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Source: Pacific Press / Getty
New York City Mayor Eric Adams opened up about his dating past and fare-beating in a recent town hall meeting, leaving
social media aghast.
The re-election campaign of New York City Mayor Eric Adams took another bizarre turn which left social media users in disbelief. On Wednesday night (March 19), Adams was at a town hall meeting being held in the Arverne neighborhood of Queens, not too far from Far Rockaway. Adams began the meeting in a nostalgic mood, opening up about dating a former girlfriend in the Rockaways. “I had a shorty that lived out here,” he said to the crowd, adding “You know, love is blind,” while reminiscing about the long ride on the A train. He also confessed to jumping the turnstile to avoid paying the fare on occasion. “The statute of limitations is over,” he joked.
Mayor Adams’ trip down memory lane was captured on video, which quickly went viral on social media with users comparing him to the Rashad Tate character in the Power television franchise, played by veteran actor Larenz Tate. Comedian Roy Wood Jr. highlighted the moment and juxtaposed it with a joke he made about politicians being entirely too social from a past routine. “Give him enough time, Eric Adams gone prove you right. As he did today. This joke is 2 years old,” he wrote in the post on X, formerly Twitter.
https://x.com/roywoodjr/status/1902832309264368016
The video is the latest instance that observers are pointing to in questioning Adams’ attitude about his re-election chances after a slow crowdfunding period. He’s been vague about his intentions, with persistent rumors stating that he may opt out of running in a packed Democratic primary and instead run as an independent, giving him more time to raise funds and be more definitive with his outreach. Adams has also lost a good deal of support from allies in the Democratic Party, due to his refusal to condemn the actions of President Donald Trump and his immigration agenda since taking office. Others have withheld their support due to suspecting his lobbying of Trump to have federal corruption charges against him dropped, as recommended by the Department of Justice last month.
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Source: Tierney L. Cross / Getty
Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert attempted to defend her racist attack on Congressman Al Green by asking about “white pimps”, which led social media users to mock her.
Controversial Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert has come under fire for doubling down on a racist remark using a curious statement. Boebert zeroed in on Texas Democrat Al Green after his protest of President Donald Trump at the State of the Union address. “Al Green was given multiple opportunities to stand down, to sit down, to behave, to show decorum. And he did not,” Boebert said at the time. “For him to go and shake his pimp cane at President Trump was absolutely abhorrent.” Her comments would lead another Democratic Representative, Chrissy Houlahan, to introduce a resolution condemning Boebert. The Colorado politician expressed surprise in an interview with Grant Stitchfield on the Real America’s Voice Network.
https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1899631976245498035
“To attack me for referencing his cane as a pimp cane, and Grant, I stand by it,” Boebert began, “I have never seen Al Green actually use his cane as a support to walk. I have seen him shake it for years, all throughout the Capitol during any meeting that I’ve ever been present with him in, and if that gold-plated cane isn’t a pimp cane, I don’t know what is.” But she didn’t stop there. “But maybe Hula Hoo is really the racist here. Are only blacks pimps? Is that what I’m hearing? Are there no cisgendered white pimps in America?” As she spoke, the graphics team for the show put up an artist’s rendering of Boebert in a purple fur coat holding a jeweled cane.
Boebert and fellow Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have a history of being openly disrespectful, including repeatedly heckling President Joe Biden during his State of The Union address in 2022 which led some of their fellow Republicans to criticize their behavior as “unbecoming.” Social media users took immediate notice of her using “white pimps” as a way to justify her remarks, with some bringing up her ejection from a performance of the Beetlejuice musical in 2022 for vaping in the audience and visibly groping her date at the time. Others called her out for being ableist. Bluesky user Boops McGee honed in on that point, writing: “It’s not a pimp cane. It’s a cane. Al Green is a politician who uses a tool to help him walk, just like many of his constituents who are dependent on Medicaid assistance.”
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Source: Nathan Stirk / Getty / X
Elon Musk is too busy firing and laying off government workers to pay attention to his crappy platform X because it was running like absolute crap on Monday.
