TikTok

The billionaire Frank McCourt is launching a “people’s bid” to buy the app, replace its addictive algorithm, and give users greater control of their data. Is it a publicity stunt or a sincere attempt to reform the digital age?

In 2016, I went viral for telling people to quit social media. In 2024, I ignored my own advice.

“Social Studies,” a documentary series by Lauren Greenfield, follows a group of young people, and screen-records their phones, to capture how social media has reshaped their lives.

Trump has always drawn ideas from the darker corners of the Internet, but his new opponent has found a different kind of traction by embracing the Web’s native formats.

The show is poised as the inheritor of the prestige TV mantle, but it doesn’t quite look or act like what we’ve come to expect from the genre.

By mimicking classic film aesthetics, the Fujifilm X100 has become a digital hit.

Gen Z creators are learning the lessons of Scorsese and Akerman: putting mom and dad in your work brings pathos, complexity, and a certain frisson.

In a digital landscape overrun by algorithms and A.I., we need human guides to help us decide what’s worth paying attention to.

A prominent tech journalist sees Silicon Valley corporations making policy in Washington—and lawmakers refusing to regulate social media properly.

Is TikTok the killer app of social media—or a Trojan horse sent by the enemy? Two views on the recent ban. Plus, salmon in the dishwasher, and more highlights of culinary TikTok.

You can take the platform away from American users, but it is far too late to contain the habits that it has unleashed.

How the viral TikToks of a Chinese glycine factory elucidate our increasingly chaotic digital environment.

Byung-Chul Han, in treatises such as “The Burnout Society” and his latest, “The Crisis of Narration,” diagnoses the frenetic aimlessness of the digital age.

Alena Kate Pettitt helped lead an online movement promoting domesticity. Now she says, “It’s become its own monster.”

We know that social media breeds propaganda, misinformation, and feelings of isolation among users, especially children. How do we resist its effects without encroaching on civil liberties?

Radu Jude’s TikTok-tinged movie can be breathtakingly funny, but the absurdity is rooted in a powerful sense of outrage.

The freedom to use social media is a First Amendment right, even if it’s one we should all avail ourselves of less often.

“Donald Trump’s vision, or lack of vision, of what the United States can be in the world is a risk of a kind we really haven’t had in any of our lifetimes,” Evan Osnos says.

Nicola Fegg’s short documentary follows a young woman who becomes a social-media star during the war in Ukraine.

The canny marketing campaign behind the wildly popular tumblers.