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Tyler James Williams had more than a few words for those speculating about his sexuality, addressing the matter through social media.
The Abbott Elementary star sent out a message celebrating Pride Month on Sunday (June 4) through his Instagram Stories, taking the time to address the rampant questions about his own sexuality.
“Usually I wouldn’t address stuff like this, but I feel like it as a conversation is bigger than me. I’m not gay, but I think the culture of trying to ‘find’ some kind of hidden trait or behavior that a closed person ‘let slip’ is very dangerous,” the Golden Globes winner began.
“Overanalyzing someone’s behavior in an attempt to ‘catch’ them directly contributes to the anxiety a lot of queer and queer-questioning people feel when they fear living in their truth,” he continued. “It makes the most pedestrian of conversations and interactions in spaces feel less safe for our gay brothers and sisters and those who may be questioning.”
The former child star of Everybody Hates Chris also pointed out how such speculation can be harmful in reinforcing stereotypes about what straight men are supposed to be.
“Being straight doesn’t look one way. Being gay doesn’t look one way,” he wrote. “And what may seem like harmless fun and conversation may actually be sending a dangerous message to those struggling with real issues,” he wrote. “I refuse to inadvertently contribute to that message.”
The 30-year-old star has been pivotal as teacher Gregory Eddie in the success of the ABC sitcom helmed by Quinta Brunson with Emmy Award-winning actress Sheryl Lee Ralph as part of the cast. Abbott Elementary was renewed for a third season by the network in January of this year, and the previous two seasons are now available to watch on Hulu.
Williams concluded his message by saying “Happy Pride to all of my queer and questioning brothers, sisters, and individuals. I pray that you feel seen in ways that make you feel safe in the celebration that is this month. As an ally, I continue to be committed to assisting in that where I can and helping to cultivate a future where we are all accepted and given permission to be ourselves,” he said, signing off his message with a white heart emoji.
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Offset doesn’t mince his words when it comes to his wife. He recently shared a clip of him appreciating Cardi B’s ample backside.
As spotted on Page Six the “Ric Flair Drip” rapper missed his better half in a major way. This week he reunited with her and made it clear that he is a very lucky man. He shared a not safe for work clip of her laying down on a bed while his hand went to her backside. He proceeded to pull down her pants and massage her signature assets in all their glory. Naturally Bardi felt the love and responded “You happy to see me?” to which he responded “Yes, I miss you so much.”
As expected Offset’s share drew both support and criticism with some questioning his respect for Cardi. “I don’t get s—t like this at all, u want the whole world to see ur lady like that??????” one user commented. Another follower called out that the move was in poor taste given they have kids saying “What happened to dignity & self-respect?”. While Cardi and Offset seem to be on great terms it seems his relationship with his recording home Quality Control Music is not. Recently it was revealed that he has been in a legal battle to retain his masters.
On Monday, April 3 he took to social media to preview a new untitled song which seemed to address his challenges with his recording home. “They can’t be too upset / I could of kept it to myself, they can’t be too upset / I done broke bread, cut checks, they can’t be too upset / I took that rope off my neck, they couldn’t be too upset / N****s still bite my style, they can’t be too upset / I done laid low for a while, they can’t be that upset / N****s lost all my respect, they can’t be that upset” he rapped.
You can see Offset worship Cardi’s cakes below.
Instagram’s director of music partnerships, Perry Bashkoff, was one of the about 6,000 Meta employees whose roles were eliminated by Meta leadership on Wednesday (May 24). “Yes, I was one of them,” Bashkoff confirmed on Thursday in a LinkedIn post. As Bashkoff noted, he was “part of the team that brought music to the Meta […]
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Source: SOPA Images / Getty / Instagram
With Twitter still on a path to self-destruction thanks to Elon Musk, Instagram is looking to offer people a substitute.
The Verge reports Instagram is working on its own text-based social media component that aims to be a direct competitor to Twitter, according to Social and Influencer Marketing teacher Lia Haberman. Via her ICYMI Substack newsletter, she shared a screenshot of a marketing slide detailing the new app.
According to the slide, the new app has no name and is just “Instagram’s new text-based app for conversations.” Haberman reports it is codenamed P92 and Barcelona.
Users can sign in using their current Instagram username and password, and their bio, IG handle, followers, and verification status will transfer over.
Per The Verge:
In the app, you’ll see a feed, and you can make text posts up to 500 characters long with attached links, photos, and videos.
The app looks pretty much like if you mixed Instagram and Twitter together, based on two screenshots included in the leaked marketing slide. And Meta will apparently have some good moderation controls from the start, “equipping you with settings to control who can reply to you and mention your account,” the slide says. Any accounts you’ve blocked on Instagram will apparently carry over.
