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The Meaning of Life: Variations and Statistics

Executive Summary The question “What is the meaning of life?” has been explored across religious, philosophical, scientific, and secular traditions. This report synthesizes research findings, philosophical frameworks, and statistical data from global surveys to present the major variations in how different cultures and individuals define life’s purpose. Table of Contents Religious Traditions Major Religious Frameworks…

X continues to suffer bugs following Thursday outage

For over 24 hours, many X users, including this reporter, have been experiencing issues with the site’s basic functionality. Some messages won’t load, timelines won’t update, and certain posts can’t be seen without a webpage refresh (or several). The trouble started Thursday afternoon, according to Downdetector, a crowdsourced platform for flagging web outages. Beginning at…

Grok says it’s ‘skeptical’ about Holocaust death toll, then blames ‘programming error’

Grok, the AI-powered chatbot created by xAI and widely deployed across its new corporate sibling X, wasn’t just obsessed with white genocide this week. As first noted in Rolling Stone, Grok also answered a question on Thursday about the number of Jews killed by the Nazis in World War II by saying that “historical records,…

Reddit intros new profile tools for business customers

Reddit on Thursday announced profile enhancements for businesses that’ve joined Reddit Pro, the company’s suite of tools designed to help brands discover, join, and contribute to the social network’s communities and conversations. Now, Reddit will now generate suggested profile bios for businesses during Reddit Pro sign-up. Once businesses provide their website, they can choose from…

New court filing shows that Meta execs agreed that Facebook was losing to TikTok

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram head Adam Mosseri, and other Meta execs thought that TikTok was beating Meta at its own game. That’s according to a new filing in the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant, published on Monday. The document, dated February 2022, includes conversations among a number of Meta…

Reddit will tighten verification to keep out human-like AI bots

Redditors around the world were scandalized last week after learning that a team of researchers released a swarm of AI-powered, human-impersonating bots on the “Change My View” subreddit. The large-scale experiment was designed to explore just how persuasive AI can be. The bots posted over 1,700 comments, adopting personas like abuse survivors or controversial identities…

Week in Review: Apple won’t raise prices — yet

Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got lots of news for you today: Amazon earnings, Apple earnings, ChatGPT sycophancy, Alibaba’s AI models, and much more. Let’s get to it! Well? During Apple’s earnings call yesterday, Tim Cook revealed that the company paid $900 million in tariffs last quarter. But despite this, the CEO didn’t…

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Report finds Meta’s celebrity-voiced chatbots could discuss sex with minors

AI chatbots available on Meta’s platforms like Facebook and Instagram can engage in sexually explicit conversations with underage users, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ says that after learning about internal concerns about whether the company was doing enough to protect minors, it spent months conducting hundreds of conversations…

Instagram Edits topped 7M downloads in first week, a bigger launch than CapCut’s

Instagram Edits, Meta’s newly released video creation app, had a bigger debut than its direct competitor, ByteDance’s CapCut, once did. The new app, which today helps users craft videos for Instagram reels, stories, and other social posts, was downloaded an estimated 702,900 times on iOS devices during its first two days on the market. That’s…

Parents who lost children to online harms protest outside of Meta’s NYC office

Meta may have managed to kill a bipartisan bill to protect children online, but parents of children who have suffered from online harm are still putting pressure on social media companies to step up. On Thursday, 45 families who lost children to online harms – from sextortion to cyberbullying – held a vigil outside of…

Threads officially moves to Threads.com and updates its web app

Instagram Threads, Meta’s newest social network and X competitor, is officially relocating from the website Threads.net to Threads.com. The transition will coincide with a handful of quality-of-life improvements for the Threads web app, including features to more easily access custom feeds, saved posts, and likes, as well as other tools for creating new columns, copying…

Facebook cracks down on spammy content by cutting reach and monetization

Facebook will begin lowering the reach of accounts sharing spammy content and making them ineligible for monetization, Meta announced on Thursday. The company is also increasing efforts to remove Facebook accounts that coordinate fake engagement and impersonate others, it says. The move comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has promised a return to “OG Facebook.”…

Government censorship comes to Bluesky, but not its third-party apps … yet

Government censorship has found its way to Bluesky, but there’s currently a loophole thanks to how the social network is structured. Earlier this month, Bluesky restricted access to 72 accounts in Turkey at the request of Turkish governmental authorities, according to a recent report by the Freedom of Expression Association. As a result, people in Turkey can…

Meta’s Threads opens up ads to global advertisers

Months after first testing ads in select markets, including the U.S., Meta on Wednesday announced that its Instagram Threads app would now expand ads to all advertisers worldwide. The expansion will allow eligible advertisers to reach Threads’ over 320 million monthly active users, and it will include access to an inventory filter to control the sensitivity level…

