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For most social media companies, getting users to doomscroll as much as possible is the name of the game. But Pinterest is now encouraging its young users to put their phones away during class. The mood board app is currently demoing a new pop-up for users aged 13 to 17 in the U.S. and Canada that will prompt them to stop scrolling and close the app during class, according to a report from The Verge. Focus is a beautiful thing, a screenshot of the prompt reads. Stay in the moment by putting Pinterest down and pausing notifs until the school bell rings. The pop-up is set to appear between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. on school days, and Pinterest plans to roll out the test to millions of young users. The new test feature comes as, just this week, a new report from Pew Research found that nearly half of teens think social media has a mostly negative mental effect on people their age. Over the past several years, the issue of social media regulation for young users has become a prominent concern both for lawmakers and for schools. More than 40% of Pinterest’s users are Gen Z. Now, in a small way, the company is taking matters into its own hands. Phones are increasingly distracting in the classroom, teachers say In a Pew Research survey this January, 72% of high school teachers and 33% of middle school teachers reported cellphone distractions as a major problem in school. And another study from the think tank, published this Tuesday, found that 48% of teens aged 13 to 17 think that social media has a mostly negative effect on their peers, up 32% from a similar study question back in 2022 (though most respondents in 2025 were ambivalent about social medias affect on themselves.) For years, experts have warned users of social medias addicting and often distracting algorithmic propertiesand the effects of these properties on school-age users is an increasingly widespread topic of discussion, as well as some potential legislation. Most recently, U.S. legislators have proposed two pieces of legislation to protect young social media users: the Children and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act, nicknamed COPPA 2.0, which would ban targeted advertising to minors and data collection without their consent; and the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would make explicit a duty of care that social media companies have when it comes to preventing harm to minors using their products. Both COPPA 2.0 and KOSA passed in the Senate this July, but have been stalled since then. (COPPA 2.0 was reintroduced in the Senate earlier this month.) While these wide-reaching pieces of legislation have not yet passed, momentum around child internet health and safety has resulted in several major outcomes. In June, for example, New York State passed legislation limiting addictive social media feeds for children. In September, Instagram seemingly decided to get out ahead of potential changes by introducing a new account type for teens. And, according to the health policy organization KFF, nine states have passed statewide policies that ban or restrict cellphone use in schools as of March 2025. How Pinterest is implementing more proactive safeguards for teens Despite these trends toward safeguarding school-age students’ social media use, Pinterest claims its pop-up test will be the first time a tech company tries a proactive feature to keep kids focused in class. At Pinterest, we believe that schools can take advantage of all that technology has to offer students, while minimizing the harms and distractions, Wanji Walcott, Pinterests chief legal and business affairs officer, told The Verge of the pop-up. Tech companies need to work together with teachers, parents, and policymakers to build solutions that ensure in the hands of our students, smartphones are tools, not distractions. This isnt the first time that Pinterests leadership has expressed an interest in implementing more guardrails around young peoples social media use, nor is it the first instance of the app adding new safety features for teens. Pinterest CEO Bill Ready has led the company for nearly three years, during which time he has called for a national digital ID system to verify users ages and declared his support for KOSA. Back in 2023, an NBC News investigation found that adult men were using Pinterest to create mood boards of young girls. In response, the platform created new default privacy settings for users 16 and underincluding keeping all teen accounts private and undiscoverable, adding new limits to messaging functions, and making age verification more stringent. In addition, Pinterest doesnt allow content that might be perceived as promoting body-shaming (like weight loss ads, for example) and it has removed filters from its beauty testing features. Making Pinterest safer for teens seems to be something of a personal mission for Ready, who spoke in favor of phone-free schools at this years World Economic Forum. He shared in an interview at the time, Its so objectively clear that studnts will benefit from fewer distractions in the classroom. It will benefit their learning. A key difference between Pinterest and other platforms is that we do not optimize for time spent, but rather time spent welltime spent on joyful, inspiring experiences, Ready wrote in a January email to Fast Company. Were betting on hope, not hatred as the driver of engagement on Pinterest.
