Category: social

In time, Artifact’s goal is to provide tools that would allow readers to click a button to show more or less from a given topic to better control, personalize and diversify their feed. In the meantime, however, users can delve into settings to manage their interests by blocking or pausing publishers or selecting and unselecting general interest categories. Also new today is a feature that allows you to upload your contacts in order to see a signal that a particular article is popular in your network. This is slightly different from Twitter’s Top Articles feature, which shows you articles popular with the people you follow, because Artifact’s feature is more privacy-focused.

“It doesn’t tell you who read it. It doesn’t tell you how many of them read it, so it keeps privacy — and we clearly don’t do it with just one read. So you can’t have one contact and like figure out what that one contact is reading … it has to meet a certain minimum threshold,” notes [Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom]. This way, he adds, the app isn’t driven by what your friends are reading, but it can use that as a signal to highlight items that everyone was reading. In time, the broader goal is to expand the social experience to also include a way to discuss the news articles within Artifact itself. The beta version, limited to testers, offers a Discover feed where users can share articles and like and comment on those shared by others. There’s a bit of a News Feed or even Instagram-like quality to engaging with news in this way, we found.

Other notes from the tour:

The journalists weren’t allowed to enter a special server room “housing the app’s source code for outside auditors to review.”

A room that explained TikTok’s algorithm using iMacs running “code simulators” was “frustratingly vague”

“Despite it being called a transparency center, TikTok’s PR department made everyone agree to not quote or directly attribute comments made by employees leading the tour.”

The Verge ultimately concludes TikTok’s Transparency and Accountability Center is “a lot of smoke and mirrors designed to give the impression that it really cares.”

On Wednesday, the involvement of technology companies in the ongoing fentanyl crisis will be discussed on Capitol Hill at a House Energy and Commerce Committee roundtable. One of the listed speakers, Laura Marquez-Garrett, an attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center, said Snapchat will be the focus. “The death of American children by fentanyl poisoning is not a social media issue — it’s a Snapchat issue,” she said. […] While dealers use many social media platforms to advertise their drugs, experts, lawyers and families say Snapchat is the platform of choice for arranging sales. Dealers prefer to use Snapchat because of its encrypted technology and disappearing messages — features that have given the platform an edge over its rivals for fully legitimate reasons and helped it become one of the world’s most popular social media apps for teens.

Former White House drug czar Jim Carroll said drug traffickers are always going to flock to where the young people are. “From everything I have read, I do believe that Snapchat has been more widely used for facilitating drug sales,” than other platforms, said Carroll, who serves on Snap’s safety advisory council and now works for Michael Best Consulting. “I think that’s because of its popularity among the young.” In December, Snap reported 363 million daily active users in its quarterly earnings report. That same month, the National Crime Prevention Council wrote a letter to Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland, urging the Justice Department to investigate Snap and its business practices. “Snapchat has become a digital open-air drug market allowing drug dealers to market and to sell fake pills to unsuspecting tweens and teens,” the letter said. Garland didn’t respond, but federal investigators have started to ask questions, multiple people said. Santa Monica-based Snap, which makes Snapchat, said it has worked with law enforcement for years to clamp down on illegal activity on its platform and has boosted moderation efforts to detect illegal drug sales. Last year, Snap said it removed more than 400,000 user accounts that posted drug-related content.

“We are committed to doing our part to fight the national fentanyl poisoning crisis, which includes using cutting-edge technology to help us proactively find and shut down drug dealers’ accounts,” Rachel Racusen, a Snap spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement.

“Gas’ founders have a proven track record of creating exciting apps and experiences, and we’re thrilled to work with their team to take things to the next level,” says Discord in a blog post announcing the Gas acquisition. “At this time, Gas will continue as its own standalone app and the Gas team will be joining Discord to help our efforts to continue to grow across new and core audiences.” Discord hasn’t disclosed the terms of its Gas acquisition, but it’s clearly part of a broader and continued effort to target communities and users outside of just gaming.

There were about 500,000 active Mastodon users before Elon Musk took control of Twitter at the end of October. By mid-November, that number climbed to almost 2 million active users. […] The surge in new Mastodon users continued throughout November, peaking at over 130,000 new users a day. The upticks often coincided with controversial decisions made by Elon Musk. Data from Google suggests there was also a surge in searches for Mastodon in April 2022, around the time Musk announced he had become Twitter’s largest shareholder.

