Mashable

Why is the internet rooting against Argentina?

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:22:10 +0000

Spend five minutes on the World Cup side of TikTok or scrolling through X, and you might come away with one glaring conclusion: Everyone is rooting against Argentina.

That is not exactly true, of course. Argentina has one of the loudest, most passionate fan bases in the tournament, and Lionel Messi remains one of the most beloved athletes on the planet. But online, the defending champions have become the World Cup's biggest lightning rod, as every rival fan base seems ready to cast Argentina as the tournament's heel, the team that always seems to thrive amid controversy.

The latest fuel came after Argentina's dramatic 3-2 comeback win over Egypt in the Round of 16, a match that ended with Egypt filing a formal complaint to FIFA over disputed VAR decisions and officiating. Head coach Hossam Hassan even suggested the governing body wanted to keep Messi in the tournament, allegations FIFA has not substantiated.

BBC Sport later analyzed the match and concluded that while several officiating decisions were undoubtedly controversial, they did not amount to evidence of a conspiracy. Still, the outlet noted that perception has become part of the story, pointing to statistics that have fueled online debate and FIFA's decision to appoint an all-Argentine on-field officiating crew for France's quarterfinal against Morocco, a choice it described as "not a great look."

But the anti-Argentina pile-on is bigger than one controversial match. It is what happens when sporting rivalries, geopolitical tension, Messi fatigue, and internet fandom all collide.

That is the strange beauty of the World Cup. Every match carries decades of history onto the pitch before the opening whistle. Or, as one Portuguese-language X user put it, "The World Cup is 20% soccer and 80% colonial resentment."

Unlike club soccer, where rivalries are built around cities and leagues, the World Cup asks entire countries to compete. As writer Franklin Foer argued in How Soccer Explains the World, the sport often reflects far more than what happens on the field; it can become a proxy for nationalism, historical conflict, and cultural identity.

On social media, those fault lines get compressed into memes and 130 characters. Argentina is not just Argentina; depending on who is posting, it is the team that broke France's heart in 2022, the rival England still associates with Maradona and the Falklands, the opponent Mexico fans love to hate, or the Messi-led dynasty some viewers are simply tired of seeing win.

Geography doesn't always dictate loyalty, either. While fans often talk about Latin America rallying behind one of its own, the region's football rivalries run deep. Brazil and Argentina have spent more than a century battling for continental supremacy, while Uruguay and Chile each have their own sporting history with La Albiceleste. Mexico, meanwhile, has repeatedly seen its World Cup dreams ended by Argentina, helping turn every meeting between the two countries into an internet event of its own.

Argentina's relationship with the rest of Latin America is complicated by more than football. Historians and sociologists have written about the country's long-standing self-image as a uniquely "European" nation within Latin America, an identity that often minimized or erased its Black and Indigenous history.

That history has collided with soccer before. After Argentina won the 2024 Copa América, the French Football Federation said it would file a complaint with FIFA over "racist and discriminatory remarks" in a chant sung by Argentina players about France's diverse team; Enzo Fernández later apologized, and his Premier League club, Chelsea, opened an internal disciplinary process.

That broader conversation has followed Argentina into this year's World Cup. FIFA is investigating allegations of racist abuse directed at YouTube creator iShowSpeed during Argentina's Round of 32 victory over Cape Verde after footage from his livestream appeared to capture an altercation with an Argentina supporter. The investigation is ongoing, but the incident quickly became another flashpoint in the wider online debate surrounding Argentina and race.

None of that means every Argentina fan shares those views, or that every anti-Argentina post is about race. But it helps explain why some Latin American and Black football fans online are reading this year's incidents through a broader history, one in which Argentina's image of itself as white and European has long been contested.

So, the next time your For You Page insists that "everyone hates Argentina," remember that you're probably looking at more than just another soccer take. You're watching decades of history compressed into a 90-second video and one very heated comments section.

The Odyssey sails into rave reviews and online backlash

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:43:44 +0000

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has finally completed its first voyage in front of critics, and the early reaction is basically: find the biggest screen near you.

The first social reactions to Nolan's adaptation of Homer's epic arrived after the film's London world premiere and early press screenings. The movie, shot entirely with IMAX film cameras, opens in theaters July 17.

That last part is not just marketing copy. The Odyssey is the first feature film shot entirely with IMAX cameras, and Nolan's commitment to scale appears to be a major part of the early conversation. The nearly three-hour film was shot across six countries, including Morocco, Greece, and Iceland, with real ships, practical effects, and large-scale crowd scenes. Matt Damon, who stars as Odysseus, called the experience "much harder than anything I've ever done."

The movie follows Odysseus after the Trojan War as he tries to return home to Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and their son, Telemachus (Tom Holland). Along the way, because this is The Odyssey, there are gods, monsters, witches, temptation, punishment, and the kind of journey that has been tormenting high school English students for generations.

Zendaya plays Athena, while the stacked ensemble also includes Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, John Leguizamo, Jon Bernthal, Samantha Morton, Himesh Patel, Elliot Page, and Benny Safdie.

Early reactions suggest Nolan has leaned fully into both the myth and the machinery needed to make it feel enormous, with the cast matching the scale around them. Holland, Damon, Hathaway, Leguizamo, Pattinson, and Nyong’o have all received praise for their performances.

For movie lovers online, the first reactions are exactly what they were hoping to hear.

Not every reaction around The Odyssey has been glowing. Before the first critical reactions arrived, Nolan's film had already become the latest blockbuster pulled into an online fight over casting, historical accuracy, and what counts as loyalty to a centuries-old text.

Some of the backlash has focused on the film's ensemble, including Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy, Elliot Page as Sinon, Himesh Patel as Eurylochus, and Travis Scott as a bard. Right-wing commentators have accused Nolan of modernizing the story too aggressively, with Elon Musk repeatedly criticizing the film's casting and claiming Nolan had "desecrated" Homer's epic to appeal to awards voters, prompting a response from Tom Holland (the historian, not the actor).

Other complaints have been about the film's look and language, including costumes some viewers called anachronistic, American accents, and Holland's Telemachus referring to Odysseus as his "dad." Nyong'o, for her part, has defended Nolan's approach, stating she supports "the version of this story that he is telling" and that the cast is "representative of the world" in a recent interview. Notably, Nolan has cited Emily Wilson's more modern 2017 translation of the Greek epic as one of his many inspirations.

All of this buzz, both good and bad, arrives with unusually high expectations. The Odyssey is Nolan's follow-up to Oppenheimer, the 2023 blockbuster that won Best Picture and turned a talky, three-hour biographical drama about J. Robert Oppenheimer into a genuine pop-cultural event (with a little help from Barbie). The Odyssey cost $250 million to make, and box office forecasters expect it to open between $80 million and $130 million in the U.S. and Canada.

The hype has been building for a while. Select IMAX tickets went on sale a year in advance and were snapped up quickly. Now that the first reactions are out, the message from critics and film journalists is fairly consistent: This is not the movie to casually half-watch later on a laptop while answering emails.

Odysseus may be trying to get home, but we'll be trekking toward the nearest IMAX.

Erling Haaland is somehow a Love and Deepspace star now

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:39:35 +0000

Erling Haaland has become one of the 2026 World Cup’s biggest characters in China, and not just because he keeps scoring.

The Norwegian striker has spent the past few weeks dominating the field, terrifying defenders, and helping push Norway deep into the 2026 FIFA World Cup. But online, especially on Chinese social media, he has become many other things: a “Nordic Cyborg,” Majin Buu, a goofy giant, a Viking warrior, and, somehow, the romantic lead on Love and Deepspace.

The fixation has been building for weeks. In early June, Haaland became a global brand ambassador for Walovi, the international arm of Wang Lao Ji, a popular Chinese herbal drink brand. The campaign featured Haaland speaking Mandarin in scenes built around football, summer heat, and a jingle that plays on the sound of his name.

Chinese fans quickly ran with it.

Since joining Weibo, China’s major microblogging platform, and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, a month ago, Haaland has amassed over 1 million followers on Weibo and more than 5 million on Douyin. Hashtags related to the striker have also generated hundreds of millions of views on Weibo, where fans have been clipping his ads, remixing his image, and turning him into a running joke.

A lot of the appeal comes from how different Haaland is on the field versus online. On the field, he’s a 6-foot-5 Manchester City forward with a mechanical scoring record. Online, Chinese fans have nicknamed these two personalities: “Nordic Cyborg” on the pitch, and “Habao” or “Baby Ha” off of it.

One of the most unexpected versions of Halaand has been...a digital love interest? The popular Chinese sci-fi romance mobile game Love and Deepspace lets players form relationships with fictional male characters, and fan-made Haaland posts have styled him like a collectible love interest and comparing him to the characters players already know.

The romance-game jokes are only one corner of the larger Haaland meme boom in China. Fans have also turned him into a Viking, an anime hero, and the subject of song edits built around his name. One popular fan song, “Haaland (Ha Ha Ha),” is set to the tune of “Moskau,” the 1979 track by German Eurodisco group Dschinghis Khan.

These aren't the only versions of Haaland circulating online.

Last week, a video circulated on X appearing to show Haaland sitting in a restaurant, eating, then flinching at his own reflection. One post sharing the clip racked up more than 31 million views in a matter of days. The video was debunked — fact checkers traced the original footage to a slapstick skit by Chinese comedian Jin Long, posted to TikTok in mid-June, with Haaland’s face later swapped in using AI.

But, Haaland himself makes these digital depictions easier to believe. His own social media presence is famously unpolished, especially on Snapchat, where he posts casual selfies, filters, jokes, Q&As, and strange little updates that give fans more material to work with.

He also engages in many of the memes, leaving comments on edits and AI footage.

He is not the only footballer getting AI treatment. Videos have reimagined Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Neymar, Kylian Mbappé, and David Beckham as K-pop idols, complete with idol styling and choreography.

There is plenty more content that has kept the internet entertained during the past few weeks of back-to-back World Cup programming, some with full scripts.

At this point, the World Cup has a knockout bracket and a fan-edit bracket. Haaland seems to be doing pretty well in both.

Connor Storries Emmy nod delights Heated Rivalry fans

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 17:41:22 +0000

Connor Storrie just earned his first Emmy nomination — but not for the role that turned him into one of the internet's newest heartthrobs.

The 26-year-old actor received the nod Wednesday for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series. That was for hosting Saturday Night Live earlier this year.

While many fans had hoped to see Storrie recognized for his breakout performance as Ilya Rozanov in Heated Rivalry, the queer hockey drama wasn't actually eligible for the Primetime Emmys — because it was entirely financed in Canada.

Still, the nomination felt like a victory to fans, many of whom celebrated it as overdue recognition for an actor whose career has skyrocketed since Heated Rivalry premiered. Over the past year, Storrie has gone from breakout star to awards-season regular, appearing at the Golden Globes, making his Met Gala debut alongside co-star Hudson Williams, landing luxury campaigns with Saint Laurent and Tiffany & Co., and preparing for the show's anticipated second season.

While Heated Rivalry couldn't compete at the Emmys, it dominated Canada's awards season, taking home 16 Canadian Screen Awards, including Best Drama Series. Because Storrie is American, he wasn't eligible for an individual acting prize there either, making Wednesday's nomination his first major acting nomination tied to the Heated Rivalry era, even if it came through an unexpected role.

Fans were quick to celebrate the news, with many joking that the universe had found a loophole to honor the actor after Heated Rivalry was shut out of eligibility. They also declared they couldn't wait to watch "Emmy-nominated Connor Storrie" return for Heated Rivalry Season 2.

The excitement also reignited calls for broader recognition of Heated Rivalry, with fans lamenting that one of the year's most talked-about new dramas couldn't compete at the Emmys because of eligibility rules rather than a lack of acclaim.

The moment also seemed like a full circle for the actor, who spent his adolescent years uploading videos to YouTube under the name "Actorboy222," chronicling his ambitions of making it in Hollywood. On Wednesday, many pointed out that the younger version of Storrie had finally gotten the recognition he'd always dreamed about.

Whether or not Storrie takes home the trophy, the nomination marks another milestone in what's been a meteoric rise. With Heated Rivalry already renewed for a second season and production expected to begin soon — not to mention an A24 project in the works — fans won't have to wait long to see him back on screen, Emmy nominee status included.

Jude Bellingham, Erling Haaland take their bromance to the World Cup

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 18:58:32 +0000

Jude Bellingham and Erling Haaland are about to play a World Cup quarterfinal. Naturally, the internet has decided this is also an HBO sports drama.

On Saturday, July 11, England will face Norway at Miami Stadium for a spot in the World Cup semifinals, setting up one of the tournament’s most internet-friendly player matchups: Bellingham, England’s midfield star, against Haaland, Norway’s goal-scoring machine and his former Borussia Dortmund teammate. FIFA's match center lists Norway vs. England as a quarterfinal in Miami, while England confirmed the matchup after its 3-2 Round of 16 win over Mexico.

The football stakes are obvious. England got here after Bellingham scored twice in quick succession against Mexico, with Harry Kane adding a second-half penalty. Norway arrived after stunning Brazil 2-1, with Haaland scoring both goals to send his country into the final eight.

But online, the matchup has become about more than tactics, form, or who survives the Miami heat in July. Some fans have latched onto the long-running friendship between Bellingham and Haaland, resurfacing old clips, affectionate moments, and edits of the two from their Dortmund days.

Some have even started comparing the setup to Heated Rivalry, the late-2025 breakout sports romance series about two rival hockey players whose on-ice competition hides a heated bond (for lack of a better word).

Before Bellingham became one of Real Madrid's defining players and Haaland became Manchester City's long-term superstar, they were two of the most exciting young players at Borussia Dortmund. Bellingham joined Dortmund from Birmingham City in 2020 as a teenager and quickly became the club's youngest goalscorer in a competitive match. Haaland had arrived earlier that same year and was already one of Europe's most-feared young forwards.

On the pitch, the pairing had tons of chemistry. Bellingham brought the energy, timing, and midfield drive. Haaland brought the terrifying inevitability of a striker who always seemed one run away from scoring. Off the pitch, they seemed to grow a genuine friendship.

And the friendship did survive their inevitable transfers. Haaland left Dortmund for Manchester City in 2022, while Bellingham joined Real Madrid in 2023. Haaland has since signed a long-term contract keeping him at City until 2034, while Bellingham's move to Madrid made him one of the most high-profile English players ever to join the club.

Even after they separated, Bellingham made it clear that Haaland was still checking in. During the 2022 World Cup, Bellingham said Haaland messaged him before and after England's opening game, sending "good luck" and then "well done." He described Haaland as encouraging and said the two still sent each other "silly stuff" when something reminded them of an old joke. Oh, to be on the receiving end of one of Halaand's snaps...

It also helps that both players have become perfect internet characters in different ways. "Hey Jude" Bellingham has the polished superstar aura and the ability to turn a high-pressure match into his own stage. Haaland has spent this World Cup becoming something like Norway's final boss and social media content creator, with Norway's run producing some of the tournament's most joyful moments, both online and offline.

Sports fans already love a former-teammates-turned-rivals storyline. The internet loves lore. Fortunately for fans, Saturday's matchup has both.

Erling Haaland makes the Majin Buu meme official

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 17:46:21 +0000

Erling Haaland bears a striking resemblance to Dragon Ball Z villain Majin Buu. This isn't new information; it's a comparison that first went viral way back in 2021. The meme has resurfaced as the Norway striker has become one of the breakout stars of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

But only now, as his team prepares for a quarter-final showdown with England, has Haaland finally acknowledged the likeness himself.

The latest chapter in this long-running meme began with an Instagram post from @hidden.ny, showing Haaland recreating Majin Buu's signature hand gesture.

Fans immediately flooded the comments with references to the iconic villain, continuing a joke that has done the rounds on social media for years.

Then Haaland joined in. Responding in the comments on July 6, the Manchester City striker wrote: "I mean I don't disagree."

That single sentence was all the internet needed.

Screenshots of Haaland's response quickly spread on X, Instagram, and TikTok, with fans celebrating the striker's tacit approval of one of his most persistent online memes.

Majin Buu is one of the most memorable antagonists in the legendary anime series Dragon Ball Z. Created by the wizard Bibidi and later unleashed by Babidi, the pink magical being is known for his seemingly limitless power, ability to regenerate from almost any injury, as well as his habit of turning opponents into candy before eating them.

Fans aren't exactly saying Haaland has the character's villainous tendencies. The joke has always been about the resemblance — not just his closely shaved blond hair and broad facial features, but also the occasional expression that gives off unmistakable Majin Buu energy.

The meme has gone far beyond side-by-side comparisons. Some fans have made art by kitting Majin Buu out in a Norway shirt and giving the pink villain Haaland’s signature blond hair.

One kitted-out mockup DBZ figure seems a perfect collectible for soccer and anime fans alike.

As far as athlete-anime comparisons go, it's one of many. But they don't always get acknowledged by the subject. Now that Haaland has officially signed off, fans can consider this meme canon.

Australias kid social media ban is ineffective, study suggests

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:57:09 +0000

A study by a team of advisers to the Australian government has suggested that the country's social media ban for children under 16 is ineffective, Reuters reported.

Australia enacted the ban in Dec. 2025, requiring social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok to take "reasonable steps" to prevent those under 16 from creating accounts. The fine for noncompliance was originally up to $AU49.5 million ($US33 million), but in June Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that the maximum fine would be doubled to $AUD99 million ($US68.2 million).

"It is clear that social media platforms are adopting tricks straight out of the big tech playbook and doing the bare minimum to get by," Minister for Communications Anika Wells said in an official statement at the time.

Now, news comes that the bans are failing in test environments. A team of software testers found that platforms didn't ask for proof of age for any of the 50 accounts it opened after the law went into effect. The dummy accounts claimed to be 16, and apparently, the initial vetting process (which estimates age based on online activity) doesn't flag young users for further checks.

Director at testing firm KJR, Andrew Hammond, told Reuters, "You should be asked to demonstrate how old you are, and not once have we been asked to verify our age or use age-assurance measures."

Researchers tested these accounts on platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and TikTok. One account that signed up for X and claimed to be 16 was shown pornographic content, according to Reuters, and X didn't respond to Reuters' request for comment.

