Elon Musk’s track record of success is undeniable, with achievements spanning industries like electric vehicles, space exploration, and renewable energy. From his six rules for insane productivity to 120-hour workweeks, what truly sets Musk apart isn’t just the scale of […]
TikTok’s hope of survival rose on Thursday as the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear its bid to block the looming ban. The U.S. Supreme Court announced Wednesday it will review TikTok’s appeal against a law set to force the app’s […]
A new app called Tapestry promising to unify social media, news, and RSS in one place, is nearing completion. Designed by Iconfactory, the same team that created the third-party Twitter client Twitterific back in the day, Tapestry was unveiled at the beginning of the year as a tool that could better organize today’s fragmented online […]
Threads is introducing a new way to reshare photos and videos on its social network. Instead of quote-posting the original post and then adding commentary, Threads users will instead be able to click a new option, “Use media,” allowing them to just reshare the photo or video directly to a new post where they can […]
In 2015, Instagram contributed only 7% to Meta's total U.S. revenue, according to Emarketer. Ten years later, the app is projected to account for half, according to the research firm's latest forecast. Instagram is projected to generate $32.03 billion in U.S. advertising revenue next year, a 24.4% increase from 2024, per Emarketer. This rise would...
Bluesky, a decentralized social media startup founded in 2019 as a project under Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey, has undergone significant changes since its inception. While Dorsey originally backed the platform, he left its board in May after publicly endorsing […]
Social magazine app maker Flipboard is reinventing itself for the new era of the open social web. While the company’s original app allowed users to collect content from blogs, news websites, and traditional social media services like Facebook and Twitter in order to create curated magazines, its new app called Surf, launching into invite-only beta […]
For every illegal drug, there is a combination of emojis that dealers and consumers use to evade detection on social media and messaging platforms. Snowflakes, snowfall, and snowmen symbolize cocaine. Love hearts, lightning bolts, and pill capsules mean MDMA, or molly. Brown hearts and dragons represent heroin. Grapes and baby bottles are the calling cards for codeine-containing cough syrup, or lean. The humble maple leaf, meanwhile, is the universal symbol for all drugs.
The proliferation of open drug dealing on Instagram, Snapchat, and X—as well as on encrypted messaging platforms Telegram and WhatsApp—has transformed the fabric of illegal substance procurement, gradually making it more convenient, and arguably safer, for consumers, who can receive packages in the mail without meeting people on street corners or going through the rigmarole of the dark web. There is no reliable way to gauge drug trafficking on social media, but the European Union Drugs Agency acknowledged in its latest report on the drivers of European drug sales that purchases brokered through such platforms “appear to be gaining in prominence.”
Initial studies into drug sales on social media began to be published in 2012. Over the next decade, piecemeal studies began to reveal a notable portion of drug sales were being mediated by social platforms. In 2021, it was estimated some 20 percent of drug purchases in Ireland were being arranged through social media. In the US in 2018 and Spain in 2019, a tenth of young people who used drugs appear to have connected with dealers through the internet, with the large majority doing so through social media, according to one small study.
Elon Musk has spoken, and hashtags may have just been canceled. The hashtag, born in 2007 on Twitter, started as a simple way to group conversations and track topics. It quickly became a cultural symbol, powering global movements like #BlackLivesMatter […]
The aspirations around experiential events have exploded in recent years. Activations used to be confined to physical spaces, and now entire worlds can be built in digital realms like Fortnite. And even physical events have reached ambitious new heights. Now in its sixth year, ADWEEK's 2024 Experiential Award winners know how to dazzle with interactive...
The House China Select Committee began issuing reminders on Friday that it is serious about the potential ban of TikTok in the U.S. starting Jan. 19. Committee chair Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) and ranking member Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) sent letters to Apple, Google, and TikTok Friday reminding them that barring a change in TikTok's...
Email has been a cornerstone of communication for decades, but it’s no secret that using it often feels more frustrating than it should. Whether it’s tangled conversation threads, messy formatting, or bloated features, platforms like Gmail haven’t evolved to match […]
Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour confirmed on a podcast interview that his employees asked social media influencers to promote memes about the FBI’s raid on the home of his archrival, the CEO of Polymarket. Both companies offer competing events-betting markets, a new kind of betting industry where people wager about the outcomes of events ranging from […]
Now with 25 million users, Bluesky is facing a test that will determine whether or not its platform will still be seen as a safe space and place of refuge from the toxicity of X. In recent days, a large number of users on Bluesky have been urging the company to ban one newcomer for […]
Frank McCourt says his bid for TikTok is part of a broader mission to move millions of people to healthier online platforms. “I compare this to large-scale, human physical migration.”
Nearly half of teens in the U.S. are online almost constantly, and the platform they’re using the most is YouTube, a new study from the Pew Research Center has found. The Center reports that 46% of teens say they’re online “almost constantly,” and 90% of teens it surveyed said they use the Google-owned video platform, […]
Shopify is making a bigger bet on advertising. The ecommerce giant is making its two-year-old ad product, Shop Campaigns, available to all of its merchants in the U.S. and Canada. Shopify might be an ecommerce behemoth, but it's still a smaller advertising player compared to Amazon. Ecommerce experts closely watch Shopify's advertising moves to gauge...
Spotter, a startup that underwrites creators and offers AI-driven tools, has laid off staff following its partnership with Amazon, according to The Information. The layoffs occurred in early November and affected various parts of the Los Angeles-based company, marking a […]
