Following a troubling proliferation of AI-generated and manipulated media, Twitter announced on Tuesday its plans to expand its Community Notes system to flag altered and fake images. First launched late last year shortly after Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, Community Notes built upon the company’s previous Birdwatch program aimed at leveraging unpaid, crowdsourced fact checking of tweets to rein in misinformation and hoaxes.

[Related: Why an AI image of Pope Francis in a fly jacket stirred up the internet.]

The expansion is currently in an “experimental” testing phase, and only pertains to posts containing a single image. Twitter states it plans to extend the feature to handle tweets featuring additional media uploads such as GIFs, videos, and multiple images in the near future. As of right now, however, only those signed up as a Community Notes contributor with a user rated Writing Impact score of 10 can see the option to flag a post for its accompanying media instead of just its text. According to Twitter’s Community Notes page, “Tagging notes as ‘about the image’ makes them visible on all Tweets that our system identifies as containing the same image,” meaning that other users’ tweets containing the same image alongside different text will hypothetically contain the same flag.

Twitter’s Community Notes team warned that the new feature’s accuracy could still produce both false positives and negatives for other tweets.  “It’s currently intended to err on the side of precision when matching images,” they explained, “which means it likely won’t match every image that looks like a match to you.” Twitter added that its team will continue to “tune this to expand coverage” while also cutting down on “erroneous matches.”

The new feature arrives just days after a fake image depicting an explosion at the Pentagon began circulating on Twitter, first via an account claiming association with Bloomberg News. The now-suspended account included a “Blue Checkmark” that for years reflected an account’s verified authenticity. Following Musk’s company takeover, a verification can now be obtained via subscribing to the premium Twitter Blue user tier.

[Related: Twitter’s ‘Blue Check’ drama is a verified mess.]

Twitter has relied extensively on crowdsourced moderation via the Community Notes system after axing the majority of its staff dedicated to trust and safety issues. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported the social media platform is now worth approximately one-third of the $44 billion Musk paid for it.

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Following a similar report issued by the American Psychological Association (APA) earlier this month, the US Surgeon General released an advisory statement on Tuesday warning of social media platforms’ potentially harmful effects on minors.

While cautioning more research is still needed to understand the full scope of social media’s impact on children, adolescents, and teens, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s office makes clear they believe “ample indicators” show social media can represent a “profound risk of harm to [their] mental health and well-being.”

“We are in the middle of a national youth mental health crisis, and I am concerned that social media is an important driver of that crisis—one that we must urgently address,” Murthy said in a statement this week, citing the “growing evidence” supporting their worry. In one such study referenced, adolescents who spend over 3 hours per day on social media faced double the risk of mental health issues such as symptoms of anxiety and depression. Additional research cited by the Surgeon General’s report points towards particular harm for girls, who face cyberbullying and body-image issues.

[Related: APA releases youth social media guidelines.]

“At this time, we do not yet have enough evidence to determine if social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents,” the advisory states.

At the same time, the advisory statement makes it clear that children and adolescents utilize and are influenced by social media in vastly varying ways. The ways children are impacted by social media are often based on their particularly emotional and psychological strengths and vulnerabilities, as well as cultural, historical, and socio-economic factors. Some of these experiences on social media can prove beneficial, such as offering spaces for community and connection with like-minded individuals sharing “identities, abilities, and interests,” alongside offering access to important information and spaces for self-expression.

As The New York Times noted on Thursday, social media has also proven especially helpful to children and teens within the LGBTQ+ community. “[A] variety of research over the decade since social media became ubiquitous among teenagers has found that often, social media use has been more beneficial than not for LGBTQ youth,” the article states.

A Surgeon General’s advisory does not carry any legal weight, but often serves as a public statement calling attention to a health issue alongside subsequent recommendations for policymakers, businesses, and the public. Among other suggestions, the Surgeon General’s office urges lawmakers to enact legislation ensuring tech companies share relevant health impact data to independent researchers and the public “in a manner that is timely, sufficiently detailed, and protects privacy.”

Additionally, the report recommends the development and implementation of digital and media literacy curricula in schools, as well as encouraging policies that “further limit access—in ways that minimize the risk of harm—to social media for all children.”

[Related: How to use built-in parental controls on Instagram, TikTok, and more.]

Meanwhile, businesses such as Meta, Twitter, and TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, are pushed to maintain a proper level of transparency about their own internal research and methods for developing products used by minors—something that’s frequently proven difficult to realize. Parents are also strongly encouraged to discuss, educate, and monitor their children’s social media habits.

Earlier this month, the American Psychological Association released its first-ever health advisory report on youth and adolescent social media usage, which spoke broadly of potential developmental effects stemming from experiences on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. The APA’s 11-page outline described these apps as “not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people,” but stressed it was rather how minors used the apps that influenced them.

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Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) slapped Meta with a record-shattering $1.3 billion (€1.2 billion) fine Monday alongside an order to cease transferring EU users’ Facebook data to US servers. But despite the latest massive penalty, some legal experts warn little will likely change within Meta’s overall approach to data privacy as long as US digital protections remain lax.

The fine caps a saga initiated nearly decade ago thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden’s damning reveal of American digital mass surveillance programs. Since then, data privacy law within the EU changed dramatically following the 2016 passage of its General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). After years of legal back-and-forth in the EU, Ireland’s DPC has determined Facebook’s data transfer protocols to the US do not “address the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms” of EU residents. In particular, the courts determined EU citizens’ information could be susceptible to US surveillance program scrapes, and thus violate the GDPR.

[Related: A massive data leak just cost Meta $275 million.]

User data underpins a massive percentage of revenue for tech companies like Meta, as it is employed to build highly detailed, targeted consumer profiles for advertising. Because of this, Meta has fought tooth-and-nail to maintain its ability to transfer global user data back to the US. In a statement attributed to Meta’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg and Chief Legal Officer Jennifer Newstead, the company plans to immediately pursue a legal stay “given the harm that these orders would cause, including to the millions of people who use Facebook every day.” The Meta representatives also stated “no immediate disruption” would occur for European Facebook users.

As The Verge notes, there are a number of stipulations even if Meta’s attempt at a legal stay falls apart. Right at the outset, the DPC’s decision pertains only to Facebook, and not Meta’s other platforms such as WhatsApp and Instagram. Next, Meta has a five-month grace period to cease future data transfers alongside a six-month deadline to purge its current EU data held within the US. Finally, the EU and the US are in the midst of negotiations regarding a new data transfer deal that could finalize as soon as October.

[Related: EU fines Meta for forcing users to accept personalized ads.]

Regardless, even with the record-breaking fine, some policy experts are skeptical of the penalty’s influence on Meta’s data policy. Over the weekend, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties told The Guardian that, “A billion-euro parking ticket is of no consequence to a company that earns many more billions by parking illegally.” Although some states including California, Utah, and Colorado have passed their own privacy laws, comprehensive US protections remain stalled at the federal level. 

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Montana Governor Greg Gianforte signed a bill into law on Wednesday banning TikTok within the entire state, all-but-ensuring a legal, political, and sheer logistical battle over the popular social media platform’s usage and accessibility.

In a tweet on Wednesday, Gianforte claimed the new law is an effort to “protect Montanans’ personal and private data from the Chinese Communist Party.” Critics and security experts, however, argue the app’s blacklisting infringes on residents’ right to free speech, and would do little to actually guard individuals’ private data.

“This unconstitutional ban undermines the free speech and association of Montana TikTok users and intrudes on TikTok’s interest in disseminating its users’ videos,” the digital rights advocacy organization Electronic Frontier Foundation argued in a statement posted to Twitter,  calling the new law a “blatant violation of the First Amendment.”

[Related: Why some US lawmakers want to ban TikTok.]

According to the EFF and other advocacy groups, Montana’s TikTok ban won’t actually protect residents’ from companies and bad actors who can still scrape and subsequently monetize their private data. Instead, advocates repeated their urge for legislators to pass comprehensive data privacy laws akin to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations. Similar laws have passed in states like California, Colorado, and Utah, but continue to stall at the federal level.

“We want to reassure Montanans that they can continue using TikTok to express themselves, earn a living and find community as we continue working to defend the rights of our users inside and outside of Montana,”TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter stated on Wednesday.

Montana’s new law is primarily focused on TikTok’s accessibility via app stores from tech providers like Apple and Google, which are directed to block all downloads of the social media platform once the ban goes into effect at the beginning of 2024. Montanans are not subject to the $10,000 per day fine if they still access TikTok—rather, the penalty is levied at companies such as Google, Apple, and TikTok’s owner, ByteDance.

[Related: The best VPNs of 2023.]

That said, there is no clear or legal way to force Montanans to delete the app if it is already downloaded to their phones. Likewise, proxy services such as VPNs hypothetically could easily skirt the ban. As The Guardian noted on Thursday, the ability for Montana to actually enforce a wholesale ban on the app is ostensibly impossible, barring the state following censorship tactics used by nations such as China.

“With this ban, Governor Gianforte and the Montana legislature have trampled on the free speech of hundreds of thousands of Montanans who use the app to express themselves, gather information, and run their small business in the name of anti-Chinese sentiment,” Keegan Medrano, policy director at the ACLU of Montana, said in a statement. “We will never trade our First Amendment rights for cheap political points.”

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WhatsApp just got a new feature bolstering its long-standing emphasis on users’ privacy: a “Chat Lock” feature that squirrels away your most confidential conversations.

Much like Apple’s hidden photos option, Chat Lock allows users to create a separate folder for private discussions; it’s protected by either password or biometric access. Any conversations filed within WhatsApp’s Chat Lock section also will block both sender and text in their push notifications, resulting in a simple “New Message” button. According to WhatsApp’s owners at Meta, Chat Lock could prove useful for those “who have reason to share their phones from time to time with a family member or those moments where someone else is holding your phone at the exact moment an extra special chat arrives.”

[Related: WhatsApp users can now ghost group chats and delete messages for days.]

To enable the new feature, WhatsApp users simply need to tap the name of a one-to-one or group message and select the lock option. To see those classified conversations, just slowly pull down on the inbox icon, then input the required password or biometric information to unlock. According to WhatsApp, Chat Lock capabilities are set to expand even further over the next few months, including features like locking messages on companion devices and creating custom passwords for each chat on a single phone.

Chat Lock is only the latest in a number of updates to come to the world’s most popular messaging app. Earlier this month, WhatsApp introduced multiple updates to its polling feature, including single-vote polls, a search option, and notifications for when people cast their votes. The platform also recently introduced the ability to forward media and documents with captions for context.

[Related: 3 ways to hide photos and files on your phone.]

Although it has long billed itself as a secure messaging alternative to standard platforms such as Apple’s iMessage (both WhatsApp and iMessage use end-to-end encryption, as do some other apps), WhatsApp experienced a sizable user backlash in 2021 when it changed its privacy policy to allow for more personal data sharing with its parent company, Meta. Meanwhile, other privacy-focused apps like Signal and Telegram remain popular alternatives.

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One of the leading US mental health organizations, the American Psychological Association (APA), has issued its first ever health advisory report on social media usage for youth and adolescents. Published on Tuesday, the 11-page brief speaks in broad terms regarding the habits of children and teens on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter, describing them as “not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.” Rather, the APA argues social media’s influences on minors are only part of a much wider, complex array of factors, and “likely depend on what teens can do and see online, teens’ pre-existing strengths or vulnerabilities, and the contexts in which they grow up.”

In short, the APA reiterates that, like every other aspect of psychological development, it’s difficult to pinpoint and quantify any single influence on an individual’s brain evolution. Instead, the association focuses on two major contributors to how social media can potentially affect younger users—parental oversight and awareness, as well as a platform’s own algorithmic structures.

[Related: Twitter may soon purge ‘inactive’ accounts.]

The APA recommends parents regularly review and discuss their children’s social media usage, particularly during early adolescence—usually defined as between 10- and 14-years-old. Educating children and teens on social media literacy and usage alongside fostering healthy online habits and relationships are also considered key methods of maintaining a safe experience on platforms like TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Meanwhile, the APA stresses the responsibility does not rest solely on minors’ parents. The advisory’s authors note that the tech companies’ algorithms determining how, when, and why users see certain content are built upon “centuries of racist policy and discrimination encoded.” Social media therefore often becomes an “incubator” of these inherent biases, and which can  introduce and exacerbate extremist socio-political and racist ideals. “The resulting potential impact is far reaching, including physical violence offline, as well as threats to well-being,” adds the APA.

Speaking to PopSci, Jeremy Birnholtz, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University focusing on LGBTQ+ adolescent social media usage and the head of the school’s Social Media Lab, says he believes the APA’s “measured document” is a step in the right direction, but argues some of the guidelines are potentially difficult to follow for parents.

[Related: Is shyness something kids feel, or something kids are?]

In one section of the report, for example, the APA advises limiting the amount of time younger users spend comparing themselves to others the see on social media, “particularly around beauty- or appearance-related content,” pointing towards its potentially influence on “poorer body image, disordered eating, and depressive symptoms, particularly among girls.”

“The guideline is ‘teens should avoid using social media for social comparison.’ And it’s like, well, what does that mean? You shouldn’t look at your friends’ vacation photos? You shouldn’t follow the influencers that all your friends follow? I don’t think that’s realistic,” says Birnholtz.

Like the APA’s report, Birnholtz also argues social media’s negative effects are often symptomatic of broader, real world issues. Racism can be baked into social media—while that’s true, it’s also baked into society,” they say of platforms’ algorithmic biases. “Certain things like social comparison, no question, can be exacerbated by social media. But to suggest that they are a function of [it] is problematic, I think.”

Birnholtz goes on to explain that while it’s vital to take the APA’s suggestions into account, it’s important to remember the origins of many social media issues. “You’re detaching problems with social media from the problems that they represent in the broader society,” says Birnholtz. “You can fix it on social media, but as long as it’s in the [real world], you’re not going to fix it.”

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On Monday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced plans to delete accounts that the company deems inactive. He also warned that users may see their number of followers drop as a result of the digital house cleaning. “We’re purging accounts that have had no activity at all for several years,” Musk tweeted via his personal account.

The decision prompted swift criticism from both fans and critics of Musk’s chaotic tenure at the company, with some users pointing towards the emotional and historical implications in the wholesale erasures. For many, the Twitter profiles and messages of deceased relatives and loved ones function as digital memorials. Since Musk’s announcement, some users describe scrambling to archive the data before it disappears.

[Related: Twitter’s ‘Blue Check’ drama is a verified mess.]

“My son’s account is inactive because he died nearly 2 years ago. I would be devastated if his account were to be deleted… [I]t is one of the few things I have left,” one user tweeted. “I agree it’s worth preserving the libraries from the ancient internet,” tweeted Grimes, a musician and Musk’s ex-partner.

The sudden policy shift comes less than a week after Musk threatened to reassign NPR’s account handle after the news outlet publicly stated it would cease utilizing the social media platform. NPR’s decision stemmed from objections over Twitter’s attempt to relabel the nonprofit as a “government-funded media.” It now simply features a blue checkmark indicating the account is “Verified.” Federal funding comprises less than 1 percent of NPR’s annual operating budget, according to its own public data.

Prior to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the social media platform attempted a similar inactive username sweep in 2019, but widespread criticism at the time prompted the company to promptly reverse course. “We’ve heard you on the impact that this would have on the accounts of the deceased. This was a miss on our part,” company representatives said at the time, adding that Twitter would not remove any inactive accounts until they created “a new way for people to memorialize accounts.”

[Related: How to download your data from Twitter and other sites.]

A new memorialization method was never announced, although in responding to one critic yesterday, Musk claimed purged accounts “will be archived… But it is important to free up abandoned handles.” Musk has not yet offered an estimated timeline of when username deletions might occur, nor how a purged account archive would work. As of writing, it is still possible to download an archive of one’s own personal account.

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Some corners of the internet act as bastions of healthy discussion, but out there on the Wild Web, discourse appears worse than ever before. If you’re tired of feeling your blood boil every time you get to the bottom of an article or open up your social media app of choice, it’s time to clean up your internet conversations.

Block comments on news sites and blogs

Some sites are doing away with comments altogether, but there are plenty that have stuck by their discussion section—even if it’s littered with spam and hateful garbage. You can’t stop commenters from spewing their filth, but you can banish them from your view. Shut Up is a simple open-source tool that will automatically block most comment sections across the web. It’s available as an extension for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Opera. Just install it on your desktop or mobile platform of choice, and comment sections will disappear as if they were never there.

If there’s a site that you actually like to read comments on—yes, there are a few decent ones out there—you can click the Shut Up button in your toolbar or press Ctrl+Shift+X to whitelist that site. It will remember your preferences, so your favorite comment sections will stay visible no matter how many times you leave and return. Sadly, there’s no way to mute certain comments based on keywords.

Note that due to the way Chrome’s annoyingly broad permission system works, this extension will request access to read and edit data on all sites you visit, but you can read the developer’s privacy policy to ensure you agree with it. Afterward, if you’re still uneasy, you can always inspect and inject the Shut Up CSS code yourself, if you have a stylesheet extension you like.

Mute words on Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks

Website and blog comments are just a small fraction of toxic internet conversation—most of it happens on social media. Shut Up will block comment sections on some networks, like Facebook and Reddit, but that defeats the purpose of using those platforms at all. Thankfully some services, like Twitter and Instagram, have caught on and built “mute” functions that let you hide comments that contain certain keywords, for more control over what you see.

On Twitter, you can mute tweets with certain words or phrases by heading to the Twitter website and clicking More on the sidebar to the left. Next, go to Settings and Support > Settings and privacy > Privacy and safety > Mute and block > Muted words. Finally, click the plus icon in the top right to add words to your list. In the mobile app, the steps are nearly identical, but you start by tapping your avatar in the upper left-hand corner of your screen and build a list of muted words by using the Add button at the bottom right.

When you add the words you want to avoid, you can also select how long you want to mute it—which is useful if you’re just trying to avoid spoilers for a few days.