Google, which owns YouTube, also didn't respond to Reuters' request for comment. Snap and TikTok declined to comment.

A Meta spokesperson told Reuters that the test seemed inconsistent with Australia's guidance of escalating "to ‌formal age ⁠verification when behavioral indicators suggest they may be underage, or when an account is reported." The spokesperson also said it was unclear if the dummy accounts "posted content or engaged in a way a true under-16-year-old user would."

Australian streaming platform Kick, meanwhile, refused to let them make accounts without proof of age. A spokesperson for Kick said it's not possible to rely on age inference (guessing age depending on behavior) because the platform is new and doesn't have enough data to do so.

Social media bans like Australia's are criticized due to how difficult they are to enforce, and because of potential violations to free speech and expression. Yet, more countries plan to enact such bans, such as Canada, Indonesia, and the UK.

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelces wedding guest list reportedly excludes these people

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 12:11:57 +0000

For a wedding with a reported 1,000-person guest list, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s alleged Madison Square Garden celebration still appears to have a velvet rope.

The reported wedding has become a full-blown spectacle in the middle of sweltering-hot Manhattan, with fans, photographers, and celebrity-watchers all trying to figure out who will actually make it inside the Garden. But the more revealing question might be who will not.

While plenty of A-listers are reportedly gearing up for the alleged big night, there is also a pretty long list of people who appear set to watch the wedding content on Instagram like the rest of us.

Keep reading for the reported, rumored, and heavily speculated names we do not expect to see inside the Garden tomorrow night.

Prince William and Kate Middleton

Despite weeks of speculation, Prince William and Kate Middleton will not be attending Swift and Kelce’s wedding. A People report ended chatter that the Prince and Princess of Wales would be in attendance after William jokingly said he was "hoping" there might be an invitation during a May appearance on the British radio show Heart Breakfast.

William has known Swift for years, famously joined her and Jon Bon Jovi onstage in 2013, and later took Prince George and Princess Charlotte to the Eras Tour in London, where the royal family posed backstage with Swift and Kelce.

Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds

Blake Lively has been one of the most-discussed possible absences from the wedding because, for years, she was one of Swift’s most visible close friends. Lively directed Swift’s "I Bet You Think About Me" music video, Swift used the names of Lively and Ryan Reynolds' children in "Betty" and other songs, and the couple was regularly part of Swift's public friend circle, from New York outings to the 2024 Super Bowl suite where Swift cheered on Kelce.

The reported strain stems from Lively's legal battle with Justin Baldoni over It Ends With Us, which pulled Swift into the surrounding drama even though she was not part of the film.

As the dispute unfolded, reports said Swift had been referenced in court filings and text messages, and Baldoni’s side accused Lively of using her friendship with Swift as leverage during conversations about the movie. Swift’s rep denied that she had any involvement with It Ends With Us beyond licensing “My Tears Ricochet” for the soundtrack, but the damage appeared to be done.

Miles Teller and Keleigh Sperry

Miles Teller and his wife, Keleigh Sperry, are also reportedly not on the guest list. Sources close to the couple claim they were not invited, despite their once-close ties to Swift and Kelce, which allegedly ended due to the drama between Swift and Lively, and that Sperry did not want to be involved.

Sperry and Teller were seen with Swift during the early days of her relationship with Kelce, including at the 2024 Super Bowl. Teller also later appeared on Travis and Jason Kelce's New Heights podcast, where he referred to Travis as his "brother." Doesn't seem like it anymore.

Karlie Kloss

Karlie Kloss is another name with a long history in Swiftie lore. She and Swift were once inseparable during the 1989 era, appearing together at events, on social media, and even on a joint Vogue cover. Then, over time, public sightings slowed, and fan theories took over.

The widely discussed fracture has often been linked to Scooter Braun, who acquired Swift's Big Machine master recordings in 2019, sparking one of the most public disputes of Swift's career. Kloss' 2018 wedding to Joshua Kushner became part of the speculation because Braun was reportedly a guest, and Swift did not attend.

Kloss' wedding status, however, is messy. Some outlets have reported she is not invited, while TMZ suggested the opposite. Given that she sat GA at the Eras Tour, I'm going to go with the former.

Kim Kardashian and Kanye West

This choice isn't a surprise. Kardashian and Swift's history goes back to the 2016 fallout over Kanye West's song "Famous," after West claimed Swift had approved lyrics about her, and Kardashian released edited clips of a phone call between West and Swift. A fuller version of the call later leaked in 2020, which supported Swift's claim that she had not been told about the most offensive lyric.

That feud became one of the defining celebrity conflicts of Swift's Reputation era, complete with snake emojis, public backlash, and years of fan analysis. Taylor even has a song called "thanK you IMee" with the letters "KIM" capitalized. Real subtle.

Scooter Braun

Scooter Braun is also widely presumed to be nowhere near the guest list. The reason is obvious: Swift's long-running masters dispute began after Braun's Ithaca Holdings acquired Big Machine Label Group in 2019, giving him control of the master recordings for Swift's first six albums. Swift publicly criticized the deal, and the dispute eventually became a major artist-rights story as Swift began rerecording her old albums.

So yes, Braun's absence would be expected.

Calvin Harris

Calvin Harris, Swift's ex-boyfriend, has also been named in some rumored "not invited" lists. The history there is less dramatic than Kardashian-West, but it did get messy in 2016 after Swift's team confirmed she had co-written Harris and Rihanna’s hit "This Is What You Came For" under the pseudonym Nils Sjöberg. Harris responded in a series of tweets, including one accusing Swift's team of trying to make him look bad after their breakup. At least we got a really good song out of it.

John Mayer

John Mayer is another ex who is most likely far, far away from the Garden on July 3. Mayer dated Swift when he was 32, and she was 19. Following their breakup, Swift released "Dear John," which fans have long believed is about Mayer. Mayer even told Rolling Stone that the song made him feel "really humiliated" and called it "cheap songwriting."

That "cheap songwriting" was inducted into the Songwriter Hall of Fame, but I digress.

Charli XCX

Speaking of artists believed to have been called out on The Life of a Showgirl, Charli XCX is also rumored not to be in attendance. Rumors of a feud between the two began after Charli released "Sympathy Is a Knife" on Brat, which some listeners interpreted as a dig at Swift. Swift then appeared to respond with "Actually Romantic," a song fans believe is about Charli and includes the pointed line: "I heard you call me boring Barbie when the coke's got you brave."

Charli is also engaged to George Daniel, the drummer for The 1975 — the same band fronted by Matty Healy, whom Swift briefly dated in 2023 and wrote an entire album about in 2024.

Kayla Nicole

Kayla Nicole, Kelce's ex-girlfriend, is another snub that is not especially surprising. Nicole dated Kelce on and off for about five years before they split in 2022. In Oct. 2023, shortly after Kelce and Swift's relationship became public, Nicole told People that she had unfollowed Brittany and Patrick Mahomes on Instagram because she needed to "protect" herself, while emphasizing that she still had love for her Kansas City circle.

After Kelce and Swift announced their engagement in Aug. 2025, Nicole posted about choosing "joy" on Instagram Stories. More recently, in February 2026, she reflected on her last serious relationship during a TikTok Live and described the breakup as potentially a "right person, wrong time" situation.

Most weddings do not include the bride or groom’s exes unless everyone involved has reached an unusually high level of emotional maturity, so Nicole's absence would not be particularly shocking. Well, besides Harry Styles, of course, who will likely be there with his fiancée, Zoë Kravitz. Now that's called growth.

Heres everyone who definitely wont be at Taylor Swifts wedding

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 20:44:08 +0000

For a wedding with a reported 1,000-person guest list, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s alleged Madison Square Garden celebration still appears to have a velvet rope.

While plenty of A-listers are reportedly gearing up for the alleged big night, there is also a pretty long list of people who appear set to watch the wedding content on Instagram like the rest of us.

Keep reading for the reported, rumored, and heavily speculated names we do not expect to see inside the Garden tomorrow night.

Prince William and Kate Middleton

Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds

The reported strain stems from Lively's legal battle with Justin Baldoni over It Ends With Us, which pulled Swift into the surrounding drama even though she was not part of the film.

Miles Teller and Keleigh Sperry

Karlie Kloss

Kloss' wedding status, however, is messy. Some outlets have reported she is not invited, while TMZ suggested the opposite. Given that she sat GA at the Eras Tour, I'm going to go with the former.

Kim Kardashian and Kanye West

Scooter Braun

So yes, Braun's absence would be expected.

Calvin Harris

John Mayer

That "cheap songwriting" was inducted into the Songwriter Hall of Fame, but I digress.

Charli XCX

Charli is also engaged to George Daniel, the drummer for The 1975 — the same band fronted by Matty Healy, whom Swift briefly dated in 2023 and wrote an entire album about in 2024.

Kayla Nicole

After Kelce and Swift announced their engagement in Aug. 2025, Nicole posted about choosing "joy" on Instagram Stories. More recently, in Feb. 2026, she reflected on her last serious relationship during a TikTok Live and described the breakup as potentially a "right person, wrong time" situation.

The Supreme Court’s strangest media tradition is still running

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 18:07:24 +0000

In 2026, the fastest news delivery system in Washington still appears to be a sweaty intern in sneakers.

After the Supreme Court handed down a series of major rulings on June 30 — including a landmark decision on birthright citizenship and rulings on transgender athletes and campaign finance limits — interns were once again seen sprinting from the court with printed opinions in hand.

The footage quickly turned into its own internet event, partly because the visual is irresistible and partly because everyone had the same questions: what is this tradition, and why are they still doing this?

Let us introduce the "running of the interns," one of Washington's strangest and most beloved rituals.

The tradition has existed in some form for decades, dating back to the print era of Supreme Court coverage. Because recording devices are banned inside the courtroom, hand-delivered opinions were once the fastest way for news organizations to get major rulings from the Court to reporters outside.

That job often fell to interns at media outlets such as CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, and other news organizations covering the Court. They would wait for printed opinions inside or near the building, grab copies as soon as they were available, and race them to producers and correspondents stationed outside so their networks could report the decision as quickly as possible.

The "running of the interns" became a recognizable Washington media spectacle during the Bush v. Gore case in 2000, when TV networks were racing to report the decision that effectively settled a presidential election. In the years that followed, interns kept running on major decision days, including the 2012 Affordable Care Act ruling and the 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, which popularized the tradition.

The routine is simple: interns wait for printed opinions, grab the documents, and race them across the Court plaza to producers and correspondents preparing to go live. It's part breaking news, part relay race, part free cardio.

This tradition comes at a very digital time, when the Supreme Court posts opinions online — and PDFs are often available within moments of a ruling. I mean, the rule of birthright citizenship was posted online by SCOTUS the moment it was announced.

Plus, during the pandemic (March 2020 to June 2022), the Court actually released opinions exclusively online. Once that became normalized, the old paper relay started to feel less like a breaking-news necessity and more like a relic from another media era.

After this change, the concept was declared extinct. But the ritual clearly still has legs (pun intended), and the "run" is back, both IRL and online.

Many online are admiring the tradition — some to the point of tears — and the interns' hustle. Others find it absurd and intense. Some are tagging sneaker brands, begging them to turn the scene into an ad.

In a world where every major ruling instantly becomes a PDF, a push alert, a live blog, and a social post, there's something refreshing about watching young people sprint through the streets in business casual attire, driven purely by their love of breaking news.

Serena Williams returns to Wimbledon after nearly 4 years away from singles

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 20:10:03 +0000

A first-round match at Wimbledon is not usually treated like the main event. Serena Williams’ return is one of the exceptions.

Williams, 44, is set to play 20-year-old Australian Maya Joint on Tuesday, June 30, in her first Wimbledon singles match since 2022, and tennis fans are abuzz with anticipation.

Williams has not played a singles match since the 2022 U.S. Open, where she "evolved away" from professional tennis after a third-round loss to Ajla Tomljanovic. In the years since, she has had a second child, expanded her business life, and moved into the kind of post-tennis chapter most fans assumed was permanent.

The comeback did not come out of nowhere. Williams has been inching back onto the court since 2025. But the singles decision, according to Williams, was not automatic. At her pre-tournament press conference, she said Wimbledon had held a wild card for her and that she was still unsure until the final days before the draw.

Part of the hesitation, Williams said, came from what returning to professional tennis required off the court. To compete again, she had to re-enter tennis’ anti-doping testing pool and make herself available under the sport’s whereabouts rules, which require players to provide a daily one-hour testing window and keep officials updated on where they can be found.

Williams told reporters that the process has been "grueling," especially as someone balancing tennis with children, travel, and running multiple businesses. She said she understands why testing is necessary, but argued that parts of the system feel unreasonable for players whose lives do not fit neatly into one location or one schedule.

Ultimately, though, "I thought I should really take this opportunity,” Williams said. “Who knows if I’ll ever make it here again? This could be it.”

Williams has won seven Wimbledon singles titles and 23 Grand Slam singles titles overall. This time, though, Williams has said her expectations are different. She has talked less about chasing history and more about enjoying the chance to compete again.

Tennis players have spoken about the comeback as a major moment for the sport. Novak Djokovic called it "inspirational" and "epic," while Aryna Sabalenka said Williams' return is bringing more eyes to tennis. Online, fans have followed her practice sessions, press conference quotes, wild-card news, and even prediction-market movement around whether she would actually take the court.

But the reaction has not been entirely celebratory.

Williams’ wild card has also reopened a debate about access and fairness at Grand Slam tournaments. Wild cards are discretionary entries, meaning tournaments can award them to players who do not qualify strictly through ranking. In Williams’ case, Wimbledon left its final women’s singles wild-card spot open before giving it to her.

That decision has frustrated some fans, who argue that a player active on tour could have used that spot, and Williams should remain retired.

On the other hand, Williams' draw is also bringing eyes to her opponent, Maya Joint. Joint was born after Williams had already won several Grand Slam titles, and she has spoken about Williams with nothing but respect.

“It’s an honor,” Joint told the WTA. “I always dreamed about playing Serena Williams, and if you’d told me 10 years ago that I’d be playing her first round at Wimbledon, that’s just crazy.”

Nevertheless, a win over Williams at Wimbledon would be career-cementing for her.

The result could become a Serena comeback moment, a Maya Joint breakout, or simply an early look at what this version of Williams can still bring to the court. Either way, it has already become bigger than a normal first-round match, and us at Mashable will be tuning in.

Australia is doubling max fines for social media ban violations

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 18:27:50 +0000

Australia's teen social media ban has been in effect since December, and the government's verdict on how it's going is pretty clear: not well enough.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced this week that Australia will double the maximum penalty for violating its social media minimum age law, raising the fine ceiling from $AUD49.5 million ($US33 million) to $AUD99 million ($US68.2 million). The government is also moving to expand the eSafety Commissioner's powers to compel platforms to hand over evidence of what they're actually doing to keep under-16s off their services.

The news comes roughly six months after Australia's Online Safety Amendment Act took effect, banning platforms including Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, X, and YouTube from allowing users under 16 to hold accounts, as Mashable previously reported. More than five million accounts have been removed, deactivated, or restricted since Dec. 10 — but according to Albanese, that's not good enough.

"It is clear that social media platforms are adopting tricks straight out of the big tech playbook and doing the bare minimum to get by," said Minister for Communications Anika Wells in the government's statement.

The eSafety Commissioner is currently investigating potential non-compliance across five platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.

The new legislation would also extend the Commissioner's reach to third parties like age-verification and app-store providers — closing a loophole that let platforms point fingers elsewhere when their enforcement fell short.

Twitchs CEO says passive scrolling cant beat the community of live streaming

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 14:54:04 +0000

If there's one thing Twitch CEO Dan Clancy wants people to know about what makes Twitch special, it's that the live streaming site is all about community.

"Social media, interestingly, has become anti-social," Clancy said during a fireside chat titled, Why Live is the Future of Connection: From Passive Scrolling to Real Connection at VidCon 2026. "It started as a technology that connected us with people, but now sitting and swiping actually leaves you a little more isolated. It doesn't make you feel connected, and that's why live is coming on strong now."

So what is it about Twitch that fosters community? According to Clancy, the platform encourages people to stay with their streamer for longer than the seconds they might spend with someone on TikTok. When a streamer takes some time off, their audience notices their absence in a way they might not with a TikTok creator. And then there's the magic of reacting to the same content with the rest of the chat in real-time.

Dan Clancy on stage at VidCon 2026. Credit: Bethany Allard / Mashable

"People often think sports are about watching the world's best athletes. It's not about that at all. It's about community, right? It's about shared identity," he said during the talk. "Twitch actually is the same thing where the affinity that you're gathering around is a streamer, but then you form these bonds horizontally, so the same thing that happens in sports is exactly what happens on Twitch."

Still, creating community can come with its challenges.

Creator discoverability on Twitch is lacking, but that might change

Clancy encouraged creators to use more than one platform, noting that Twitch content often finds its way onto other platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

"Use short form for discovery [and] use long form to build an emotional connection and to earn a living," Clancy said during his talk.

Still, smaller- to midsize streamers have long struggled with a lack of discoverability on the platform itself, as it doesn't push algorithmic recommendations nearly as aggressively as YouTube or TikTok. Clancy told Mashable that's by design.

"If I said, I'm going to solve the discovery problem, the only way I could fully solve it is by taking them off your page, putting more stuff on your page to distract them, more stuff to get them away from you. And that is exactly what our creators don't want," Clancy said.

Still, he acknowledged a desire for some kind of fix. He shared that Twitch is working on bringing short-form content to the platform in a way that makes sense, by investing in a feature called Recaps. Clancy described it as an evolution of Twitch's existing story feature, intended to show users clips from recent streams that the streamer selects after going live.

"I think the thing that will benefit our creators the most is if the creators are able to easily create short form and viewers are watching it more on Twitch," he said to Mashbale.

How generative AI fits into the Twitch ecosystem

During his talk on stage, Clancy responded to concerns about AI, saying that while Twitch has a plan in place if AI channels run more rampant, for the time being, it's limited to a handful that are clearly identifiable as AI, and in his opinion, not engaging enough to hold a viewer's attention for the same amount of time as a human creator can.

When speaking to Mashable, Clancy also pointed to the ways AI can be leveraged to improve the viewer experience, saying a large language model could improve upon the existing AutoMod feature, which automatically flags and holds potentially inappropriate messages in a streamer's chat.

