<p>Earlier this month, a Berlin court ordered Elon Musk-owned X to provide immediate access to public platform data to two civil society organizations seeking to study systemic risk around the country&#8217;s upcoming election. In a post on X, the social media company said Tuesday it is challenging the order, claiming the summary proceeding &#8220;egregiously undermines [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The new feature lets users limit their conversations to connections of their own choosing.</p>

<p>Social media is often about scale, but Nextdoor bet long ago on something different: that it could grow a big business off smaller, local communities. For years, the plan worked. The 15-year-old company has long been a dominant platform for neighborhood-based conversations, connecting users for everything from lost pet alerts to local business recommendations. Then [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) is blocking links to Signal.me, a URL shortener used by the private messaging app Signal that allows users to send out a link that&#8217;s used to contact them directly through the service. The blocks, which impact direct messages, public posts, and profile pages, were first spotted by the blog Disruptionist.  [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Welcome back to Week in Review. This week we’re looking at OpenAI canceling the release of o3; TikTok returning to U.S. app stores nearly a month after it was removed; more complications in Elon Musk’s bid to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billion; and more! Let’s do it. OpenAI effectively canceled the release of o3, which [&hellip;]</p>

<p>A new startup is addressing the need for an all-in-one toolset built for people who want to grow, manage, and track their Bluesky presence and following. The subscription service BlueSkyHunter, which launched Friday, introduces an online dashboard that combines access to analytics and other tools to schedule posts and automate DMs (direct messages), alongside other [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Mastodon, the decentralized alternative to X, is going to adopt a controversial feature from the platform formerly known as Twitter: quote posts. The company on Friday shared the progress it&#8217;s making on the implementation of the feature, which has divided users over its potential to be used for online abuse and bullying. Critics have long [&hellip;]</p>

<p>After users noticed a new button on Instagram to downvote or dislike comments, the company confirmed that it is testing a way for users to signal that they either didn&#8217;t like the comment or don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s relevant. The feature will appear across both Feed posts and Reels. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Apple and Google on Thursday evening restored TikTok to their respective app stores in the U.S., nearly a month after they removed the short video app following a national security law that banned it in the country. The apps were restored after U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sent Apple a letter saying that the ban [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Meta&#8217;s CTO said staff unhappy with the tech giant&#8217;s latest policies should work somewhere else, an internal chat reveals.</p>

<p>Staying on the right side of the European Union&#8217;s online rulebook when it comes to the slippery topic of disinformation is set to get easier for platforms that commit to the bloc&#8217;s long-standing Code of Practice on Disinformation. You know, the voluntary Code that Elon Musk pulled X (formerly Twitter) out of back in 2023. [&hellip;]</p>

<p>YouTube Shorts is integrating with Google DeepMind&#8217;s latest video model, Veo 2, allowing creators to generate AI video clips for their posts. Veo 2 is Google&#8217;s response to Sora, OpenAI&#8217;s text-to-video generator. YouTube, owned by Google, already allowed creators to generate AI backgrounds for their Shorts with a text prompt through a feature called Dream [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Elon Musk&#8217;s X has agreed to pay President Donald Trump $10 million to settle a lawsuit from the days when the company was still called Twitter and owned by Jack Dorsey, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed sources. The lawsuit took issue with Twitter&#8217;s decision to ban Trump after January 6, when Trump&#8217;s supporters [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said the online forum site plans to launch an upgraded search experience in 2025 designed to help users navigate the social network and be able to answer &#8220;subjective hard, [and] interesting questions.&#8221; The company plans to achieve this by integrating Reddit Answers — a feature that allows visitors to ask questions [&hellip;]</p>

<p>E-commerce startups built around food continue to gobble up funding as investors look for sticky consumer concepts that can scale without breaking the bank. On Wednesday, Germany’s Lanch — which taps social media and influencers to develop popular food brands alongside retail networks for distributing them — closed funding of €26 million ($27 million) to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>In the wake of Meta’s decision to remove its third-party fact-checking system and loosen content moderation policies, Google searches on how to delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads have been on the rise. People who are angry with the decision accuse Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of cozying up to the Trump administration at the expense of [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Google has removed events such as Black History Month and Pride Month from being listed on the calendar by default.&nbsp; Other events that were removed from the default calendar include Jewish Heritage, Indigenous People Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Hispanic Heritage Month.  Google spokesperson Madison Cushman Veld confirmed the changes to TechCrunch, saying that in [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Since 2022, blogging site Tumblr has been teasing its plans to integrate with the fediverse &#8212; the open social web powered by the protocol ActivityPub also used by Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, and others. Now, the Automattic-owned blogging platform is sharing more information about when and how that integration could actually happen. As it turns out, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Bluesky users on Android now have access to a new app that works more like Instagram than X. On Tuesday, an app called Pinksky launched an Android version of its photo-centric social networking experience built on top of Bluesky. The app is now one of many attempting to court former Instagram users by offering a [&hellip;]</p>

<p>BuzzFeed, the media site known for its celebrity news and quizzes, announced on Tuesday that it’s developing its own social media platform in a move to counter the current negativity on the internet. Semafor first reported BuzzFeed’s plan for the platform this past week. Details on the new platform are not yet public. However, the [&hellip;]</p>