• Latimer AI plans to launch a bias detection tool as a Chrome browser extension in January.
• The tool scores text from one to 10, with 10 being extremely biased.
• Latimer AI hopes the product will attract new users.

Bias is in the eye of the beholder, yet it's increasingly being evaluated by AI. Latimer AI, a startup that's building AI tools on a repository of Black datasets, plans to launch a bias detection tool as a Chrome browser extension in January.

The company anticipates the product could be used by people who run official social media accounts, or anyone who wants to be mindful of their tone online, Latimer CEO John Pasmore told Business Insider.

"When we test Latimer against other applications, we take a query and score the response. So we'll score our response, we'll score ChatGPT or Claude's response, against the same query and see who scores better from a bias perspective," Pasmore said. "It's using our internal algorithm to not just score text, but then correct it."

The tool assigns a score from one through 10 to text, with 10 being extremely biased.

Patterns of where bias is found online, are already emerging from beta testing of the product.

For instance, text from an April post by Elon Musk, in which he apologized for calling Dustin Moskowitz a derogatory name, was compared to an August post from Bluesky CEO Jay Graber.

Musks' post scored 6.8 out of 10, or "High Bias," while Graber's scored 3.6 out of 10, or "Low Bias".

Latimer's technology proposed a "fix" to the text in Musk's post by changing it to the following: "I apologize to Dustin Moskowitz for my previous inappropriate comment. It was wrong. What I intended to express is that I find his attitude to be overly self-important. I hope we can move past this and potentially become friends in the future."

While what is deemed biased is subjective, Latimer isn't alone in trying to tackle this challenge through technology. The LA Times plans to display a "bias meter" in 2025, for instance.

Latimer hopes its bias tool will draw in more users.

"This will help us identify a different set of users who might not use a large language model, but might use a browser extension," Pasmore said.

The bias detector will launch at $1 a month, and a pro version will let users access multiple bias detection algorithms.

• Generative AI tools have made it easier to create fake images, videos, and audio.
• That sparked concern that this busy election year would be disrupted by realistic disinformation.
• The barrage of AI deepfakes didn't happen. An AI researcher explains why and what's to come.

Oren Etzioni has studied artificial intelligence and worked on the technology for well over a decade, so when he saw the huge election cycle of 2024 coming, he got ready.

India, Indonesia, and the US were just some of the populous nations sending citizens to the ballot box. Generative AI had been unleashed upon the world about a year earlier, and there were major concerns about a potential wave of AI-powered disinformation disrupting the democratic process.

"We're going into the jungle without bug spray," Etzioni recalled thinking at the time.

He responded by starting TrueMedia.org, a nonprofit that uses AI-detection technologies to help people determine whether online videos, images, and audio are real or fake.

The group launched an early beta version of its service in April, so it was ready for a barrage of realistic AI deepfakes and other misleading online content.

In the end, the barrage never came.

"It really wasn't nearly as bad as we thought," Etzioni said. "That was good news, period."

He's still slightly mystified by this, although he has theories.

First, you don't need AI to lie during elections.

"Out-and-out lies and conspiracy theories were prevalent, but they weren't always accompanied by synthetic media," Etzioni said.

Second, he suspects that generative AI technology is not quite there yet, particularly when it comes to deepfake videos. 

"Some of the most egregious videos that are truly realistic — those are still pretty hard to create," Etzioni said. "There's another lap to go before people can generate what they want easily and have it look the way they want. Awareness of how to do this may not have penetrated the dark corners of the internet yet."

One thing he's sure of: High-end AI video-generation capabilities will come. This might happen during the next major election cycle or the one after that, but it's coming.

With that in mind, Etzioni shared learnings from TrueMedia's first go-round this year:

• Democracies are still not prepared for the worst-case scenario when it comes to AI deepfakes.
• There's no purely technical solution for this looming problem, and AI will need regulation. 
• Social media has an important role to play. 
• TrueMedia achieves roughly 90% accuracy, although people asked for more. It will be impossible to be 100% accurate, so there's room for human analysts.
• It's not always scalable to have humans at the end checking every decision, so humans only get involved in edge cases, such as when users question a decision made by TrueMedia's technology. 

The group plans to publish research on its AI deepfake detection efforts, and it's working on potential licensing deals. 

"There's a lot of interest in our AI models that have been tuned based on the flurry of uploads and deepfakes," Etzioni said. "We hope to license those to entities that are mission-oriented."

• TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is the public face of the company, rallying its fans and testifying before Congress.
• He's 41 years old, went to Harvard Business School, and interned at Facebook when it was a startup.
• He met with president-elect Donald Trump recently as he continues his fight to avoid a TikTok ban in the US.

TikTok is under a lot of pressure right now.

As US lawmakers worry the video-sharing platform, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, poses a danger to national security, TikTok is scrambling to fight a law requiring it be sold to a US owner by January 19 or else risk being banned in the country.

So who's leading the company through this turbulent period?

That would be Shou Zi Chew, TikTok's 41-year-old CEO from Singapore, who got his start as an intern at Facebook.

Here's a rundown on TikTok's head honcho:

Chew worked for Facebook when it was still a startup.

He earned his bachelor's degree in economics at the University College London before heading to Harvard Business School for his MBA in 2010. 

While a student there, Chew worked for a startup that "was called Facebook," he said in a post on Harvard's Alumni website. Facebook went public in mid-2012.

 

Chew met his now-wife, Vivian Kao, via email when they were both students at Harvard.

They are "a couple who often finish each other's sentences," according to the school's alumni page, and have three kids.

Chew was CFO of Xiaomi before joining Bytedance.

He became chief financial officer of the Chinese smartphone giant, which competes with Apple, in 2015. Chew helped secure crucial financing and led the company through its 2018 public listing, which would become one of the nation's largest tech IPOs in history. 

He became Xiaomi's international business president in 2019, too.

Before joining Xiaomi, Chew also worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs for two years, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He also worked at investment firm DST, founded by billionaire tech investor Yuri Milner, for five years. It was during his time there in 2013 that he led a team that became early investors in ByteDance, as the Business Chief and The Independent reported.

For a while, Chew was both the CEO of TikTok and the CFO of its parent company, ByteDance.

Chew joined ByteDance's C-suite in March 2021, the first person to fill the role of chief financial officer at the media giant.

He was named CEO of TikTok that May at the same time as Vanessa Pappas was named COO. Bytedance founder and former CEO Zhang Yiming said at the time that Chew "brings deep knowledge of the company and industry, having led a team that was among our earliest investors, and having worked in the technology sector for a decade."