The creators of Twitch are growing beyond gamers

At its core, Twitch is an entertainment platform. While traditionally that was rooted in gaming, over the years it's become more and more common for artists, musicians, actors, and even animal sanctuaries to find a home on the platform. Clancy said the shift in the user base over time has been like "night and day."

"Now, when I meet an actor, musician, almost 70 percent of the time when they hear I'm the CEO of Twitch, they go, 'Oh, yeah, I've been thinking I should do something.'"

Safety concerns ahead of the next TwitchCon

Community, however, doesn't work without safety. Last year, Twitch faced backlash after streamer Emiru was assaulted at last year's TwitchCon. Prior to the convention's start, major streamers like Hasan Piker, Valkyrae, and QTCinderella said they would not be attending the conference due to safety concerns. Ahead of this year's conference, Clancy assured that Twitch has measures in place to prevent any future incidents.

"We've updated how we do meet and greets so that they're more structured. We don't allow signups on the day of; you have to reserve a spot. So that restricts it a little bit, but it restricts us in a way to protect the creators," he told Mashable. "So I feel very confident about where we're at right now, in terms of our ability to make sure something like that doesn't happen again."

Mashable is reporting live from VidCon 2026 in Anaheim. Follow our coverage for creator interviews, panel highlights, and the biggest moments from the convention floor.

The World Cup’s latest viral trend is surprisingly wholesome

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 19:52:03 +0000

The FIFA World Cup has plenty of ways to make a country famous when they succeed: a goal for the ages, a goalkeeping masterclass, or a star player turning into a meme.

But in 2026, with the world the way it is, even losing teams can go viral simply by being nice — cleaning up their locker room, bringing a box of desserts, or leaving a thank-you note. Call it the Ted Lasso World Cup.

Case in point: Jordan’s run at their first World Cup ended June 22 with a 2-1 loss to Algeria. But the team left more than their tournament hopes behind. A video posted by FIFA shows Jordan’s dressing room spotless, with a thank-you note, gifts, and Jordanian sweets left out for the stadium staff.

The team was making its World Cup debut, and after losses to Austria and Algeria, its knockout hopes were gone. Still, they took the time to wish the U.S. a warm goodbye.

In the message, Jordan thanked everyone involved for a "truly unforgettable one," and praised the “dedication, professionalism and warm hospitality” it had received.

Winners can go viral for post-game courtesy too. After their 4-0 win over Tunisia in Mexico on June 20, team Japan left its locker room spotless, along with a thank-you message.

Japanese fans, meanwhile, took thoughtfulness to the next level. After their 2-2 draw with the Netherlands in Texas on June 14, social media was full of videos featuring Japanese fans staying behind to pick up litter — gathering cups, wrappers, and trash into blue plastic bags before taking them away.

Japan would clearly be the team to beat in any World Cup of sweetness. Fans have been cleaning stadiums for years, going back to Japan’s first World Cup appearance in 1998. At the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, fans cleaned their section after Japan beat the mighty Germany. Some even came to tidy up after the tournament opener between Qatar and Ecuador, despite Japan not even being on the field.

The reason is expressed in a popular Japanese proverb “tatsu tori ato wo nigosazu,” which roughly translates to “birds leaves nothing behind them.” (Or as we say on the hiking trail, "leave no trace.") At this World Cup, the gesture even got an assist from New York Giants quarterback Jameis Winston, who was seen helping clean in a blue Japan shirt with his name on the back.

Meanwhile in Los Angeles, the Iranian team extended its gratitude — despite being allegedly forced to leave the U.S. in a hurry after its games and return to base camp across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. Some Iranian support staff and officials haven't been able to enter at all.

Still, following a 0-0 draw with Belgium at SoFi stadium, with goalkeeper Alireza Beiranvand making seven spectacular saves, Iran wrote a note thanking LA for its hospitality, and Iranian fans for giving their “heart, voice and soul” during the team’s first two matches.

“We came to Los Angeles with pride, competed with honor, and leave with dignity,” the note read.

Now that we know such gestures can go as viral online as a great goal, will more teams bring their politeness A-game to the 2030 World Cup — which will, for the first time, be held on multiple continents at once?

As Ted Lasso might say: Believe.

Underdog joy is the heart of this World Cup

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:27:13 +0000

Since it began in 1930, the World Cup's most memorable moments are rarely the ones that end with a team lifting a trophy. And the 2026 FIFA World Cup is no exception.

So far, this tournament has been defined by its underdog celebrations: Curaçao fans erupting after their team walked away with a draw, Cape Verde exploding into a global fan favorite team in just two games, and lesser soccer powers like DR Congo, Haiti, Uzbekistan, and Egypt hitting milestones they've awaited for decades.

To bring you up to speed, here are our picks of the best underdog moments from this World Cup so far.

Curaçao celebrates its first World Cup point like a win

In Willemstad, Curaçao’s capital city, fans gathered to watch their national team play Ecuador in its first-ever World Cup. The match ended 0-0 — but for Curaçao, a draw still meant history. The team had earned its first point in the tournament standings.

That point mattered even more because of how the match played out. Curaçao had opened the tournament six days earlier with a 7-1 loss to Germany. Ecuador controlled most of the team's second game, finishing with nearly 30 shots and more than three expected goals.

But goalkeeper Eloy Room kept Curaçao in it, making 15 saves and helping the team hold on for the draw.

By the final whistle, Curaçao had not scored, but it had done enough to give fans something to celebrate. The country has a population of about 156,000, making it the smallest nation ever to play at a World Cup, so its presence at the tournament was already historic. Its first ever point made the moment feel even bigger.

Cape Verde becomes everyone’s favorite debut story

Cape Verde has been one of the easiest teams to root for at this World Cup, and not just because it is making its tournament debut.

The team, nicknamed the Blue Sharks, arrived with a fanbase already ready for the moment, with Cape Verdean communities around the world watching a small island nation see its name on soccer’s biggest stage.

But the games gave everyone even more reason to pay attention. Cape Verde held Spain to a 0-0 draw in its first-ever World Cup match, then followed it with a 2-2 draw against Uruguay. Kevin Pina scored the country’s first World Cup goal with a long-range free kick from 31 meters out, and Hélio Varela came off the bench to score the second-half equalizer.

The team has also found a breakout star in Vozinha, its 40-year-old goalkeeper. After helping shut out Spain, he became one of the viral names of the tournament, with his Instagram following jumping from around 50,000 to more than 15 million.

Vozinha's virality also brought attention to one of the tournament’s most touching off-field stories. The keeper revealed he was crying after the Spain game because his mother could not attend because of visa costs. But with some help from the State Department and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, she was able to get a visa in time for Cape Verde’s match against Uruguay in Miami.

That's not the only amazing underdog story in the Cape Verde team. Another player, an Irishman with dual nationality, found himself in the squad after being recruited by its coach on LinkedIn — via a DM he initially thought was spam.

With a final group match against Saudi Arabia still ahead, the Blue Sharks now have a chance to turn one of the tournament’s best stories into something even bigger, and potentially make it into the final 32 teams.

Iran left Los Angeles with a handwritten thank-you note

Not every touching moment has looked like fans running into the streets.

After Iran’s 0-0 draw with Belgium at SoFi Stadium, the team’s most-shared moment came from the locker room. Before leaving, Iran left behind a handwritten note thanking Los Angeles for its hospitality and thanking Iranian fans who gave their “heart, voice and soul.”

“We came to Los Angeles with pride, competed with honour, and leave with dignity,” the note reads.

The message stood out because Iran’s tournament has unfolded under unusual circumstances. The team has been based in Tijuana, Mexico, and traveling into the U.S. for matches because of restrictions around its stay, with some staff and officials reportedly banned from entering the country. Iran arrived in Los Angeles the night before the Belgium match, played at midday, and was expected to leave again that night.

On the field, Iran still managed to hold Belgium scoreless and leave Los Angeles with a point. Off the field, it left a note that gave the result a different kind of weight, turning a 0-0 draw into one of the tournament’s more human moments.

Uzbekistan lost, but still made history

Uzbekistan’s World Cup debut did not end with a win, but that was not the only thing people were watching for.

The game against Colombia marked the country’s tournament debut and the first-ever World Cup appearance by a Central Asian nation — and its first goal. The game drew public screenings and early-morning crowds, and gave fans a debut they had waited years to see, even with a 3-1 loss.

Haiti returned after more than five decades

Haiti is back at the World Cup after a 52-year absence, and its return this year has been about more than just soccer.

The team also qualified despite playing every match away from home, which has made its presence in the tournament feel especially meaningful for Haitian supporters.

For fans, the World Cup gives Haiti a chance to be seen through football, pride, and family, rather than the crisis narratives that often surround the country in international coverage.

Egypt finally got its first World Cup win

Egypt is not a tiny newcomer in the same way Curaçao or Cape Verde is, but its victory against New Zealand still belongs in this roundup — because the country has been waiting 92 years to win at the World Cup.

Mohamed "Mo" Salah, star of mighty club team Liverpool FC, helped Egypt beat the Kiwis 3-1, handing the African team its first-ever World Cup victory. Reuters reported that celebrations continued in Vancouver and in Cairo, where fans went into the streets even though the match ended around 6 a.m. local time.

Messi makes World Cup history — the internet reacts

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:49:13 +0000

Days before his 39th birthday, legendary striker Lionel Messi gave Argentina fans an unbeatable gift — by becoming the top goalscorer in World Cup history.

Just one goal in Argentina's game against Austria would have put Messi on top of the all-time goalscorer list, at 17 goals. Messi managed two, scoring his second in the last minute of added-on stoppage time.

Google was ready for the historic moment. Fans noted that searches for "Messi" produced a shower of virtual confetti from the search giant.

Messi's 18th World Cup goal puts him two ahead of Miroslav Klose, a German player whose last World Cup was in 2014. That's how long we've been waiting for a new goal record.

One fan in the stadium, however, seems to have been preparing for this moment since 1926.

During the game, Messi also missed a penalty kick — and it wasn't his first time. The Argentine striker hit another record when he became the first player to miss a penalty in three separate World Cups. But some fans argued Messi didn't want to claim the record via a penalty — and if anything, the miss made him more of a social media legend ...

As did his height. (Messi is 5 ft. 7 in. tall).

Some fans wryly noted Messi has scored almost exactly the same goal multiple times in his club career.

Meanwhile, at least one Austrian was downhearted about his sartorial choices.

Still, whether or not he is the GOAT, Messi needs to watch his back. Kylian Mbappe, France's top goalscorer, is sitting pretty on an all-time World Cup count of 14 goals — and has plenty of games left to go. As fans are quick to point out, Mbappe has nothing but praise and humility for his rival, recently declaring Messi a better player.

Mbappe vs. Messi World Cup final, anyone?

Infowars is returning with Tim Heidecker at the helm. Heres what it’ll look like.

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 17:14:26 +0000

After satirical paper The Onion bought right-wing conspiracy site Infowars, it faced legal obstacles — but now the people behind it say they're launching a new Infowars and sidestepping the courts.

The founder of Infowars, Alex Jones, declared bankruptcy in 2022 following defamation lawsuits from families of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, which Jones claimed was a hoax. He was ordered to pay them $1.3 billion in damages, and The Onion won an auction bid for Infowars in 2024 — but a judge swiftly blocked the sale.

Then, in April 2026, The Onion announced a new way to buy the outlet: a licensing deal that would allow The Onion to publish on Infowars' site and start paying the Sandy Hook families. But that has faced legal challenges too, MS NOW reported, and The Onion has decided not to wait for the courts to relaunch the website.

"Alex is holding Infowars.com hostage," CEO of The Onion, Ben Collins, told MS NOW. "He's trying to intentionally degrade the assets so these families can never sell them, and the courts have largely obliged. We're tired of waiting around."

The refreshed Infowars is now set to launch on July 2 with original programming, with comedian Tim Heidecker as creative director. Heidecker, who's known for Adult Swim shows such as Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! with his creative partner Eric Wareheim, will host a parody of Jones's old Infowars show. An "emergency" statement from Heidecker (doing a Jones impression) has already been published on YouTube.

Other shows coming to Infowars this summer, according to MS NOW, are The Jim Haggerty Show and a documentary-style film called Birth of a Nation, which has the same name as the racist 1915 film featuring the Ku Klux Klan.

In an April interview with TIME, Heidecker said there will be a "transition phase" of doing Onion-style parody, and he eventually wants to turn Infowars into a "destination for good comedy — a new streaming site, a new comedy platform." He also stated that the team hopes this will be profitable and "provide nice, healthy budgets for young creators to make interesting things for the world."

He reiterated this in a June interview with WIRED, stating that "there will be a sense of curation" of comedy coming out of Infowars, "the same way Adult Swim was a brand."

Mexico vs. South Korea: The World Cups friendliest rivalry

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:42:21 +0000

If the FIFA World Cup were a romantic comedy, Mexico and South Korea would be in the strangers-to-lovers arc.

Before their teams even met on the pitch, fans from both countries had already hit it off. In the streets of Guadalajara, supporters have broken into impromptu performances of "Gangnam Style," greeted one another with chants of "BTS," posed for photos together, and shared not only bottles of tequila but also videos of their celebrations across social media.

Which makes Thursday night's Group A matchup a little awkward. After all, every good romance needs conflict.

Mexico and South Korea enter the June 18 match with plenty at stake, but unlike most World Cup rivalries, this one comes with an unusual amount of affection. Eight years after South Korea's famous upset over Germany helped send Mexico to the knockout stage, fans from both countries have rekindled a friendship that has become one of the tournament's most unexpected storylines.

The relationship even has a slogan: "Coreano, hermano, ya eres Mexicano," which translates to "Korean brother, you're Mexican now."

And if the videos flooding TikTok, Instagram Reels, and X are any indication, plenty of fans seem to mean it.

Part of that affection can be traced back to the 2018 World Cup, when South Korea stunned Germany in the group stage. The result helped Mexico advance to the knockout rounds, turning Korean players into unlikely heroes among Mexican supporters. Mexican fans famously gathered outside the South Korean embassy in Mexico City to celebrate and even crowdfunded beer for Korean fans. Eight years later, the amity hasn't disappeared. If anything, social media has only strengthened it.

The relationship now extends well beyond football. Mexico has become one of the largest markets for Korean pop culture outside Asia, with K-pop acts regularly selling out arenas across the country. According to Spotify data, Mexico ranked fifth globally for K-pop listening in 2025. So when South Korean supporters arrived for the World Cup, many found themselves welcomed by fans who were already familiar with their music, food, and culture.

That welcome wasn't just online. Earlier this month, hundreds of Mexican supporters greeted South Korea's national team when it arrived at its hotel in Guadalajara, a scene that quickly went viral on social media.

The affection has become so pronounced that some supporters have half-jokingly suggested the ideal result would be a draw, a way for both teams and both fanbases to walk away happy.

Of course, goodwill only goes so far once the whistle blows. For 90 minutes, at least, Mexico and South Korea will have to set aside their status as the World Cup's friendliest rivalry and do what every tournament demands: Try to beat each other.

As one fan told NPR ahead of the match, "Whoever wins, that's my team."

Most World Cup rivalries don't work that way.

The World Cup is turning lesser-known players into social media stars

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 20:06:05 +0000

The World Cup has always created unlikely heroes. In 2026, it is also turning them into social media sensations.

The latest example is Cape Verde goalkeeper Josimar José Évora Dias, better known as Vozinha, who entered Monday's match against Spain with roughly 50,000 Instagram followers and a 19-year career largely unknown to casual soccer fans. But after helping Cape Verde hold one of the tournament favorites to a 0-0 draw in the country’s first-ever World Cup match, his following has surged to 12 million.

His performance in the game gave the internet plenty to work with. The 40-year-old goalkeeper made seven saves against Spain, which took 27 shots but failed to score. Vozinha was named Man of the Match — and a digital darling.

Much of his early attention came from Brazilian streamer Casimiro “Cazé” Miguel and his platform CazéTV, a digital sports broadcaster that has the rights to all 104 World Cup games in Brazil. The channel, which has more than 31 million YouTube subscribers, is known for a more stream-like broadcast style built around fan participation.

During the match, Cazé noticed Vozinha's relatively small Instagram following and asked viewers to follow him. Vozinha went from about 50,000 followers before the match to more than 1 million shortly after the final whistle, and nearly 10 million less than 24 hours later — surpassing the likes of NBA superstar Victor Wembanyama and Super Bowl champion Patrick Mahomes.

His sudden fame has done more than boost his metrics. After the game, Vozinha went viral when he emotionally revealed that his mother couldn't attend due to visa issues and costs. Now his story has prompted the U.S. State Department to step in, saying it's working to help his family with visa services.

Vozinha may be the tournament's latest viral main character, but he is not the first. Before the tournament began, New Zealand defender Tim Payne became the subject of a similar campaign after Argentine influencer Valen Scarsini, also known as El Scarso, set out to find the World Cup's "least-known player." Payne had fewer than 5,000 Instagram followers at the time, but after Scarsini encouraged his audience to support him, Payne's following climbed to 6 million.

Australia's Kai Trewin also saw his profile rise after creator RubikayTV pushed a campaign to make him "the Cristiano Ronaldo of the World Cup," helping his follower count jump from around 3,000 to more than 100,000. And Curaçao backup goalkeeper Trevor Doornbusch gained tens of thousands of followers after a shoutout from soccer influencer FiagoBall.

The trend clearly reflects how this World Cup is being distributed and watched. FIFA named TikTok its first-ever preferred platform for World Cup video content this year and reached a deal with YouTube allowing broadcasters to stream the first 10 minutes of every match live. Those deals have made the tournament more accessible to audiences who are following games through clips, livestreams, creator commentary, and social feeds as much as traditional broadcasts.

In this developing environment, a player does not need to be a household name before kickoff to become one by the final whistle. A great performance, a well-timed shoutout, or an organized fan push can quickly turn lesser-known players into some of the tournament’s most visible figures online.

World Cup tourists are obsessed with everyday America

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:08:22 +0000

The 2026 FIFA World Cup has given the internet plenty to talk about on the field, but one of the tournament’s best side quests is happening far from the stadiums.

