Selena Gomez has been in the public eye since 2002, when she was a teeny-tiny “and Friends” on Barney and Friends. She later starred on the Disney Channel show The Wizards of Waverly Place, beginning in 2007. And, like magic, she seems to have managed to have made it through the last two decades-plus with her sense of humor intact. Case in point: A photo she posted of herself and pal Taylor Swift at Tuesday’s MTV Video Music Awards.
“She looks stunning, I look constipated,” she wrote on her Instagram Stories alongside a photo of the two smiling at each other. “Typical.”
Granted, Gomez, who took home the Moonman for Best Afrobeats for “Calm Down,” her collaboration with Rema, does sport the “smiling at my friend” equivalent of being caught mid-sneeze in the shot, sure. But it’s a cute mid-sneeze, made all the cuter by her self-deprecation.
Swift, who swept the awards and took eight of the 10 categories her work was nominated in, including Artist of the Year, Video of the Year, and Song of the Year (seems like “Anti-Hero” turned her into a hero after all), was visibly delighted for Gomez during the awards, blowing kisses when her friend took the stage to accept her own statue.
Gomez also seemed to take a stance on her Instagram Stories Tuesday night, sprinkling in a text-only slide amid the celebrations of her win and constipation face: “I will never be a meme again,” she posted. “I’d rather sit still than be dragged for being myself. Much love.”
Gomez has been keeping busy in various arenas, starring in the third season of Only Murders in the Building on Hulu, as well as releasing her new single, “Single Soon.” It’s a wonder she even has time to make jokes about her own facial expressions.
Edmonton soccer darling Alphonso Davies has been crowned the most influential Canadian sport star, based on Instagram statistics, including number of followers and engagement.
Davies plays for Bayern Munich and the Canadian national team.
The study, conducted by online gambling company PlayOJO, ranked the top 10 Canadian sports stars.
Davies, 22, has over 5.4 million Instagram followers, a 3.2 per cent engagement rate and 173,000 average likes per post.
“Phonsie, especially, is a wonderful news story, both in terms of his upbringing — coming in as a refugee — growing, in terms of the Canadian soccer community, and going and playing for Bayern, is awesome,” said Gilles Prefontaine, a marketing instructor at NAIT’s JR Shaw School of Business.
“His success draws in a whole bunch of young athletes that want to share in that and be part of that with him.”
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Prefontaine says soccer has a more global reach than some other sports.
“Being Canadian, we often think of hockey, and that’s because it’s part of our culture, it’s part of our DNA. But we also have to remember that many of these athletes are going to draw from international groups. And so many of the sports that have much larger international volumes will naturally have a bigger impact in terms of that number of followers.”
World Cup inspiring youth soccer in Edmonton
The study estimates Davies also has the highest potential earnings per sponsored post — an estimated $87,176 per post and $113,424 per reel.
With that power, Prefontaine says, comes responsibility.
“When someone with that kind of notoriety can change behaviour and turn around and influence potentially whole generations of individuals to consume something or do something very different, there is a certain amount of accountability,” he said.
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Retired MMA fighter Georges St-Pierre, 42, is ranked second, with over 4.4 million followers, but a lower — 0.6 per cent — engagement rate.
In third place is Ontario’s Tristan Thompson, who has played 12 seasons in the NBA. Thompson has over 3.9 million followers and gets an average of 170,000 likes per post.
Rounding out the top 10 are Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (basketball), Genie Bouchard (tennis), Andrew Wiggins (basketball), Adam Copeland (WWE), Jamal Murray (basketball), Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (baseball) and RJ Barrett (basketball).
PlayOJO researchers rank top 10 most influential Canadian sports stars.
Courtesy: PlayOJO
Davies’ story is well known. Born in a refugee camp in Ghana to parents who had fled the civil war in Liberia, Davies came to Canada when he was five.
In July 2016, a 15-year-old Davies left his home in Edmonton to pursue a professional soccer career.
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He signed with the Vancouver Whitecaps, becoming the third-youngest in history to sign an MLS deal. Two years later, the Whitecaps agreed to sell Davies to Bayern Munich in a then-record MLS deal, worth possibly in excess of US$22 million.
Davies, then 17, finished out the season with Vancouver before officially joining Bayern in January 2019.
When it comes to Team Canada, he was just 16 when he made his senior debut for the country in June 2017 against Curacao, becoming the youngest men’s player in Canadian team history. He had obtained his Canadian citizenship the week before.
Davies has since become the face of Canadian men’s soccer, on and off the field. In June 2018, he opened Canada’s presentation to the FIFA Council in Moscow as part the joint North American bid, along with the U.S. and Mexico, to host the 2026 World Cup.
His social media accounts are followed by a legion of fans. He has 6.6 million followers on TikTok, 5.1 million on Instagram and 472,800 on Twitter.
Alphonso Davies’ return to Edmonton for World Cup qualifiers ‘makes people believe’
“If we’re really thinking about a social media influencer, we’re thinking about someone who is using their platform, their notoriety to change other people’s behaviour,” Prefontaine said.
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“A lot of deals with — or should, at least, deal with — the athlete’s or the person’s values.”
He says a successful influencer draws back the curtain of their life and creates a sense of belonging.
“We think about the realms of influence,” Prefontaine said. “Having someone, like a phenom like Phonsie, come from Edmonton, has already done amazing things — for example, for the Edmonton soccer community, where others look at this Edmonton area and realize we’re not a wasteland.
“Because in Canada, we have the Whitecaps and Toronto FC and it’s kind of feeling like everything in between, there’s nothing.”
Davies has endeared himself to many off the field as well. He serves as a global goodwill ambassador for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.
“He’s also been very genuine in terms of sharing some of that influence with his local community,” Prefontaine said.
“I’ve seen him flipping burgers and doing a variety of things to promote some local businesses, some different outreach with soccer clubs and soccer communities and that creates a sense of authenticity, but brings Edmonton and what’s going on in Edmonton, to a much higher level at the global stage.”
Soccer phenom’s life story detailed in new book ‘Alphonso Davies: A New Hope’
With so many apps available for people to share the details of their lives, some are now feeling social media fatigue. Sydney Bradley, senior reporter for Insider, joins CBS News to explain how some people are putting the “social” back in social media.
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Former One Direction star Liam Payne announced “with a heavy heart” on Instagram Friday that he is postponing his South American tour due to a serious kidney infection.
Payne posted a video about his condition, explaining that he has been unwell recently and was in the hospital over the past week.
“This really is the last news I want to be telling you,” the 29-year-old singer said. “We started rehearsals and I’ve just been advised that now is really not the right time to be out on the road trying to recover from this.”
“Doctor’s orders are that I now need to rest and recover,” he added in the caption.
Singer Liam Payne being interviewed at the OVO Arena Wembley in London. May 13, 2023.
Zac Goodwin/PA Images via Getty Images
The singer did not provide more information on his ailment or hospitalization, but said “it’s something I wouldn’t wish on anyone.” He also apologized to his fans who have bought tickets.
As for the tour — which was supposed to take place across six dates in September in Peru, Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico — the English pop star said his team is working to reschedule it. For now, ticket holders will be refunded for their purchases.
“Hopefully we’ll put on an even bigger show,” Payne said in his video address while thanking his supporters. “I’m looking forward to seeing you guys soon.”