That November, it was announced that Chew would leave his role as ByteDance's CFO to focus on running TikTok.

TikTok's former CEO, Kevin Mayer, had left Walt Disney for the position in May 2020 and quit after three months as the company faced pressure from lawmakers over security concerns.

Some government officials in the US and other countries remain concerned that TikTok's user data could be shared with the Chinese government.

Donald Trump's administration issued executive orders designed to force ByteDance into divesting its TikTok US operations, though nothing ever happened.

President Biden signed an executive order in June 2021 that threw out Trump's proposed bans on the app.

Last year, the Biden administration demanded that TikTok divest its American business from its Chinese parent company or risk being banned in the US. In response, Chew said such a divestment wouldn't solve officials' security concerns about TikTok.

In a TikTok last March, Chew announced the company has amassed 150 million monthly active users in the US and broached the subject of the ban threats.

"Some politicians have started talking about banning TikTok," he said. "Now this could take TikTok away from all 150 million of you."

Chew testified before Congress that month about the company's privacy and data security practices.

Wall Street said his testimony didn't do much to help his case to keep TikTok alive in the US, though Chew seemed to win over many TikTok users, with some applauding his efforts and even making flattering fancam edits of him.

Now, Chew and TikTok are in the spotlight again as the company tries to stave off a looming potential ban.

The House of Representatives passed a bill on March 13 that would require any company owned by a "foreign adversary" to divest or sell to a US-based company within 180 days to avoid being banned in the US.

Chew put out a video response shortly after, asking users to "make your voices heard" and "protect your constitutional rights" by voicing opposition to lawmakers.

He called the vote "disappointing" and said the company has invested in improving data security and keeping the platform "free from outside manipulation."

"This bill gives more power to a handful of other social media companies," he added. "It will also take billions of dollars out of the pockets of creators and small businesses. It will put more than 300,000 American jobs at risk."

The Senate also passed the bill, and President Biden signed it into law in April.

In September, a hearing on the potential TikTok ban began in federal appeals court and in December, a three-judge panel from the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the law is constitutional.

On the heels of the bad news, Chew met with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago several days later.

Trump said in a press conference on the day they met that he has a "warm spot" for TikTok, which he has criticized in the past, because he says it helped him win over young voters in the 2024 election.

Also on the day of their meeting, TikTok asked the Supreme Court to block the law that requires it be sold to avoid a shutdown, arguing that it violates Americans' First Amendment rights.

When he's not fighting efforts to ban TikTok, Chew makes appearances at some pretty high-profile events.

He's been seen at the Met Gala, and also posted about attending the 2023 Super Bowl and even Taylor Swift's Eras Tour.

His hobbies include playing video games like Clash of Clans and Diablo IV, golfing, and reading about theoretical physics.

In the early days of the pandemic, Josh Kramer and his wife set up a Discord server to stay in touch with their friends. Branched off from the main group of about 20 people are different channels for topics — like AI and crypto, which took over a channel previously devoted to "Tiger King," and another called "sweethomies" to talk about their houses and apartments — that only some people might want to be notified about to avoid annoying everyone all the time. Now, more than four years later, it's become "essential" for the extended friend group, says Kramer, seeing them through the early anxiety of COVID-19 and two presidential elections.

While the chat is made up of friendly faces, it's not really an echo chamber — not everyone has the same ideology or political opinions, Kramer tells me. But it's more productive than screaming into the void on social media. Now, when he has a thought that may have turned into a tweet, he instead takes it to the group, where it can become a conversation.

"It's a way to have conversations about complicated issues, like national politics, but in context with people I actually know and care about," Kramer, who is the head of editorial at New_ Public, a nonprofit research and development lab focusing on reimagining social media, tells me. The success of the server has also informed how he thinks about ways to reform the social web. On election night, for example, using the group chat was less about scoring points with a quippy tweet and "more about checking in with each other and commiserating about our experience, rather than whatever you might take to Twitter to talk about to check in with the broader zeitgeist."

In the month or so since the 2024 election, thousands have abandoned or deactivated their X accounts, taking issue with Elon Musk's move to use the platform as a tool to reelect Donald Trump, as they seek new ways to connect and share information. Bluesky, which saw its users grow 110% in November according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, has emerged as the most promising replacement among many progressives, journalists, and Swifties, as it allows people to easily share links and doesn't rely as heavily on algorithmic delivery of posts as platforms like Facebook, X, and TikTok have come to. But some are turning further inward to smaller group chats, either via text message or on platforms like Discord, WhatsApp, and Signal, where they can have conversations more privately and free of algorithmic determinations.

It's all part of the larger, ongoing fracturing of our social media landscape. For a decade, Twitter proved to be the room where news broke. Other upstarts launched after Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022 and tried to compete, luring people with promises of moderation and civility, but ultimately folded, largely because they weren't very fun or lacked the momentum created by the kind of power users that propelled the old Twitter. But for many, there's still safety in the smaller group chats, which take the form of your friends who like to shit talk in an iMessage chain or topic-focused, larger chats on apps like Discord or WhatsApp.

"Group chats have been quite valued," Kate Mannell, a research fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child at Deakin University in Australia, tells me. They allow people to chat with selected friends, family members, or colleagues to have much "more context-specific kinds of conversations, which I think is much more reflective of the way that our social groups actually exist, as opposed to this kind of flattening" that happens on social media. When people accumulate large followings on social media, they run into context collapse, she says. The communication breakdown happens as the social platforms launched in the 2000s have taken on larger lives than anyone anticipated.

By contrast, some more exclusive chats are seen as cozy, safe spaces. Most of Discord's servers are made up of fewer than 10 people, Savannah Badalich, the senior director of policy at Discord, tells me. The company has 200 million active users, up from 100 million in 2020. What started as a place to hang with friends while playing video games still incentivizes interacting over lurking or building up big followings. "We don't have that endless doomscrolling," Badalich says. "We don't have that place where you're passively consuming content. Discord is about real-time interaction." And interacting among smaller groups may be more natural. Research by the psychologist Robin Dunbar in the 1990s found that humans could cognitively maintain about 150 meaningful relationships. More recent research has questioned that determination, but any person overburdened by our digital age can surely tell you that you can only show up authentically and substantially in person for a small subset of the people you follow online. A 2024 study, conducted by Dunbar and the telecommunications company Vodafone, found that the average person in the UK was part of 83 group chats across all platforms, with a quarter of people using group chats more often than one-to-one messages.