As international fans travel between host cities, their off-field discoveries have become one of the tournament's most charming online trends. The 2026 World Cup is being played across 11 U.S. cities, nearly half of which are in the South. An additional 25 communities are also hosting national teams at base-camp training sites, including stops like Greensboro, Chattanooga, Columbus, and Spokane.

In practice, that means visitors are not just passing through the usual tourist hubs, but winding up in grocery stores, gas stations, college towns, and chain restaurants — posting wide-eyed reactions to the parts of American life locals usually move through without thinking twice.

Among the trend's breakout figures is @FreddyLA7, a German fan whose World Cup road trip through the South has turned into a rolling tour of Americana — and amounted to over 600,000 followers in the process. Since landing in Atlanta, he has documented stops at Taco Bell, Stranger Things filming locations, Walmart, and Waffle House (which was a “10/10”).

After hearing Ella Langley repeatedly on local stations, he posted that the country singer had become "basically the soundtrack" of the trip, and it went so viral that he got invited to see her perform. He even met the Mayor of Houston and has gotten many online shoutouts from Republican lawmakers.

But @FreddyLA7 is far from the only viral visitor. Swedish fan Elsa Thora treats ranch dressing, grocery-store snacks, and yellow school buses like major discoveries.

Fans from the UK have posted their first encounters with Erewhon and a high school football field that looked like it was right out of a "movie set." Scottish fans in Boston have embraced tailgates, while Japanese fans have documented bottomless chips and salsa. Irish fans have salivated over Raising Cane's. Even the size of American stadiums has become part of the fascination.

Not every part of the World Cup travel experience has been as easy to romanticize. From price gouging that's alarmed even the Mexican president to confusing, jammed transportation to reports of missing tickets, many fans and lawmakers have an issue with FIFA.

Access has been another barrier: fans, family, and even referees from several qualifying countries have struggled to enter the country. Cape Verde goalkeeper Josimar Dias, who goes by his nickname Vozinha, became a breakout star (and gained over 8 million followers on Instagram) after making seven saves in Cape Verde's 0-0 draw against Spain. Following the shocking match, he said his mother couldn't attend because of visa issues and costs.

Still, those frustrations haven't stopped the off-field experiences from becoming a defining part of the tournament. The World Cup runs through July 19, leaving plenty of time for more visitors to find America’s unofficial attractions…and post all about it.

Social media reacts to Knicks storybook NBA Finals win

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 16:38:46 +0000

The New York Knicks just won their first NBA championship since 1973, ending one of the longest title droughts in professional sports, and both New York City and the internet have erupted in response. But you don't need to be a basketball fan to appreciate what just happened. In fact, we would argue that last night represents one of the finest storybook endings in sports history, something so picture-perfect that you would think it was scripted.

Skeptical? Hear us out first.

The 'Nova Knicks win big

Last night, three college best friends came together to repeat their improbable 2016 NCAA March Madness run on an even bigger stage.

Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, and Mikal Bridges were all teammates at Villanova University 10 years ago, where they helped to defeat a heavily-favored North Carolina team 77-74 in one of the most celebrated NCAA tournament games of all time.

And the friendship they forged a decade ago is simultaneously a major reason for their incredible team chemistry today and the single reason the Knicks have the roster they currently have, because it required team captain and certified superstar Jalen Brunson to take a $113 million pay cut in the summer of 2024 to clear up the necessary cap space.

Two years ago, NBA analyst/savant Adrian Wojnarowski called that move "largely unprecedented," but last night it paid off in a big way, as Brunson has been crowned the King of New York, and he and his college buddies are now NBA champions.

The redemption of Karl Anthony Towns

It's hard to think of an NBA superstar who has been more unfairly maligned than Karl Anthony Towns. Former Minnesota Timberwolves teammate Jimmy Butler famously called him "soft" all the way back in 2018, and the insult has stuck ever since — until last night.

Not only did KAT put up fantastic numbers throughout this series, averaging over 15 points, 11 rebounds and 2.5 assists per game, he did it while taking on the toughest defensive matchup, guarding Spurs superstar Victor Wembanyama, a 7'4" center with a silky-smooth jump shot and superhuman agility (they don't call him "the Alien" for no reason).

But it's the behind-the-scenes drama, so often overlooked by casual fans, that makes KAT's victory so meaningful. In 2020, his mother and biggest supporter passed away from complications from COVID-19. Unlike many superstar athletes and celebrities, or famous men in general, Towns was extremely open about sharing his grief. In an emotional YouTube video entitled "The Toughest Year of My Life," he went into detail about his mother's difficult upbringing, her unwavering support for him, and their pre-game rituals, and in a post-game interview after game one of the Finals, he spoke about what she still meant to him: "I felt like I was seeing her in the stands. It felt like a certain presence that was very comforting and very loving and I felt like I could have fun out here in Game 1 of the NBA Finals, which is the weirdest thing because you would expect to have the pressure at the highest.

From that great sadness, though, good things have emerged, including his engagement to long-time girlfriend Jordyn Woods.

Instead of "soft," the internet will now refer to him as NBA Champion Karl Anthony Towns, and that's as it should be.

Brunson burns his haters

If Jalen Brunson wasn't a household name before this NBA Finals, he certainly will be now. But before he balled out on the game's biggest stage, he had to put up with a lot of criticism. In fact, the 6'2" point guard has been overlooked and underestimated for his entire career. In 2023, former WNBA superstar-turned-analyst Becky Hammon famously dismissed him as too small to be a "1A" player on a winning team, and Stephen A. Smith, the NBA's most famous talking head, described his signing with the Knicks as "nothing," a disaster move destined not to pan out.

Not only did Brunson deliver the first NBA title to New York in more than half a century, but he also did it while averaging 32.6 points, 4.6 assists, and 4.2 rebounds per game, and 45 points in the close-out Game 5 on the road, en route to his winning Finals MVP. And it gets better: his father, Rick Brunson, a former Knicks player and current assistant coach for the Knicks, got to share the moment with him.

Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing cast reunion

For decades, the Los Angeles Lakers had A-list actor Jack Nicholson sitting courtside, cheering on the Showtime Lakers, the Shaq-Kobe three-peat, and the Kobe-Pau era, an absolute fixture of Lakerdom. In the entire NBA, only one other celebrity matched that level of dedication: Spike Lee.

The celebrated director can be seen in Knicks highlights from decades past, harassing refs, taunting Reggie Miller (when he was a Pacer, not an analyst!), and generally showing support. But ironically, his biggest moment as a Knicks fan would occur not in Madison Square Garden, but in San Antonio, where he reunited with Giancarlo Esposito and John Turturro, major cast members of his breakout film Do the Right Thing, to cheer on the Knicks together.

In hindsight, it's pretty fitting that a film director would be the headline fan of this Knicks' run, because there were enough fantastic storylines here to make a movie about — maybe the next Spike Lee joint?

Reddit rolls out video comments

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:08:17 +0000

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

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

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

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

SEE ALSO: AI is fueling Reddit's spam problem

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

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

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

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

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

The internet thinks Trump just cursed the Knicks

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:47:12 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why everyone online wants to live like Dua Lipa

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:24:24 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

Survey: Teens regularly see harmful content, messages on Snapchat

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 22:42:38 +0000

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

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

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

Top dangerous experiences on Snapchat

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

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

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

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

A Snap Company spokesperson contested the report's findings.

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

Legal action against Snap

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

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

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

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

How teens handle harmful content on Snapchat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adults may be contacting teens on Snapchat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Shirley Raines broke through the noise of TikTok and Instagram to inspire millions

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:01:45 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Josh Johnson is looking for the good parts of the internet

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:01:04 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: Image Credit: Ian Moore/Mashable

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

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

Some people are chronically online; Johnson is thoughtfully online.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: Image Credit: Ian Moore/Mashable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: Image Credit: Ian Moore/Mashable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hackers say that Meta AI helped them compromise big Instagram accounts

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 18:30:58 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Knicks have taken over New York City — and the internet

Tue, 26 May 2026 18:11:07 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elon Musks X begins rolling out new History feature

Thu, 14 May 2026 14:55:08 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Threads is adding a Grok-like AI search feature

Wed, 13 May 2026 18:41:52 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instagram adds Instants tool to send disappearing photo dumps to friends

Wed, 13 May 2026 16:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

Credit: Instagram / Mashable

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

Now, for the important caveats.

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

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

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

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

Mashable has reached out to Instagram for comment.

Vine reboot, diVine, is out now to save us from AI slop

Tue, 05 May 2026 17:35:55 +0000

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

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

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

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

Credit: Mashable screenshot / Divine

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Threads down? Users report outage with social media app.

Tue, 05 May 2026 15:38:13 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a developing story...

Parents on Instagram, Facebook: Expect a big message from Meta

Tue, 05 May 2026 11:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meta back on trial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friendster has returned! But you can only connect with offline friends.

Fri, 01 May 2026 19:01:54 +0000

Do you remember Friendster?

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

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

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

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

What happened to Friendster

Before even MySpace took off, there was Friendster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DJI launches the Mic Mini 2. But theres a catch.

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:29:04 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seeing everyone play Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is giving me serious FOMO

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is Thundr? Omegles replacement, warts and all.

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 12:56:15 +0000

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

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

How does Thundr work?

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

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

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

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

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

Is Thundr free?

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

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

Small Boost: $3.99 for 10 minutes
Normal Boost: $7.99 for 30 minutes
Super Boost: $16.99 for 60 minutes

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

Is Thundr available on mobile?

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

Is Thundr NSFW?

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

Is Thundr safe?

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

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

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

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

Final thoughts on Thundr

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

What is DirtyRoulette? Exactly what it sounds like.

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

How does DirtyRoulette work?

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

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

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

One week: $7.99/trial (rebills monthly at $29.99)
One month: $19.99/month
Six months: $14.99/month (rebills every six months at $89.94)

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

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

Is DirtyRoulette free?

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

Is DirtyRoulette available on mobile?

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

Is DirtyRoulette legal?

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

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

Is DirtyRoulette safe?

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

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

Final thoughts on DirtyRoulette

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

X custom timelines: What users are saying about the new feature

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:29:27 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: X / @nikitabier

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

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

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

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

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

Why Instagram was turning some users photos black and white

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:38:09 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bluesky breaks silence on outage and reveals cause

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 16:17:12 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Bluesky down? Heres what we know.

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:36:59 +0000

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

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

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

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

Credit: Downdetector

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

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

Credit: Bluesky

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

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

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

Lena Dunhams memoir reopens the Jack Antonoff–Lorde case

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:15:10 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even Tumblr chimed in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Survey: This is the most distracting app for teens

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:13:18 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Justin Biebers Coachella set was deeply online in the best way

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:34:28 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milk, tears, and Digimon: BTS Hot Ones episode was pure chaos

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:49:54 +0000

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

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

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

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

Remi Cruz Parsons says longevity online comes down to one thing

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And people were really connecting with it.

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

It's because your audience really gravitates toward you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love any kind of one-pot meal situation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's also about protecting your mental health.

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think is the key to longevity?

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

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

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

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

Those interactions matter more to me now than anything else.

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

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

What excites you most about creating content these days?

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

So you do read comments?

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

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

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

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

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

Do you feel like each platform has a different audience?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch a jar of Nutella make space history alongside Artemis II astronauts

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:48:45 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going viral from space: NASAs tech-savvy Artemis II crew

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:14:29 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you know ball? Inside the internets most obsessive basketball debate.

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

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

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

More than a name drop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is ball knowledge?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rules, unwritten and otherwise

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

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

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

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

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

What's it done for the game

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raising the bar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KitKat heist tracker lets candy lovers check if their KitKat is from the heist

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:32:04 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI-generated fruit slop is taking over the internet

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:49:10 +0000

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

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

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

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

What is Fruit Love Island?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why are people watching AI fruit slop?

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

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

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

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

Make of all that what you will.

Blueskys new AI is being rejected by users, blocked more than White House account

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:45:50 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

We didnt grow up on social media. We grew up on digital nicotine.

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

And she is not alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s why these trials matter.

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

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

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

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

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

This article reflects the opinion of the writer.

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

The next social media ban? Austria looks to block kids under 14 from social media

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 14:38:05 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mini Kindle Pods are trending on TikTok, but these devices arent what they seem

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 16:51:39 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are mini Kindle pods actually Kindles?

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

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

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

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

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

J.K. Rowling controversy explained

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 22:46:28 +0000

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

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

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

SEE ALSO: 75 best LGBTQ films to stream right now

J.K. Rowling's pop culture takeover

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

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

Potterheads had gifted Harry Potter an eternal legacy: the largest fan-powered media conglomerate in the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rowling's image sours

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: Andrew Aitchison / In pictures via Getty Images

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

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

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

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

A full timeline of Rowling's transphobia

2019 - "#IStandWithMaya"

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

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

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

2020 - "Accusations of TERFery"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2021 - "Ignorance is Strength."

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

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

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

2022 - "She never dropped her flag."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: Wiktor Szymanowicz / Future Publishing via Getty Images

2024 - "Out and proud cheat."

Rowling's online crusade reached new heights in 2024.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2025 -"TERF VE Day"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2026 - "Never give up on your dreams."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reddit addresses bot problems, ID verification

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:11:59 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The internet made BTS. Arirang asks what comes next.

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:16:06 +0000

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

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

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

Credit: BIG HIT MUSIC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In K-pop, especially, where the clip economy drives visibility, presence is often secondary to documentation.

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

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

Credit: BIGHIT Music / Netflix

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

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

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

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

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

Then, abruptly, it stops.

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

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

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

The internet that once made BTS feel close is no longer the same one they're returning to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They return not as artists trying to be seen, but as the biggest band in the world.

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

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

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

Credit: BIGHIT Music / Netflix

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

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

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

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

Desperate times: Reddit considers adding ID verification to fight flood of AI bots

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:37:39 +0000

Reddit has a real bot problem on its hands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The incel glossary decoded: Alpha males, body counts and the manosphere’s key terms

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 15:42:22 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

80/20 rule

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

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

Alpha Male

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

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

AWALT ("All Women Are Like That")

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

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

Becky

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

Beta Male

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

Beta Orbiter

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

Betabux

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

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

Black Pill

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

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

Blue Pill

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

Body Count

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

Briffault's Law

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

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

Chad

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

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

Cuck

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

ELO Score

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

Femcel

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

Femoid

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

Friendzone

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

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

Game

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

High Value Man

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

High Value Woman

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

Hypergamy

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

Incel

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

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

Looksmatch

To date someone at a perceived level of equal attractiveness.

Manlet

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

Manosphere

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

MRA

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

Nice Guy

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

Normie

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

NPC

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

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

Pink and Blue roles

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

Proximity principle

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

PSL rating

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

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

PUA

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

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

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Purple Pill

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

r/MGTOW

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

Red Pill

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

Roastie

A derogatory term for sexually active women.

Sexual Market Value

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

Sigma

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

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

Simp

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

Soyboy

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

Stacy

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

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

The Wall

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

Trad Wife

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

White Knighting

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

Pinterest CEO says ban kids under 16 from social media

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 21:11:59 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TIL creators need a prenup for their TikTok

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:05:25 +0000

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

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

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

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

This isn’t a hypothetical situation, either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is X down? Thousands of users report outage.

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:32:06 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a developing story...

Elon Musks X teases new dislike button on replies

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:51:14 +0000

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

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

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

"Give me 60 seconds," Bier replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wildest moments from Oscars 2026

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 10:06:08 +0000

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

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

Kevin O'Leary is placing bets on Kalshi

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

Conan O'Brien as Aunt Gladys

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

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

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

SEE ALSO: 2026 Oscar winners: See full list

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

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

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

Timothée Chalamet loses Best Actor at the Oscars. Social media celebrates.

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 03:08:55 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steven Spielberg praises ballet and opera at SXSW amid Timothée Chalamet backlash

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 20:00:40 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ballet star Misty Copeland also weighed in, noting that while opera and ballet may not dominate pop culture in the same way films do, their cultural impact has endured for centuries. "There’s a reason that the opera and ballet have been around for over 400 years," she said.

So when Spielberg praised those same art forms during his SXSW keynote conversation — and the crowd erupted in approval — the moment landed as more than just a passing comment. In the context of the internet's ongoing Chalamet saga, it felt like a gentle correction.

Pokémon Pokopia is the cozy escape the internet needed

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:00:00 +0000

At a moment when the internet feels like a constant stream of bad news alerts, many people online have found a surprisingly gentle escape: Pokémon Pokopia.

Even if you're not a gamer, it's hard to miss. I don't own a Nintendo Switch — let alone the new $500 Switch 2 — and yet cute clips from Pokopia keep appearing on my feeds anyway. Thanks to my algorithm, I'm vicariously living through them. Honestly, I want a cozy Pokémon island of my own to maintain, a little Eevee to befriend. Across platforms like TikTok, Reddit, and X, players are sharing snapshots and videos of the game's miniature towns, peaceful gameplay, and unexpectedly tender character stories.

In Pokopia, the stakes are low, the world is soft and colorful, and even its Pokémon seem more interested in helping their neighbors than battling anyone.

Credit: Nintendo

In other words, Pokopia is exactly the kind of game the internet seems to need right now. On social media, some users say they even bought a Nintendo Switch 2 just to play the $70 game exclusive to the device. (According to reports, it's more than worth it.)

Pokopia trades the traditional Pokémon formula of gyms, battles, and elite trainers for something far slower and softer. Set in a tiny town where Pokémon live together in a close-knit community, the game puts players in the role of a shapeshifting, human-like Ditto. Instead of traveling the world to catch them all, your job is much simpler: help neighbors around town, complete small tasks, and slowly build relationships with the Pokémon who live there. You can even ask the Pokémon to live with you, which is how you end up with this roommate situation:

The pace is intentionally relaxed, drawing easy comparisons to Animal Crossing. There's less pressure to compete and more encouragement to simply exist in the world: talking to neighbors, exploring cozy corners of the town, and watching the daily routines of its Pokémon residents. It's less about becoming a champion and more about becoming part of a community.

Credit: Nintendo

Much of Pokopia's viral attention has centered on its characters, particularly a small, pale Pikachu whom players online have quickly embraced as the game's emotional mascot. I barely know her, and I would die for her.