If you want to do a little less work, you can also turn on the switches under the Offensive words and phrases heading at the top of the page to hide comments or message requests containing any words Instagram thinks you won’t want to see.

Other social networks, like Reddit, don’t have a mute feature built-in. However, browser extensions like the ever-popular Reddit Enhancement Suite will allow you to mute comments with certain words just the same. Install the extension and open the RES Settings Console. Navigate to Subreddits > filteReddit, and create filters to your heart’s content. You can hide posts with specific terms in the title, or block posts that come from chosen websites. You can also build filters for comments, provided you know how regular expressions work—there’s a small tutorial available if you need it.

Finally, Facebook is in a weird spot when it comes to muting or filtering comments. Back in June of 2018, Facebook began testing a feature called Keyword Snooze that would allow you to hide any comment containing words you specified. It wasn’t available to everyone and that test ended in January 2021. Now, your best bet is to hit the three dots in the top right corner of any post on your News Feed and choose Hide post to see fewer posts like it. From the same menu, you can snooze and unfollow the person or page that posted it.

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US Facebook users can now apply for their share of the settlement from the Cambridge Analytica class action lawsuit. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, settled the suit last December, agreeing to pay $725 million—although it didn’t have to admit any wrongdoing. If you reside stateside and had an active Facebook account any time between May 24th, 2007, and December 22nd, 2022, you are entitled to a part of the multi-million dollar payout even if you have since deleted your account. You just have to submit a claim before August 25th, 2023.

The settlement all stems from the 2018 revelations that Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct British consulting and data mining company, to improperly access personal information from up to 87 million users and use it to target voters during Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign. The data was purportedly collected for academic purposes using a personality quiz app. Even though only 270,000 people took the quiz, because of Facebook’s lax privacy policies, the app was able to scrape personal information from their Facebook friends. 

The fall out at the time was pretty severe. Facebook CEO (and now Meta CEO) Mark Zuckerberg was called before Congress to answer questions related to the scandal, and the company agreed to voluntarily enforce GDPR-like privacy rules globally to prevent something similar from happening again.

After an investigation, the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook a record-breaking $5 billion. The SEC also fined the company $100 million for misleading investors. And, of course, there was this class action lawsuit—which was later expanded to encompass any other third parties Facebook had allowed to improperly access user data. 

Unfortunately, whatever sum of money you get from this settlement will likely be pretty small. As the FAQs explain, every claimant will be given one point for each month they used Facebook between 2007 and 2022. The full settlement, minus administrative fees, legal costs, and a few other expenses, will then be divided by the total number of points and shared out accordingly. If you have only used Facebook for a few years, you’ll get less than someone who has used the service for the full 15-year claim period.

It’s impossible to know the exact amount that anyone will get until the claim period has passed, but we can do some quick calculations to get a rough range. There were 240 million US Facebook users in 2022. If all of them submitted a claim and they’d all (impossibly) been using monthly Facebook since 2007, assuming the lawyers received 33 percent of the settlement, then you would be entitled to just around the $2 mark. 

At the other end of things, let’s say that just 10 percent of the 50 million users on the site in October, 2007 bother to apply for the settlement and the lawyers only take 25 percent as fees, you’d be entitled to something north of $100. 

So, depending on how active you’ve been on Facebook over the past 15 years, it seems likely that class action participants will get enough for a meal out—though whether that’s at McDonald’s or a local steakhouse remains to be seen. (Of course, if only a handful people bother to fill in Facebook’s claim form, then you could walk away with a few hundred thousand dollars. That seems unlikely, but you never know.)If you want to submit a claim, Facebook has set up a dedicated website. Once you (ironically) fill in a few personal details and select whether you want to be paid with a prepaid gift card, through PayPal or Venmo, or directly into your bank account, all you have to do is wait for your money.

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Montana is one step away from instituting a state-wide wholesale ban of TikTok. On Friday, the state’s House of Representatives voted 54-43 in favor of passing SB419, which would blacklist the immensely popular social media platform from operating within the “territorial jurisdiction of Montana,”  as well as prohibit app stores from offering it to users. The legislation now heads to Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte, who has 10 days to sign the bill into law, veto it, or allow it to go into effect without issuing an explicit decision.

Although a spokesperson only said that Gov. Gianforte would “carefully consider any bill the Legislature sends to his desk,” previous statements and actions indicate a sign-off is likely. Gianforte banned TikTok on all government devices last year after describing the platform as a “significant risk” for data security.

TikTok is owned by the China-based company, ByteDance, and faces intense scrutiny from critics on both sides of the political aisle over concerns regarding users’ privacy. Many opponents of the app also claim it subjects Americans to undue influence and propaganda from the Chinese government. Speaking with local news outlet KTVH last week, Montana state Sen. Shelley Vance alleged that “we know that beyond a doubt that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is operating as a surveillance arm of the Chinese Communist Party and gathers information about Americans against their will.”

[Related: Why some US lawmakers want to ban TikTok.]

As Gizmodo also notes, however, there is still no definitive proof TikTok or ByteDance is surveilling US users, although company employees do have standard access to user data. Regardless, many privacy advocates and experts warn that the continued focus on TikTok ignores the much larger and more pervasive data privacy issues affecting Americans. The RESTRICT Act, for example, is the most notable federal effort to institute a wholesale blacklisting of TikTok, but critics have voiced numerous worries regarding its expansive language, ill-defined enforcement, and unintended consequences. The bill’s ultimate fate still remains unclear.

If Montana’s SB419 ultimately moves forward, it will go into effect on January 1, 2024. The bill proposes a $10,000 per day fine on any app store, or TikTok itself, if it continues to remain available within the state afterwards. The proposed law does not include any penalties on individual users.

In a statement reported by The New York Times, a TikTok spokesperson said the company “will continue to fight for TikTok users and creators in Montana whose livelihoods and First Amendment rights are threatened by this egregious government overreach.”

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Picture this: You’re at your desk working on a project when your phone chimes. A quick glance tells you a friend sent over a video on TikTok. Convinced you’re due for a break, you click the link to find a new dance video from Charli D’Amelio. Fast forward an hour later, and you’re still on your phone, except now you’ve gone from viral dances to animal videos to fitness gurus raving about a weight loss hack. 

If this scenario hits too close to home, you’re not alone. Most people on social media check it daily, and younger people are likelier to return to their favorite platforms multiple times a day. TikTok is especially popular with teenagers: A 2022 survey from the Pew Research Center suggests 67 percent of teens use it, while 16 percent use it almost constantly. 

So why do people spend so much time online? One underlying reason is that platforms like TikTok promote infinite scrolling. You might start off in one video only for the page to continuously load a never-ending stream of content. Absent-mindedly scrolling through content might seem like an innocent activity and a great excuse to waste time. However, research suggests it can negatively influence the brain and mental health.

Anyone can fall prey to mindless scrolling. Younger people are especially vulnerable since the brain is not fully developed until age 25, says Lisa Pion-Berlin, a psychologist and president of Parents Anonymous, a child abuse prevention nonprofit. While limiting access to social media (like this Utah bill requiring parental permission is trying to do) is one option, learning how to be a more active user can help anyone stop infinite scrolling and still enjoy social media.

Why infinite scrolling is bad for you

Social media platforms like TikTok are not comprehensively bad for you. Several studies suggest social media can prompt feelings of connectedness and positive well-being. Further, they allow for personal expression, which fosters positive mental health.

Ultimately, how social media makes people feel depends on how they use it. For example, excess social media use is associated with feeling more anxious, lonely, and generally bad about yourself. 

“The more attached we are to our devices, the more problematic it becomes,” says Lisa Strohman, a psychologist and the founder of Digital Citizen Academy, an education program that teaches children and teens how to have a healthy relationship with technology. 

[Related: Do you never feel FOMO? Time to meet its twin, JOMO.]

Moreover, Strohman says watching pictures and videos of everyone living their best life might make you worried or sad that you’re missing out. Some research suggests that comparing yourself to others on social media can result in aggression and anxiety, while other studies suggest a link between negative comparisons on social media and suicidal ideation.

Meanwhile, mindless scrolling can result in a state of mind similar to being in a trance state, says Pion-Berlin. She’s concerned that “mindless scrolling is a way to tune out” or dissociate from reality. Some research suggests that overuse of social media can result in negative psychological impacts: A 2023 study in the journal JAMA Pediatrics found that middle schoolers who constantly checked their social media feeds showed changes in how their brains responded to feedback and criticism from peers.   

Infinite scrolling can also lead to disrupted sleep patterns in adolescents and adults. The screen’s blue light can make it difficult to fall asleep, and the constant content prevents your brain from shutting down for the night. 

When we sleep, the brain sorts through and categorizes the information from the day and commits the vital stuff into long-term memory, explains Strohman. But mindless social media surfing before bedtime keeps giving it more data for the brain to process throughout the night, “and that’s what tends to lead to that insomnia,” she explains.

How infinite scrolling can hijack the brain

Mindless scrolling helps make social media an addicting habit because it takes advantage of the brain’s reward system, says Strohman.

An enjoyable TikTok, for example, can trigger the brain’s reward pathway. Subsequently, this causes the brain to release a chemical called dopamine, which Strohman describes “as a hit or a high” for the brain. The dopamine surge tells the brain that scrolling through social media is pleasurable and that we should do it again. Because another attention-grabbing Tiktok plays immediately when the first is over, this process starts all over again immediately. 

“The brain is rewarded every time because of how the feeds and algorithms are set up so that anytime we’re not on the app, we think we’re missing something,” explains Strohman. “That makes us want to go back on it again.:

The same process applies to adolescents—possibly to a more significant effect. Pion-Berlin explains that because the prefrontal cortex is one of the last brain areas to mature fully, younger people are more impulsive and have less self-control than adults. With less self-control, it may be easier for teens to fall into this rabbit hole of social media content, she says. In addition, the limbic system—a part of the brain involved in behavioral and emotional responses—is also more sensitive during our teenage years, which makes them likelier to prioritize pleasurable and desirable activities.

What are some ways to stop infinite scrolling?

While infinite scrolling isn’t great, that does not mean you need to quit social media altogether. On the contrary, there are some benefits to staying on the apps, such as building communities among people with a shared hobby or interest, maintaining relationships with family who live miles away, raising awareness for a particular cause, and learning from credible experts.

[Related: All the ways you can reduce screen time across your devices]

To make the most of your time, you’ll want to become an active rather than a passive user. Active users interact with others— in practice, this could look like commenting on posts or creating content. The high engagement gives you a specific purpose for being on the app, allows you to nurture and maintain online friendships, and is associated with improved well-being. 

Meanwhile, infinite scrolling is a passive activity because you’re socially disconnected from others and lurking in the background. Of course, sometimes you just want to take a break from life and watch some mind-numbing videos. In these situations, you’ll want to set a timer to limit the time you spend online and know when it’s time to log off, Strohman says. 

Another suggestion from Strohman is turning off notifications. People often fall into mindless surfing when notified or tagged in something. And while you might start out looking at the relevant post, you can easily find yourself lost in a comment thread or other recommended videos. 

“Have a clear purpose when accessing social media,” Strohman says. If a friend shares a post, tell yourself you will only watch this one video and not spend the next two hours on TikTok. 

“The more you scroll, the less settled you’ll be,” advises Strohman. “Be mindful, recognize your part in it, and try to do what you can to manage yourself in those online worlds.”

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The fate of the RESTRICT Act remains unclear. Also known as the “TikTok ban,” the bill has sizable bipartisan political—and even public—support, but critics say the bill in its current form focuses on the wrong issues. If it becomes law, it could change the way the government polices your internet activity, whether or not you use the popular video sharing app. 

Proponents of the RESTRICT Act, which stands for “Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology,” have called China’s social media app dangerous and invasive. But Salon, among others, has noted that “TikTok” does not appear once throughout the RESTRICT Act’s 55-page proposal. Salon even refers to it as “Patriot Act 2.0” in regards to its minefield of privacy violations.

[Related: Why some US lawmakers want to ban TikTok.]

Critics continue to note that the passage of the bill into law could grant an expansive, ill-defined set of new powers to unelected committee officials. Regardless of what happens with TikTok itself, the new oversight ensures any number of other apps and internet sites could be subjected to blacklisting and censorship at the government’s discretion. What’s more, everyday citizens may face legal prosecution for attempting to circumvent these digital blockades—such as downloading banned apps via VPN or while in another country—including 25 years of prison time.

In its latest detailed rundown published on Tuesday, the digital privacy advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation called the potential law a “dangerous substitute” for comprehensive data privacy legislation that could actually benefit internet users, such as bills passed for states like California, Colorado, Iowa, Connecticut, Virginia, and Utah. Meanwhile, the digital rights nonprofit Fight for the Future’s ongoing #DontBanTikTok campaign describes the RESTRICT Act as “oppressive” while still failing to address “valid privacy and security concerns.” The ACLU also maintains the ban “would violate [Americans’] constitutional right to free speech.”

As EFF noted earlier this week, the current proposed legislation would authorize the executive branch to block “transactions [and] holdings” of “foreign adversaries” involving information and communication technology if deemed “undue or unacceptable risk[s]” to national security. These decisions would often be at the sole discretion of unelected government officials, and because of the legislation’s broad phrasing, they could make it difficult for the public to learn exactly why a company or app is facing restrictions.

In its lengthy, scathing rebuke, Salon offered the following bill section for consideration:

“If a civil action challenging an action or finding under this Act is brought, and the court determines that protected information in the administrative record, including classified or other information subject to privilege or protections under any provision of law, is necessary to resolve the action, that information shall be submitted ex parte and in camera to the court and the court shall maintain that information under seal.”

[RELATED: Twitter’s ‘Blue Check’ drama is a verified mess.]

Distilled down, this section could imply that the evidence about an accused violator—say, an average US citizen who unwittingly accessed a banned platform—could be used against them without their knowledge.

If RESTRICT Act were to be passed as law, the “ban” could force changes in how the internet fundamentally works within the US, “including potential requirements on service platforms to police and censor the traffic of users, or even a national firewall to prevent users from downloading TikTok from sources across our borders,” argues the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Because of the bill’s language, future bans could go into effect for any number of other, foreign-based apps and websites. As Salon also argues, the bill allows for a distressing lack of accountability and transparency regarding the committee responsible for deciding which apps to ban, adding that “the lack of judicial review and reliance on Patriot Act-like surveillance powers could open the door to unjustified targeting of individuals or groups.”

Instead of the RESTRICT Act, privacy advocates urge politicians to pass comprehensive data privacy reforms that pertain to all companies, both domestic and foreign. The EFF argues, “Congress… should focus on comprehensive consumer data privacy legislation that will have a real impact, and protect our data no matter what platform it’s on—TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere else that profits from our private information.”

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After years of Instagram users pining for the return of chronological feeds, the app has finally made a change that lets you put the most recent posts at the top. There is a catch, though: your choice to sort your homepage chronologically is temporary, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

As we mentioned above, this change will not stick. If you close the app and reopen it, you’ll be right back on Instagram’s algorithmic feed. You also won’t be able to see Stories in this view, so it feels very much like a sub-feed. But if you tap any of the icons at the bottom of the screen (search, Reels, shop, and profile), then go back to the homepage, it should still be sorted chronologically. To get back to the standard feed, tap the back arrow in the top left.

This feature isn’t available if you’re using Instagram in a web browser, but if you don’t see these options on your mobile device, try updating your app. The Meta-owned platform launched this feature almost a year ago, so getting the most recent version should give you the ability to make your feed chronological. The pre-update workaround still helps, too: tap View Older Posts wherever you see it to gaze upon posts you may have missed.

How to set up Instagram’s chronological Favorites feed

If you follow a lot of accounts, a chronological Instagram feed can become tedious. When Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the change in January 2021, he noted that most people don’t get through most of their feeds. You can use the Favorites sorting option to only see the most recent posts from select accounts.

Posts from accounts on your Favorites list will be starred and appear higher up on the standard Instagram feed, Mosseri said in a post on Meta’s official blog.

There are a few ways to manage your Favorites list after you’ve created it. If you’re viewing the Favorites feed, tap the starred list icon in the top right to add or remove accounts. You can also tap the star icon next to a post from a favorited account wherever you see it, then hit Manage favorites to get to the same screen. Or tap the three lines in the top right corner of your profile page, then choose Favorites. It’s a great way to keep only the best posts on your sparkling new chronological Instagram feed.

This story has been updated. It was originally published on March 29, 2022.

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The “winding down” of Twitter’s Legacy Verified accounts supposedly began over the weekend. However, the only blue checkmark to take the hit so far appears to be the one for The New York Times—at CEO Elon Musk’s personal direction after a user’s meme brought it to his attention.

A spokesperson for The New York Times confirmed on Sunday the media company would decline to pay $12,000 a year for its verification badge. Upon apparently hearing the news, Musk responded, “Oh ok, we’ll take it off then.” It is unclear if Musk’s information source, DogeDesigner, is verified via the legacy system, or a paid Twitter Blue subscriber. It is now impossible to distinguish between the two tiers.

[Related: Twitter Blue is back and more confusing than ever.]

Twitter has granted verified statuses to thousands of individuals and organizations deemed “notable” since 2009, including governmental bodies, celebrities, professional journalists, and official corporate accounts. The simple system, while not perfect, for years helped users distinguish authentic accounts from imposters, scammers, and parodies. 

Since Musk assumed control of the social media platform in October 2022, Twitter has ushered in a dizzying flurry of updates, backtracks, and conflicting alterations to the verification program, which Musk has described as “corrupt and nonsensical.”

Amid last month’s verification requirement alterations, Twitter announced organizations such as news outlets could retain their gold “organization” badges—part of a recent color-coded policy shift—by ponying up $1,000 a month. The New York Times isn’t alone in skipping the expense— representatives from outlets like The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and Politico have said the companies would also not pay for the designation.

[Related: TikTok is taking on the conspiracy theorists.]

The main account for The New York Times now lacks a verification badge, but subsections such as Books, Arts, and Travel still retain their statuses. That said, both Arts and Travel show gold badges—while Books still boasts a blue checkmark. What’s more, blue ticks are now apparently reserved for both legacy verified users and Twitter Blue subscribers. Previously, clicking an individual account’s blue verification symbol showed whether it was a non-paying account, or one paying $8 per month for Musk’s “premium” Twitter experience.

As The Washington Post explained on Friday, the legacy phase-out delay may stem from a “largely manual process by a system prone to breaking.” Described as “similar to an Excel spreadsheet,” the verification database is reportedly “held together with duct tape,” according to one anonymous former employee. 

Twitter is currently worth around $20 billion, according to a recent internal memo. Musk paid $44 billion for the company in October 2022.

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Utah’s governor signed two bills into law on Thursday aimed at protecting the state’s underage social media users. Privacy critics, however, argue that the new laws’ constitutional legality and enforcement remain troublingly murky.

As NBC News and elsewhere report, H.B. 311 and S.B. 152 would make any social media companies with over 10 million users age-verify all Utah residents, as well as require parental consent from minors who want to make a profile. Among other sweeping reforms, the laws also require social media companies to allow parents complete access to their children’s posts and private messages. Additionally, the law sets up a curfew on social media use for underage Utahns from between 10:30 PM to 6:30 AM. Although the new legislation is scheduled to take effect in March 2024, it is unclear if the regulations will hold up to judicial scrutiny. 

In a letter sent to Gov. Spencer Cox earlier this month, digital rights advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued Utah’s bills are some of the most egregious they’ve seen so far.  Other states including Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Ohio, and New Jersey are considering similar legislation, as well.

[Related: Social media drama can hit teens hard at different ages.]

“Young people have First Amendment rights,” writes an EFF representative, adding that federal attempts to restrict internet content access “generally have not withstood constitutional scrutiny when challenged” in courts. Privacy advocates also argue Utah’s laws will ironically give social media companies even greater access to users’ private data via ID verification requirements, as well as disadvantage many young Utahans by limiting informational access. Because of the laws’ broad language, EFF argues apps including Duolingo and the hiking service, AllTrails, are subject to the new access restrictions.

“This all feels a little like the ‘ban on dancing’ in Footloose,” argued Evan Greer, director for  online privacy group Fight for the Future.

In an email to PopSci, Greer agreed there are “very real harms” to youth from social media companies, but contended that those problems would be better addressed by cracking down on abusive corporate practices rather than “draconian” restrictions for young people—restrictions Greer said could disproportionately harm LGBTQ+ children and those suffering from abusive environments. “[T]hey also just don’t really make any sense. I’m not sure anyone has actually thought about how any of this will work in practice,” added Greer.

[Related: Why TikTok’s algorithm is so addictive.]

Greer points to various scenarios, such as how to authentically determine a young person’s parent or legal guardian, as well as instances involving custody battles or abuse allegations. “Once you create mechanisms for parents to snoop on their kids’ social media activity, they’ll be abused by others,” said Greer.

Instead of Utah’s latest examples, Greer and likeminded advocates contend politicians should push to pass comprehensive privacy legislation. The FTC and state regulators, they argue, should tighten restrictions on predatory design practices such as apps’ autoplay and infinite scroll features, using personal data for algorithmic recommendations, and intrusive notifications.

“These laws are clearly unconstitutional,” said Greer, “but more importantly they’re going to put children in danger and strip them of their rights.” 

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TikTok announced a number of updates to its community guidelines on Tuesday, including how it will address misinformation, AI-generated art, and deepfakes. The revamped rulebook and classifications go into effect on April 21. The changes arrive amid mounting political pressure from Western lawmakers in the US and UK, alongside an impending congressional testimony from TikTok CEO Shou ZI Chew regarding alleged security concerns within one of the world’s most popular social media platforms.

Perhaps the most noticeable addition comes in the form of TikTok’s new guidelines section dedicated to the rapid proliferation of “synthetic media,” such as altered videos and deepfakes. Although TikTok “welcome[s] the creativity that new artificial intelligence (AI) and other digital technologies may unlock,” it acknowledges these tools often blur the lines between reality and fiction. Beginning next month, all deepfaked or otherwise altered content must be labeled as such through a sticker or caption.

[Related: Why some US lawmakers want to ban TikTok.]

Additionally, a wholesale ban on using the likeness of “any real private figure” will be initiated in April. Public figures, meanwhile, are granted more leeway due to their high profiles and societal relevance. That said, content including a deepfaked politician or celebrity cannot “be the subject of abuse,” or used to mislead audiences on political or societal issues. As The Verge also noted on Tuesday, TikTok’s prior stance on deepfakes were summed up by a single line banning uploads which “mislead users by distorting the truth of events [or] cause significant harm to the subject of the video.”

Notably, the company is also instituting a new section explicitly addressing the proliferation of climate misinformation. Any content that “undermines well-established scientific consensus” regarding the reality of climate change and its contributing factors is prohibited. As TechCrunch explains, conversations on climate change are still permitted, including the pros and cons of individual policies and technologies, as long as it does not contradict scientific consensus. Last year, at least one study showcased that TikTok search results were inundated with climate change misinformation and denialism. The new hardline on misinformation apparently extends beyond climate disinfo, as well. In a separate section, TikTok explains content will be ineligible from users’ For You Feed if it “contains general conspiracy theories or unverified information related to emergencies.”

[Related: US government gives TikTok an ultimatum, warning of ban.]

These and other changes come as TikTok weathers increasingly intense criticisms and scrutiny over its data security, with lawmakers citing issues with the social media platform’s China-based parent company, ByteDance. Last week, the Biden administration issued its starkest warning yet, urging the platform’s Chinese national owners to sell their shares or face a wholesale ban on the app. The announcement came after moves to ban the social media platform from all US government devices—a decision echoed recently in the UK and the Netherlands, as well. Critics of the hardline stances point towards the larger data insecurities within the digital ecosystem.

In a statement released last week from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights advocacy group conceded that “TikTok raises special concerns, given the surveillance and censorship practices of its home country, China, but contended that the solution isn’t a single business or company ban. Rather, we must enact comprehensive consumer data privacy legislation.”

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Scrolling through Instagram and TikTok on a Monday morning is an easy trigger for the dreaded fear of missing out–or FOMO. To push back against this need to never miss a party or fancy vacation, the term JOMO (joy of missing out) has been popularized for those who report a healthy level of enjoyment of solitude.

However, most people who also have high JOMO also report higher levels of social anxiety, according to a study published this month in the journal Telematics and Informatics Reports.

[Related: Seattle schools sue social media companies over students’ worsening mental health.]

For the study, a team from Washington State University looked at two 500-person samples of adults recruited through Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform MTurk. As a way to measure JOMO, they asked a slate of questions about enjoying spending time alone and experiencing disconnection. For example, whether subjects liked having time to self-reflect and if they were happy to see friends and family out enjoying themselves even if they weren’t there. Questions to assess loneliness, social media use, social anxiety, personality traits, and general life satisfaction were also included. 

The surveys revealed mixed results, with some evidence that there is actually some anxiety hiding behind the joy. 

“In general, a lot of people like being connected,” psychology professor and co-author Chris Barry said in a statement. “When trying to assess JOMO, we found that some people were enjoying missing out, not for the solitude or a Zen-like, calming experience of being able to regroup, but more to avoid social interaction.”

This avoidance might explain the correlation the team found between social media use and JOMO, which surprised the team. They anticipated that people who wanted to miss out on social gatherings would not care to check in to see what their friends or family were doing. Instead, they found that those who have social anxiety may find social media as a less intense way to connect instead of interacting in person. 

The study of the first sample group showed connections in those high in JOMO and social media and also general life satisfaction, but social anxiety actually had the strongest correlation.

[Related: Study confirms the obvious: youth have abandoned Facebook.]

After getting these mixed results, they designed a second study to see if there was a group of people high in JOMO, but without that anxiety. While they did find these blissful introverts, the group was small and represented only about 10 percent of the participants in the study. This group was not socially anxious, but still reported some moderate feelings of loneliness.

Previous studies have linked FOMO with low self-esteem and loneliness, but these findings indicate that the experience of JOMO is not as clear. The team believes that JOMO might be more of a momentary phase of needing to disconnect instead of a constant state of feelings. Other studies have also shown that continued exposure to anxiety triggers can help lessen stress later.

“There are a lot of unanswered questions like ‘what’s a good dosage of social interaction versus disengagement?’ I think that’s going to differ for everyone,” Barry said.  “The motives matter,” Barry said. “Why are people missing out? If it’s because they need to recharge, that’s maybe a good thing. If they’re trying to avoid something, that is probably not healthy in the long run.”

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The heat is truly on for short video app TikTok in both the US and abroad following months of political posturing and threats. On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal first reported that the Biden administration has issued an unofficial ultimatum to the popular social media app’s Chinese owners—sell your stock shares, or face a wholesale app ban in the US. Meanwhile, the UK moved forward on Thursday with blacklisting TikTok from all government devices, citing security concerns.

The latest domestic pressures come after a consistent torrent of criticisms from US lawmakers against TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. Among others, Sens. John Thune (R, SD) and Mark Warner (D, VA) allege that China-based owners ostensibly can’t be trusted with access to their millions of American users’ data. Although it is true both ByteDance’s owners and TikTok itself have been shown to engage in questionable and outright illegal practices in the past, critics of the ban say this is nothing but a deflection from the larger issues at hand—namely, consumers’ overall digital privacy safeguards across the entire spectrum of online life and social media platforms.

[Related: Why some US lawmakers want to ban TikTok.]

“If it weren’t so alarming, it would be hilarious that US policymakers are trying to ‘be tough on China’ by acting exactly like the Chinese government,” recently argued Evan Greer, director of the privacy advocacy group, Fight for the Future, in a statement. Greer also added that, “Banning an entire app used by millions of people, especially young people, LGBTQ folks, and people of color, is classic state-backed Internet censorship.”

Greer and others concede that while TikTok may pose some security risks for users, so does virtually every other major social media platform collecting massive troves of data for targeted advertising, branding, and consumer profiles. Even if TikTok were banned, Greer says, ByteDance could hypothetically still access much of the same data by buying it from data brokers, given that there are few laws in place to protect American consumers from this kind of strategy. Earlier this month, David Greene, civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told PopSci that American lawmakers “can’t just be responding to undifferentiated fear, or to uninvestigated or unproven concerns, or at the worst, xenophobia.”

[Related: Hackers could be selling your Twitter data for the lowball price of $2.]

Instead, anti-ban advocates continue to urge Congress to pass a universal data protection legislation, much like what the European Union did back in 2018 with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This regulation, which has affected companies such as Google and Amazon, most recently cost Facebook’s owners at Meta $275 million for a massive data leak in 2021.

Meanwhile, actually enacting such a targeted ban on TikTok could prove difficult to enforce, says Greer. Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union released a letter urging politicians to reconsider their stance on the issue while warning that blacklisting the app could violate First Amendment rights.

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The disappointment of watching a great TikTok on your For You page just to accidentally reload everything and lose the clip forever is so common—so visceral—that the experience has become a bit of a meme. The incessant cries of us common folk must have reached the ears of those running the app, because they’ve rolled out several ways to check your watch history and find recently viewed videos.

Unlike the early days on the so-called clock app, it’s now easy to navigate your TikTok watch history. And if you’re a power user, you can use specific search filters and techniques to hunt down previously watched TikToks if scrolling through your archive gets a bit too tedious.

How to find your TikTok watch history on iOS and Android

Although people with iPhones got the ability to see their TikTok history before Android users, the processes have since unified. As it should be.

On iOS, all you need to do is tap Profile in the bottom right, hit the main menu (three lines) in the top right, touch Settings and privacy, find Comment and watch history under the Content & Display heading, and select Watch history. If you never comment, you’ll only see Watch history after you open the settings and privacy menu.

On Android, the steps are similar: Profile > main menu (three lines) > Settings and privacy > Comment and watch history > Watch history. Again, if you never comment, you’ll only see Watch history after Settings and privacy.

No matter which mobile operating system you’re using, you’ll see every video you’ve watched within the past 180 days. If you’re trying to find something older, you’ll have to search for it with the normal TikTok search function (tips below).

You can find a recently watched video by scrolling down this page, but be warned: everything is on there. Whether it’s a video you watched in its entirety or one that happened to briefly load and autoplay as you moved around the app, it’s part of your TikTok watch history. The only videos you won’t find are Lives and Stories.

[Related: 7 tips to make the most of TikTok]

Unless you’re extremely patient, this method isn’t great for digging deep into your archive, because you can’t search the watch history page. If you’re a heavy TikTok user and watched something days or weeks ago, you’ll end up scrolling for a while. You can, however, hit Select in the top right and tap individual videos or touch Select all watch history in the bottom left. Then you can permanently get rid of those clips by tapping the bright red Delete button. At least tidy up a bit while you’re there.

First, tap the search icon (a magnifying glass) in the top right corner of your screen. Then type out the relevant keywords and hit Search. Next, hit the Watched button just above the first row of videos. This will change your search results to show any videos you’ve watched. If you don’t see this option (along with All, Unwatched, and Recently uploaded), make sure you’re in the Top tab—they don’t appear if you’re in any of the others. Otherwise, TikTok may not have registered that you watched a video related to your search terms, or it may have passed before your eyes longer than 180 days ago.

As with your watch history, the Watched search filter will display TikToks that appeared in recent searches and auto-played as thumbnails as you looked through the results, so you may have to dig deeper every time you search.

Other TikTok search tips

The main search results page, whether you filter it or not, is stuffed with content. You can use these tabs and suggestions to further refine your search or just get lost in the TikTok abyss and hope your algorithm doesn’t take a devastating hit. I, for one, will probably spend the next week telling TikTok I’m not interested in those videos where people pour milk all over the counter while “making coffee” because I searched “coffee TikTok” while working on this story. (To do so, long-press on the video when it plays on your FYP and hit Not interested on the menu that appears.)

Across the top of the results page, you’ll see built-in filters that will display only top posts, users, videos, sounds, accounts that are currently live, and hashtags related to your search. Scroll down a little and you may also find suggestions for what other people searched for.

[Related: Why some US lawmakers want to ban TikTok]

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Yesterday, lawmakers introduced a new bipartisan Senate bill that would give the US government the power to ban TikTok. The bill is called, clunkily, the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology, or RESTRICT Act. It was introduced in part by Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, who is also the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and it would allow the Commerce Department to review deals, software updates, and data transfers from apps and tech companies in which “foreign adversaries,” specifically the governments of China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela, have an interest. 

It’s the latest—and perhaps the closest to becoming law—in a long line of proposals that look to limit the potential for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to exert influence on TikTok, and by extension, its users around the world.

Both the US and European Union governments are considering banning TikTok, limiting how it can handle customer data, and generally just increasing the regulatory burden it’s under compared to, say, Facebook or Instagram. Both entities have gone so far as to ban it on government staff’s work phones over espionage fears. Let’s take a look at why. 

Although TikTok has over 100 million active monthly users in the US and at least 10,000 employees across the US and Europe, its parent company, ByteDance, is headquartered in Beijing, China. This has led to some security concerns as well as plenty of bellicose posturing from US lawmakers and China-hawks. 

The security concerns come in part because ByteDance has bowed down to the CCP in the past. For example, in 2018, its then-CEO and founder, Zhang Yiming, had to issue a groveling, self-criticizing apology after the CCP compelled it to shut down one of its other apps. He promised to “further deepen cooperation” with the authoritarian government.

TikTok and ByteDance employees also have a manual override for what goes viral and gets promoted by the app’s “For You” algorithm. Earlier this year, a Forbes report on the “heating” feature revealed that TikTok frequently promoted videos in order to court influencers and brands and entice them into partnerships based on inflated video view counts. The concern here is that government propaganda, fake news, and anything else could be manipulated in the same way. 

Then there are legitimate concerns about TikTok’s data handling practices. Last year, a BuzzFeed news report revealed that engineers in China were able to access data from US users, despite the information supposedly being stored in the US. TikTok’s COO, Vanessa Pappas, did little to alleviate those concerns in a grilling before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee last summer. Finally, TikTok had to fire four employees based in the US and China for attempting to spy on reporters, including Emily Baker-White who wrote both the Forbes and BuzzFeed investigations. 

Of course, the app also enjoys a huge amount of popularity domestically—more than two-thirds of teens use TikTok, after all. 

As David Greene, civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, explains over Zoom, ByteDance and TikTok aren’t really handling data or bowing down to government pressure in a wildly different way compared to other social media apps. The big difference is where ByteDance is headquartered. 

Greene also thinks any US government attempt to ban TikTok is on shaky ground. “If the government wants to ban a way for people in this country to communicate with each other and with other people, it’s going to have to do so within the framework of the First Amendment,” he says. 

As Greene explains it, this means the US government will need to show that not only does some real threat to the public exist, but also that banning TikTok is justified. “It can’t just be responding to undifferentiated fear, or to uninvestigated or unproven concerns, or at the worst, xenophobia,” he says. 

TikTok is also fighting hard to ensure it can continue to operate in the US and Europe. It’s recently launched Project Texas and Project Clover, multi-billion dollar restructuring plans that would involve storing US data in the US and European data in Ireland and Norway in ways that they could not be accessed in China. Whether these efforts can reassure lawmakers that it doesn’t need additional oversight—or worse, a total ban—remains to be seen.

The same day the bill was introduced, the White House said in a statement from the National Security Advisor that they “urge Congress to act quickly to send it to the President’s desk.” You can watch Senator Warner talk more about the bill here.

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Think about the music and podcasts you listen to, and how they affect your mood. If streaming audio content makes you happier, you’re not alone, and the proof is in the study data Spotify released today.

That finding comes courtesy of 426 free-tier Spotify users who volunteered to wear an electrodermal activity sensor on their palm any time they tuned in over the course of 40 days. The company learned that listening to either podcasts or music improved its users’ moods, and that the activities listeners participate in influenced the type of content they gravitated to.

