Remember in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic when live audio was suddenly everywhere? The trend was made popular by the briefly viral phenomenon Clubhouse before seemingly every other online platform copied the feature for themselves.
Since then, live audio has become mostly a footnote to a weird time when we were all stuck at home at the same time with nothing to do and listening to hours-long streams of strangers talking to each other passed as entertainment. Now LinkedIn, which was somewhat late to the live audio party in 2022, has opted to get rid of its standalone live audio events.
In an update, the company says it will no longer support native audio events beginning next month. Users will stop being able to create new events as of December 2, and previously scheduled events will no longer work after December 31. Instead, the company is “bringing together” audio events with its live-streaming feature, LinkedIn Live. LinkedIn Live, however, requires creators to use third-party tools to set up streams. So while audio-only streams will still be able to exist on LinkedIn, they will take a few extra steps.
LinkedIn isn’t the only company to change course on live audio. Reddit, Facebook, Spotify and Amazon have all shuttered their pandemic-era live audio products.Even Clubhouse (which, yes, still exists) pivoted away from the format last year. The feature is, however going strong on X despite a few high-profile technical issues.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/linkedin-is-killing-the-standalone-live-audio-feature-you-probably-forgot-about-232705727.html?src=rss
Threads is making more changes to address long-running complaints from users. This time, the company is testing out improvements to its search and trending topics feature in updates that Adam Mosseri described as “long-overdue improvements.”
On search, Threads is testing the ability to search for posts within specific date ranges and account-specific searches. The changes are similar to some of X’s advanced search capabilities and could make it easier for users to look for a specific post they want to revisit. The lack of advanced search on Threads has long been frustrating and up to now, the most reliable way to search for a specific Threads post was to use Google.
Threads is also experimenting with AI-powered summaries for its “trending now” topics, which shows US users a handful of popular topics on the platform. The app will also show an “expanded set” of up to 15 trends (currently, Threads only displays five trends at a time). The changes sound a little more like how X handles trends, which are sometimes summarized by its “Grok” AI feature. (Grok has somewhat of a mixed track record when it comes to accuracy, however.) It’s unclear how Meta plans to handle these summaries, though the company already uses Meta AI to summarize Facebook comments and discussions in groups.
The new tests are the latest in a flurry of updates from Threads. In the last week, Meta has also announced a test of custom feeds, which it made official just five days later, and improvements to users’ algorithmic feeds. Those changes also just happen to coincide with a huge surge in growth for Threads competitor Bluesky. The decentralized service has grown to more than 20 million users and has had several days where its growth has rivaled Threads daily sign-up numbers.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/threads-is-testing-out-advanced-search-features-and-ai-summaries-for-trending-topics-182250201.html?src=rss
Meta is making progress in its fight against pig butchering scams. In an update, the company said it has taken down more than 2 million accounts associated with such scams this year and that its effort to work with other companies to take down fraudsters has had some success.
Described by Meta as “one of the most egregious and sophisticated” online scams, pig butchering is an increasingly common ruse in which scammers trick victims, who they often find on social media and dating apps, into making crypto investments and other financial schemes before disappearing with their funds. One study, published earlier this year and reported byBloomberg, found that these scams “have likely stolen more than $75 billion from victims around the world” since 2020.
Meta says it’s been tracking the criminal networks behind these scams for the last two years as these groups have increasingly grown their geographic footprint. “This year alone, we’ve taken down over two million accounts associated with scam centers in Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines,” the company said in a blog post. “We also continue to update behavioral and technical signals associated with these hubs to help us scale automated detection and block malicious infrastructure and recidivist attempts.”
Earlier this year, Meta joined Match Group, Coinbase and others in forming a coalition to jointly fight financial scams. In its latest update, Meta notes that it has also worked with other firms exploited by scammers. It says that OpenAI recently tipped off the social media company to “a newly stood up scam compound in Cambodia” after the AI company caught the would-be scammers attempting to translate scam content.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-says-its-taken-down-2-million-accounts-linked-to-pig-butchering-scams-180036668.html?src=rss
Bluesky has passed the 20 million user mark as the app continues its recent surge in growth. The decentralized service, which reached 15 million users less than a week ago, has just about tripled its user base in the last three months.
