The Daily Beast: People are Already Making Deepfake Videos of Trump’s Arrest. “Newswatchers don’t have to wait for real images of Donald Trump in handcuffs—deepfakes are already flooding social media thanks to artificial intelligence technology that lets any hoaxer pose as a breaking news photographer.”
Rolling Stone: How Kevin Hart Reaction Memes Took Over the Internet. “You can’t deny the hustle: Hart consistently ranks among the highest-paid comedians, collaborates with big names on high-profile movie projects and, through his two separate production companies, maintains a dizzying number of partnerships and development deals. Oh, and last year, he launched a tequila brand. The upshot of all this labor is that Hart is more than famous — he’s omnipresent, perhaps one of the most recognizable faces in American culture today. Which helps to explain how he became a meme.”
The Verge: How a social network falls apart. “Twitter is in a period of decline. The site still functions, people are still using it, but there’s a familiar stink that lingers on the website. It reminds me of the twilight days of two other social media platforms I’ve used: LiveJournal and Tumblr — onetime vibrant communities that grew in popularity until everyone seemed to be using them, which then began a long, slow death.”
New York Times: The Satisfaction of Viral Quitting. “TikTok is full of advice about what to do after quitting a job. Ms. Garcia is part of a different trend, one that predates TikTok, in which young people are posting mini dramas that draw millions of viewers. And in some cases, these very public videos can translate into new career opportunities, helping those who post them build their online personalities.”
Search Engine Journal: Social Media Engagement Rates Dropping Across Top Networks. “Discover median engagement rates for 14 industries on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter in the 2023 Social Media Benchmarks Report.”
Teen Vogue: Influencer Parents and The Kids Who Had Their Childhood Made Into Content. “Search Claire’s name online and this is some of what you will find: photos of her as a child, merchandise with her face on it available for sale, and a YouTube channel with millions of subscribers and hundreds of videos featuring Claire and members of her family. In the videos, Claire grows from a toddler to a teenager. On Instagram, fans comment they miss videos from the old days. In public, people sometimes recognize her and ask for photos. Altogether, the family’s YouTube channel has over a billion views but if it were up to Claire, none of the videos would exist.”
Stars and Stripes: Suffering through a state of social media mediocrity. “Thirteen years ago, when I posted my first photo-less status update on Facebook, typing a few words sufficed for posting. But today, social media posts must tell a compelling, cool, hilarious, heart-warming, informative or tear-jerking tale, complete with a collage of photographs — or better yet, a well-edited video set to music — and include captioning that drives engagement without rendering you unfollowed, unfriended or, worse yet, muted. And that’s just on Facebook.”
Brigham Young University: What type of GIF user are you?. “BYU communications professor Scott Church said even though people don’t think much about their GIF usage, understanding them and how we use them can help us better understand ourselves and how we communicate in today’s media environment. According to a new study by Church and a team of BYU coauthors, GIF users fall into one of three categories.”
PC Magazine: Google Search Has a Surprise Easter Egg for ‘Mandalorian’ Fans. “The Mandalorian’s third season wasn’t the only thing that dropped this week: Google on Thursday introduced an Easter egg for fans of the Disney+ series’ most adorable character.”
Slate: What Happens After You Become a Main Character on Elon Musk’s Twitter. “That Twitter’s changes had produced a new generation of ‘main characters’ became apparent in January with the viral fame of ‘menswear dude,’ aka fashion blogger Derek Guy, whose @DieWorkwear account had been recommended to many tweeters with little interest in fashion.”
Motherboard: How Shock Sites Shaped the Internet. “To talk about shock sites is to talk about the internet, understanding how the latter couldn’t exist in its modern form without the former. And they’re far from a relic of the past. Shock site creators, meme historians, and psychologists say they’ve reshaped pop culture, defined the modern era of the internet, and informed how we use it today.”
Michigan Daily: Why TikTok loves ‘Get Ready with Me’s and why you should too. “Creators big and small prop up their phones and film themselves doing their skincare routine and putting on their makeup, all while chatting with their followers. Where are they going? Who are they going with? What products are they using? It feels oddly reminiscent of a FaceTime call with a friend, and may just be one of the easiest yet most successful genres to post on the app.”
Boing Boing: The cryptid complications of Wikipedia’s editing policies. “This is (apparently) a great war simmering between Wikipedia editors and cryptid hunters. Cryptid enthusiasts, such as those who haunt r/Cryptozoology, accuse the open-source information website of being biased against their beloved beasts, dismissing such things as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster with pejorative descriptors of ‘pseudoscience’ (Or, worse — ‘folklore’).”
Insider: TikTokers are using AI to make Joe Biden talk about ‘getting bitches,’ Obama drop Minecraft slang, and Trump brag about how he’s great at Fortnite. “Over the weekend, TikTok account @ai.voicesspeech posted a video featuring algorithmically-generated voices for Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and other notable figures playing the social deduction game ‘Among Us,’ and squabbling over who among them is the evil impostor.”
WIRED: Meet the Superusers Behind IMDb, the Internet’s Favorite Movie Site. “In an era when many have become pessimistic about the state of the internet, Wikipedia is often held up as a rare miracle of collaborative, crowdsourced knowledge-gathering for the public good—a lonely holdout for the early web’s utopian ideals. But IMDb has been doing much the same for five years longer than Wikipedia.”
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