<p>It&#8217;s Friday afternoon and I&#8217;m listening to Bowdoin College&#8217;s radio station, interspersed with ambient car honking noises. I am not in Maine. I am not in a car. I am at my desk. This is Internet Roadtrip. Internet Roadtrip is what I will call an MMORTG (massive multiplayer online road trip game). Neal Agarwal, the [&hellip;]</p>

<p>xAI blamed an &#8220;unauthorized modification&#8221; for a bug in its AI-powered Grok chatbot that caused Grok to repeatedly refer to &#8220;white genocide in South Africa&#8221; when invoked in certain contexts on X. On Wednesday, Grok began replying to dozens of posts on X with information about white genocide in South Africa, even in response to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>TikTok is launching in-app guided meditation exercises, the social network announced on Thursday. The company began testing the meditation exercises with select teens earlier this year and is now making the feature available to all users on its app. The idea behind the feature is to help users improve their sleep quality and encourage them [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Instagram Threads is taking on Linktree and other &#8220;link-in-bio&#8221; solutions by introducing a way for creators to use their Threads profile to share links to their other interests and online presences. At launch, the feature will support adding up to five links to a bio, which can connect visitors to the creator&#8217;s blog, newsletter, website, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Pinterest has now publicly apologized for the wave of moderation issues that have swept across the social network over the past few weeks, leading to account bans and Pin removals that users said were unwarranted. In posts published to social media on Tuesday, the company took responsibility for the issue, saying that an &#8220;internal error&#8221; [&hellip;]</p>

<p>TikTok announced on Wednesday that it&#8217;s expanding its suite of accessibility tools by rolling out AI-generated ALT text for photos, a high-contrast mode, and support for device-level bold text preferences. TikTok introduced support for ALT text for photos a few weeks ago, allowing creators to provide descriptive text for photos to help users with screen [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Yuga Labs, known as the creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club and other notable NFTs, sold its iconic CryptoPunks to the nonprofit NODE Foundation, which focuses on preserving digital art. The deal details are undisclosed, and a representative declined to comment. Back in April, NODE announced it received a $25 million grant to “build the [&hellip;]</p>

<p>TikTok is launching its first image-to-video AI feature, the company announced on Tuesday. The new feature is called &#8220;TikTok AI Alive&#8221; and allows users to turn static photos into videos within TikTok Stories. The feature is only accessible via TikTok&#8217;s Story Camera and uses AI to create short-form videos with &#8220;movement, atmospheric and creative effects,&#8221; [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Microsoft is about to trim its worldwide workforce by 3%, CNBC reports. The company had around 228,000 employees worldwide as of June, it says, meaning more than 6,500 could be affected by the cuts. It would be one of the company’s largest staff reductions since it cut 10,000 people in 2023. A Microsoft spokesperson told [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Hasan Piker, one of the most popular left-wing political creators in the U.S., says he was detained and questioned at the Chicago O&#8217;Hare Airport upon returning to the U.S. after a trip to France. In a stream in which he addressed the experience, Piker claims that he was questioned about his views on Trump, Hamas, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Welcome back to Week in Review! We&#8217;ve got lots of news for you this week: There were CEO shake-ups at Instacart and 11x; the web series is back — kind of; Threads is getting video ads; and much more. Let&#8217;s get to it! Big move: Instacart CEO Fidji Simo will become OpenAI&#8217;s CEO for Applications, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Updated 7:50 a.m. Pacific: About an hour after this article was published, notifications began working for me again. Your mileage may vary. The original story follows: Sometime Thursday night, timelines stopped updating for a number of users on X, the social network owned by billionaire Elon Musk. Many users report that their notifications stopped working [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The bill would have required social media companies create encryption backdoors to allow access to users&#8217; private information.</p>

<p>Social media startup Fizz is suing grocery delivery giant Instacart and party planning app Partiful for trademark infringement, the company announced on Thursday. Earlier this week, Instacart launched a new drinks and snack delivery app for parties called Fizz and announced that Partiful had integrated Fizz directly into its platform. Founded in 2020, Fizz is a [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Instagram Threads will begin testing video ads, Meta announced on Thursday. The test, which will make Threads look more like its competitor X, is an expansion of Threads&#8217; advertising initiatives, which began last month with the opening up of ads to global advertisers. The news was announced at Meta&#8217;s presentation at the IAB NewFronts, where [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Reddit on Thursday announced profile enhancements for businesses that use Reddit Pro, the company&#8217;s suite of tools designed to help brands discover, join, and contribute to the social network&#8217;s communities and conversations. Reddit will now generate and suggest profile bios for businesses when they sign up for Reddit Pro. Once businesses provide their website, they [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram head Adam Mosseri, and other Meta execs thought that TikTok was beating Meta at its own game. That&#8217;s according to a new filing in the U.S. Federal Trade Commission&#8217;s antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant, published on Monday. The document, dated February 2022, includes conversations among a number of Meta [&hellip;]</p>

<p>“Day 25 of starting over my whole entire life,” Raegan Lynch narrates over a short video. “Right now, I’m wandering around the city I just moved to, in a country I’d never seen, all by myself after my relationship ended, and I had to leave my old life behind.” It’s a pretty enticing hook, which [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Tech executives have long talked about how AI is going to revolutionize the advertising industry. In particular, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been quite vocal about how exactly he wants his company to lead the transformation. Speaking onstage at Stripe&#8217;s annual Sessions conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Zuckerberg laid out his plans to automate [&hellip;]</p>

<p>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 &#8220;Change My View&#8221; 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 [&hellip;]</p>