ReportWire

Tag: virality

  • Why Donald Trump Death Rumors and Health Conspiracies Will Keep Going Viral

    [ad_1]

    Donald Trump appeared live from the Oval Office on Tuesday, standing in front of a podium and, though having emerged nearly an hour later than scheduled, looking entirely normal. Flanked by members of his administration and select Republican members of Congress, Trump announced that US Space Command would be moving from Colorado to Huntsville, Alabama. It was a seemingly mundane announcement, but the live appearance had deeper significance for the chronically online: proof of life after a weekend of rampant speculation about his health.

    Presidential vitality has long been a reliable font for conspiracies, but the speed and breadth of the most recent round of speculation—spurred largely by a lack of scheduled public appearances, some slightly inopportune asides from Vice President JD Vance, and a news aggregator powered by the online betting site Polymarket—served as a reminder of how singular a figure Trump is in such matters. His tendency to engage with rumor and speculation himself and the rabidity of feeling he inspires in admirers and detractors alike both seem to play a large role.

    “Trump’s death has been the subject of a lot of online content for years now, but especially over the past year, since he took office,” Taylor Lorenz, an internet-culture journalist and the author of Extremely Online, tells Vanity Fair. As morbid as it might be, she adds, “there’s this pent-up anticipation and excitement for it to happen.”

    When people notice a confluence of any activity relating to Trump’s health, it becomes an opportunity to post jokes about the possibility of his passing, which fuels further speculation.

    “It sort of just feeds itself,” Lorenz says.

    “It feels cathartic for these people that feel like Trump has done enormous harm over the past two terms,” Lorenz explains, noting that that’s why you see Spotify playlists titled with some variation of “When It Happens,” made in preparation to celebrate Trump’s eventual demise.

    Adam Cochran, a tech and crypto investor, as well as an academic who conducts what he considers to be independent investigative journalism, contributed extensively to the discourse, posting a 31-part thread proposing that the White House was partaking in a cover-up. With Cochran’s follower count of more than 200,000 on X, plus the additional boost that the platform’s verification system provides, the first post in his Sunday-afternoon thread has been viewed 11.3 million times, amassing 71,000 likes as of Wednesday afternoon. He argues that while some people, himself included, would celebrate Trump’s no longer being in office, “that is markedly different than wishing him ill.” Cochran tells VF that, in most cases, the crass jokes about Trump’s demise stem from “people’s frustrations rather than actual wishes of harm.”

    During his Tuesday press briefing in the Oval Office, Trump was asked about the theories, dismissing them as “fake news.” Trump claimed that he was “very active, actually, over the weekend,” referencing his exhaustive Truth Social posting and visits to his Virginia golf club. He also pointed to appearances last week, including an interview he did with The Daily Caller.

    A detailed view of the hand Donald Trump, September 2, 2025 in Washington, DC.by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

    Concern over Trump’s transparency on the matter of his personal health is not entirely unwarranted. At the end of his term, Trump will be the oldest serving president ever, and his second term follows Joe Biden’s tumultuous presidency, which was often overshadowed by intense speculation over the now former president’s mental acuity.

    “Trump has never been forthcoming about his health,” New York Times reporter and Trump chronicler Maggie Haberman told me in a June interview. She recalled October 2020, when Trump—who, she said, “views sickness as weakness”—was diagnosed with COVID and reportedly turned out to have been far more ill than he and the administration let on. Some officials believed, per Haberman, that Trump could have died had he not been given a Regeneron treatment involving monoclonal antibodies. “That’s scary, how perilous that moment was, and how little real-time information the public had,” Haberman said.

    [ad_2]

    Natalie Korach

    Source link

  • French startup ten ten finds viral success and controversy in reinventing walkie-talkies | TechCrunch

    French startup ten ten finds viral success and controversy in reinventing walkie-talkies | TechCrunch

    [ad_1]

    Less than one year after its iOS launch, French startup ten ten has gone viral with a walkie-talkie app that allows teens to send voice messages to their close friends — even when their phone is locked. 

    Whether you think that’s a recipe for disaster or the coolest thing you’ve heard may depend on your age group, and teens clearly heard of that one long before we did; although walkie talkies are clearly not a new concept, even in app form. Ten ten is doing the same, but in 2024.

    “We’re ephemeral by design,” ten ten co-founder and CEO, Jule Comar said in a written interview with TechCrunch. He added that In CB codes, 1010 means “Transmission completed, standing by.” According to Comar, this is just one of “multiple meanings that align with our values and the concept.” It seems to be resonating; the app is free and quickly climbing rankings.

    Ten ten’s sudden rise is particularly noticeable in France, where it has been downloaded 1 million times. Including on Android, where it became available a few weeks ago, the app saw 6 million downloads since its launch, according to data shared by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower with TechCrunch on Friday. 

