter — all AI-generated.

These accounts spit out conversation that was treacly and weird — and also somewhat problematic. (Liv told Karen Attiah of The Washington Post in a chat that none of her creators were Black.)

As soon as people on social media noticed the AI bots, they hated them. Meta quickly removed the accounts.

But it turns out, these accounts were actually quite old. Liz Sweeney, a Meta spokesperson, said that the AI accounts were "from a test we launched at Connect in 2023. These were managed by humans and were part of an early experiment we did with AI characters."

(This was around the same time Meta launched a bunch of AI chatbots based on celebrities like Kendall Jenner and MrBeast. Those celeb AIs were scrapped this past summer.)

But here's where there was some confusion: Liv, Grandpa Brian, and Dating with Carter were not the AI users that Meta is dreaming of — they were an abandoned experiment from over a year ago. Meta is very much full steam ahead with its vision of an AI-user-filled future.

Connor Hayes, VP of generative AI at Meta, recently gave an interview to the Financial Times in which he talked about Meta's vision for an AI user-filled future:

"We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," said Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta. "They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform . . . that's where we see all of this going," he added.

Hayes's interview doesn't really give too much detail about what these AI users would be for — or why people would want to interact with them, or much detail at all. (I asked Meta for additional comment.)

Meanwhile, Facebook already has AI bots you can chat with — they're inside Messenger. Just go to "Compose a new message" in Messenger, and you'll see an option for "Chat with AI characters," where you can design your own AI or use someone else's.

If you look through the user-made chatbots, you can sort of start to get a sense of what people are using these for: companionship chatting.

Companionship/romance AI chatbot services like Replika or Character.ai are becoming very popular (if not also problematic). There is a market for people who want to chat with an AI, even if I don't see the appeal. (I've tested them!)

Meta has been, uh, inspired by features from other competing social apps plenty of times before (Instagram Stories seeming to be rather inspired by Snapchat, for instance). Perhaps Meta is just seeing that social chatbots are popular, so they're rolling out their own.

I'm not sure I understand exactly what Meta's vision is here, and I'm pretty skeptical about why I would ever want to interact with an AI-generated user on Facebook. I tried out a few of the AI chatbots in Messenger and even tried creating a few of my own.

But as far as a social network full of these kinds of AI accounts? I just don't get it — even if Meta seems very confident about its future.

• YouTube and Threads have taken down pro-Luigi Mangione posts they've said violate their policies.
• YouTube told Business Insider it forbids videos that glorify the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO.
• The different moderation approaches among platforms are leaving some users confused.

Diana "Ladidai" Umana, a content creator based in New York, has been closely following the news of Luigi Mangione — posting her thoughts on various social media accounts.

Umana's posts are pro-Luigi (and some have unorthodox angles, like saying he wasn't the shooter, which authorities have charged him with). But she was surprised when her entire YouTube account was permanently removed for what YouTube told her were "severe or repeated violations" of its rules.

YouTube's content moderation policies forbid "content praising or justifying violent acts carried out by violent extremist, criminal, or terrorist organizations."

"This means we remove content that glorifies or promotes the suspect in the murder of [UnitedHealthcare CEO] Brian Thompson, as well as content that trivializes his death," Jack Malon, a spokesperson for YouTube, told Business Insider. "This enforcement began in the immediate aftermath of the incident, as part of our standard practice to address content related to violent tragedies."

Other social platforms have also taken down content related to Mangione.

Several subreddits devoted to him have been banned — like r/luigimangione2 — although there are still other active subreddits about him. Reddit didn't respond to a request for comment on its moderation policies about the topic.

TikTok also has a policy against "promoting (including any praise, celebration, or sharing of manifestos) or providing material support" to violent extremists or individuals who cause serial or mass violence. People have complained that TikTok has removed comments saying "Free Luigi" and some videos about Mangione.

