There's a new name to add to the list of the best players in all of the MLB. After a stellar first half of the season and an amazing performance in the Home Run Derby, Julio Rodriguez has cemented himself as one of the game's next big stars.

We’re used to hearing tales of OnlyFans creators who have been disowned by friends and loved-ones over their line of work. But one star of the platform has been left with “family trauma” over her content for a very different reason. Australian model Taila Maddison posted a TikTok on Tuesday detailing how she’d “ruined” her mum’s marriage after uncovering the true identity of her X-rated account's top subscriber. “When I first started my website, I had this customer who was my number one customer, bought every single thing that I sent him, he was pretty much a follower since the beginning,” she began her confession. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter “We would talk every day, he made custom requests – very specific things – and he also had a very specific username on the website.” Within two months, he had spent $2,000 AUD (around £1,000) on raunchy pictures and videos of Taila. It was at this point that someone with the exact same username as the mystery man viewed her TikTok page, and she spotted a note saying that the person was “from [her] contacts.” “I went absolutely mental trying to figure out who this person was from my contacts,” she continued. “I narrowed it down to six people, and one of them was my stepdad. I went with my gut feeling and I messaged the website account and I said, ‘I know who this is.’ “Within two minutes, I got a text from my stepdad saying, ‘Hey Tai, can we talk?’” @ta1laaa Do we need a part 2??? #fup #viral #scandal #drama #tea In a follow-up video, Taila explained that her stepfather had been part of her life since she was 11 years old. “When I caught him, he denied it to all of his friends, and obviously my mum got rid of him straight away,” she confirmed. “But yeah, if you want to talk about family trauma, my stepdad watched me have sex with my partner for two months.” @ta1laaa TRAUMAAAAA #fyp #viral #drama #tea Her two videos racked up nearly two million views in just one day as commentators voiced their horror at the revelation. “That means he's been looking at you in that way since day one..a warning to all mothers here for sure,” one pointed out. “He’s probably still subscribed, but under a different username,” suggested another, to which Taila replied: “His phone is blocked, but [possibly] from another device!” “Are you OK?” asked a third. “That must have been really hard for you emotionally.” “I’m okay now,” Taila responded. “At the time I couldn’t leave the house for a couple of days. I was still working in retail and was too anxious to be at the shopping centre worried that he would be there.” Inevitably, scores of users wanted more details on the kind of content the disgraced stepdad was requesting. So Taila duly obliged in another follow-up. “Like I said, in a previous video, we messaged every single day on the website, and he would make requests almost every single day,” she said. “One of them was to see the underwear that I was wearing every day. At the time I was working still, so I was out of the house five days a week, and he would ask for pictures in the bathroom or the changing rooms of wherever I was. “He also requested that when I was filming solo content at home, that I would not do it in the bathroom or in the shower. He always wanted it to be on my bed or on the floor of my bedroom.” Further underlining the creepiness of his actions, she added: “He had access to this room every single day. He also was helping out do the washing at home with said underwear.” @ta1laaa I cant believe i did this #fyp #viral #drama #scandal Taila later confirmed that she had cut all contact with her now ex-stepdad and had blocked him “from my pages on all platforms”. “I have not heard from him since the day I called him out,” she said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. “He wouldn’t even come into the house to collect his belongings while I was there.” She then urged other OnlyFans creators to get to grips with the fact that it is “highly likely someone from your school, gym, workplace or family is watching your every move”. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

This content originally appeared on Mashable for a US audience and has been adapted for

GENEVA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 20, 2023--