X, formerly known as Twitter, has been down for thousands of UK and US users for a good portion of the day. Outage tracking website Downdetector.com reported more than 21,000 incidents of people in the US reporting issues with the platform during the first incident and 10,800 in the UK.
The platform reportedly returned to normal around 2:30 a.m. PT, so the outage lasted about 45 minutes in total.
X wasn’t out of the woods yet. Later in the day, around 6:45 a.m. PT, Downdetector.com reported 8,000 incidents, and the platform eventually went down again minutes later.
The last time X suffered a significant outage like this was in August 2024, with 66% of users reporting issues with the app, website, and server connections.
Since Musk reluctantly acquired the platform for $44 billion and laid off about 80% of its employees, X has been running terribly.
According to the Tesla chief, his company suffered a massive cyberattack.
“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against 𝕏. We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved,” Musk wrote on his personal X account.
Right now, Musk’s time and attention have been on his DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), which has been under fire for firing thousands of government employees and shutting down government agencies like USAID as part of the Trunp administration’s efforts to cut government spending and waste. This has been nothing short of the purest of jigs.
X Users Always Deliver The Jokes When The Platform Suffers An Outage
As with every time X goes down, the reactions from users are always hilarious.
“When you think Twitter is down but you can’t go on Twitter to see if #TwitterDown is trending because Twitter is down,” one user on X wrote alongside a GIF of Chandler from the show Friends looking sad while looking out of a window.
https://x.com/jjeonghyeons/status/1899148534735147184
Currently, the platform is up and running again, but we won’t be shocked if it goes down again. You can see more reactions in the gallery below.
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Source: Theo Wargo / Getty
The controversial founder of Fyre Festival announced that the second edition of the concert event will take place on a Mexican island, causing many online to express disbelief.
On Monday (February 24), Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland announced that the second edition of the ill-fated music fest will take place this year. In a press release that was shared on social media, McFarland stated that it would be a “three-day escape to the Mexican Caribbean where you’ll explore by day alongside your favorite talent and come together at night to celebrate with music,” with patrons being hosted in “world-class accommodations” with the ability to take part in “adventures led by international and local talent, taking guests on boundary-pushing excursions by day and uniting for intimate beach-side performances at night.”
Further details revealed that the festival will be held at Isla Mujeres, a luxury tourist destination just off the coast of Mexico from May 30 to June 2. Specifically, the festival will be staged at “Playa Fyre”, which is just west of Isla Mujeres according to coordinates on the event’s website. The local government of Isla Mujeres stated that it has not received any permits from organizers when contacted by The New York Times. 2,000 tickets are now available, with prices ranging from $1,400 to $1.1 million. The latter price is for an all-inclusive “Prometheus” package promising round-trip airfare from Miami to Cancun as one of the perks.
There are no performers scheduled so far for Fyre Festival 2, and in an interview with NBC’s Today, McFarland said “I’m not in charge of booking the talent,” adding that the musical acts would be from different genres including Hip-Hop, rock and electronic pop. “I’m sure many people think I’m crazy for doing this again. But I feel I’d be crazy not to do it again,” McFarland said in a statement, adding: “After years of reflection and now thoughtful planning, the new team and I have amazing plans for FYRE 2. The adventure seekers who trust the vision and take the leap will help make history. Thank you to my partners for the second chance.”
The news of the festival potentially taking place caught the attention of numerous skeptics online, who had jokes for those considering going to the festival after the first iteration failed spectacularly leading McFarland to spend six years in prison beginning in 2018. He was released in 2022. “We have Trump round 2 so why not Fyre Festival round 2,” wrote Blue Sky user Daniel Braten.
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Source: Jacob Kupferman / Getty / Steve Smith Sr.
When former NFL wide receiver Steve Smith Sr. woke up on Saturday morning, we are positive he didn’t think he would be one of the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter.
