Creators

The TikTok show Boy Room tours the disgusting bedrooms of men, cigarette butts, dirty clothes, and all. It’s gross, funny, and weirdly revealing — and now much more sanitized via an Amazon partnership.

In an HGTV-esque reboot, the show will now give home makeovers featuring Amazon furniture and decor. It serves as a front end to Amazon: Boy Room is also promoting the products via affiliate marketing.

Could be handy if you want to keep track of what your favorite creators are making, or where else to find them on the internet.

Pew Research Center released a report on news influencers who people are increasingly getting their information from.

The report couldn’t have come at a better time, following an election where the role of influencers and podcasters was especially notable. Of today’s news influencers:

- 77 percent have no background with news orgs

- 65 percent are men

- More identify as Republican or conservative than Democratic or liberal

- Far more have a presence on X than on any other platform

And apparently, it’s not hurting them too much, reports The Cut:

As someone who has proven, time and again, to be impervious to traditional shaming tactics, Trump has ultimately given legions of his supporters license to finally go public about their support for him, one prominent New York–based communications consultant told me. And though there has been some backlash to posts like Javed’s in the form of angry comments or Reddit threads documenting influencers who are also Trump supporters, the outcry has been relatively minimal.

After calls for Twitch to address antisemitism on the platform, the site’s hateful conduct policy now includes “Zionist” as a potential slur. Twitch specifies this is conditional: you’re allowed to discuss the political movement of that name, but not “attack or demean another individual or group of people on the basis of their background or religious belief.”

The company announced today it’s opening up its AI ads tool to all advertisers — so prepare to see more AI content on your feed.

TikTok’s Symphony Creative Studio lets advertisers remix content and generate new videos promoting products in just a few minutes. Some of those ads even include AI avatars resembling humans.

Over on Hackaday, Max.K has shared their design for a charger that can automatically load and eject rechargeable AAs. Using it is as easy as dumping dead batteries in the top, and grabbing fully charged ones from the bottom. The charger handles everything else, including rejecting AAs that aren’t rechargeable. If you want to build your own, you can find plans and schematics available on GitHub.

Well, four people close to Trump say he’s going to try and stop it from happening, reports the Washington Post. It’s unclear what, exactly, that means. TikTok faces a ban unless its parent company, ByteDance, sells it by January 19th — the day before Trump’s inauguration.

Maybe Trump, who was courted by tech leaders in the months leading up to the election, will convince one of his new friends to buy it.

What was once a list is now a slider. According to 9to5Google, YouTube is rolling out a redesigned mobile UX for choosing your preferred playback speed.

I’m old fashioned and watch at normal speed — and no, I don’t want to know how much of my life I’ve wasted on YouTube. But Nilay says the 1.75x option is now harder to get to.

“Social media is doing harm to our kids and I’m calling time on it,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said. “The onus will be on social media platforms to demonstrate they are taking reasonable steps to prevent access. The onus won’t be on parents or young people. There’ll be no penalties for users.”

Legislation will be introduced this month and would come into force 12 months after ratification.

Industry minister François-Philippe Champagne says the government is acting “to address the specific national security risks related to ByteDance Ltd.’s operations in Canada.”

However, Canada is not attempting to ban or control the TikTok app:

The government is not blocking Canadians’ access to the TikTok application or their ability to create content. The decision to use a social media application or platform is a personal choice.

TikTok has responded, saying it would challenge the order in court.

The Information reports that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance grew its overall revenue to $73 billion in the first half of 2024 — just shy of Meta’s $75.5 billion. The share of ByteDance’s revenue that comes from TikTok grew to 23 percent, meaning its operations outside of China are increasingly important for the company’s bottom line.

Entertainment outlet Giant Freakin Robot will stop publishing new content to its site and instead focus on YouTube, citing plummeting Google traffic.

It’s not the first small publisher who’s been vocal about how changes to Google’s search algorithm has made it all but impossible to keep the lights on. And Google has said it “can’t guarantee” traffic to independent sites will ever recover.