After taking last Friday off for the long weekend, welcome back to Lately. If you have feedback or just want to say hello to a real-life human, send me an e-mail.
In this week’s issue:
🎂 Happy 20th birthday, YouTube
📱 Should you buy a smartphone right now?
🗳️ How election memes, TikTok trends and podcasts are shaping the federal election
🚨 Apple and Meta fined by EU
SOCIAL MEDIA
Happy 20th birthday, YouTube
YouTube turns 20Illustration by Kagan McLeod
Twenty years ago this week, the first video was uploaded to YouTube: a grainy 19-second clip of YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim standing near an elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo. “Me at the zoo” became emblematic of one of the platform’s first core genres: unfiltered home videos. But since then, YouTube has been the venue for the invention of a multitude of new genres – from unboxing to ASMR, video-game walk-throughs and podcasts. It’s become a platform that’s built multimillion-dollar empires, influenced real-life trends and changed how we consume politics.
So on the 20th anniversary, I chatted with screens reporter J. Kelly Nestruck about YouTube’s legacy, and how it’s fundamentally changed how the world views itself. Then we gave ourselves the impossible task of picking the top 20 videos that most defined the platform.
POLITICS
From memes to podcasts, the federal parties are using influencers
Content creator Hazel Thayer with Jagmeet Singh.Hazel Thayer/Supplied
Ahead of Monday’s federal vote, campaign staff in war rooms have been making memes, clipping and retrofitting sound bites from YouTube podcasts, and collaborating directly with influencers. The goal is virality that can be converted into ballots, particularly from younger voters who are more likely to get their news from social media. This week I spoke with some of the influencers who are helping these campaigns, including YouTubers, meme makers and TikTok activists. Read the full story here.
ANTITRUST
EU fines Apple and Meta
The European Union fined Apple €500-million and Meta €200-million this week for violating a law that intends to allow smaller rivals into markets that are dominated by Big Tech. The penalties are the first sanctions under the EU’s landmark legislation, the Digital Markets Act. After a years-long investigation, the EU found that Apple violated the DMA by restricting how app developers could communicate with customers about sales and offers. It found that Meta violated the law by imposing a system that forces users to either allow their personal data to be used for targeted advertising or pay to use ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram. Both Apple and Meta said they would challenge the penalties.
The EU fines could stoke tensions with U.S. President Donald Trump, who has threatened to hike tariffs against countries that penalize companies.
What else we’re reading this week:
Who reads entire lawsuits for fun? (The Atlantic)
OpenAI wants to buy Chrome and make it an “AI-first” experience (Ars Technica)
The techno-utopians who want to colonize the sea (The New York Times Magazine)
Adult Money
ELECTRONICS
Should you buy a smartphone right now?
Trump's tariffs could bring a 43 per cent price increase for iPhones.Scott Olson/Getty Images
U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs threaten to hike up the prices of smartphones, leaving some consumers wondering if now is the time to take the plunge and upgrade their devices. After all, 90 per cent of the world’s iPhones are made in China, and Taiwan produces more than 60 per cent of semiconductors.
As The Globe and Mail’s consumer affairs reporter Mariya Postelnyak writes, Trump’s 54-per-cent cumulative tariff on China could mean a 43-per-cent increase to the cost of an iPhone, bringing the basic iPhone 16 model from around US$799 to US$1,142. MacBooks and AirPods were estimated to rise 39 per cent. So should you buy now? Experts say it would likely take a few months for price hikes to trickle down to the retail level and that retailers will also often go through existing inventory before raising prices. But if your phone is on its last legs, go for the upgrade now.
Culture radar
BOOKS
Voice actors behind Rebecca Yarros’s audiobooks find a devoted fanbase of listeners
Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean books, the romantasy series about dragon-riding students at a war academy, are so wildly popular, the voice actors who narrate the books have become micro-celebrities in their own right. One of these voice actors is Rebecca Soler, who has narrated all three books in the series, including the latest instalment, Onyx Storm. Her voice has been recognized out in the world, which can be a bit awkward considering the books’ famously spicy plot lines. In an interview with The Globe, Soler talks about how she keeps track of the characters – including the voices she does for them – by creating a detailed “org chart” of who everyone is, staying caffeinated during the long recording days and receiving DMs from fans. Read the full story.