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This Month

Kelly Partners CEO Brett Kelly is a prolific writer.

Kelly Partners CEO and Buffett aficionado bypasses ASX with Twitter

Brett Kelly has drawn inspiration from Warren Buffett’s habit of writing open letters to shareholders.

Thousands of recruiters checked out my profile, but none of them came knocking.

‘No time wasters’: Why workplace ditherers are no longer tolerated

Rejecting time wasters can seem abrupt. But in our overloaded age, taking up valuable time is also an affront.

May

‘Nowhere to hide’: Why more CEOs are fronting videos

Executives are increasingly filming themselves for social media as a way to talk directly to staff, customers and shareholders.

Under Elon Musk, X is widely thought to have contributed to the enshittification of the internet.

Here’s what Elon Musk sees when he opens X

The New York Times re-created a version of Elon Musk’s personal feed by opening a new account on X and following the same 1109 users that he follows.

Meet the new (ultrathin) champions of body positivity

A new cultural ideal for women is ultrathin but cloaked in the language of inclusivity and self-acceptance.

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‘Black Mirror’ showed us a future. Some of it is here now.

The long-running tech drama always felt as if it took place in a dystopian near future. How much of that future has come to pass?

Snapchat made $88.6 million in Australia last year.

Why Snapchat has struggled to grow while TikTok, Facebook surge

The social media and messaging app’s accounts for Australia reveal a company with a huge user base that is struggling to monetise it.

Peter Dutton looking classy in defeat, according to Telstra’s marketing boss.

Telstra marketing boss deletes anti-Dutton loathing

The marketer apparently forgot LinkedIn is a safe space only for humble brags.

People are changing how they use LinkedIn. So is the platform

The social media platform is providing its owner with a billion willing guinea pigs, perhaps giving it an edge in the artificial intelligence race.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland’s decision to exempt YouTube from the social media ban for children under the age of 16 is under scrutiny from Google’s biggest rivals.

How YouTube justifies its carve-out from social media ban

Emails obtained under freedom of information laws reveal how Google argued the video service was so different from TikTok, Facebook and Instagram.

Meta Founder Mark Zuckerberg greets Microsoft’s chief executive Satya Nadella at his company’s LlamaCon 2025 AI developer conference this week.

Why investors (but not workers) are raving about Microsoft, Meta

The big-tech AI party seemed to be winding down, but Meta and Microsoft say the night is still young.

TikTok almost doubled its revenue and tripled its profits in 2024.

TikTok triples its Australian profits as youth social media ban looms

The short-form video platform nearly doubled its revenue in Australia as it continues a hiring spree to outgrow rivals Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.

The idea that the internet carries a scythe is familiar. But the scale of the potential extinction still isn’t adequately appreciated.

An age of extinction is coming. Here’s how to survive

The digital era is killing us softly by distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life and making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.

April

Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive and founder of Meta Platforms, which owns Facebook.

Facebook’s local revenues surge to $1.46b, almost all sent overseas

The social media giant owned by Meta has defied an advertising downturn to increase income by $110 million over last year, even as it faces big headwinds.

Andrew Forrest and Basil Zempilas make sure we know they met the Pope

Pope Francis’ lessons on modesty, service and getting the job done are lost on the rich and not-so-famous.

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Communications Minister Michelle Rowland’s decision to exempt YouTube from the social media ban for children under the age of 16 is under scrutiny from Google’s biggest rivals.

TikTok, Meta, Snapchat demand answers on YouTube ‘sweetheart deal’

The tech giants say Michelle Rowland’s unexplained favouritism towards Google’s video platform undermines new social media age restriction laws.

The Dubai chocolate craze has caused a shortage of pistachios.

Dubai chocolate sparks pistachio shortage as TikTokers go nuts

A TikTok craze has helped drive pistachio kernel prices from $US7.65 a pound a year ago to around $US10.30 a pound now as importers scramble for supplies.

The government has given no logical explanation why YouTube is being exempted from its teen social media ban.

YouTube exemption exposes teen social media ban as a sham

The government’s preferential treatment of YouTube undermines the purpose of its under-16s social media ban, and is unfair to the other tech industry players.

‘A bouncy castle of idiocy’: The top political TikToks reviewed

We asked two advertising veterans to review the major parties’ highest performing TikToks. Here’s their verdict.

Michelle Rowland assured YouTube CEO Neal Mohan the platform would be exempt from a social media ban.

Rowland gave YouTube a personal exemption guarantee from social ban

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland wrote to YouTube’s global chief to reassure him the platform would not be covered by a contentious social media ban.

Original URL: https://www.afr.com/topic/social-media-621