Tech
TikTok bans Musk documentary account
Reading in data-saving mode. Read full article from The Verge website.
Published 10/17/2026 2:32:23 PM
TikTok says ban of Musk documentary account was ‘an error’
Larry Ellison’s TikTok has shut down the promotional account for Alex Gibney’s Elon Musk documentary.
Larry Ellison’s TikTok has shut down the promotional account for Alex Gibney’s Elon Musk documentary.
is the Verge’s weekend editor. He’s covered the tech industry for over 18 years and knows a thing or two about synths.
Update, October 18th: TikTok US spokesperson Mahsau Cullinane confirmed to The Verge that the ad account for the Musk doc has “been restored after an error.”
Just ahead of the wider release of Alex Gibney’s Musk documentary, TikTok has banned the film’s social media account from its platform. TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film’s distributor, Bleecker Street, was informed Friday afternoon that a “permanent suspension” was imminent. Bleecker Street has not yet responded to a request for comment from The Verge.
While TikTok has no official affiliation with Elon Musk, part owner Larry Ellison appears in the film via a text message offering to help Musk fund his Twitter purchase.
Last month, YouTube, Meta, X, and TikTok all faced backlash for rejecting ads for the film. YouTube and Meta quickly reversed course, calling it an “error.” However, TikTok and X have refused to change their stance, and neither platform has allowed paid advertisements for the film.
Banning the documentary’s account, however, marks a serious escalation, and one laced with a dash of irony — shortly before the account was removed, it posted that people should see the movie “before it gets shut down.”
Correction October 18th: The third paragraph originally read that “YouTube and Google quickly reversed course.” That has been corrected to read “YouTube and Meta.”
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
§
The Genie 4 world model offers more realism and can create audio to accompany its interactive worlds.
The Genie 4 world model offers more realism and can create audio to accompany its interactive worlds.
is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Google announced today its Genie 4 world model for generating interactive experiences using AI. The company says the model has four main updates: It allows for more realistic worlds, lets users update an experience in real time with a natural language prompt, can generate audio, and uses Gemini 3.8 Flash under the hood to help with its simulations. It also can create experiences that are about two minutes long, up from one minute for the previous Genie 3 model.
Google is pitching Genie 4 as a tool that could be helpful for things like pre-visualization for filmmakers, prototyping game ideas, and making training scenarios for robots. But the company warns that, as simulations run longer, details and object permanence can shift over time.
I haven’t been able to try Genie 4 for myself — it’s launching first as a “research preview” to “trusted testers” — so I can’t tell you how it compares to the Genie 3-powered Project Genie, which I used to generate bad Nintendo knockoffs. But here are some examples from Google demonstrating what’s possible with the new model.
Genie 4 will be “coming soon” to Google AI Ultra subscribers, Google says, and the company has opened a waitlist where you can apply to be able to try it in Project Genie.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
§
An update to Firefox’s AI browsing experience can draw from your open tabs to help you fill out forms.
An update to Firefox’s AI browsing experience can draw from your open tabs to help you fill out forms.
is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
Mozilla is updating Smart Window — Firefox’s AI-powered browsing experience — with a new feature that can help you fill out online forms based on your open tabs. As an example, Mozilla says Smart Window can pull information from your online portfolio or LinkedIn page to paste your work history into a job application.
You can try out this feature by clicking into a form with at least four text fields. From there, you’ll see an option to “Fill from sources,” which will show all of the tabs Firefox will draw from. You can then select or deselect tabs that you want Firefox to use, and the browser will generate suggestions based on the information in them. This feature currently supports text fields on web forms, but Mozilla is working to add support for dropdown menus and PDFs. Mozilla notes that data from your source pages is shared with Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, the AI model that generates the text suggestions.
Along with this update, you can now ask Firefox’s Smart Window to watch a certain webpage for sales, new job listings, and other updates. You can set up a task by typing “/watch” in the Smart Window chat, describing what you’re looking for, and adding the webpages you want to watch. Firefox can then check for updates on a daily or weekly basis, but only when the browser is open.
When Firefox detects the change you’re looking for, it will send you a notification through the Tasks button on the toolbar, or on your desktop (if you have desktop notifications enabled). Firefox will pause watching for updates if it doesn’t detect a change after 60 days, before stopping them completely after 90 days.
Image: Mozilla
These two features are rolling out to the Smart Window beta on desktop in the US and Canada. They’ll be available in other countries in the “coming months.”
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