Although part of Spotify’s motivation for this research is to help advertisers understand how users’ engagement habits with music and podcasts can be used to create a seamless ad experience, it also has interesting implications for scientific studies related to the human experience with sound. 

“The project is showing that you can actually study this stuff in the wild. The conditions here were as realistic as you can get considering these were people that were just living their lives,” study co-author Josh McDermott, associate professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, tells PopSci. 

In his view, this opens the door to a new kind of anthropology-like study that can look at how people deal with audio in their lives. “There’s this big cultural shift in the way that we consume music and other audio that really happened over the last decade. It’s just changed the way that people live and probably has a lot of important effects,” McDermott adds. “This is just one way to understand that.” 

Key to Spotify’s work was the electrodermal activity sensor, which measures sweat and variations in the electroconductivity of the skin.

“The reason why we went with that specific technology is that we really wanted measure the impact of digital technologies throughout the day, so it was crucial for us to get outside of a lab environment and let our research participants use and interact with Spotify as they would normally do,” says Marion Boeri, global lead of Thought Leadership Research at Spotify.

This research follows a 2021 collaboration with a company called Neuro-Insight that measured users’ brain activity while they listened to Spotify. In the Neuro-Insight project, “we had people come in the lab, and we measured their neural activity when they’re listening to Spotify, which obviously helped us understand engagement that our platform drove, but it was something that was limiting us to that environment,” Boeri adds. 

In an effort to break free of that limitation, this time Spotify enlisted research participants from the US and the UK who had free Spotify accounts. Across 14,878 Spotify listening sessions, the company tracked what these people listened to, and asked them to fill out surveys before and after each session about the activity they were doing, their mood, if they remembered the ads they had heard, and if they were interested in the product advertised. Spotify’s researchers took a baseline measure of electrodermal activity before people listened to any audio, and used changes they observed as a metric for engagement. 

[Related: Meet Spotify’s new AI DJ]

No matter the audio content, streaming boosted mood across the board. 

“You do see that people report their mood improves regardless of what they do. You see this boost in every activity [we measured],” McDermott says. “People are choosing what they consume and it makes them a little bit happier.”

There were also findings that broadly proved some long-suspected trends in audio science, like the fact that our environments dictate the types of audio content we gravitate toward in the moment.

“The musical attributes and the audio attributes that characterize what people are listening to vary a lot depending on what they’re doing,” he notes. For example, people like dancey music if they’re in a social setting, or if they’re being active. And they might like podcasts or wordier songs when they’re on a walk by themselves. “This is the kind of thing people have suspected intuitively for a long time, but it’s never been demonstrated,” McDermott says. “This was really the first time anybody had access to that.”

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The Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, is bulking up its internal tech team. The agency, which focuses on consumer protection and antitrust issues in the US, announced last week that it would be forming an Office of Technology and hiring more tech experts. 

Leading the new office is Stephanie Nguyen, the agency’s existing chief technology officer, who recently spoke with PopSci about what the new department will do and what her priorities for it are. 

“In general, the FTC has always stayed on the cutting edge of emerging technology to enforce the law,” she says. “In the 1930s, we looked at deceptive radio ads.” Earlier this century, she notes, they focused on “high-tech spyware.” The goal of the agency in general involves tackling problems that plague the public, like the scourge of robocalls.

“The shift in the pace and volume of evolving tech changes means that we can’t rely on a case-by-case approach,” she adds. “We need to staff up.” And the staffing up comes at a time when the tech landscape is as complex and formidable as it’s ever been, with the rise of controversial tools like generative AI and chatbots, and companies such as Amazon—which just scooped up One Medical, a primary care company, and in 2017 purchased Whole Foods—becoming more and more powerful. 

A relatively recent example of a tech issue the FTC has tackled comes from Twitter, which was hit with a $150 million fine in 2022 for abusing the phone numbers and email addresses it had collected for security purposes because it had permitted “advertisers to use this data to target specific users,” as the FTC noted last year. The Commission has also taken on GoodRx for the way it handled and shared people’s medical data. They have an ongoing lawsuit against Facebook-owner Meta for “anticompetitive conduct.” Meanwhile, in a different case, the FTC was unsuccessful at attempting to block Meta’s acquisition of a VR company called Within Unlimited, which CNBC referred to as “a significant defeat” for the FTC. 

[Related: Why the new FTC chair is causing such a stir]

Nguyen says that as the lines become increasingly blurry between what is, and isn’t, a tech company, the creation of the office became necessary. “Tech cannot be viewed in a silo,” she says. “It cuts across sectors and industries and business models, and that is why the Office of Technology will be a key nexus point for our consumer protection and competition work to enable us to create and scale the best practices.” 

The move at the FTC comes at a time when the tech literacy of various government players is in the spotlight and is crucially important. The Supreme Court has been considering two cases that relate to a law known as Section 230, and Justice Elana Kagan even referred to herself and her fellow justices as “not the nine greatest experts on the internet.” 

At the FTC, what having the new Office of Technology will mean in practice is that the amount of what she refers to as in-house “technologists” will roughly double, as they hire about 12 new people. She says that as they create the team, “we need security and software engineers, data scientists and AI experts, human-computer interaction designers and researchers,” and well as “folks who are experts on ad tech or augmented and virtual reality.”

Tejas Narechania, the faculty director for the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, says that the FTC’s creation of this new office represents a positive step. “I think it’s a really good development,” he says. “It reflects a growing institutional capacity within the executive branch and within our agencies.” 

“The FTC has been operating in this space for a while,” he adds. “It has done quite a bit with data privacy, and it has sometimes been criticized for not really fully understanding the technology, or the development of the technology, that has undergirded some of the industries that it is charged with overseeing and regulating.” (The agency has faced other challenges too.)

One of the ways the people working for the new office will be able to help internally at the FTC, Nguyen says, is to function as in-house subject matter experts and conduct new research. She says they’ll tackle issues like “shifts in digital advertising, to help the FTC understand implications of privacy, competition, and consumer protection, or dissecting claims made about AI-powered products and assessing whether it’s snake oil.” 

Having in-house expertise will help them approach tech questions more independently, Narechania speculates. The FTC will “be able to bring its own knowledge to bear on these questions, rather than relying on the very entities it’s supposed to be scrutinizing for information,” he reflects. “To have that independent capacity for evaluation is really important.” 

For Nguyen, she says the big-picture goal of the new office is that they are “here to strengthen the agency’s ability to be knowledgeable and take action on tech changes that impact the public.”

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There are few laws more fundamental to the way the internet works than Section 230. Just 26 words long, it created the framework for much of the modern web. But now the Supreme Court has taken up two cases that challenge its basic premise: Gonzalez v. Google LLC and Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh. If you want to know what all the hubbub is about, here’s what the law says, and what people think about it.

What is Section 230? 

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was initially passed in 1996. That’s before Google, Facebook, Amazon, or many of today’s internet giants were founded. Instead, it was designed to deal with an internet filled with message boards and rudimentary search engines. 

Section 230 has two key provisions: (c)(1), which states, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider;” and (c)(2), which provides protection from liability for “any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of” objectionable content, whether or not that content is constitutionally protected by the First Amendment. 

In general, the courts in the US have taken a broad approach to interpreting Section 230. They have largely ruled that search engines, large social media services, e-commerce sites, and even small blogs that host comment sections aren’t liable for content that users post—though there are exceptions for things like illegal content and content that violates intellectual property law. The courts have also ruled that platforms have broad rights to remove whatever content they like, which is how former President Donald Trump got himself banned. 

This law has very important ramifications for how websites have been able to operate over the past 26 years. Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, explains that “Section 230 is considered both an immunity from suit as well as from liability.” (The EFF has filed amicus briefs in support of Section 230 in both recent Supreme Court cases, and has long argued that it is an essential law for maintaining free speech rights on the internet.)

The law means that not only are websites and social networks off the hook from any potential civil settlements for any harm that comes to a plaintiff from user-generated content these platforms host, but they can get out of any lawsuit early without having to defend against the specifics of the claim. 

As Cope explains, without Section 230, “Platforms would have to defend themselves all the way to the very end of a case that might take several years… and then there could be multiple appeals that cost a lot of money and take a lot of time.” 

Why do tech companies like Section 230? 

Section 230 is often described as a “liability shield,” and really, that’s why tech companies like it. 

In other countries around the world, tech companies have far stricter obligations to remove content than they presently do in the US. In Germany, for example, social media companies have to promptly remove illegal content (that can include crimes such as insulting a public office) or face up to a €50 million (roughly $53 million) fine. 

And not only are they forced to pay fines, but they’re forced to employ lawyers and lobbyists to argue against the cases and the laws in the first place. It’s why they have fought so hard against the latest spate of European Union laws like the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act that are expressly designed to rein American tech companies in. 

How do politicians feel about Section 230?

As much as tech companies enjoy the protection of Section 230, politicians from across the political spectrum take issue with it. 

As Cope explains it, Republican politicians over the past several years tend to feel that, under Section 230, “platforms are taking down too much content—particularly too much conservative or Republican content.” Former President Trump, for example, has called for it to be abolished. 

“But on the other hand,” says Cope, “You have the Democrats, or more the liberals, who actually think that not enough content is being taken down. They complain about a lot of bad content, like hate speech, which is protected under our First Amendment.” 

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month, President Joe Biden called for “bipartisan action from Congress to hold Big Tech accountable,” including amending Section 230 to make the companies more liable for the content they host.

What else is there to know about Section 230?

For better or worse, change could be on the horizon. “It seems like there’s consensus in Congress that after 25 years of Section 230, they want to do something,” says Cope, “but it’s not a hundred percent clear what it is they would do.” 

First though, the Supreme Court has to consider it. Both Gonzalez v. Google LLC and Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh are being taken under the federal Anti-Terrorism Act, and both hinge on how the court interprets Section 230. In reporting on the first of those cases yesterday, The New York Times said that the court appears leary of making big changes to the law. 

It’s the first time the highest court has considered Section 230, and whatever it decides will have serious implications for the future of the internet around the world. 

The post A guide to Section 230, the law that made the internet the Wild West appeared first on Popular Science.

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In living rooms, backyards, and public parks throughout the country, baby showers are being replaced by something a bit more dramatic. Some of today’s expectant parents share their joy by “revealing” their child’s sex in parties that feature balloons, cake, and confetti in pink or blue (or occasionally purple, if the parents want to signal that they will not know their child’s chosen gender for many years to come). But the biggest ones, fueled by social media trends, go even further, involving extravagant stunts. And these spectacles can wreak havoc on the environment. 

A pink pigeon found in New York City, who some speculate was brightly colored for a gender reveal party, died from inhaling the dye’s toxins earlier this month. A couple who used a pyrotechnic device to reveal their baby’s gender started the El Dorado fire in California in 2020, which killed a firefighter and destroyed five homes and 15 buildings. An off-duty border patrol agent lit an Arizona forest on fire with a blue-colored explosive. And in one gender reveal party in Brazil, a couple dyed an entire river blue.

[Related:

[Related: How to build and extinguish a campfire without sparking a catastrophe]

While most gender reveal parties stick to colored cupcakes or other tame features, social media could be driving a few expectant parents to go bigger. Popular videos and posts can encourage people to mimic what others are doing, such as learning a TikTok dance, says Laura Tropp, a professor of communication arts at Marymount Manhattan College who specializes in representations of pregnancy, motherhood, and families in popular culture. Or they can take a trend to dangerous heights, which seems to be the case with the pigeon, river, and fires. Insurance companies are even posting liability advice for when reveals go wrong.

“You’re seeing this pressure on a lot of people to have the next-level gender reveal party,” Tropp says. “They involve color; they involve objects. And I think people love to watch all these extreme parties happening because they’re exciting.” 

Not only are gender reveals visual phenomena—they are also able to make what used to be a very private human experience something more social. “Pregnancy is long, most of it is just happening inside a woman’s body,” Tropp explains. “So it’s the ability to kind of take an aspect of pregnancy, move it outside a woman’s body, and then make it exciting. And then maybe make it extreme to get the social media views that people want.”

[Related: TikTokers are taking a diabetes drug to lose weight. Now it’s in short supply.]

Tropp says it’s all part of the commoditization of pregnancy and parenthood. The baby product industry is estimated to reach $352 billion by 2023, and offers everything from “it’s a boy!” hand sanitizer to edible glitter bombs. “There’s this pressure on parents to be a part of all these rituals that were never associated with pregnancy or parenting,” she notes. “Gender reveal parties are a part of this moment where you could publicly express an aspect of your pregnancy really early on. So I think we’re seeing this kind of shift from parenting starting at the moment of birth to parenting starting much, much earlier.”

But gender reveal parties are just one of many human rituals that can be harmful to the environment, according to Bron Taylor, a professor of religion, nature and ethics at the University of Florida, who has written about environmental ethics. “Fireworks are an obvious example,” he writes in an email to PopSci. “They pollute the air, soil, and water, and of course, their production, distribution, and use, contributes to anthropogenic climate disruption. But these practices, whether for nationalistic, calendrical, or religious rituals, are now so well-established, that many consider questioning them unthinkable … In this age of profound environmental crises, we should be rethinking everything, including every sort of ceremony and ritualized practice.” 

For those who still want to throw a gender reveal party, a good starting point may be to “eschew things that burn, explode, or otherwise risk hurting people or ecosystems,” Taylor says. Share your excitement in a responsible way—or you could just stick to cupcakes and piñatas.

The post Gender reveal parties are turning nature pink and blue appeared first on Popular Science.

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Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the heartbreakers at the Federal Trade Commission recently released their latest report on online romance scammers and the aftermath of their schemes. According to the FTC’s statistics, almost 70,000 people reported falling for romantic scams amounting to $1.3 billion in personal losses. The median loss for individuals tallied up to around $4,400 per person.

As the FTC report details, con artists are constantly improving their tactics and are frequently scouring social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for personal information on their targets. As such, they approach their potential victims armed with quick, seemingly meant-to-be similarities. “You like a thing, so that’s their thing, too. You’re looking to settle down. They’re ready too,” explains Emma Fletcher, author of the FTC’s Data Spotlight rundown.

[Related: Cryptocurrency scammers are mining dating sites for victims.]

After approaching people via these digital venues, conversations often transfer over to messaging apps like Telegram, Google Chat, or WhatsApp. From there, malicious scammers try to elicit money, more personal details, alongside potentially explicit images and videos which they can then use for blackmailing—a tactic often referred to as “sextortion.”

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of payments sent to scam artists came in the form of cryptocurrency and wire transfers, given their highly anonymized natures. Other runners-up include gift card requests and asking for payment to cover a nonexistent package’s shipping costs.

The FTC conducted a breakdown of scammers’ preferred storylines via keyword analysis based on over 8 million romance scam reports resulting in monetary losses. Nearly a quarter of lies stem from someone claiming a friend or relative is sick, hurt, or in jail. Grifters also like to claim they can teach victims how to invest, are deployed overseas in the military, or have recently come into some fortune they inexplicably want to share.

[Related: Social media scammers made off with $770 million last year.]

Anyone hoping to avoid becoming a lovelorn statistic should abide by a few straightforward rules: First off, virtually no one is going to out-of-the-blue request money or investment opportunities via crypto or gift cards—swipe left if a suitor ever does. Vet your potential lover’s stories by friends and family to see if anyone raises an eyebrow, and trust those suspicions.

Lastly, the FTC also suggests a rather ingenious bit of amateur sleuthing if you ever start getting second thoughts: Conduct a reverse image search if a pursuer ever offers any supposed photographs or selfies. If the stories don’t line up, then it’s time to wade elsewhere in the online dating pool.

The post Don’t fall for an online love scam this Valentine’s Day appeared first on Popular Science.

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Ever since Elon Musk officially became the owner of Twitter, user experience on the platform has been… interesting. The company has endured massive layoffs, glitches, and scandals, and the also-owner of Tesla and SpaceX has taken it upon himself to manage things from the comfort of his own Twitter polls. Needless to say, some people have had a problem with all this.

Twitter hasn’t imploded (yet), despite predictions its collapse is imminent, but if you don’t want to stay to witness that, you might want a place where you can re-create the pre-Musk Twitter experience. 

Well, we checked, and some of the countless available social media platforms do have the potential to feel a bit like Twitter. If you’re thinking about where to set up shop next, these should be your first stops. 

People can tip or pay a creator on a post-to-post basis using a point system that translates into money: one point equals one cent. You get 50 points for free upon signing up, but you’ll need to start spending your own money if you want to keep tipping. That’s when the currency conversion gets a little iffy. For example, a bundle of 10,000 points, which should translate to $100, is actually $127 (with a discount, because buying in bulk is cheaper). Logically, that $27 difference goes to expenses like taxes and operational costs, but since we didn’t see any ads in the time we spent there, it’s easy to assume this is one of the ways Post makes money. Even if some of the initial payments go to the platform, Post’s developers say tips go entirely to creators.  

[Related: 11 Twitter bots that will make the most of your timeline]

Aesthetically, Post looks like a put-together version of Twitter: as soon as you create a profile, you can start scrolling a curated feed that gets refined the more you click and scroll. The interface is clean and the site uses a legible serif font. You can share original content and like and repost stuff from other users, but instead of Twitter-like replies where everything you say is in the form of a new tweet, you can comment the old-fashioned way—publicly, but not showing as a new item on your personal timeline.

Overall, things are generally civil over at Post, and even though you can find a large variety of wholesome content, there’s a lot of politics and journalism from reputable sources going around. 

If you never experienced the good ol’ days of peak Tumblr, the best way to understand the platform is to think of it as Twitter’s and Instagram’s forbidden love child. Its design makes it more of a visual-first platform than Twitter, but you can post all sorts of content: text, photos, videos, GIFs, and even audio. You can also interact with posts from people you follow by reposting (retweeting) them and replying to them just like you would on Twitter. 