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E-Commerce
The elephant enclosure at your local zoo is an interesting place to be. But until 20 years ago, it was somewhere youd encounter in personwith reverence and intimacy. A video uploaded by YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim 20 years ago today changed that. Karim wanted to test out the capabilities of a new website he and his colleagues had developedwhat they called YouTubeand needed content to share with the world. It was designed to be filler: That much is evident in the halting presentation of the 19-second video. But beyond its role as a historical footnotethe video that gave birth to YouTube, the cultural phenomenon that has reshaped our consumption habits and redefined celebrity over the past two decadesMe at the zoo” changed our lives in another, subtler way. It normalized the idea of a share-all society. Today, if you visited the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo, as Karim did 20 years ago, youd likely find people viewing the animals through their cellphone screens as much as with their own eyes. And thats because of that video, and the behaviors it introduced to us. More kids today want to be YouTubers than astronauts. Creators who built their names on YouTube now top the list of celebrities most recognized by younger generations. But its not just that YouTube became a job, or that YouTubers became public figures. Me at the zoo” and all that followed helped instill the idea that we are all content creators by default, and that our lives are meant to be shared. This shift wasnt driven by YouTube alone, admittedly. But YouTube has been the most visible force guiding this cultural direction. Its thanks to YouTubes influence that we now take photos of our meals before eating, snap selfies in moments of crisis, and shape our lives to fit tidy, pithy narratives on platforms like X and Bluesky. YouTubes early motto, Broadcast Yourself, was a democratizing force, a clarion call to shift our behaviors. Its why we now see videos of subway fights, supermarket arguments, and other spontaneous snippets of lifefragments that form an intoxicating, always-on feed to follow and engage with. Two decades on from “Me at the zoo,” much will be written about how YouTube has reshaped entertainment. Ive contributed to that discussion myself, having written a book on the platform and its rise. But I believe YouTubes deeper, more enduring impact lies at the foundation of society itself. At the high end, through creators like MrBeast, YouTube videos now resemble big-budget TV series or Netflix productions more than off-the-cuff vlogs. Yet it all began with a simple, unscripted moment at the zoo. “Me at the zoo” normalized sharing the mundane with strangersand turning it into a performance. It ushered in a performative culture and a share-all society that were still trying to understand. In doing so, it also quietly redefined what counts as meaningful or noteworthy, elevating the everyday into something worthy of an audience. And in the long run, that may be the legacy YouTube is best remembered for.
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E-Commerce
In early April, around 20 miles off the coast of Long Island, construction crews started working on Empire Wind 1, an offshore wind farm designed to power as many as half a million homes in New York. But on April 16, the Trump administration told the project to stop work. Doug Burgum, the Interior secretary, claimed that the approval process had been rusheddespite the fact that the federal review of using the area for a wind farm began in 2011. After an initial environmental analysis of the area, the government auctioned off a lease in late 2016. A Norwegian company called Equinor (previously known as Statoil) was officially awarded the lease in 2017during Trumps first term. At that point, despite Trump’s antipathy for wind projects, he wasn’t actively opposing them. The company began planning Empire Wind. From 2021 to 2023, the government undertook a detailed environmental review of everything from the projects potential impacts on wildlife and ships to its visual impact from shore. By the end of 2023, the project had permits for construction. The idea that the review was rushed is just preposterous, says Douglas Nowacek, a professor at Duke Universitys Marine Science and Conservation Marine Lab who had planned to begin a study of whales in the construction area this month. (Spoiler: Nowacek says theres no evidence that wind farms kill whales, despite the arguments from anti-wind activists.) From the actual start in 2011, there was just an enormous amount of work and data that was collected over that time to get to the point of actually issuing a record of decision and then approving a construction and operation plan, says Elizabeth Klein, who served as the director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the agency that leads regulatory approval for offshore wind projects, under President Biden. The process involves determining whether a project complies with multiple different environmental laws, from the Clean Water Act to the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and evaluating other impacts, including potential economic harm to the fishing industry. Multiple agencies are involved. The analysis looked in detail at potential impacts on wildlife, including whales. Whales have been experiencing an “unusual mortality event,” or a spike in the deaths of certain species, for nearly a decade on the East Coast. But scientists say that the primary causes are strikes from ships and entanglement in fishing gear. Part of the increase in deaths is likely linked to