In addition to hosting group chats, WhatsApp has tried more recently to position itself as a place for news, giving publishers the ability to send headlines directly to followers. News organizations like MSNBC, Reuters, and Telemundo have channels. CNN has nearly 15 million followers, while The New York Times has about 13 million. Several publishers recently told the Times that they were seeing growth and traffic come from WhatsApp, but the channels have yet to rival sources like Google or Facebook. While it gives them the power to connect to readers, WhatsApp is owned by Meta, which has a fraught history of hooking media companies and making them dependent on traffic on its social platforms only to later de-emphasize their content.

Victoria Usher, the founder and CEO of Gingermay, a B2B tech communications firm, says she's in several large, business-focused group chats on WhatsApp. Usher, who lives in the UK, even found these chats were a way to get news about the US election "immediately." In a way, the group chats are her way of optimizing news and analysis of it, and it works because there's a deep sense of trust between those in the chat that doesn't exist when scrolling X. "I prefer it to an algorithm," she says. "It's going to be stories that I will find interesting." She thinks they deliver information better than LinkedIn, where people have taken to writing posts in classic LinkedIn style to please the algorithm — which can be both self-serving and cringe. "It doesn't feel like it's a truthful channel," Usher says. "They're trying to create a picture of how they want to be seen personally. Within WhatsApp groups or Signal, people are much more likely to post what they actually feel about something."

The candid nature of group chats — which some have called the last safe spaces in society today — gives them value and tethers people with looser connections together, but that can also make them unwieldy. Some of the larger group chats, like those on Discord, have moderation and rules. But when it comes to just chatting with your friends or family, there's largely no established group-chat etiquette. Group chats can languish for years; there's no playbook for leaving or kicking out someone who's no longer close to the core group. If a couple breaks up, who gets the group chat? How many memes is a person allowed to send a day? What happens when the group texts get leaked? There's often "no external moderator to come in and say, 'That's not how we do things,'" Mannell says.

Kramer, while he likes his Discord chat, is optimistic about the future of groups and new social networks. He says he's also taken over a community Facebook group for his neighborhood that was inactive and made more connections with his neighbors. We're in a moment where massive change could come to our chats and our social networks. "There's been a social internet for 30 years," says Kramer. But there's "so much room for innovation and new exciting and alternative options." But his group chat might still have the best vibes of all. Messaging there "has less to do with being right and scoring points" than on social media, he says. "It has so much value to me on a personal level, as a place of real support."

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

It used to be that when a killer emerged in America, we found out who the man was before we began to enshroud him in myth. But with Luigi Mangione, the lead suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, that process was reversed. The internet assumed it already knew everything about Thompson's killer before a suspect had even been identified, let alone arrested.

Within hours of the shooting, social media was churning out a mythologized version of the masked man. In his anonymity, he became an instant folk hero, portrayed as a crusader for universal healthcare, a martyr willing to risk it all to send a message to America's insurance giants with "the first shots fired in a class war." A Reddit forum offered up dozens of laudatory nicknames to crystalize his mythology: the Readjuster, the Denier, the People's Debt Collector, Modern-Day Robin Hood. "I actually feel safer with him at large," one tweet a day after the shooting said; it received 172,000 likes. A surveillance image of the suspect moved some to comment that he was "too hot to convict" and prompted comparisons to Jake Gyllenhaal and Timothée Chalamet. In New York City, a "CEO-shooter look-alike competition" was held in Washington Square Park. Surely, the internet assumed, the suspect shared left-wing ideas about the cruelties of privatized healthcare.

Then the man himself appeared — and he didn't fit into any of the neat categories that had already been created to describe him. On X, he followed the liberal columnist Ezra Klein and the conservative podcaster Joe Rogan. He respected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and retweeted a video of Peter Thiel maligning "woke"-ism. He took issue with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. He played the cartoon video game "Among Us," posted shirtless thirst traps, quoted Charli XCX on Instagram, and had the Goodreads account of an angsty, heterodox-curious teenage boy: self-help, bro-y nonfiction, Ayn Rand, "The Lorax," and "Infinite Jest." Yes, he seemed to admire the Unabomber. But mostly, this guy — a former prep-school valedictorian with an Ivy League education and a spate of tech jobs — was exceedingly centrist and boring. A normie's normie. He wasn't an obvious lefty, but he wasn't steeped in the right-wing manosphere either. His posted beliefs don't fit neatly into any preestablished bucket. In his 261-word manifesto, which surfaced online, he downplayed his own qualifications to critique the system. "I do not pretend," he wrote, "to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument."

That didn't stop the denizens of social media from pretending to be the most qualified people to lay out exactly who Mangione is. He's "fundamentally anti-capitalist" and "just another leftist nut job." Or he's "a vaguely right-wing ivy league tech bro." Or he was invented by the CIA, or maybe Mossad, as a "psyop." The reality of Mangione — his messy, sometimes contradictory impulses — allowed everyone to cherry-pick the aspects of his personality that confirmed their original suspicions. In the attention economy, patience is a vice.

The rush to romanticize killers is nothing new. A quarter century ago, we cast the Columbine shooters as undone by unfettered access either to guns or to the satanic influences of Marilyn Manson and Rammstein. A decade ago, we debated the glamorization of the Boston Marathon bomber, gussied up like a rock star on the cover of Rolling Stone. But social media has sped up the assumption cycle to the point where we put the killer into a category before police have found the killer. Perhaps there's a "great rewiring" of our brains that has diminished our capacity to understand each other, as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests in "The Anxious Generation" — a book Mangione had retweeted a glowing review of.

Mythmaking is easier, of course, when it's unencumbered by reality. The less we know about a killer, the more room there is to turn him into something he's not. From what we have learned so far, Mangione is a troubled Gen Zer who won the privilege lottery at birth and ascribed to a mishmash of interests and beliefs. We will surely learn more about him in the coming days, weeks, and months. But now that we know who he is, it will be hard, if not impossible, to let go of our initial assumptions. Instead, we'll selectively focus on the details that fit tidily into the myths we've already created. In the digital-age version of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," the legend was already printed by the time the facts came along.

Scott Nover is a freelance writer in Washington, DC. He is a contributing writer at Slate and was previously a staff writer at Quartz and Adweek covering media and technology.

On Wednesday, moments after the news broke that Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, had been fatally shot in Midtown Manhattan, social media unleashed a barrage of caustic commentary about his death. In lieu of condolences, Americans from all walks of life shared barbed jokes, grim memes, and personal anecdotes about their own experiences with giant insurers like UnitedHealthcare.

On Facebook, UnitedHealthcare's statement about the murder of its chief executive elicited 46,000 reactions — 41,000 of which employed the laughing emoji. The company quickly turned off comments on the post, but hundreds of users shared it with arch commentary.