In the beginning and during its heyday, this platform was a haven for women, fandoms, artists, and the LGBTQI+ community, who were free to post all sorts of content. Tumblr’s decline began when Yahoo bought the platform in 2013, but the biggest hit came when Verizon acquired the site in 2017. The telecom company set up stricter community guidelines that purged adult content from the site (including that of an artistic or educational nature), driving a lot of users onto other platforms, like Twitter. 

Pillowfort was highly attractive to those users for two main reasons: its interface is similar to Tumblr’s (especially because it gives more space to photos and videos) and community guidelines are more flexible, which is why the platform currently has a thriving fandom community. 

The site emphasizes content filtering and giving users the ability to interact with a handpicked group of people. Sign up, and you’ll be able to blacklist bothersome accounts, preventing them from seeing your posts or contacting you in any way—even through reposted content or instant messaging. 

Right now, Pillowfort is still in an open beta stage, and new users can only create accounts by paying a one-time $5 fee or by signing up for the waitlist, which promises to send you an invitation code in less than an hour.

If you don’t want to pay or wait, you can take a tour of the platform as a “demo user,” which will give you a pretty good idea of what you’ll encounter if you decide to join. 

With an easy-to-use and retro-looking interface, Cohost works a lot like Tumblr, but there’s no algorithm. This means you’ll only see the content from accounts you follow and tags you’ve bookmarked. As an anti-spam measure, new users cannot post or comment until a day or two after opening their accounts, but you can bypass that if you have an invite code from an existing user. 

Because there’s no algorithm, the easiest way to find people and posts you’re interested in (and make it easy for other users to find you) is by using tags. Users are encouraged to slap as many as possible onto each post, even if they’re super niche or more of an extra comment than a label. 

Cohost also attracts the artistic and LGBTQI+ communities, and has a strong population of Furries. In general, users are nice and respectful, while looking to make friends, show their work, and share humor. A cute extra feature is Cohost’s mascot, Eggbug, a round magenta bug who’s the star of a lot of fan art and merchandise.  

People can interact freely with each other at a “federal” level—meaning regardless of what community they belong to—or join more than one server at a time. If you change your mind, the platform allows you to move your entire account, including your followers, from one community to another. 

All this makes the Mastodon concept a little difficult to understand upfront, so the learning curve for new users is a bit steeper than for other platforms. Still, the best way to truly see if Mastodon is the Twitter alternative for you is to create an account and dive in head first. 

What makes CounterSocial different from other platforms is its claim to have a zero-tolerance policy for bullies, trolls, ads, and fake news. The network takes this so far that it has completely banned entire countries for being “well known to be origin points of an overwhelming majority of bots and trolls.” The list currently includes Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, and Syria, and the platform reserves the right to add and remove territories to this list at its own discretion. 

[Related: 8 tricks for making your Twitter feed less toxic]

CounterSocial (also known as COSO) puts a particular emphasis on news and politics. You’ll see MSNBC’s news ribbon at the top of your screen, and Counter Pro accounts even have access to news video clips on the homepage. Something you won’t see anywhere else is COSO’s current overall network sentiment—you’ll see it in the form of a thermometer at the top of the first column. This tool is constantly taking the pulse of the platform, measuring its level of toxicity. By looking at it you can be sure that people are, indeed, on edge, and it’s not just you. 

In terms of community, CounterSocial has a variety of folks sharing things like random thoughts, music, and the latest decal they’ve stuck to their bikes. Still, in the time we spent there, most posts were about politics, and all of them were very clearly from the same blue side of the US political spectrum. 

As an added bonus, COSO Pro users ($4.99 a month) get access to Counter Realms, which is a virtual reality iteration of the social network. There, users can create spaces or join those formed by others, and talk to other people using their avatars. If you have a VR set, you can use it in Realms, but if you prefer to keep it old-school, you can also access the platform with only your computer. 

This story has been updated. It was first published on April 27, 2022.

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Elon Musk has long claimed Twitter suffers from a major bot problem. But his latest attempt to fix the dubious issue has many critics worried about the collateral damage. On Thursday, the social media platform’s official developer account announced the company will no longer offer free access to its application program interface, or API, beginning on February 9. Third-party users and developers have long relied on data obtained through the Twitter API for research projects, information dissemination, as well as popular generative text and image bots. 

“While Twitter has long charged researchers to access older tweets, the ability to use a robust and researcher-friendly API to scrape Twitter data was a fantastic resource,” recounts Matthew Hannah, an assistant professor of digital humanities at Purdue University.

[Related: Hackers could be selling your Twitter data for the lowball price of $2.]

Hannah explains he previously utilized automated API tools to track Twitter conversations regarding trending topics like the QAnon movement for his own work. The platform’s research-friendly interface proved “incredibly useful” for teaching students how to understand and work with Twitter data in the classroom, he added. “I fear that is now a thing of the past,” he says.

Another unfortunate byproduct to Musk’s latest disruption to the online Twitter ecosystem will be the deaths of many positive bot projects that have for years provided users with entertainment and creative content. Cameron Ezell, creator of a bot that tweeted random screenshots from King of the Hill to its 78,000 followers every 30 minutes, confirmed via the account on Thursday that its tenure on Twitter would cease next week. “I hope Twitter changes course between now and then, but if not you can follow another version of this account over on Mastodon,” Ezell said via the “King of the Hill Screens” account.

[Related: Twitter suspensions, Elon Musk’s jet, and other messes you may have missed this week.]

“It’s really shameful and is going to take away a lot of the joy people get from using Twitter,” Ezell writes to PopSci. “When people follow a stupid account like [mine], it’s just because it makes their timeline a little more interesting… [it] just drives home the point that this is going to make people spend less time on Twitter.”

Ezell isn’t alone in migrating their project to the decentralized social media platform. Others such as Mark Sample’s “Moby Dick at Sea” and “ClipArt1994” accounts, are also planning Mastodon transfers.

“In the darkest times on Twitter, these accounts often brought a spark of joy and humor, and this decision betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about what makes Twitter enjoyable for so many,” Hannah also argues.

Since assuming control of Twitter in October 2022, multiple reports indicate Musk has consistently struggled to generate reliable revenue streams through the social media platform. Although Twitter subsequently mentioned that a “paid basic tier will be available instead,” the specifics remain unknown as to what that could entail. On Wednesday, Musk claimed Twitter’s free API is “abused badly right now” by “bot scammers & opinion manipulators,” and lamented the lack of verification process or fees. “Just ~$100/month for API access with ID verification will clean things up greatly,” he concluded.

The post Twitter’s latest bad idea will kill vital research and fun bot accounts appeared first on Popular Science.

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Nearly six years ago, on March 10, 2017, the Netflix Twitter account made a very simple claim: “Love is sharing a password.” 

Apparently, there’s been a lot of love going around. More than 100 million people use Netflix passwords from their friends, families, and sometimes even strangers, a figure that Netflix notes in its fourth quarter shareholder letter released on January 19, 2023. It even happens with celebrities—bestselling author and YouTube star John Green revealed on TikTok that he shares his Netflix account with a hacker named Omar.

But account sharing, of course, is bad business for Netflix, and all good love stories must come to an end. Netflix made headlines last year when it announced it was beginning to trial new strategies to curb account sharing on its platform. The company announced in the Q4 shareholder letter that they’re planning to launch new paid sharing features later this financial quarter. Then they updated their FAQ section, and the public noticed.

But what does this change mean for your Netflix account? Is this decision something to worry about? Here’s what you need to know:

The largest change to the platform is that Netflix is redefining which users can share one account. As the first line in the updated Netflix FAQ reads: “A Netflix account is for people who live together in a single household.” The definition for “household” obviously changes depending on who you ask, but Netflix appears to be using a definition based on proximity (more accurately, using “location based information like IP addresses and device IDs,” according to the new FAQ page). If you live in the same location, that counts as one household. If your device is in the correct location, then everything should work as expected, with no changes at all. 

Once you start introducing multiple devices, Wi-Fi networks, and locations, that’s where the new rules will come into play. When someone logs in to Netflix from a device outside of the household, they may be asked for verification, according to their FAQ. The account owner will get an email or text with a code to be input on the device attempting to log in—a slightly altered version of the common two-factor authentication methodologies used by most major websites.

The outcry from the public following the announced changes stems largely from information that has since been removed from the Netflix FAQ page—the original version of the new rules on device sharing had much harsher restrictions. Under those rules, Netflix users had to log into their account from their home network once every 31 days to maintain access. Travelers could request a temporary code to give them access to the site for seven days. 

Netflix has four subscription options in the United States—basic with ads, basic, standard, and premium. The biggest difference between the accounts is how many users can be logged in at once. Both basic plans allow just one user to watch at a time, while the standard and premium plans let two and four viewers watch concurrently, respectively. Regardless of your Netflix plan, you can have different profiles—that’s the screen with the avatars that pops up when you first log in to the site. 

Last year, the company tested features out for users in Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru, allowing standard and premium users to add “subaccounts” and letting users transfer existing profiles to a new account. The subaccounts from the tests in Latin America worked well enough that the functionality will be expanded to more countries with the new password-sharing rules to let old borrowers maintain access to their old profiles, as announced in Netflix’s third-quarter shareholder letter. This did come with an extra charge, however. Adding a secondary location costs a user about $3, depending on the country. 

Netflix’s decision to crack down on password sharing will make it unique among streaming platforms like Hulu, HBO Max, and Disney+. 

The moves represent a departure from just six years ago when Netflix tweeted about love and password sharing. Love, it appears, might be more complex than sharing a password, and Netflix access is going to cost you. 

The post Prepare for the great Netflix password-sharing crackdown appeared first on Popular Science.

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Floodwaters up to 30-feet-high swept through Indonesia’s North Sulawesi province last Friday, destroying dozens of homes and killing at least five people. Unfortunately, experts warn the nation’s monsoon season is far from over, and will likely worsen in the years ahead due to climate change.

However, locals now have access to a potentially vital new tool to help communicate, coordinate, and prepare against an area increasingly beset by dire natural disasters—and it’s a first for one of the world’s most popular messaging apps.

[Related: New factory retrofit could reduce a steel plant’s carbon emissions by 90 percent.]

Today, disaster relief management nonprofit Yayasan Peta Bencana announced the debut of BencanaBot, a “Humanitarian WhatsApp Chatbot.” Billed as the first of its kind, BecanaBot’s AI-assisted chat features can now guide locals through the process of submitting disaster reports that are then mapped in real-time on the free, open source platform, PetaBencana.id. There, anyone in need can view and share updates to coordinate decisions regarding safety and responses via collaborative evidence verified by government agencies.

“With over 80 million active users of WhatsApp in Indonesia, the launch of BencanaBot on WhatsApp represents a new milestone in enabling residents all across the archipelago to participate in, and benefit from, this free disaster information sharing system,” Nashin Mahtani, director of Yayasan Peta Bencana, said in a statement.

Going forward, anyone in Indonesia can now anonymously share disaster information via WhatsApp (+628584-BENCANA), Twitter (@petabencana), Facebook Messenger (@petabencana), and Telegram (@bencanabot). WhatsApp’s default end-to-end encryption also ensures an added layer of privacy for its users, although like all messaging platforms, it is likely not without its faults.

[Related: A chunk of ice twice the size of New York City broke off the Brunt Ice Shelf.]

Using such an exhaustive program may sound intimidating to some, but BencanaBot’s creators specifically designed the service to be intuitive and easy-to-understand for underfunded communities in Indonesia. In particular, the platform is designed to be “data-light,” meaning it works seamlessly through the existing instant messaging, social media, and SMS-based communications its users already know, without requiring a lot of device data usage.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), access to local and timely information remains one of the greatest hurdles for populations adapting to climate change’s rapidly multiplying existential threats. The rise of tools like BencanaBot are crucial for societal adaptation to these issues, and can strengthen communities’ resilience in the face of some of the planet’s most difficult ongoing climate challenges.

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Misinformation is rampant on social media, and a new study has shed some light on why. Researchers from Yale University and the University of Southern California argue that basically, some people develop a habit for sharing things on social media—whether they’re true or not. Although “individual deficits in critical reasoning and partisan bias” are commonly cited as reasons that people share fake news, the authors wrote in the paper, “the structure of online sharing built into social platforms is more important.” 

Previous studies have found that some people—especially older people—just don’t consider whether something is true before sharing it. Other research has shown that some people are motivated to share news headlines that support their identity and match their existing beliefs, whether the headlines are true or not—especially Conservatives. 

While the research team from Yale and USC accept these as contributing factors to the spread of misinformation online, they hypothesized that they may not be the only mechanisms that lead people to share fake news. Both the idea that people share misinformation because of a lack of critical thinking or that it’s a result of partisan bias assume that they would share less fake news if they were sufficiently motivated or able to consider the accuracy of the headlines they are sharing, however, the Yale-USC team’s research suggests that may not be the case. 

Instead, the team argues that “misinformation sharing appears to be part of a larger pattern of frequent online sharing of information.” To support that, they found that the people in their 2,476-participant study who shared the greatest amount of fake news stories, also shared more true news stories. The paper is based on four related, but separately conducted studies all aimed at teasing out how habitual sharing affects the spread of misinformation. 

[Related: The biggest consumers of fake news may benefit from this one tech intervention]

In the first study, 200 online participants were shown eight stories with true headlines and eight stories with false headlines and asked if they’d share them on Facebook. The researchers also measured how strong their habitual sharing was on social media using data on how frequently they shared content in the past and a self-reported index that measured if they did so without thinking. 

As the researchers expected, participants with stronger sharing habits reposted more stories and were less discerning about whether they were true or not than participants with weaker habits. The participants with the strongest habits shared 43 percent of the true headlines and 38 percent of the false headlines while those with the weakest habits shared just 15 percent of the true headlines and 6 percent of the false ones. In total, the top 15 percent of habitual sharers were responsible for 37 percent of the shared false headlines across this study. 

The second study, which contained 839 participants, was aimed at seeing if participants would be deterred from habitual sharing after they were asked to consider the accuracy of a given story.

While asking participants to assess the headline accuracy before sharing reduced the amount of fake headlines shared, it was least effective in the most habitual participants. When participants had  to assess the accuracy before being asked about whether or not they would share a sample of stories,they shared 42 percent of the true headlines and still shared 22 percent of the false ones. But, when participants were only asked about whether or not they would share the stories, the most habitual participants shared 42 percent of the true headlines and 30 percent of the false ones.

[Related: These psychologists found a better way to teach people to spot misinformation]

The third study aimed to assess if people with strong sharing habits were less sensitive to partisan bias and shared information that didn’t align with their political views. The structure was similar to the previous study, with around 836 participants asked to assess the whether a sample of headlines aligned with liberal and conservative politics, and whether or not they’d share them. 

Again the most habitual sharers were less discerning about what they shared. Those not asked to assess the politics of the headlines beforehand reposted 47 percent of the stories that aligned with their stated political orientation and 20 percent of the stories that didn’t. Even when asked to assess the political bias first, habitual sharers reposted 43 percent of the stories that aligned with their political views and 13 percent of the ones that didn’t. In both conditions, the least habitual sharers only shared approximately 22 percent of the headlines that aligned with their views and just 3 percent of the stories that didn’t. 

Finally, in the fourth study, the researchers tested whether changing the reward structure on social media could change how frequently misinformation was shared. They theorized that if people get a reward response to likes and comments, it would encourage the formation of habitual sharing—and that the reward structure could be changed. 

To test this, they split 601 participants into three groups: a control, a misinformation training condition, and an accuracy training condition. In each group, participants were shown 80 trial headlines and asked whether or not they’d share them before seeing the eight true and eight false test headlines similar to the previous studies. In the control condition, nothing happened if they shared the true or false headline, while in the misinformation condition, participants were told they got “+5 points” when they shared a false headline or didn’t share a true one, and in the accuracy condition they were told they got “+5 points” when they shared a true headline or didn’t share a false one. 

As predicted, both accuracy training and misinformation training were effective in changing participants sharing behaviors compared to the controls. Participants in the accuracy condition shared 72 percent of the true headlines and 26 percent of the false headlines compared with participants in the misinformation condition who shared 48 percent of the true headlines and 43 percent of the false ones. (Control participants shared 45 percent of the true headlines and 19 percent of the false.)

The researchers conclude that their studies all show that habitual sharing is a major factor in the spread of misinformation. The top 15 percent most habitual sharers across were responsible for between 30 and 40 percent of all shared misinformation across all studies. They argue that this is part of the broader response patterns established by social media platforms—but that they could be restructured by internal engineers to promote the sharing of accurate information instead. 

The post The real reason people share so much fake news on social media appeared first on Popular Science.

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With nearly 3 billion daily users to its name, Facebook is buzzing with activity—particularly if several hundred of those people happen to be friends with you. Between wedding photos of friends-of-friends-of-friends, angry articles from your political uncle, and all-caps updates from the girl you haven’t seen since middle school, your News Feed can get cluttered with information you couldn’t care less about. Don’t settle for reading every other post—here’s how to clean up your feed so it will only show the people and news you actually care about.

1. Unfollow your friends

Facebook includes more options than you might think for cleaning up your News Feed, including the ability to unfollow your friends. This isn’t the same as unfriending someone; you’ll stay friends with them but their posts won’t appear in your feed. It’s perfect if you want to occasionally check up on or message people, but aren’t interested in the minutiae of their daily lives. And don’t worry—they won’t know you’ve unfollowed them.

[Related: How to make your Facebook account more private]

Click on the three dots next to any post in your News Feed and choose the Unfollow option to unfollow your friend. Alternatively, go to your friend’s profile page on the web, click the Friends button at the top, and select Unfollow from the drop-down menu. If you’re viewing a profile on the mobile app, tap the Friends button and choose Take a Break.

2. See fewer posts from someone

Let’s say you don’t want to see as many posts from someone, but you’d still like to get the occasional update. Instead of unfollowing that friend, you can opt to see fewer posts from them. You’ll find this setting via the same drop-down menu as the unfollow option: in the top right of any post in the News Feed. Click Hide post, and you won’t see as many posts from that person in the future. If you hide a post from an ad or a Page, you won’t hear about it again.