climate change: As ocean temperatures heat up, whales are moving to different areas that coincide with more ship traffic. New development of wind farms is unlikely to be playing a role. “The bottom line is, there’s no evidence whatsoever connecting any [whale] deaths and offshore wind development in any of its stages,” says Nowacek. One recent study looked in detail at where whales were dying and where wind development was occurring, and “there was no overlap in time or space,” he says. That isn’t to say building giant wind turbines has no impact on wildlife at all. But the effects can be mitigated; when piles are driven into the ocean floor to support a turbine, for example, it’s possible to use “curtains” of bubbles to help reduce the noise that’s created. The process lasts for several hours, but then it’s over. In contrast, surveying for oil and gas drilling in the ocean is thousands of times louder. The Trump administration is pushing hard to expand offshore oil and gas development. Groups that oppose offshore wind development often argue that their concern is for whaleswhile failing to lobby for changes that are proven to help the animals, such as speed limits for boats and ships. And many of the “grassroots” groups that have been fighting offshore wind have actually been funded by a right-wing think tanks with ties to the oil industry. In late March, a Republican representative from New Jersey, Chris Smith, wrote to Burgum urging him to block construction of Empire Wind. He talked about “potential inadequacies in environmental reviews,” and raised other supposed risks that have been dismissed after years of research. (Studies and simulations have found that ship collisions with offshore wind turbines, for example, aren’t a significant risk when navigation is properly managed.) It’s not clear what will happen next. Equinor has a strong case to sue the government to be able to continue its work. “It’s completely unclear to me, and other observers, what legal authority [the Trump administration] is using to strip Empire of its rights at this point,” says Klein. “It has been given the approval to move forward.” (Equinor did not respond to a request for comment.) If the wind farm had been built on schedule, it would have been completed by 2027. If the project can’t move forward, it would be an economic loss for the region. An onshore terminal for the project in Brooklyn, which would connect the power from the wind turbines to the local grid, was already under construction and creating hundreds of union jobs. Equinor was committed to using local materials, including stone ferried down the Hudson River from upstate New York. The company was investing millions of dollars in workforce development and training. “The ancillary benefits of that project are huge, and it really does amount to billions of dollars of investment in the U.S.,” says Klein. “This administration professes that it wants to create an environment welcoming business and economic development in the U.S., and here you’re taking an industry that was building itself up here in the U.S., and really creating investment here at home, and trying to destroy it for no good reason.” If the project doesn’t happen, it also would be a loss for the climate. “Offshore wind for certain communities, particularly on the East Coast, is really the only viable way to meet climate goals and to transition to the levels of clean energy needed,” she says. The region doesn’t have enough space for large-scale solar farms. (Without growth in offshore wind, it will also be harder to keep up with the rapidly increasing demand for energy on the grid.) If emissions don’t shrink as quickly, that’s also obviously bad for whales. “The greatest threat to marine mammals, including whales, is actually climate change,” says Klein. “And these projects are meant to address that issue.”
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E-Commerce
Curt Covert would love for people to play his latest board gamebut with sky-high tariffs, hes not sure anyone ever will. At 54%, I had a plan, Covert tells Fast Company, referring to a tariff rate on imports from China imposed by the Trump administration in early April. That rate has nearly tripled since. His reponse: 145% brings business to a standstill. It is absolutely crushing to my business. Covert is the owner of Smirk & Dagger Games, a small Connecticut-based company that has been making quirky board games for more than 20 years. Its latest title, A Place for All My Booksa game designed for introverts with a love of literaturewas backed by 16,000-plus Kickstarter supporters, raising more than $1.1 million in pledged orders. This was our biggest campaign ever, Covert says. Around 13,000 of those backers are in the United States. Now Covert is trying to figure out how to fulfill their orders amid a trade war, since the game is manufactured in China. The tariffs make it impossible to import anything, he says. Even more pressure on creators Covert isnt alone. In recent weeks, numerous Kickstarter creators have used the platform to warn backers about shipping delays, rising costs, and other uncertainties. We have to revisit the numbers again, and again, and perhaps again, one creator wrote in an update. We’re in one helluva predicament right now, admitted another. Kickstarter has addressed the issue in multiple blog posts and is exploring new ways to support creators. While the platform hasnt seen a spike in canceled campaigns, a spokesperson acknowledged the pressure in a statement: Tariffs and rising production costs are putting even more pressure on independent creators, many of whom already operate with limited resources and tight margins. If these