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Humor

Real estate agent asks his Gen Z employee to edit a work video and the result is hilarious

"This 100% caught my attention far more than whatever you were going to say."

@pridemoreproperties/Instagram

"Gen Z in the workforce is my favorite thing about life."

We've got to hand it to Gen Z—their tech savviness and sarcastic humor is a potent combination for comedy. Add to that a blatant disregard for workplace decorum, and you’ve got a recipe for some grade A viral entertainment. Mike Hege, a realtor at Pridemore Properties in North Carolina, recently learned this after asking the company's 27-year-old video marketing manager to make a video for his Instagram and TikTok pages.

The employee did as asked, but took on some, shall we say…creative touches that Hege certainly didn’t expect. As the phrase “Asked my Gen Z employee to edit a video for me, and this is what I got!” appears on screen, viewers witness a compilation video made entirely of Hege taking various inhales, presumably before going into whatever spiel he had intended to be recorded.

Essentially, this employee showcased the infamous “millennial pause” in action. Over and over again. She even threw in some awkward hair zhuzhing for good measure.

Watch:

See on Instagram

Clearly this employee was onto something because the video has already racked up a little over 4 million likes on Instagram. Several viewers suggested a raise was called for.

“Give her a raise because this 100% caught my attention far more then whatever you were going to say,” one person wrote.

Another added, ““Her audacity is so respectable tho.”

Of course, just type in “Letting Gen Z Edit My Videos” on TikTok, and you’ll see that Hege isn’t the only one giving his videos the Gen Z treatment. Check out this one from the Goodwill of North Georgia. Poor fella giving the presentation made the mistake of saying “it’s okay, he’ll edit that out” after making a flub. It was, of course, not edited out.

@goodwill_ng
We've definitely got things😊

There’s also this delightfully quirky one from the Poe Museum, home of “a wide variety of chairs”…where you’ll learn that “you can never have too many flat Edgars.”

@poemuseum
We’ve got chairs at the Poe Museum! #edgarallanpoe #Richmond #poe #PoeMuseum

“Gen Z in the workforce is my favorite thing about life,” a viewer wrote.

Even celebrities aren't are benefiting from Gen Z's *unique* marketing abilities. In July 2024, Ed Sheeran announced the final leg of his Mathematics Tour with a TikTok captioned, "My video editor is gen z and tells me this is how people announce tours now." It's delightfully unhinged. Watch:

@edsheeran
My video editor is gen z and tells me this is how people announce tours now

As for Hege and his employee, he told TODAY that his company wanted their social media presence to reflect “authenticity” and “humanity,” and that the Gen Z employee completely succeeded in her task.

“This was the editor’s way of showcasing that we’re real people and that we can have fun and be on the lighter side,” he said, adding that she’s been “crushing it” since her employment began. So, maybe that raise isn’t so far off after all.

This article originally appeared last year. It has been updated.

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Celebrity

'God, what if I was 15?': Julia Roberts responds to being shamed in photo with niece Emma Roberts

It opened her eyes to the toxicity of social media.

via U.S. Department of State/Wikimedia Commons and Dominick D/Wikimedia Commons

Julia Roberts and Emma Roberts

Actress Julia Roberts was late to the game when it came to joining social media, so she was blown away when she finally saw first-hand how toxic it could be. She started an Instagram account in June of 2018 and, shortly after, was the target of trolls mocking her appearance in a post by her niece.

Roberts was upset about the negative comments people made about her looks and then was gutted when she considered social media's effect on young women. In a 2018 interview with Oprah Winfrey for Harper’s Bazaar, Julia recounted the story:

“Although something did happen recently on my niece Emma’s Instagram that I think taught me a lot about what it’s like being a young person in today’s society. One weekend morning Emma slept over, and we got up and were having tea and playing cards and having this beautiful morning, and then a couple of days later, she posted a picture of us,” Roberts recalled.