Things got interesting for the former Carolina Panthers and Baltimore Ravens wide receiver, now an NFL Network analyst, when the husband of a woman on X responded to his post featuring a video of himself playing golf, accusing him of sleeping with his wife. He came bearing receipts in the form of text messages.
Smith has been married since 2000 and has four children.
Man just found out that former NFL receiver and current NFL Network analyst Steve Smith Sr. has been sleeping with his wife. He posted the texts and a phone call with Smith on X after finding out.
“I’m sorry”
pic.twitter.com/Q6FckGDXy8
— FearBuck (@FearedBuck) February 22, 2025
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The accuser shared a screengrab of the alleged sexts between Smith and his wife while tagging multiple news outlets, Smith’s sponsors, Yeti Coolers and TaylorMade, his former team, the Panthers, Ravens, and, for some strange reason, Antonio Brown.
He also shared a video of an alleged phone call between himself and Smith where you can hear the former pro football player saying, “I’m sorry,” and a photo of a bare-chested Smith with a unicorn graphic over his midsection.
The man claims his wife met Smith while working for the Ravens marching band.
Social Media Had Jokes About The Situation
Following the revelation of social media has been on one, of course, it was nothing but pure jokes, especially regarding the explicit nature of the sexts.
“White man crashing out on Twitter cause his wife’s fucking Steve Smith Sr….and yall think I’ll leave this app? Tuh. NEVER. Can’t pay for this kind of live entertainment,” one user on X wrote.
Another user was too tickled by the accuser’s wife telling Smith he almost shifted her contraceptive device. “Rearrange my IUD…..I am dead,” the user said.
Bruh, moments like these make the dumpster fire that is X bearable.
You can see more reactions in the gallery below.
Even before a disruption in January caused by a looming U.S. ban, TikTok’s domination of video-based social media usage had started to wane. The service’s share of U.S. consumers’ time spent using social media apps fell to 29% in the fourth quarter of 2024 from 34% in the prior-year period, according to MusicWatch. In that same time span, YouTube Shorts’ share increased from 24% to 26% and Facebook Reels improved from 16% to 18%, while the “other” category rose one percentage point to 6%, Instagram Reels was flat at 18% and Triller remained at 3%.
That coincided with an overall downward trend in social media use. The average time spent using social media apps per week dropped from 7.9 hours in the fourth quarter of 2022 to 6.5 hours in the fourth quarter of 2024, says MusicWatch principal Russ Crupnick. That’s not an unexpected trend as Americans move further past pandemic-era behaviors, but Crupnick also notes that average times will fall as older, more casual users adopt social media platforms.
Trending on Billboard
Still, that overall decrease doesn’t account for TikTok’s declining share of consumers’ attention. A few years ago, the app seemed like an unstoppable freight train as its influence spread across tech and commerce. It also became a powerful promotional vehicle for artists, many of whom launched their careers by going viral on the platform. Once TikTok proved there was an insatiable demand for short-form video, Instagram and YouTube launched copycat products with Reels and Shorts, respectively. Its impact even spread to Amazon, which launched a TikTok-styled feed for product discovery called Inspire in 2022 (Amazon announced it was shutting down the feature earlier this week). Music streaming services also followed suit: At Spotify, artists can now post short video messages to their fans.
Exactly why TikTok lost share in 2024 isn’t clear. “It’s hard to say,” says Crupnick. “Is this a function of all the political nonsense going on around the app? Is it a function of YouTube and some of the competitors catching up a little bit? Is it a little bit of exhaustion with music on social video? Or is it all three?”
Whatever the case, this reshuffling of the landscape has led artists to flock to other platforms and eroded TikTok’s dominance as a promotional vehicle. Experts who spoke with Billboard about TikTok’s decline described a changing social media landscape in which the platform remains a powerful marketing tool but has lost some of its allure and potency. For a variety of reasons, consumers are spending more time at TikTok’s competitors, and artists are thus seeing more opportunity at platforms such as YouTube and Instagram.