changes remain in place long term, theyll continue to pose real challenges around pricing, fulfillment, and backer communication. Kickstarter gained prominence for ambitious consumer electronics projects like the Pebble smartwatch, but it has long been a favorite of smaller creators, particularly in the board game community. To date, the platform has hosted nearly 1 million game campaigns, which have raised more than $2.5 billion. Much of that funding supported games manufactured in China, according to George Lam, former head of Kickstarter outreach in Asia and now a crowdfunding consultant. There just arent manufacturing sites outside of China that can do this, he says. Those creators now face steep import taxes. The board game space is very fragile, Lam adds. A majority of them are really small companies or mom-and-pop-type operations. A stopgap measure to buy time Covert recently got a taste of the tariffs impact when a delayed shipment of games was hit with a 20% tariff for leaving port two days after a grace period endedresulting in a $60,000 import tax bill. Now hes preparing to ship $500,000 worth of games to the U.S. and is scrambling to avoid paying what could amount to more than $700,000 in tariffs. Hes spent the past few weeks working on contingency plans, and believes hes found a temporary work-around. Logistics companies have long used so-called bonded warehouses in the U.S., where imported goods can be stored tariff-free and are taxed only when they leave the warehouse. Covert hopes to use one of these facilities to buy time, ideally until a new trade agreement is reached. If the trade war persists, he may need to ask Kickstarter backers to pay significantly more to receive their games on time. You can ask for a little patience, says Covert. But at some point, the backers will lose confidence. One of the Trump administrations justifications for the tariffs is to bring manufacturing back to the United States. Covert is skeptical. Most of his games cant be produced domestically, and the few that could would be far more expensive. A simple party game with cards that normally would retail for $20 . . . If I produced it here in the U.S., it would be a $50 dollar card gameand no one in the U.S. would pay [that]. Could new U.S. factories fill the gap? That takes three to five years, not three to five months, Covert says. Chinese manufacturers might actually benefit Ironically, Chinese creators might be the ones to benefit most from the current situation. Many are large manufacturers that have pivoted from producing goods for Western brands to launching their own products on platforms like Kickstarter. They’re in a much better position to cut costs, or find a different tariff code, or find a better logistics partner, says Lam. It’s what they do all day. Still, Lam believes there may be a silver lining for Western creators. If global trade slows down, so might shipping and marketing costs. The manufacturing cost of your product is often not the biggest cost on a per-unit basis, he says. If you sell something on Kickstarter, you might pay $15 to the factory to make it. But you might pay $40 [for ads on] Facebook to acquire one customer for it. Ad prices on platforms like Facebook have surged in recent years, driven by heavy spending from Chinese e-commerce giants like Temu and Shein. Now that these companies can no longer ship to the U.S. tariff-free, theyve started dialing back their ad budgets. Covert, however, remains unconvinced that any of this will help him get his new gameor any future titlesinto the U.S. without prohibitive costs. [Losing] the ability to print new games, and bring them in affordably would be the end of my company, he says. It wont [even] take a year.
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E-Commerce
You might have a go-to hot sauce already. But for the past year or so, Sichuan condiments brand Fly by Jing has been repositioning to capture mainstream heat seekers, and its subtle packaging update, rolling out now, is the DTC darlings latest move to optimize for its new distribution channel of choice: mass retail. To call the visual changes a rebrand would be a stretch, but the subtle updates point to how the company is pivoting its messaging for analog sales. Its packaging uses pared-down graphics and copy, with more negative space and a strict focus on must-have details that allow first-time buyers to quickly make a purchase decision just by looking at the product in hand. What is it? Whats it taste like? And what do I put it on? There’s three seconds that [consumers are] going to see you on-shelf before they make a decision, says Fly by Jing founder and CEO Jing Gao. In this context, Fly by Jing cares less about brand story. Instead, it designs packaging for the three-second rule. Pivot to retail The refresh comes at a time when retail partnerships are commonplace for brands that originated as direct-to-consumer startups. CPG olive oil brand Graza is in a slew of grocery stores, including Whole Foods. Brands like Rare Beauty, Dieux Skin, and Glossier have diversified e-comm sales with wholesale partnerships at big-box beauty retailer Sephora. IRL shopping experiences continue to be a vital avenue for product discovery and testing, even if many thought the pandemic might kill brick-and-mortar shopping for good. Gao views the broad adoption of retail among DTC companies as a result of the 2021 iOS 14 update, which prompted users to give apps tracking permission. More than 80% opted not to be tracked. This made it difficult for companies to analyze how well targeted ads worked, and therefore more costly to advertise on third-party sites like Facebook and Instagram. Gao sees that