Who would have ever thought that cheese boards could earn you $1 million?
But that’s exactly what happened to Monisha Mirsa, whogrew her side hustle charcuterie board business, BoardsbyMo, to $1 million in revenue in just three years. Mirsa now runs the business full-time with a team of 7 employees.
She recently appeared on my podcast The Side Hustle Show, part of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, to tell her extraordinary story.
Photo courtesy of BoardsbyMo
Filling a need during the pandemic
When the quarantine orders were put in place in Boston during the beginning of the pandemic, Mirsa started going a little “stir crazy” at home working for a software company.
She had a lot of friends and family who were essential employees and healthcare workers. Seeing her friends working so hard gave her the idea to prepare some snack platters or home-cooked meals for them. Mirsa started dropping these off at hospitals around Boston for free.
But some of the staff she gave platters to asking if they could buy some. That “planted a little seed,” Mirsa said. She didn’t see this becoming a full-time job though, as she assumed she’d be going back to work in the near future.
A month later a friend reached out and asked if Mirsa would make a cheeseboard for her mom for Mother’s Day. She insisted on paying and also insisted that Mirsa start an Instagram account and think about turning this into a business. On May 5th, 2020, Mirs started her Instagram account, and on May 10th, she had her first order.
“It was never supposed to happen, I just kept thinking this is cool,” Monisha said.
After Mirsa started her Instagram account, she posted what she called, “almost like a fake promotion”, which read:
$40 date night board gets delivered to your doorstep, mix of cheese, charcuterie, fruit, nuts, jams, 2 days only, DM me to reserve yours now!
She admits she had no idea what she was doing. Two hours later she had more than 20 DMs from complete strangers asking for one of these boards to be delivered.
Mirsa said she was being found because she was tagging Boston food bloggers and using hashtags that promoted her boards. In that first year, she grew her account to around 20,000 followers.
Building a Website
Mirsa wanted her own platform where people could place orders and learn more about her business, so she built her site, BoardsByMo.com, on the eCommerce platform Shopify and integrated HubSpot so her orders flowed through.
Starting workshops
Mirsa also offered virtual charcuterie board-building workshops as corporate team-building exercises on Zoom. Given the inbound interest, Mirsa began teaching other aspiring charcuterie entrepreneurs how to start their own businesses.
After consistently hitting her monthly revenue goals for 6 straight months, Mirsa gained the confidence to leave her stable 9-to-5 job and devote herself entirely to her passion.
You can hear my interview with her about that decision and what happened next here.
Since making the jump and committing to BoardsbyMo, she has seen her Instagram following grow to around 120,000+ followers, 6 times what it was when she was working her office job.
While quitting was nerve-wracking for Mirsa, she set a target revenue that made her comfortable stepping away from the reliability of a steady paycheck.
“It was definitely one of the scariest things I think I’ve ever done,” she said. But by focusing on her revenue goals and passion for charcuterie, she took the plunge into full-time entrepreneurship.
Tapping into B2B opportunities
Mirsa has since expanded her marketing to platforms like LinkedIn. With corporate catering now being a huge part of her business, she uses LinkedIn to target prospects planning large conferences, meetings, and events.
She tries to keep it organic—posting about successes but also being open about challenges.
Leveraging Email marketing strategies
Mirsa’s email newsletters highlight upcoming events like public workshops, special deals, and new product launches.
She considers email marketing critical. “I have a fear that one day all these social media platforms are just going to go away,” she said. Email allows her to stay in touch with her audience.
To drive newsletter signups, Monisha positions BoardsbyMo as a thought leader in charcuterie—offering tips, tricks, and expertise. This provides more value beyond just promoting products.
“It just shows people here’s another local business that you can support and that you can frequent and purchase from later on,“ she said.
The co-marketing workshops are free exposure events for both businesses involved. Mirsa and her partner coordinate marketing emails to promote the workshop and bring in new audiences.
Diversifying revenue streams
In terms of revenue streams, catering corporate events is now Mirsa’s biggest moneymaker.
“It’s easier to book when people are spending company budgets rather than their own money,” she said.
Workshops are another major stream, including public collaborative workshops and private team-building events.
Drawing on her software sales background, Mirsa created a small business strategy workshop that quickly gained popularity, even being used by Harvard Business School. She fills a gap by helping creative founders sell their passion projects.
She offers charcuterie board workshops and classes through her business. The workshops are available as online courses on Teachable.
The main course is her sales and marketing strategy workshop, which costs $400 individually or $900 as part of a bundle with other courses. It includes pre-recorded videos and a downloadable workbook.
The secret to her success
Asked why her charcuterie business has stood out amongst the many similar cheese plate influencers that popped up in recent years, Mirsa believes the aesthetically pleasing nature of charcuterie boards gives her an automatic advantage on visual platforms like Instagram.
But she says she started adding more behind-the-scenes, day-in-the-life type of content, showing the “not sexy” parts of running her business. She’ll bring followers into the kitchen, cutting huge wheels of cheese for hours, with salami in her hair.
This depicts “a more organic and realistic depiction of what it’s like to be a small business owner,” she said.
If you were wondering what following Michelle Pfeiffer on Instagram ever got you, wonder no more: It’s a no-makeup selfie.
In the wee hours of Friday morning (or late Thursday night, depending on in which time zone you are getting your Pfeiffer Pfix), the 65-year-old actor celebrated the social media milestone of hitting three million followers on Instagram.
She marked the occasion by giving her followers exactly what they came for: Her.
“3M followers. Thank you all for hanging out with me here!! 🤍” she captioned the picture.
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And she does indeed appear to be hanging out: the snap is a bonafide selfie, no filters, no makeup, all loungewear. The actor’s blonde hair hangs loose in the pic, and she donned a grey crewneck sweatshirt to relax on a flax-colored couch and smirk into that front-facing camera. It’s not totally clear where the “here” is that she’s going all that hanging out—maybe her house, maybe some random couch. The important thing is, all 3 million of us are right there (virtually) with her.
The relaxed ‘tude is a far cry from when she joined the platform in 2019, nervously telling Vanity Fair, “I’ve spent my whole life doing as little as possible and hiding out,” adding, “I’ve been really, honestly, anxious about entering into the world of social media, and just fearing I’ll say the wrong thing and somebody’s gonna get snarky on my feed.”
Doja Cat is trying to flip the script by assuring her dejected fans they mean nothing to her.
The Grammy winner reportedly lost more than 180,000 Instagram followers in recent weeks after brutally honest posts on Twitter and Threads, where she not only refused to embrace her fandom — but wrote in all capital letters that she doesn’t “give a fuck” what they think.
“Seeing all these people unfollow makes me feel like I’ve defeated a large beast that’s been holding me down for so long and it feels like I can reconnect with the people who really matter and love me for who i am and not for who i was,” she wrote on Instagram.
The rapper concluded Wednesday’s since-expired Story by claiming: “I feel free.”
“I want you all to read this comment and take it as a message,” wrote Doja Cat. “I don’t give a fuck what you think about my personal life I never have and never will give a fuck what you think about me or my personal life goodbye and good riddance miserable hoes haha!”
Doja Cat recently clarified her stance on privacy and autonomy in a Harper’s Bazaar interview.