Credit: Nintendo

According to her Pokédex entry, Peakychu once shared much of her electricity with her friends to help them recover from an illness. The effort permanently altered her body, leaving her unable to generate electricity on her own. She can still manipulate electricity if another source charges her, but the story has resonated widely with players as a surprisingly tender moment in the game's world. And it's a perfect example of the game's emphasis on community.

Pokopia's rise also reflects a broader pattern in internet culture: when the world feels overwhelming, people gravitate toward softer, more comforting media.

The "cozy game" boom has been building for years. Games centered on farming, decorating, community building, and slow daily routines — from Animal Crossing: New Horizons to indie hits like Stardew Valley and Unpacking — have drawn millions of players looking for a gentler alternative to competitive shooters or high-stakes RPGs. On TikTok alone, the hashtag #cozygames has amassed hundreds of millions of views, with creators sharing everything from title recommendations and relaxing gameplay loops to aesthetic virtual town tours.

Pokopia taps directly into that mood. Its tiny world feels safe. Its conflicts are small. Most importantly, its characters care about each other.

And lately, that softness feels especially appealing. Scroll through social media for more than a few minutes, and it's easy to feel swallowed by the constant churn of headlines: political tension, economic anxiety, climate disasters, the rapid rise of AI, war. Pokopia offers the opposite emotional experience — a place where the biggest problem might be helping a neighbor fix something around town.

That sense of repair is baked into the game's premise, too.

Beneath its pastel towns and cozy routines, Pokopia carries a surprisingly reflective setup. The game takes place in a post-human world, where the ruins of an old civilization dot the landscape. Players slowly restore the environment by crafting, building, and farming their way through abandoned spaces with the ultimate goal of creating a new utopia for Pokémon. There's something quietly hopeful about the idea of building connection amid structural collapse.

Credit: Nintendo

For decades, Pokémon games have been about adventure — leaving home, battling rivals, and becoming the very best. Pokopia quietly flips that formula.

Here, the goal isn't to conquer the world. It’s simply to live in it together. And for many people scrolling through their feeds right now, that small, cozy vision of community might be exactly the kind of fantasy that feels most comforting.

Blueskys CEO is stepping down. Heres why.

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 22:31:59 +0000

Bluesky, the popular alternative social media platform that rose to prominence following Elon Musk's acquisition of X, is looking for a new CEO to guide it through a growth phase.

In a post on Bluesky's website, Bluesky's now-former CEO Jay Graber announced that she was stepping down from the role. Graber noted that she's stepping back to build new products, not leaving Bluesky.

Graber will be staying with the social network as the organization's first Chief Innovation Officer — while a more experienced CEO is found. Bluesky now has more than 40 million users.

Venture capitalist Toni Schneider, a partner at the VC firm True Ventures, will step in as temporary CEO while Bluesky searches for its next head. Schneider previously served as CEO of Automattic, the parent company of the popular blog and CMS platform Wordpress.

Graber has been with Bluesky since its early beginnings in 2019. Back then, it was a project being worked on from within Twitter, the social media platform now known as X. Bluesky eventually spun off into a standalone organization working on a decentralized platform.

She cited "several intense and incredible years building Bluesky from the ground up," and the need for "a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things."

Bluesky gained traction as an alternative to Elon Musk's X after Musk acquired then-Twitter in October 2022. Bluesky's user base surged following the 2024 election as more liberal and progressive social media users looked for less far right online spaces, which was what Musk's X was transforming into.

As CEO, Graber seemingly became the reluctant face of Bluesky. As Wired points out, Graber started her career as a software engineer and always seemed more enthusiastic about the tech aspects of running Bluesky, as opposed to the business side of the endeavor.

Despite this, and unlike many other tech CEOs, Graber enjoyed broad support from Bluesky's users. For example, a shirt that Graber wore at SXSW last year that poked fun at Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg quickly sold out on Bluesky's online store.

Graber will also play a role in choosing her successor. While the search is just beginning, Bluesky’s board of directors will ultimately appoint the social media platform's next CEO. Members of the board include Jabber founder Jeremie Miller, TechDirt founder Mike Masnick, and Graber who will also remain on the board while also in her new role.

Indonesia to ban social media for children under 16

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 15:18:22 +0000

Indonesia just announced a ban on social media for anyone under 16, following a similar ban in Australia.

On Friday, Indonesia's minister of communication and digital affairs, Meutya Hafid, said in a speech shared online that the ban will begin on March 28. The rationale, according to a translation by the New York Times, is due to perceived threats of pornography, cyberbullying, online fraud, and social media addiction.

On March 28, children's accounts on "high-risk" platforms — including X, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Roblox, and livestreaming app Bigo Live — will begin to be deactivated. There aren't many details about how this will take place.

The announcement comes after Indonesia lifted a ban on Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok at the start of February. The country initially blocked Grok due to safety concerns and said it will continue to monitor its guardrails.

This is also happening after Australia banned social media for children under 16 last year. Elsewhere, such as in the U.S. and UK, age-verification laws have been enacted in an attempt to restrict minors' access to content "harmful to minors," namely pornography. A landmark trial about social media addiction is also underway in the U.S.

The Looksmaxxing Glossary: Every term you need to understand the internets most unhinged subculture

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Every so often, a word or phrase claws its way out of a cultural underground and into the mainstream lexicon. More often than not, it's African American Vernacular English (AAVE) that gets co-opted by TikTokkers before landing on Good Morning America, say. Slightly cringe, mostly harmless.

But some slang breaks containment in ways that aren't so benign.

Case in point: looksmaxxing. This term, which has recently been explained to viewers of NBC News, refers to the practice of maximizing your physical attractiveness — methodically, relentlessly, and by any means necessary. But it's no fashion-world portmanteau. The word actually hails from incel forums in the 2010s.

And it's not just looksmaxxing. Incel terminology that once festered in the dark corners of obscure boards has gone mainstream, while its proponents are viral. Influencers like Clavicular have amassed millions of views for unhinged takes involving the dangerous practice of bonesmashing. And unless you're in the know, you won't always know these terms when you see them.

If you're scratching your head at tweets like this, or wondering what your kids or friends are suddenly all talking about, you're in the right place. Here's your field guide to the people, terms, and corners of the internet you never knew you needed to know.

Acension

The moment an incel successfully escapes their condition, crossing over from involuntary celibacy into an active romantic or sexual life.

Androgenic

An Australian looksmaxxing influencer locked in an ongoing battle with Clavicular and others for the title of #1 Chad — a term that broadly means a sexually successful male, but in looksmaxxing circles means winners of an online leaderboard.

ASU frat Leader

The influencer seen in a video that went viral on campus at Arizona State University. IRL, he's fitness influencer Varis Gilaj.

BIMAX

Short for bimaxillary osteotomy, BIMAX is a double-jaw surgery typically performed as a corrective procedure for conditions like an open bite. In medical contexts, it's reconstructive. In looksmaxxing circles, the procedure is sought out as an extreme cosmetic upgrade.

Blackpill

No, this isn't the red or blue pills of The Matrix. Blackpilling is a nihilistic offshoot of incel ideology and the manosphere, It refers to a bleak thesis: in the heterosexual dating market, physical attractiveness is the only thing that matters.

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Chad

Incel slang for physically attractive and sexually successful men. In incel culture, Chads represent the top 1% of men that women seek in the dating marketplace. Chads are often depicted in memes as a strong-jawed, blonde Übermensch.

Chadlite

A portmanteau of Chad (see above) and lite (to be lesser). Used to describe men who are above average in looks, but not to the level of a Chad.

Chud

A forgettable 1984 sci-fi horror film set in New York City, C.H.U.D. — which stands for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller — has found new relevance. It's a pejorative lobbed at incels and adjacent communities like the manosphere, comparing their communities to sewer creatures.

Clavicular

A Kick streamer, real name Braden Peters. His online username is a reference to the clavicle, which is very important in the looksmaxing community.

Mashable's Anna Iovine has an excellent piece on everything you'd need to know about the now-viral internet influencer.

Cortisol spike

Cortisol is a naturally produced steroid in the adrenal gland; it's better known as the stress hormone. In incel spaces, "cortisol spike" means getting visibly flustered or stressed out over something embarrassing.

Foid

This is shorthand for the incel term "Femoid." A portmanteau of female and humanoid, this is one of many pejorative terms incels use to refer to women.

Framemogged

When your upper body simply overwhelms the competition. This refers to having wider shoulders, a bigger back, and a silhouette that makes the guy next to you look narrow by comparison.

Incel

Short for "involuntarily celibate," the incel community has its origins in a niche blog in the late 1990s. The Involuntary Celibacy Project began as a genuine support group for people struggling to find aromantic connections.

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

Jestermaxxing

On the surface, this just means someone who leans hard into being the funny one. But in incel spaces, it's a pejorative aimed at men who use humor to get attention from women.

Kick

A Twitch alternative, backed by crypto casino Stake. Kick has carved out its niche through looser content moderation, with a lighter touch on copyrighted material, hate speech, and on-stream gambling.

That permissiveness has made it a natural home for several right-wing manosphere influencers, including Sneako, xQc, Aidan Ross, and Clavicular.

Limb Lengthening Surgery

A reconstructive procedure that gradually elongates the bones of the arms or legs, typically performed on patients with skeletal dysplasia or other genetic bone growth conditions. The process is lengthy, painful, and intensive — bones are surgically broken and then slowly separated over months, allowing new bone tissue to fill the gap.

Nevertheless, you guessed it, the surgery has gained traction online as a way to make oneself taller.

Looksmaxxing

We explained it up top, but what does Looksmaxxing look like in practice? On the tamer end, it's standard self-improvement: skincare routines, hitting the gym, and upgrading your wardrobe.

But the rabbit hole goes deep for some, particularly men of color, who face an added layer of racialized beauty standards within these spaces. Skin whitening treatments, anabolic steroid abuse, and increasingly extreme body modification have all found a home here. And then there's influencer Clavicular, who has become the poster child for bonesmashing.

Looksmax.org

One of many online forums for people in the looksmaxxing and incel community. According to a 2023 BBC investigation, the site was created by Lamarcus Small, a Black man living in Alabama. Small is also the creator of a sanctioned suicide forum that the BBC links to 50 deaths in the UK.

-maxxing

To understand looksmaxxing, you first need to understand the suffix it borrows from. "-Maxxing" means doing something with maximum, obsessive effort — and it traces back to min-maxing, a concept from tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons. It refers to players putting all their points into high-value stats like strength while deliberately neglecting others — faith, intelligence, charisma.

Mewwing

A pseudoscientific oral training technique that claims that proper tongue posture — pressed firmly against the roof of the mouth — can reshape your jaw structure over time. The science doesn't back it up, but that hasn't slowed the spread of this odd practice.

Mogging

To undermine another man by eclipsing him in physical appearance. The term is derived from the acronym AMOG, or "Alpha Male of the Group."

PSL Scale

The scale runs from 0.25 to 8, though in practice, no one actually scores an 8. It measures facial features with an almost clinical specificity: eye shape, canthal tilt, nose angles, jaw size, and lip thickness. Proponents of the scale can be found on sites like Looksmax.org and on Reddit, in r/rateme and r/truerateme.

Sexual Market Value

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

Slaymaxxing

To have lots of sex.

Stacy

The female equivalent of a Chad. A Stacy is attractive, socially popular, and — crucially, to the incel mind — sexually active.

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

Stake

An online crypto casino and parent company of Twitch-alternative Kick. Stake has become infamous for one of the laziest — and most effective — ad strategies on the internet: paying meme pages and content aggregators to slap its watermark onto viral images before reposting them.

Verified LinkedIn users data is shared in shocking ways, report claims

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 19:26:08 +0000

Thinking of verifying your LinkedIn account so you can get that coveted blue checkmark badge?

You may want to hear this first.

One observant anonymous user is warning other LinkedIn users that the Microsoft-owned social network for professionals utilizes a third-party verification service that, in turn, shares users' data with other companies.

Inc highlighted a story posted on The Local Stack, a blog that covers "surveillance capitalism" from an individual who simply goes by the name "rogi."

According to the report by rogi, after going through the LinkedIn verification process to confirm his identity, he took a deeper look into the privacy policy and terms of service for the process, which is carried out by a third-party vendor called Persona.

Persona may sound familiar if you've been following the ongoing controversies around age and ID verification policy. For example, both Roblox and Discord also use Persona for their age verification process.

According to rogi, what concerned him was exactly what Persona could do with his data. Persona accessed rogi's full name, passport photo, selfie, facial biometric data, NFC chip data (or the info stored on the chip inside his passport), his nationality, sex, birthday, age, email, phone number, physical address, IP address, geolocation, device type, MAC address, browser, OS version, and language.

But that's not all. Persona also reportedly utilized "hesitation detection," which tracked just how long it took rogi to complete the process and where he paused, as well as copy and paste detection.

What's more, Rogi claimed that this data not only gets shared with LinkedIn and Persona, but also with Persona's “global network of data partners,” which includes further third-party vendors, also known as subprocessors. If requested, Persona may even hand over data to law enforcement, according to their terms of service. Persona's subprocessors include Amazon's AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and even a few AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

After rogi's The Local Stack post on LinkedIn and Persona went viral, the co-founder and CEO of Persona Rick Song addressed the report in a comment on LinkedIn.

"No personal data processed is used for AI/model training," Song said in a comment. "Data is exclusively used to confirm your identity."

Song also said that all biometric data is deleted right after processing, and all other personal data is deleted within 30 days. Song also denied that AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic were subprocessors used to verify a user's identity, even though those companies are included on a Persona webpage that lists the company's subprocessors.

"The referenced subprocessor list is the superset of subprocessors used across all customers which is unfortunately misleading," Song said. "Our customers select which products are used which determines which subprocessors are used. We are adding a clarification to this list to make this clearer in the future."

In other words, just because a company is listed on this page, that doesn't necessarily mean that LinkedIn user data in particular will be shared with them.

Persona's growing usage among some of the internet's most popular platforms is certainly putting the company under a microscope. Another recent report on Persona from a security researcher claims that the company performs "269 individual verification checks" on Discord users.

Further causing concern for many privacy watchdog groups? Peter Thiel, the controversial co-founder of surveillance firm Palantir, is a major investor in Persona as well.

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

The internet is worried about Punch the monkey. The zoo says hes OK.

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:47:54 +0000

The internet has fallen in love with Punch, the 7-month-old macaque who clings to a stuffed animal for comfort. So when a video (since deleted) surfaced showing him being dragged across the ground by another monkey inside his enclosure at the Ichikawa City Zoo in Japan, people online panicked.

Clips spread rapidly across social media this week, with viewers accusing the other monkeys of abusing him. People demanded answers. Some accused the zoo of negligence. Others declared the other monkeys bullies.

But according to Ichikawa City Zoo, what people saw wasn’t cruelty. It was socialization.

In a statement published to X on Feb. 20, first in Japanese and then translated to English, the Ichikawa City Zoological and Botanical Gardens addressed the viral video directly.

Zoo keepers said Punch had approached another baby monkey in an attempt to interact. The baby avoided him. An adult monkey — likely the baby's mother — then intervened, dragging Punch away.

The behavior may look harsh to human eyes. But for macaques, it's part of establishing boundaries.

"She probably felt that her baby was annoyed by Punch and got upset," the zoo wrote, describing the interaction as a form of discipline, not aggression.

Importantly, keepers said Punch was not injured. After the incident, he returned to his stuffed toy briefly — then resumed interacting with the other monkeys. "No single monkey has shown serious aggression toward him," the zoo said.

But the internet isn't watching Punch as a zoologist would. It's watching him like a fan.

Punch's story has unfolded almost entirely online. People first met him through viral videos showing him clinging to a plush toy after being rejected by his biological mother. They projected onto him immediately: loneliness, vulnerability, resilience. They rooted for him.

So when a video appeared that seemed to confirm their worst fears — that he was being rejected again, and violently so — the reaction was visceral. They wanted to protect him. That emotional investment is part of what makes viral animal stories so powerful. And so volatile.

Online, animals often become characters in narratives that people build themselves. Every interaction becomes a plot point. Every setback feels personal. But those narratives don't always reflect reality.

Punch is still learning how to be a monkey. And according to the zoo, Punch's difficult interactions are part of a gradual process of integrating him into the troop.

He was hand-raised after his mother abandoned him. That saved his life. But it also meant he missed out on early social bonding. Now, he’s learning. That process includes rejection, correction, and trial and error.

It also includes progress. The zoo said Punch continues to communicate with other monkeys and shows resilience. Videos posted after the incident show him moving freely within the enclosure and being groomed by other adult monkeys in the troop. So instead of feeling sorry for the little guy, the Ichikawa City Zoo is asking Punch's online admirers to support his efforts.

He still carries his stuffed animal. But he doesn't always need it.

Wired cover on techs gay mafia ignites controversy

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:48:34 +0000

Breaking news: There are gay people in positions of power in Silicon Valley in 2026.

That not-so-surprising fact is the center of Wired's latest cover story, which hit the internet Thursday. The internet immediately reacted, in part thanks to some, uh, unusual imagery that accompanied the article.

The handshake cover wasn't the only bizarre choice. Inside, the magazine used an image of a musclebound man with San Francisco's Salesforce Tower between his legs. California state senator Scott Weiner, a leader on LGBTQ issues, took issue with the whole premise.

One Silicon Valley investor, a gay man who said he refused multiple requests to be interviewed, felt justified by the "gross" result:

He wasn't the only one. Many LGBTQ tech employees felt the article could be described as "homophobic."

Other readers noted that the article itself is, to use the magazine's lingo, tired rather than wired:

Meanwhile, social media did what it does best: Skewering with satire.

Elon Musks Grok faces another EU investigation over nonconsensual AI images

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 19:41:06 +0000

Grok, Elon Musk's AI chatbot, has been under investigation in France, California, the UK, India, and Brazil for allegedly creating non-consensual intimate images, including images that depict minors. Now, it's facing yet another investigation, this time in Ireland.

On Tuesday, Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced that it had opened an investigation into Musk's X, which hosts Grok, over "potentially harmful, non-consensual intimate and/or sexualised images, containing or otherwise involving the processing of personal data of EU/EEA data subjects, including children, using generative artificial intelligence functionality associated with the Grok large language model within the X platform."

