Let’s watch some videos

Ugh

The newsletter will be a lighter one today because I’m feeling emotionally drained and need to save my spoons for other work projects. 

TL;DR - This week, I learned more about the messed up stuff that happened at my conservative Christian high school. You can learn more here or here if you want. Trigger warnings for conversations about alleged sexual assault for both those links. 

Platform Updates

Instagram 

• Instagram now lets you save posts into collections shared with friends

The Rest of Meta 

• Meta Launches New Reels Ad Options as it Leans into Evolving Consumption Shifts

• Meta to Let Users Opt Out of Some Targeted Ads, but Only in Europe

TikTok

• TikTok Looks to Facilitate Branded AR Campaigns with New Program

Twitter

• Twitter says it's killing legacy verified checkmarks starting on April 1st (what a joke) 

• Twitter Source Code Leaked Online, Adding to the Company’s Challenges

• Elon Musk is now the most-followed person on Twitter (he now has more followers than my mutual, Barack Obama) 

Reddit

• Reddit Launches ‘Simple Create’ Streamlined Ad Creation Process

Pinterest (Disclosure: I’m currently working as a contractor with Pinterest) 

• Pinterest Adds New Display Options, Including Shoppable Items in Separate ‘Shuffles’ App

Culture Movers 

Film & TV

• Jury finds Gwyneth Paltrow not at fault in the ski crash trial (her trial outfits did give us lots of memes and reaction images though) 

Shopping 

• TikTok and Amazon Bet on China’s Ecommerce Model. It’s a Dud

Gaming 

• E3 2023 has been canceled

AI 

• FTC should stop OpenAI from launching new GPT models, says AI policy group 

• Midjourney Shuts Down Free Trial Access Amid Deepfake Bonanza, but Says It's Unrelated

• BuzzFeed is using AI to write SEO-bait travel guides (I think the two main near-term commercial uses of AI might be generating low-quality content and filtering out low-quality content) 

Scams

• The Metaverse Is Quickly Turning Into the Meh-taverse (Microsoft and Disney both shut down metaverse projects)

Video Queue

Wanted to share a couple of recent YouTube videos with y’all that expand on some of the themes we’ve been discussing in this here newsletter. 

First up is “Silicon Valley's Midlife Crisis Is Destroying The Internet” from Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day. It does a great job of walking through how we got to this version of the social internet and why the vision for tech’s future coming from the top is breaking things. Good watch.

Next up is “The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse” by Dan Olson of Folding Ideas. It takes a lot of the “why are people pushing crypto and the metaverse so hard when they still suck as products” and drills down into the specifics of how those two ideas work right now. Dan Olson is also the guy who had the great video on crypto last year that got shared a ton. Wonderful resource for helping you actually understand what’s happening there from someone with the patience, curiosity, and skill to sift through all the hype. 

One of These Pope Stories is Fake

Over the weekend, this image of the Pope in a puffer jacket blew up on Twitter. It’s also fake. 

Someone shared it on Reddit. It made it to Twitter. Got shared and memed. Then the fact that it’s made with AI also got shared. But then, there was a real story about the Pope. Earlier this week, news broke that the current head of the global pedophile coverup organization known as the Catholic Church was actually hospitalized with a respiratory infection. 

No real profound observation on my part here, but worth noting the conscience of this week as we all recalibrate our media literacy skills for a world with decent AI-generated content. 

April Fools Day PSA

If you’re a brand manager, you still have time to pull the plug on your April Fools Day campaign. Unless you’ve invested time and money into something whimsical that your community will actually enjoy, don’t bother.