VERIFY, the Tegna initiative which fact checked stories and looked to root out misinformation in the media, is losing its social media presence after being effectively eliminated by Tegna. VERIFY reportedly had 600,000 followers across its platforms. A quick check by TVSpy of VERIFY’s TikTok account, which had 312,000 followers, shows it has been taken…
A year and a half after its debut, Meta’s text-based social platform Threads is testing its first-ever ads with “a handful” of brands in the U.S. and Japan, according to Instagram head Adam Mosseri. Ads will appear as image posts sprinkled throughout the home feed and will only appear for “a small percentage of people,”…
Dash Social, a 10-year-old company that helps brands manage their social media, wants a cut of creator budgets. Dash Social, formerly known as Dash Hudson, is launching a platform for brands to find and work with creators. Dash Social also sells social media technology that brands like Amazon, Estee Lauder, and Unilever use to schedule…
Way back in the early 2Ks, someone must have reported my Facebook account called “Dabitch”, as Facebook came demanding a scan of my government-issued ID or passport. My response was to delete the entire account and everything in it with a “cleanout” script. Under no circumstances do I trust US companies with my passport images. You know how you're just supposed to look straight ahead and have a neutral face for your passport photo? That's how AI maps your features to store them in a database.
Now the social app formerly known as Twitter, X, wants you to verify your identity by uploading your ID. If this becomes a requirement, my account will be script-deleted so that I can remove as much data as a user possibly can. I've already removed the app from my phone, as it tracks my location that way, I no longer trust the opt-out setting on that.
There are many reasons I think this is a terrible idea. With the GDPR in Europe, X might be banned there. Elon Musk has a lofty goal with X, he wants to turn it into the “one” app that does everything.
Think about your data habits, and what you are storing about yourself in other people's databases. Zuckerberg's Facebook knows all of your friends and family. Bezos knows what you buy, what you watch, and everything you eat if you shop at Wholefoods – and Amazon cloud stores millions of companies' data as well as the US military's.
Now X wants to become the one app for everything. That sounds like a digital ID to me. Twitter already has your voice if you participated in any spaces, now they want your face. Musk stores data outside of the GDPR, so he can ignore all data protection rules.
So what's so scary about one app that can also be used as an ID to log in with say, facial recognition at the NHS? That's not the freaky part, it's the combination of everything. Twitter is where users voice their political opinions, engage in debates, announce their dislikes, vent, and more often than not they do so with their qualifications, job titles, and companies that they work for in their bio. Clearview.ai has over 100 billion images in its database, and a whole bunch of those were illegally collected.
Faulty facial recognition has already gotten Uber Eats drivers fired in the UK, and facial recognition is used as a surveillance tool of Palestinians in Israel. Private use of facial recognition, by institutions and even individuals, poses just as much of a threat to the future of human civilization as government use.
Now, Bezos, Musk, and, his buddy Pieter Theil are also heavily invested in funding Quantum Computing as well. Google has already announced new algorithm that makes FIDO encryption safe from quantum computers, but it's safe to say this is a now a digital arms race.
I had a hunch that Musk was going to do something strange, so I luckily deleted a large portion of my past Twitter history with an app before he locked the API down. Now that those apps no longer work, people who have been on Twitter since it began have their entire Twitter history in this man's hands. While I only have 2000 posts to manually remove.
You can find me on Keybase, on Telegram (if you know my number), and on Discord as .dabitch but not as frequently on X anymore. I've even removed my face from the profile pic.
