Social Media
Aug 6, 2026
Nikita Bier Exits X After Just Over a Year as Head
Serial entrepreneur Nikita Bier is stepping down from his role as X's head of product, departing after roughly 14 months at the company. Bier joined X in mid-2025 to lead product direction at the platform formerly known as Twitter. His exit raises fresh questions about leadership stability inside Elon Musk's social media operation.
Social Media
Startups
Leadership
Aug 6, 2026
Reddit Uses AI Moderation to Break the Karma Catch-22
Reddit is rolling out AI-powered moderation tools aimed at reducing communities' dependence on karma thresholds and account-age requirements. The move could meaningfully lower barriers for legitimate first-time posters who currently get filtered out alongside bad actors.
AI
Social Media
Moderation
Aug 5, 2026
Reddit Is Losing the War Against AI-Generated SEO Spam
Brands and agencies are deploying AI to seed Reddit threads with fake product recommendations, exploiting the platform's growing influence on search results. As Reddit's authenticity becomes a target, the spam problem is getting harder to detect — and harder to stop.
AI
SEO
Marketing
Aug 5, 2026
OpenAI's Influencer Brand Trip Sparked More Backlash
OpenAI flew a group of social media influencers on an all-expenses-paid brand trip — a tactic borrowed straight from the fast fashion playbook. The move drew swift criticism online, raising questions about whether AI companies should be leaning on lifestyle marketing to shape public perception.
AI
Marketing
OpenAI
Aug 4, 2026
Bluesky's New CEO Wants an Open Social Web 'Big Tent'
Toni Schneider has moved from interim to permanent CEO of Bluesky, bringing a WordPress-era vision of open ecosystems to social media. He sat down with Decoder to explain how he plans to balance the app's user base with the sprawling AT Protocol developer community — and why revenue might not depend on ads.
Social Media
Open Source
Startups
Jul 31, 2026
Reddit's Strong Q2 Can't Escape Its Google Dependency
Reddit delivered a solid quarter with revenue and user growth beating expectations, but investors are growing uneasy about the platform's deep reliance on Google search traffic — and what AI-driven search could do to that relationship.
AI
Social Media
Advertising
Jul 31, 2026
LinkedIn Adds 'AI Slop' Button, Drops AI Writing Tool
LinkedIn is rolling out a new reporting option that lets users flag low-quality AI-generated posts as 'slop,' while simultaneously replacing its own AI writing assistant with a more restrained proofreading tool. The moves signal a broader reckoning on the platform with the content quality crisis that generative AI has accelerated.
AI
Content Moderation
Jul 30, 2026
Zuckerberg Bets Billions on Everyone Having an AI Agent
Mark Zuckerberg is doubling down on his vision for AI agents, predicting that billions of people will have personal AI assistants within five years. It's an ambitious forecast that Meta is backing with massive infrastructure spending — and one that carries significant implications for how products, marketing, and user relationships are built.
AI
Meta
AI Agents
Jul 29, 2026
New York's SAFE for Kids Act Adds Age Verification
New York's Attorney General has finalized rules implementing the SAFE for Kids Act, requiring social media platforms to verify users' ages before granting access to algorithmic feeds and late-night notifications. The rules set concrete compliance standards for platforms like Instagram and TikTok, with enforcement beginning later this year. Here's what the law actually requires — and what it means for the broader tech industry.
Policy
Social Media
AI
Jul 28, 2026
Meta Brings AI Chatbot Directly Into Threads DMs
Meta is rolling out its Meta AI assistant inside Threads' direct messages, giving users a conversational AI experience embedded within the social platform. The move deepens Meta's push to integrate AI across its entire product suite.
AI
Meta
Social Media
Jul 24, 2026
Bluesky's AI Assistant Attie Becomes a Research Engine
Attie, Bluesky's built-in AI assistant, is expanding beyond simple Q&A into a full social research tool — letting users query news, trends, and conversations across Bluesky and the broader AT Protocol ecosystem. The move signals Bluesky's ambition to make its open network a serious alternative to walled-garden social intelligence platforms.
AI
Social Media
Bluesky
Jul 24, 2026
Meta's AI Ad Reveals a Marketing Strategy in Crisis
Meta's new AI ad uses David Bowie's 'Five Years' — a song literally about Earth's final days — to argue that AI will bring people closer together. The choice is either tone-deaf or weirdly inspired, and it says a lot about where Big Tech's PR strategy currently stands.
AI
Marketing
Meta
Jul 23, 2026
Yope Raises $12.3M for an Algorithm-Free Network
Yope has closed a $12.3M seed round to build a social app centered on small, private groups rather than algorithmic feeds and creator content. The startup is betting that the next wave of social networking looks more like intimate messaging than broadcast media — and it's using AI to reinforce real-world relationships.
Startups
Social Media
AI
Jul 15, 2026
Reelful Uses AI to Turn Your Camera Roll Into Videos
Reelful is a new AI-powered app that automatically converts photos and videos from your camera roll into short-form social media content. Targeting everyday creators who find traditional editing tools too daunting, the app handles the heavy lifting of sequencing, timing, and formatting. It's the latest entrant in a crowded but rapidly evolving space of AI-driven content creation tools.
AI
Creator Economy
Social Media
Jul 11, 2026
Bluesky Makes Toni Schneider Its Permanent CEO
Toni Schneider has officially dropped the 'interim' from his title at Bluesky, committing full-time to the decentralized social platform. The former Automattic CEO and True Ventures partner says he's 'all in' on the company's unconventional approach to social media.
Bluesky
Social Media
Leadership
Jul 11, 2026
HyperTexting Wants to Turn the Open Web Into a Feed
A new app called HyperTexting is reimagining how we consume the open web — aggregating websites, blogs, newsletters, and podcasts into a single scrollable feed. It also lowers the barrier for publishing your own content online, blending social media habits with the indie web ethos.
Open Web
Social Media
RSS
Jul 10, 2026
Instagram's Mosseri: Label AI Content, Don't Ban It
Instagram head Adam Mosseri says the platform won't block AI-generated content, but wants to give users the choice to curate it in or out of their feeds. Speaking on a podcast, he outlined a nuanced stance: transparency through labeling, not platform-level suppression.
Meta
AI Content
Jul 7, 2026
X Launches Native Video Editor to Fight Stolen Reposts
X is rolling out a native video editor and recorder on iOS, featuring multilingual captions, green-screen effects, and more. The move is a direct push to incentivize original content creation and reduce the platform's persistent reposted-video problem.
Content Moderation
Creator Economy
iOS
Jul 7, 2026
Search Console Adds 'Platform Properties' for Creators
Google is rolling out a new Search Console feature called 'platform properties,' giving creators visibility into how their Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube content surfaces in Search. The update is part of Google's broader push to position Search as a central hub for creator and publisher analytics.
Search Console
Creator Tools
Jul 3, 2026
Meta's New 'Pocket' App Lets Users Build AI Gizmos
Meta is launching an app called Pocket — no relation to Mozilla's defunct read-it-later service — that lets users create and share interactive 'gizmos' generated from AI prompts. The move reflects Mark Zuckerberg's broader bet that AI-driven interactive experiences are the next evolution of social media.
Meta
AI
Social Media