On Meta's Threads, people have said some of their posts about Mangione — like a post about his astrological sign or a video montage of him set to an Olivia Rodgigo song — were removed.

Meta has similar guidance, banning the "glorification" of dangerous organizations and individuals, which it defines as "legitimizing or defending the violent or hateful acts of a designated entity by claiming that those acts have a moral, political, logical or other justification that makes them acceptable or reasonable."

However, Meta recently updated what it calls its dangerous organizations and individuals policy to allow for "more social and political discourse in certain instances including — peace agreements, elections, human rights related issues, news reporting and academic, neutral and condemning discussion — and to ensure users are not unduly penalized for sharing it."

A spokesperson for Meta pointed to this policy but declined to comment further.

Pro-Lugi posts can be difficult to moderate

You might imagine how, when it comes to posts discussing Luigi Mangione, there are some gray areas between what's considered praise vs. discussion of social issues.

That's where the deluge of pro-Luigi posts from American users on social platforms gets a little weird.

Mangione's popularity among some people online is complicated, and I won't try to untangle it here (read this or this for some smart analysis). But you've probably already observed some of this online: There are a lot of people posting about Mangione and running afoul of content guidelines that they'd never usually run up against — rules designed for posts praising ISIS or Mexican drug cartels, for instance.

The result is some confusion and frustration among users.

Content moderation is an art, not a science, and there's a spectrum of differences between a statement like "Luigi was justified" and a meme about his looks or an ironic fan cam edit video.

Mangione has been charged with first-degree murder "in furtherance of terrorism," which may clarify things for platforms about whether to consider him as a single accused murderer or an alleged terrorist when it comes to content policy.

For now, it seems that a lot of social media users are surprised or confused by what is or isn't allowed when talking about Mangione on social media.

• Spotify added audiobooks last year. Paid subscribers get 15 hours worth each month.
• You can also get them through Amazon or your library — celebrity memoirs are great on audiobooks.
• I'd never cared one way or the other about Al Pacino until I listened to him read his audiobook.

You probably already know that Spotify offers audiobooks with its paid-tier subscriptions. (If not, now you do!)

You might even be confused as to why I'm mentioning this when the audiobook feature launched more than a year ago, in November 2023.

Well, I'm writing this because fairly often over the last year, when I'm talking to people and I mention that I've listened to a book on Spotify, they're surprised — they didn't notice the audiobook feature even if they're a regular Spotify music listener. Or maybe they didn't realize that the books were all included for free with their subscription.

So I am taking it upon myself, during this quiet dead time between the holidays to remind you all:

You can listen to books for free* on Spotify.

(*OK, technically, you get 15 hours a month for free with your subscription. That's typically one or two books. If you go over, you can purchase more books à la carte. For me, 15 hours is fine.)

On Amazon, the largest bookseller, you can go through its Audible subscription service, which charges a monthly fee in exchange for credits you can use to purchase audiobooks. Amazon Music is now doing something similar to Spotify — you get one free book to listen to a month with a paid subscription.

Of course, there are people who are extremely high-volume consumers of audiobooks — and one book a month isn't going to even come close to cutting it for them. On Reddit, some of these power listeners who burn through three to five books in a week discussed their strategies: mixing together Audible credits, the one free Amazon Music books, and Libby (the app for public libraries, which is great because it's unlimited and actually free, but it doesn't have everything and there can be long wait times for new releases or popular titles).

There's also a shady underworld to audiobooks: torrent sites, or YouTube brain rot-style videos where someone plays Minecraft over the audiobook narration for the entire "Lord of the Rings" series.

I don't condone any of that. Point is: With Spotify or Amazon Music, the audiobooks are a nice add-on. They could completely change your reading habits if you're now someone who really loves the feel of paper in your hands or likes to curl up with their Kindle.

If you've never listened to audiobooks, allow me to make the case for a specific genre that they're perfect for: celebrity memoirs, especially if the celebrities themselves read them.