“And the number of people who felt absolutely required to talk about how terrible I looked in the picture—that I’m not aging well, that I look like a man, why would she even post a picture like this when I look that terrible!” she continued. “And I was amazed at how that made me feel. I’m a 50-year-old woman and I know who I am, and still my feelings got hurt. I was sad that people couldn’t see the point of it, the sweetness of it, the absolute shining joy of that photo. I thought, ‘What if I was 15?’”

body shaming, instagram, social media, body, dysmorphia A young woman looks uncomfortable in the mirror. Image via Canva.

Beauty influencer Samantha Marika combined the audio of Julia telling the story, added it to the candid photo of her and Emma, and posted it to Instagram, and it went viral. The post has since been deleted, but in February 2024, actress and author Ali Wentworth posted a similar video of the photo of Roberts with her niece along with other photos from throughout the actress' life. Her words to Oprah play over the video and Wentworth applauds Roberts for being "spot on about the corrosive nature of social media and its effect on younger generations" in the caption.

See on Instagram

In short, Julia’s concerns about teenage mental health aren’t unfounded.

A 2022 report by Pew Research shows that online bullying is pervasive among teenagers and looks are a common target. “Nearly half of U.S. teens have been bullied or harassed online, with physical appearance being seen as a relatively common reason why,” the report said. “Older teen girls are especially likely to report being targeted by online abuse overall and because of their appearance.” The Cyberbullying Research Center confirms these findings, noting in 2023 that "adolescent girls are morel likely to have experienced cyberbullying in their lifetimes (59.2% vs. 49.5% for adolescent boys).

bullies, cyberbullying, teen girls, adolescent girls, social media Girls experience cyberbullying more than their peers. Image via Canva.

Even though online bullying is common, those who watched Wentworth's video were disturbed by what happened to Roberts and her niece.

“I thought they were going to say how much like twins they look like & just a sweet beautiful moment they let us in on, when they didn't have to,” one viewer wrote.

"The anonymous aspect of social media adds to the cruelty. This picture is lovely and your statement is so true," said another.

Even though Roberts was disturbed by the comments she saw on Instagram, she’s glad that it helped her grasp what’s happening to young people online.

“I was so happy that happened because I had this whole new glimpse into a way of living that I didn’t get at all,” she told Winfrey. “You have to go through things to understand them, and this was just a little paper cut of what can really go on with social media.”

This article originally appeared last year. It has been updated.

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Education & Information

Debunking doesn't stop misinformation online. But researchers found 'pre-bunking' can.

This approach is more effective than fact-checking.

Photo credit: Canva

Some helpful information to fight misinformation.

The rise of misinformation on social media has been a monumental stress test for the world’s critical thinking skills. Misinformation has had a huge influence on elections, public health and the treatment of immigrants and refugees across the world. Social media platforms have tried to combat false claims over the years by employing fact-checkers, but they haven’t been terribly effective because those who are most susceptible to misinformation don’t trust fact-checkers.

“The word fact-checking itself has become politicized,” Cambridge University professor Jon Roozenbeek said, according to the Associated Press. Further, studies show that when people have incorrect beliefs challenged by facts, it makes them cling to their false assumptions even harder. These platforms have also attempted to remove posts containing misinformation that violates their terms of service, but this form of content moderation is often seen as insufficient and is often applied inconsistently.

misinformation, conspiracy theories, tin foil hat, fake news, debunking false information Conspiracy theorists are associated with tin foil hats.via Mattias Berg/Flickr

How do we combat dangerous misinformation online if removing false claims or debunking them hasn’t been effective enough? A 2022 study published in the journal Science Advances by a team of university researchers and Jigsaw, a division of Google, found a relatively simple solution to the problem they call “pre-bunking.”

Pre-bunking is an easy way of inoculating people against misinformation by teaching them some basic critical thinking skills. The strategy is based on inoculation theory, a communication theory that suggests one can build resistance to persuasion by exposing people to arguments against their beliefs beforehand.

— (@)

The researchers learned that pre-bunking was effective after conducting a study on nearly 30,000 participants on YouTube.

“Across seven high-powered preregistered studies including a field experiment on YouTube, with a total of nearly 30,000 participants, we find that watching short inoculation videos improves people’s ability to identify manipulation techniques commonly used in online misinformation, both in a laboratory setting and in a real-world environment where exposure to misinformation is common,” the recently published findings note.

The researchers uploaded videos into YouTube ad slots that discussed different types of manipulative communication used to spread false information such as ad hominem attacks, false dichotomies, scapegoating and incoherence.

Here’s an example of a video about false dichotomies.

- YouTubeyoutu.be

Researchers found that after people watched the short videos, they were significantly better at distinguishing false information than they were before. The study was so successful that Jigsaw is looking to create a video about scapegoating and running it in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. These countries are all combating a significant amount of false information about Ukrainian refugees.

Many people talk about "critical thinking," but a lot of people don't really understand what the term means. Learning about the tropes and techniques used to spread misinformation is a vital part of developing critical thinking skills. It's not just about thinking for yourself and determining what's true based on what your brain tells you; it's about recognizing when messaging is being used to manipulate your brain to tell you certain things. It's learning about logical fallacies and how they work. It's acknowledging that we all have biases that can be preyed upon and learning how propaganda techniques are designed to do just that.

There’s an old saying, “If you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Teach that man to fish and he’ll eat forever.” Pre-bunking does something very similar. We can either play a game of whack-a-mole where social media platforms have to suss out misinformation on a minute-by-minute basis or we can improve the general public’s ability to distinguish misinformation and avoid it themselves.

Further, teaching people to make their own correct decisions about misinformation will be a lot more effective than pulling down content and employing fact-checks. These tactics only drive vulnerable, incredulous people toward misinformation.

This article originally appeared three years ago.

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Internet

A nail salon made an ad so funny that people are taking road trips just for a manicure

Nailed it.

Representative photos by Wonderlane|Flickr and Aris Leoven|Canva

This Canadian nail salon has people packing their bags for a manicure

There are a lot of nail salons out there and, without word of mouth recommendations from people you trust, it can be impossible to know which salon to visit. Thanks to social media, though, many businesses have pages where they can advertise their services without having to spend a lot of money on traditional marketing practices like television, billboards, and radio. Doing their marketing using pictures and videos of their amazing work can help keep a steady flow of customers coming—but one Canadian nail salon is going with a slightly different approach.

Henry Pro Nails in Toronto, Canada is leaving the Internet in stitches after creating a viral ad for his nail salon. The video takes the beginnings of several viral video clips but instead of the expected ending, Henry pops in completing the viral moment in hilarious different ways.

It opens with a familiar viral video of a man on a stretcher being pulled by EMS when the stretcher overturns, flopping the man onto the ground. But instead of it ending with the injured man on the ground, Henry seamlessly appears laid out on the floor of his salon and delivers his first line, "Come to my nail salon. Your nails will look beautiful."

nails, nail salon, manicure, henry's pro nails, ads Rihanna Nails GIFGiphy

In another clip, a man holds his leg straight up and somehow flips himself into a split. When the camera cuts back to Henry, he's in the splits on the floor of his nail salon promoting loyalty discounts. The ad is insanely creative and people in the comments can't get enough. Some are even planning a trip to Toronto just to get their nails done by the now Internet famous top nail artist in Canada. This isn't Henry's first rodeo making creative ads, but this is one is without a doubt his most popular—and effective.

"I will fly to Canada to get my nails done here just because of this hilarious video. You win this trend for sure," one woman says.

"Get yourself a passport and make a road trip! My bf and I are legit getting ours and its only a 4 hr drive from where we are in Pennsylvania. Their prices are a lot better than other places I've been too," another person says while convincing a fellow American citizen to make the trip.

"Omg, where are you located? I would fly to get my nails done by you," one person writes.

"The pedicure I had at Henry’s was the best I have ever had. Unfortunately made all other places disappointing and I don’t live close enough for Henry’s to be my regular spot," someone else shares.