When you hide a sponsored post, rather than something from one of your friends, Facebook asks for some feedback about why you took the action you did. It uses your response to decide which ads to serve you in the future. If you decide to tell Facebook why, you’ll see another menu with other privacy-related steps you can take. Click the Make changes to your ad preferences option to take more control over the ads Facebook shows you (see below for more on this).

3. Prioritize your close friends

In any group of acquaintances, there will be some people you care about more than others. To help you focus on your nearest and dearest, Facebook creates a custom friends list for you called Close Friends. Updates from anyone in this select group will always prompt a notification (if you’ve got them enabled) and put the post high up in your News Feed. Fortunately for your friends’ self-esteem, they won’t know whether or not they’re on your Close Friends list.

[Related: You don’t have to delete Facebook, but you could definitely be using it better]

To set up your list, you’ll need to open Facebook in a web browser and look at the scrollable menu on the left side of the screen—these options aren’t available in the mobile app. Click Friends and find the Custom Lists option. Click that, then the Close Friends link. You can add or remove friends via the Manage button in the top right. While you’re there, you might notice that Facebook has suggested other lists for you, such as Acquaintances. More on that feature below.

4. Set up your own friend lists

You don’t have to settle for the friend lists Facebook makes for you. From the Custom Lists screen, click Create List, and you can make a group based on the buddies you play cards with, the relatives you’re closest to, or any other mix of people you like.

The lists you make for yourself won’t affect how often you see your friends in your News Feed, but you can bookmark each list for quick access. Facebook used to offer the ability to see only updates from people on a given list, but that no longer appears to be the case. Now, the most you can do is click on the individual profiles of people on a list to see what they’ve posted recently.

That said, custom lists remain useful as a way to limit the audience who sees anything you post on Facebook. For example, you might want to tweak your settings so only your closest friends and relatives will see all the baby photos you’re uploading. To do so, click the audience drop-down menu under your name when you are creating a post. Scroll down to find the desired list, select the circle to its right, decide if you want this to be your default audience, and hit Done.

5. Choose who you see first

If you’d rather not get notifications each time your close friends post, you can use a different setting to choose who comes first in your News Feed. Go to Facebook in a web browser, click your profile photo in the top right, open Settings & privacy, and select Feed. The top option (Favorites) lets you set who you’ll see first in your News Feed. Just click the star icon next to any page or profile to mark them as preferred.

[Related: Make Facebook useful by turning off all its annoying features]

This works a lot like Close Friends, but you won’t get notifications about everything these people or pages do—their posts will just be prioritized in your News Feed. If you’re using the mobile app, you can tap the Menu button in the bottom right, select Feeds, and choose Favorites from the top of the screen to see only posts from these accounts. Again, your friends won’t get any alerts about how you’re sorting them, so you don’t have to worry about hurting anyone’s feelings.

6. View posts in chronological order

Another option for your feed is to switch to seeing posts in chronological order. On the web, go to the scrollable menu on the left-hand side of the screen and click Most Recent. This will clean up your News Feed so the newest posts are at the top.

Unlike the tips we’ve already mentioned, this actually gives you less control over what appears in your News Feed. But it’s still a useful way to switch up what’s displayed, and perhaps see updates from people you haven’t checked in on for a while. To go back to the normal view, click the Home icon (a house) at the top of the screen, or the Facebook icon in the top left.

7. Adjust your ad settings

Facebook uses a lot of personal data to decide which ads to display on your News Feed. To view and edit some of this information, click your profile photo at the right end of the toolbar at the top of the Facebook site. Pick Settings & privacy from the list, then Settings, and select Ads from the menu on the left to open the Ad Preferences page. Follow the same steps in the mobile app, but tap Ad Preferences after Settings.

From here, you can edit a lot of different options. Click Ad Settings, Categories used to reach you, Other categories, and See all categories to view what information Facebook is using to serve you ads, and click the Remove button next to any one of these to eliminate it. From this same series of menus, you can prevent Facebook from showing ads based on details such as your relationship status or job title. Back on the Ad Preferences page, behind the Advertisers option and Advertisers whose ads you’ve clicked button, it’s possible to block Hide Ads from certain companies.

Facebook can also show you ads based on what you do on sites and apps beyond the social network, and it goes the other way as well: Your behavior on Facebook can affect which ads you see when you’re browsing around the rest of the internet. You can manage and learn about some of these options from the web (Ad Preferences > Ad Settings > Data about your activity from partners), but you have much more control from the mobile app.

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Meta’s Oversight Board—an independent group responsible for overseeing Facebook and Instagram’s content moderation policies—wants to suggest a change the company’s long standing nudity policy to be more inclusive and respectful of human rights. It comes as the Oversight Board overturned Meta’s original decision earlier this month to remove two posts on Instagram that depicted transgender and non-binary people with bare chests. 

The case was brought to the Oversight Board by a US couple who identify as transgender and non-binary. In 2021 and 2022 they posted two images on Instagram where, according to the Board’s decision, they were “bare-chested with the nipples covered.” The captions discussed transgender healthcare and said the couple were fundraising and selling t-shirts so one of them could undergo top surgery—gender-affirming surgery that generally involves the removal of breast tissue.

After a series of alerts from both Meta’s content moderation AIs and reports from users, the posts were “reviewed multiple times for potential violations of various Community Standards” by the human moderation team. In the end, both posts were removed for violating the Sexual Solicitation Community Standard—which is meant to ban sex workers soliciting payments—“seemingly because they contain breasts and a link to a fundraising page.”

The couple appealed the content moderation decision to Instagram and then the Oversight Board on the basis that the reason for the removals did not match the actual intention for the post. After the Board accepted the two cases, Meta’s moderation team decided it had been wrong to remove the posts and restored them. This was too little, too late for the Board, which heard the cases anyway in order to give broader recommendations on Meta’s nudity policies. 

The decision released this week found in the couple’s favor. The Oversight Board decided that removing the posts was “not in line with Meta’s Community Standards, values or human rights responsibilities,” and highlighted “fundamental issues with Meta’s policies.” It found that Meta’s guidance to moderators about the Sexual Solicitation policy was too broad for the stated rationale and publicly available guidance. 

The Oversight Board also found that the Adult Nudity and Sexual Activity Community Standard—which “prohibits images containing female nipples other than in specified circumstances, such as breastfeeding and gender confirmation surgery”—is inappropriately based on a binary view of gender. The distinction between male and female bodies makes it unclear to both users and moderators “how the rules apply to intersex, non-binary and transgender people, and requires reviewers to make rapid and subjective assessments of sex and gender.” Regardless of the ethics of the situation, the Board highlights that it’s “not practical when moderating at scale.”

Similarly, the Board called the restrictions and exceptions to the rules on showing female nipples “confusing, particularly as they apply to transgender and non-binary people.” Female nipples are allowed be shown as part of a protest, during childbirth, and in medical and health contexts (including top surgery) but not while someone is at the beach or in other context where anyone may “traditionally go bare-chested.” It argues that, as these cases show, “Meta’s policies on adult nudity result in greater barriers to expression for women, trans and gender non-binary people on its platforms” and that LGBTQI+ people can be “disproportionally affected.” 

As well as overturning Meta’s original decision to remove the posts, the Board had three recommendations for improving the company’s policies around nudity, LGBTQI+ expression, and nipples in general. 

First, Meta should “define clear, objective, rights-respecting criteria to govern its Adult Nudity and Sexual Activity Community Standard, so that all people are treated in a manner consistent with international human rights standards, without discrimination on the basis of sex or gender.” Second, it should “provide more detail in its public-facing Sexual Solicitation Community Standard on the criteria that leads to content being removed.” Finally, it needed to “revise its guidance for moderators on the Sexual Solicitation Community Standard so that it more accurately reflects the public rules on the policy,” which could help reduce the number of enforcement errors. 

All in all, it’s a pretty clear win for free expression—though as TechCrunch notes, if some of the Board’s recommendations are taken to the fullest extent, it could result in some pretty major changes to how nudity is moderated on Facebook and Instagram. Automatically presuming that nude female, transgender, and non-binary bodies are sexually suggestive while male bodies are not is at odds with the kind of gender-neutral policies that international human rights standards call for. 

Meta says that it welcomes the Oversight Board’s decision and that it already reinstated the affected content. It says it will conduct a review of the Board’s recommendations, and will issue an update when it decides how it plans to move forward. 

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By design, it’s very easy to publish to social media from just about any location and any device connected to the internet, so there are going to be times you wish you could undo a post. Maybe you wish you hadn’t said what you said, shared a photo without permission, or simply made an embarrassing typo.

Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook all enable you to go back and edit your posts, or delete them completely. We can’t guarantee that no one will have reacted to or screenshotted your original post in the meantime though, so quicker is better when it comes to making these changes.

How to edit a tweet

The wrinkle with Twitter is that you need to be a paid-up member of the Twitter Blue club to edit tweets. Twitter Blue costs $8 a month for the web ($11 if you sign up on a phone), and gives you extras such as app themes and folders for bookmarked tweets, as well as editing functionality.

If you have a Twitter Blue subscription, you’ll get a 30-minute window after you post a tweet to make edits to it. After that, you’ll need to leave the tweet as it is, or delete it. What’s more, other users will be able to see a label that says the tweet has been edited, and can select the tweet to see the earlier versions of it.

To edit a tweet, you must be on the same device you used to post it. If that’s a phone, tap a tweet on your profile, then touch the three dots to the right of it. If the edit window hasn’t closed, you’ll see Edit Tweet on the menu that pops up. Choose that, and you’ll be able to make whatever changes you want. Finally, tap Update to send the new version live.

On the web, you’ll also see three dots next to all of the tweets on your profile—click on them to find the Edit Tweet option, and if you see it, you’ll be able to make alterations. To get rid of a tweet completely, the Delete Tweet option is in the same menu, and you’ll be asked to confirm your decision before it’s erased.

How to edit an Instagram post

Unlike Twitter, there’s no time limit for editing Instagram posts, so you can fix typos going back years. On the web, go to your profile and select the post you want to change. Then click the three dots (top right) and choose Edit.

You can adjust the caption of your photo or video, change who’s tagged in the photo or video, and add or edit a location tag. If you’re editing a multiple-image carousel post, you can delete individual pictures or videos from the group. You can’t swap out the photo or video though, or add new content to the post—you’ll need a whole new post for that. When you’re happy with the way the post looks, click Done.

[Related: Why the web version of Instagram is better than the app]

The process is similar on the mobile apps. Tap your profile picture (bottom right), then pick a photo or video. Touch the three dots in the top right, choose Edit, and you make your changes. To confirm them, tap the blue checkmark (Android) or Done (iOS) in the top right corner. The post stays where it is in your timeline, and although it gets marked with an “edited” label, people won’t be able to see past versions.

You can find the option to Delete an Instagram post in the same menu as the edit option: behind the three dots. And while you can’t edit comments you’ve left on other people’s posts, you can remove them: Click or tap the three dots next to a comment you’ve left, then pick Delete on the next dialog.

How to edit a Facebook post

As on Instagram, there’s no time limit on editing Facebook posts. If you have the site open in a web browser, head to your profile via the link on the left, then scroll down to the post you want to alter. Next, click the three dots at the top right of the post, then Edit post.

You can change just about everything in a Facebook post, if needed, including the text, attached images, and the location and contact tags. You can even change the post audience by clicking the current audience label at the top (it will say whatever the current audience is, such as Friends or Public). Tap Save when you’re done.

On the Facebook mobile apps, tap your profile picture (top right), then your name. Touch the three dots next to the post you want to change, then Edit post, and you’ll be able to make your changes. All the same options are available as on the web, and you can tap Save when you’ve finished. Note that anyone who can see the post can view its edit history via the menu behind the three dots.

Tapping on those three dots also gives you the option to delete posts. You can also edit and delete any comments you leave across Facebook, whether they’re on your own posts or on posts from other people: click or tap the three dots to the side of a comment, then choose Edit or Delete as needed.

The post Instantly edit Facebook posts and other social media mistakes appeared first on Popular Science.

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The ability to stuff multiple pictures into a single Instagram post is incredibly useful, especially because most of us don’t have the time, energy, or money to commit to daily curated posting like the most successful influencers. What can be complicated is figuring out how to delete one of those images when it no longer belongs in an existing photo dump.

So if you’ve fallen out of love with a picture (or a person) in one of your posts, but haven’t trashed it because you like the other photos, it’s time you learned how to excise that malignant memory like a skilled social media surgeon.

One catch: you can’t delete one image from a two-photo carousel, potentially because that would make it a single-item post and mess with something inside Instagram, though we can’t say for sure. These steps will only work with a post stocked with at least three pieces of media.

• Step 1: Go to the post and tap the three dots in its top right corner.
• Step 2: When the options menu appears, ignore the bright red “delete” option and hit Edit.
• Step 3: Swipe to the image or video you want to send to the trash.
• Step 4: Tap the little trash can icon in the top left corner of the image. If you can’t see this, scroll up, as the app defaults to editing the post caption. If you still can’t see it, you’re likely working in a two-picture post.

• Step 5: Instagram will ask if you really want to scrap it, and you do, so hit Delete to confirm. Your problematic post has been cleansed.
• Step 6: Hit Done (iOS) or the blue check (Android) in the top right to save your changes.

Instagram’s post editing feature also lets you add and edit tags, the alt text, location, and caption. Unfortunately, you currently can’t use the Edit button to change the order of photos in a carousel post after it goes live, or add images or video at a later date.

How to recover deleted photos or videos on Instagram

Any deleted items will hang out in a folder deep within your settings for 30 days. If you change your mind, you can recover them before that time runs out. Or you can go in and delete them permanently so you’re not tempted to restore them in the future.

To find these discarded pics in their purgatorial location, go to your main Instagram profile page and follow the steps below.

• Step 1: Tap the three lines in the top right corner.
• Step 2: Go to Your activity.
• Step 3: Scroll down and tap Recently deleted.

• Step 4: Tap on the image you want to revive
• Step 5: Hit the three dots in the top right.
• Step 6: Choose one of the two available options: Restore and Delete. Deleting anything from the Recently Deleted folder will erase it forever, while restoring it will put it back where it was—kind of.

We say “kind of” because if you delete an image from a carousel and then restore it, the photo won’t go back to its original spot in the lineup. It’ll show up at the very end. This may not matter, but if you’ve carefully curated a group of pictures to tell a specific story or exude a certain aesthetic, this could ruin that. And if that’s a problem for you, just reupload the whole batch—maybe you’ll get more likes this time around.

This story has been updated. It was originally published on November 20, 2021.

The post How to delete one photo from an Instagram carousel (and get it back if you change your mind) appeared first on Popular Science.

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Meta announced yesterday that it is pursuing legal action against a data scraping-for-hire firm called Voyager Labs for allegedly “improperly” amassing Facebook and Instagram users’ publicly available information, which it then sold to organizations including the Los Angeles Police Department, Meta says. As The Verge and other outlets note, the LAPD then utilized the data trove to compile profiles of potential future criminals. Critics have repeatedly voiced concerns over methodology and algorithms behind this strategy as being reductionist, unethical, and racist.

Public knowledge of Voyager Labs’ tactics can be traced back to November 2021 via a report from The Guardian, but Meta only recently instigated a wholesale ban of the company alongside more than 38,000 fake user profiles from its social media platforms, according to a legal complaint filed on Thursday. Using a proprietary software system, Voyager Labs allegedly launched multiple campaigns utilizing false accounts spread across a diverse computer network in various countries to hide its activity. From there, Meta claims it amassed “profile information, posts, friends lists, photos and comments” from over 600,000 users. Those datasets were then sold to third-party buyers for their own purposes, such as the LAPD.

[Related: Meta will pay $725 million for a single Cambridge Analytica privacy settlement.]

In its legal complaint, Meta alleges that Voyager Labs violated the company’s Terms of Service against fake accounts, alongside unauthorized and automated scraping. Voyager Labs also conducted similar strategies on other platforms including Twitter, Telegram, and YouTube, according to the lawsuit.

“We cannot comment on this aspect of the legal action,” a spokesperson for Meta told PopSci.

Situations such as what allegedly happened with Voyager Labs are often difficult to cope with for even the biggest tech giants like Meta. Legal cases can move notoriously slowly—all the while, the problematic companies can continue their potentially illegal tactics, often emboldened by the perceived inaction. Previously, Meta launched similar legal action against a different data-scraping company, Octopus, for amassing information on over 350,000 Instagram users. 

Meta is seeking a permanent injunction for the company, as well as restitution for “ill-gotten profits in an amount to be proven at trial.” The request does not specify if Meta’s users affected by Voyager Labs’ actions will be included in the compensation.

The post Meta sues data-scraping firm for selling user data to LAPD appeared first on Popular Science.

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In an attempt to make its app less awful to use, Instagram announced this week that it will redesign the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen next month. From February, instead of Reels being at the center of the navigation bar, the shortcut to create content (the + button) will be back where it belongs. Reels will shift to the right and the Shop tab will be removed entirely. 

Instagram originally changed the navigation bar in 2020 in a not-so-subtle attempt to push users to try all the new features—like Reels and Shopping—that they didn’t ask for. It meant the Compose button and Activity tab moved to the top right of the app (where I still struggle to find them). Presumably, Meta, Instagram’s parent company, was hoping to pump its Reels and Shopping engagement numbers, which it may feel offer better revenue-generating opportunities than pictures posted to a feed or story. 

While these changes happened without major backlash, other shifts Instagram made over the past year, like trying full screen videos, have been less well received. Meta’s attempt to make the app increasingly more like TikTok with lots of suggested videos from people you don’t follow broke one of the cardinal rules of social media: don’t piss off the Kardashians. A campaign to “make Instagram Instagram again” drew a response from Instagram head Adam Mosseri who admitted things were “not good yet” and that if users were seeing a lot of suggested posts that they weren’t interested in, they were “doing a bad job.” The internet largely agreed with him and the hubbub died down after Instagram walked back a few of the changes, like temporarily limiting the number of suggested posts users would see, though the underlying issues of Instagram losing its way weren’t solved. By chasing trends, and younger users, the Instagram app today has lost much of its original appeal in the midst of its many reinventions.

