Mashable Selects Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Look Up Back to School Say More Trending Now Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Switch Off Mashable Voices Safety Net Versus All Series Digital creators are now on IMDb. The new category recognizes careers built online. Will it help creators land their next opportunity? Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine.

The cable news network's president, Rebecca Kutler, wants to leverage its massive online and TV audience to create a fan community. First up: letting you chat with Rachel Maddow. Even if you're a casual consumer of MS NOW, formerly MSNBC, you know the names: anchors like Chris Hayes, Stephanie Ruhl, and yes, the one and only Rachel Maddow. The network has built a stable of talent who've amassed a massive number of casual viewers, plenty of fans and more than a few obsessives. Now, the network's president, Rebecca Kutler, is looking to build that entire audience into something more akin to a fandom--turning casual viewers and fanatics alike, whether on TV or online, into paying members of an MS NOW media universe. To do it, she's launching an ambitious subscription program, called Membership, designed to connect MS NOW consumers much more directly to the Hayeses and Maddows of the world. Sure, plenty of news providers now offer subscriptions, WIRED included (and by the way, you can subscribe here). But what struck me about Kutler and Co.'s efforts was both their methodical approach--they surveyed 18,000 people before landing on a final offering--and their resolute focus on MS NOW's deep bench of talent as the locus of their paid program.

Look Up Trending Now Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Creator Playbook Say More Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Switch Off Mashable Voices Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List All Series From Laverne Cox's powerful chat with Keke Palmer to MUNA on'Gaydar.' Shannon Connellan is Mashable's Senior Editor, General Assignments, based in London. She has been Mashable's UK Editor (and still manages the illustrious UK team) and Australia Editor, but emotionally, she lives searching for . A Tomatometer-approved critic, Shannon writes about entertainment, tech, social good, science, culture, and Australian horror, and loves to nerd out with movie stars, filmmakers, and TV creators . All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. And how to push back against the price hikes. Ad-free streaming used to be one of the biggest benefits of cutting the cable TV cord. Now it's become a luxury. Inspired by some new research into the growing price gap between ad-supported and ad-free streaming, I decided to calculate how much the cost to avoid commercials has increased over time.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Hopefully, it'll save me some money, even if it doesn't last. After 17 uninterrupted years of Netflix membership, I just hit the cancellation button. Netflix was the main reason I was able to cut the cable TV cord way back in 2008, and since then it's been our home's streaming staple. Even as we cycled through other services, Netflix was worth keeping because it usually had something we wanted to watch.

YouTube and X Have Become'Gateways' to Nudify Apps A new study found that social media platforms are referring people to sites where they can create nonconsensual, sexually explicit deepfakes for as little as $1 an image. Most mainstream social media platforms have strict guidelines preventing the dissemination of nonconsensual intimate images (NCII), or sexually explicit photos and videos. But a new report finds that many social media platforms directly refer users to such content. The report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an anti-extremism and anti-disinformation organization, analyzes the online ecosystem that enables the proliferation of so-called "nudify" apps and websites, which allow users to digitally undress people without their consent. The study, which was published on Monday, looked at the top 10 apps and websites used to make nonconsensual explicit deepfakes, as well as how people are finding them.

Five big questions about the UK's under-16s social media ban After the government's announcement on Monday, we know a social media ban is coming for under-16s in the UK . However, details on which apps are and are not included, besides those named by the government, and how the measures will extend to gaming sites like Roblox, remain sparse. And many are already asking whether enforcing the ban will mean cracking down on virtual private networks (VPNs), which can disguise someone's location online. Ministers have said they will provide an update on further restrictions like potential curfews, curbing of addictive features like infinite scroll and AI chatbots, in July. But here are some of the big unanswered questions about the UK social media ban.

At 21, Speed has pushed the limits of streaming by transforming a distinctly solo format into a global group chat. His song for this year's World Cup is becoming the tournament's unofficial anthem. Streamer IShowSpeed is a huge soccer fan who plans to bring this year's World Cup to his millions of followers. In the days leading up to the 2026 World Cup, the streamer IShowSpeed--one of the most watched people on the planet, who occasionally moonlights as a rapper--released the music video " World Cup (Champions)," a song about flexing national pride where he mentions all 48 teams. As with everything the 21-year-old born Darren Watkins Jr. does, the video was instantly everywhere. The song racked up over 7 million views on YouTube in under 24 hours. The internet rushed to christen it as the anthem of the tournament, even though the World Cup already has one. FIFA, following a ridiculous outpouring from fans and perhaps realizing the massive instant exposure he could bring, added the song to its official album.

Text-to-video generative models convert textual prompts into dynamic visual content, offering wide-ranging applications in film production, gaming, and education. However, their real-world performance often falls short of user expectations. One key reason is that these models have not been trained on videos related to some topics users want to create. In this paper, we propose VideoUFO, the first Video dataset specifically curated to align with Users' FOcus in real-world scenarios. Beyond this, our VideoUFO also features: (1) minimal (0.29\%) overlap with existing video datasets, and (2) videos searched exclusively via YouTube's official API under the Creative Commons license.

Eyes in the tech world have turned toward Mountain View, California this week. The San Francisco Bay Area city is where Google's headquarters is located, making it a logical place to hold the company's annual developer conference. That's right, gang, Google I/O 2026 kicked off on Tuesday with the usual opening keynote, which is where the company reveals what's arguably the event's most relevant info for consumers. Google made a ton of Android announcements last week, so its mobile ecosystem wasn't really on the agenda. But what else could the onus possibly have been on if not AI? We heard the word Gemini more times than I could possibly care to count, and the company had many updates to share on that front. Search, Google's longtime bread and butter, was a big focus of the event. The company talked up a new Ask YouTube feature as well as changes to AI subscription pricing and Workspace features like Docs and Gmail.