Most recently, I listened to Al Pacino's autobiography, "Sonny Boy: A Memoir." Pacino reads it himself, and it's the perfect delivery — he's got all the strangely YELLED WORDS!!! and quiet asides. At points, I wondered if he was even going off-script, it sounded so natural.

I hadn't previously particularly cared much either way about Al Pacino, but I finished the book absolutely delighted by him and his commitment to leading an artistic life. But I truly think that I wouldn't have found the book as compelling if I had read it on paper — his reading of it added so much.

Celebrity autobiographies often aren't exactly hugely weighty or complicated tomes — you can listen as you would a podcast: while doing the dishes, grocery shopping, driving.

So here's my pitch: If you're already paying for Spotify, Amazon, or any other service, give an audiobook a try. It's usually free, there's nothing to lose — if you think the book stinks, just start a new one!

• I love Facebook Marketplace, except for this one problem with how it does geographic searches.
• I often see search results that are inconveniently located because they're across a body of water.
• Make the search functions in travel time, not miles radius!

If there is one thing I absolutely love doing, it's buying cheap crap on the internet. But I feel bad about this; I worry about overconsumption and our planet — not to mention the effects on my own wallet.

Which is why I love Facebook Marketplace. It scratches the itch for mindless consumption in a more sustainable way. I'm simply virtuous — my place in Heaven secured! — for buying a used 8-by-10 rug in good condition for $75 instead of a brand-new one.

I probably spend more time browsing Facebook Marketplace than I spend on lots of other interesting and popular things. My iPhone's screen time tells me that I spent more time on the Facebook app last week than TikTok, Slack, or Bluesky. And you'll have to just believe me when I tell you that I spent a lot of time on those other apps.

However, I have a very specific and very real gripe.

Facebook Marketplace shows me listings for items located across a body of water — even if the items are within my specified distance radius.

Let me explain: For local listings, you can select a distance range of a set number of miles — just a few, or even farther, say 50 miles. Facebook Marketplace will then create a perfect circle of that search radius, giving you as-the-crow-flies distance in every direction.

But in reality, 10 miles to the east isn't always the same as 10 miles to the west. Especially in cases where a river or body of water is involved.

Let's say I'm in downtown Brooklyn. If I search a 4-mile radius, Facebook Marketplace will show me items for sale deeper into Brooklyn, easily accessible by car or subway, and it will also show me results in lower Manhattan (more annoying to drive to) — and worst of all, it will also give some results in New Jersey.

This is by no means a knock on the great Garden State. In fact, I've often observed in my Marketplace searching that New Jersey has some of the most desirable furniture and other items. But it is a massive pain to get from Brooklyn to New Jersey just to pick up a used end table— the tolls alone make it not worth it.

Consider searching around suburban Connecticut, where things are more spread out, and 20 miles of driving isn't unreasonable. However, this creates a big enough search radius that it extends across the Long Island Sound, into the northern tips of Long Island. Do you have any idea how long it takes to drive from Bridgeport, Connecticut to Huntington Station, New York? Long enough to drop dead, that's how long.

This isn't just an East Coast problem, either. In fact, for Meta employees, this should hit close to home. Menlo Park, California — where Meta is based — is located along a body of water. That makes it quite annoying to get to the land on the other side of the bay, either by public transportation or car.

I have a proposed solution here: One option could be that instead of making a perfect circle of a search radius, you could draw your own search shape with your finger. Zillow has a version of this that it uses for its home search.

Another option — and my preference — would be to factor in driving distance or public transit access. It would be great to say, "Show me all the coffee tables within 30 minutes driving distance," instead of a perfect circle on a map.

When I asked a representative for Meta if they viewed the water issue as a problem, they seemed slightly puzzled and asked if I was seeing things that were actually errors — results outside the specified range.