Meta’s Oversight Board seeks details on the company’s new hate speech policies

Meta’s Oversight Board, the independent group created to help Meta with content moderation decisions, on Tuesday issued its response to the social media company’s new hate speech policies announced in January. The Board says that Meta’s new policies were “announced hastily, in a departure from regular procedure,” and called on the company to provide more…

Mark Zuckerberg once suggested spinning out Instagram as a solution to its ‘cannibalization’ of Facebook

In an internal email surfaced as part of the Meta antitrust trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg fretted about the potential that the company’s Instagram acquisition may cannibalize Facebook. Were that to happen, it could lead to the “network collapse of the more engaging and profitable product,” a worried Zuckerberg told other Meta executives in a…

Mark Zuckerberg once suggested spinning out Instgram as a solution to its ‘cannibalization’ of Facebook

In an internal email surfaced as part of the Meta antitrust trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg fretted about the potential that the company’s Instagram acquisition may cannibalize Facebook. Were that to happen, it could lead to the “network collapse of the more engaging and profitable product,” a worried Zuckerberg told other Meta executives in a…

Instagram is using AI to find teens lying about their age and restricting their accounts

Meta is using AI technology to search for kids who are lying about their age on Instagram in order to bypass safeguards, the company announced on Monday. When Meta finds an account that it suspects belongs to a teen, the platform will enroll them into a restricted Teen Account, even if the account lists an…

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Uncovered emails showed how Meta struggled to keep Facebook culturally relevant

With the first week of Meta’s antitrust trial behind us, documents shared by the U.S Federal Trade Commission (FTC) offered more insight into Meta’s internal struggles to keep Facebook relevant. In emails from 2022, Meta executives mulled different visions for Facebook’s future to boost its success, acknowledging that its cultural relevance was decreasing.  Fast-forward to…

Read what Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook execs said about Instagram before buying it

The first week of the Meta antitrust trial brought new revelations about how the company formerly known as Facebook approached the competitive threat posed by Instagram in the early 2010s. The U.S. government is accusing Meta of violating competition laws by acquiring companies like Instagram and WhatsApp that threatened the Facebook monopoly. If lawyers for…

The latest viral ChatGPT trend is doing ‘reverse location search’ from photos

There’s a somewhat concerning new trend going viral: people are using ChatGPT to figure out the location shown in pictures. This week, OpenAI released its newest AI models, o3 and o4-mini, both of which can uniquely “reason” through uploaded images. In practice, the models can crop, rotate and zoom in on photos — even blurry…

TikTok begins testing Footnotes, a new Community Notes-like feature

TikTok is testing a new “Footnotes” feature that works similarly to Community Notes on X. The social network announced on Wednesday that Footnotes will allow users to add additional context and relevant information to videos to help others better understand certain content, starting in the United States. The company says Footnotes will complement its current…

Patreon tests a native live video feature where creators can stream 24/7

Patreon is finally experimenting with a native livestreaming, a new feature that could attract more creators and help them earn more money. The capability is rolling out to select testers this week and will become more widely available this summer.  Similar to other platforms, Patreon’s new livestream feature comes with a live chat where fans…

Mark Zuckerberg once considered deleting all your Facebook friends

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg once considered deleting everyone’s Facebook friends in an effort to boost the social network’s cultural relevance. This “potentially crazy idea,” as the exec called it at the time, was revealed on Monday as a part of the evidence introduced during the first day of the U.S. government’s antitrust trial against Meta.…

Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to ‘delete all IP law’

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.” X’s current owner Elon Musk quickly replied, “I agree.” It’s not clear what exactly brought these comments on, but they come at…

Ireland’s data regulator investigates X’s use of European user data to train Grok

Ireland’s data regulator, the Data Protection Commission (DPC), said Friday that it has opened an investigation into Elon Musk’s X over the social media platform’s use of personal data collected from European users to train Grok. The DPC will investigate how X processes personal data “comprised” in publicly accessible posts by European users for the…

Bluesky’s latest update adds chat reactions and an Explore page, similar to X

Social network Bluesky is rolling out a new version of its software, which adopts some of the features former X users have missed. Nope, it’s not an edit button! Instead, the open social network is adding support for chat reactions in its direct messages feature and is revamping its search page as “Explore,” directing users…

Bluesky’s latest update adds chat reactions and an Explore page, similar to X

Social network Bluesky is rolling out a new version of its software, which adopts some of the features former X users have missed. Nope, it’s not an edit button! Instead, the open social network is adding support for chat reactions in its direct messages feature and is revamping its search page as “Explore,” directing users…

Bluesky’s latest update adds chat reactions and an Explore page, similar to X

Social network Bluesky is rolling out a new version of its software, which adopts some of the features former X users have missed. Nope, it’s not an edit button! Instead, the open social network is adding support for chat reactions in its direct messages feature and is revamping its search page as “Explore,” directing users…