Technologies
Instagram CEO testifies before Congress for the first time: 5 takeaways
US lawmakers expressed their distrust in the company even as the executive tried to assure them the company was committed to keeping young users safe.

Near the end of a more than two-hour congressional hearing, Sen. Marsha Blackburn gave Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri a chance to speak directly to parents whose children have been harmed by the platform.
«We’re not talking to people that have ever had any kind of response from Instagram and you have broken these children’s lives and you have broken these parents’ hearts,» Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, told Mosseri on Wednesday.
«To any parent who’s lost a child or even had a child hurt themselves, I can’t begin to imagine what that would be like for one of my three boys. As the head of Instagram, it’s my responsibility to do all I can to keep people safe. I’ve been committed to that for years. I’m going to continue to do so,» Mosseri responded.
US lawmakers weren’t satisfied with Mosseri’s reply. The executive was testifying during a Senate hearing, titled «Protecting Kids Online: Instagram and Reforms for Young Users,» that focused on what Instagram, which is owned by Meta, knows about the impact of its service on young people. Mosseri’s testimony comes at an uncomfortable moment for Instagram and Facebook, which rebranded itself as Meta. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager turned whistleblower, leaked a trove of internal research to Congress and the US Securities and Exchange Commission before leaving the company in May.
Lawmakers still don’t trust Instagram to self-regulate
Lawmakers kicked off the hearing by expressing their frustration that not much has changed to safeguard children online. In September, Antigone Davis, who runs Facebook’s global safety operations, appeared before the same subcommittee. The Senate panel also held a hearing in October about online child safety with executives from Snapchat, TikTok and Google-owned YouTube.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said his office created a fake Instagram account on a Monday for a teenager and the user was still shown recommendations for eating disorder content. The example was one of several anecdotes lawmakers brought up to illustrate how enforcement of Instagram’s rules falls short.
«The resounding bipartisan message from this committee is legislation is coming. We can’t rely on trust anymore. We can’t rely on self policing. It’s what parents and our children are demanding,» he said.
Ahead of the hearing, Instagram also announced new tools, including a feature that reminds people to take a break from the platform, to demonstrate that the company is serious about the mental health of its users.
Blumenthal said the new safety tools Instagram released «fall way short of what we need» — and should have been released earlier.
Instagram pushes for the creation of an industry body
Mosseri told US lawmakers that keeping young people safe online is «not just about one company.» One idea he pushed during the hearing is the creation of an industry body to determine best practices for protecting young people online such as how to verify a user’s age and to build parental controls.
Citing a survey from Forrester, Mosseri also noted it appears that more teens are using short-form video app TikTok and Google-owned YouTube more than Instagram.
Companies like Instagram «should have to adhere to these standards» to earn protections under Section 230, a federal law that shields online platforms from liability for user-generated content, he said.
Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and other lawmakers didn’t appear to support that idea.
«Your idea of regulation is an industry group creating standards that your company follows. That’s self regulation, that status quo and that just won’t cut it,» Markey said.
Instagram Kids isn’t permanently off the table
In September, Instagram said it was pausing the development of a version of the photo-sharing app for children under 13-years-old known as Instagram Kids. Instagram says the project is meant to give parents more control over the social media usage of kids between the ages of 10 to 12 years old who may already be on the app.
But the project raised concerns from child advocacy groups who say kids aren’t developmentally equipped to deal with the social comparison and mental health risks that come with being on Instagram.
During the hearing, Blumenthal asked if Mosseri would commit to permanently pause Instagram Kids. Mosseri said what he could commit to is that no child between the ages of 10 to 12 if the company ever managed to build Instagram Kids would have access to the «without their explicit parental consent.»
Teen accounts created on the web don’t default to private
Instagram said in July that users under the age of 16, or 18 in some countries, will have their accounts set to private by default.
Blackburn, though, pointed out her staff created a fake Instagram account for a 15-year-old girl but it defaulted as public not private.
«While Instagram is touting all these safety measures, they aren’t even making sure the safety measures are in effect,» she said.
Mosseri said accounts for teenagers created on a mobile device do default to private but that’s not the case when accounts are created on the web.
«We will correct that quickly,» he said.