See on Instagram

To keep up with demand, in late October 2024 Henry's announced another location was coming soon in Vaughan, Ontario. Though there's no word on when the new "more spacious and professional facility" is opening just yet, customers can keep an eye out for Henry's next ad on social media.

See on Instagram

It just goes to show that creative advertising can get people to go just about anywhere, but great service is what gets them to come back. If you're ever in Toronto (or Vaughan!) and find yourself needing an emergency manicure, Henry's Pro Nails is apparently the place to be.

This article originally appeared last year.

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Kids

A 4th state just passed laws protecting 'child influencers' from their own parents

A former 'Youtube star' had brutal words for these parents in her testimony.

Canva Photos

New laws aim to protect teen and child influencers' money. It's a start.

In recent years, some big questions have popped up about the kids you see on social media. When an influencer posts a photo with their children or an adorable candid family video, it might not ring many alarm bells. But what if their kids are constantly an integral part of their every day content? What if those influencers rely on the cuteness of their kids, or the hilarious things they say, to drive engagement of their content? Content they earn money for?

In the worst cases, teens and even toddlers are not just a prop in their parents' videos, but they are positioned as the "stars" of their own social media accounts. Child influencers. I remember once seeing a shocking post about a 3-year-old girl who was "excited" to tour the country and meet all of her fans. My own daughter is that age and only cares about cartoons and mac and cheese, so it's ridiculously easy to see the parents pulling the strings behind the scenes. But social media is big business, and big money.

Finally, something is being done to protect these kids. Utah just became the 4th state to pass simple legislation designed to ensure children are at least being fairly compensated for their work online.

influencers, social media, screentime, youtube, tiktok, instagram, children, families, parents Utah is letting kids delete content they appeared in when they turn 18. Photo by Ethan De Long on Unsplash

The new law dictates that any family earning more than $150,000 per year from online content that includes their children set up a trust fund for them, and offers guidance via a formula to calculate how much the kids are owed for their appearances. It may not end up being much, but at least the kids will be compensated somewhat for their own likeness.

Most fascinatingly, the Utah law also gives kids the right to have any content they appeared in deleted when they turn 18. That is a major win, and it gives kids some agency back when they become adults capable of making their own informed decisions.

Other states with similar protections include California, Illinois, and Minnesota — with legislation currently being drafted and debated in many more places. The monetary protections are a good start, but more will definitely need to be done to reign in parents putting kids on the Internet without their permission. The exposure, fame, and messages can do a lifetime of harm to young people.

The passing of the law hinged on testimony by former child YouTube "star" Shari Franke, who was forced to appear on her family's channel 8 Passengers as a kid. Her mother was later arrested for child abuse.

“I want to be clear: there’s never, ever a good reason for posting your children online for money or fame," Franke said to lawmakers. "There’s no such thing as a moral or ethical family vlogger. ... The only people harmed by child influencer laws are the parents exploiting their children.”

She called being a child influencer "24/7 labor" and has urged for stronger protections that go beyond just setting aside money earned.

"How do we determine how much a child should get paid for appearing in family content?" she said. "What price is worth giving up your childhood?

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

The line between using your kids as props to monetize and genuinely sharing moments from your family's life is thin and grey. This area of social media is uncharted territory, and we don't even know the full impact of how growing up in the online spotlight (and not by their own free will) will affect kids. There will always be loopholes in legislation meant to protect kids. Hollywood has been trying to get it right for nearly 100 years, starting with the first law that gave child actors some control of ownership over their own wages.

It's great that Utah is taking a first step, and hopefully many more parts of the country follow suit soon.

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Joy

Professor accidentally starts viral online university that anyone can attend free of charge

What was meant to be an introduction to her actual class turned into a movement.

Photo credit: Canva

College professor accidentally starts free online university

Everybody has an embarrassing moment or two in their lifetime. It's impossible to be human and not make a hilariously embarrassing mistake but it's not every day that a humorous blunder turns into something that could be life changing for others. Recently a college professor, Dr. Leah Barlow created an introduction video for her class TikTok account.