"The amount of laugh reacts on the original post speaks volumes lol," one user wrote.

"My thoughts & prayers were out of network," wrote another.

While the motive behind Thompson's murder remains unknown, the internet treated it as an occasion for ghoulish schadenfreude. America's health insurance system is so broken and cruel, people openly declared, that the death of one of its most powerful executives merited nothing but scorn and derision. "He was CEO when he was shot," read one tweet that received more than 120,000 likes. "Preexisting condition. Claim denied."

"The UnitedHealthcare CEO might be the most celebrated death on this app since Henry Kissinger," wrote another user on X.

Given the nature of social media, where the most provocative and emotion-laden commentary is engineered to rise to the top, it's not surprising that platforms from TikTok to Reddit would be filled with hateful invective. What's striking, however, is how the backlash revealed the depth of the bitterness toward health insurers. In the face of a man being gunned down in the street, people didn't keep their feelings toward insurers in check; rather, they seized on it as a moment to vent their rage. Everyone from right-wing influencers to tenured Ivy League professors responded to Thompson's killing by posting about what they saw as the injustices of America's health insurers. Even on LinkedIn, one of the internet's last bastions of civility and professionalism, hundreds of business executives, HR leaders, and tech managers shared deeply personal stories about how they and their loved ones had suffered at the hands of a healthcare bureaucracy that often delays and denies reasonable claims.

In one exchange, a hospital executive acknowledged that many Americans are fed up with health insurers. "As healthcare security professionals, we know that many see healthcare as a target for their anger," he wrote. "Family members who have lost a loved one may feel as though a physician, healthcare facility, or insurer is responsible for that loss."

Jill Christensen, a former vice president at Western Union, responded to the post by forcefully rejecting its wording. "In many instances, it's not feel, it's ARE responsible for that loss," she wrote. "I was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer and UHC denied every claim. While today's event is tragic, it does not come as a surprise to the millions of people — like myself — who pay their OOP costs and premiums, only to be turned away at their greatest time of need."

The joking language of the internet has become a standard way for Americans to process tragic events, whether the September 11, 2001, attacks or the July 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump. But Thompson's murder sparked something different: an unparalleled public reckoning with one of the country's largest and most profitable industries. "When you shoot one man in the street it's murder," wrote one user on X. "When you kill thousands of people in hospitals by taking away their ability to get treatment you're an entrepreneur."

To some observers, the outpouring of ire also appeared to have an immediate effect on the industry itself. One day after Thompson's murder, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield announced that it was rescinding a controversial plan to limit coverage for anesthesia. "When patients become financially responsible because a health plan cuts how much they pay providers, that's what breeds all this anger," Marianne Udow-Phillips, a former Blue Cross executive, told Axios. An Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield spokesperson told Business Insider, "It never was and never will be the policy of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield to not pay for medically necessary anesthesia services. The proposed update to the policy was only designed to clarify the appropriateness of anesthesia consistent with well-established clinical guidelines."

The storm of invective surrounding Thompson's killing will soon subside, as online malice always does. But it's also possible that the CEO's death will mark an inflection point in the debate over America's privatized system of health insurance. On X, one user drew a direct line between the callousness of the internet's response to Thompon's murder and an industry that makes it hard for many Americans to receive the medical treatment they need.

"All jokes aside," the user tweeted, "it's really fucked up to see so many people on here celebrating murder. No one here is the judge of who deserves to live or die. That's the job of the AI algorithm the insurance company designed to maximise profits on your health."

Scott Nover is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC. He is a contributing writer at Slate and was previously a staff writer at Quartz and Adweek covering media and technology.

• Paul Chai is an Australian dad with two teenage sons — one is 18, and the other is 14.
• Chai says his younger son doesn't make friends quickly and Snapchat has helped.
• He's not convinced that a social media ban on young teenagers is what Australian parents want.

My 14-year-old son often rolls his eyes when I talk politics, but he has taken a keen interest in the topic lately, since Australia's government has decided to ban everyone in the country from accessing social media until they turn 16.

He got his own phone and started using social media earlier than I would have liked. It was 2021, he was 12, and Melbourne had been in lockdown for over six months. Melbourne's lockdown during the pandemic added up to 262 days, the longest cumulative lockdown in the world.

At the time, my wife and I decided that giving our son a phone seemed less harmful than months of isolation. Looking back, he has become quite attached to his device.

I recognize that social media can harm children. It can do the same to adults, to reputations, and to democracy. But what concerns me about my country's new policy, which was announced on November 21, is the lack of nuance and public discussion.

Losing the good with the bad

With his parents' help and guidance, my son now has what I consider a pretty healthy relationship with social media. He is online, but he also loves travel, gets out a lot with friends, runs in Parkrun, and plays drums in a couple of bands.

Online, he uses TikTok to discover new music, Snapchat to keep up with friends who live far away, and Signal to communicate with his grandparents who live abroad. He and I share a love of movies, and I enjoy how he is almost always ahead of me when it comes to the latest releases and entertainment news that he finds online.

We have a family group chat on WhatsApp that helps us manage our daily lives and allows us to share memes with each other.

My son is worried the ban will cut him off from far-flung friends. He has also talked about wanting to get his first job as soon as he turns 15 and wonders if he will face barriers to work communications. His older brother, who just turned 18, has been receiving his work shifts via social media chats for a few years.

Australia's government has said the social media ban will apply to Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, Instagram, and X. Certain chat-based social media, including Messenger Kids, WhatsApp, Kids Helpline, Google Classroom, and YouTube, will not be banned. A decision on other messaging apps — like Signal, Discord, and Google Chat — has not yet been made.

"We know social media is doing social harm," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in the November media release. "This is a landmark reform. We know some kids will find workarounds, but we're sending a message to social media companies to clean up their act," he continued.

The government has announced that tech companies have one year to stop minors from logging into their social media platforms or risk up to 49,500,000 Australian dollars, or $32,000,000, in fines.

Albanese also said that neither underage users nor their parents will face punishment for violations.

But what I worry about is that the ban will sweep away all the positives of my son's online life in an attempt to tackle the negatives.

In June, just a few months before the social media ban was passed, Australia's eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, suggested that a ban on social media for kids may not be a cure-all. "Social media may also provide a range of opportunities that are protective of mental health, such as inclusion, social connection and belonging," the commissioner said, per The Guardian.

Grant's statement reminded me of my own son using social media to build friendships. It also made me think of the under-16 LGBTQ+ Australians and rural communities who have formed friendships and found acceptance online.