The success of advertising rests on clear, concise, and culturally considerate communication. Yet only 22 days into 2025, legal mandates and corporate maneuvers would suggest that facts are not important to consider when crafting what we say, how we say it, or how we show it. Everyone was left a little shaken following Mark Zuckerberg’s…
Seventeen years ago, a multimillion-dollar brand was born before the eyes of 1.13 million TV viewers, and none of them knew it. It began during the first season of The Real Housewives of New York. In episode six (“Girl’s Night Out”), Bethenny Frankel and Luann de Lesseps are ordering cocktails. “I only drink one drink,…
The creator marketing ecosystem dodged a potentially devastating bullet with President Donald Trump’s recent executive order postponing the ban on TikTok in the U.S. Now, a creator luminary is stepping in to help save the platform. Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, has now joined a group in a bid to buy TikTok from its…
It’s been a busy few days in U.S. politics, from Donald Trump’s tech-CEO-studded presidential inauguration, the declaration of a “border emergency,” and the revoking of federal DEI guidelines. Amidst all this, America’s 47th POTUS found time to sign an executive order instructing the attorney general’s office to delay by 75 days enforcing a Supreme Court…
The vertical videos that once flowed natively from a sleek smartphone app have been replaced by a link to a website, and the trending tunes that soundtracked them have been silenced. TikTok has officially gone dark in the U.S., at least for now. A message on the app for U.S. users says that TikTok isn’t…
As the U.S. Supreme Court upholds the TikTok ban, brands and publishers are grappling with how to maintain their connection to young consumers. The reality of losing TikTok has sparked reactions ranging from strategic reevaluation to outright panic. However, history shows us that platforms evolve, algorithms shift, and audiences adapt. Here’s what marketers need to…
Hours after the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a law banning TikTok in the U.S. as of Sunday, the platform’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, posted his response in video form, going out of his way to praise President-elect Donald Trump. “On behalf of everyone at TikTok and all our users across the country, I want to…
Stanley Cups, Charli XCX’s Apple dance, Duolingo’s “unhinged” green owl mascot, and being “very demure, very mindful.” Some things are simply synonymous with TikTok, including the brands that have used the platform to boost themselves into the stratosphere via paid and native content. From January 19, TikTok will be banned in the U.S. after the…
The Supreme Court Friday upheld the law banning TikTok in the U.S. as of Jan. 19, dealing a major blow to the platform’s 170 million American users and the businesses that rely on it for marketing and commerce. The decision marks a significant escalation in the government’s efforts to curb Chinese-owned tech companies, leaving brands,…
Mondelez International’s Nutter Butter went viral with a disturbing, surreal crime scene of smeared peanut butter and broken cookies. Language-learning app Duolingo’s green owl twerked for millions of followers and flirted with pop star Dua Lipa. Mars pet food brand Sheba pitted cats against each other in a race to lick gravy. All of these…
As discussions about a U.S. TikTok ban continue, with President-elect Trump reportedly considering an executive order to extend the case, creators are migrating to other platforms like Triller and RedNote. Triller is trying to poach TikTokers with new tools. Chinese-owned RedNote has popped up seemingly overnight. And Snap launched an ad campaign highlighting why creators…
President-elect Donald Trump, who takes office the day after the law banning TikTok in the U.S. goes into effect, is reportedly mulling an executive order that would stay the ban by 60 days or 90 days to allow time for negotiating a sale of the application by Chinese parent company ByteDance, or some other alternative….
If you’ve logged onto TikTok within the past week (haven’t we all?), you’ve probably seen the latest #goodbyetiktok and #savetiktok content as users stateside prepare for the very real possibility that the nationwide ban on the app will go into effect on January 19. As we anxiously await the Supreme Court’s decision on TikTok’s fate,…
Snap is reminding creators that its app is a central place to build a community in a new ad campaign. The company’s campaign comes as rival TikTok faces a potential ban in the U.S. this week. The Supreme Court is set to rule on a looming ban that would wipe the app from the U.S….
TikTok’s potential removal from U.S. markets by January 19 has marketers and influencers racing to figure out how to reach the app’s lucrative audience elsewhere. With 44% of Gen Alpha using TikTok in 2024, it’s hard to imagine a world where this platform–a gateway of discovery (and brain rot) for millions of tweens–is suddenly gone….
Brands and agencies have been seemingly unruffled about a potential TikTok ban becoming a reality in the U.S.–until now. After the Supreme Court displayed skepticism on Friday while hearing oral arguments in two cases taking aim at the legality of a ban, agencies are now seriously seeking out alternative places for their clients’ media dollars….
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