“Twitter, in its most basic form is simple,” Meg Coffey, a social media strategist, said. “You can open up an app or open up a website, type some words, and you’re done. I mean, it was [a] basic SMS platform.” For many, Mastodon may have proved too hard to port over their communities and was just too complicated. Some may have gone back to Twitter, while others, said Coffey, may have dropped social media entirely. “Everybody went and signed up [on Mastodon] and realized how hard it was, and then got back on Twitter and were like, ‘Oh, that’s, that’s hard. Maybe we won’t go there,'” she said. “It’s like the people that said ‘I’m moving to Canada’ when Donald Trump was elected,” Coffey added. “They never actually moved to Canada.”

In fact, for every 363 active users on Twitter, there’s now one on Mastodon, CNN’s figures suggest (since Twitter has nearly “238 million daily active monetizable users”). Exploring the recent spike, they note that Mastodon “has a similar look to Twitter, with a timeline of short updates sorted chronologically rather than algorithmically. It lets users join a slew of different servers run by various groups and individuals, rather than one central platform controlled by a single company like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.”

Unlike larger social networks, Mastodon is both free to use and free of ads. It’s operated by a nonprofit run by Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko, and is supported via crowdfunding… “It is not as large as Twitter, obviously, but it is the biggest that this network has ever been,” said Rochko, who originally created Mastodon as more of a project than a consumer product (and, yes, its name was inspired by the heavy metal band Mastodon)….

A lot of Mastodon’s features and layout (particularly in its iOS app) will look and feel familiar to current Twitter users, though with some slightly different verbiage; you can follow others, create short posts (there’s a 500 character limit, and you can upload images and videos), favorite or repost other users’ posts, and so on…. There are some key differences, particularly in how the network is set up. Because Mastodon users’ accounts are hosted on a slew of different servers, the costs of hosting users is spread among many different people and groups. But that also means users are spread out all over the place, and people you know can be hard to find.

CNN also notes the problem with signing up for a Mastodon server: “some of which are open to anyone, some of which require an invitation (you can also run your own server). There is a server operated by the nonprofit behind Mastodon, Mastodon.social, but it’s not accepting more users.”

Although trending on the server I found today: #Caturday photos.

LinkedIn also said it is adding a warning to some LinkedIn messages that include high-risk content, or that try to entice the user into taking the conversation to another platform (like WeChat). “We may warn you about messages that ask you to take the conversation to another platform because that can be a sign of a scam,” the company said in a blog post. “These warnings will also give you the choice to report the content without letting the sender know.”

Minting or the creating of NFTs on IG will start on Polygon, a boon for the layer-2 blockchain (a separate blockchain built on top of Ethereum) given the potential onboarding of IG’s billion active users. The price of Polygon’s token MATIC jumped 17% from Wednesday evening to Thursday morning, boosted by IG news but also, because JPMorgan conducted its first live DeFi trade using that blockchain. The platform is adding support for Solana blockchain and Phantom wallet with the latest feature update, adding them to the list of already-supported wallets such as MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, Dapper Wallet, Rainbow and Trust Wallet. Ethereum and Flow blockchains are already supported. Info for selected collections with OpenSea metadata, like collection name and description, will show up on IG.

A help center post and the community guidelines offer a little more detail. They say that “text, images, and videos that contain nudity, offensive language, sexual themes, or mature subject matter” is allowed on Tumblr, but “visual depictions of sexually explicit acts (or content with an overt focus on genitalia)” aren’t. There’s an exception for “historically significant art that you may find in a mainstream museum and which depicts sex acts — such as from India’s Sunga Empire,” although it must be labeled with a mature content or “sexual themes” tag so that users can filter it from their dashboards.

“Nudity and other kinds of adult material are generally welcome. We’re not here to judge your art, we just ask that you add a Community Label to your mature content so that people can choose to filter it out of their Dashboard if they prefer,” say the community guidelines. However, users can’t post links or ads to “adult-oriented affiliate networks,” they can’t advertise “escort or erotic services,” and they can’t post content that “promotes pedophilia,” including “sexually suggestive” content with images of children. On December 17th, 2018, Tumblr permanently banned adult content from its platform. The site was owned by Verizon at the time and later sold to WordPress.com owner Automattic, which largely maintained the ban “in large part because internet infrastructure services — like payment processors and Apple’s iOS App Store — typically frown on explicit adult content,” reports The Verge.