Is this what parents want?

While I have read a lot about Australian parents supporting this ban, it was only recently that I came across someone who agreed with it.

A father I spoke to, who was in favor of the ban, has a teenage daughter. He told me that she's obsessed with her phone and has even threatened to self-harm if it were taken away from her. He said that a nationwide ban will help him wean her off her online addiction.

Within my community, most parents I've discussed this with have said they don't want the government to control their parenting any more than they do their bodies.

My son doesn't make friends quickly, and many of his current friendships have grown stronger online. I don't see it as a replacement for their IRL get-togethers but as a complement.

Many of us who grew up without social media tend to romanticize our childhoods. While I did a fair bit of running around the neighborhood with mates as a kid, I also remember spending hours on the phone talking to girlfriends when I was a teenager.

I also had pen pals in America with whom I would spend hours corresponding; in-person communication is not the only way to form strong bonds.

• Mark Cuban learns about new technologies and trends through his teenage kids.
• Knowing about social media also allows the billionaire to connect with them.
• Cuban recently left "Shark Tank" to spend more time with his kids.

Social media may feel like unchartered territory to some parents — but Mark Cuban is leaning in.

In an interview with People posted on Thursday, the entrepreneur shared eight rules that he follows in life — including this one parenting tip.

"Number one, follow the scroll," Cuban, 66, said. "Oh my goodness, I learned so much from my kids. I learned what 'skibidi' is," he said, referring to the Gen Alpha lingo. "Skibidi Toilet" is an animated YouTube series about singing and dancing toiletlike creatures that want to take over the world.

Social media is an integral part of their lives, he added. "I keep on learning from them because they are exposed to all these new technologies."

Referring to himself as a "tech guy," Cuban said he tries to understand how social media algorithms influence his kids' lives.

Knowing about social media also helps him connect with them.

"They're in the car, and I'm driving my son. I can look over at a stoplight and see him scrolling through his Instagram or TikTok and know exactly what he's interested in," he said.

"Trying to be able to connect to him, which, like for any parent, could be almost impossible, but it's just informative," he added.

Cuban has three kids, who are 14, 17, and 21.

In May 2020, he posted a video on Instagram of him dancing with his daughters. "Teaching me to dance 😂😂😂," he wrote in the caption.

Last November, Cuban announced that he would leave "Shark Tank" after Season 16, which premiered in October on ABC.

"I'm leaving just to spend more time with my kids — they're teenagers now," he told The Wrap in October. "We shoot in June and September, and just getting the opportunity now when they're getting out of school to be able to spend time directly with them, that's important. I'm tired of missing that."

Cuban is not alone in using social media as a tool of connection.

Nina McCollum recently wrote for Business Insider that she uses TikTok and Instagram to communicate with her teenage son. They watch social media content together and have discussions about them.

"Politics, religion, science, life choices, and risk-taking are just some of the discussions social content has sparked," she wrote. "None of this connection would be happening if we didn't communicate through these videos."

A few celebrity parents have resorted to other means of connection.

"Modern Family" actor, Julie Bowen, said she hangs out around the house so her three teen sons know where to find her if they need her.

"If you just kind of park it, make fake cookies in the kitchen no one's ever going to eat, they start coming in and out. You start having conversations with teenagers," Bowen said in an October episode of "The Three Questions with Andy Richter" podcast.

Molly Shannon, a "Saturday Night Live" alum, advised parents of teens to change their attitudes about parenting in an interview on "Today with Hoda and Jenn." She added that they should have empathy when interacting with their teens.

"Most of the time, they just want to be heard. I try to think of that," she said.

Cuban did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.

• Influencers must adapt to keep up in an oversaturated market.
• Audiences are tired of ads and seek authentic, expertise-driven content.
• Platforms like VSCO and Reddit have gained traction, with users craving genuine communities.

A splintered social media world is on the horizon — and it's paving the way for a new, more authentic breed of influencer.

"People are just trying to find authentic communities," Eric Wittman, CEO of photo-editing app VSCO, told Business Insider.

Wittman pointed to Reddit's surge in users and skyrocketing earnings as an example. Bluesky's user base has also risen in recent weeks to 21 million, and Mastodon is seeing more modest growth, with about 90,000 new sign-ups this month, according to its CEO.

In a white paper published earlier last year, Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, who researches digital public infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said there's a reboot taking place.

He believes that will include the rise of "very small online platforms" that host the kind of intimate conversations that are lacking on today's major platforms.

"It will create a lot more fragmentation in the market," said Wittman. "It's going to be more interest-driven and more community-driven, which I think is healthy."

Trust is key, losing it is costly

Audiences appear to be more discerning. Some are getting cynical about sponsored posts and bored of being sold to, especially when products or brands don't align with their values.

For example, TikTok can feel like a pseudo-shopping channel where every other video seems to be an ad.

Kate Smoothy, an SEO specialist and the founder and director of Webhive Digital, is also a content creator with 47,000 TikTok followers. She told BI she only partners with brands that she believes in because she values her audience's trust.

"As soon as you lose that trust, you may as well kiss the whole content creator thing goodbye," she said.

Smoothy said she sees things changing, with different "tiers" of content creators emerging from the industry's oversaturation. The top ones will have prioritized their community and built trust with their audience.

"Ultimately, the 'lower down' creators will struggle to establish themselves or pivot as the industry adapts to new platforms and changes in trends," Smoothy said.

New social media horizons

Lucy Edgerley, the head of influence at the global social media agency Born Social, told BI that Gen Zers, in particular, are craving creativity, entertainment, and inspiration.

Some may choose alternative platforms like VSCO, Bluesky, and Mastodon over the major players of Instagram, TikTok, and X.

Others are following their favorite creators to subscription services like Substack or Patreon.

"Platforms like Pinterest, which foster ideas-driven content, are thriving because they align with this demand," she said.

Wittman said that 57% of VSCO's user base is between the ages of 18 and 24, and the app is seeing a million new sign-ups a month. He pointed to the lack of ads on the platform — none if users opt for the paid service, which starts at a monthly fee of $2.50.

"We are very restrictive on who can advertise on our platform," Wittman said. "When we do these brand partnerships, we want to make sure that it's a brand that kind of suits our principles and philosophies as well."

Young people who have grown up with social media are learning the lessons about the dark side of it — the mental health toll, the bullying, and the over-consumerism — the hard way, he said.

"They're looking for healthier places to go to where they're not feeling manipulated," he said.

Intellectual influencers will thrive

Not everyone sees it this way. While newer platforms such as Threads and Bluesky are reporting impressive numbers, Kim Murray, the founder of the influencer marketing agency Virality Boost, told BI that many influencers are likely to stay put with what they know.