Though it’s still far smaller than its rivals Threads and X, Bluesky’s current momentum is notable. The app has had several days over the last week where it added a million new users in a single 24-hour period. That’s similar to the growth rate of Threads, which has been getting a million new sign-ups a day for “going on three months,” according to an update last week from Meta’s Adam Mosseri. Threads reached 275 million monthly users earlier this month and has added at least 15 million since the start of November.
And while Bluesky remains the underdog, there are other signs it’s gaining momentum. Bluesky has been the top app in Apple’s App Store for the last six days and has been the top non-gaming app in Google Play for four days, according to data provided by analytics firm App Figures. Meta’s Threads is currently in the number two spot on the App Store.
Though Bluesky has experienced other periods of significant growth over the last year, the recent surge is far bigger than what the open-source service has previously seen. The latest growth for Bluesky seems to be at least partially furled by mounting frustration from some X users. There was a significant spike in traffic to Bluesky on November 7, the day after the presidential election, according to a report from analytics company SimilarWeb. That spike seemed to coincide with a surge in users trying to deactivate their accounts on X.
Bluesky has also been keen to differentiate its policies from its larger rivals. Last week, the company pledged that it would not use its users’ content to train generative AI. X’s new privacy policy allows it to work with third-parties to train AI models on users’ past tweets. Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber has also said that she doesn’t want to “enshittify the network with ads.” Threads, meanwhile, reportedly plans to start experimenting with its first ads in January.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/bluesky-hits-20-million-users-143920955.html?src=rss
If your Instagram recommendations have been feeling a little stale, you’ll soon have a way to make the app’s algorithm forget everything it thinks it knows about you. Meta is testing a new feature that will allow users to reset the algorithmic suggestions that power the app’s feed, Reels and Explore section.
The company described the feature as a “test,” but said the update “will soon roll out globally.” With the change, users will be able to “reset suggested content” from the content preferences section in Instagram’s settings. This will, according to Meta, allow you to “start fresh” and provide an opportunity to re-tune the app’s suggestions.
But while this may help you get an Instagram feed that better reflects your current interests, Meta notes that doing this kind of “reset” doesn’t delete any of your data from the app or change how the company serves you ads. (Instagram has a separate setting to personalize ad preferences.)
Meta is framing the change as part of its push to bring new safety features to teens, even though the feature will be available to all users. “We want to give teens new ways to shape their Instagram experience, so it can continue to reflect their passions and interests as they evolve,” the company wrote in a blog post. The service has previously faced criticism over its recommendations, which EU regulators have suggested could encourage “addictive behavior.”
The company notes that it has other teen-specific features meant to prevent its younger users from seeing inappropriate content. It recently introduced “teen accounts,” which have stricter privacy settings, and attempts to block certain types of harmful content from appearing in their feeds.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/instagram-will-let-you-reset-your-recommendations-120022492.html?src=rss
It’s no secret that non-traditional news sources are becoming an increasingly relevant part of the already fractured online media environment. But a new report from Pew Research and the Knight Foundation offers a more complete picture of what the growing crop of “news influencers” on social media believe.
Titled “America’s News Influencers,” the report is based on a survey of 10,000 US adults, as well as an analysis of 500 “news influencers.” Pew defined the latter group as “individuals who regularly post about current events and civic issues on social media and have at least 100,000 followers” on Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok or YouTube.
The report highlights the growing popularity of these accounts, particularly among younger Americans. The researchers note that 20 percent of US adults report “regularly” relying on influencers as a news source, and that the number climbs to 37 percent for people between the ages of 18 and 29.
It also offers new insights about the people behind these influential accounts. The researchers found that news influencers are far more likely to be men and “slightly more likely” to identify with the political right than the left. (Pew notes that about half of the influencer accounts studied didn’t explicitly identify with a political ideology.)
But regardless of political affiliation, it’s clear that influencers are tapping into a real demand for non-traditional news sources. “There's no partisan split,” says Galen Stocking, a senior researcher at Pew. “Republicans and Democrats are saying they're getting news regularly from news influencers at roughly the same rate.”
Pew’s researchers did, however, uncover some notable differences between platforms. While most of the 500 influencers they studied were active on multiple platforms, X was by far the most popular with 85 percent of influencers having a presence on the platform formerly known as Twitter. News influencers on X were also more likely to “explicitly identify with the political right (28 percent) than the left (21 percent),” the report says.
