Keep scrolling for the latest update on the TikTok-Meta battle for relevance.
Famous Birthdays wants to be the Wikipedia for Gen Z
It’s no secret that Gen Z is chronically online, often gathering information from some more unconventional sources. According to The Economist, one website is eclipsing Wikipedia as a favourite research tool. The site in question: Famous Birthdays.
Evan Britton founded Famous Birthdays in 2012, with the platform set to function like “Wikipedia for mobile.”
“The American entrepreneur reckoned there was a gap in the market for a simple website that could supply salient facts about celebrities,” the article reads. “Users, however, were also searching for unfamiliar names: people not on IMDb, a movie database, or Wikipedia.”
With users searching for somewhat obscure celebrities, Britton added these figures to the site, allowing Famous Birthdays to become “an evolving, reactive map of the people who matter to Gen Z.”
Famous Birthdays has almost become a bellwether for who is up and coming in the digital space.
With this platform prioritising internet celebrities (far before mainstream media got on board), it has become a mainstay in internet culture today.
“The first interview Charli D’Amelio, a TikTok personality, gave was at the Famous Birthdays office in Santa Monica, California, in 2019,” the piece continues. “Being featured on Famous Birthdays is a kind of validation—the sort which, unlike a blue tick on X, cannot be paid for. A few hopefuls try to lobby administrators for a page, but many are turned down.”
Not only is Famous Birthdays a stepping stone for many rising content creators seeking credibility, but it also epitomises the nature of the internet celebrity. Today, users are drawn to niche communities and supporting influencers that many of us are unfamiliar with.
“Famous Birthdays demonstrates the splintered nature of fame in the digital era. Gamers and models you may never have heard of can top the “trending” league table,” the author continues. “In a capricious age, it is fascinating to watch a star’s stock rise and fall.”
Read the piece via The Economist.
TikTok is copying Instagram again with Whee
While Famous Birthdays might be competing with Wikipedia, TikTok is vying for Instagram (which, honestly, should be the other way around). In a new piece for The Verge, Jay Peters breaks down the launch of Whee, an Instagram-like photo-sharing app from TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company, ByteDance.
Google Play describes the platform as a “social app created to keep you connected with your close friends through life's spontaneous moments.”
Peters notes that Whee offers features similar to Instagram, such as the ability to direct message friends and scroll through a feed filled with pictures.
“Screenshots of the app listing feature things like a photo viewfinder, a list of friends to message, and a feed — and many of the photo captions highlight how the features are for connecting with friends,” he writes.
Of course, this isn’t the first time TikTok has tried to emulate Instagram.
In April, TikTok introduced TikTok Notes, a “dedicated space” for photo and text content.
Before that, in September 2022, TikTok launched its slideshow feature, Photo Mode, which allows users to post photos in a carousel. Soon, the app became filled with photo dumps, much like Instagram.
According to Peters, Whee is not yet available in the United States, but it is live in "more than a dozen countries" around the world, including Australia.
For context, US officials (throughout both the Trump and Biden administrations) have repeatedly voiced suspicions about ByteDance and its potential to share data from millions of US-based users with the Chinese government.
With continuous efforts calling for ByteDance to divest from TikTok or face a nationwide ban in the United States, the future of TikTok remains uncertain. Having said that, it is unclear if Whee will ever launch there.
Even as TikTok surpasses Meta apps in popularity among Gen Z, it's clear that the battle between social media platforms is not slowing down anytime soon—despite frequent complaints about apps not sticking to what we love them for.
Read the full piece via The Verge.
The Anderson Cooper of Black Twitter Believes Journalism Can Survive Influencers
Aside from Instagram and TikTok, one social media platform undergoing significant changes (and not for the better) is X. Since Elon Musk took over, Twitter has become a haven for discrimination and misogyny—moving away from the platform’s previous role as the “internet’s newspaper.” Jason Parham interviewed Twitter news aggregator Phil Lewis for WIRED, seeking insights on the future direction of news in the online world.
For those unfamiliar with Phil Lewis, he gained notoriety online in 2015—a time when social media felt simpler and, of course, less polarising.
At the time, Phil was a teacher who decided to join the rising trend of citizen journalism online.