"Most creators find it challenging to build and maintain audiences across an ever-expanding array of platforms," she said.

Audiences are already more selective than they used to be, she added, so influencers will have to evolve wherever they are, regardless of their follower count.

"This shift signals a transformation rather than an endpoint," Murray said. "The real opportunity lies in how influencers adapt to meet this heightened selectivity by focusing on distribution strategies that deliver genuine value to both audiences and brands."

Wittman said the bar has been raised, and he sees a move toward "intellectual influencers" emerging, where people gravitate to creators who offer something unique.

"They actually want experts," he said. "They want it to be fun, and they want it to be creative. They don't want just some crazy infomercial."

Edgerley agreed we're witnessing a shift. Despite the success of YouTube shorts and TikTok, long-form storytelling is on the rise, she said, suggesting users want deeper engagement rather than endless scrolling.

"Ultimately, it's about meeting audiences with humor, inspiration, and substance," she said. "Not just ads."

• Australia's government approved a law that would ban social media for kids under 16.
• The legislation puts the onus on tech companies to keep children off their platforms.
• But how exactly companies are supposed to comply remains a big question.

Australia's government agreed to a sweeping social media ban this week in an attempt to protect young people from online harm, though exactly how tech companies like TikTok, Meta, and Snapchat would verify users' age remains a giant question mark.

The law gives tech companies one year to figure out how to keep children under 16 from using their social platforms or risk up to $32 million in fines.

The legislation is among the strictest of its kind as countries around the world increasingly target social media as the next frontier for child safety laws.

"The law places the onus on social media platforms — not parents or young people — to take reasonable steps to ensure these protections are in place," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a November 21 press release.

The country's House of Representatives overwhelmingly supported the bill in a 102-13 vote on Wednesday, while Australia's Senate voted 34 to 19 in favor of the legislation on Thursday.

Some pornography websites and online gambling platforms have implemented ID checks in recent years to comply with a wave of legislation requiring online age verification in several US states, asking users to submit a selfie with a government-approved ID.

Australia's new law specifically bars social media companies from asking for users' IDs in an effort to protect privacy rights.

Julie Inman Grant, Australia's eSafety commissioner in charge of implementing the new law, told The New York Times that age verification technologies are improving daily and expressed faith in tech companies' ability to comply.

"They've got financial resources, technologies and some of the best brainpower," she told the outlet. "If they can target you for advertising, they can use the same technology and know-how to identify and verify the age of a child."

A government-commissioned trial looking into technologies that could be used for age verification, including biometrics, is underway in Australia and is set to deliver its report next summer.

Google and Meta had lobbied to delay the vote until the commission delivered its report. Snap Inc., which owns Snapchat, said "device-level age verification" was the best possible option to meet the requirements. Meanwhile, X CEO Elon Musk suggested the legislation was "a backdoor way to control access to the internet by all Australians."

Other critics of the legislation, including opposition lawmakers and some mental health experts, have expressed concern that the bill could have unintended consequences, especially for marginalized young people who have historically used social media to find online support.

Support for the legislation appears to be high in the country. A YouGov poll released ahead of the vote last week found that 77% of Australians backed the ban.

"This is a landmark reform," Albanese said. "We know some kids will find workarounds, but we're sending a message to social media companies to clean up their act."

• A woman's creative out-of-office emails sparked debate on professionalism and workplace norms.
• Experts say OOO emails should reflect a company's culture.
• Legal and social issues can arise if OOOs don't align with employer expectations.

The backlash to a woman's creative out-of-office emails has caught the attention of TikTok and ignited a debate over how much personality to bring to work.

Thara Moise, better known as Chef Moise, is a TikTok creator and private chef who also works a regular 9-5 as a catering and sales manager.

In a recent TikTok, which amassed more than a million views, she said she had received the "same talking to" from her boss at her day job multiple times due to her "super cute" out-of-office emails.

The emails would include stories she'd made up, historical facts, or wellness tips.

"Tell me why I had another conversation with this man today about how unprofessional that is," Moise said, adding that she felt like her personality was being "smothered by corporate America."

"Am I wrong?" she asked.

Being creative can work

Some saw her creative automated emails as unprofessional, while others thought it was a sign that her workplace was stifling and restrictive.

"Imagine you sent an urgent email to someone and their automated response was a story instead of letting you know who to contact while they're out," read one comment, which received 21,000 likes.

Workplace analysts are also divided on the issue, saying it may all depend on the specifics of your office and the people in it.

Carla Bevins, an associate teaching professor of business management communication at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business in Pittsburgh, told Business Insider that OOO emails are an extension of workplace communication.

"While injecting personality can make them memorable, it's important to balance creativity with professionalism," she said.

However, Rich Mehta, the founder of the digital marketing agency Rigorous Digital, said that adding some personality into an OOO email could be beneficial in the right workplace setting.

"From the sendee's perspective, getting an OOO isn't usually a nice experience," he said. "Surprising someone with what can otherwise be a bit of a rubbish experience introduces dissonance, which usually means you'll be remembered."

Issues can arise

In more traditional workplaces, legal issues might arise.

Jo Mackie, a partner and employment law specialist at the law firm Burlingtons, told BI that inappropriate, offensive, or rude messages should never be tolerated, "but that begs the question of who decides what is and is not appropriate."

Raising the conversation three times shows that Moise should take notice, Mackie added, as failing to "follow a wilful management instruction" in employment law can potentially lead to disciplinary action, she said.

"If this continues, there is also scope for an employer to claim there has been a breakdown in trust and confidence between the employer and employee," she said. "And that is grounds for a breach of contract claim and may lead to dismissal."

Reading the room

Joelle Moray, a psychotherapist, workplace dynamics consultant, and the author of "What Are We Doing?! Radical Self-Care for the Hustle Culture," said that Moise's story is an example of the need to "get it right" rather than "being right."

Moray advises that individuals start by reading the room and deciding whether their workplace is more conservative or relaxed.

Then, they should take some time to consider who will read the email and why they want to add a casual tone or anecdote.

"Are you adding a wellness tip because you're the wellness committee chairperson?" she said. "Are you adding a historical factoid because you think they would be interested, or are you adding this so that you appear interesting?"

Moise told BI that she had found the response to her video funny for the most part, though some had veered into bullying or calling for her to be fired, which was "unnecessary," she said.

"Most people expressing negative thoughts are projecting their insecurities about being different or odd," she said. "I am incredibly accomplished on my own and have always navigated the workforce with ease."