Jordan Strauss/Invision/Associated Press
The rapper also insisted that her fanbase doesn’t have names — unlike Nicki Minaj loyalists who call themselves Barbz — and wrote in a deleted Threads post that anyone who calls themselves “kitten” in her honor should stop using their phone “and get a job.”
Doja Cat has since reportedly deactivated her Threads account.
Her purported relief at the mass exodus coincided with an interview by Harper’s Bazaar, who named her one of the three cover stars of its “September ’23 ICONS” issue — in which she was far clearer and less hostile about her stance on privacy and autonomy.
“My theory is that if someone has never met me in real life, then, subconsciously, I’m not real to them,” she told the outlet. “So when people become engaged with someone they don’t even know on the internet, they kind of take ownership over that person.”
She continued: “They think that person belongs to them in some sense. And when that person changes … there is a shock response that is almost uncontrollable. …I’ve accepted that that’s what happens. So I put my wigs on and take them off … I have all the freedom.”
Iconic supermodel Cindy Crawfordtook to Instagram Thursday to share a snap featuring glistening curves and plump mounds of flesh pressed together, cleavage aplenty that surely made mouths water and thumbs pause in their scrolling.
We agree: It was a very nice photo of a handful of perfectly ripe blackberries. It makes getting those K and C vitamins in seem infinitely appealing, not to mention the benefits that the fruit’s fiber provides.
She also shared a shot of herself topless in a hot tub, gazing out at a lake.
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Crawford, 57, simply captioned her carousel “lake life,” gently drifting into the August weekend on the full wave of her thirst trap. Pardon, thirst traps: there are those blackberries, of course, they won’t be soon forgotten, but Crawford also posted a selfie in a bikini top and button-up shirt, strategically revealing a swath of chest with a string of beads finding a natural point to rest.
The model appears on the just-released cover of the September issue of Vogue alongside Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington, the cohort who defined high fashion and the supermodel look in the ‘80s and ’90s.
Crawford has previously talked about learning the ins and outs of social media with her also-supermodellic 21-year-old daughter, Kaia Gerber.
“Like anything, there’s good and bad sides to it,” she said. “The good thing is you have direct communication with your audience. The bad thing can be, it’s a lot of pressure and you see a lot of snarky comments on there.”
Thankfully, we have Crawford out here to tell us directly about the greatness of peak berry season, and the importance of having access to at least two bodies of water to luxuriate in at all times.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
When Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook as little more than a student prank in a dorm room, he could have hardly guessed that he was about to create one of the world’s favorite connecting tools. But not only that — in one fell swoop, Zuckerberg also developed the first of several powerful platforms used by brands to connect to their communities.
By now, social media platforms offer brands more than simply one more location for advertising messages. These platforms have become instrumental in building brand trust. They are creating genuine connections that allow brands to engage with their customers on previously impossible levels.
The importance of brand trust
In 2020, the Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report indicated that 70% of consumers believe that trust in a brand has never been more critical than today. The result was the same across different demographics. So, what is brand trust? Marketing researchers at Northwestern University define brand trust as the respect and loyalty customers have for a brand or the strength of their belief that a brand will be able to deliver on its promises.
Brand trust is based on several factors, including:
In this digital age, consumers have never been subjected to more marketing messages. In this crowded marketplace, with thousands of companies vying for consumers’ attention, brand trust is critical to help a brand stand out.
More than 300 million Americans are using social media platforms. The vast majority of them connect with others on the likes of Facebook, Instagram and TikTok every day. By 2028, experts predict that the figure will have increased beyond 300 million.
While the time of use and preferred platforms vary between age groups and other criteria, one thing is clear: social media offers brands unprecedented opportunities to connect directly to their audiences. Compared to traditional media, there is no barrier between the messages brands communicate and those that audiences see.
Plus, by reaching out to potential customers on social media, brands connect where people are already hanging out rather than forcing audiences into a different setting.
Build brand trust through authenticity and transparency
Social media has the reach as well as the coveted audience insights that brands look for when they choose where to connect. However, to run transformational campaigns, marketers need more than reach.
They need authenticity and transparency to build trust in their brands. On social media, authenticity is built on genuine interactions with customers. Of course, brands can leverage auto-reply tools, but they are only a stopgap. Consistent messaging and open communications are key to genuine connections.
Transparency is just as essential. Never have consumers had this much access to information, and they expect brands to share the truth about products and services. Most customers will understand that even the best product will occasionally have problems if the brand is open about their resolution.
How to leverage social media for engaging content
Social media platforms were built with engagement in mind. While the original intention may have been focused on individuals, the concept works just as well for brands looking to engage with customers by using one of the following approaches:
Listening and Responding to Your Community — Social media turns target audiences into communities that interact with the brand and each other. For brands, that creates a unique opportunity to listen into conversations, actively participate and respond to their community’s needs.
Building an Authentic Brand Personality — Social media channels are among the best-performing tools for brands to establish their own voices and personalities and allow their communities to get to know them. The platforms create relatively informal settings that foster conversations that would not happen via email inquiries or direct mail marketing.
Influencer Partnerships and Collaborations — Working with influencers who are trusted in their community automatically builds trust in the brand, by extension. These partnerships can expand the brand’s audience, too. However, they need to be well chosen to be effective for both sides.
Crisis Management and Reputation Building — Social media channels allow brands to talk directly to consumers in a crisis, for example, when a product recall becomes necessary. Rather than relying on third-party media outlets, these channels help brands explain their position without a filter.
Not every social media platform will work for every brand. Researching audience demographics and matching those against target audiences is key for successful campaigns. Brands must also be prepared to adjust and iterate their campaigns and even their overarching strategies regularly as they learn more about audience engagement.
Some of the most effective key performance indicators include overall reach, engagements, conversions and impressions.
Example: Dove’s campaign for real beauty
Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty stands out for its longevity – it will celebrate its 20th anniversary next year – and its ability to connect and engage. Having started even before most consumers started using social media, the campaign has consistently evolved to reconnect with and engage audiences.
One of its successful social media-based iterations included 2019’s #ShowUs campaign on YouTube, designed to smash beauty stereotypes. At the same time, the brand has also been critical of social media excesses, which increased authentic engagement with its target audiences.
Conclusion
Social media channels offer brands many opportunities to connect with and engage audiences. Authenticity and transparency are key to successful campaigns, whether brands focus on their community, work with influencers, or use social media for crisis communications.
Threads, Meta’s Twitter rival, is struggling to retain users roughly a month after its highly publicized launch, according to fresh industry estimates showing that app engagement has fallen to new lows.
The data from market research firms Similarweb and Sensor Tower highlight the challenges facing Meta as it seeks to exploit the opening created by the chaos surrounding Twitter’s management.
Threads’ daily active user count is down 82% from launch as of July 31, according to Sensor Tower, with just eight million users accessing the app each day. That is the lowest it has been since the day after the app’s release when daily active users peaked at roughly 44 million, Sensor Tower said.
People are also opening the app less frequently and spending less time there, Sensor Tower added.
On its launch day, Threads users opened the app an average of 14 times and spent an average of 19 minutes scrolling through it, the company reported. By the end of the month, however, those figures had fallen sharply.
As of August 1, Threads’ daily average time spent fell to just 2.9 minutes a day, and people spent only 2.6 sessions per day using the app, said Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower.