From fuelling genocide in Myanmar, kowtowing to authoritarian regimes and causing an epidemic of depression among teenagers, Noam Bardin has watched aghast as the platforms that promised to bring people closer together tore at the connective tissue of society. “Social media has become the worst of us”, the serial tech entrepreneur tells The Independent in an interview. “That’s by design. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” So he decided to build his own, Post, with a vision to reinvent the relationship between social media, its users and news publishers. Post launched in the App Store on 15 June, one of a number of start-ups vying to usurp Twitter as it lurches through a series of crises. Post’s soft launch When Twitter imploded last October during Elon Musk’s tortuous $44bn takeover, a flood of high-profile users announced they were ditching the site. Mr Bardin spotted an opportunity, and decided to rush Post into beta testing. He soon had more than 350,000 people on a waiting list, and initially allowed around 65,000 users onto the site. Mr Bardin said the decision to launch and capitalise on the chaos at Twitter may have been premature, but it allowed him to iron out flaws and convince news outlets that the app’s profit-sharing model could work. “Once we came out, suddenly, publishers were willing to come on board.” Mr Musk’s ownership has been plagued by a series of erratic decisions, including firing content moderators, promoting conspiracy theorists, declaring war on what he calls the “woke mind virus”, and using it as a tool to boost his own profile. The billionaire may not have been the cause of all of Twitter’s woes, but he certainly hasn’t helped, says Mr Bardin. “Twitter was a sick company before. It didn’t have a good business model. It couldn’t afford what it was doing. It didn’t provide value for the creators, and the toxicity was off the charts, right? “All these are kind of assuming that Twitter was an amazing, healthy company before Elon Musk came? Elon Musk obviously did his bit to destroy it.” Mr Musk’s belief that he could run a social media company was typical of the attitude among Silicon Valley venture capitalists, he said. “Silicon Valley is full of really, really smart people who have accomplished tremendous things. And because of that, they assume they can do anything and accomplish anything,” Mr Bardin said. “They like to talk about diversity, and they have diversity of people in terms of their backgrounds, skin colour and race, but everyone has exactly the same engineering MBA from Stanford or somewhere else.” Mr Bardin says he didn’t believe Twitter would ever disappear entirely, but that its profits and trustworthiness will continue to crater as users grow tired of Mr Musk’s antics. Post will inevitably draw comparisons to Twitter, but Mr Bardin sees it more like TikTok, a disruptor that exists alongside and improves an existing idea. ‘Ultimate product person’ Mr Bardin, 52, became a billionaire overnight when he sold his crowdsourced navigation app Waze to Google in 2013, After seven years as a vice president of product at Google, Mr Bardin quit suddenly in 2021. In a blistering farewell post, he wrote that the company mollycoddled its “entitled” employees who were more concerned with personal fulfillment and their 11am yoga classes than the products they worked on. Post was initially entirely self-funded by Mr Bardin. When he unveiled the app in November, he announced that Silicon Valley venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz, which manages $35bn in assets, had come on board. Post’s only other investor is Scott Galloway, the author, podcast host and professor of marketing at New York University, who has said he invested “substantial personal capital” in the project. The partnership came about after the pair hit it off when Professor Galloway had the entrepreneur as a guest on his podcast. Professor Galloway, an outspoken critic of tech titans including Mr Musk, told The Independent in an email that he was convinced to invest in Post after hearing Mr Bardin’s vision to reimagine social media as a force for good. “From the outset, Post has been committed to healthier online conversation,” Professor Galloway said. “Elon’s mission, as evidenced by his relentless s***posting and public disdain for our elected leaders, appears to be the opposite.” Professor Galloway described his partner as “the ultimate product person”, a necessity going up against behemoths that invest billions in “keeping eyeballs glued to the screen”. “However, there’s another side to running a business in social, which Noam understands deeply — and that’s mission. “Specifically, what value are you providing to enhance societal discourse such that we can engage in truthful and respectful debate? Most social media companies are sorely lacking in this area, because the ad-based model forces their algorithms to value clicks and engagement over good-faith contributions to public discourse.” Professor Galloway said Mr Bardin was a “rare innovator who hasn’t made the mistake of believing his own press”. “He puts the product and the consumer before his own vanity, and that’s rare in tech these days. We need more leaders like that.” Mr Galloway’s Pivot podcast co-host Kara Swisher is also an adviser on the start-up, helping Mr Bardin connect with publishers. It’s the first time that Ms Swisher, a powerful figure in tech journalism for decades, agreed to help out an entrepreneur, such is her belief in the product. How Post works Post allows users to toggle between three feeds: following, explore and news. Users can follow individuals and topics they are interested in, create their own posts, like and repost other content. When users click on an article, it displays within their feed, rather than taking them through to a news site. For that, users are charged a micropayment of a few cents from their digital wallet, which goes directly to the publisher. More than 30 news organisations, including The Independent, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters and ProPublica, have already signed on as publishing partners. Mr Bardin explains that Post is pioneering a new business model that allows users to find and pay for reliable news. Since the dawn of the internet, media companies have missed “every opportunity” to carve out a slice of profits for themselves, he says. “They’ve been screwed by every tech platform.” He believes that the central idea to fixing social media is rebooting the relationship with news publishers. On Post, publishers can set the price of their content — usually a few cents per article. “We hope that we’ll have the critical mass on our platform that will give that breaking news from everywhere,” Mr Bardin says. “But we think that includes premium publishing, and newsletter writers and experts and creators. There’s a whole slew of new entities who are creating newsworthy content and want to be able to host it all.” A network of journalists, influencers and newsletter publishers including Dan Rather, George Takei and Robert Reich were early adopters of the platform. While keen to reimagine what social media can look like, Mr Bardin says his larger goal is to create a better informed society through promoting reliable information. He sees the rise of authoritarianism in his home country of Israel, Hungary, Poland and the United States as an existential threat similar to the climate crisis. “Americans like to think that Trump is a unique phenomenon. He’s not, he’s part of this wide agenda of authoritarians. And authoritarian regimes have never delivered the goods over time,” he says. “Putting aside global warming, which is the hardware problem, to me authoritarianism is the software problem.” Professor Galloway agreed that the social media giants had failed in their obligations not to “mess up” democracy. “In many cases, they intentionally look the other way and play dumb such that they don’t have to do the hard work of actually dealing with these issues.” Mr Bardin tells The Independent that he would never have caved to Turkish president Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan’s request to censor opposition parties ahead of recent elections. He expects to “have a problem” in India, where the party of prime minister Narendra Modi has made similar requests targeting political opponents, and accepts that Post will likely never be able to operate in China or Russia. “I find it very disheartening when I see so many American companies basically getting on their knees and removing any kind of moral in Western liberal value to try and operate in these countries. You have to be able to stand for something and if it means you lose a market, you lose a market. “Part of the problem is, the Second World War was a long time ago. So we forgot what the world used to be like. And so we’re allowing ourselves now to go down these paths that we know are terrible. “There are a million reasons for this, not just social media, but social media is one of them and it’s the place where I think I can make an impact,” he said. “I’m 52, this is my last company, and this is something I want to do for the next few decades. It’s something I think is super important.” Content moderation Mr Bardin sees Post’s content moderation being driven by the community, with good behaviour being rewarded, while trolls will be aggressively suspended and removed. The more you play by the rules, the more reach your content will receive. “And the more we’re gonna trust you on the platform, while being very aggressive on removing and suspending people that are just there to troll others.” He cites the genocide of Rohingya Muslims by the military dictatorship in Myanmar in 2016 and 2017 as a prime example of how big tech has failed. Facebook, the primary source of news in the country, allowed anti-Islamic hate speech to spread unchecked, which a United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission found played a “determining role” in the massacre, rape and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. “There’s no way that the moderator sitting in a call center in the Philippines will understand the Buddhist verse Muslim animosity in Myanmar. You can’t expect them to ever reach that level of understanding, but everyone in Myanmar understands it,” he said. Building a community to self-police bad behaviour and set its own standards would be key to Post’s success, he added. “We’re the platform for the 85 per cent of people who are not crazy, who want to get their news, get some opinions and say something, but don’t want to be called a fascist or communist.” Read More Elon Musk vs Mark Zuckerberg: Who would win a fight between tech titans? Inside the final days of Twitter 1.0: How Elon Musk razed us to the ground RFK Jr compares Elon Musk to American revolutionaries during conspiracy-driven Twitter event Four people were just locked inside a fake Mars habitat for a year-long study Apple releases urgent update to iPhone and iPad users Twitter hacker who took over Musk, Obama, Biden accounts gets prison sentence

