The White House is teaming up with Giphy, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other organizations and companies to preserve Barack Obama administration’s social media history.
Chief among the new offerings is an open social media archiving platform — built by software company ArchiveSocial — that lets the public access more than 250,000 online posts shared by President Obama, the White House, and First Lady Michelle Obama. Users can search the Obama archive by keyword or utilize the advanced search tab to access posts from specific platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Google Plus, and Flickr.
Since taking office in 2009, Barack Obama adopted social media like no other president before him. His administration created more than 100 official social media profiles across the aforementioned social platforms and on YouTube, Periscope, Snapchat, and Vimeo. Additionally, a little-known blast from the past, Obama even had a Friendster account. As a result, the outgoing president leaves behind a trove of data, which the White House maintains must be archived “in the interest of historical preservation and transparency.”
This data also includes GIFs, with the White House tapping Giphy to devote a page on its website to all the GIFs the Obama administration has ever shared.
Additionally, the MIT Media Lab’s Electome group is launching an interactive tool in collaboration with programmer Derek Lieu that compares tweets shared by the White House with a sampling of those shared by the public. In its summary, the MIT Media Lab states that the official @potus Twitter account devoted its largest share of tweets (22 percent) to gun issues. On the other hand, Michelle Obama’s @flotus account tweeted the most about veterans (40 percent), whereas @whitehouse focused on energy and the environment. The election-engaged public, however, was more concerned with an altogether different topic, tweeting most about immigration (10 percent).
If you are keen to relive Obama’s tweets instead of just searching for them, you’re in luck. The White House is teaming up with Oregon-based studio Feel Train on a Twitter bot (@Relive44) that will retweet a selection of the Obama administration’s tweets over the next eight years.
Aside from its online offerings, two White House-related hackathons are set to take place — hosted by the New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), and the Internet Archive on Friday and Saturday, respectively. The latter is also making White House social media data available to download from its website.
You can find out more about the social media initiatives and events the White House is launching on its blog.
Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.
According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?