Sofia Elizabella Wyciślik-Wilson

Instagram head Adam Mosseri has ended 2025 in a reflective mood, looking at the social media trends he sees being the hallmarks of the year ahead. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he sees the onslaught of AI continuing, and has some thoughts about what this means and how to handle it.

Mosseri makes a couple of statements that are difficult to disagree with: “Deepfakes are getting better and better”, and “AI is generating photographs and videos indistinguishable from captured media”. Interestingly, though, he does not necessarily see this as a problem.

With the end of 2025 drawing ever closer WhatsApp is getting ready for its busiest period. As the clock strikes midnight around the world, a surge of messages will be sent over the platform, and Meta is using the arrival of 2026 as a launchpad for new features and options – as well as highlighting recent additions which lend themselves to this time of year.

The company has focused on the celebratory and connective nature of New Year, providing new ways to liven up the messages you send to friends and family. There is quite a lot here, from new stickers and call effects, to the arrival of animated stickers in Status updates.

Currently in beta testing, iPhone users are being given access to an enhanced and updated version of WhatsApp’s chat cleanup tool.

The feature – which allows for the deletion of messages and media in different ways – is not completely new, but it now offers greater control over what is deleted. The cleanup tool now provides a better balance between freeing up space and retaining the files that were shared in a chat.

If you have use BitLocker to secure files within Windows 11, you will almost certainly have noticed something of a performance hit. Microsoft is not unaware of this, and is taking steps to help improve things.

The company is rolling out hardware-accelerated BitLocker, which should help to provide a speed boost on systems with NVMe drives. The new approach helps to avoid bottlenecks which can massively impact on performance.

Depending on when you signed up for a Gmail account, and factoring in the uniqueness or otherwise of your name, your email address may be one you are happy with, or it could feel like a burden.

If you have become unhappy with the @gmail.com address you chose years ago, you have always been able to sign up for another account. But actually changing your email address is a different matter – and it is something that Google appears to be experimenting with.

Back in September, US software firm Red Hat suffered a security breach. The incident was not acknowledged until October, but even now the full impact of the breach is unfolding.

Japanese car maker Nissan has just confirmed that it was indirectly affected by the Red Hat security breach. As a result of this, detailed contact information for thousands of customers were accessed by hackers.

Ever mindful of security, the US has announced a ban on new foreign-made drones and components key to their manufacture. The Federal Communication Commission’s public notice says that uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) “pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons”.

The ban only applies to new devices and components, so anything which has already made its way into the US is unaffected. In implementing a blanket ban on all foreign-produced drones, there has been no need to publish a list of affected models.

There can be few people who have not interacted with ChatGPT over the last year, and you may be wondering how you have used the artificial intelligence tool.

In line with so many other online tools and services, as we approach the end of the year, ChatGPT is giving users the chance to look back over the previous 12 months in a review of the year. The predictably named “Your Year with ChatGPT” is available now.

Microsoft has released Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7523 (KB5072043) to the Dev and Beta Channels, bringing with it a number of important changes and additions. As is the case with so many updates to Windows 11 at the moment, this is heavy on the AI.

The difference this time is that Microsoft is starting to focus more on business users – starting by introducing Ask Copilot on the taskbar with Microsoft 365 Copilot. The taskbar is also now adorned with Agents, but not everything is related to artificial intelligence.

The end of the year means endless round ups of the best products, services and more. It also means that lookbacks such as Spotify Unwrapped are made available, and now X has decided to get in on the action by taking a look back at what the past year was like on Elon Musk’s social platform.

What does this look like? Number. Numbers and statistics. So, if stats are not your thing, look away not. Otherwise, let’s delve in and see what has been happening on X throughout 2025.

As we approach the end of 2025, you may be one of the many Android users expecting Google Assistant to be completely replaced by Gemini. Indeed, this was very much the plan that Google announced earlier in the year.

But as year end creeps up on us, the company has had a change of heart and is slowing down the pace of things. The precise new timescale is not really very clear at the moment, but Google has shared an update about how things will proceed.

Netflix has acquired Ready Player Me, a platform for creating avatars. It comes as the company moves deeper and deeper into the gaming arena.

The acquisition will give Netflix subscribers the chance to create customized avatars that can be used across gaming titles. It is a similar system to that found on other gaming networks.

There are some sites which are famous and others which are notorious; Anna’s Archive falls into the latter category. Ostensibly a pirate site from which ebooks can be downloaded, the site has billed itself as an archivist, preserving data and documents for the future.

The latest move by “the largest truly open library in human history” see the site “back[ing] up Spotify”. More than this, Spotify’s entire library of content is being released in a series of colossal torrents – and we mean huge.

All social media platforms are about connections, and Bluesky is no different. The problem that a social platform with a focus on privacy and security has is that it can be hard to track down people you know that you would like to connect to.

It is with this in mind that Bluesky is launching a new contact import feature called – somewhat uninspiringly – Find Friends. One of the aims, apart from connecting people, is to help cut down on spammy methods of tracking people down.

The seemingly never-ending story of TikTok and its place in the US could be coming to an end. A new deal between TikTok’s parent company ByteDance and US investors allows the social platform to continue operating in the country.

Reports from CNBC say that TikTok has signed an agreement to create a new US joint venture. The arrangement involves a number of big investors, and the resulting entity is known as TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC.