Author Archives: Karissa Bell

X is back in Brazil after a five-week ban

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X is coming back online in Brazil after officials lifted a ban that took the service offline for five weeks. Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes said Tuesday that regulators could “take steps to resume the platform's service” as the company had complied with the court’s demands.

The order for now ends a long-running dispute between Elon Musk’s X and Moraes. Moraes had demanded X block certain accounts in Brazil, which the company had described as “censorship orders.” The dispute also ensnared Starlink, which had its Brazilian bank accounts frozen after X initially refused to cooperate with the Supreme Court’s demands. The company eventually relented by blocking the accounts in question and paying close to $5 million in fines.

“X is proud to return to Brazil. Giving tens of millions of Brazilians access to our indispensable platform was paramount throughout this entire process,” the company wrote in a statement. “We will continue to defend freedom of speech, within the boundaries of the law, everywhere we operate.”

While the standoff is now over, X’s outage in Brazil helped boost at least one rival: Bluesky. The service, which began as a project at Twitter under former CEO Jack Dorsey, said it added more than 2 million new users in the days immediately following the ban.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/x-is-back-in-brazil-after-a-five-week-ban-231406758.html?src=rss

EU residents will have a new way to dispute content moderation decisions by Facebook, YouTube and TikTok

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European Union residents will have a new place to turn to settle disputes with Facebook, TikTok and YouTube. A new Appeals Centre, certified by Irish regulators, will soon begin accepting complaints about content moderation decisions.

The concept is similar to Meta’s Oversight Board, which weighs in on content moderation decisions across Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Meta has long suggested that other social media companies should use its Oversight Board, though there’s been little incentive for them to do so. Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA) changed that calculation somewhat, as it enabled the creation of Out-of-Court Dispute Settlement (ODS) bodies that have the ability to help resolve user complaints.

And while the Appeals Centre is a separate entity, there are some notable links between the two organizations. The new Appeals Centre will be led by Thomas Hughes, who was previously the CEO of the Oversight Board Administration. The Oversight Board Trust, which oversees the board's budget, also helped fund the new Appeals Centre with a “one-time grant,” according to a statement from its chair of trustees, Stephen Neal. And, the first non-executive trustees of the Appeals Centre are also trustees on the Oversight Board.

The Appeals Centre says it expects to be up and running “in late 2024,” at which time individuals and organizations will be able to request appeals through its website. Users wishing to appeal a moderation decision from Facebook, YouTube or TikTok will be required to pay a “nominal fee” that will be refunded if the group rules in their favor, according to information posted on its website.

However, it’s not clear exactly how this process will work or how many cases the group will be able to take on. Meta’s Oversight Board, which has been up and running for years, received nearly 400,000 appeals and issued just 53 decisions in 2023. The Appeals Centre may also end up being less influential than the Oversight Board. A press release from Ireland's media regulator notes that “the decisions of ODS bodies are not binding.” Still, it could increase the visibility of the kinds of content moderation issues that often frustrate users and give some hope that their situation may be reconsidered.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/eu-residents-will-have-a-new-way-to-dispute-content-moderation-decisions-by-facebook-youtube-and-tiktok-190221606.html?src=rss

Most US TikTok users aren’t following political accounts, study says

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As TikTok faces the possibility of a ban in the United States, a new study sheds light on the type of accounts US adults follow on the platform. According to the report, published by Pew Research, political content and news are only a small fraction of the accounts US adults follow in the app.

The report is based on an analysis of 227,946 accounts followed by 664 TikTok users who participated in the study. Of those accounts, less than one percent were “politicians, civic actors or traditional media outlets and journalists,” Pew found, noting that “the typical U.S. adult on TikTok follows no accounts in each of these categories.”

Instead, people were more likely to follow accounts that posted about entertainment and pop culture, humor and viral dance clips. “To the extent Americans’ followed accounts discuss politics, it tends to be mixed with other topics,” Pew writes. “Some 43% of all followed accounts that discussed politics or current events during the study period also discussed entertainment and pop culture.”

Pew's findings show that news and political accounts are a tiny fraction of what US adults follow on TikTok.
Pew Research Center

The content of users' following feeds doesn't offer a complete picture of what people see on TikTok. The app defaults to the algorithmic “for you” feed, which is made up mainly of recommendations. And even though most users may not choose to follow explicitly political accounts, previous research from Pew found that 45 percent of US TikTok users report seeing “at least some” content about politics or political issues in the app.

The question of what US users see on TikTok has been more closely scrutinized over the last year. Some lawmakers stepped up calls for a ban of the app last fall after TikTok critics used hashtag data to suggest that the app was disproportionately recommending pro-Palestinian content. The company said such takes were the result of “unsound analysis.” TikTok stopped showing view counts for specific hashtags earlier this year.

