As 2025 drew to a close, Instagram head Adam Mosseri ended the year by doom-posting about AI. “Authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible,” Mosseri lamented. “Everything that made creators matter — the ability to be real, to connect, to have a voice that couldn’t be faked — is now accessible to anyone with the right tools.” … Read more
Two hours before one of the most important live events in Netflix’s history, LA’s sprawling CBS Radford Studio Center is abuzz with the strangest combination of things. As I walk through one cavernous soundstage on a Tuesday afternoon, I hear multiple people warming up their voices to sing. I pass a man carefully waving a … Read more
During the 2024 presidential election, @KamalaHQ was something of an alter ego for Vice President Kamala Harris — as Harris ran a buttoned-up campaign, the online accounts shared clips of her set to viral TikTok sounds, shitposted unflattering pictures of Donald Trump, and adopted a voice that was at times indistinguishable from the average 20-something … Read more
“where are you? Are you ok , I loved the torture video,” reads one email, allegedly sent by Jeffrey Epstein in 2009. The reply, from a redacted address, states: “I am in china I will be in the US 2nd week of may.” Her face hovering over a screenshot of the exchange, a TikTok creator … Read more
Love them or hate them, more than half of the world’s population interacts with algorithmic recommendations in some way every day. Algorithmic recommendations play an integral role in how users discover new content across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. It can be nice to be fed a stream of fresh posts, pictures, and … Read more
On December 9th, Rolling Stone published a story that some saw as a bombshell: a network of coordinated, “inauthentic” social media accounts had a hand in the weekslong discourse that trailed the release of Taylor Swift’s recent album, The Life of a Showgirl. It was a big deal for those in the Swiftie/anti-Swiftie universe. Immediately … Read more
On Monday, several dozen members of the public are lined up outside 100 Centre Street in Lower Manhattan, hoping to squeeze into the courtroom to hear testimony from witnesses called by the state against Luigi Mangione — the man accused of shooting and killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson a year ago. Despite the endless news … Read more
The first Chinese-made car Omar Rana ever drove was a gas-powered SUV that he rented while on a trip overseas in 2015. To say it didn’t leave much of an impression would be an understatement. “It sucked really bad,” Rana, aka OmarDrives, tells me. “A horrible experience.” Flash forward nearly a decade to last year, … Read more