Findings from Similarweb showed the same pattern of decline. Threads’ user count peaked at roughly 49 million on July 7, the day after launch, and fell steadily to just over 11 million by July 29, said David Carr, a senior insights manager at Similarweb.
The steepest drop-off occurred in the two weeks immediately following Threads’ launch. But the new data show how the decline has continued and is ongoing.
According to Sensor Tower, Threads’ daily active user count is still falling at a rate of roughly 1% per day.
Speaking on the company’s earnings call last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was “quite optimistic” about the app.
“We saw unprecedented growth out of the gate and more importantly we’re seeing more people coming back daily than I’d expected,” he said. “And now, we’re focused on retention and improving the basics. And then after that, we’ll focus on growing the community to the scale we think is possible.”
Threads launched with only a handful of features and later promised to add in highly requested tools like a reverse-chronological content feed, a desktop version of the app and direct messages.
On July 10, Zuckerberg announced that more than 100 million people had signed up for Threads, making it one of the fastest-growing apps in history. The company has reportedly looked into adding “retention-driving hooks” that can keep users engaged.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino, leader of the platform formerly known as Twitter, said the company is keeping an eye on new competitor Threads, despite the sharply slowing growth of the rival app from Meta.
“Threads did jump in with a ton of hype and a launch pad from their Instagram users … [but] it’s dropped off dramatically,” Yaccarino told CNBC Thursday in her first interview as CEO of the company now called X.
“But you can never, ever take your eye off any competition because they’ll continue iterating and as much as the launch has stalled, we’re keeping an eye on everything that they’re doing.”
Still, Yaccarino said X remains largely focused on its own future as the company chases profitability, and that Threads may be looking at its past.
“What we can see is that [Threads] may be building to what Twitter was — enter rebrand, enter X — and we’re focused on what X will be, and it’s an entirely different roadmap and vision,” she said.
Staving off competition from Meta’s Threads and other rival platforms is just one of the things Yaccarino is now tasked with after taking over from owner Elon Musk as X’s CEO in June. In just her first two months, the company underwent a massive rebrand from Twitter to X in hopes of transforming into an “everything app” similar to China’s WeChat, and has continued to warn of challenges reviving its core advertising business. Musk, who is now the company’s chief technology officer, has also been preparing for a cage fight with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Yaccarino joined the company after months of turmoil caused by Musk’s takeover, including mass layoffs, controversial policy decisions and various legal battles.
But on Thursday, she doubled down on the company’s vision and explained why it retired its highly recognized brand name.
“The rebrand really represented a liberation from Twitter, a liberation that allows us to evolve past a legacy mindset and to reimagine how everyone … around the world is going to change how we congregate, how we transact, all in one place,” Yaccarino said, adding that users would soon be able to make video calls and payments through the platform.
“It’s developing into this global town square that is fueled by free expression, where the public gathers in real time,” she said.
Yaccarino said that the company is returning to growth mode after months of slashing costs through ongoing layoffs, infrastructure and office space reductions and, in some cases, allegedly holding back on paying its bills and employee severance. Twitter’s staff has shrunk from nearly 8,000 employees to just around 1,500 workers since Musk’s takeover, Yaccarino said.
“Are we hiring? Yes,” Yaccarino said. “I get to come in and shift from this cost discipline to growth … the future is bright.”
Threatening to stand in the way of that evolution are the company’s very real business challenges. Musk last month disclosed in a post that, due to a 50% drop in advertising revenue and a “heavy debt load,” the platform is still losing money. After Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last October, the company’s value now stands around $15 billion, according to a May disclosure from a Fidelity fund.
Yaccarino, a former marketing executive with NBCUniversal, was brought on to Twitter in part to help revive its advertising business. And she said on Thursday that the company is “close to breakeven.”
“Coca Cola, Visa, State Farm is a huge partner, they’re coming back — the last bunch of weeks, continued revenue growth,” Yaccarino said.
But maintaining the ad business has been an uphill battle for the site since Musk’s takeover. Hordes of advertisers halted spending on the platform over concerns about content moderation, mass layoffs and general uncertainty about the company’s future. Musk has also defended his own controversial tweets, telling CNBC in May, “I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.”
Yaccarino pointed to the company’s “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” policy that aims to limit the reach of so-called lawful but awful content on the platform and to protect brands from having their ads appear alongside such content. X on Tuesday rolled out additional brand safety controls for advertisers, including the ability to avoid having their ads show next to “targeted hate speech, sexual content, gratuitous gore, excessive profanity, obscenity, spam, drugs.”
“I wrap my security blanket around you, my brand and my CMO, and say your ads will only air next to content that is appropriate for you,” Yaccarino said Thursday.
Dozens of states sued Instagram-parent Meta on Tuesday, accusing the social media giant of harming young users’ mental health through allegedly addictive features such as infinite news feeds and frequent notifications that demand users’ constant attention.
In a federal lawsuit filed in California by 33 attorneys general, the states allege that Meta’s products have harmed minors and contributed to a mental health crisis in the United States.
“Meta has profited from children’s pain by intentionally designing its platforms with manipulative features that make children addicted to their platforms while lowering their self-esteem,” said Letitia James, the attorney general for New York, one of the states involved in the federal suit. “Social media companies, including Meta, have contributed to a national youth mental health crisis and they must be held accountable.”
Eight additional attorneys general sued Meta on Tuesday in various state courts around the country, making similar claims as the massive multi-state federal lawsuit.
And the state of Florida sued Meta in its own separate federal lawsuit, alleging that Meta misled users about potential health risks of its products.
Tuesday’s multistate federal suit — filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California — accuses Meta of violating a range of state-based consumer protection statutes, as well as a federal children’s privacy law known as COPPA that prohibits companies from collecting the personal information of children under 13 without a parent’s consent.
“Meta’s design choices and practices take advantage of and contribute to young users’ susceptibility to addiction,” the complaint reads. “They exploit psychological vulnerabilities of young users through the false promise that meaningful social connection lies in the next story, image, or video and that ignoring the next piece of social content could lead to social isolation.”
The federal complaint calls for court orders prohibiting Meta from violating the law and, in the case of many states, unspecified financial penalties.
“We share the attorneys generals’ commitment to providing teens with safe, positive experiences online, and have already introduced over 30 tools to support teens and their families,” Meta said in a statement. “We’re disappointed that instead of working productively with companies across the industry to create clear, age-appropriate standards for the many apps teens use, the attorneys general have chosen this path.”
The wave of lawsuits is the result of a bipartisan, multistate investigation dating back to 2021, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said at a press conference Tuesday, after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen came forward with tens of thousands of internal company documents that she said showed how the company knew its products could have negative impacts on young people’s mental health.
“We know that there were decisions made, a series of decisions to make the product more and more addictive,” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti told reporters. “And what we want is for the company to undo that, to make sure that they are not exploiting these vulnerabilities in children, that they are not doing all the little, sophisticated, tricky things that we might not pick up on that drive engagement higher and higher and higher that allowed them to keep taking more and more time and data from our young people.”
Tuesday’s multipronged legal assault also marks the newest attempt by states to rein in large tech platforms over fears that social media companies are fueling a spike in youth depression and suicidal ideation.
“There’s a mountain of growing evidence that social media has a negative impact on our children,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta, “evidence that more time on social media tends to be correlated with depression with anxiety, body image issues, susceptibility to addiction and interference with daily life, including learning.”
