Good morning! Lara Trump joins Fox News as a host, the NWSL will create a $5 million fund to compensate players in abuse case settlement, and another social app is growing thanks to the politicization of Meta, TikTok, and X.
- Online safety. Emma Bates started January ready for her app, Diem, to see a surge of activity. The social search platform’s user base of young women and LGBTQ people was the exact audience that expected to be affected by a few major events: an impending ban on TikTok and the second inauguration of Donald Trump as president.
But Bates couldn't imagine just how significant that surge would be. In addition to TikTok's brief ban and Trump's inauguration, January saw Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg alienate some users of Instagram and Facebook with a rollback of content moderation and an interview in which he called for more "masculine energy" in corporate America. And while X owner Elon Musk's involvement in the Trump administration was long known, the reality of that partnership in action (Musk's access to Treasury information including social security numbers, for example) turned off even more users from X's increasingly politicized platform. Even when TikTok came back from its less-than-24-hour ban, its messages thanking "President Trump" by name for saving the platform repelled some longtime users.