One factor in TikTok’s decline in market share is YouTube and Meta successfully leveraging the scale and scope of their respective platforms to become serious contenders in short-form video. YouTube, in particular, has succeeded in integrating Shorts into a platform that used to be occupied only by long-form videos. “I think YouTube has done a good job of building an ecosystem,” says J.D. Tuminski, founder of Casadei Collective Marketing Agency. “They do a lot of education for artists and labels about building the Shorts ecosystem that feeds into the bigger picture of music video content and lifestyle content.”
Jenna Rosenberg, head of operations and marketing at Gorilla Management, agrees that YouTube has benefitted by combining short-form and long-form videos. “I think when people are watching the longer videos [on YouTube] they can easily get sucked into the short-form part of that platform as well, and vice versa. Whereas TikTok, it’s literally just the vertical short-form content.”
At the same time, YouTube and Instagram are increasingly seen as friendly to creators. “Anecdotally, YouTube and Meta pay better than TikTok,” says Tuminski. “Also, the TikTok creator fund is always shifting. There are different thresholds that you have to meet to be able to earn on there, and they’re not always clear.”
TikTok, on the other hand, is seen as prioritizing some of its e-commerce initiatives. TikTok Shop, for example, allows creators to stream live videos and sell goods and merchandise. In January, TikTok Shop sales were up 153% year-over-year, far exceeding the growth rates of Chinese e-commerce platforms Shein and Temu, according to Bloomberg. While live shopping may be a sensible practice for a TikTok influencer, musicians tend to shy away from that kind of activity — and as a result, they aren’t flocking to TikTok Shop. “An artist isn’t necessarily going to go on TikTok Live and say, “Hey, come and buy my vinyl,’” says Rosenberg. “It’s just very uncomfortable for them.”
The standoff between Universal Music Group (UMG) and TikTok may also have played a part in shifting sentiment around the app in the music community. In February 2024, UMG began pulling its content from TikTok over a disagreement about compensation, among other factors. For many artists and labels, that dust-up was “a warning sign” that TikTok’s dominance in social media wasn’t secure, says Dan Roy Carter, managing director of digital consultancy Carter Projects. “Deals fell apart, carefully designed viral campaigns became eye-watering wastes of budget, and acts who had built their presence reliant on TikTok were left very much bent out of shape.”
“I think a lot of folks were looking for alternatives, even before all the political things that are going on,” says Tuminski. Artists want to work with brands they trust, he adds, and they will go where their fans are. If one service isn’t providing what they want, “they’ll go to somewhere that makes a little bit more sense to them.”
Things have worsened for TikTok in 2025 due to a pending shutdown in the U.S., although President Donald Trump provided a stay of execution when he entered office. The looming ban caused traffic to decline, however, and pushed people to download alternatives such as RedNote. As of this week, TikTok has lost one-tenth of its U.S. users since the first week of January, according to Similarweb data published by The Information.
Still, TikTok remains a powerful and influential force in music and entertainment. By 2024, a third of U.S. adults used TikTok, while almost six in 10 teens (57%) say they use the platform daily and 16% say they’re on it “almost constantly,” according to Pew Research. People use TikTok mostly for pop culture and entertainment but also viral music and dances, humor and comedy, personal stories, fashion advice, product recommendations, politics and, for 5% of U.S. adults, news.
“There is still huge value in TikTok as a platform for music discovery and promotion, and perhaps their ability to tap into merch, ticketing, and conversion to paid streaming will usher a second coming,” says Carter. “But its days of being the only horse are seemingly coming to an end.”
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Source: Handout / Getty
President Donald Trump and the White House are being blasted for releasing a video online showing immigrants in chains being deported with a flippant caption, with social media expressing revulsion.
On Tuesday (February 18), the White House released a dehumanizing video showing immigrants whose faces are not shown being shackled being put on a flight during the deportation process, alarming many. The video shows multiple people being placed in handcuffs and shackled around the ankles with a torso chain, with the sounds vividly captured including that of the aircraft waiting on the tarmac. It currently has 63.8 million views on X, formerly Twitter, and 2.6 million views via Instagram reels.