The suits follow a raft of legislation in states ranging from Arkansas to Louisiana that clamp down on social media by establishing new requirements for online platforms that wish to serve teens and children, such as mandating that they obtain a parent’s consent before creating an account for a minor, or that they verify users’ ages.
In some cases, the tech industry has challenged those laws in court — for example, by claiming that Arkansas’ social media law violates residents’ First Amendment rights to access information.
New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella said the states expect Meta to mount a similar defense but that the company will not succeed because the multistate suit targets Meta’s conduct, not speech.
Formella added that in addition to consumer protection claims, New Hampshire is also bringing negligence and product liability claims as part of the federal suit.
The complaints filed in state courts allege violations of various state-specific laws. For example, the complaint from District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb accuses Meta of violating the district’s consumer protection statute by misleading the public about the safety of company platforms.
Tuesday’s lawsuits come days before a federal judge in California is set to consider a slew of similar allegations against the wider tech industry. In a hearing Friday morning, District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is expected to hear arguments by Google, Meta, Snap and TikTok urging her to dismiss nearly 200 complaints involving private plaintiffs that have accused the companies of addicting or harming their users.
It is possible that Tuesday’s multistate suit could be merged with the consumers’ cases, said Weiser, adding that the main difference of the multistate case is that it could lead to nationwide relief.
“The coordination that we bring across the AG community, we believe is invaluable to this,” Weiser said.
Participating in Tuesday’s multistate federal suit are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
The additional suits filed in state courts were brought by the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah and Vermont.
Threads users, rejoice: the app is rolling outits highly anticipated web version Tuesday.
The update — perhaps the most requested by users since Threads’ mobile-only launch last month — puts the new platform one step closer to recreating the functions offered by rival X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, and could help reignite user growth following a sluggish period.
Parent company Meta says Threads users will soon be able to log in, post, view and interact with other posts via a browser on a desktop computer, as the web version rolls out to users in the coming days. The company says it plans to add more desktop features in the future. In an early access test of some of the web-based features, CNN was able to post on the platform but could not yet scroll the home feed.
Threads launched in early July with stunning success, garnering more than 100 million sign-ups in its first week on the back of months of chaos at Twitter. But the buzz faded somewhat as users realized the bare-bones platform still lacked many of the features that made Twitter popular, such as trending topics, robust search functions and direct messaging. Threads has been steadily rolling out smaller updates but the hotly demanded web version could help reignite stronger user engagement.
The new web version could also raise fresh competitive concerns for X, after owner Elon Musk sparked user backlash last week by suggesting he might do away with the platform’s block feature.
Meta employees have for weeks teased that a desktop version of Threads was in the works and being tested internally. Just last week, Instagram head Adam Mosseri, who is also leading Threads, said he had been posting from the platform’s desktop version and suggested “it’ll be ready soon but it needs more work.”
Web access is just one of a series of recent updates to Threads as Meta continues to build out the new platform. Other features added over the past month include new “reposts” and “likes” tabs that show users the posts they have reshared and liked in their profiles, a chronological following feed and a button to share threads posts to Instagram DMs.
Continued updates to Threads are essential if Meta wants to maintain the early traction it had with users. Despite the app’s stunning success following its launch, by the end of July, Threads’ daily active user count had fallen 82% to around 8 million users, according to a report from market research firm Sensor Tower earlier this month. By August 16, updates to Threads had helped the app notch slight gains to 11 million daily active users, Sensor Tower said in a report Monday.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he is “quite optimistic” about the app’s potential.
“We saw unprecedented growth out of the gate and more importantly we’re seeing more people coming back daily than I’d expected,” he said last month during the company’s earnings call. “And now, we’re focused on retention and improving the basics. And then after that, we’ll focus on growing the community to the scale we think is possible.”
Many schools, psychologists and safety groups are urging parents to disable their children’s social media apps over mounting concerns that Hamas plans to disseminate graphic videos of hostages captured in the Israel-Gaza war.
Disabling an app or implementing restrictions, such as filtering out certain words and phrases, on young users’ phones may be sound like a daunting process. But platforms and mobile operating systems offer safeguards that could go along way in protecting a child’s mental health.
Following the attacks on Israel last weekend, much of the terror has played out on social media. Videos of hostages taken on the streets and civilians left wounded continue to circulate on varying platforms. Although some companies have pledged to restrict sensitive videos, many are still being shared online.
That can be particularly stressful for minors. The American Psychological Association recently issued a warning about the psychological impacts of the ongoing violence in Israel and Gaza, and other research has linked exposure to violence on social media and in the news as a “cycle of harm to mental health.”
Alexandra Hamlet, a clinical psychologist in New York City, told CNN people who are caught off guard by seeing certain upsetting content are more likely to feel worse than individuals who choose to engage with content that could be upsetting to them. That’s particularly true for children, she said.
“They are less likely to have the emotional control to turn off content that they find triggering than the average adult, their insight and emotional intelligence capacity to make sense of what they are seeing is not fully formed, and their communication skills to express what they have seen and how to make sense of it is limited comparative to adults,” Hamlet said.
If deleting an app isn’t an option, here are other ways to restrict or closely monitor a child’s social media use:
Parents can start by visiting the parental control features found on their child phone’s mobile operating system. iOS’ Screen Time tool and Android’s Google Family Link app help parents manage a child’s phone activity and can restrict access to certain apps. From there, various controls can be selected, such as restricting app access or flagging inappropriate content.
Guardians can also set up guardrails directly within social media apps.
TikTok: TikTok, for example, offers a Family Pairing feature that allows parents and guardians to link their own TikTok account to their child’s account and restrict their ability to search for content, limit content that may not be appropriate for them or filter out videos with words or hashtags from showing up in feeds. These features can also be enabled within the settings of the app, without needing to sync up a guardian’s account.
Facebook, Instagram and Threads: Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and threads, has an educational hub for parents with resources, tips and articles from experts on user safety, and a tool that allows guardians to see how much time their kids spend on Instagram and set time limits, which some experts advise should be considered during this time.
YouTube: On YouTube, the Family Link tool allows parents to set up supervised accounts for their children, screen time limits or block certain content. At the same time,YouTube Kids also provides a safer space for kids, and parents who decide their kids are ready to see more content on YouTube can create a supervised account. In addition, autoplay is turned off by default for anyone under 18 but can be turned off anytime in Settings for all users.
Hamlet said families should consider creating a family policy where family members agree to delete their apps for a certain period of time.
“It could be helpful to frame the idea as an experiment, where everyone is encouraged to share how not having the apps has made them feel over the course of time,” she said. “It is possible that after a few days of taking a break from social media, users may report feeling less anxious and overwhelmed, which could result in a family vote of continuing to keep the apps deleted for a few more days before checking in again.”
If there’s resistance, Hamlet said should try to reduce the time spent on apps right now and come up with an agreed upon number of minutes each day for usage.
“Parents could ideally include a contingency where in exchange for allowing the child to use their apps for a certain number of minutes, their child must agree to having a short check in to discuss whether there was any harmful content that the child had exposure to that day,” she said. “This exchange allows both parents to have a protected space to provide effective communication and support, and to model openness and care for their child.”
