Two senators have given TikTok a deadline to answer questions about an experiment that withheld a safety feature from 15 million U.S. users, including a teenager who later died by suicide.

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) sent a letter to TikTok CEO Shou Chew and Adam Presser, CEO of the company’s U.S. business, calling the company’s decision to run the experiment “depraved.”

Bloomberg reported that TikTok intentionally disabled an algorithmic safeguard for 10% of U.S. users, creating a control group for the experiment. The safeguard was designed to prevent users from being overwhelmed by harmful content, but TikTok wanted to determine whether it made the app less engaging, so it decided to conduct the experiment.

One of the people in the control group was 16-year-old Chase Nasca, whose algorithm fed him thousands of videos about sadness, suicide, and loneliness up until he died by suicide.

The senators are demanding answers to 13 questions regarding the experiment, including names of every employee who knew about the experiment and why TikTok allowed minors to be part of the control group. They’re also looking for a list of every algorithmic experiment in the U.S. when the social network disabled or delayed a safety feature. The senators have given TikTok until September 1 to respond.

TikTok did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

The team at Patreon, the membership platform for creators, has been building like crazy and is now revealing the result. On Thursday, the company debuted dozens of new features to help creators get discovered, build their community, learn from insights, and more.

Patreon says its roadmap is meant to reflect the core philosophy that today’s internet has failed creators by prioritizing fleeting engagement over genuine community, making it hard for creators to be fairly paid.

“The current version of the web is a failed promise for creators and fandoms. As creators, we can’t even reach our followers on the platforms anymore,” wrote Patreon CEO Jack Conte in an announcement about the new features. “Social media has created mass polarization, addiction, and made it increasingly difficult to build a creative community and business. I refuse to believe that this is the best or only way that the internet can work for creators and fans. I believe it can and should be better,” he added.

Patreon’s changes, however, acknowledge the role that short-form video platforms, like TikTok or Reels, play in helping creators find an audience.

To make that discovery easier, it’s rolling out a feature on iOS called Clips, which will turn creators’ videos into short, shareable clips. These can be downloaded and shared off-platform, as on TikTok, or posted as Patreon’s own short-form post format, known as Quip.

Plus, creators will be able to leverage new tools that offer potential fans more previews of their work.

The tools, which are still in early testing, include suggested video previews, which will pull out the most engaging parts of their paid videos, and another that lets creators quote snippets of their longer written posts into Quips. The video previews can be shown to fans who are weighing whether or not to pay to unlock the content or subscribe to a membership, while the text-based, quote Quips can be shared as previews to the Home feed, offering creators more exposure.

Native video and Quips are also now rolling out to creators of adult (18+) content.

Another significant change in today’s update involves Patreon’s discovery algorithm.

Before, the company’s recommendation systems focused on finding creators similar to those the user already liked, but it tended to favor larger creators. Now, discovery will focus more on comparing a particular post to other posts by topic, craft, style, theme, and other factors. Patreon says this will help to highlight smaller creators, too.

The company is also rolling out several new features designed to deepen fandoms and help make Patreon more of a destination.

The highlight here is a new communities feature called Niches, which allows creators to participate in dedicated, topic-based communities built around specific interests, subcultures, or fandoms. This could help fans discover more of what they like, without needing to dig around the site to find all the different creators focused on the topic at hand.

Patreon will also roll out other tools, like support for Live Q&As on creator livestreams, and tools that let fans make their own profiles. (Those profiles and the communities are now in early testing, while the Live Q&As are now arriving.)

Another set of tools will help creators track their audience and earnings, which can be key to developing a healthy fandom.

Patreon is launching more granular earnings, membership, and growth analytics, with an earnings tab that breaks down earnings by tier and billing cadence. The platform is also adding membership insights, like member counts that show free trials and members in payment retry, plus filters to break down memberships by trial, gift, active, and retrying status.

A revamped version of the Payouts tab will also show creators a complete record of the earnings moving in and out of their account.

Soon, Patreon will also add creator milestones, or key growth moments, to celebrate special moments in terms of the growth of their community.

As part of its longer-term roadmap, Patreon plans to develop security features like anti-AI scraping tools, real-time spam detection, expanded auto-moderation, additional verification measures, and more.

The full list of improvements includes thirty new or revamped features, some of which are still in early testing. Over the next few months, creators should expect to see many more changes arrive, Patreon said.

Meta’s experimental vibe-coding gaming app, Pocket, is now rolling out to everyone in the U.S. The app, which arrived quietly last month in the test market of Brazil, allows people to generate small, interactive games using AI prompts, which are published to a scrollable feed.

Based on Meta’s acqui-hire of the team at the vibe-coded gaming platform Gizmo earlier this year, these games — or “gizmos” as they’re called — respond to touch and the tilt of your phone, play sound effects, and can include clips of your favorite songs.

They can also use photos from your camera roll or access your camera. The resulting games can then be shared on your profile, where others can save them, remix them into other creations, or simply repost them.

The app is the latest example of Meta’s push to make AI creation tools mainstream, following its earlier efforts that included making AI-generated images with its Meta AI app as well as AI videos created with an experimental app called Vibes.

Pocket now joins these and several other standalone mobile applications from Meta in recent months. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has credited the increased output to AI-enabled software development, which makes it faster for the company to test and ship new ideas.

“Earlier this year, we shipped Instagram Instants. We also just launched Forum, a stand-alone Groups app, and Seller, a stand-alone Marketplace app. I expect it to become a lot easier to ship new apps,” he told analysts on July’s earnings call. “So we are planning to build out more ideas and use our recommendation systems to scale them.”

In addition to Instants, Forum, and the Seller app, Meta has shipped an experiment involving AI bedtime stories, and this week, a Meta AI app for Mac.