moment as the sunsetting of the golden era of DTC, when digital-first brands had to diversify to reach consumers. Fly by Jing was no exception. Fly by Jing has already been making retail inroads. Gao initially marketed the chili crisp as a premium product with a $15 price point. That included premium packaging that highlighted its specialized ingredient sourcing and rich history, in part as an effort to educate consumers and counter prevailing stereotypes around Chinese food as inherently cheap. Fly by Jing has since cut its price point by 30% to make the product more accessible and reach a broader consumer base as it seeks to expand. Gao says the company achieved this by economizing its packaging design with changes like shifting from a pricey embossed decal on glass to a paper label, and finding efficiencies in logistics and supply chain. Its products are now available in 11,000 stores nationwide, including at major national retailers like Target, Sprouts, Wegmans, Albertsons, Safeway, and Walmart. As of 2025, its in 4,000 Walmart stores. It has also expanded its product categories to include prepared noodles, which launched last year and are relaunching in stores next month with new packaging. The Asian foods category is itself becoming more crowded, with brands like Momofuku and ML (formerly Xiao Chi Jie) offering chili crisp and prepared noodles as well. Theres lots of opportunity to go around: The ethnic foods market, which includes Asian cuisine, is expected to reach $200 billion by 2032. Fly by Jing now makes the majority of its sales in retail and is profitable. Although Gao said the company’s tariffs had doubled at the time we spoke in early April, and this has tightened the company’s margins, there are no plans to change its sourcing. She says the company should be fine due to cost-savings measures previously put in place and increased velocity in stores. She describes this refresh as a key part of that. [Photo: Fly by Jing] Less-is-more labeling The brands previous packaging, launched in 2020, took a Dr. Bronners more-is-more approach that packed the label with copy and graphics related to the brand story. A Venn diagram in the center of the label included details such as its ingredients sourcing. That graphic has been replaced with a transparent window that allows shoppers to see the product inside. Previous copy described Gaos founder story, including the reclamation of her birth name, Jing, rather than the Americanized Jenny shed typically used. Now copy focuses on the products taste description and use case. The label still boasts the original line You will find yourself putting this on everythingthats the mainstream playmade more prominent by reducing other copy. One of just a few front-of-label callouts reads: Makes anything taste better. The brand also unified product names as variations of its fastet-selling store SKU, its Sichuan chili crisp, to increase in-store velocity and create a sense of familiarity across the product range. [Photo: Fly by Jing] Online, you could tell this rich brand story. We created a brand universe you can really dive deep into, says Gao. But as time went on and as retail became the dominant channel for us, now all of a sudden people are seeing us on shelves for the first time versus on their phone where they can learn more, dig in more. Thats where the aforementioned three-second rule came in. [Photo: Fly by Jing] Making mainstream moves The brand’s retail expansion also meant it was entering markets it hadnt engaged before, and consumers who were not a part of its initial customer base of well-traveled, international people [who are] plugged in, says Gao. It’s constantly thinking about how do we meet people where they are in terms of their understanding, in terms of their experience? Gao recalls a product demo at Costco. The key was to make the pitch fast to catch people as they walked by. So she simplified it by asking passerby if they wanted to try hot sauce. Then she explained the flavors. We were able to communicate very quickly what the differences were, Gao recalls. People were like, Oh, I want the sweet one, or I want the crunchy one. That was the insight of, okay, maybe we should just pare it back for people instead of calling it Chengdu Crunchthis is a cool name, but now it makes someone think it’s different from chili crisp, when really you use it the same way. It’s just a variation. [Photo: Fly by Jing] Gao describes one of her early goals as divorcing chili crisp from the idea that its a Chinese condiment that can be used only on Chinese cuisine. Product imagery includes chili crisp on pizza, eggs, avocado toast, and ice cream. That’s what really helped us to bridge the condiment into the mainstream, says Gao. But if you look at this old jar, that’s not immediately apparent because there’s such a rich story here. There’s so many layers that if someone were just to interact with it on a very basic [level], from an I just care what it tastes like standpoint, they’re not going to be able to uncover that. So we wanted to . . . present the top three things that you should know about it, and then open up the window and allow someone in. Then you’ll see [it] a bit differently now, right? The packaging design changes are indicative of the brands mainstream play, and an ambition to become a household product synonymous with a product category, like Cholula hot sauce or Huy Fong Sriracha. Can Fly by Jing become the Heinz of chili crisp? No matter the food, the brand wants new consumers to have the same inclination to reach for its jar and think Eggs, avocado toast, or dumplingsit has to be Fly by Jing.
Category:
E-Commerce
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