While Pew’s report doesn’t touch on TikTok’s algorithmic recommendations, the authors note that follows are an important signal for the app. “User interactions with posts from the accounts they follow play a nontrivial role in shaping their For You page,’” the report says. “And studying these followed accounts can give us a better understanding on the content that users actively choose to look for on the platform.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/most-us-tiktok-users-arent-following-political-accounts-study-says-140053492.html?src=rss

Meta is working to fix Threads’ engagement bait problem

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If you’re active on Meta’s Threads app, then you’ve probably encountered some amount of engagement bait in your “for you”” feed. Now, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has acknowledged the issue, saying that the company is “working to get it under control" after a spike in such posts.

“We’ve seen an increase in engagement-bait on Threads and we’re working to get it under control,” Mosseri said in a post on Threads. He didn’t say what steps the company is taking but said there would be “more to come” on the issue.

Mosseri’s comments are the first time the Meta executive has acknowledged the problem that’s become an increasingly prominent topic of discussion on Threads. Because the app defaults to the algorithmic “for you” feed, engagement bait style posts that attract a lot of replies often go viral on the app even if it’s the type of content many users say they don’t want to see.

But addressing the issue could be tricky because what people often refer to as “engagement bait” takes many forms in the app. There are downright spammy posts that lift the kind of copypasta content that’s shared widely on Facebook (here’s a particularly egregious recent example). There are accounts that post open-ended AskReddit-style questions. And then there’s the rage-bait posts, as recently documented by Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos.

Those posts, which often touch on polarizing topics, seem like they’re only meant to elicit angry responses from other users who have a controversial opinion from someone they don’t know thrust into their timeline. For example, I’ve seen dozens of posts with hundreds of replies about whether young children should be allowed on airplanes. In her experiment, Notopoulos got more than 1 million views and 5,000 replies on a post — heavily inspired from a two-year-old viral tweet and Reddit post — about not feeding children who come over for playdates.

And while Mosseri and Meta haven’t explained why it’s proved so easy to game Threads’ algorithm to go viral with this kind of content, it seems to be related to how the app has prioritized replies in deciding what to surface to users. “Not all comments or replies are good,” Mosseri said.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-is-working-to-fix-threads-engagement-bait-problem-173135011.html?src=rss

X lost a court battle after trying to claim ‘Twitter ceased to exist’

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X has lost a legal fight in Australia in which the company tried to avoid a $400,000 fine by claiming that Twitter no longer exists. The creative legal argument, first spotted by ArsTechnica, came amid a more than year-long dispute with Australia’s eSafety Commission.

The commission had asked the company, then known as Twitter, to provide details about its handling of child sexual exploitation on the platform last February. In its response, X failed to answer a number of questions and left “some sections entirely blank,” the commission said in a statement last year. As a result, the eSafety Commission slapped the company with a more than $415,000 fine for non-compliance.

It was an attempt to fight that fine that led to X’s claim that it shouldn’t be responsible since Twitter had “ceased to exist.” From the court filing:

X Corp submitted that, on and from 15 March 2023, Twitter Inc ceased to be a person, and therefore ceased to be a provider of a social media service. It was submitted that Twitter Inc therefore lacked capacity to comply with the notice, and that X Corp was not obliged to prepare any report in Twitter Inc’s place, as X Corp was not the same person as the provider to whom the notice was issued.

The argument isn’t exactly new for the Elon Musk-owned entity. CEO Linda Yaccarino has also repeatedly claimed that X is a “brand new company” in a bid to avoid scrutiny. She repeated the line multiple times earlier this year while testifying at a Senate hearing on child safety issues.

Australia federal Judge Michael Wheelahan, however, found the claim unconvincing, saying that X’s argument required “leaps in logic that were not supported by adequate explanation.” X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, eSafety Commissioner Inman Grant cheered the decision. “Had X Corp’s argument been accepted by the Court it could have set the concerning precedent that a foreign company’s merger with another foreign company might enable it to avoid regulatory obligations in Australia,” Grant said.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/x-lost-a-court-battle-after-trying-to-claim-twitter-ceased-to-exist-203030765.html?src=rss

Facebook is pushing ‘local’ content and events to try to win back young adults

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Meta has spent the last few years saying that “young adults” are crucial to the future of Facebook. Now, the company is introducing a number of changes to its 20-year-old social network in an effort to get younger users to spend more time in the app.

