"Bound by Honor," billed as a "top series" on ReelShort, opens with a young woman being drugged and coerced into marriage. In "Divorced at the Wedding Day," a "popular" pick on DramaBox, a pregnant widow is whipped and pushed onto broken glass at an engagement party before being locked up in a crate. ReelShort and Disney-backed DramaBox are the market leaders in the rising category of micro dramas, made-for-mobile soaps that feature fast-paced action and wild plots.
When WIRED attempted to post a link on Facebook, we received a message that read: "Posts that look like spam according to our Community Guidelines are blocked on Facebook and can't be edited." Hours later, however, that message was updated to read: "Your content couldn't be shared, because this link goes against our Community Standards." The message linked to Meta's Community Standards homepage rather than a specific part of those rules.
The European Commission, the bloc's governing body, said on Monday that it had opened a formal investigation into X over the spread of illegal images, including possible child sexual abuse material, generated by Grok on the platform. The Commission said it would also extend an ongoing investigation into X's recommendation algorithm, with the regulator previously fining the social media platform $140 million over its "deceptive" blue checkmarks.
After months of negotiations, TikTok finalized a deal with several US-based investors days before the next deadline, after which TikTok would have allegedly been banned in the US. Today, TikTok was finally divested from ByteDance, which retains a 20% stake, while the other 80% is split between Oracle, Silver Lake, MGX and others. Each of those three companies gets a 15% stake.
Your YouTube Shorts feed might soon be filled with a lot more AI-generated content from your favorite creators - including AI-generated versions of the creators themselves. In his annual letter released today, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan says that sometime this year, creators will be able to make Shorts using their "own likeness." Mohan didn't share further details about these likenesses. "We'll have more to share soon, including the launch date and how the feature will work," according to YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle.
OpenAI has added age prediction features to ChatGPT, meant to identify and bolster protections for underage users. These age detection plans were announced in December alongside updated guidelines for interacting with teens, and follow a rise in similar age-gating efforts from online platforms, including Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Roblox. ChatGPT's age prediction model works by examining behavioral and account-level signals, including a user's stated age, how old the account is, when the user is active, and usage patterns over time.
The case being reviewed isn't exactly one of an everyday user. Instead, the case involves a high-profile Instagram user who repeatedly violated Meta's Community Standards by posting visual threats of violence against a female journalist, anti-gay slurs against politicians, content depicting a sex act, allegations of misconduct against minorities, and more. The account had not accumulated enough strikes to be automatically disabled, but Meta made the decision to permanently ban the account.
In the coming weeks, we will begin to roll out enhanced technology in Europe to further support how our moderation teams detect and remove accounts that belong to someone under the age of 13. This follows an initial pilot in Europe over the last year, which led to the removal of thousands of additional underage accounts.
According to XCreators, the initiative is designed to encourage creators to produce high-quality, original content that sparks conversation, breaks news and shapes culture. The winning article must be original, a minimum of 1,000 words and will be primarily judged based on Verified Home Timeline impressions. The official announcement states that content that violates X's policies or is hateful, fraudulent, or manipulative will not be taken into consideration, and that only users in the United States are eligible.
In the past, the degree of graphic or descriptive detail was not considered a significant factor in determining advertiser friendliness, even for some dramatized material, Consequently, such uploads typically received a yellow dollar icon, which restricted their ability to be fully monetized. With this week's update, our guidelines are becoming more permissive, and creators will be able to earn more ad revenue.
Unlike most people, fainting at work is a rite of passage; she moderates videos on social media that have been reported for violating the terms of service. That means watching everything from horrible porn to horrible politics to horrible accidents and everything in between, a non-stop diet of videos with titles such as fetus in blender or strangulation but she doesn't die.
Rockstar Games has removed a fan-made mission simulating the assassination of Charlie Kirk from its popular online crime sim Grand Theft Auto Online, with the publisher even banning the conservative activist's name to prevent similar missions from appearing. As reported by IGN, developer Rockstar North introduced a new feature in the A Safehouse in the Hills update on December 10, allowing GTA Online players to create and share unofficial missions within the game.
My journey on TikTok Shop started out with a search for "hip hop jewelry." It's an innocuous search query multiple users have likely typed in, hoping to find something to wear. While browsing the cheap jewelry, I was struck by what TikTok's algorithm repeatedly suggested that I might also be interested in: jewelry with blatant Nazi symbolism. TikTok continues to struggle with moderation as its in-app ecommerce store gains traction with younger users.
Shortly after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, in 2022, he claimed that "removing child exploitation is priority #1." It was certainly a noble goal-social-media sites had become havens for distributing abusive materials, including child pornography and revenge porn, and there was perhaps no major platform as openly hospitable to such content as Twitter. Unlike Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, which restricted nudity and pornographic videos, Twitter allowed users to post violent and "consensually produced adult content" to their feeds without consequence.
Malaysia and Indonesia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Elon Musk's company xAI, as concerns grew among global authorities that it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing scrutiny of generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, along with concerns that existing safeguards are failing to prevent their abuse.
I have quite a lot of pressure to remove the BBC from X, he said. By the way, that is not what I'll be doing because we need to be on these platforms. We need to give quality information on to these social media platforms, bring people in. I actually think that's critical, because otherwise the Chinese, the Iranians they're flooding the zone. They're investing very hard. We are in a position where the majority of 16 to 34s come to BBC every week we're still fighting that battle.