[Related: It’s not just you—everyone hates Instagram now. Here’s why.]

Now, in the face of increased competition from TikTok, especially among teen users, Instagram is trying the wild idea of making its app nicer to use. Sure, moving a few buttons isn’t going to fix everything—but it at least gives the impression that posting content—rather than watching an endless stream of suggested videos—is something you’re meant to do on the platform. 

A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch that businesses who use the Shopping feature have no reason to be concerned. “You will still be able to set up and run your shop on Instagram as we continue to invest in shopping experiences that provide the most value for people and businesses across Feed, Stories, Reels, ads, and more,” they said. To us, that sounds like anyone relying on the Shopping feature does have a reason to be concerned.

These improvements to the navigation bar aren’t the only changes coming to Instagram over the next month or two. Meta is also going to change how users under-18 can be targeted by ads on both Facebook and Instagram. It is ending the ability for advertisers to target them based on their in-app activity, like who they follow and their gender. Advertisers will only be able to target teens based on their age and location. Teen users will also get the option to “see less” of any topic to control what kind of ads are served to them. These changes come after Meta was fined €405 million (~$435 million) by Irish Data Protection Commission last year for violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for how it handled teen users’ data. (Meta has been fined more than $1 billion over the past year by EU regulators for breaching similar privacy laws.) 

Whether these changes are all a sign that Instagram is course correcting after trying too hard to be TikTok is still unclear, but they are welcome nonetheless. Though if you truly want a better Instagram experience right now, we’ve got one tip here for you at PopSci: skip the mobile app and use the web app instead.

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Seattle’s school district has announced an unprecedented lawsuit against Meta, Google, TikTok, ByteDance, and Snap, arguing that their social media platforms both facilitated and profited off of American adolescents’ and teens’ mental health crises for years. While families across the country have recently filed multiple, similar cases, the new complaint made public on January 6 is the first of its kind in claiming that students’ well-documented addictions to platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Facebook “directly affects Seattle public schools’ ability to fulfill its educational mission.”

“Defendants’ growth is a product of choices they made to design and operate their platforms in ways that exploit the psychology and neurophysiology of their users into spending more and more time on their platforms,” argues the legal filing made by Keller Rohrback, LLP, adding that, “These techniques are both particularly effective and harmful to the youth audience defendants have intentionally cultivated, creating a mental health crisis among America’s youth.”

[Related: Meta will pay $725 million for a single Cambridge Analytica privacy settlement.]

Excessive social media usage’s dire effects on users including changes in brain chemistry, anxiety, and depression—particularly children and teenagers—is widely documented at this point. In his State of the Union address last year, President Biden urged lawmakers to “hold social media platforms accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit.”

Much of the issues stem from the fact that the brain’s prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed in adolescents and teens, meaning they have difficulty exercising self-control on social media. A Pew Research study in August 2022, for example, highlighted how one-in-five teenages say they use YouTube “almost constantly,” and admitted they would have extreme difficulty giving up social media. Seattle schools’ complaint also cites copious studies showing that higher screen time directly correlates to diagnoses of anxiety and depression when compared to lower screen time users.

These issues particularly came to light during former Facebook employee, Francis Haugen’s October 2021 high-profile congressional whistleblower testimony. At the time, Haugen offered internal documents and communications showing how company executives were not only well aware of their platforms’ negative psychological effects, but they relied on them to generate as much data collection as possible for ad revenue streams. Shortly after Haugen’s testimony, internal documents from Instagram—also owned by Facebook’s parent company, Meta—called US teens a revenue “pipeline.”

[Related: Study confirms the youth have abandoned Facebook.]

These companies sought even younger crowds through the development of “kid versions” of their platforms that, although legally prohibited from collecting and using their information, were reportedly “designed to fuel [kids’] interest in the grown-up version.”

With nearly 50,000 students spread across 106 schools, the Seattle public school district’s size and geographic location send a stark message to Big Tech. Both Amazon and Microsoft have long counted Seattle as their base of operations, while Meta expanded its own offices into the area in 2020. As Bloomberg noted over the weekend, however, the Big Tech companies could possess a broad defense in Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which grants internet platforms broad immunity from claims of users’ harmful content.

According to the legal filing, the plaintiffs seek an enjoinment on the companies’ ongoing strategies, relief funds dedicated to prevention education and treatment of issues related to social media overuse, alongside unspecified statutory and compensatory fines.

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This week, Meta was fined €390 million ($410 million) by the European Union for illegally forcing users to accept personalized ads or stop using its services. It now has three months to outline how it will change its practices to comply with EU law. 

The General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) came into force in 2018 and since then, they’ve been a major headache for Meta. Amongst other things, it requires organizations to be transparent about why they are collecting data, have a lawful reason to do so, and get clear, affirmative consent users. This is why so many sites inflict large GDPR popups on visitors, and it’s what has caused Meta its latest issues. 

This fine stems from two complaints, one against Facebook and one against Instagram, both filed on May 25, 2018, —the date that GDPR came into operation. In essence, Meta attempted to comply with GDPR by changing the Terms of Service so that personalized ads and other data-driven services were a core part of what the company offered. By clicking “I Accept” on the Terms of Service popup, users weren’t opting into personalized ads, they were agreeing to a contract with Meta that happened to include them. Both complaints argued that by doing this, Meta was forcing users to opt-in to data collection and thus was falling afoul of the requirements of the GDPR. 

The specifics of Meta’s legal wangling get into the weeds, but the gist of it is that the Irish Data Protection Commission (which is Meta’s main regulator in Europe as it has its headquarters there) found that the company was in breach of its obligations to be transparent with users about what data it was collecting and why. As a result, it was fined €210 million ($~ 221 million) for Facebook and €180 million ($~ 189 million) for Instagram and it has been given three months to outline how it will comply with the ruling and bring its Terms of Service in line with GDPR.

These latest penalties bring the total that Meta has been fined by the EU in the past 12 months to more than $1 billion. According to the Irish Times, the company has set aside $2 billion to deal with the penalties it expects to receive this year. 

While the fines amount to a small chunk of its overall profits, Meta’s revenue fell last quarter for the first time and it laid off more than 11,000 employees worldwide. It also has to contend with declining advertising revenue and major investments in the Metaverse that, so far, does not seem to be paying off. 

Meta isn’t the only company having issues with the EU. Over the past few years, the 27-country bloc has been open in its attempt to control how the US tech giants operate within its borders. Amazon, Twitter, and Google have all been hit with fines for breaching the terms of GDPR. A new law that requires all portable electronic devices to use USB-C is forcing Apple to ditch its lightning connector. Over the next two years, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) is going to add a whole host of new obligations to “online gatekeepers”—including forcing Apple to open up its App Store. While the wheels of bureaucracy turn very very slowly, the US tech giants might finally be facing a reckoning in Europe—though expect the legal process to drag out for the next decade.

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The latest dramatic twist to Twitter’s ongoing chaos under the tumultuous tenure of Elon Musk—a massive data breach of 235 million users’ email addresses, phone numbers, names, and other credentials. The information is now available to anyone on the dark web with a couple extra bucks to spend.

The news, first brought to public attention by The Washington Post on Wednesday evening and subsequently covered by multiple outlets, traces the major security exploitation to 2021—which, admittedly, was well before Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the social media platform in October 2022. The files, posted to an online hacking forum via an anonymous account “StayMad” under the title “Breached,” were reportedly amassed via a former API vulnerability that allowed them to search user info attached to over 200 million accounts. The bug resulted in a “bizarre ‘lookup’ function” that allowed anyone to insert an email or phone number to find out if the credentials were connected to active accounts, per Gizmodo’s rundown on Thursday. “StayMad” is allegedly offering the data trove for the equivalent of $2 in cryptocurrency.

[Related: Former Twitter employees warn of platform’s imminent collapse.]

The API weakness was first discovered in January 2022, thanks to Twitter’s previous implementation of a bug bounty program to encourage crowdsourced security oversight. Twitter publicly announced the issue 8 months later, but assured users the loophole had since been addressed and that there was “no evidence to suggest someone had taken advantage of the vulnerability.”

While it is currently unclear how expansive the fallout will be for Twitter’s latest breach, experts warned WaPo that the exposure could easily be exploited by bad actors like repressive governments seeking to silence, intimidate, or even physically harm dissidents and critical journalists. What’s more, there doesn’t seem to be much victims can do about the situation, unless their accounts were created using dummy emails or burner phone numbers. Concerned users can hypothetically reset their attached email addresses, although doing so for phone numbers is usually far more difficult and potentially expensive.

Twitter, for its part, hasn’t said anything regarding the news since its reveal earlier this week. Much of the social media platform’s security experts and teams have been axed since Musk’s takeover, as well as the company’s entire PR department.

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In theory, social media promises to connect you with the world. In practice, it compromises your personal privacy, puts you at risk of online abuse, and makes you angrier. 

If you’re irritated by Twitter or depressed by Facebook, you can avoid social media for limited periods of time. But when you’re ready to say goodbye for good, the next step will be to delete those apps from your phone and shut down your accounts entirely. Here’s how to do it, one network at a time.

Next, make sure you’re deleting your account for the right reasons. If you’re ready to bid farewell to the whirlwind of social media for the sake of time or mental health, that’s fine. But if you’re only closing your accounts so you can create a new one and get a fresh start, we recommend hitting pause. Your first step should be to check the do-over options some platforms offer. On Instagram, for instance, you can change your username without shutting down your existing account. Once you’ve exhausted your options, you can move on to deactivating or deleting your account.

To deactivate your account from a web browser, visit the site and click your profile picture in the top right corner of the screen. Choose Settings & privacy, then Settings, Privacy, and go to Your Facebook Information. From there, click Deactivation and deletion, select Deactivate account, and hit Continue to account deactivation. On the next screen, Facebook will prompt you for your password and ask you to give a reason for leaving, such as privacy concerns or wasted time. Make your choice and click Continue to finish up.

You can also deactivate your account through a mobile app. On iOS, open the app and hit the menu button (three lines) in the lower right corner. Then tap Settings & privacy, Settings, Personal and Account Information, Account Ownership and Control, and Deactivation and Deletion. Finish by tapping Deactivate Account and then Continue to account deactivation. On Android, you can follow the same process, but the menu button looks like three horizontal lines and you can reach Account Ownership and Control from the first submenu.

Deactivation is a good way to test the waters and see if you can live without Facebook. Give it a few months and see how you feel. When you’re ready to say goodbye to your account forever, delete it. To do so, follow the same steps for deactivation, but choose Delete account when given the option. As far as your friends are concerned, you will disappear immediately. However, Facebook will only erase of your data after 30 days, so you may change your mind within that timeframe. But once it’s done, there’s no going back.

To trash Twitter, you’ll need to visit this page in a web browser and click Deactivate your account. Read the information Twitter provides, then click Deactivate. You’ll receive a prompt to enter your password and confirm that yes, you really do want to deactivate your account.

Once you do so, the process of erasing your Twitter presence starts. As far as other users can see, your profile and tweets will vanish immediately. However, Twitter hangs on to your data for a grace period of 30 days (verified users get the option of a full 12 months) to make sure you don’t change your mind. During this time, you can still log back into the site, an act that will restore your profile and all of your tweets from the digital grave.

After that 30- or 365-day period ends, Twitter will officially delete your data and you will lose it forever. So if you repent and decide to return to Twitter, you’ll need to sign up for a brand-new account.

To deactivate online, go to the Instagram website. Log in, click your profile icon in the top right, choose Settings, and Edit Profile. Scroll all the way down and select Temporarily deactivate my account—you’ll notice this is not so much a button but a link to the right of the Submit button, so it’s easy to miss. Once you do that, you’ll have to decide on a reason why you no longer feel the Instagram love—options range from Just need a break to Too many ads. Finally, enter your account password and click Temporarily Deactivate Account.

Much like Facebook’s deactivation option, this choice will put your account on hold. As far as other users know, your Instagram page will be gone, but the social network will hang on to your photos, comments, and other data. Log into the site again, and it will instantly restore your account.

For a more permanent fix, you’ll need to go to the dedicated Delete Your Account page online. Log in, give a reason for your desertion, and enter your password. Finally, click Delete [username]. This will wipe all traces of your Instagram life from the network’s servers, including the likes and instant messages. But before this happens, you’ll have 30 days to change your mind. If you do, just log in again and everything will be right where you left it. But wait too long, and you’ll have to start from scratch. 

If you have an Android phone, you’ll have to go through all of these steps on the web, but if you have an iPhone, you can also find these options on the app. Tap your profile icon, then the menu button (three lines) Settings, Account, and Delete account. There, the app will ask if you want to disable your account instead of deleting it, but both options are available.

To proceed, you must first decide what you want to do. You can tap Deactivate account, which, as in other platforms, hits the pause button on your page. Your content will disappear and users won’t be able to find you through the search feature. Tap Delete account permanently instead, and TikTok will delete all of your account information after a 30-day period where you can change your mind and come back. If you truly want to call it quits, the app will ask why you are leaving, and—depending on the reason—offer a solution to try to retain you. For example, if you think you’re spending too much time on the platform, a message will appear offering you to set up a limit to your watch time.  

If you’re sure and just want to get out of there, tap Skip at the top right corner of your screen and bow out. You’ll still get 30 days before your account is completely gone, so if you change your mind before then, just log into the platform with your credentials and tap Cancel deactivation at the bottom of the screen. 

From this point on, your friends won’t be able to contact you on Snapchat, but as with Twitter, you’ll get a 30-day grace period before permanent deletion actually occurs. If you log back into the network before that time is up, your account will reappear and you can carry on as before with the same username and contact list.

After the 30 days pass, Snapchat will permanently erase your account. To come back from that, you’ll have to start adding friends and collecting Snaps all over again.

Keep in mind that if you requested your data from Snapchat and haven’t received it yet, you should wait until you hear back from them before terminating your account. Once you finish the process, all your ties with the platform will be cut, so when your data is ready, they won’t be able to notify you or send you a download link. 

If you decide to go through with deletion, the platform will immediately log you out of your account and other users will be unable to find your content and profile. BeReal gives you a 15-day period for you to change your mind. If you do, you can regain access to your account (and everything you’ve posted on it) just by signing in again with your credentials. But if you let that grace period go by, the platform will obliterate your data and your content will be lost forever. 

As on other platforms, BeReal will ask you why you’re leaving. You can make your choice or just tap Other, and finalize your decision by tapping Yes, I’m sure. The next screen will show you the date your account will be deleted if you don’t log back in, and then the app will automatically kick you out. 

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Facebook’s owner, Meta, agreed Friday to pay a $725 million class action lawsuit settlement over the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal—the largest data privacy sum in history, according to lawyers speaking with the BBC. In exchange, Facebook will not be required to admit any wrongdoing regarding its role in facilitating the mishandling of over 87 million users’ personal data via third-party companies.

One of those businesses, the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica, became a focal point of the Big Tech controversy for its leverage of a relatively obscure app’s trove of personal user information. Despite only 300,000 people installing an app called This Is Your Digital Life, its access to users’ friend networks allowed it to build a vast set of voter “psychoanalytic profiles,” which it then sold to both Ted Cruz’s and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaigns.

[Related: Meta lays off more than 11,000 employees.]

The ensuing fallout prompted numerous congressional hearings involving Meta (then just Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, alongside an eventual $5 billion fine paid to the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 to settle its own privacy investigations. As Engadget details, additional fines have also included a $100 million Securities and Exchange Commission settlement, alongside a roughly ​​$644,000 fine paid in the UK—a number that would have been much steeper if the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) law had already gone into effect.

Meta’s legal woes surrounding the Cambridge Analytica scandal are far from over, however, as it faces an ongoing lawsuit by the Washington DC attorney general, as well as other lawsuits on various issues from multiple state attorneys general.

Despite all this, the newest $725 million fine is paltry to a massive tech company like Meta, with one expert telling Reuters that it only amounts to “less than a tenth” of last year’s expenses related to its burgeoning “metaverse” project. Still, it’s another thorn in Zuckerberg’s side, who has seen Meta’s stock tank over 60 percent during the course of 2022, a dramatic downturn that resulted in a massive layoff announcement of over 11,000 global employees last month.

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TikTok is launching a new feature that will let users see why a particular video has appeared in their For You feed. According to a blog post this week, it’s all part of the company’s goal to “bring meaningful transparency” to its platform. 

TikTok’s For You feed offers up a never ending stream of suggested videos. Its algorithm bases its recommendations on lots of different factors, including the people users follow, the videos they like, interact with or watch, and the kind of content they create. But largely, TikTok has been cagey regarding the specifics of what goes into their secret formula. However, leaked reports to the New York Times suggest that the app might also be taking into account what users are sending to each other on private messages. Once the algorithm learns what a given user likes—and doesn’t like—it gets remarkably good at keeping users engaged with the app. Its success is why Meta is trying—and largely failing—to cram as many TikTok-like features into Instagram. Whatever the algorithm is doing under the hood, its recommendations seem to resonate with users in a way that suggested posts on other social networks just don’t.

Experts have previously told PopSci that part of this is because TikTok is pulling its inventory of videos from everyone on the platform, instead of just from a user’s friends and following. And Bytedance engineers have published a pretty technical preprint paper on the app’s recommendation system. 

[Related: How to find your recently watched TikTok videos]

But being good at mysteriously accessing user interests can often come at a fault. Investigations by publications like Wall Street Journal showcases how the app can steer users down a rabbit hole of potentially toxic content, although TikTok has since refuted this, saying that WSJ’s experiment “isn’t representative of real user behavior because humans have a diverse set of interests.”

Now though, TikTok is going to give users some information about why exactly a video has appeared in their feed. To see it, you tap the Share icon and then the Question Mark icon called “Why This Video?”

