Instagram's newest feature lets users take posts from the Tagged tab and move it to their main profile grid instead.

Snapchat says the new features can be used to organize everything from birthday celebrations and sporting events to study sessions and weekend hangouts.

Meta's new personal AI agent Muse wants access to users' email, calendars, payments, health services, and more — making the company's biggest consumer AI bet yet a major test of whether people still trust Meta with their data.

A federal judge temporarily barred an X rival from using the Twitter name, but found that X was likely to have abandoned the “Tweet” trademark and bird logo. The startup has since relaunched as Tweet.app.

With the additions, the app is borrowing features from messaging apps as it looks to deepen engagement on its platform.

X says U.S. creator payouts will now be handled through its X Money payments service, a change that appears to replace the previous Stripe-powered payout system.

X is investigating a wave of unsolicited password reset emails that it believes may be tied to the rollout of its new payments service.

As frustration over AI influencers has been growing, Instagram is limiting the reach of undisclosed AI profiles.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Operation Bluebird, the Virginia-based startup trying to revive the allegedly abandoned "Twitter" name and logo, announced Monday that it has launched its new social media network: Twitter.now. "We are a small company, we have investors, and we have a product," Stephen Coates, one of Operation Bluebird's cofounders, told Ars. "And we have waited months and months to launch, and we are not going to wait anymore." [...] Twitter.now, still in its nascent stage, only has hundreds of users for the time being. The social media network looks and feels much like the Twitter of old and many of its offshoots -- it has replies and retweets. A new and notable feature is the automated fact-checking tool, a Gemini-based "veracity engine for real-time analysis" ("Vera" for short), which runs on every tweet. Coates has been testing Vera in recent days by posting obviously false messages, like "George Washington was our second president." "Our first goal is to see if we can truly bring back a town square that's safer and less harmful," he said. "We say freedom of speech and not freedom of reach. We want people to say what they want, but we also want to create a platform that's not financially locked into that viral content that's harmful or inaccurate." Operation Bluebird argues that Elon Musk effectively abandoned the Twitter brand and trademarks when he renamed the company X, opening the door for the startup to claim them. X Corp. sued to stop the effort, but a federal judge tentatively ruled in April that X appeared to have relinquished rights to "tweet," the bird logo, and possibly "Twitter" itself, though no written ruling has been issued. Bluebird has taken that as enough of a green light to move forward while emphasizing that its new Twitter is not affiliated with X. "Operation Bluebird, Inc. picked up the name X Corp. walked away from and is rebuilding it on trust, in your browser at twitter.now," it states prominently on its website. "We are not X, and we are not affiliated with X Corp."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Portland-based social media startup Graze is joining Flipboard in a strategic acquisition aimed at expanding open social protocols and giving users control over their own content algorithms.

Founded by Devin Gaffney, Peat Bakke and Andrew Lisowski — starting from a blog concept and officially forming 21 months ago — Graze has grown into an engine for the open social web.

The Graze platform has delivered over 41 billion posts to 12 million users. It enables creators, publishers and everyday users to build, tune, and monetize custom social algorithms, particularly across platforms like Bluesky, without writing a single line of code.

In announcement announcing the deal, Gaffney said that Graze marks the most important work of his career, creating a new “playbook for how to re-orient the attention economy, and start pulling us back out of the widening gyre.”

Under the direction of Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has heavily invested in open social protocols like AT Protocol, ActivityPub and RSS through initiatives like its Surf browser and “Social Websites” product.

The acquisition combines Flipboard’s front-end discovery tools with Graze’s back-end algorithmic engine.

“Combined, we become two halves of one machine,” wrote Gaffney. “Surf will be the browser for the open social web — where people go to read and discover feeds across Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, RSS, and more. Graze will be the engine under those feeds — how a curator builds, tunes, and monetizes one without writing a line of code.”

As a lean team, Graze faced a number of operational slowdowns with Gaffney writing that they ended up “wearing a half dozen hats we didn’t know we needed at the start.” Joining Flipboard allows the team to accelerate development by tapping into Flipboard’s established infrastructure rather than rebuilding existing systems from scratch.

“Mike (McCue) and I share a vision of creating an attention economy that works for everyone, and as the onslaught of generative AI starts to clog the pipes of legacy platforms, we both deeply believe that a curatorial role in shaping “the algorithm” is the only sustainable way to run that attention economy into the future,” Gaffney wrote.

For Graze’s existing user base, the team confirmed that the core product and service will remain online. The combined entities aim to offer a creator-first alternative to closed, legacy platforms like Facebook or Instagram, providing users with ownership over what they see and how they earn.

In April 2025, Graze raised $1 million in a pre-seed round led by Betaworks, Salesforce Ventures Factorial, Apertu Capital, Skyseed, and angel investors from Mozilla and Protocol Labs. Graze employed just two people — Gaffney and software engineer Nick Gerakines — and both will be transitioning to Flipboard. Bakke and Lisowski left the company last year.

In an email to GeekWire, Flipboard’s McCue said that the Graze team has built a special tool that has benefited many curators, community builders, creators and developers.

“I’m inspired by their vision and can’t wait to work closely with them to continue building out the open social web,” McCue said. “Devin and Nick will continue to advance Graze as the ultimate feed building and hosting platform while Surf and Flipboard will enable millions of additional users to discover and experience feeds in new ways we’re going to design together.” 

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, though Gaffney tells GeekWire that they are “confident that this is a great outcome for the team, the company, and the investors.”

New Zealand has introduced legislation that would ban children under 16 from social media platforms and AI companion services. "We have protections to keep children safe in the real world and we need them in the virtual world too," said Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in announcing the bill. Jurist.org reports: The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill would require an age restriction on platforms with harmful features for children. These features include recommender systems, endless feeds, feedback features and time-limited features. The bill also seeks to restrict underage users from accessing AI companion services. However, it explicitly excludes messaging apps, professional networking sites, gaming and music platforms, and other educational and health tools. Notably, age verification through self-declared dates of birth and formal identification does not satisfy the platforms' duty under the law. It also requires platforms to verify their users' age through other methods such as facial scans and user activity patterns. The bill would also require platforms to conduct child safety risk assessments for all users under 18 and protect them from harmful content such as bullying, violence, and sexually explicit materials.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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