Category: social

As with any social network, and especially for Threads, monthly users only tell part of the growth story. It’s telling that, unlike Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, Meta hasn’t shared daily user numbers yet. That omission suggests Threads is still getting a lot of flyby traffic from people who have yet to become regular users. I’ve heard from Meta employees in recent months that much of the app’s growth is still coming from it being promoted inside Instagram. Both apps share the same account system, which isn’t expected to change.

Threads will now let people like and see replies to their Threads posts that appear on other federated social media platforms, the company announced on Tuesday.

Previously, if you made a post on Threads that was syndicated to another platform like Mastodon, you wouldn’t be able to see responses to that post while still inside Threads. That meant you’d have to bounce back and forth between the platforms to stay up-to-date on replies… [I]n a screenshot, Meta notes that you can’t reply to replies “yet,” so it sounds like that feature will arrive in the future.
“Threads is Meta’s first app built to be compatible with the fediverse…” according to a Meta blog post. “Our vision is that people using other fediverse-compatible servers will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads profile, and vice versa, connecting communities…” [If you turn on “sharing”…] “Developers can build new types of features and user experiences that can easily plug into other open social networks, accelerating the pace of innovation and experimentation.”

And this week Instagram/Threads top executive Adam Mosseri posted that Threads is “also expanding the availability of the fediverse beta experience to more than 100 countries, and hope to roll it out everywhere soon.”

Former White House photographer Pete Souza said in an Instagram post that one of his photos was tagged with the new label. Souza told TechCrunch in an email that Adobe changed how its cropping tool works and you have to “flatten the image” before saving it as a JPEG image. He suspects that this action has triggered Meta’s algorithm to attach this label. “What’s annoying is that the post forced me to include the ‘Made with AI’ even though I unchecked it,” Souza told TechCrunch.

Meta would not answer on the record to TechCrunch’s questions about Souza’s experience or other photographers’ posts who said their posts were incorrectly tagged. However, after publishing of the story, Meta said the company is evaluating its approach to indicate labels reflect the amount of AI used in an image. “Our intent has always been to help people know when they see content that has been made with AI. We are taking into account recent feedback and continue to evaluate our approach so that our labels reflect the amount of AI used in an image,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. “For now, Meta provides no separate labels to indicate if a photographer used a tool to clean up their photo, or used AI to create it,” notes TechCrunch. “For users, it might be hard to understand how much AI was involved in a photo.”

“Meta’s label specifies that ‘Generative AI may have been used to create or edit content in this post’ — but only if you tap on the label. Despite this approach, there are plenty of photos on Meta’s platforms that are clearly AI-generated, and Meta’s algorithm hasn’t labeled them.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will hold oral arguments on lawsuits filed by TikTok and ByteDance along with TikTok users on Sept. 16. TikTok’s future in the United States may rest on the outcome of the case which could impact how the U.S. government uses its new authority to clamp down on foreign-owned apps. “This law is a radical departure from this country’s tradition of championing an open Internet, and sets a dangerous precedent allowing the political branches to target a disfavored speech platform and force it to sell or be shut down,” ByteDance and TikTok argue in asking the court to strike down the law.

Meanwhile, the results of New York’s first mental health report were released today, finding that depression and anxiety are rampant among NYC’s teenagers, “with nearly half of them experiencing symptoms from one of both in recent years,” reports NBC New York. “In a recent survey conducted last year, 48% of teenagers reported feeling depressive symptoms ranging from mild to severe. The vast majority, however, reported feeling high levels of resilience. Frequent coping mechanisms include listening to music and using social media.”

Daily active users increased 37% year over year to 82.7 million. Weekly active unique users rose 40% from the prior year. Total revenue improved 48% to $243 million, nearly doubling the growth rate from the prior quarter, due to strength in advertising. The company delivered adjusted operating profits of $10 million, versus a $50.2 million loss a year ago. [Reddit CEO Steve] Huffman declined to say when the company would be profitable on a net income basis, noting it’s a focus for the management team. Other areas of focus include rolling out a new user interface this year, introducing shopping capabilities, and searching for another artificial intelligence content licensing deal like the one with Google.

Bloomberg notes that already Reddit “has signed licensing agreements worth $203 million in total, with terms ranging from two to three years. The company generated about $20 million from AI content deals last quarter, and expects to bring in more than $60 million by the end of the year.”

And elsewhere Bloomberg writes that Reddit “plans to expand its revenue streams outside of advertising into what Huffman calls the ‘user economy’ — users making money from others on the platform… ”

In the coming months Reddit plans to launch new versions of awards, which are digital gifts users can give to each other, along with other products… Reddit also plans to continue striking data licensing deals with artificial intelligence companies, expanding into international markets and evaluating potential acquisition targets in areas such as search, he said.

Meanwhile, ZDNet notes that this week a Reddit announcement “introduced a new public content policy that lays out a framework for how partners and third parties can access user-posted content on its site.”

The post explains that more and more companies are using unsavory means to access user data in bulk, including Reddit posts. Once a company gets this data, there’s no limit to what it can do with it. Reddit will continue to block “bad actors” that use unauthorized methods to get data, the company says, but it’s taking additional steps to keep users safe from the site’s partners…. Reddit still supports using its data for research: It’s creating a new subreddit — r/reddit4researchers — to support these initiatives, and partnering with OpenMined to help improve research. Private data is, however, going to stay private.

If a company wants to use Reddit data for commercial purposes, including advertising or training AI, it will have to pay. Reddit made this clear by saying, “If you’re interested in using Reddit data to power, augment, or enhance your product or service for any commercial purposes, we require a contract.” To be clear, Reddit is still selling users’ data — it’s just making sure that unscrupulous actors have a tougher time accessing that data for free and researchers have an easier time finding what they need.

And finally, there’s some court action, according to the Register. Reddit “was sued by an unhappy advertiser who claims that internet giga-forum sold ads but provided no way to verify that real people were responsible for clicking on them.”

The complaint [PDF] was filed this week in a U.S. federal court in northern California on behalf of LevelFields, a Virginia-based investment research platform that relies on AI. It says the biz booked pay-per-click ads on the discussion site starting September 2022… That arrangement called for Reddit to use reasonable means to ensure that LevelField’s ads were delivered to and clicked on by actual people rather than bots and the like. But according to the complaint, Reddit broke that contract…

LevelFields argues that Reddit is in a particularly good position to track click fraud because it’s serving ads on its own site, as opposed to third-party properties where it may have less visibility into network traffic… Nonetheless, LevelFields’s effort to obtain IP address data to verify the ads it was billed for went unfulfilled. The social media site “provided click logs without IP addresses,” the complaint says. “Reddit represented that it was not able to provide IP addresses.”

“The plaintiffs aspire to have their claim certified as a class action,” the article adds — along with an interesting statistic.
“According to Juniper Research, 22 percent of ad spending last year was lost to click fraud, amounting to $84 billion.”

The company didn’t say much about the app’s features and functionality apart from the fact that users can log in with their existing TikTok account. Even the app’s description in the app stores is pretty light on details. The screenshots on the App Store listing suggest that the posts will appear in two-column grids on the home page. The screenshots also indicate that you can post multiple photos through a carousel post.