TikTok: A TikTok spokesperson, which said the platform uses technology and 40,000 safety professionals to moderate the platform, told CNN it is taking the situation seriously and has increased dedicated resources to help prevent violent, hateful, or misleading content on the platform.
Meta: Meta similarly said it has set up a special operations center staffed with experts, including fluent Hebrew and Arabic speakers, to monitor and respond to the situation. “Our teams are working around the clock to keep our platforms safe, take action on content that violates our policies or local law, and coordinate with third-party fact checkers in the region to limit the spread of misinformation,” Meta said in a statement. “We’ll continue this work as this conflict unfolds.”
YouTube: Google-owned YouTube said it is providing thousands of age-restricted videos that do not violate its policies – some of these, however, are not appropriate for viewers under 18. (This may include bystander footage). The company told CNN it has “removed thousands of harmful videos” and its teams “remain vigilant to take action quickly across YouTube, including videos, Shorts and livestreams.”
As the Israel-Hamas war reaches the end of its first week, millions have turned to platforms including TikTok and Instagram in hopes of comprehending the brutal conflict in real time. Trending search terms on TikTok in recent days illustrate the hunger for frontline perspectives: From “graphic Israel footage” to “live stream in Israel right now,” internet users are seeking out raw, unfiltered accounts of a crisis they are desperate to understand.
For the most part, they are succeeding, discovering videos of tearful Israeli children wrestling with the permanence of death alongside images of dazed Gazans sitting in the rubble of their former homes. But that same demand for an intimate view of the war has created ample openings for disinformation peddlers, conspiracy theorists and propaganda artists — malign influences that regulators and researchers now warn pose a dangerous threat to public debates about the war.
One recent TikTok video, seen by more than 300,000 users and reviewed by CNN, promoted conspiracy theories about the origins of the Hamas attacks, including false claims that they were orchestrated by the media. Another, viewed more than 100,000 times, shows a clip from the video game “Arma 3” with the caption, “The war of Israel.” (Some users in the comments of that video noted they had seen the footage circulating before — when Russia invaded Ukraine.)
TikTok is hardly alone. One post on X, formerly Twitter, was viewed more than 20,000 times and flagged as misleading by London-based social media watchdog Reset for purporting to show Israelis staging civilian deaths for cameras. Another X post the group flagged, viewed 55,000 times, was an antisemitic meme featuring Pepe the Frog, a cartoon that has been appropriated by far-right white supremacists. On Instagram, a widely shared and viewed video of parachuters dropping in on a crowd and captioned “imagine attending a music festival when Hamas parachutes in” was debunked over the weekend and, in fact, showed unrelated parachute jumpers in Egypt. (Instagram later labeled the video as false.)
This week, European Union officials sent warnings to TikTok, Facebook and Instagram-parent Meta, YouTube and X, highlighting reports of misleading or illegal content about the war on their platforms and reminding the social media companies they could face billions of dollars in fines if an investigation later determines they violated EU content moderation laws. US and UK lawmakers have also called on those platforms to ensure they are enforcing their rules against hateful and illegal content.
Since the violence in Israel began, Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the social media watchdog group Center for Countering Digital Hate, told CNN his group has tracked a spike in efforts to pollute the information ecosystem surrounding the conflict.
“Getting information from social media is likely to lead to you being severely disinformed,” said Ahmed.
Everyone from US foreign adversaries to domestic extremists to internettrolls and “engagement farmers” has been exploiting the war on social media for their own personal or political gain, he added.
“Bad actors surrounding us have been manipulating, confusing and trying to create deception on social media platforms,” Dan Brahmy, CEO of the Israeli social media threat intelligence firm Cyabra, said Thursday in a video posted to LinkedIn. “If you are not sure of the trustworthiness [of content] … do not share,” he said.
‘Upticks in Islamophobic and antisemitic narratives’
Graham Brookie, senior director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, told CNN his team has witnessed a similar phenomenon. The trend includes a wave of first-party terrorist propaganda, content depicting graphic violence, misleading and outright false claims, and hate speech – particularly “upticks in specific and general Islamophobic and antisemitic narratives.”
Much of the most extreme content, he said, has been circulating on Telegram, the messaging app with few content moderation controls and a format that facilitates quick and efficient distribution of propaganda or graphic material to a large, dedicated audience. But in much the same way that TikTok videos are frequently copied and rebroadcast on other platforms, content shared on Telegram and other more fringe sites can easily find a pipeline onto mainstream social media or draw in curious users from major sites. (Telegram didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Schools in Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States this week urged parents to delete their children’s social media apps over concerns that Hamas will broadcast or disseminate disturbing videos of hostages who have been seized in recent days. Photos of dead or bloodied bodies, including those of children, have already spread across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X this week.
And tech watchdog group Campaign for Accountability on Thursday released a report identifying several accounts on X sharing apparent propaganda videos with Hamas iconography or linking to official Hamas websites. Earlier in the week, X faced criticism for videos unrelated to the war being presented as on-the-ground footage and for a post from owner Elon Musk directing users to follow accounts that previously shared misinformation (Musk’s post was later deleted, and the videos were labeled using X’s “community notes” feature.)
Some platforms are in a better position to combat these threats than others. Widespread layoffs across the tech industry, including at some social media companies’ ethics and safety teams, risk leaving the platforms less prepared at a critical moment, misinformation experts say. Much of the content related to the war is also spreading in Arabic and Hebrew, testing the platforms’ capacity to moderate non-English content, where enforcement has historically been less robust than in English-language content.
“Of course, platforms have improved over the years. Communication & info sharing mechanisms exist that did not in years past. But they have also never been tested like this,” Brian Fishman, the co-founder of trust and safety platform Cinder who formerly led Facebook’s counterterrorism efforts, said Wednesday in a post on Threads. “Platforms that kept strong teams in place will be pushed to the limit; platforms that did not will be pushed past it.”
Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, said in a letter Wednesday to the European Commission that the platform has “identified and removed hundreds of Hamas-related accounts” and is working with several third-party groups to prevent terrorist content from spreading. “We’ve diligently taken proactive actions to remove content that violates our policies, including: violent speech, manipulated media and graphic media,” she said. The European Commission on Thursday formally opened an investigation into X following its earlier warning about disinformation and illegal content linked to the war.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said that since Hamas’ initial attacks, the company has established “a special operations center staffed with experts, including fluent Hebrew and Arabic speakers, to closely monitor and respond to this rapidly evolving situation. Our teams are working around the clock to keep our platforms safe, take action on content that violates our policies or local law, and coordinate with third-party fact checkers in the region to limit the spread of misinformation. We’ll continue this work as this conflict unfolds.”
YouTube, for its part, says its teams have removed thousands of videos since the attack began, and continues to monitor for hate speech, extremism, graphic imagery and other content that violates its policies. The platform is also surfacing almost entirely videos from mainstream news organizations in searches related to the war.
Snapchat told CNN that its misinformation team is closely watching content coming out of the region, making sure it is within the platform’s community guidelines, which prohibits misinformation, hate speech, terrorism, graphic violence and extremism.
TikTok did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Large tech platforms are now subject to content-related regulation under a new EU law called the Digital Services Act, which requires them to prevent the spread of mis- and disinformation, address rabbit holes of algorithmically recommended content and avoid possible harms to user mental health. But in such a contentious moment, platforms that take too heavy a hand in moderation could risk backlash and accusations of bias from users.