The video was posted on their social media accounts, with the caption “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response, which is a sensation that promotes relaxation and a tingly sensation and goosebumps in people. It has been a popular genre of social media videos, growing over the past decade. There has been no clarity of who is responsible at the White House for the posting of the video, as the Trump administration has kept the identities of those operating those accounts under wraps, a stark contrast to the Office of Digital Strategy under the previous Biden-Harris administration which was more transparent.
The immediate reactions from the video by supporters of President Trump were appalling, with tech billionaire and Trump advisor Elon Musk chiming in on his X platform calling it “so based.” Another online figure who has frequently used racism in their posts, Joshua Kilgore, applauded the video. “Got what I voted for award,” he wrote.
But far many more online, including Democratic Senators Ed Markey and Seth Moulton, expressed their outrage and disgust. March For Our Lives board member Caroline McCarthy Pompizzi summed it up in an X post: “I don’t care what side of the aisle you’re on or who you voted for – I think we can all agree this is *extremely* psychopathic s–t.”
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Source: Kayla Bartkowski / Getty
A 19-year-old teen engineer with a dubious nickname has access to highly sensitive government information, thanks to Elon Musk, and online observers are outraged.
As tech billionaire Elon Musk has directed his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Team to gain access to sensitive federal servers under the premise of cutting government waste, the identities of six prominent technologists have been revealed, among them a 19-year-old high school graduate named Edward Coristine. Coristine has gained attention due to his nickname, “Big Balls,” and also for having a background that officials state would not have allowed him the clearance to obtain security clearance under normal circumstances.
Coristine, a former student at Northeastern University, was revealed to have worked for the Path Network in 2022, a firm known for hiring reformed blackhat hackers. Blackhat hackers specialize in cyberwarfare and other computer-based forms of malice. Coristine was also linked to a Telegram account that solicited a cyberattack-for-hire job that year. In addition, he has been linked to the ownership of at least five different companies in the last four years, including one named Tesla.Sexy LLC. The company, according to WIRED, controls dozens of web domains which include two registered in Russia. One of those is still active under the name of Helfie, operating an AI bot targeting Discord servers in the Russian market.
Coristine’s presence on the DOGE team adds more chaos and uncertainty to a situation that has been brewing since last week, with Democratic lawmakers and others expressing concern and outrage over Musk and his team’s unfettered access to information at the US Treasury, USAID, the Social Security Administration, and others. “It’s highly likely they’re improperly accessing, transferring and storing highly sensitive data outside of the environments it was intended to be contained within,” said British cybersecurity expert and hacker Marcus Hutchins in an interview. “If I were a nation like China, Russia, or Iran, I’d be having a field day with a bunch of college kids running around with sensitive federal government data on unencrypted hard drives.” Musk has threatened to shut down the accounts of those on X, formerly Twitter, disclosing more information about him and the other five. This was highlighted in a post by X user Kiera Golden.
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Source: Allen J. Schaben / Getty / Kanye West
Following his ridiculous Grammys red carpet stunt that saw him show up with his butt-naked wife Bianca Censori, Kanye West took to his favorite soapbox, Instagram, to clap back at claims that he and Censori were shown the door.
West or Ye has been active on his Instagram account, and while promoting some new hot ass mess he calls clothing and teasing new dated music, he addressed the issue of whether he and his mannequin of wife were told to leave the Grammys.
In a now-deleted post featuring a photo of Don Lemon, West wrote in the caption, “This the goofball that started the rumor that me and my wife got kicked out the Grammies 3 decades of innovating music and they always K—S like this.”
Lemon quickly responded, “I saw someone on your team who asked me to correct it because it had been reported everywhere. So first of all, get your s*** straight.”
Lemon also posted a video on his Instagram page reporting that West was not kicked out of the Grammys.
