Entertainment

Starting Thursday, living in Louisiana will mean no more making hilarious Vines of yourself singing “Back That Thang Up” as you drive to work. A new law bans the use of social media behind the wheel. Put directly, the law includes “any web-based service that allows individuals to construct a profile within a bounded system,…

(The Root) — When celebrities mess up, they often take to Twitter to send out their mass apologies. This time, it’s Twitter that’s doing the apologizing. The popular microblogging site is facing a wave of criticism from people who say that threats of rape and bodily harm against women transmitted through the site are not…

When United Nations investigators approached Facebook for help tracking down suspected Somali pirates, Facebook basically gave them a metaphorical Kanye shrug. Though some groups and companies have obliged such requests in the past, Facebook apparently isn’t one of them, reports the U.N.’s Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea. In an issued statement, Facebook said that…

(The Root) — Lots of black folks on Twitter have a problem with sites like Gawker, Jezebel and BuzzFeed. Many feel that the wildly popular news entertainment sites mine what has come to be known as “black Twitter” for content, sometimes without citing or crediting the source of their ideas. In the midst of Twitter…

(The Root) — Are you experiencing an influx of fools in your timeline sorely in need of pity? Never fear! Mr. T. is on Twitter, and his tweets are completely awesome. They’re so good, in fact, that at first glance it seems like a parody account. But it’s real — he’s verified — and he…

(The Root) — If misery loves company, it’s having one heck of a tea party with Don Lemon this week. His victim blaming and respectability policing on the heels of the devastating George Zimmerman ruling have made headlines and rubbed many the wrong way. Twitter has been karate-chopping his argument for the last couple of…

(The Root) — The black folk on Twitter are a wildly creative bunch. This has been proved time and time again with hilarious hashtags, like #BlackBuzzFeed and #PaulasBestDishes. They also have a penchant for cleverly remixing famous names to make them funnier. We saw this when Chris Brown subtweeted Rihanna, and we see it every…

(The Root) — Tim Allen can now be added to the list of white people who really, really want to be able to use the n-word. In an interview with the Tampa Bay Times, Allen talks about his distaste for the euphemism “the n-word,” saying that the phrase is more offensive than the actual word…

(The Root) — In the battle of social media video sharing, Vine is refusing to go gently into that good night. When Instagram, Facebook’s picture-sharing app, announced that it, too, would support video, many heralded it as the death of Vine, Twitter’s video-sharing app. But in an ironic twist, Facebook’s fastest-growing page is one dedicated…

(The Root) — Ryan Coogler’s first full-length film, Fruitvale Station, officially hit theaters today, but it has been the talk of the cinema world for weeks. The Sundance winner is based on the life of Oscar Grant, a young, unarmed black man who was shot to death by police in Oakland, Calif. With the high-profile…