But instead of her sharing it to her page privately, it went out in the main TikTok universe where strangers started asking questions. You know, all the normal questions a professor might receive, "where can I find the syllabus," "how do I access the discussion board." Except these weren't her students, these were just random people who saw her introduction on their For You Page and were determined to make a good grade.

"Hello everyone and welcome to introduction to African American Studies for the spring semester. My name is Dr. Leah Barlow. It is cold outside but I really wanted to quickly get on and just show my face, introduce myself, share a little bit about me and the course ahead of your homework being due tomorrow and whatever else I post over the remaining of the semester," Dr. Barlow says in her now viral video.

View this post on Instagram
A post shared by BERNARD TAYLOR (@_bernardtaylor)

She goes on to explain how the class works including that she teaches the class chronologically backwards starting with recent moments in history first. The class is informed that their grade is made up of quizzes, discussion board posts, midterm and final exams. The formality didn't deter people on TikTok from assuming she was offering a free course so they introduced themselves in the comments along with asking how to properly participate.

This is when the good doctor using TikTok to connect with her Gen Z students realizes her faux pas. She set her page to private and removed everyone that wasn't actually registered for her college level course without realizing she started a movement. Many people think of TikTok as this app for teenagers to do dances and create silly trends, but there are a lot of highly educated professionals on the app. They saw the interest people had in learning and decided to offer their own courses for free.

View this post on Instagram
A post shared by George Lee Jr (@theconsciouslee)

Many of the people offering courses are current or former college professors, teachers or experts in their field. Several of the creators possess a PhD, doctorate or a master's degree and they quickly put together classes complete with a syllabus and reading lists. Within just a few days of Dr. Barlow's accidental TikTok introduction, the creators had organized to form a centralized online unaccredited university, completely free.

The "official" name of the university is HillmanTok University, the mascot is a black panther and there's already a administration to help enrollment run smoothly. There will be no fancy acceptance letter or dorm decor to shop for, and getting enrolled is as easy as following the instructor of the class you'd like to take on TikTok. Some professors are utilizing TikTok live for instruction and discussions while others are using Zoom, Google Meet, Patreon or Substack. The instructors are mindful of the cost of learning so much of the material they list is free online or through a local library.

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A post shared by @sunnydaejones

Thousands have flocked to "register" for classes through HillmanTok University with so many registering it crashed the Discord server that is used for study groups, advising, tutoring and more. The classes are open to anyone interested in learning, with some professors handing out grades. You may be curious about the course selection. It's extensive and you can view the list on a Google Doc that lists over 100 classes.

Students of HillmanTok University can take classes ranging from Personal Finance 101 to Intro to Pilates. There are Spanish classes for non native speakers, American Sign Language classes, as well as classes on emotional regulation. There's a class for just about everyone, and yes they're free. There may be a few instructors that put their classes behind a paywall on a site like Patreon but overwhelmingly many are simply volunteering their time.

View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Author Nicole Johnson (@en_her_g)

The reception to this impromptu university has been extremely positive from those that have higher education and those that have always wanted to go to college but couldn't. In fact, the reception has been so positive that Dr. Barlow is now also offering to teach a free version of her course at HillmanTok University.

This just goes to show that when people put their minds to something, they can create magic, and those who want to learn will find a way. Good luck to the inaugural spring semester of HillmanTok University. You may not walk away with a degree, but the knowledge, community and experience you'll gain will be something to carry with you forever.

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Health

It's the side of extreme weight loss rarely seen, but that's why it's needed

Courage and body positivity. This is me.

Image from YouTube video.

An emotional and strong Matt Diaz.

Matt Diaz worked extremely hard to lose 270 pounds over six years.

But his proudest moment came in March 2015 when he decided to film himself with his shirt off to prove an important point about body positivity and self-love.

Matt had lap-band surgery in 2009 at age 16.

Through the course of his weight-loss journey, Matt became passionate about promoting body positivity for people of all shapes and sizes.

before and after weight loss photos of young man

Here's Matt at 16 years old and 497 pounds versus recently after his surgery — at 22 years old and 220 pounds.