Currently, Meta doesn't really directly profit from these in-person Marketplace transactions — when you show up at someone's home and hand them cash for their stuff. (Meta does take a cut if the monetary transaction is completed on Facebook, typically for shipped items.) It may not be a big profit center for Meta, but it definitely is important.

Marketplace is a cornerstone of Facebook's strategy for young people. Despite its sometimes fuddy-duddy reputation, Facebook is actually growing its Gen Z user base. So, improving Marketplace is important to Facebook's overall health. Many young people tend to live in urban areas near bodies of water (rivers, bays, oceans). No one wants to have to drive over a bridge to buy a couch.

My plea to Mark Zuckerberg is to take a break from the kickboxing and focus in on this important issue. End the Marketplace search that goes across water boundaries!

• These days, Hollywood is more focused on animated blockbusters for kids than on live-action movies.
• Although animated movies can be great, I think kids are missing out. They need to see real humans.
• My solution? Getting DVDs of '90s movies from the library for my kids.

Think of your favorite holiday movies as a kid: "Elf," "The Santa Clause," "It's A Wonderful Life," "Home Alone." What do they all have in common? Real people! They're live-action, not animated.

In fact, when you think back to some of your most cherished movies as a kid, assuming you were a kid before the year 2000 — I bet a lot of them are also not animated. "E.T.," "Honey I Shrunk the Kids," "The Parent Trap" (both versions!), "The Sandlot," "The Mighty Ducks," "The Goonies," "Newsies," Hocus Pocus," "The Princess Bride," "The Bad News Bears." And on and on and on.

I don't want to sound like a grump or overly nostalgic — but too many kids' movies these days are animated. I wish Hollywood were producing more live-action kids' movies! You know, with real people!

Please don't mistake this for disparaging the art of animation. I also believe that, overall, kids' movies are far better than when I was a kid. The average kids' movie in 1985 was probably fairly intolerable for an adult; whereas now I am perfectly happy to watch even the most average Pixar or Illumination movie with my kids. "Hotel Transylvania 2?" Totally enjoyable! "Boss Baby?" Fine by me! "Despicable Me 4?" You know what, it's really funny!

I appreciate that animation can create worlds and do things that could never be done in live-action, even with special effects. "Kung Fu Panda" or "Inside Out" simply wouldn't work if they weren't animated, and they're delightful.

In the decades since I was a kid, animated movies for kids have become studio blockbusters. "Inside Out 2," "Frozen II," "The Lion King (2019)," and "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" are in the top 20 highest-grossing movies of all time.

Why studios have moved toward animation

These tentpole films are expensive to make and take years of animation work. (For better or worse, it's possible that AI could make the process cheaper and faster.) There's also a low end of this — if you've ever seen some of the crummy animated movies that are straight to streaming platforms … yikes.

The movie business has changed radically because of streaming, and kids' content has been affected in specific ways. No one buys DVDs anymore, and that used to be a big revenue stream for certain genres like comedies and family movies. Now, it means that a movie generally has to earn a lot during its opening weekend. Hence, more sequels, even for animated kids' fare: Franchises are a safer bet.

This is the reason that for adult films, we see fewer romcoms, comedies, and smart dramas than we did 10 years ago, and more action movies and franchises. That same dynamic is playing out with family movies, too. You can imagine why a studio would rather do another "Frozen" movie than take a risk on something weird like "Mrs. Doubtfire."

The business reasons make sense. But I think kids are missing out if they're not seeing many live-action movies or TV shows — they're not seeing real actors showing emotions or real-world situations playing out. Seeing real kids, real adults, speaking, moving, even singing — that's a different kind of experience. I would posit that seeing real humans on film is important for young viewers to become true movie lovers, and to experience the pleasures of the art of film.

A good movie is a transformative and magical experience — and yes, animated movies can achieve this — but there's something to be said about the magic that real, live acting can bring.

I just wish more of these amazing live-action family movies were being made today.

How I find good live-action movies

When I browse the streaming services for movies for my preschool and elementary-age kids, I find that nearly all the movies available are animated. The rare live-action ones tend to be older movies from the '90s, probably put there to appease millennial parents.

(I would like to give a brief shoutout to the rare Netflix original live-action kids movie, "Yes Day," starring Jennifer Garner. It's delightful and a family-pleaser.)

I can't make the movie business work differently, but I can suggest something to my fellow millennial parents of young kids who want to find more good live-action movies to watch: Try your local library's DVD section. I've discovered that there are tons of good '90s and early '00s live-action movies out there that simply aren't on streaming services.

A hidden bonus feature of watching real DVDs instead of streaming is that it eliminates the thing where you open Netflix, and your kids see the thumbnail for a show they've already watched three times and start begging to watch it again.

I've been doing a fairly regular family movie night with my kids with my own hidden agenda: I get to pick the movie, and I always pick live-action movies. So far, it's been a success with my kids and I've even enjoyed movies I hadn't seen since I was a kid, like "Free Willy." It's enough to hold us over until "Paddington 3" comes out.

• "Beast Games" is the Amazon Prime Video game show from the YouTuber MrBeast.
• The show is family-friendly, but its message about the concept of money makes me uncomfortable.
• I'd say to enjoy the show but remind your kids that money doesn't work this way in real life.

"Beast Games," the game show on Amazon Prime Video from MrBeast, debuted Thursday, and I watched along with my elementary-aged son. As an adult, I enjoyed the spectacle and found the show highly watchable. But as a parent, I'm not sure I liked the message about money it was imparting to my young ward.

Elementary-school-aged kids, whether or not they're allowed to watch YouTube, all know who MrBeast is. He's a superstar to Gen Alpha. His candy bars are on grocery-store shelves, and his specter hangs over playgrounds and lunchrooms.

(My colleague reports that his teenage son says MrBeast isn't quite as cool in high schools anymore, perhaps because he's seen as being for little kids.)

Like most parents, I want to teach my kids the value of a dollar: that money comes from hard work and that saving and budgeting are important.

"Beast Games" flies in the face of all that. Money is tossed around as this strange easy-come, easy-go object. It opens with MrBeast standing on a pyramid of cash (allegedly the full $5 million prize in stacks of bills). We are repeatedly told this is the largest cash prize ever in a game show.

The show's premise is that a group of contestants will compete in challenges to win that big prize — a season-long version of some of his popular YouTube videos.

Later in the season there will be physical challenges (we see preview clips of people pulling a monster truck), but in this first episode the games are almost all psychological tests.

This first series of minigames aims to winnow the contestant pool to 500 people from 1,000. The games are variations on the prisoner's dilemma, pitting what's good for an individual against what's good for the group.

In the first game, MrBeast makes this offer: Anyone who quits the game immediately can share a pot of money — but the pot gets smaller as more people choose to take the early out. In another game, each team of about 100 people must have one person sacrifice themselves and leave the game with no prize money at all — or else the whole team is eliminated. People are sobbing, yelling at each other to be the ones to quit.

I worry about the message 'Beast Games' sends

It's a fascinating challenge to watch as an adult. But I'm not sure a kid can really understand what's going on — the wrenching pain of people losing what they thought could be a chance to pay off loans or buy a home.

In the game, money is an object to build into pyramids or toss around in bags — it's funny money; it doesn't feel real.

Representatives for MrBeast declined to comment for this story.

Other game shows have cash prizes, even kid-friendly ones like "Is It Cake?" or even the old "Double Dare" on Nickelodeon. But on other shows, the prize is an exciting treat at the end — it isn't the whole point of the show.

In "Beast Games," money is the point — and even the games themselves are about money. I'm not sure I like what subtle message that's sending to young minds not old enough to earn a real paycheck.

Update: December 20, 2024 — MrBeast representatives declined to comment when contacted by BI; the story has been updated reflecting that.