In fact, that trend holds true for almost all of the platforms in the study. On Instagram, 30 percent of news influencers identified with the right while 25 percent identified with the left. YouTube had a similar split with 28 percent right-leaning influencers and 21 percent left leaning. On Facebook, it was even more pronounced. “Influencers on Facebook are particularly likely to prominently express right-leaning views: There are three times as many explicitly conservative news influencers (39%) as liberal ones (13%) on the site,” the report notes.
Pew-Knight Initiative
TikTok, meanwhile, looks somewhat different. It was the only platform to have a slightly higher share of left-leaning news influencers, at 28 percent, compared with 25 percent on the right. It also had the highest share of women news influencers at 45 percent.
While the report doesn’t attempt to unpack what the greater share of conservative voices may mean, Stocking points out that the social media users surveyed by Pew also expressed some differences in how they perceive the content shared by news influencers. “There's actually a pretty interesting gap where the moderates within the parties are less likely to say that it helps them better understand current events,” Stocking tells Engadget.
Pew’s researchers are far from the first to note that the political right is often more prominent on social media. A 2021 report from Media Matters found that posts from Facebook pages aligned with the political right consistently outperformed those from “nonaligned and left-leaning pages.” Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found in 2022 that conservative news was more visible on the platform then known as Twitter.
And while Pew doesn’t speculate about whether platforms themselves are incentivizing certain viewpoints, the researchers note that their findings are at odds with what many on the right believe about mainstream social media. “Many Republicans have long believed that social media sites censor conservative viewpoints,” the report says. “But overall, more news influencers explicitly present a politically right-leaning orientation than a left-leaning one (27% vs. 21%) in their account bios, posts, websites or media coverage.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/americas-news-influencers-skew-conservative-pew-report-finds-150002876.html?src=rss
Roblox is adding new restrictions to younger kids’ accounts and revamping its parental control features as part of a push to beef up the safety features on its platform. The changes come after damaging reports about the company’s safety practices and amid a broader industry reckoning over online platforms’ effect on kids.
Now, Roblox is drastically limiting the ability of its youngest users to interact with others on its service. The company plans “over the next few months” to bar all kids under 13 from exchanging private messages with other users outside of specific games or experiences. The company will continue to allow younger kids to see messages publicly broadcast within games and experiences, but they won’t be able to message other users without parental permission.
The added restrictions follow a previous update in which the company barred kids under 13 from accessing certain types of experiences. This included unrated experiences, as well as “Social Hangouts and Free-form User Creation experiences.”
Roblox is also making it easier for parents to set up and tweak their parental control preferences. With the changes, some of which were previously detailed by Bloomberg, parents will be able to monitor their children’s Roblox usage and settings from their own devices. Previously, Roblox’s parental control features required parents to make adjustments on their child’s device. Now, parents are able to get push notification when their kids want approval for specific actions like joining an experience with a higher maturity rating. Parents will also be able to keep tabs on their kids’ screen time stats and set daily limits, after which the app will be inaccessible.
The changes are Roblox’s latest effort to address safety concerns about its service. A report in Bloomberg Businessweek earlier this year detailed what it described as Roblox’s “pedophile problem,” noting that “since 2018, police in the US have arrested at least two dozen people accused of abducting or abusing victims they’d met or groomed using Roblox.” Hindenburg Research, a firm known for short-selling, also recently published a report in which it accused Roblox of failing to protect children from being targeted by predators.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/roblox-restricts-dms-for-kids-under-13-and-beefs-up-parental-controls-in-safety-push-120031833.html?src=rss
As the competition between Bluesky and Threads heats up, Meta is adding a new feature to Threads that will likely look familiar to Bluesky users: custom feeds. The Meta-owned service is starting to test a feature that allows users to pin topic-based feeds to the home screen of the app.
The change will give people additional feeds beyond the algorithmic “for you,” which will remain the default view, and their “following feed.” Users can add custom feeds by searching a keyword like “skincare” and then tapping the “...” menu and selecting “create new feed.” These feeds can be further customized by adding specific profiles of people whose posts you want to see in that feed. Users are able to add up to 128 custom feeds in the app, a Meta spokesperson said, though it’s still only a test for now so not all users have access to it just yet.