Moise's workplace did not respond to a request for comment.

• Threads is letting users choose a default feed, Mark Zuckerberg has said.
• Meta's move to compete with Bluesky's growth follows a wave of users leaving Elon Musk's X.
• With its recent rapid growth, Bluesky faces fresh challenges, including content moderation.

Threads is stepping up its game by giving users the power to pick their default feed as it battles to keep pace with Bluesky's explosive growth.

Meta's chief, Mark Zuckerberg, said in a Threads post on Monday that it was "testing the option" for users to decide whether they want a "For You," "following," or customized feed. "Interested to see how and if people use this," he added.

The move has come as the Meta-owned platform seeks to capitalize on a wave of users leaving Elon Musk's X and compete with a surge in interest at the rival social network Bluesky, which is winning over millions of new users.

Bluesky says it now has more than 22.6 million users, up from 13 million in October. Droves of X users recently left the platform because of concerns over hate speech and misinformation.

Bluesky is encountering a fresh set of challenges amid its growth boom. Its chief operating officer, Rose Wang, told Business Insider last week that its 20-person team was in "firefighting mode" as its user growth surpassed its own projections. It's even had to expedite getting additional server capacity at its data centers as it anticipates further growth.

The company is also seeing an "uptick in harmful content" with the surge in users, it said Monday in a post. To tackle this, it's making some short-term decisions to recall posts, which has resulted in "over-enforcement and temporary suspensions for multiple users," it said.

Platformer's Casey Newton reported that Bluesky had eight confirmed cases of child-sexual-abuse material on Monday, compared with just two cases throughout 2023. Aaron Rodericks, Bluesky's head of trust and safety, told Platformer it was increasing the number of its content moderators fourfold to 100.

Threads has recently made a series of updates to its platform that seem to be driven by heightened competition from Bluesky. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said last week that Instagram would prioritize content from people users follow, which in turn would mean they'd see less recommended content.

Mosseri also said Instagram was testing a few "long-overdue improvements," including the ability for users to search for posts from a specific date or from a particular account. It's also set to give AI-generated summaries of trending topics in its "Trending Now" feed.

Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider made outside normal working hours.

• Paul Mescal said that he has to "quit the internet."
• In the latest episode of "Happy Sad Confused," Mescal said his algorithm has "too much" of him.
• Mescal rose to fame after his role in the 2020 drama, "Normal People."

Paul Mescal might be in need of a digital detox.

On Monday's episode of "Happy Sad Confused," Josh Horowitz asked the "Gladiator II" star what his algorithm was like.

"I've got to quit the internet," Mescal responded. "It's like too much. It's too much of yourself. There's not enough bakeries, and there's too much of me."

He said that he would take "anything else other than me." "But I think it's just the way that the algorithms are cursed," he said.

Mescal plays Lucius in the action sequel "Gladiator II." In the same interview, he opened up about the growing media attention he has been receiving.

Acting was never on his radar, and he had no desire in his childhood to be "out in the world," said Mescal, who was nominated for Best Actor in the 2023 Academy Awards for his role in "Aftersun."

"But also, you're smart enough to realize that, like, that's the gig. You get out in front of the movie, and you do your job," said the Irish actor. "But there's a certain tax that comes with it."

In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning on November 17, Mescal said his break-out role as Connell Waldron in "Normal People" changed his career trajectory.

"That was so abrupt," he said. "I think it started the scale moving in the direction that just that was the new normal, which was totally abnormal."

A representative for Mescal did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours.

Going on a digital detox

Mescal is not the only celebrity to have considered taking a break from social media.

In January, Selena Gomez posted an Instagram story with the caption, "I'm off social for a while. I'm focusing on what really matters." Still, the pop star returned to the platform in less than 24 hours.

Instead of completely abstaining from social media, setting limits may be more helpful in managing phone addiction, Neha Chaudhary, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, previously told BI.

She recommends leaning on friends and family to stay accountable.

"Accountability plays a big role in trying to make any change," she said. "Maybe decide with a friend that you want to both reduce use, or tell your family member your goals so that they can check in with you about it. Whatever it is, find a way to have someone help keep you on track — breaking habits alone can be difficult."

Chaudhary recommends unfollowing accounts that can negatively impact your mental health to curate a more positive social media feed.

"I tell my patients that one of the biggest shifts they can make is to start to replace content that leaves them feeling worse with content that makes them feel better when they consume it," she said.

• Elon Musk says a lot of us are doing it wrong when it comes to posting links on X.
• He says people should write a description in their main post, followed by the link in a reply.
• Musk says this will stop "lazy linking." If you have any idea what that even means, please let me know!

For anyone who posts links to X, it's been intuitively clear that since Elon Musk took over, posts with links don't get the same reach as they used to.

On old Twitter, a tweet with a link to a news article would often go viral or get a lot of engagement. Now, with the new "For you" algorithm that prioritizes images and videos, posts with links go almost unnoticed.

Finally, we now have some confirmation. Over the weekend, Elon Musk responded to Paul Graham, a Y-Combinator founder, about the topic:

What Musk describes — putting the link in a reply instead of in the main tweet — is what savvy posters have already been doing.

You've probably seen a variety of workarounds on X lately from people who often post links to articles, such as posting a screenshot of the headline or a multi-tweet thread.

As you have probably noticed, all of these options are kind of annoying for readers. I can confirm that they're also very annoying for the person posting the article.

(I should note that one of the features of the paid version of X is a "Top Articles" feature where you can see the articles your friends are posting.)

Initially, it seemed (to me) that the downranking of link posts was partly because of the new emphasis on video on X, and partly about a desire to keep people from leaving X to go anywhere else (in various posts, links to other social platforms have faced some version of a shadowban).

Musk says this is meant to stop "lazy linking" — which … I'm not sure exactly what that is. The term isn't common social media slang like "dirty delete," "subtweeting," or "soft block." (The term is sometimes used in computer programming.) X didn't respond to questions about lazy linking.

Graham's response was to ask Musk what was so lazy about putting a link in the main tweet instead of following it up with a reply that contains a link. Musk, so far, has not responded.

The overall effect here is that X is no longer useful for finding links to interesting articles to read — something that Twitter used to be fantastic at. Bummer!

• Madeline Mann, a career coach, advises job seekers to be careful about what they post online.
• Mann said job recruiters will check a candidate's LinkedIn and other social media platforms.
• She said sharing about your current job search journey on LinkedIn could backfire.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Madeline Mann, a 32-year-old career coach and CEO of Self Made Millennial from Los Angeles. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I've been a career coach for about six years. As the CEO of Self Made Millennial, my career coaching service, I want people to feel confident in selling themselves and ultimately land the job offer.