The updates include a new “local” section in the Facebook app that aims to surface information relevant to your local community, a renewed focus on events planned on the service and a new “Communities” feature for Messenger. The changes, Meta claims, will help young adults “explore their interests and connect with the world beyond their close friends.”

Emphasizing events isn’t an entirely new strategy for the company. It launched a standalone events app in 2016 and then rebranded it a year later to focus on “local” businesses and happenings. It quietly killed the app in 2021.

Meta is taking a slightly different approach this time. The new “local” section will surface Marketplace listings, Reels and posts from Facebook groups alongside event listings from your community. Local news, which Meta has also previously boosted, is notably absent Meta’s announcement.

In addition to the local tab, the company is also trying to make events more prominent in Facebook. Facebook will now provide personalized event recommendations in the form of a weekly and weekend digest that will be pushed to users via in-app notifications. The company is also changing how invitations to Facebook events work so users can send invites to their connections on Instagram and via SMS and email.

Groups on Facebook, which Meta has said is among the most-used features by young adults, is also getting attention in this update. Meta is experimenting with a “a customizable Group AI” that allows admins to create a bot that can chat with members to answer questions based on posts that have been shared in the group. Elsewhere in the app, Meta is starting to test an Instagram-like Explore section and a dedicated space for Reels inside of Facebook.

On Messenger, Meta is adding a new “Communities” feature, a concept it previously introduced on WhatsApp. Communities allows “small to medium-sized” groups to organize their conversations and interact in a way that’s more like a Facebook group. Members can create topic-based chats and there are built in moderation and admin tools for controlling who can join.

The changes are part of a broader effort by Meta to bring younger people back to its app with features tailored around how they use social media. “Facebook is still for everyone, but in order to build for the next generation of social media consumers, we’ve made significant changes with young adults in mind,” the Facebook app’s head, Tom Alison, wrote in May.

Whether Meta’s latest efforts will be successful, though, is unclear. The company says there are more than 40 million young adults on Facebook in the US and Canada, a number that’s “the highest it’s been in more than 3 years.” But that’s still a relatively small percentage of its total users in the region and an even tinier slice of its users overall.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/facebook-is-pushing-local-content-and-events-to-try-to-win-back-young-adults-161742961.html?src=rss

Texas is suing TikTok for allegedly violating its new child privacy law

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against TikTok claiming the company violated a new child privacy law in the state. It's set to be the first test of Texas’ Securing Children Online Through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act since it went into effect just over a month ago.

Under the law, parts of which were struck down by a federal judge, social media platforms are required to verify the ages of younger users and offer parental control features, including the ability for parents to opt their children out of data collection.

Paxton alleges that TikTok’s existing parental control features are insufficient. "However, Defendants do not provide the parents or guardians of users known to be 13 to 17 years old with parental tools that allow them to control or limit most of a known minor’s privacy and account settings,” the lawsuit states. “For example, parents or guardians do not have the ability to control Defendants’ sharing, disclosing, and selling of a known minor’s personal identifying information, nor control Defendants’ ability to display targeted advertising to a known minor."

The lawsuit also argues that the app’s “Family Pairing” tool isn’t “commercially reasonable” because it requires parents to make their own TikTok account and because teens are free to deny their parents’ requests to set up the monitoring tool. TikTok didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The app already prohibits most targeted advertising to anyone younger than 18.

"We strongly disagree with these allegations and, in fact, we offer robust safeguards for teens and parents, including family pairing, all of which are publicly available," the company said in a statement shared on X. "We stand by the protections we provide families."

The lawsuit adds to TikTok’s growing legal challenges in the United States. The company is currently fighting a law that could result in a total ban of the app in the United States. It’s also facing a separate Justice Department lawsuit related to child privacy.

Update, October 3, 2024, 8:05 PM ET: This story has been updated to add a statement from TikTok. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/texas-is-suing-tiktok-for-allegedly-violating-its-new-child-privacy-law-235432146.html?src=rss

Women of color running for Congress are attacked disproportionately on X, report finds

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Women of color running for Congress in 2024 have faced a disproportionate number of attacks on X compared with other candidates, according to a new report from the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the University of Pittsburgh.

The report sought to “compare the levels of offensive speech and hate speech that different groups of Congressional candidates are targeted with based on race and gender, with a particular emphasis on women of color.” To do this, the report’s authors analyzed 800,000 tweets that covered a three-month period between May 20 and August 23 of this year. That dataset represented all posts mentioning a candidate running for Congress with an account on X.

The report’s authors found that more than 20 percent of posts directed at Black and Asian women candidates “contained offensive language about the candidate.” It also found that Black women in particular were targeted with hate speech more often compared with other candidates.