The Aftermath of The Stunt
Reports about the incident vary. The New York Post reported that the police removed West and Censori following the stunt for possibly violating the Grammys dress code. The Daily Mail reported that CBS was worried about backlash from advertisers and sent someone to speak with the Chicago rapper, but it denied involving law enforcement.
TMZ and Variety claim that is not the case. They claim that Ye and Censori were not told to leave, but they walked the red carpet and left.
Page Six also claims the stunt was done to recreate West’s Vultures 1 album cover with a lip reader determining Yeezy instructed his wife to “make a scene.”
The “Jesus Walks” crafter is also on the Gram boasting that he “beat the Grammys” and that his wife is the “most Googled person on the planet.”
Someone should tell him mainly because she was naked, and people on the internet are dangerously horny.
He is also currently going on a bizarre rant on X, formerly Twitter, and sharing some interesting Polaroids featuring himself and his wife. The gallery below shows his posts and more reactions.
1. Bruh… What?
4. Rehearsal
5. No lies detected
7. Dee-1 With some Knowledge
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Source: Future Publishing / Getty / Karla Sofía Gascón
Those old tweets will always come back to haunt you. That’s what Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón is finding out the hard way.
Netflix’s newest darling, musical Emilia Pérez, is garnering tremendous buzz during award season, good and some bad, specifically from those who feel the film isn’t worth all the praise it’s getting. Those people are now probably licking their chops as one of the film’s stars, trans actor Karla Sofía Gascón, is catching hell for some very problematic tweets from her past.
Gascón forgot to scrub her timeline of old tweets talking very recklessly about George Floyd, the unarmed Black man who was murdered by law enforcement, Muslims, and Oscars diversity, which hilariously is something Gascón would stand to benefit significantly from.
The tweets posted between 2020 and 2021 sparking outrage were deleted on Thursday, but not before journalist Sarah Hagi spotlighted them after Gascón criticized campaigns in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper on Jan.21, that she felt attacked her and Emilia Pérez.
Gascón Had A Lot To Say About Muslims
One of the tweets, which was translated to English from Spanish independently by Variety, read, “I’m Sorry, Is it just my impression, or are there more Muslims in Spain? Every time I go to pick up my daughter from school there are more women with their hair covered and their skirts down to their heels. Next year instead of English we’ll have to teach Arabic.”
“Islam is marvelous, without any machismo. Women are respected, and when they are so respected they are left with a little squared hole on their faces for their eyes to be visible and their mouths, but only if she behaves. Although they dress this way for their own enjoyment. How DEEPLY DISGUSTING OF HUMANITY,” another tweet attached with a photo of a Muslim family in a restaurant Gascón shared on Sept. 2, 2020.
Her Comments About George Floyd
Along with her despicable comments about Muslims, she also dropped a long thread about George Floyd just days after he was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, which led to protests across the country.
“I really think that very few people ever cared about George Floyd, a drug addict swindler, but his death has served to once again demonstrate that there are people who still consider black people to be monkeys Without rights and consider policemen to be assassins,” she tweeted. “They’re all wrong.”
She continued, “Too many things to reflect on regarding the behavior of our species every time an event occurs. Perhaps it is no longer a question of racism, but of social classes that feel threatened by each other. Maybe that’s the only real difference.”
But Wait, There’s More
Gascón, the first openly trans actor to be nominated for an Academy Award, was not a fan of what she saw during the 2021 Oscars ceremony.
“More and more the #Oscars are looking like a ceremony for independent and protest films, I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M,” Gascón said. “Apart from that, an ugly, ugly gala.”
Gascón has since apologized via a statement through Netflix: “As someone in a marginalized community, I know this suffering all too well, and I am deeply sorry to those I have caused pain.”
She continued, “All my life I have fought for a better world. I believe light will always triumph over darkness.”
Her apology might be a little late because she is currently being read for filth on X, formerly Twitter.
https://x.com/RhodeToLove/status/1885060836881740221
Those reactions to her old problematic tweets are in the gallery below.
2. Lol, damn
3. Y’all play too damn much
4. Well damn
8. Gotta love screen record