“Vine was still a thing. Influencing was a relatively new concept. I was a teacher with a decent following. A friend of mine was like, ‘You should get into social media,’ Phil tells Praham.
Since then, Phil has become one of the most famous and reliable news accounts on X, becoming a front-page editor for HuffPost.
While Phil admits it would be difficult for creators today to follow his trajectory, where "we [are now] competing with so many eyeballs," he acknowledges that the rise of news influencers and news-based content isn't all bad.
“We are in a crisis of attention, but what I find more frightening is the rise of misinformation and disinformation,” he continues. “That’s more chilling to me than the amount of people who want to do the best work that they can, whether that’s on YouTube or TikTok.”
Unlike some newsfluencers, Phil sees himself as a journalist—rather than an influencer—first, making sure that "the stories that I think people need to know about or need to read about" get out there.
This holds particular importance for the Black community on Twitter, as many individuals distrust traditional news media and institutions— instead seeking out newsrooms and creators who affirm and represent the Black perspectives.
“It’s nice to see that people care about what you’re doing. But it also reminds me of how important it is—especially for our community, the Black community—to get these stories out and to make sure our stories are told and represented, and that people know about them,” Phil adds.
Read the interview via WIRED.
Is AI The Answer to Gender-Based Harassment Online?
In the latest episode of 'Let The Girls Game,' powered by Let’s Sing, host Lauren Meisner chats with two Games Studies academics about how artificial intelligence could potentially address gender-based harassment in the gaming space.
The discussion begins with Meisner asking Dr Lucy Sparrow how labels contribute to online harassment. Dr Sparrow shares her experience playing games as a tween: many people she communicated with just didn't believe she was a girl.
“No one would believe me, like not at all, because they just simply didn't believe that an 11-year-old girl would be playing a game with them. Because they're made invisible, right?,” Dr Sparrow explains. “There's this sense that the less that we adopt certain mainstream labels and also the more that we hide who we are online, the less visible that we actually are in these gaming spaces.”
She continues by noting that women online, after revealing their gender, tend to face the "highest rates of online abuse," with rates in Australia “higher than the global average.”
Addressing this harassment is a complicated question for users, developers, and gaming industry professionals. Moderators on gaming-adjacent apps like Discord simply don’t do enough, and many games themselves encourage violence towards women.
“A lot of us are familiar with [the traditional] online tools, right? Where we can block people, we can report people, we can mute people who are harassing us,” Dr Sparrow continues. “But actually, while these tools do form a really, really important function, they don't always work. For instance, when online harassment is sustained people find ways around them.”
Drawing on their research, Dr Sparrow and Dr Mahli-Ann Butt explain the role AI could play to address some of these issues and actually empower victims, instead of solely punishing perpetrators.
“AI has a lot of really positive potential in the moderation space, with ethical oversight, obviously,” she continues. “When we're talking about harassment online. It can be so sustained and at such a high volume that, honestly, there aren't enough people in the world to do that job of moderation. You need some kind of automation in order to take care of it.”
Tune into ‘Let The Girls Game’ on TikTok, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
It Pays to Play: Over half of Aussie Gamers attribute financial literacy to The Sims
Speaking of gaming, research from ING reveals that many young people are learning financial literacy through games—a concept that, honestly, is crazy.
According to ING's polling, millions of Australians continue to struggle with financial topics such as saving, budgeting, and investing.
However, a majority of Australian gamers agree that gaming enhances financial understanding. The Sims and Minecraft are particularly effective— with 51% and 42% of participants, respectively, ranking these games as useful for learning about finances.
“Games like The Sims are helping Aussies hit the ‘motherlode’ when it comes to their personal finance, with 7 in 10 Aussies believing that digital games can be a powerful tool when it comes to learning better financial habits,” a press release from ING reads.
Of those who play these games, the most common financial skills learned include anything from general saving habits (28%) to creating a budget (25%).
As Emma, a 25-year-old teacher, tells ING, “I spent whole summers as a teenager playing The Sims. I loved building my [Sim] families’ empires from the ground up with a mix of career driven aspirations and tight budgeting. I never used money cheats because saving money – aka “Simoleans” – was the most fun part for me.”
With Gen Alpha emerging as some of the biggest gaming enthusiasts— and many of them playing Minecraft—here’s to hoping they will also gain valuable financial literacy skills while gaming.