Per the slide, the new Instagram App will feature some form of decentralization, noting, “Soon, our app will be compatible with certain other apps like Mastodon.”
Instagram Suffered A Serious Service Outage
No one asked for this new app, but okay. But it would also be nice if Meta made sure Instagram works appropriately. On Sunday, the popular photo-sharing app turned TikTok clone was down “for a couple of hours,” according to The Verge.
Timelines did not refresh, and users were receiving error messages when refreshing them. If you hit Instagram via the website, it only loads a blank page.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused some people to have trouble accessing Instagram. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we’re sorry for any disruption this has caused,” Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold told The Verge in an email following the service outage.
Like any time Instagram is down, social media (Twitter) has plenty of jokes because nothing is serious on that app.
You can see the jokes in the gallery below.
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Photo: SOPA Images / Getty
2. Howling
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Kanye West aka Ye is not online but is back outside. His Instagram account has been deactivated but he pulled up to the Fear Of God fashion show this week.
As spotted on Digital Music News, Kanye West is officially off Instagram. His last post on April 18 alluded to him contemplating leaving the social media platform as the visual was a screenshot of the app’s settings page where you can manually deactivate the account immediately. Later that afternoon, his page was gone for good. While his departure from Instagram was abrupt it seems this was inevitable.
Within the last couple of months the rapper’s account had been suspended for violating the terms of use; specifically when he posted some content that was deemed “hate speech”.
Additionally, his energy toward his rival Pete Davidson was largely viewed as harassment and bullying. While he has fallen back from social media, High Snobiety reports he did take the time to attend the Fear Of God runway show on Thursday, April 19.
Held at Hollywood Bowl, the invite-only event was packed with high-profile tastemakers and celebrities but Kanye West and his new wife turned the most heads. Wearing his signature all-black roomy attire with a mask, Yeezy seemed to be in good spirits. His better half on the other hand wore a skin-tight latex body suit that left very little to the imagination.
You can see a video of the couple at the fashion show below.
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Photo: Getty
Kanye West has bid farewell to Instagram.
The rapper took to the social media platform on Tuesday (April 18) to share a screenshot of the Instagram deactivation page, with the confirmation on temporarily removing his account ready to be submitted. Shortly after his announcement, the account was deactivated.
Ye has had ups and downs with Instagram over the past few years. In March 2022, he was suspended from Instagram for 24 hours, after some of his posts violated the platform’s policies on hate speech, bullying and harassment. Leading up to the suspension, Ye posted repeated racial slurs underneath a screenshot of Daily Show host Trevor Noah’s Google page.
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Additionally, he had countless posts dedicated to targeting Pete Davidson, who was dating West’s estranged wife Kim Kardashian at the time. He wrote that the Saturday Night Live comedian, whom he refers to as “Skete,” “will get my kids mom hooked on drugs He’s in rehab every 2 months.”
Ye was suspended again in October 2022 following a string of antisemitic remarks, before returning in March 2023 to declare that he “likes Jewish people again” after watching Jonah Hill’s performance in 21 Jump Street.
Selena Gomez is expressing her gratitude after becoming the first woman on Instagram to surpass 400 million followers.
The Only Murders in the Building star, who is now the most-followed woman in Instagram, took to the social media platform on Sunday (March 19) to show her appreciation to her millions of supporters around the world.
“Wishing I could hug all 400 million of you,” Gomez captioned a photo gallery on Instagram of herself excitedly posing with fans.
As of Sunday morning, the 30-year-old actress and singer had 401 million Instagram followers. Less than a month ago, when Gomez reached 381 million followers, she surpassed Kylie Jenner as the most-followed women on the social media platform.
While Gomez is the most-followed woman on Instagram, soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo is the most-followed person in general with 563 million followers. Another soccer star, recent World Cup winner Lionel Messi, follows with 443 million.
Prior to her celebratory post on Sunday, Gomez shared a stunning makeup-free selfie on March 13 with the simple caption, “Violet Chemistry,” which is a song from Miley Cyrus’ new album, Endless Summer Vacation.
The “Lose You to Love Me” singer returned to personally posting on her Instagram page in January, more than four years after she deleted the app from her phone and gave posting rights to a a member of her team due to her unhealthy relationship with the platform.
“At one point Instagram became my whole world, and it was really dangerous. In my early 20s, I felt like I wasn’t pretty enough. There was a whole period in my life when I thought I needed makeup and never wanted to be seen without it,” she previously told InStyle.