Platforms’ algorithms and business models — which generally rely on the promotion of content most likely to garner significant engagement — can aid bad actors who design content to capitalize on that structure, Ahmed said. Other product choices, such as X’s moves to allow any user to pay for a subscription for a blue “verification” checkmark that grants an algorithmic boost to post visibility, and to remove the headlines from links to news articles, can further manipulate how users perceive a news event.
“It’s time to break the emergency glass,” Ahmed said, calling on platforms to “switch off the engagement-driven algorithms.” He added: “Disinformation factories are going to cause geopolitical instability and put Jews and Muslims at harm in the coming weeks.”
Even as social media companies work to hide the absolute worst content from their users — whether out of a commitment to regulation, advertisers’ brand safety concerns, or their own editorial judgments — users’ continued appetite for gritty, close-up dispatches from Israelis and Palestinians on the ground is forcing platforms to walk a fine line.
“Platforms are caught in this demand dynamic where users want the latest and the most granular, or the most ‘real’ content or information about events, including terrorist attacks,” Brookie said.
The dynamic simultaneously highlights the business models of social media and the role the companies play in carefully calibrating their users’ experiences. The very algorithms that are widely criticized elsewhere for serving up the most outrageous, polarizing and inflammatory content are now the same ones that, in this situation, appear to be giving users exactly what they want.
But closeness to a situation is not the same thing as authenticity or objectivity, Ahmed and Brookie said, and the wave of misinformation flooding social media right now underscores the dangers of conflating them.
Despite giving the impression of reality and truthfulness, Brookie said, individual stories and combat footage conveyed through social media often lack the broader perspective and context that journalists, research organizations and even social media moderation teams apply to a situation to help achieve a fuller understanding of it.
“It’s my opinion that users can interact with the world as it is — and understand the latest, most accurate information from any given event — without having to wade through, on an individual basis, all of the worst possible content about that event,” Brookie said.
Potentially exacerbating the messy information ecosystem is a culture on social media platforms that often encourages users to bear witness to and share information about the crisis as a way of signaling their personal stance, whether or not they are deeply informed. That can lead even well-intentioned users to unwittingly share misleading information or highly emotional content created with the intention of collecting views or monetizing highly engaging content.
“Be very cautious about sharing in the middle of a major world event,” Ahmed said. “There are people trying to get you to share bullsh*t, lies, which are designed to inculcate you to hate or to misinform you. And so sharing stuff that you’re not sure about is not helping people, it’s actually really harming them and it contributes to an overall sense that no one can trust what they’re seeing.”
Schools in Israel, the UK and the US are advising parents to delete their children’s social media apps over concerns that Hamas militants will broadcast or disseminate disturbing videos of hostages who have been seized in recent days.
A Tel Aviv school’s parent’s association said it expects videos of hostages “begging for their lives” to surface on social media. In a message to parents, shared with CNN by a mother of children at a high school in Tel Aviv, the association asked parents to remove apps such as TikTok from their children’s phones.
“We cannot allow our kids to watch this stuff. It is also difficult, furthermore – impossible – to contain all this content on social media,” according to the parent’s association. “Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.”
Hamas has warned that it will post murders of hostages on social media if Israel targets people in Gaza without warning.
There are additional concerns that terrorists will exploit social media algorithms to specifically target such videos to followers of Jewish or Israeli influencers in an effort to wage psychological warfare on Israelis and Jews and their supporters globally.
During the onslaught on Saturday, armed Hamas militants poured over the heavily-fortified border into Israel and took as many as 150 hostages, including Israeli army officers, back to Gaza. The surprise attacks killed at least 1,200 people, according to the Israel Defense Forces, and injured thousands more.
Since Israel began airstrikes on the Palestinian enclave Saturday, at least 1,055 people have been killed in Gaza, including hundreds of children, women, and entire families, according to the Palestinian health ministry. It said a further 5,184 have been injured, as of Wednesday.
As the war wages on, some Jewish schools in the US are also asking parents not to share related videos or photos that may surface, and to prevent children – and themselves – from watching them. The schools are also advising community members to delete their social media apps during this time.
“Together with other Jewish day schools, we are warning parents to disable social media apps such as Instagram, X, and Tiktok from their children’s phones,” the head of a school in New Jersey wrote in an email. “Graphic and often misleading information is flowing freely, augmenting the fears of our students. … Parents should discuss the dangers of these platforms and ask their children on a daily basis about what they are seeing, even if they have deleted the most unfiltered apps from their phones.”
Another school in the UK said it asked students to delete their social media apps during a safety assembly.
TikTok, Instagram and X – formerly known as Twitter – did not immediately respond to requests for comment on how they are combating the increase of videos being posted online and for comment on schools asking parents to delete these apps.
But X said on its platform is has experienced an increase in daily active users in the conflict area and its escalation teams have “actioned tens of thousands of posts for sharing graphic media, violent speech, and hateful conduct.” It did not respond to a request to comment further or define “actioned.”
“We’re also continuing to proactively monitor for antisemitic speech as part of all our efforts,” X’s safety team said. “Plus we’ve taken action to remove several hundred accounts attempting to manipulate trending topics.”
The company added it remains “laser focused” on enforcing the site’s rules and reminded users they can limit sensitive media they may encounter by visiting the “Content you see” option in Settings.
Still, misinformation continues to run rampant on social media platforms, including X.
A post viewed more than 500,000 times – featuring the hashtag #PalestineUnderAttack – claimed to show an airplane being shot down. But the clip was from the video game Arma 3, as was later noted in a “community note” appended to the post.
Another video that is purported to show Israeli generals after being captured by Hamas fighters was viewed more than 1.7 million times by Monday. The video, however, instead shows the detention of separatists in Azerbaijan.
On Tuesday, the European Union warned Elon Musk of “penalties” for disinformation circulating on X amid Israel-Hamas war.
The EU also informed Meta CEO Zuckerberg on Wednesday of a disinformation surge on its platforms – which include Facebook – and demanded the company respond in 24 hours with how it plans to combat the issue.
In an Instagram story on Tuesday, Zuckerberg called the attack “pure evil” and said his focus “remains on the safety of our employees and their families in Israel and the region.”
A slew of viral conspiracy videos on social media have made baseless claims that the Maui wildfires were started intentionally as part of a land grab, highlighting how quickly misinformation spreads after a disaster.
While the cause of the fires hasn’t been determined, Hawaiian Electric — the major power company on Maui — is under scrutiny for not shutting down power lines when high winds created dangerous fire conditions. (Hawaiian Electric previously said both the company and the state are conducting investigations into what happened). Maui experienced high winds from Hurricane Dora in the south while it was also grappling with a drought. Wildfires across the region have long been a concern.
It’s not uncommon for conspiracy theories to make the rounds after a national crisis. According to Renee DiResta, a research manager at Stanford University who studies misinformation, people often look for a way to make sense of the world when they are anxious or have a feeling of powerlessness.
“Theories that attribute the cause of a crisis to a specific bad actor offer a villain to blame, someone to potentially hold responsible,” DiResta said. “The conspiracy theories that are the most effective and plausible are usually based on some grain of truth and connect to some existing set of beliefs about the world.”
For example, someone who distrusts the government may be more inclined to believe someone who posts negatively about a government agency.