Instagram could bring back the chronological feed next year
Mosseri said during the hearing he thinks users should have more control over their experience on Instagram, including the ability to view their feed chronologically. The company got rid of the chronological feed in 2016 and shows posts that users are more likely to be interested in based on activity such as what users «liked.»
Instagram is working on a way to pick the people users want to see at the top of their feed and a chronological version of Instagram.
«I wish I had a specific month to tell you right now, but right now we’re targeting the first quarter of next year,» Mosseri said.
Technologies
Marvel Rivals’ Sharknado Team-Up Ability Cements the Game’s Fun Direction
This is a wacky, wild superhero game at its core — and superheroes aren’t perfectly balanced.

In Marvel Rivals Season 2.5, team-up abilities are going full camp. Keep your head down, because the sharknado is coming to gobble you up — and resistance is futile.
The Season 2 balance patch was the first one to make wide-reaching changes to the game’s iconic team-up abilities, and the midseason patch is about to arrive with a similar shakeup. Gone are the days of the Punisher’s infinite ammo and Spider-Man’s symbiote one-shot combo.
Now, Jeff the Shark can combine his ultimate ability with Storm’s tornado as a nod to one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen — and the little land shark can also team up with Venom to heal nearby teammates through symbiotic tendrils. Yes, that evil shark is getting two new team-up abilities in a single patch. It’s the type of lopsided favoritism that keeps me up at night.
These team-ups are fun ideas, but based on the team compositions I see in Diamond and above, I’d venture to guess they won’t get much playtime in highly competitive matches — even with these cooperative boosts, Jeff just doesn’t compete with more effective strategists. Instead, I think these gimmicks are here because what seems like publisher NetEase’s real No. 1 priority is providing different outlets for players to let loose as their favorite superheroes.
Maintaining the Marvel power fantasy
Marvel Rivals is first and foremost a game about stepping into the shoes of some of the most popular superheroes in the world. Comic books are a great storytelling medium — but they’re also a visual spectacle that will just as often fall back on the «rule of cool.»
It wouldn’t feel right playing as Wolverine if you didn’t have access to the iconic Fastball Special, where he’s picked up and tossed like a football by Colossus (or in Rivals, by Hulk or Thing). Giving up your autonomy to another player rarely goes well, and it’s not like the ability is all that useful — unless you’re one of the best players in the world with Rocket Raccoon’s rocket boots — but it’s an integral part of Wolverine’s combat style.
The same principle applies to Captain America and the Winter Soldier. These characters have known each other for nearly a century. They grew up together in Brooklyn. They’re going to combine their combat styles in a special move.
Is the reverberating slam between Bucky’s metal arm and Steve’s vibranium shield all that great? Not really, because Bucky likely has to be out of position to make use of it. But it’s extremely cool to use and makes players feel like they’re more fully embodying these characters.
That brings us to what will surely be the game’s most infamous combo. The Jeff-nado started out as a Marvel Rivals community joke, and now it’s going to be a real team-up. How often will Storm and Jeff realistically combine their ultimate abilities? I can’t imagine seeing it in many games, but the interaction exists for Jeff players that want to ride the lightning, and that is quite simply cool.
NetEase has designed a game where not every team-up ability should be expected to reshape the entire meta, and I think that’s a great thing. What matters to the developers is that you’re able to enjoy experiencing gameplay for Marvel heroes that isn’t replicated elsewhere.
Each update provides clarity on Marvel Rivals’ competitive mode
If imaginative power fantasy is NetEase’s No. 1 priority, that means the competitive balance of Marvel Rivals takes a backseat. And that’s OK — there are folks who argue that the incessant changes, nerfs and reworks to Overwatch characters have made them less fun over the years, especially oddballs like Sombra and Mercy that are very different from their original incarnations.
Counter to what a game community’s sweatiest players might say, a game is fine when it’s unbalanced. It’s fun to have abilities that aren’t as useful as others, but are super bombastic and flashy. It’s OK to have characters that just won’t make the cut in higher levels of play. There have long been signs that Marvel Rivals is not being designed as a hyper-competitive game — there don’t seem to be Overwatch League-level ambitions at work here.
