Haken dran – das Social-Media-Update der c't

Haken dran is c't’s Social-Media-Update, a fast-moving German conversation about platforms, policy, online culture, and the weird business logic behind everyday feeds. It has jokes, but it is not casual about stakes. A story about Meta losing in court becomes a route into youth protection, default privacy settings, growth incentives, and the uneasy possibility that regulation can also expand surveillance. That is the show’s lane. It takes the small mechanism seriously. TikTok adding more integrated advertising is not treated as a product footnote; it becomes a discussion about creator monetization, hidden persuasion, Cameo links, and whether advertising now wants to feel indistinguishable from content. The show is comfortable naming its own digressions, then returning to the point. It often sounds like people thinking in public after reading. Recent episodes make room for media-addiction research, ICD classification, parental knowledge gaps, cyberbullying, unsuitable content, and the practical limits of age bans. The tone is alert rather than panicked. It can be irritated by platforms without pretending every screen habit is a catastrophe. It also has a memory for the older internet, especially the sense of social networks as places where outsiders once found one another before the feeds hardened into growth machines. That nostalgia does not become an escape hatch. AI culture, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s founding story, Instagram fatigue, creator sponsorships, Patreon economics, and synthetic slop all sit inside the same larger question: who benefits when platforms shape attention? Guests bring personal habits and professional angles, but the show keeps a recognizable editorial center. It assumes the audience knows the basic vocabulary. It does not slow down for every acronym, and it does not polish away its judgments. Haken dran works best for listeners who want social-media news with context, skepticism, and enough dry humor to make the grim incentives easier to examine.