Conspiracy theorists on varying platforms claim the fires, which killed at least 114 people earlier this month, were planned as part of a strategic effort to weed out less wealthy residents on Maui and make room for multi-million dollar developments.
In one video, a user claims a friend sent him a video of a laser beam “coming out of the sky, directly targeting the city.” “This was a direct energy weapon assault,” he said. The video remains posted but now includes a label from Instagram listing it as “false information.” The imagery appears to be from a previous SpaceX launch in California.
Related far-fetched theories say the alleged “laser beams” were programmed not to hit anything blue, explaining why so many blue beach umbrellas were left unscathed by the fires.
Other social media users allege elite Maui residents were behind the fires so they could buy the destroyed land at a discounted price and rebuild potentially a “smart city.”
“You’re telling me that these cheaper lower middle class houses burnt down directly across the street and all of the mansions are still standing?” one YouTube user posted, referencing aerial imagery taken of the destruction.
Onetweet about a celebrity purchasing hundreds of acres across Maui over the past few years has received more than 12 million views on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
When a conspiracy theory gains traction online, others may chime in and offer explanations for details not discussed in the original post. Social media algorithms can amplify these theories based on user attention and interactions.
“Social media is incredibly valuable in crisis events as people on the ground can report the facts directly, but that usefulness is tempered, and can be dangerous, if misleading claims proliferate particularly in the immediate aftermath,” DiResta said.
Social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube have taken steps to curb the spread of conspiracy theories and misinformation, but some videos can slip through the cracks. Many platforms use a mix of tech monitoring tools and human reviewers to enforce their community guidelines.
Ahead of the publishing of this article, TikTok removed several conspiracy theory videos sent by CNN that were in violation of its community guidelines, which it characterizes as “inaccurate, misleading, or false content that may cause significant harm to individuals or society, regardless of intent” on the platform. A company spokesperson said more than 40,000 trust and safety professionals around the world review and moderate content at all hours of the day.
Meanwhile, in a statement provided to CNN, YouTube spokesperson Elena Hernandez said the platform uses different sections, such as top news, developing news and a fact-check panel, to provide users with as much context and background information as possible on certain trending topics, and will remove content when necessary.
“During major news events, such as the horrific fires in Hawaii, our systems are designed to raise up content from authoritative sources in search results and recommendations,” Hernandez said.
Instagram also employs third-party fact-checkers to contact sources, check public data and work to verify images and videos on questionable content. They then rate and provide labels to the content in question, such as “false,” “altered” or “missing context,” to encourage viewers to think critically about what they’re about to see.
As a result, those posts show up far less often in users’ feeds and repeat offenders can face varying risks, such as losing monetization on their pages.
Social media platform X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Michael Inouye, a principal analyst at market research firm ABI Research, said social media companies are in a challenging spot because they want to uphold freedom of speech, but do so in an environment where posts that receive the most shares and likes often rise to the top of user feeds. That means posts sharing conspiracy theories that spark fear and emotion may perform better in a crisis than those sharing straightforward, accurate information.
“Ultimately, social media will have to decide if it wants to be a better news organization or remain this ‘open’ platform for expression that can run counter to the ethics and standards that is required by news reporting,” Inouye said. “The problem is, even if something isn’t labeled as ‘news,’ some will still interpret personal opinion as truth, which puts us back in the same position.”
Threads, the much-hyped social media app from Facebook-parent Meta, is taking heat for blocking searches for “coronavirus,” “Covid,” and other pandemic-related queries.
The tech giant’s decision to block coronavirus-related searches on its service comes as the United States deals with a recent uptick in Covid-19 hospitalizations, per CDC data, and more than three years into the global pandemic.
News of Threads blocking searches related to the coronavirus was first reported by The Washington Post.
A Meta spokesperson told CNN that the company just began rolling out keyword search for Threads to additional countries last week.
“The search functionality temporarily doesn’t provide results for keywords that may show potentially sensitive content,” the statement added. “People will be able to search for keywords such as ‘COVID’ in future updates once we are confident in the quality of the results.”
As of Monday, searches on the Threads app conducted by CNN for “coronavirus,” “Covid” and “Covid-19” yielded a blank page with the text: “No results.” Searches for “vaccine” also prompted no results. Typing any of these queries into the Threads app does, however, offer a link directing users to the CDC’s website on Covid-19 or vaccinations, depending on the search.
Meta did not disclose what other keyword searches currently yield no results.
Meta’s Facebook and other social media platforms faced controversy in the early part of the pandemic for the apparent spread of Covid-19-related misinformation online.
Meta officially launched Threads in early July, and the app quickly garnered more than 100 million sign-ups in its first week on the heels of months of chaos at Twitter, which is now known as X. But much of the buzz faded somewhat in the weeks that followed as users realized the bare-bones platform still lacked many of the features that made X popular with users.
Threads released its much-requested web version late last month, and its keyword search about a week ago. But the current limitations around its search function highlights how the platform still has some kinks to work through before it can fully replace the real-time search and engagement experience that social media users have historically relied on with X.
In an unfortunate turn of events, the mother of Britney Spears’ husband, Sam Asghari, was rushed to the emergency room in Los Angeles after a major accident, leaving fans and followers concerned. However, thanks to the incredible efforts of the medical staff, she is now on the mend.
Sam Asghari expresses gratitude and updates all
Taking to his Instagram on July 29, the 29-year-old fitness trainer and actor expressed his heartfelt thanks to the staff at Cedars-Sinai hospital for their exceptional care during this challenging time. Sam wrote, “Today my mother was involved in a major accident. With the amazing help of the medical staff and some friends she’s doing okay.” While Sam didn’t provide specific details about the accident, he did share the positive news that his mother is on the road to recovery and is currently “resting it off.”
Despite the distressing situation, there is some relief as it appears that Fatima Asghari is now on the road to recovery. Sam’s reassuring words of her “resting it off” provide some comfort to those concerned about her well-being.
Meanwhile, in the midst of her professional achievements, Britney is also celebrating her first wedding anniversary with Sam. Having tied the knot in 2022 after five years of dating, the couple’s love for each other shines brightly through their heartfelt social media updates. On June 9, Sam posted an Instagram story and shared his joy. He wrote, “Happy 1 Year to me & my better half. One year married to the woman of my dreams. Happy anniversary my Love.”
Britney also expressed her joy on Instagram, sharing snippets of their spectacular wedding day. The couple’s journey of love and happiness has been a source of inspiration for many, showcasing the power of standing together through thick and thin.
I don’t know exactly what it is, but there is something so sartorially exciting about the arrival of fall. Maybe it’s the striking difference in weather that makes the transition so inviting. There’s nothing more invigorating to me than moving on from the barely there looks of summer to all the cozier pieces that come in autumn with richer hues and interesting textures.
In preparation for the new season, I scoured all the profiles of my favorite fashion follows on Instagram for fresh outfit inspiration. With guidance from the best of the best in the industry, it’s easy to transform an otherwise lackluster wardrobe into one a fashion person would be proud of. Many outfit ideas caught my eye, spanning casual everyday looks to party-ready ensembles. The sweaters and outerwear alone are worth checking out.
Keep scrolling to peruse 30 fall outfit ideas I guarantee will inspire your next looks this month and beyond.