When it comes to job hunting, I tell my clients that recruiters will definitely check their LinkedIn profile — but they might not stop there. It's very likely they'll search for candidates on other social media platforms too.

For that reason, when looking for work, there are several things you shouldn't share online. Here are four of them.

1. Don't share your job search journey

When you're job searching, I'd heavily advise against documenting your journey. There has been a surge of people on LinkedIn, sharing what it's like to apply for jobs in today's market.

They say things like, "Oh, I just went through this company's interview process, and I didn't get the job," or, "Look how silly this job application is — and here's how I feel about it."

While it might get you some good engagement, understand employers are watching, too. As a job seeker, you don't want them to think, "Oh no, if we put this person through our interview process, what are they going to publicly say about our company?"

Although the job search journey can be pretty isolating, and it can feel good to talk about it, you really want to be cautious here.

2. Mental health

Similarly, I would advise against sharing your mental health journey online. This is something that has become a much more mainstream conversation and for such good reason.

But understand, it's something that an employer could make snap judgments on. Those hiring might question your ability to do the role, and you might not know it — as they won't tell you that.

Sharing things about depression, or anxiety, might make an employer wonder, "How is that going to impact our business?" and "Are they going to be capable of this job?"

Even if you're being uplifting and reflective, it's very risky. Instead, I'd try to keep this more to your inner circle, where you can control who has access to knowing.

3. Don't share your résumé online

On LinkedIn, there's an option to share your résumé — and I wouldn't recommend doing that.

If you share the same résumé everywhere online, you're missing the chance to tailor it to what that company is looking for. This is especially important if you have diverse interests in different roles; that one résumé could send the wrong message.

Instead, I suggest only sharing your résumé with the company you're applying to, rather than making it public on your website or LinkedIn profile.

4. Consider not sharing political campaigns

If you've worked on a political campaign, it's important to consider whether you should actually include it on your LinkedIn profile.

Yes, you likely gained valuable experience, but before posting it, think about the cities you want to work in, the role you're applying for, and the jobs you'd like to pursue.

Many people struggle to separate their beliefs and may make assumptions based on who they think you voted for. These differences can cloud someone's judgment, and when you're applying for jobs, you don't want that to happen.

Even if they shouldn't, small biases can make a big impact. In the end, you don't want to give people the ability to quickly judge you before they get to know you.

Protecting your accounts

When applying for jobs, go to Google, type in your name, and see what comes up. A recruiter will usually start there. They might see your LinkedIn profile, but they could also come across your X and Instagram accounts, too. If those platforms appear, they'll likely click on those links.

To protect yourself from that happening — you can do a few things. First, you can put your social media accounts on private, which isn't necessarily foolproof, but a start, or you can set your social media accounts to include just your first and middle name, so your last name doesn't appear.

You can also slightly misspell your last name. For example, I saw someone whose last name starts with "W," but he used two "V"s instead. That way, if someone searched his last name, it wouldn't show up.

But just as a general rule, know that if someone does get through your privacy settings, there are ways to see what you've liked and who you follow.

Before posting, ask yourself is this the right way to portray myself? Should I just send this in a group text to my friends instead? Really consider those things before posting.

If you're a career coach who would like to share helpful job searching tips, please email Manseen Logan at [email protected].

• Bluesky's user base surged to 21 million, prompting the company to race to get more servers.
• Rose Wang, Bluesky's COO, told Business Insider that its 20-person team is in "firefighting mode."
• Its growth follows users leaving X, with over 280,000 closing their accounts on Election Day.

Bluesky has "blown past" its user growth projections so much that it's racing to get more servers to keep the site running smoothly, the social media platform's chief operating officer has said.

Rose Wang told Business Insider that the influx of new users at Bluesky over the past two weeks was "quite unexpected" and that the company's 20-person team has been in "firefighting mode."

The social media network has surpassed 21 million users, up from 13 million in October, as X users have left in droves and flocked to the platform.

But that level of scaling has come with some growing pains. Bluesky experienced an outage earlier this month, which the company said was due to an external internet provider.

To preempt further growth, it has expedited additional server capacity at its data centers.

"We have grown by a million users every day for the last eight days, which has blown past our projections, and so we were going to get new servers next year, but we had to fast forward that," Wang said.

The US election appears to have triggered a migration of X users to Bluesky, which has been praised because of its similarity to the "old Twitter." More than 280,000 people closed their X accounts on Election Day, data from Similarweb shows.

Gordon MacMillan, X's former head of content strategy, previously told BI that people have been leaving the platform because of its owner, Elon Musk, using it as a political megaphone in his support for president-elect Donald Trump. He also pointed to concerns over hate speech and misinformation on X.

Wang said that Bluesky's growth has come from two areas: event-driven growth, where something happens on a different platform like X, and community-driven growth, where people joined because they like the interaction on the platform.

Bluesky was created in 2019 as an internal project at X when it was still known as Twitter, and Jack Dorsey was still at the helm. It launched as a separate company in 2021, with Jay Gruber as CEO.

It launched a beta version of its app last year, and users could only join with an invite code until February. Dorsey exited the board of directors in May as it shifted towards a corporate structure and told Wired that it was "literally repeating all the mistakes" Twitter made.

Bluesky's 'lightning in the bottle moment'

Wang said that Bluesky caught the attention of users after Musk acquired X for $44 billion in 2022.

"There was a moment in time when right after Elon bought Twitter and before Threads launched, we had our lightning in the bottle moment where the whole world was paying attention to Bluesky, and we had invite codes," she said.

"We didn't have invite codes to be a 'hot' exclusive club, but we had invite codes because we wanted to make sure our moderation was in place to bring on many millions of people," Wang added.

Wang said it was a "hard decision" to make as a company because growth is so hard to come by, but "we chose to stick to our principles."

The company has received a lot of requests from users for new features, Wang said. Some of those already exist on X, such as the ability to bookmark posts and lists of trending topics.

Wang says the team wants to build new products, but the boom in new users means its priorities have completely shifted. Instead of shipping new features, Bluesky is placing its efforts on core priorities like moderation and "firefighting."

"We wish we had the resources to go and build those features," she said. "But instead, the team is focused on let's make sure that one, the website stays online, and two, that moderation is intact so that we are responding to reports within 24 hours with global coverage, and three, that people are able to find each other and the end user is having a good experience."

The company plans to launch a paid subscription model by the end of this year, which will include features such as customizable aesthetics, avatar frames, and more video uploads or high-resolution images.