Marvel Rivals’ competitive system has been criticized since launch, with many players reaching ranks as high as grandmaster with a sub-50% win rate. The rank distribution is extremely generous compared with other games (like Overwatch), and many players who actively play competitive matches will gravitate toward the top.
The recent introduction of Chrono Shield Cards has made it even easier to escape the lower skill brackets, and games in the middle ranks like Platinum and Diamond sometimes feel like a coin flip depending on how skilled the players that queue into the game are. The skill gap between players in each rank is far too wide, and that seems to be how the system is intended to function.
But that relaxed vision for the game may not last, as it seems like NetEase wants to have its cake and eat it too. The Marvel Rivals Ignite 2025 tournament is being backed with a smooth $3 million prize pool. Funky team-ups and a more casual ranked ladder are one thing, but that’s serious money, and it signals that NetEase wants players to get serious about winning.
Marvel Rivals is moving in two distinct directions at once. The actual patches lead me to believe that the developers want this game to be fun first, balancing it around unique hero ability interactions and lower-ranked casual play that the presumed majority of players will experience. The tournament money and the player culture are heavier stuff, and there are a lot of people who want to compete to be the best in Marvel Rivals.
Trying to split the difference will lead the game down a path that ends in an identity crisis. It happened to Overwatch before, and Marvel Rivals isn’t immune to falling into the same traps. If the Jeff-nado is any indication of things to come, I hope the devs at NetEase stick to their guns and keep balancing the game around the Marvel power fantasy rather than prioritize competitive balance for high-tier tournament players and One Above All-ranked streamers.
Technologies
Anthropic Launched New Claude 4 Gen AI Models. Here’s What They Do
The models can now use tools like web searches during extended reasoning tasks.

The latest versions of Anthropic’s Claude generative AI models made their debut Thursday, including a heavier-duty model built specifically for coding and complex tasks.
Anthropic launched the new Claude 4 Opus and Claude 4 Sonnet models during its Code with Claude developer conference, and executives said the new tools mark a significant step forward in terms of reasoning and deep thinking skills.
The company launched the prior model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, in February. Since then, competing AI developers have also upped their game. OpenAI released GPT-4.1 in April, with an emphasis on an expanded context window, along with the new o3 reasoning model family. Google followed in early May with an updated version of Gemini 2.5 Pro that it said is better at coding.
Claude 4 Opus is a larger, more resource-intensive model built to handle particularly difficult challenges. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said test users have seen it quickly handle tasks that might have taken a person several hours to complete.
«In many ways, as we’re often finding with large models, the benchmarks don’t fully do justice to it,» he said during the keynote event.
Claude 4 Sonnet is a leaner model, with improvements built on Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet model. The 3.7 model often had problems with overeagerness and sometimes did more than the person asked it to do, Amodei said. While it’s a less resource-intensive model, it still performs well, he said.
«It actually does just as well as Opus on some of the coding benchmarks, but I think it’s leaner and more narrowly focused,» Amodei said.
Anthropic said the models have a new capability, still being beta tested, in which they can use tools like web searches while engaged in extended reasoning. The models can alternate between reasoning and using tools to get better responses to complex queries.
The models both offer near-instant response modes and extended thinking modes.
All of the paid plans offer both Opus and Sonnet models, while the free plan just has the Sonnet model.
Technologies
Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for May 23, #446
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle No. 446 for May 23.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.
Today’s NYT Strands puzzle has a humorous title, and if you understand the reference, you’ll know what words to look for. If you need hints and answers, read on.
I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.
If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.
Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far
Hint for today’s Strands puzzle
Today’s Strands theme is: The musical fruit
If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: There are magical ones in fairy tales.
Clue words to unlock in-game hints
Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints, but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:
- REEK, GADS, PLAY, PLAYS, PITA, DIAL, FALL, PALL, PALLS, FALLS, GENIE, BEEN, LACK, DENY, NILL.
Answers for today’s Strands puzzle
These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you’ve got all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:
- FAVA, NAVY, BLACK, GREEN, PINTO, KIDNEY, CANNELLINI
Today’s Strands spangram
Today’s Strands spangram is BEANSALAD. To find it, start with the B that’s three letters to the right on the top row, and wind down.
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