X is already the subject of an EU investigation from French authorities over the actions of Grok during a nearly two-week period that began late last year and went into 2026. Ofcom, the UK's communications regulator, announced its own investigation into Grok last month, with potential fines of up to 10 percent of X's revenue.

In the midst of these investigations, Grok is also facing potential bans in Malaysia and Indonesia.

When xAI launched Grok Imagine, a new AI image and video generation tool, last August, Mashable's reporting revealed that it lacked basic safety guardrails to prevent sexual deepfakes and non-consensual intimate imagery.

In late December, a harsh spotlight was put on Grok when a critical mass of X users noticed that the chatbot was generating sexualized images of individuals based on requests from other X users. While these nonconsensual images often depicted celebrities or private adults, some users reported finding AI-generated images that depicted minors as well.

A study from the nonprofit watch group Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that over an 11-day period, Grok had generated an estimated 3 million sexualized images, including 23,000 images of children.

Musk originally defended Grok and claimed governments like the UK were just seeking to censor free speech. Eventually, X paywalled some of Grok's image-generating capabilities behind its X Premium subscription. Shortly after, X changed its policies and outright banned the generation of sexualized imagery featuring real-life individuals.

While it does appear that X has now resolved this specific issue involving Grok, the length of time it took for Musk's company to take action, and the sheer number of images that the chatbot created, will likely be at the forefront of the ongoing investigations.

“The DPC has been engaging with XIUC [X Internet Unlimited Company] since media reports first emerged a number of weeks ago concerning the alleged ability of X users to prompt the @Grok account on X to generate sexualised images of real people, including children," said DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle in a statement. "As the Lead Supervisory Authority for XIUC across the EU/EEA, the DPC has commenced a large-scale inquiry which will examine XIUC’s compliance with some of their fundamental obligations under the GDPR in relation to the matters at hand.”

If you have had intimate images shared without your consent, call the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative’s 24/7 hotline at 844-878-2274 for free, confidential support. The CCRI website also includes helpful information as well as a list of international resources.

This dad is turning his 3-year-olds stories into adorable, groovy songs

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0000

If you've ever heard a toddler tell a story, then you know they have a tendency to let the narrative meander. Kids often have an excess of imagination and a deficit of mental organization, leading to silly, wildly entertaining tales.

One parent has taken it upon himself to turn his 3-year-old's silly, adorable stories into cute, catchy tunes — songs he's posted online to the benefit of us all. Stephen Spencer is more than qualified; he's a songwriter, composer, and music professor, which means the somewhat silly exercise has resulted in songs that are way too good.

Listen to this ditty about the Apple Man, for instance, which has racked up millions of views.

"Apple-the-Stoola the Apple Man" is going to rattle around your head for days, I guarantee it. And just when you might think this whole thing is a one-hit-wonder — nope! Let me introduce you to "Regular Rabbit." You're simply not going to believe the regularity of this rabbit named Pippa-Tory Fripp.

Seriously, these songs are amazing. Most of Spencer's TikTok and Instagram are devoted to his daughter's masterpieces. His audience has really responded to every song he's posted. Don't sleep on "Funchy the Snow-woman," for instance. Mashable reached out to Spencer for further details but did not hear back in time for publication.

If you want to support Spencer and his daughter's work, however, you can pre-save "Regular Rabbit" before it hits the music platform of your choosing.

The internet mourns James Van Der Beeks death

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:09:52 +0000

The internet is mourning Dawson's Creek star James Van Der Beek, who died on Wednesday, Feb. 11. He was 48 years old.

"Our beloved James David Van Der Beek passed peacefully this morning. He met his final days with courage, faith, and grace," the actor's wife, Kimberly Van Der Beek, wrote on Instagram. "There is much to share regarding his wishes, love for humanity, and the sacredness of time. Those days will come. For now we ask for peaceful privacy as we grieve our loving husband, father, son, brother, and friend."

Van Der Beek announced in late 2024 that he had been diagnosed with Stage 3 colorectal cancer.

Van Der Beek's Dawson's Creek co-star Katie Holmes, who played Joey Potter alongside his Dawson Leery, posted a handwritten letter on Instagram.

"James, Thank you," she wrote. "To share space with your imagination is sacred — breathing the same air in the land of make believe and trusting that each others' hearts are safe in their expression...These are some of the memories, along with laughter, conversations about life, James Taylor songs — adventures of a unique youth…"

Katie Holmes, James Van Der Beek, Michelle Williams, and Joshua Jackson in "Dawson's Creek." Credit: Warner Bros. / Getty Images

Mary-Margaret Humes, who played Dawson's mother Gail on the show, also posted a tribute on Instagram.

"Rarely am I at a loss for words … today would be the exception. James, my gracious warrior, you fought a hard battle against all odds with such quiet strength and dignity. I will always love and admire you for that. Our last conversations … merely a few days ago … are forever sitting softly in my heart for safe keeping."

The internet has also reacted to the untimely passing of the beloved actor, who epitomized late '90s teen angst in his role on the WB drama. Van Der Beek also starred in the football film Varsity Blues, the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' The Rules of Attraction, and the cult sitcom favorite Don't Trust the B---- In Apartment 23.

Van Der Beek is survived by his wife and six children.

The rise of Anti-Valentines Day online

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0000

As any hardcore fan — stan — of a famous musician or actor knows, they also have haters. "Antis," if you will. As it turns out, Valentine's Day is no different.

Love Day is almost here, and your algorithm might be spitting up videos about the best restaurants to go to, recipes to try, or gifts to shower your loved one with. Or, it might be showing you the opposite: posts railing against Valentine's Day, and even events celebrating "anti Valentine's Day."

Why are some people anti-Valentine's Day?

"For a lot of people, Valentine's Day represents old or stale values, like heteronormativity, the commercialization of love, this sort of monogonormativity of it all," sex therapist and founder of therapy practice The Expansive Group, Casey Tanner, told Mashable.

"It makes total sense to me that the sort of response to that is, 'Why not create some community around that experience, instead of only centering people who are on the relationship escalator?'" Tanner said.

According to recent YouGov data, only 37 percent of 1,114 U.S. adults surveyed plan to celebrate Valentine's Day, and only 52 percent in a romantic or sexual relationship do, too.

February 14 can be isolating if you're single, and it also props up romantic and sexual relationships as superior to platonic ones. (Maybe you celebrate Galentine's Day instead to buck this notion.)

Anti-Valentine's Day festivities

Amanda Badeau, founder of bookstore, cafe, and wine bar The Archive in South Carolina, told Mashable she puts a lot of pressure on herself to be unique and perfect, especially around holidays. Valentine's Day carries a lot of pressure, and she also mentioned it can be isolating. Instead of forcing a more "traditional" event, The Archive is hosting a "Shred Your Ex" anti-Valentine's Day night instead.

Badeau wanted to take a lighthearted approach and create an event that felt inclusive, supportive, and relatable (and just a bit petty). "Shred Your Ex grew out of the idea of turning a moment that's often heavy or awkward into something communal, a little playful and empowering," she added.

In addition to having shredders at the ready, Badeau and the all-female staff team are also putting on "red flag bingo."

The reaction so far has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic, Badeau said. "We've heard from customers who feel relieved to see an event that acknowledges heartbreak and singlehood with humor instead of pressure, and a lot of individuals are already planning to come with friends — which is exactly the kind of energy we hoped for."

Meanwhile, over in New York, the Bronx Zoo is holding its 15th annual Name a Roach initiative. For $15, you can symbolically name one of the zoo's thousands of Madagascar hissing cockroaches.

Executive director of membership and digital at the Wildlife Conservation Society and the team lead for Name a Roach, Debbie Schneiderman, told Mashable that, given roaches' longevity, most people name one for someone they love, like their partner or child. "But we do get a fair number" that name a roach after their exes or people they like…less than their partner or child.

"The majority are sent with love," Schneiderman said.

But even naming a roach after your beloved isn't the same as buying flowers. In 2026, people might want to celebrate Valentine's Day differently. The day has historically been a test for relationships, Tanner said, like using the caliber of the gift to gauge how much value your partner gives you.

Anti-Valentine's Day is "also a rejection of using any one day to make a value judgment about somebody's life, somebody's relationship," she said.

"It's an anti-capitalist move," Tanner said of anti-Valentine's Day. "It's a rejection of the pressure to buy into a particular script, or to be sold on the marketing of it all."

"More people start to see behind the curtain of why days like this exist, and sort of understand the ways that we've been tricked into commercializing love," Tanner continued. She compared this to how people question days like New Year's, when we now know that many cultures celebrate the beginning of a new year at different times.

If you're into Valentine's Day, there are a lot of pink and red hearts out there for you. But if your style is more black this Saturday, there's room for that as well.

Discord age verification: How it works, when it happens

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 17:34:51 +0000

Age verification is spreading on the internet. Following Roblox's implementation of the age verification process, Discord is the next platform in line to do it.

So, what is Discord's age verification process and what happens if users don't go through with it?

We'll break it down.

How to verify your age on Discord

Discord, the online chat platform that's extremely popular with gamers, has announced that it will be rolling out a mandatory age verification process for some of its users starting in March.

According to Discord, most users will not have to go through the process. The platform uses an "age inference model" that analyzes the account tenure, device and activity data, and patterns across Discord communities to place users in the appropriate age group: Adult or Teen. (Discord says they do not use any private messages or message content for this process.)

However, Discord will require additional information from some users in order to verify their age.

Discord age verification prompt Credit: Discord

Those users will be met with a prompt asking them to verify their age when the age verification system goes live worldwide next month. To begin the process, users simply need to click the Get Started button on the pop-up.

Next, users will be prompted to upload a selfie or a photo of a government ID. In some instances, if the age verification system has trouble estimating the age of a user simply from their selfie, the user will be required to submit both a selfie and ID.

Discord age verification upload Credit: Discord

According to Discord, uploaded selfie and ID photos are deleted after the verification process is complete.

Once a user submits this information, they will receive a DM on Discord informing them that they've been placed in either the teen or adult age group.

What happens if you don't verify your age on Discord?

According to Discord, all user accounts that require age verification going forward will be teen-by-default. This sounds exactly like what it is. If Discord cannot confirm an account owner's age, the account will, by default, be placed in the teen age group. Teenagers will not have to take part in the age verification process as their accounts will already be placed in the appropriate age group.

However, in order to see certain content and take part in certain platform experiences, some adults will need to verify their age to be placed in the adult age group. If an adult does not verify their age, their account will be placed in the teen group.

Teen accounts will be unable to see certain content. Sensitive content will be blurred by Discord. The only way to unblur content or change that content setting platform-wide will be to verify your age in order to be placed in the adult age group. Discord users in the teen age group will also be unable to access age-restricted channels, servers, and app commands.

When it comes to direct messages, teen age group accounts will have a separate inbox for messages from users that they don't already know on the platform. Teen age group users will also receive warning prompts when they receive friend requests from users they may not know.

Additionally, teen age group users will be unable to speak on stage in Discord servers.

Users who go through the age verification process and are deemed to be younger than the minimum age required as mandated by their country (age 13 in the U.S.) will be banned from Discord entirely.

If the age verification process incorrectly marks a user as underage, Discord has an appeal process that users can follow as well.

Discord has already rolled out the age verification process in the UK and Australia in order to comply with local laws. The company says it will further roll the process out globally in "early March."

UPDATE: Feb. 13, 2026, 3:54 p.m. EST This piece was updated to provide clarification from Discord regarding which users will need to verify their age.

Moltbooks real risk isnt AI. Its your data.

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 12:47:01 +0000

There has been a lot of hype around Moltbook, the Reddit-like social media platform for AI bots where humans aren’t allowed to post. But how, exactly, does it work? Should we worry about agentic AI taking over the world, or should we worry about our data?

In this video, Mashable producer Teodosia Dobriyanova spoke to AI ethicist Catharina Doria who talked us through the latest AI hype, the importance of AI governance and data protection, and why she believes the internet is going to move on from AI-generated content into something way more human.

If you're unsure about the latter, just look at 2026 social media trends. Instead of AI content, there is a return to analogue, to offline activities, and mundane realism in most aspects of life — offline dating, tactile experiences, or the resurgence of early 2000s tech.

Whats AI.com, the mysterious website with the Super Bowl commercial?

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:41:50 +0000

If you were one of the hundreds of millions of people watching Super Bowl LX on Sunday evening, you saw Bad Bunny, all the other Halftime Show celebrities, some viral commercials, and of course the Seahawks beating the Patriots in the football game.

One of the commercials that had people talking was for a new website called AI.com. The commercial informed users to go to the website so they can reserve a username of their choice, even suggesting that names like "Elon" were available. The site went down almost immediately after the Super Bowl commercial aired as it struggled with the influx of traffic.

And, that might make sense when you find out the story behind the domain name AI.com, which sold to its new owners for a record-breaking amount shortly before the Super Bowl.

What is AI dot com?

AI.com is a new website from the co-founder and CEO of Crypto.com, Kris Marszalek.

As of right now, users can simply go to the website, sign up with a Google login, and claim their own @ handle along with a separate handle for their AI. After finding two available handles, the user must then confirm their identity with a credit card. However, the site doesn't charge users anything for the transaction confirmation. After that, users are informed that their handles are reserved.

There is a footnote on the website that says they will verify users who are a "celebrity with more than 100,000 followers" and allow them to reserve a handle that matches their X account.

Marszalek shared that AI.com will be an AI assistant platform, and it seems like there is some social media aspect, but anything more regarding AI.com unclear right now.

How much did AI dot com sell for?

Marszalek paid $70 million for the AI.com domain name, as confirmed by the domain name broker Larry Fischer of Get Your Domains.

In March 2025, Fischer announced that AI.com was for sale with an asking price of $100 million. The domain sold for $30 million less than that price. Perhaps the seller made even less than that, as the purchase was made entirely with cryptocurrency, which has seen prices fall dramatically in recent weeks.

Regardless, $70 million is still a new record high for a sale involving nothing more than a domain name. (No website or other assets were included in the sale. Just AI.com, the domain name.)

AI.com's $70 million selling price shattered the record previously held by CarInsurance.com, which sold for $49.7 million in 2010.

Marszalek first publicly announced the acquisition of the domain on his X account last week, saying he acquired the domain in April. The site went live, however, on the same day as the Super Bowl, just hours before the AI.com commercial aired.

Marszalek is no stranger to big acquisitions regarding domain names or even naming rights. The Crypto.com domain name was reportedly acquired for his crypto company's use in 2018 for between $10 and $12 million. And, in 2012, Crypto.com acquired the naming rights for the Staples Center for a whopping $700 million.

Mashable previously reported on a prior sale of AI.com in 2021, after it became public knowledge in 2023. It first appeared as if OpenAI acquired the domain name, as the URL forwarded to ChatGPT's website. However, AI.com later was updated to forward to Elon Musk's xAI website, further muddying the waters surrounding its ownership.

With the latest $70 million sale to Marszalek, it appears that the mystery around the previous acquisition has been resolved. Early Bitcoin investor Arsyan Ismail is the current seller and appears to have been the person who last acquired the domain name for $10 million from domain name portfolio company Future Media Architects.

Discord defaults to teen experience for all users

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:12:45 +0000

The messaging platform Discord announced Monday that all user accounts will default to teen safety settings beginning in March. The policy, meant to create a safe environment for teens, restricts adult content and spaces without verification or assurance of a user's age.

Following significant criticism from users skeptical of the platform's age-assurance efforts, Discord updated its announcement Tuesday to clarify that the "vast majority of people can continue using Discord exactly as they do today, without ever being asked to confirm their age."

Discord, which has more than 200 million global monthly active users, said that it's relying on an inference model with hundreds of signals, like account tenure and activity data, to detect the age of an account holder. Users identified as adults will not need to go through an age assurance process.

New and existing users who aren't assessed as adults must verify their age to access adult spaces and content.

Discord will use facial scans to help establish age, and the third-party verification service k-ID for age and identification checks.

"We would like the experience to feel more like you are on Main Street," Savannah Badalich, head of product policy at Discord, told Mashable. "If you're going into an adult space, you do ID verification or something like that, whereas the Main Street itself is built for just generally [everyone]."

Badalich suggested to Mashable that users will not be able to circumvent the safety measures by relying on a virtual private network, or VPN, that conceals their location, since the default settings will be universal.

Discord under pressure on teen safety

The new policy arrives in the wake of sustained pressure on social media platforms to improve safety for minors.

A 2025 lawsuit filed against Discord and the gaming platform Roblox alleged that together the platforms created a "breeding ground for predators." At the heart of the complaint is an anonymous 11-year-old girl who was allegedly groomed, sexually exploited, and raped by a perpetrator who used Roblox and Discord to communicate with her.

In late 2025, the platform launched a hub that allows parents or guardians to view the top five users a teen messaged and called, the servers they messaged most frequently, their total call minutes in voice and video, and all the purchases they've made.

At the time, Haley McNamara, executive director and chief strategy officer of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, told Mashable in a statement that Discord's new safety features fell short by placing the burden of youth safety on parents rather than implementing fundamental design changes.

Age-gated content and experiences on Discord

Badalich said that though Discord will have teen safety settings for all users by default, the platform will preemptively assess accounts that seem to belong to adults and permit them to access age-gated content and features.

While Discord hopes to keep false positives to a minimum, Badalich did not share the platform's confidence in accurately predicting user age.

Beginning in March, any user whose age is unverified or whose account has been placed in teen settings will need to either submit an ID or go through the facial estimation process in order to have full access to Discord.

Only adults will be able to unblur sensitive content, or turn off the setting; access age-gated channels and servers; receive message requests directly, instead of to a separate inbox; and speak on a "stage" in a Discord server.

Badalich described the new policy as "a foundational change to how we think about Discord."

Age verification on Discord

Discord began using age assurance measures in the UK and Australia last year, though not without challenges.

In the UK, some users also initially bypassed the age check requirement by submitting a realistic-looking selfie of a video game character, which was deemed adult. Badalich told Mashable that Discord and k-ID worked "tirelessly" to patch that vulnerability, and that the experience has informed its subsequent age assurance efforts.

Discord's new age-assurance efforts will restrict adult servers. Credit: Courtesy of Discord

"[W]e know that teens are creative," Badalich said. 'They're going to try to find ways around it."

