X is laying off about half of its staff to crack down on the spread of Fake News regarding elections - this despite CEO Linda Yaccarino saying just this week "There is a robust and growing team at X working on election integrity."
Elon Musk's statement from X on the matter sounded quite different: "Oh, you mean the 'election integrity' team that undermined election integrity? Yeah, they're gone."
In addition, an evaluation by the EU Commission found that X had the highest percentage of misinformation among the major platforms. Musk had backed out of an agreement for dealing with misinformation between the EU and major online services.
Social media timeline
-
-
-
This week saw the first meeting of X's newly formed "Customer Council," where the new X management team, led by CEO Linda Yaccarino, gave an overview of recent developments and goals for the near future. Most of the features don't represent any real innovation, but an upbeat presentation for advertisers never hurt anyone... According to Yaccarino, the key points are:
- Long format blog posts on X
- Video calls
- Money transfers between users
- Creator Subscriptions
- Product listings
- Video playback in multiple formats
- Participation in the Creators' advertising revenues
- Job postings (X Hiring)
in-stream payments and shopping, two of the key elements of Elon Musk's "everything app" push, have not yet been finalized.
-
YouTube announces its first generative AI elements, among other new creative tools. With Dream Screen feature, creators can add AI-generated image or video backgrounds to their YouTube shorts and add creative backgrounds and other elements based on simple text instructions.
-
Meta has launched its new multi-profile option "Create another profile". This allows users to create multiple Facebook profiles to explore different interests, share different content with different audiences, etc.
"Whether you're new to Facebook or have been there for a long time, you may want to keep your personal and professional relationships separate, or have one profile for a community you belong to and another profile just for friends. If you create multiple personal profiles, you can easily organize who you want to share with and what content you want to show to whom. For example, one profile for the foodie scene and another to keep up with your friends and family," Meta says.
-
After initial testing, TikTok is now officially introducing new in-stream labels for AI-generated content. The app now requires users who have used AI to create a post on the app to label it as such. Those who fail to do so risk having their content removed. "AI enables incredible creative opportunities, but can also confuse or mislead users if they don't know the content was created or edited with AI. Content tagging helps address this issue by making it clear to viewers when content has been significantly altered or modified by AI technology. That's why we're introducing a new tool that creators can use to easily notify their community when they post AI-generated content," TikTok said.
-
According to Elon Musk, there are around 550 million monthly X users who post 100 to 200 million daily posts. That sounds like a lot, but it is much less than the figure of 500 million posts per day, which has been claimed as a success since 2013 and was still current in March 2023. 100 to 200 million would be a drop of up to 400%, which can only be partially explained by the exclusion of bots. This means that X is increasingly dependent on a small number of its most active users. In 2021, Pew Research published a study showing that the most active 25% of Twitter users in the U.S. produce about 97% of all tweets on the market.
-
Pinterest announces new features for advertisers to span the entire customer journey. Our goal is to provide the industry's best full-funnel solution. We've made sure there are more measurement options on Pinterest - from the first impression to the last click. We're excited to unveil the new products today that will help us make the customer journey and Pinterest as a platform an even more positive place," said Chief Revenue Officer Bill Watkins.
-
WhatsApp has a new feature: "Channels". This allows companies, media and sports teams to share posts with WhatsApp's user base. Celebrities such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also operate channels, which are used to publish texts, images and short videos on their behalf. Users can find channels with a search function directly in the app and then subscribe.
-
TikTok is to pay 345 million euros for not providing adequate data protection for minors. This was announced by the responsible Irish data protection authority. In total, TikTok was accused of five violations of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the current proceedings:
- Postings are enabled for the public by default, even for minors.
- The mode that allows parents to supervise their children's TikTok use does not control whether the adults are actually the parents.
- Children under 13 can register without restrictions.
- Underage users are not adequately informed about the functionality and dangers of the social network.
- Minors were allegedly pressured to reduce their privacy protection via the app design and targeted wording.