The feature is similar in many ways to Bluesky’s custom feeds, which the company introduced last year. But while there are dozens of user-created algorithmic feeds in the app, making a new one is still a technical process. Meta’s version of the feature, however, is more straightforward. It could also address some users’ complaints about Threads’ main algorithmic feed.
The latest Threads feature comes as Bluesky has had a particularly good month. Though the service is still far smaller than Threads, which has more than 275 million users, Bluesky, which has just under 17 million users at the time of this writing, has been gaining momentum. The decentralized service added a million new users in the week following the election, and added another million new sign-ups in a single day this week. That’s striking considering Threads has also been growing by about a million users a day, according to a recent post from Instagram chief Adam Mosseri. If Bluesky is able to sustain that level of growth for very long, Meta may feel even more pressure to borrow some ideas from its smaller rival.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-is-testing-custom-feeds-for-threads-183948414.html?src=rss
Snapchat is adding new location tracking abilities to its parental control features. The changes will give parents new visibility into their children’s Snap Map settings and allow them to keep tabs on their whereabouts.
The new features, which will be available “over the coming weeks,” will be added to Snapchat’s Family Center, the app’s portal for parental control features. With the updates, parents will be able to request to view their child’s location or share their own. Parents can also opt to receive “travel notifications” when their child leaves specific places, like their school or home.
Separately, Family Center, which already allows parents to keep tabs on who their children are chatting with, will also allow them to see who their teen has shared their location with in the app’s Snap Map.
That feature could help address some criticism the company has faced about the role its app’s location sharing abilities has played in crucial safety issues. Snapchat’s location sharing has come under particular scrutiny by safety advocates who have alleged it had enabled teens to connect with strangers, including drug dealers and potential predators. The feature was called out in a lawsuit brought by New Mexico’s Attorney General earlier this year over alleged safety lapses at the company.
In its latest update, Snap notes that it bars all users from sharing their location info with users who aren’t already their friends. And the company says it plans to push additional reminders to users about their Snap Map settings “prompting them to be extra thoughtful about their” choices.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/snapchat-will-let-parents-track-their-kids-through-family-center-130004215.html?src=rss
Bluesky may still be the underdog in the race for alternatives to X, but the once Twitter-affiliated service is gaining momentum. The app just passed the 15 million user mark after adding more than a million new users over the last week, the company said in an update.
While Bluesky is still considerably smaller than Threads, which with 275 million users is its biggest rival, there are signs that Threads users have been increasingly curious about the upstart. “Bluesky” has been a trending topic on Threads in recent days and an in-app search suggestion shows there are more than 19,000 posts about “Bluesky.” Bluesky itself has also made a push to win over Threads users in recent weeks by posting regularly on the Meta-owned service.
That effort seems to be working. A month ago, Engadget noted, the service had just under 9 million users. Its mobile app also has the top spot in Apple’s App Store, followed by Threads and ChatGPT. Its recent success also seems to be driven, at least in part, by frustration with Elon Musk and X following the US presidential election.
A recent report from web analytics company SimilarWeb found that “more than 115,000 US web visitors deactivated their accounts,” on November 7, “more than on any previous day of Elon Musk’s tenure.” The report also noted that “web traffic and daily active users for Bluesky increased dramatically in the week before the election, and then again after election day,” with Bluesky at points seeing more web traffic than Threads. (Threads’ mobile usage, however, is still “far ahead” of Bluesky.)
SimilarWeb
“In the US, Bluesky got more web visits than Threads in the immediate aftermath of the election,” the report notes. “For context, it’s important to note that both services are app centric, even though they support a web user interface.”
On its part, Bluesky seems intent on distinguishing itself from its larger, billionaire-controlled rivals. The company, which began as an internal project at Twitter before it spun off into an independent entity, has experimented with novel features like custom feeds, user-created moderation services and “starter packs” for new users.
“You're probably used to being trapped in a single algorithm controlled by a small group of people, that's no longer the case,” Bluesky’s COO Rose Wang shared in a video aimed at new users Tuesday. “On Bluesky, there are about 50,000 different feeds … these feeds provide a cozy corner for you to meet people with similar interests. And you can actually make friends again, because you're no longer tied to a dominant algorithm that promotes either the most polarizing posts and or the biggest brands, and that's the mandate of Bluesky.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/bluesky-surges-to-15-million-users-after-getting-a-million-sign-ups-in-one-week-224213573.html?src=rss