There are privacy concerns, too. In October, Discord announced a third-party customer support vendor had been hacked, breaching 70,000 government IDs provided by users.

When users submit identity documents to k-ID, the documents will be deleted quickly, if not immediately, according to Discord.

UPDATE: Feb. 10, 2026, 10:47 a.m. PST This story was updated to include new information provided by Discord on Feb. 10.

Bad Bunny Super Bowl Halftime Show Easter eggs: 15 things you might have missed

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:41:26 +0000

Bad Bunny promised good vibes and a whole lot of dancing during his Super Bowl halftime show, and he didn’t disappoint. But beneath the perreo-ready hits and viral clips was something deeper.

The performance unfolded as a densely layered visual essay, moving from Puerto Rico's sugar cane fields to New York bodegas, from reggaetón history to quiet political protest, and packing decades of memory, migration, and resistance into just 13 minutes of television.

From set pieces referencing the island's ongoing infrastructure collapse following Hurricane Maria to cameos honoring small-business legends and community elders, nearly every frame carried meaning. Some references were immediately legible. Others were designed for the fans who know where to look.

It was a case of storytelling: a reminder that Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio didn't just bring Puerto Rico to the Super Bowl. He brought its history with him. Here are some of the Easter eggs you may have missed.

Returning to the roots of the sugar cane fields

Before fireworks, choreography, or surprise cameos, Bad Bunny began his Super Bowl halftime show in a quiet, sunlit sugar cane field, worlds away from the stadium spectacle to come.

Sugar cane fields are deeply woven into Puerto Rico's history, tied to colonial exploitation and the agricultural labor of generations of working-class people. By opening the performance there, Bad Bunny grounded his global moment in the island's past, honoring the people whose work and resilience built Puerto Rico long before it became a cultural export. It was a reminder that everything that followed grew from this soil first.

Bad Bunny's "Ocasio 64" jersey carries history

When Bad Bunny stepped onto the Super Bowl stage in a custom Zara jersey stitched with the name "Ocasio" and the number "64," it immediately sparked speculation. The name referenced his full surname, Martínez Ocasio. The number, however, carried a heavier weight.

On a personal level, "64" honors his late uncle, who once wore the same number as an athlete. But it also echoes the Puerto Rican government’s initial claim of just 64 deaths after Hurricane Maria in 2017 — a figure later revealed to be a devastating undercount.

Falling into YHLQMDLG

Midway through "Party," Bad Bunny plunged through the roof of the casita into a family's blue living room, a moment that felt both unexpected and deeply intentional.

The visual mirrored the aesthetic of his 2020 album YHLQMDLG, whose blue-hued visualizers defined an era fans never got to see live. The pandemic canceled that tour, making the Super Bowl moment a belated love letter to longtime listeners who’ve been riding with him since the beginning.

Toñita's surprise cameo

Among the star-studded spectacle, one of the night's most meaningful appearances belonged to someone far from the pop spotlight: Maria Antonia "Toñita" Cay, the beloved owner of Caribbean Social Club.

A fixture of Puerto Rican life in Williamsburg for decades, Toñita has been name-checked in Bad Bunny's lyrics and embraced by the Nuyorican community. Her presence in the show was about honoring the everyday institutions that keep culture alive.

Victor Villa and the power of the side hustle

Another blink-and-you'll-miss-it guest was Victor Villa, the founder of Villa's Tacos. You'll see Benito pass a Villa's Tacos truck during "Tití Me Preguntó."

Villa's journey — from selling tacos in his grandmother's yard to running acclaimed brick-and-mortar locations — mirrors Bad Bunny's own narrative of grassroots success. His cameo not only celebrated immigrant hustle but also spoke to Bad Bunny's larger message of believing in where you come from, a belief he made explicit when he told Super Bowl viewers that he never stopped believing in himself and that others should believe in themselves, too.

Coco frío and island street life

During "Tití Me Preguntó," Bad Bunny moved past dancers gathered around a coco frío cart, a small detail loaded with nostalgia. Fresh coconut water, sold by street vendors across Puerto Rico, is part of daily life on the island. By centering it in a Super Bowl spectacle, Bad Bunny elevated an ordinary ritual into a symbol of home.

"Gasolina" and the lineage of reggaetón

No, your ears did not deceive you. After blending "Yo Perreo Sola" and "Voy a Llevarte Pa’ PR," Bad Bunny pivoted into a snippet of "Gasolina" by Daddy Yankee, a defining anthem of the genre.

The track, inducted into the Library of Congress in 2023, helped globalize reggaetón in the 2000s. Bad Bunny's performance also sampled Tego Calderón's "Pa’ Que Retozen" and Don Omar's "Dale Don Dale," situating himself within a living musical lineage.

Concho the toad makes an appearance

Before launching into "Monaco," the camera cut to an image of Concho, the animated amphibian mascot of Bad Bunny's latest album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos. Modeled after the endangered Puerto Rican crested toad, Concho represents environmental fragility and cultural survival.

Jíbaros, power lines, and "El Apagón"

Men in straw hats (pavas) and white clothing — jíbaros, Puerto Rico’s traditional mountain farmers — appeared climbing power lines, blending folklore with modern crisis.

Historically associated with rural life and folk music, jíbaros symbolize resilience. Here, their placement on broken infrastructure referenced post–Hurricane Maria privatization, rolling blackouts under LUMA Energy, and the economic displacement explored in the song "El Apagón." It was a visual essay on who gets left behind when "progress" arrives.

Ricky Martin's Spanish-language reclamation

When Ricky Martin joined to perform "Lo Que Pasó a Hawaii," the moment felt both nostalgic and quietly radical. For an artist long associated with English-language crossover hits like "Livin' la Vida Loca" and "She Bangs," returning to a Spanish-language ballad on the Super Bowl stage carried its own symbolism.

The song reflects on migration and loss. Singing entirely in Spanish, sitting in a monobloc chair, marked how far Latin music has pushed the mainstream. What once felt risky now feels inevitable.

The light blue flag of Puerto Rican independence

At one point, Bad Bunny held la bandera con azul celeste, the light-blue version of Puerto Rico's flag linked to the independence movement.

Once associated with calls for Puerto Rican sovereignty and traced back to pre-U.S. colonial revolts, the light-blue variant of the Puerto Rican flag has become a symbol of resistance and cultural pride. Historians identify azul celeste as the original shade tied to late-19th-century independence movements, and its use today often signals a deeper conversation about the island's identity.

Bad Bunny previously featured it in "La Mudanza," and bringing it to the Super Bowl transformed a political statement into a global broadcast.

A quiet nod to Haiti's visual history

In one of the show's most subtle visual callbacks, a woman waving Haiti's flag wore a green-and-orange ribbed knit top that closely echoed Jay Maisel's 1973 Haiti series, particularly "Haiti No. 59." The styling — easy to miss amid the spectacle — felt deliberately precise, mirroring the texture, color, and composition of Maisel's iconic image.

Lady Gaga and the maga flower

Lady Gaga’s baby-blue dress, paired with a red floral brooch resembling Puerto Rico's national maga flower, was more than a fashion moment. Designed by Luar founder Raul Lopez, the look wove national symbolism into couture, reinforcing the night’s emphasis on Puerto Rican pride.

"La Marqueta" and the roots of diaspora

During "NUEVAYoL," Bad Bunny walked past a New York–style streetscape featuring a storefront labeled "La Marqueta."

The real La Marqueta in East Harlem was once a hub for Latino immigrants, helping shape Spanish Harlem in the mid-20th century. Its inclusion honored the diaspora communities that carried Puerto Rican culture beyond the island — and brought it back, amplified, to the global stage.

"Together We Are America"

Toward the end of the halftime performance, Bad Bunny — notably speaking in English — said, "God Bless America." He then expanded the phrase to encompass all the countries of the Americas, not just the United States, re-framing it as a message of unity and belonging. Holding up a football emblazoned with "Together We Are America," he made the point explicit.

Then, switching back to Spanish, he added: "seguimos aquí" ("we’re still here"), before spiking the ball and launching into "DtMF." The moment crystallized the show's larger thesis: presence as resistance, visibility as power, and community as the foundation of everything.

Bad Bunny Super Bowl Halftime Show: What the football said

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 02:49:37 +0000

Depending on who you ask, there’s a narrow and deeply held idea of what it means to be "American." During his Super Bowl halftime performance, Bad Bunny pushed back on that definition, making it clear that people across both halves of the Americas are American, whether or not they fit into that limited vision.

The message was made explicit at the end of the set, when Bad Bunny held up a football emblazoned with the phrase “Together we are America,” framed by the flags of Latin American countries behind him. It was a simple visual, but a pointed one, underscoring a broader idea of American identity that extends well beyond borders, language, or race.

Much had been speculated about whether Bad Bunny would make an overt political statement during the show, especially after his more pointed remarks at the Grammys, where he capped his Best Album win with “ICE out.” Instead, the artist opted for something quieter and ultimately more powerful: a message rooted in unity and love in the face of hate.

9 times the ChatGPT caricature trend went horribly wrong

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 10:30:00 +0000

If you've been online in the past week, then you've probably seen the ChatGPT caricatures trend. We've covered a lot of ChatGPT image trends here at Mashable, but nothing that's gone this viral since the original Studio Ghibli trend.

In the latest viral ChatGPT trend, people are going to Chat with a simple prompt: "Create a caricature of me based on everything you know about me."

You can vary the prompt to your liking, but that's the most basic version. In the best-case scenario, you should get a cute and wholesome caricature with a cartoon version of you and some artwork reflecting your hobbies or career.

Of course, not everyone's ChatGPT caricature turns out quite the way they hoped. On Reddit and X, we've seen some particularly strange results from this simple prompt. In some cases, ChatGPT seems to be calling out the user.

In some examples, ChatGPT includes some very questionable details. One image of Reddit user crunchy-wraps looks fairly normal at first, until you zoom in...

Left: Enhance... Credit: Reddit / crunchy-wraps

Right: Show you what? Credit: Reddit / crunchy-wraps

Other users seem to have received a more traditional caricature. Many of the caricatures being shared offer a cute and cartoonish rendering of the user, but some show the more insulting caricature style you might get from a rude and underpaid boardwalk caricature artist.

On X, some users are using Grok Imagine to generate caricatures, and the results with Grok are especially bad. At least Grok isn't undressing people without their consent, for once.

And at least one disgruntled X user has reported that free users of the AI chatbot are getting bad results.

Head to ChatGPT to try creating your own caricature, or visit X to see some of the latest examples of the trend in action.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

The Muppets have always known how to break the internet

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:46:11 +0000

The internet loves a comeback tour, but it adores one with puppet fleece and impeccable comedic timing. Case in point: The Muppet Show special, which returned to the Muppet Theatre on Feb. 4 for a one-night event on Disney+ and ABC — and promptly took over everyone’s feeds.

Seriously. I didn't know I needed a Rizzo the Rat cover of The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights" until I saw it, and now I don't ever want to live in a world without it.

The Muppet Show originally ran from 1976 to 1981, pioneering the variety format with a blend of vaudeville silliness, celebrity guest spots, and backstage chaos anchored by Kermit the Frog's perpetually frazzled calm. The new special revives that spirit with all the familiar faces, including Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, and Statler and Waldorf, along with a lineup of contemporary guests, from Maya Rudolph and Seth Rogen (who also serve as executive producers) to pop star Sabrina Carpenter.

But it's the clips that have really sent fans and group chats into a frenzy, proof that the Muppets understand how to play the internet better than most human celebrities.

Leading the pack is a truly unexpected cover: Rizzo belting out The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights" on rat-infested streets. The contrast between the sleek, synth-pop hit and Rizzo's nasally bravado is instant comedy, and social media has embraced it wholeheartedly.

Then there's Sabrina Carpenter's performance of "Manchild," which has been circulating widely for its playful integration into the Muppet universe. Rather than feeling like a standard guest slot, the performance leans into the show’s absurdity, letting Carpenter spar with the chaos around her — which includes a flock of chickens on backup vocals.

And then there's the press run. Kermit and Miss Piggy have been popping up together in interviews (including a hilarious episode of Vanity Fair's Lie Detector Test), bantering like a couple who’ve been married, divorced, remarried, and media-trained for decades. Their chemistry feels untouched by time.

Long before algorithms and engagement metrics, Kermit and company mastered the art of attention. So, really, the Muppets were built for virality long before the concept of virality existed. The internet is just their latest stage.

Madonna celebrates as a 34-year-old deep cut goes viral on TikTok

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 19:52:48 +0000

Madonna's iconic hit “Vogue" is all over the new trailer for The Devil Wears Prada 2, but a much more obscure song of hers is currently en vogue on social media: 1992's "Thief of Hearts."

The house-inflected diss track from Madonna's divisive Erotica album is making the rounds via user dances and posts on TikTok and Instagram — and the star herself acknowledged the tune’s virality. Wearing sunglasses and a leopard-print jacket, The Queen of Pop lip-synched a few bars of “Thief” on Instagram recently and captioned the post, "Hearts are meant to be broken."

As seductive and danceable as the song is, it was never released as a single from Erotica, an album that, according to Madonna, never got its due from critics or the public, since it arrived alongside the artist’s controversial coffee table book, Sex. So, the song’s embrace by social media — it trended on TikTok and recently posted its biggest streaming day ever on Spotify — is satisfying for Madonna fans and the Queen herself, as evident in her Instagram post.

Featuring the sound of glass crashing and angry interludes, "Thief of Hearts" takes aim at a woman who allegedly stole Madonna’s man (how is that possible?). Whether the song is truly autobiographical is not clear, though Queerty posits that a certain Oscar-nominated actress may be the tune’s intended target.

Madonna's viral reach isn't a recent phenomenon. Songs like "La Isla Bonita" and "Frozen" have already been reborn on TikTok and Reels, fueling millions of videos and introducing her catalog to new generations.

The Insta360 Flow 2 Pro gimbal is back at a record-low price at Amazon: Save over $30

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 17:17:19 +0000

SAVE $33.01: The Insta360 Flow 2 Pro foldable gimbal is on sale at Amazon for $126.98, down from the list price of $159.99. That's a 21% discount that matches the record low at Amazon.

Credit: Insta360

Insta360 Flow 2 Pro foldable gimbal

$126.98 at Amazon
$159.99 Save $33.01

These days, you don't have to be a professional content creator to share great clips on socials. We have tons of free tools that help us capture video to share on our feeds, whether it's your dog being silly or your latest trip to Europe. If you've been grabbing these videos by holding your phone in your hand, it might be time for an upgrade. Check out this deal at Amazon.

As of Feb. 4, the Insta360 Flow 2 Pro foldable gimbal is on sale at Amazon for $126.98, marked down from the list price of $159.99. That's a 21% discount that shaves $33.01 off the normal price. It also matches the record low at Amazon.

Insta360 packed the Flow 2 Pro with features that make filming much more convenient. For starters, there's the active zoom tracking, which can follow subjects even at 15x zoom. The multi-person tracking is also great for filming several subjects, and the 360-degree Infinite Pan Tracking is a standout highlight. This function allows for continuous rotation. Of course, it can also serve as a tripod for still recording.

While it's still at a record-low price at Amazon, upgrade to the Insta360 Flow 2 Pro foldable gimbal for under $127. Your content will look smooth and pro-level with this added accessory.

Whats the Minions drama at the 2026 Winter Olympics?

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 17:59:27 +0000

The first major drama of the 2026 Winter Olympics has arrived before the opening ceremony, and the Minions are at the scene of the crime.

Spanish figure skater Tomàs-Llorenç Guarino Sabaté said Tuesday that he received last-minute clearance from Universal to use music from the Minions in his short program after copyright concerns briefly derailed his Olympic program. While the situation is ongoing, and he doesn't have all of the music cleared, it's enough to officially say: The Minions are headed to the Olympics.

Why was Tomàs-Llorenç Guarino Sabaté's Minions music initially blocked?

Just days earlier, Sabaté, 26, revealed on Instagram that he was no longer permitted to skate to the music in his Minions short program at the Milan-Cortina Games. The routine combines multiple songs and sound bites from the Minions franchise: It begins with the Universal theme sung by the Minions, includes Pharrell Williams' "Freedom" from Despicable Me 3, and ends with bass-heavy "Papaya (Vaya Papayas)," which features the Minions singing about bananas and papayas in Minion language.

Sabaté performed this program all season, and had submitted it for approval through the International Skating Union’s ClicknClear system back in August.

Despite this, the skater said he was informed of the issue late last week, leaving him scrambling to consider reworking his routine on the eve of his Olympic debut.

"Finding this out last Friday, so close to the biggest competition of my life, was incredibly disappointing," Sabaté wrote. "Nevertheless, I will face this challenge head-on and do everything I can to make the best of this situation."

How did the Minions music get cleared for the Olympics?

The decision was reversed after people rallied online, questioning how the music could be blocked so close to the Games and urging the rights holder to intervene. (The people need their Minions — and, frankly, how dare laws and rules get in the way of whimsy?) On Tuesday, Sabaté confirmed via his Instagram Story that Universal had granted him permission to use the soundtrack for what he described as "this one special occasion."

"Huge THANK YOU to everyone who reposted, shared, and supported," Sabaté wrote. "Because of you, Universal Studios reconsidered and officially granted the rights."

Figure skating analyst Jackie Wong, reporting from the Milan-Cortina Games, noted that while only two of the four musical cuts in Sabaté's program have been cleared so far, the most difficult hurdle has been resolved. "The Universal one at the beginning was the trickiest," he wrote on X, "and that was the one they got special clearance for."

As for Sabaté, he's just relieved that the routine's centerpiece has been saved. "I'm so happy to see that the minions hitting Olympic ice is becoming real again!!" he wrote on IG. "I'll keep you posted."

How did fans influence Universal's decision to approve the music?

Simply, the internet did what it does best and bullied Universal into relenting. Figure skating fans and those fond of joy flooded social media with posts and pleas demanding that Sabaté get his Minions music back.

What Minions song is Sabaté skating to?