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X, formerly known as Twitter, wants to start collecting “biometric information” about its users, as well as their employment history. Elon Musk’s company is seemingly giving itself permission to fingerprints or facial features, or the other kind of information about people’s bodies that are usually used in biometrics. That is according to a change to its privacy policy that was first reported by Bloomberg. “Based on your consent, we may collect and use your biometric information for safety, security, and identification purposes,” the new rules state. They will go into effect at the end of the month. The policy also allows X to collect “your employment history, educational history, employment preferences, skills and abilities, job search activity and engagement”. The policy does not give any details about where the information will be used, and the company has not elaborated elsewhere. But it has been looking into using biometric data for some features. Earlier this month, for instance, security researcher Nima Owji found that the site was testing a way for users of the premium Twitter Blue service to verify who they are by using a government-issued ID and taking a selfie. A screenshot of the feature showed users being asked to click a button to confirm they “consent to X sharing images of my ID, including biometric data” with authentication companies. Elon Musk has also suggested that X could be used for hiring in the future, which may be the purpose of collecting employment information. Last week, X announced a new feature called “X Hiring” which allows companies that pay for the verified badge to include job ads on their profiles. That appears to be part of his plan to turn X into the “everything app”. He has suggested that it could include payments in the future, and he is soon to roll out audio and video calls that will be made with people’s username rather than their phone number. Read More Tesla reportedly under probe over mysterious project to build ‘glass house’ for Musk Elon Musk booed at video games contest as crowds shout: ‘Bring back Twitter!’ Meta could finally launch Threads feature everyone is waiting for

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People can’t decide whether Balenciaga’s new $925 bath towel skirt is an example of clever marketing or just a ploy to wipe wallets. The unparalleled high fashion house, piloted by long-time creative director Demna Gvasalia, regularly releases peculiar designs, made to look beaten down and wrecked, with purposeful outlandish price tags – see its $1,850 fully destroyed sneakers or $1,800 trash bag tote. But this particular pick from the brand’s Spring 2024 collection sparked widespread debate online as soon it became available for pre-order on 14 November. A $927 terry-cloth towel, fashioned to be a wrap skirt, comes after the Georgian designer faced backlash for a controversial 2022 holiday ad featuring children holding teddy bears in leather bondage. Following the extensive criticism, Demna said he planned on tapping into his “roots in fashion as well as to the roots of Balenciaga, which is making quality clothes – not making image or buzz”. He told Vogue his plan in February a few weeks ahead of his fall 2023 debut. But while the designer intended to find motivation from Balenciaga founder Cristóbal moving forward, this quirky bathroom garment prompted further conversation about the brand’s continued desire to offer “absurd” luxury items. One riled up fashion enthusiast took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to make a larger generalisation. “This is absurd, These brands will sell anything and everything at such ridiculously high prices,” they wrote. “Balenciaga is so unserious,” another critic commented, while someone else said: “I’ll say it again... Balenciaga is conducting an experiment. It’s a behavioral science study. You can’t convince me otherwise.” Amid the flock of immediate criticism, brand supporters pointed out the platform and intended buyers Balenciaga targets. “In economics we’d say they are discovering the true demand curve. They are checking their customer base to see how elastic they are. If it’s a fairly inelastic demand curve of which it’s very likely to be. They won’t lose anything by being selling s*** like this, in actual fact…” one person wrote. “I need customers like theirs,” another fan proclaimed. One candid reviewer wrote: “What kind of madness is this? At least I’m not their target market.” Other X users added remarks about how they could make their own towel skirt with their fluffy fabric at home. “I already got a towel skirt, it cost $10 and it’s from Walmart,” one individual commented. Playing off the high-end fashion brand’s current visibility, Ikea, the Swedish homewares and furniture brand, dropped a similar advertisement, highlighting its $10 VINARN bath towel. In promotional photos, a model could be seen with the towel wrapped around his waist, layered over a pair of construction pants. On top, the man donned a common Balenciaga identifier with a black hoodie and wrap-around moto sunglasses. Read More Women’s scarves and crocheted ties - what is Robert Peston wearing now? McDonald’s and Crocs collaborate on new Grimace shoes Jacob Elordi reveals why he always carries a purse Women’s scarves and crocheted ties - what is Robert Peston wearing now? McDonald’s and Crocs collaborate on new Grimace shoes Jacob Elordi reveals why he always carries a purse