“On average, less than 1% of all tweets that mentioned a candidate contained hate speech,” the report says. “However, we found that African-American women candidates were more likely than any other candidate to be subject to this type of post (4%).” That roughly lines up with X’s recent transparency report — the company’s first since Elon Musk took over the company — which said that rule-breaking content accounts for less than 1 percent of all posts on its platform.

In a statement, an X spokesperson said the company had suspended more than 1 million accounts and removed more than 2 million posts in the first half of 2024 for breaking the company's rules. "While we encourage people to express themselves freely on X, abuse, harassment, and hateful conduct have no place on our platform and violate the X Rules," the spokesperson said. 

Notably, the CDT’s report analyzed both hate speech — which ostensibly violates X’s policies — and “offensive speech,” which the report defined as “words or phrases that demean, threaten, insult, or ridicule a candidate.” While the latter category may not be against X’s rules, the report notes that the volume of suck attacks could still deter women of color from running for office. It recommends that X and other platforms take “specific measures” to counteract such effects.

“This should include clear policies that prohibit attacks against someone based on race or gender, greater transparency into how their systems address these types of attacks, better reporting tools and means for accountability, regular risk assessments with an emphasis on race and gender, and privacy preserving mechanisms for independent researchers to conduct studies using their data. The consequences of the status-quo where women of color candidates are targeted with significant attacks online at much higher rates than other candidates creates an immense barrier to creating a truly inclusive democracy.”

Update: October 2, 2024, 12:13 PM ET: This post was updated to include a statement from an X spokesperson. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/women-of-color-running-for-congress-are-attacked-disproportionately-on-x-report-finds-043206066.html?src=rss

Google allegedly got the Juno YouTube app removed from the Vision Pro App Store

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Juno, a widely praised (unofficial) YouTube app for Vision Pro, has been removed from Apple’s App Store after complaints from Google, according to an update from Juno’s developer Christian Selig. Google, Selig says, suggested that his app violates their trademark.

It’s the latest setback for Selig, who shut down his popular Reddit client Apollo last year after the company changed its developer policies to charge for use of its API. The shutdown of Apollo and other apps like it ignited a sitewide protest from Reddit users and moderators.

This time, Selig says he doesn’t want drama, noting the $5 app was a “hobby project” for him to tinker with developing for visionOS. “I really enjoyed building Juno, but it was always something I saw as fundamentally a little app I built for fun,” Selig wrote on his website. “Because of that, I have zero desire to spin this into a massive fight akin to what happened with Reddit years ago.”

It’s unclear what aspect of Juno may have been the issue. Selig says that Google referenced its “trademarks and iconography” in a message to Apple, “stating that Juno does not adhere to YouTube guidelines and modifies the website” in a way that’s not permitted. “I don’t personally agree with this, as Juno is just a web view, and acts as little more than a browser extension that modifies CSS to make the website and video player look more ‘visionOS’ like,” Selig explains. “No logos are placed other than those already on the website, and the ‘for YouTube’ suffix is permitted in their branding guidelines.”

Google hasn’t made its own YouTube app for Vision Pro, though the company said in February such an app was “on our roadmap.” The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Selig says that people who have already paid for the app should be able to keep using it for the time being, though there’s a chance a future YouTube update could end up bricking it.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/google-allegedly-got-the-juno-youtube-app-removed-from-the-vision-pro-app-store-232155656.html?src=rss

Threads will show how many followers you have in the fediverse

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Meta has been steadily improving Threads’ compatibility with the fediverse over the last year. Now, the company is taking another significant step with an update that allows users to see more details about their followers and interactions with people from other servers across the fediverse.

Up to now, Threads has surfaced replies from Mastodon and other servers, and has alerted users to likes on their posts from other fediverse apps. But there was no way for a Threads user to see details about their followers from those services. That’s now changing, Adam Mosseri explained in a post.

With the update, anyone who has opted-in to fediverse sharing on Threads will be able to see a detailed list of their followers from other servers and view their profiles. This will give people on Threads a better sense of their reach and audience on Mastodon and other apps.

Threads’ fediverse support is still somewhat limited overall. Users still can’t reply to replies that originate on apps outside of Threads, and there’s no way to search for people on other servers from Threads. There’s also still a delay in cross-posting; it will now take 15 minutes for a post from Threads to appear as Meta also expanded the edit window for posts.

Elsewhere, third-party developers are also making it easier for users who want to post on multiple decentralized services. A new app called Croissant enables cross-posting to Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky all at once. The paid app, first spotted by TechCrunch, aims to replicate the functionality of enterprise social media management apps like Buffer.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/threads-will-show-how-many-followers-you-have-in-the-fediverse-215441432.html?src=rss