There are multiple, actually. It begins with the Universal theme sung by the Minions, which should be a familiar sound to anyone who has ever seen a Minions film. The program also features Pharrell Williams' "Freedom" from Despicable Me 3 and ends with "Papaya (Vaya Papayas)" from Juan Alcaraz and The Minions — who share artist, writing, arranging, production, and engineering credits on the song, according to EW.

Why did Sabaté choose Minions music for his Olympic program?

Sabaté has skated to songs from the Minions animated film franchise all season, performing his short program in a yellow-and-blue costume inspired by the characters. He previously said the routine was designed to bring joy and a playful style to the ice while still meeting every required technical element.

"This season I competed with my Minions short program to bring joy and a playful style to the ice," Sabaté wrote earlier this week on Instagram, adding that the program was meant to show "that skating as a male Olympic figure skater can be fun."

When will Sabaté compete at the 2026 Winter Olympics?

While the Milan-Cortina Winter Games open on Friday, Feb. 6, the six-time Spanish men's champion is set to make his 2026 Winter Olympics debut alongside the Minions during the men's single skating short program competition on Feb. 10.

The Grammys’ D’Angelo and Roberta Flack tribute took over social media

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 17:04:39 +0000

The 2026 Grammys had no shortage of standout moments, from Lola Young taking home Best Pop Solo Performance to Bad Bunny winning Album of the Year for Debí Tirar Más Fotos. But nothing moved the room quite like the In Memoriam tribute honoring D'Angelo and Roberta Flack.

The segment was anchored by Ms. Lauryn Hill, who led a powerful lineup of R&B and soul heavyweights, including Lucky Daye, Raphael Saadiq, Leon Thomas, John Legend, Chaka Khan, Jon Batiste, and former Fugees member Wyclef Jean, for a carefully curated set celebrating the lives and legacies of the two artists.

The tribute quickly became one of the night’s most talked-about moments on social media, resonating far beyond the ceremony itself. All things considered, it was a wonderful kickoff to Black History Month.

The first portion of the tribute was dedicated to D'Angelo, who passed away on October 14 of last year. Widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in modern R&B, D’Angelo helped define the neo-soul movement of the late ’90s and early 2000s, with a sound and visual style that reshaped how intimacy, vulnerability, and Black masculinity were expressed in popular music. His albums became cultural touchstones, earning both critical acclaim and a devoted fanbase that extended well beyond genre boundaries.

Ms. Lauryn Hill led the segment with renditions of several of his most beloved songs, including "Brown Sugar," "Lady," "Devil’s Pie," and "Nothing Even Matters," while Bilal delivered a soaring performance of "Untitled (How Does It Feel)," one of D’Angelo’s most iconic and enduring tracks.

While many viewers praised the tribute, others were disappointed by the lack of focus on Angie Stone during the In Memoriam segment. Stone, who passed away in March, was a foundational figure in shaping the sound of hip-hop soul and neo-soul, genres that later reached mainstream acclaim through artists like Ms. Lauryn Hill and D'Angelo. For some fans, her omission felt particularly glaring given how deeply her influence runs through the very music being celebrated onstage.

The second half of the tribute honored Roberta Flack, whose career reshaped pop and soul music. The Flack tribute moved through a tightly curated set of her most enduring songs: "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," "Compared to What," "The Closer I Get to You," and "Where Is the Love." Hill then covered "Feel Like Makin’ Love," before reuniting with Wyclef Jean for "Killing Me Softly with His Song," which transitioned into the Fugees’ version to close the segment.

Is U.S. TikTok censoring its users?

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 13:43:13 +0000

Some TikTok users in the U.S. have reported ‘zero views’ glitches, restrictions, and even account bans they say are related to content about Palestine, criticism of Donald Trump and ICE, and even mentions of Jeffrey Epstein’s name in private messages.

Notably, it happened days after the social media platform closed on a deal to separate its U.S. operations from its global business. In the States, the app is now owned by TikTok USDS Joint Ventures LLC – a private majority company established to oversee TikTok in the country. Immediately following the handover, TikTok suffered outages, and many U.S. users reported difficulties signing in to the platform. Once users could sign in, they were asked to agree to new Terms of Service, which raised privacy concerns among some users.

The internet mourns Catherine OHara, beloved Schitts Creek star

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 19:32:12 +0000

Catherine O'Hara, whose career spanned from SCTV to her Emmy-winning role on Schitt's Creek, and included beloved turns in Home Alone and Beetlejuice, has died, People confirmed on Jan. 30. She was 71.

Following news of her death, tributes to O'Hara spread quickly across social media, with fans sharing clips, quotes, and memories from her decades-long career in comedy. Many revisited scenes from Schitt's Creek, where her portrayal of Moira Rose became one of television's most easily quoted and beloved characters.

Tributes also poured in from O'Hara's fellow actors. Pedro Pascal, who appeared alongside her in The Last of Us Season 2, shared a photo of the actress on social media, writing, "Genius to be near you... This lucky world that had you, will keep you, always." Justin Theroux, who co-starred with O'Hara in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, echoed the sentiment with his own post honoring the late star: "Oh Catherine. You will be so so missed."

Macaulay Culkin, who played her son Kevin McCallister in Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, also penned a loving tribute to the late star.

The rest of the internet is remembering her for both her immense talent and singular onscreen presence.

Over a career spanning five decades, O'Hara built a body of work that bridged sketch comedy, Hollywood blockbusters, cult classics, and prestige television — all while maintaining a reputation as one of comedy’s most inventive performers.

She first rose to prominence in the 1970s as a core member of the Canadian sketch comedy series SCTV, where her ability to shapeshift into dozens of characters made her a standout. Her work on the show established her as a performer who could balance absurdity with emotional truth, a quality that would define her career. She won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series in 1982 for her work on the show.

In film, O'Hara became a staple of beloved comedies, memorably playing the frazzled mother in Home Alone and its sequel, and delivering a scene-stealing performance in Tim Burton's Beetlejuice. She voiced Sally in the holiday cult classic The Nightmare Before Christmas. And she frequently collaborated with filmmaker Christopher Guest, appearing in mockumentary classics such as Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind.

Her late-career renaissance came with Schitt's Creek, in which she portrayed the extravagant and endlessly quotable Moira Rose. The role earned her an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe, and introduced her to a new generation of fans, cementing her status as a pop culture icon and one of television's most unforgettable performers.

Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney has the internet in a chokehold

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 18:05:22 +0000

The first official look at Sam Mendes' ambitious four-film Beatles project has landed, and the internet appears to be in rare agreement when it comes to Paul Mescal stepping into the role of Paul McCartney.

And honestly? I get the hype. It's giving less "actor playing Paul" and more "the spirit of McCartney himself briefly possessed this man," sparking the kind of collective approval that almost never happens online.

The stills offer the public its first real glimpse at Mendes' unprecedented "cinematic event," set to hit theaters in April 2028, which will tell the story of The Beatles across four interconnected films, each centered on a different member of the band — Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr.

While anticipation has been high since the project was announced, Mescal's McCartney has quickly emerged as the early standout, fueling excitement that Mendes' high-risk, high-concept take on the most famous band in history may be striking the right chord from the very start.

The reveal didn't just happen online. It first arrived like a scavenger hunt for fans. Ahead of the official release, the images of the Fab Four were quietly unveiled via postcards distributed on Jan. 29 at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, the school co-founded by McCartney himself. Then more postcards began popping up at other Beatles landmarks across the globe, from John Lennon's childhood home to Hamburg's storied club scene, New York record shops, and key spots in Tokyo.

Sony Pictures officially released the stills to the wider public on Friday, Jan. 30, but by then fans were already dissecting blurry images of the character postcards posted online.

Now the only question left — after the hair, the posture, and the uncanny resemblance — is whether Mescal and co. have nailed the Scouse accent because Beatles fans will forgive almost anything, but they will hear it if they haven't.

A parents guide to keeping kids safe on Roblox

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Grow a Garden. 99 Nights in the Forest. Steal a Brainrot. If you're a parent, you've likely heard your kids talk about one of these games at some point.

They're playing Roblox. Their friends are playing Roblox. Half of all kids under the age of 16 in the U.S. are playing Roblox. But with so many kids on Roblox, predators are taking advantage of the online gaming platform.

As a result, Roblox has been hit with a slew of lawsuits over its alleged failure to keep children safe on the platform.

So, is Roblox safe for your kids? And if your kid is already on Roblox, what should you do?

As a father of three young kids, two of whom play Roblox regularly and one who will likely start playing as soon as she learns to hold a tablet, I've written this guide to help other parents navigate Roblox and ensure their kids' safety while playing the game.

What is Roblox, and should my kids play it?

Roblox is an online game where your character can explore a virtual universe and interact with other Roblox characters. The Roblox world is cartoony, with the characters resembling LEGO people.

Roblox is more like a gaming platform than a standalone game. Users create their own games in the virtual world, which other gamers can play. Roblox even has its own economy, with some developers making hundreds of thousands of dollars or more if their game gets popular. There's an in-game virtual currency called Robux, which can be used to access premium features and items.

You may already have seen Roblox received an official ESRB rating of T for Teen. However, that's just because some of the games warrant that level of rating.

If your child tells you they're playing Roblox, that really doesn't give you much information. It's the equivalent of them telling you they're playing video games. You need to know specifically what games they are playing on Roblox to get an idea of what is or isn't appropriate.

Whether your kids play it or not is up to you. I believe it's fine for my kids in the same way I let them watch their favorite shows on Netflix. There are many movies for adults available on that platform too — but with the right parental controls and monitoring, you can ensure age-appropriate content for your children.

Getting started on Roblox

So, you've decided your child can play on Roblox. Now, this is where you'll discover that Roblox actually has several parental controls in place to keep kids safe on the platform. However, parents need to actually take the time to set these things up.

First things first: Creating your Roblox accounts.

That's right, I said "accounts" as in more than one. Your child will have an account, and you will too. Create your accounts, and then from your child's account, navigate to Settings> Parental Controls> Add a parent. Input the email for your account, and then accept the link account request in your inbox. You'll need to verify your age and identification to show you are a parent.

Link a Parent Account Credit: Roblox

Once your account is linked, parents will need to set up a Parental PIN number to access those parental controls and prevent their kids from changing them. After that, you'll then have full access to control your child's account settings and view any pending requests your child receives.

Age Verification: How it works

Starting in 2026, Roblox rolled out an extra layer of child safety measures targeted directly at the platform's most problematic feature: Chat.

All users who want to utilize the chat features must now first have their age estimated by Roblox in order for the platform to assign the account to an age category.

Roblox age verification Credit: Roblox

The mandatory age check can be performed by pressing the Unlock Chat button on the user's account page. Following that, Roblox will access the user's camera on their device in order to scan their facial features. Using that, Roblox then places a user to one of six age categories: Under 9, 9–12, 13–15, 16–17, 18–20, and 21+.

Users cannot interact in chats with other Roblox gamers who are outside of their age cohort.

The age verification is performed by a third-party company called Persona. Roblox says the images used for age verification are deleted after the process, but you may still have privacy concerns. Users have reported being able to trick Roblox's age verification system into thinking a user is older or younger than they actually are.

The addition of the age verification system has basically turned the chat feature off for users who don't partake in the process. In short, there is now yet another barrier of protection for kids on Roblox.

Parental Controls and Content

Once your accounts are created, you'll find that Roblox offers several options to ensure your child's safety on the platform. However, you have to proactively set these things up.

In your account's Parental Controls settings, under Content Maturity, parents can set content restrictions based on the maturity level of the content itself, with levels ranging from Minimal, which means occasional mild violence, all the way to Restricted, which allows unfettered access to the most violence, scary, and crude content on Roblox. You probably don't want that last one. There are two in-between labels for older kids, Mild and Moderate, and these settings can be changed by a parent at any time.

Content Maturity settings Credit: Roblox

Blocked Experiences allows parents to block specific game titles within Roblox, even if they are technically within the Content Maturity options you set in the previously mentioned menu. As games are added to Roblox, parents may find a specific game that adheres to Roblox's content labels but still contains an attribute that makes the content inappropriate for their child. Parents can use the search bar to find these experiences and block them.

Similarly, there is a Sensitive Issues toggle to block games from your child that may be themed around social, political, or religious issues. Parents can choose to block games labeled as Sensitive Issues here, even if these titles fall within the previously set Content Maturity settings.

Sensitive Issues settings Credit: Roblox

Child safety controls

Now come the privacy controls that directly address the child safety issues for which Roblox is under scrutiny.

In the Communications section of the parental controls, parents can set who their kids can communicate with in Roblox experiences. For young children, the option is simple: turn those chats off completely by selecting 'No One'.

Experience Chat settings Credit: Roblox

However, as your kids get a bit older and want to interact with their real-life friends from school, there are additional options you'll want to set. Roblox allows users to "friend" one another through Connections. Additionally, they can create a Party or a group of friends that can join experiences together.

Parents can view and manage all of their child's connections to ensure they are only connected with individuals they know and trust in real life. Furthermore, parents can adjust their child's profile visibility so that only Connections can view when their child is on Roblox and which game they are currently playing.

Visibility settings Credit: Roblox

Furthermore, parents can control the Party settings so that their child can only create a Party with users who are their Connections. Parents can also toggle Party options off entirely for small children who won't be interacting with anyone on Roblox.

Party settings Credit: Roblox

Private Servers are another setting that will likely be vastly different for you based on your child's age. Private Servers essentially allow users to participate in Roblox experiences with a select group of people. For small children, you'll want to likely turn this off entirely. For older kids, setting Private Servers to Connections will allow them to play with their friends.

Private Servers settings Credit: Roblox

While Roblox can always do more to protect its youngest users, the platform does have pretty robust options for child safety. The problem is that parents need to be aware of them and learn how to use them. Hopefully, this guide helps.

UPDATE: Jan. 26, 2026, 4:37 p.m. EST Added a section on Roblox's new age verification process to access chats on the platform.

The TikTok outage cause revealed

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 18:19:51 +0000

UPDATE: Jan. 26, 2026, 1:01 p.m. EST TikTok has shared more details about the cause of the outage that affected U.S. users over the past 24 hours.

TikTok has new U.S. owners (finally), but the app had a rough opening weekend, with many U.S. users unable to access the app, upload new videos, or refresh their feed. Now, TikTok has explained what went wrong.

According to TikTok, a power outage was the source of downtime on the app.

"Since yesterday we’ve been working to restore our services following a power outage at a U.S. data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate," said an official statement from TikTok posted on X. "We're working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. We're sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon."

TikTok appears to be working normally at the moment.

Over the weekend, the social media app was hit with thousands of user outage reports, with Downdetector showing spikes in users reporting problems in accessing the platform. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as Mashable.)

Credit: Down Detector

It's worth noting that TikTok has had a very busy week, however. On Thursday, the Chinese-owned platform announced that it had reached a deal to continue operating in the U.S. after years of pressure from politicians, creating the catchily named, majority U.S.-owned TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. Following the announcement, U.S. users were greeted with a pop-up asking them to read and agree to the app's new Terms of Service, causing confusion and alarm among some users.

Is it possible that the transfer in ownership, and whatever that entails behind the scenes, led to the issues users experienced on Sunday? It's difficult to say without any official word from TikTok, but the timing certainly seems notable.

Matt Binder contributed additional reporting to this story.

Social media reacts as Alex Honnold climbs Taipei 101 skyscraper

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 17:22:37 +0000

One of the most jaw-dropping athletic feats in recent memory happened this past Saturday, when legendary rock climber Alex Honnold free soloed the Taipei 101 skyscraper live on Netflix.

Formerly known as the Taipei World Financial Center, the building stands 1,667 feet tall, making it the 11th-tallest structure in the world. From 2004 to 2009, it actually held the title of tallest building on Earth, before the Burj Khalifa took that crown. Late Saturday night for U.S. viewers, Honnold climbed the entire thing without ropes, harnesses, or safety equipment, finishing in just over 90 minutes and becoming only the second person ever to pull it off.

It’s hard to overstate how unhinged this is. Thousands of people tuned in to watch the pure, panic-inducing spectacle of a 40-year-old man scaling a skyscraper with nothing but his hands and shoes, the kind of thing your brain immediately rejects as a bad idea. And yet, Honnold made it look almost routine.

When he finally reached the top, his first words summed up the whole experience perfectly: “Sick.”

Naturally, social media had a field day. Clips and screenshots spread almost instantly, equal parts awe and disbelief, with people marveling not just at the physical feat but at how casually it was presented. A historic athletic achievement, broadcast live, that somehow still felt deeply ridiculous in the best way possible.

For anyone unfamiliar with Honnold — and mild spoilers, I guess — this isn’t his first time doing a stunt like this. He’s best known for becoming the first person to free solo climb El Capitan, a nearly 3,000-foot vertical granite wall in Yosemite that has killed multiple climbers over the years. That ascent was documented in Free Solo, the 2018 film that went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary.

All of which is to say: Alex Honnold isn’t reckless. However, he is, in the most respectful way possible, absolutely out of his mind and also extremely good at what he does.

Winter storm snowfall videos: Social media reveals how hard the storm is hitting

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 17:11:31 +0000

A monster winter storm is currently barreling through roughly two-thirds of the United States, stretching across a massive swath of the country from Amarillo, Texas, to familiar winter hotspots like Boston, Massachusetts, and Buffalo, New York. Reports from outlets like CNN indicate that cities like Boston could see more than 36 inches of snow over the course of the weekend, while areas south of the snow line, including Charlotte and Atlanta, are expected to see less snow and more ice, a combination that makes road conditions especially dangerous.

The scale of the storm has also driven a surge of activity on social media in the days leading up to its arrival. Across the country, residents have been clearing store shelves in preparation for being snowed or iced in, posting photos of empty aisles and last-minute supply runs.

At the same time, users online are fixated on the novelty of places like the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex seeing significant snowfall, a spectacle that tends to be fun for a few hours until the ice sets in and the state’s fragile power grid starts to strain.

Or you could be in Florida and not see any snow, with cities like Orlando currently predicted to reach a high of 86°F on Sunday.

Going all the way back up north, Minnesota, it's so cold that a user posted a video of pasta frozen in mid-air. As former Fox 9 meteorologist Jennifer McDermed writes on X, Minneapolis hit a low of -21°F on Friday, with wind chills around -45°F.

This article will continue to be updated as more posts and news emerge throughout the storm.