See Gomez’s post celebrating her 400 million Instagram followers below.
Selena Gomez officially became the first woman on Instagram to surpass 400 million followers on Friday (March 17).
Less than a month ago, when she reached 381 million followers, the Only Murders in the Building star passed Kylie Jenner as the most-followed women on Instagram
While Gomez is the most-followed woman on the platform, soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo is the most-followed person in general with 562 million followers. Another soccer superstar, Lionel Messi, follows with 442 million.
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Gomez’s most recent post was a stunning makeup-free selfie with the simple caption, “Violet Chemistry,” which is a track title from Cyrus’ freshly dropped eighth studio album, Endless Summer Vacation.
The “Lose You to Love Me” singer returned to personally posting on her Instagram page in January, more than four years after she deleted the app from her phone and gave posting rights to a a member of her team due to her unhealthy relationship with the platform. “At one point Instagram became my whole world, and it was really dangerous. In my early 20s, I felt like I wasn’t pretty enough. There was a whole period in my life when I thought I needed makeup and never wanted to be seen without it,” she previously told InStyle.
Facebook parent Meta is slashing 10,000 jobs, about as many as the social media company announced late last year in its first round of cuts, as uncertainly about the global economy hits the technology sector particularly hard.
The company announced 11,000 job cuts in November, about 13% of its workforce at the time. In addition to the layoffs, Meta said Tuesday that it would not fill 5,000 open positions.
“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Meta and other tech companies have been hiring aggressively for at least two years and in recent months have begun to let some of those workers go. Hiring in the U.S. is still strong, but layoffs have hit hard in some sectors.
Early last month, Meta posted falling profits and its third consecutive quarter of declining revenue. On the same day, the company said that it would buy back as much as $40 billion of its own stock.
The Menlo Park, company said Tuesday it will reduce the size of its recruiting team and make further cuts in its tech groups in late April, and then its business groups in late May.
Zuckerberg has invested tens of billions of dollars building out its metaverse, its virutal reality concept, and renamed the company Meta, signaling a new focus for Facebook.
“As I’ve talked about efficiency this year, I’ve said that part of our work will involve removing jobs — and that will be in service of both building a leaner, more technical company and improving our business performance to enable our long term vision,” said Zuckerberg.
The biggest tech companies in the U.S. are cutting costs elsewhere, too.
This month, Amazon paused construction on its second headquarters in Virginia following the biggest round of layoffs in the company’s history and its shifting plans around remote work.
Global inflation has remained stubborn and its made for more difficult decisions for both households and businesses in the U.S.
Fast growth companies, including many in the technology sector, are hunkering down for what may be an extended period of adverse economic conditions.
“At this point, I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years,” Zuckerberg said in a message to employees.
Meta shares rose nearly 7% Tuesday.
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Source: NurPhoto / Getty / Meta
If you are a content creator caking off the Reels Play bonus program on Instagram and Facebook, you’re going to have to find another way to bring in coins. Meta is officially getting rid of the program.
If you’re wondering why you haven’t gotten that notification to start pumping out those Instagram Reels, there is a good reason for that. Meta is ending the program, as seen on The Verge, first reported by Business Insider.
According to Business Insider, Meta will not offer any “new or renewed” Reels Play bonus deals, but the company will honor existing commitments.
In a statement to The Verge via an email, Paige Cohen, a Meta spokesperson, said, “We are evolving the test of our Reels Play bonus on Instagram and Facebook as we focus on investing in a suite of monetization solutions to help creators earn steady streams of income. We will look into ways to run the program in a more targeted form, for example, in potential new markets.”
The rollout of the Reels Play bonus program has been far from perfect since its launch in 2021 as a direct response to the TikTok payout program.
Initially, content creators were cashing out, receiving payouts sometimes in the tens of thousands. Over time those payments have gotten smaller, and content creators are having a tough time achieving those large payouts again.
Meta initially had a $2 billion player pool that the company promised to content creators through 2022, so we guess the well has run dry.
You can still make money through subscriptions and badges, but those methods are not as reliable as making reels.
Instagram Is Not The Only Social Media Platform Pinching Pennies
According to The Verge, Snapchat, offering content creators $1 million a day in viral content on its TokTok-like feature Spotlight, gradually cut that amount over 2022, introducing other monetization methods like ad revenue.
YouTube was offering creators cash payouts to pump out YouTube Shorts, but that ended with the video-sharing platform moving to a revenue-sharing model last fall.
Welp.
We shall see if this decision impacts Instagram users’ decision to make reels going forward.
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Photos: NurPhoto / Getty