    The concept could also receive tweaks along the way. The current UX suggests a 9-friend cap, but that’s not the case. “Ten ten is for close friends but there’s no friend limit, we’re seeing people share their PINs on social media so we’re working on a better friend management system,” Comar said.

    The PINs Comar is referring to are the IDs that users can use to find each other. The app also asks for access to the user’s contacts (but nobody gets added without user action.) There’s inherent virality in this model, but that’s not the only growth driver; TikTok “played an important role,” Comar said.

    Image Credits: ten ten

    Ten ten’s download numbers have undoubtedly kept on rising during the weekend: ten ten has been all over the French media lately. Not always with a positive spin; French newspaper Le Figaro, for instance, called it “worrying.” “I was very surprised,” Comar said. “There’s nothing “dangerous” about ten ten!”

    It’s not just articles looking at the app in a negative light; there is also fake news circulating, Comar said. “There were some rumors going around that we were a Chinese app because of the name “ten ten” and we got wrongly accused of “spying” and “stealing data”…”

    Ten ten is not Chinese, though. The company has been duly registered in France, since 2021, meaning it is also subject to GDPR. Its current terms and conditions are formulaic, but mention that the team is in the process of writing better ones. More importantly, the startup’s privacy policy is adamant about two points:

    • All your conversations are ephemeral, we can’t listen to your conversation as we don’t even store them!
    • We will never sell your data!!

    Besides that decision not to sell data, it is unclear how ten ten will make money. “We have a lot of cool ideas on how we could monetize at a later point,” Comar said. There’s no doubt that their current success will buy them time — and help them secure venture capital to get to that later point.

    Asked if his startup already had or was in the process of raising funding, Comar replied affirmatively. But, he added with a smiley, “we can’t really disclose how much and [from] whom yet.”

    In response to TechCrunch, French VC Hugo Amsellem indicated that although his firm Intuition isn’t one of these backers, he sees ten ten as part of a larger trend among French startups. 

    For Amsellem, the common thread is that “France is king at status game plays.” Individuals are seeking to increase their social status, and French entrepreneurs are happy to help, whether that’s on the software side BeReal, Yubo or Zenly, or on the hardware side with luxury devices. 

    It remains to be seen how long ten ten can retain its cool factor, but its CEO is aware that its current position is both privileged and fragile. Comar said:

    It’s exhilarating, it’s a feeling that is hard to describe but that a few lucky ones have felt, it feels like everything is going so fast and so slow at the same time, adrenaline mixed with pride, gratitude and responsibilities, you feel big and small at the same time — You can only feel this in consumer social, because it can hit you when you least expect it and there’s no ceiling. But we have to keep our heads on our shoulders, it’s just the beginning, the hardest is yet to come.

    Comar and ten ten co-founder and CTO Antoine Baché have been sleeping very little lately. A smiley-ridden email auto-reply warns that they are “having issues with our servers due to a huge number of users at the same time,”  and “working on it day and night to fix it once and for all.”

    Server pains aside, a generational gap is one hurdle that ten ten will have to navigate smartly. More than privacy, it is often the fact that ten ten is used by teens and in classrooms that’s being discussed. “When you read these articles it feels like they’re talking about some kind of new drug going around in school!” Comar said.  

    It’s easy to see why teachers were the first adults to notice the app. Since ten ten can bypass a lock screen to play a message out loud, it can be used for pranks and create small disruptions in classrooms. But having to teach phone hygiene isn’t new, and kids are savvy enough to figure it out, too.

    In a French subreddit for teachers, a discussion took place as to whether members had had any problems with ten ten in classrooms. One participant noted that there had been “no major incidents so far” despite the app “getting a lot of attention” at their school. But, that person added, “I ask the students to put their phones on airplane mode.” (We haven’t reached out to verify that this person is a teacher, but their profile seems to confirm it’s the case.)

    Instead of starting a new moral panic, perhaps ten ten could be an opportunity for parents to marvel at the fact that some of our favorite cultural artifacts are making a comeback; whether that’s cassettes, Dungeons & Dragons, or now, walkie talkies.

    There’s only one small step from obsolete to vintage, and the success of ‘Stranger Things‘ likely helped. But app-based walkie talkies would get no actual traction if there was no real use case around them. Comar thinks there is, and that’s what inspired him.

    “I’ve always had a group of close friends, we talk everyday on multiple mediums, but I felt like they all had some kind of friction,” he said. “I wanted us to be able to communicate like if we were always under the same roof, like roommates: you just pop in their room when you want to say something, if their door is closed you knock, if it’s open you just talk!”

    Hopefully for ten ten, parents will see the value in that as well. Who knows, maybe they can use it to say out loud that dinner is ready. That is, if their teen accepts them as a contact.

    [ad_2]

    Anna Heim

    Source link