According to TikTok, these issues have been eliminated - but too late, according to the data protection authority.
-
Although you can only join by invitation, the Twitter clone Bluesky is experiencing a boom. The 1-million-user mark has just been broken, and millions of invitations are still pending. Now the creators want to reach a broad audience. "That means improving the moderation and curation of the network with more staff and tools, scaling our infrastructure and unifying the network to support that growth," they said.
-
This is evident from a field test by X-er "Don Marti" on Metamask, a popular and easy-to-use wallet service: Whenever someone posts something on X about Metamask, many bots respond, their answers becoming increasingly intelligent. These try to redirect the poster to scammers with supposed tips or assistance. Scam bots also quickly get involved in tweets about other crypto topics.
-
Snapchat is rolling out new safety improvements for young users, including new warnings about potentially suspicious contacts, better protection against age-inappropriate content, and new resources for users and parents to help combat in-app risks. This includes warnings about accounts that try to connect with teen users without knowing them.
-
TikTok wants to help marketers better link the performance of their TikTok campaigns and their bottom line results. To that end, there is a new partnership with TransUnion. The process will use TransUnion's "TruAudience" framework. It leverages privacy-friendly data collection processes to enable omnichannel insights.
TikTok explains, "TransUnion's TruAudience marketing attribution solution assigns credit for a conversion to multiple touchpoints in a customer journey. This gives marketers answers to important questions, such as which marketing channels and tactics are most effective in driving conversions, and which specific touchpoints within a channel are most effective." -
Threads is expanding its keyword search to more markets and Spanish after launching in Australia and New Zealand: users in Argentina, India, Mexico, the UK and the US can try the feature in the coming days. Keyword search was one of the most requested app updates. Launching without this feature could have potentially hindered the initial adoption of the platform.
-
YouTube has announced some updated ad control options for Creators that will be rolled out later this year. It will also introduce new display formats for CTV ads that are better suited to the larger screens. YouTube on this:
"Starting in November, we'll take the guesswork out of what ad formats to use by removing individual ad controls for pre-roll, post-roll, skippable and non-skippable ads in newly uploaded videos. When creators turn on ads in the future, viewers will be able to see any of these ad formats."
So instead of giving creators control over which ad types appear in their clips, YouTube's system will now show relevant ads based on its own audience matching.
-
The novel AI solution analyzes different body types in more than 5 billion images on the platform based on shape and size. Users can customize their search results, e.g. with skin tone selection or hair type search. Different body types should now also be represented, because those who don't find themselves there are unlikely to be inspired and are less likely to stay on the platform.
-
After the Clubhouse hype quickly died down, the makers behind the app are now trying to revive it with big changes. These include the introduction of "chats," which are essentially voice messages that can be left for friends so that they can be accessed in the app at any time. The principle is already familiar from Messenger, Instagram Direct, WhatsApp, X, and LinkedIn, and is meant to push Clubhouse more in the direction of the Messenger app. Other changes include improved feed algorithms to prioritize content from friends and Houses, a "two-way friending model," and a simpler privacy model. Whether it will help? We'll see.
-
"Project Clover" by TikTok is a program to build a self-contained and secure repository for the data of European TikTokers. Their data is to be stored in three European data centers. The first of these has now opened in Dublin. Another data center in Ireland and one in Norway are under construction. The cybersecurity company NCC Group is taking control of data security.
-
After "Bereal", there is now the stark opposite of this: "Befake" - an app that manipulates users' selfies with AI before publishing them. This way, you can become any character you want. The AI offers ready-made prompts, but users can also make their own desired specifications. The AI is free for 20 minutes at a time after the photo is taken; if you look at your phone too late or don't react right away, you have to wait a day or pay: 9.99 USD a month, 99.99 a year or 2.99 a week, you can fake as many pictures as your heart desires. Behind it is the start up Alias Technologies around Kristen Garcia Dumont and Tracy Lane. The AI is the open image generator Stable Diffusion.