While it won’t reveal any major details about how TikTok’s algorithm works (sorry, Meta), it does give users a hint as to why a particular video has been shown to them. In the blog post, TikTok says that it will offer explanations like the post is similar to the content a user has interacted with or searched for, it was posted by an account that they follow, or simply that it is popular or was just posted in their geographic region (a ‘Nearby’ feed was rumored to be in the works earlier this year).

[Related: 7 tricks to make the most of TikTok]

TikTok provides tools for users to stop certain content being recommended. You can tap the Share icon and then “Not Interested” on any video. If you tap “Details” after, you can also permanently filter out specific #hashtags. TikTok also maintains a list of content, like dangerous stunts, overtly sexualized content, and content promoting alcohol or tobacco misuse, that will never be shown in the For You feed. 

This new feature is coming out just as the app is coming under fire from US regulators for how it handles the privacy and security of its users. Last year, its chief operating officer was grilled at a Senate hearing about what kind of data it collects, and where the data goes. This month, several states have already moved to ban the app from being downloaded or opened on government devices. TikTok is also a part of an ongoing national security review by the Biden administration.  

Regulatory drama aside, TikTok says the “Why This Video?” feature will be rolling out to everyone over the next few weeks. We didn’t have access to it yet at PopSci, so we have not been able to test just how detailed the explanations currently were. Though the company claims that it will “continue to expand this feature to bring more granularity and transparency to content recommendations.”

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Online content moderation is hard (as Elon Musk is currently finding out). But Meta—the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—is hoping to make it easier for other platforms. Last week it announced that it would open up the source code for its Hasher-Matcher-Actioner (HMA) tool and make it freely available. This news comes as Meta is set to assume the chair of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT)’s Operating Board. 

Founded in 2017 by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube, GIFCT has since evolved into a nonprofit organization that works with member companies, governments, and civil society organizations to tackle terrorist and violent extremist content on the internet. One aspect of this is maintaining a shared hash database of extremist content so that if one company, say Facebook, flags something as terrorist-related, other companies, like YouTube, would be able to automatically take it down.

In order for these databases to work efficiently (and so that no company has to store petabytes of horrifically violent content), they don’t store a complete copy of the offending content. Instead, they store a unique digital fingerprint, or hash. 

Here’s how hashes are made: In essence, a copy of the extremist video, terrorist photo, PDF manifesto, or anything else is fed through an algorithm that converts it to a unique string of digits and letters. You can’t recreate the content using the hash, but putting the same video through the algorithm will always yield the same result. As long as all the platforms are using the same algorithm to create the hashes, they can use a shared database to track terrorist content.

[Related: Antivaxxers use emojis to evade Facebook guidelines]

Meta’s HMA tool allows platforms to automate the process of hashing any image or video, matching it against a database, and taking action against it—like stopping the video from being posted, or blocking the account trying to do so. It isn’t limited to terrorist content, and can work with a shared database like the one maintained by GIFCT, or a proprietary one like YouTube’s Content ID. 

It’s worth pointing out that all this happens in the background, all the time. Once HMA or any other similar automated tool is up and running, all the photos and videos users post are hashed and checked against the relevant databases as they are being uploaded. If something is later flagged by moderators as violent, offensive, or otherwise warranting removal, it can go back and automatically remove the other instances that are live on the platform. It’s a continuous process that strives to keep objectionable content from being seen or spread.

While most big platforms already operate with some kind of automated content moderation, Meta hopes that its HMA tool will help smaller companies that lack the resources of the major platforms. “Many companies do not have the in-house technology capabilities to find and moderate violating content in high volumes,” explains Nick Clegg, former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and now Meta’s President of Global Affairs, in the press release. And the greater the number of companies participating in the shared hash database, the better every company becomes at removing horrific content—especially as it is rarely just shared in a single place. “People will often move from one platform to another to share this content.”

Meta claims to have spend around $5 billion on safety and security last year and is committed to tackling terrorist content as “part of a wider approach to protecting users from harmful content on our services.” Clegg claims that “hate speech is now viewed two times for every 10,000 views of content on Facebook, down from 10-11 times per 10,000 views less than three years ago.”Without access to Facebook’s internal data we can’t verify that claim, and somereports seem to indicate that the company’s own system is far from perfect. However, initiatives like HMA and the Oversight Board at least give the impression that Meta is serious about solving the problem of content moderation in a fair and consistent manner—unlike Twitter.

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Update 12/19/22: Musk adhered to the results of their public Twitter poll, and reinstated a number of previously suspended journalists’ accounts over the weekend.

Elon Musk’s chaotic tenure as Twitter overseer continued this week—sudden policy about-faces, journalists’ accounts suspensions, and new signs of Twitter’s dire financial situation are combining into a storm of issues that change by the hour. Here is a brief rundown of the recent events. 

Elon Musk stance on ‘free speech’ on Twitter remains inconsistent

In past 48 hours, Twitter suspended @ElonJet, an account created by a Florida college student tracking the world’s second-richest man’s private plane takeoffs and landings in real time based on what is ostensibly publicly available information. Open source intelligence (OSINT) experts have already condemned the move, calling it a dangerous overstep that limits accountability and access to important information.

The ban came despite a previous promise of amnesty to the account on the grounds of “free speech absolutism.” Musk claimed that due to this account, a stranger a targeted a car he believed to be transporting Twitter’s CEO but contained one of Musk’s ten children, X Æ A-Xii. Musk uploaded a video to Twitter, allegedly taken at the scene of an altercation, showing a portion of a man’s face and full vehicle license plate number alongside the question, “Anyone recognize this person or car?” OSINT researchers have contested the details of Musk’s claim.

[Related: Elon Musk completes Twitter purchase, fires CEO.]

Within hours, Musk additionally suspended a number of prominent journalists from the platform, including longtime journalist and sports commentator, Keith Olberman, as well as The New York Times’ Ryan Mac. Musk then arrived unannounced to a Twitter Spaces audio event hosted by BuzzFeed News tech reporter Katie Notopoulos to briefly defend his actions in front of an estimated 30,000 listeners. “You’re just a Twitter citizen. So no special treatment,” Musk said during the event. “You dox, you get suspended, end of story.” Notopoylos pushed back that the journalists were simply reporting on @ElonJet suspension. As of Friday morning, Twitter Spaces appears to have been disabled entirely, although Musk claims it is due to software bug updates.

Trust and Safety Council disbanded, then reformed

Musk recently disbanded Twitter’s Trust and Safety Board, which focused on child sexual exploitation, suicide prevention, human rights, among others. Musk then rebooted the team and offered to partner with a controversial “anti-sex trafficking” organization which has been subject of several exposes. The shakeup stems from Musk’s dubious claims that the company wasn’t taking the issue of child sexual exploitation material (CSEM) seriously enough prior to his acquisition, going so far as to apparently endorse a tweet accusing Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth as being pro-child sexualization. Roth fled his residence due to threats.

QAnon has taken a renewed interest in Elon Musk

Musk’s recent transphobic tweets and his Monday evening “Follow the [rabbit emoji]” alert, which is likely a reference to The Matrix and/or his ongoing efforts to drum up controversy regarding Twitter’s past content guidelines, dubbed “the Twitter Files.” This appears to have been taken as a sign by believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory, who use pop cultural phrases such “follow the white rabbit” in regards to piecing together their perceived evidence of a global cabal of Satanic, blood-drinking pedophiles run by prominent Democrats.

Twitter shows financial woes

Musk finalized his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in October, a deal partially shored up via multiple large bank loans, upon which repayments are due soon. Advertisers who previously contributed to the bulk of Twitter’s revenue have abandoned the platform in droves, and attempts to monetize the site via the convoluted Twitter Blue premium subscription aren’t going well, either. This week, there were also reports that Musk has stopped paying rent on Twitter headquarters, and hoped to renege on severance packages offered to hundreds of previous employees who were laid off shortly after Musk assumed company control. Multiple outlets reported earlier this week on auctions offering the company headquarters’ furniture, kitchenware, and decorations. (On Wednesday, news also broke that Musk had recently sold off another $3.6 billion of his stock in Tesla, despite assurances to investors in April of “no further [Tesla] sales planned.”)

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Talks around banning TikTok have been going on since the Trump administration. Over the past five years, the federal government has taken a series of actions to alleviate concerns over spying, including a still-in-progress deal to transfer US users’ data on the social video-sharing app to an American company, and a recent Senate hearing with the company’s chief operating officer. 

However, not everyone was satisfied with the requirements in the potential data-transfer agreement, and skeptics aren’t convinced by TikTok’s process for handling users’ personal information. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), the Intelligence Committee’s top Republican, stated to The New York Times earlier this year that unless the tie between TikTok and ByteDance (the Chinese company that currently owns the app) is completely severed, “significant national security issues regarding operations, data, and algorithms [will still be] unresolved.”

This week, Rubio pushed even further by introducing a bill that proposes to put a nation-wide ban on TikTok and any other apps or platforms owned by ByteDance. (The name is a mouthful: Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party Act.) If it passes, it would block and prohibit “all transactions from any social media company in, or under the influence of, China, Russia, and several other foreign countries of concern.” Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) introduced companion legislation in the House.  

TikTok, the envy of older, beleaguered apps like Facebook and YouTube, has become a de facto search engine and source of news for younger users. But it has drawn both positive and negative attention since it first launched stateside in 2016. 

Critics of the recent bill note that this kind of broad ban will mostly impact more than one billion everyday users, especially those in the younger generations that have been using TikTok as a stage for political activism, social commentary, and other forms of constitutionally protected expression. Moreover, Techdirt notes that hyper-focusing on just one app ignores the bigger problem that pervades many modern technology companies (including American ones) that sell and broker data. 

[Related: How data brokers threaten your privacy]

“TikTok’s security, privacy, and its relationship with the Chinese government is indeed concerning, but a total ban is not the answer,” Electronic Frontier Foundation Deputy Executive Director and General Counsel Kurt Opsahl tells PopSci. “A total ban is not narrowly tailored to the least restrictive means to address the security and privacy concerns, and instead lays a censorial blow against the speech of millions of ordinary Americans.” He declined to comment on whether the bill could actually pass.

Hilary McQuaide, a spokesperson for TikTok, told multiple outlets that she felt this bill was rash considering that there is an ongoing national security review by the Biden administration. ​​“We will continue to brief members of Congress on the plans that have been developed under the oversight of our country’s top national security agencies—plans that we are well underway in implementing—to further secure our platform in the US,” McQuaide said to CNN.

Rubio is not the only congressperson making efforts to corral the influence of TikTok. In an attempt to deal with the larger national security concerns that have been brought up during the Intelligence Committee hearing with TikTok, on Wednesday, the Senate unanimously passed a bill introduced by Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) that would ban the download and use of the app on government-issued devices. The legislation has to go through the House and President Joe Biden’s approval before it can become law. 

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Twitter officially relaunched its shelved Twitter Blue subscription service Monday. The subscription promises to offer three color-coded checks, additional user experience features, as well as an iOS surcharge. First launched in June 2021, Twitter Blue was SEO Elon Musk’s attempt at providing a “paid verification” system for users to purchase subscriptions to blue checks, like those of legacy verified, “notable” accounts long used by public figures, celebrities, and news sources (aside from a mouse-over alert that subscribers paid for Twitter.) Twitter Blue was briefly suspended last month due to an uncontrollable deluge of account impersonations, scams, and parodies.

[Related: Elon Musk completes purchase of Twitter, fires CEO.]

According to the company’s Director of Product Management, Esther Crawford, aside from the blue check marks, Twitter users will soon see gold checkmarks designating businesses and gray checkmarks for “government and multilateral accounts.” Crawford and Musk previously mentioned a $3 Apple device fee atop Blue’s existing $8 per month rate, but the fluctuation isn’t currently featured on Blue’s official webpage. The roughly 30 percent price hike stems from Musk’s criticism of the company’s longstanding, ubiquitous App Store profit cut across all in-app purchases, unofficially dubbed its “Apple Tax.” Upgrading to Blue via a web browser will waive the fee.

Twitter Blue users will purportedly gain a number of other features not available to free accounts, such as an Edit button, dedicated reader mode, and 1080p video uploads, alongside the possibility of future perks like search result amplifications, fewer ads, and the ability to post longform videos. Verified users should be able to change their account handles, profile photos, and names, but doing so will reportedly result in a temporary checkmark loss while Twitter manually reviews the alterations. It is unclear who will tackle this undertaking, given Musk’s recent dramatic reduction in the company’s workforce and absence of a communications department.

[Related: Elon Musk hopes humans will be testing Neuralink brain implants in the next six months.]

Last week, Musk also hinted at an impending purge of over 1.5 billion Twitter accounts deemed inactive in order to free up dormant name handles while stressing that the move would only pertain to “obvious account deletions with no tweets & no log in for years [sic].”

Musk repeatedly stated Twitter Blue is a key component in his strategy to generate sustainable profits. Historically, advertising has accounted for an estimated 90 percent of the social media platform’s entire revenue, although since his purchase of the company in October, many major advertisers have indefinitely suspended or abandoned their marketing plans on the website, while instances of hate speech, spam, and misinformation increased dramatically. Many of Musk’s own recent tweets have featured transphobic comments, anti-union jokes, and opposition to pandemic quarantine efforts.

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Google announced this week that it is bringing continuous scrolling to desktop browsers. Now when you scroll down to the bottom of the search results page, Google will automatically load another page worth of results without you having to click on an additional button. This feature has been available on mobile devices since last year, but it will now roll out to all US users searching in English—and from there, it will presumably expand to other countries and languages. 

Google is careful to call this feature “continuous scrolling” rather than “infinite scrolling.” A similar function exists across most social media sites or apps where as you scroll, new content keeps popping up into your feed just as you get to the bottom of the page. Though, infinite scroll has had its critics, some of which blame the feature for wreaking havoc on our attention spans. 

Google, though, will only load six pages of results before you need to click a button that says “See More Results.” (On mobile devices, you can scroll through up to four pages before you have to tap anything.) Also, Google doesn’t load the six pages of results all at once—how fast it presents the next pages is related to the speed that the user scrolls at.

Until now, Google has displayed search results across multiple pages with ten results per page interspersed with ads, suggested results, and other call-out boxes. There’s an entire industry of search engine optimization (SEO) consultants, companies, blogs, and tools that are able to quantify the value of different organic (which means not a paid ad or other feature) search positions, and provide advice on how to rank your website higher. 

According to one recent analysis of 4 million Google search results by SEO training website Backlinko, an average of 27.6 percent of searchers clicked on the top result. By comparison, less than five percent of searchers clicked on the results in positions six through ten on the first page. The rates are even worse for results that don’t make the first page: 0.63 percent of Google searchers clicked on any link on the second page. (Other similar analysis have come to pretty much the same conclusions.)

Presumably, Google is hoping its new continuous scrolling will encourage searchers to click on or at least consider more results—which increase the likelihood that they will find what they are looking for. 

To that end, it’s also rolled out a few other features in recent months aimed at improving the quality of the results that people see, though these are mostly available on the mobile app in the US (which seems to be where most new features get released first). Google added a “Discussions and forums” call out box nested within the first page of search, similar to the existing “News” and “Images” ones, for queries that could “benefit from the diverse personal experiences found in online discussions.” It’s also taken steps to tweak its algorithm and make visual search more natural and intuitive by allowing you to add additional queries using “multisearch.” This will supposedly allow the engine to take on more complex questions. Similarly, it has tried to encourage searchers to explore deeper by offering up topic suggestions based on their searches and showing more visuals when they shop for products on a desktop. Notably, it hasn’t committed to showing less ads.

Given the growing narrative that Google’s search results and overall user experience are getting worse (even if it might really be an internet-wide issue), getting the right results to people when they look for them is clearly important to the company—especially as more people turn to social media like Reddit and TikTok for information, but those platforms come with their own issues around misinformation and taking statements out of context. Google is also competing against other browsers like Bing and the privacy-centric DuckDuckGo (see how results across the sites vary here). Whether Google’s wide-ranging attempts to improve its product are enough to keep searchers happy remains to be seen. 

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Please, eager sightseers, do not swat golf balls or anything else into the majesty that is the Grand Canyon in the hopes of potentially going viral. And if you do—expect a fine.

Per a post on the Grand Canyon National Park Service’s Instagram alongside an article yesterday from The New York Times, Katie Sigmond—a popular TikTok and Instagram influencer who frequently uploads modeling, workout, and golf-related content—posted a clip on October 26 to Snapchat of her smashing a golf ball off a ledge of the Grand Canyon. As The New York Times reports, the TikTok star was initially charged with littering, tossing items into the canyon, and creating hazardous conditions with disorderly conduct—all of which carry a combined maximum fine of $5,000 and up to six months in prison.

However, an out-of-court agreement first confirmed by The Arizona Republic revealed that the influencer entered into an agreement to pay just $285.

The video, which has since been removed from the social media platform, showed a portion of Sigmond’s golf club flying from her hands and into the chasm. The TikTok personality’s identity was quickly revealed after someone uploaded a screenshot of the video to r/NationalParks last month.

“Do we really need to say, ‘don’t hit golf balls into the Grand Canyon?'” read the National Park Service’s subsequent Instagram post alongside the Snapchat screenshot showing the culprit’s golf club in midair. “Throwing objects over the rim of the canyon is not only illegal but can also endanger hikers and wildlife who may be below.”

[Related: Roam the Grand Canyon virtually with Google Maps.]

Unfortunately, the social media stunt is only the most recent in the persistent problem of visitors trashing national parks such as the Grand Canyon. Last year, the park posted a far more unsanitary issue plaguing NPS staff on Facebook—people apparently have a habit of relieving themselves in less-than-appropriate spots. “Pro tip for proper trail etiquette: Carry ALL trash out of the canyon—plan to use the restrooms provided, bag or bury waste, and bring a bag to carry out toilet paper,” the NPS wrote on Facebook at the time. “It may make you uncomfortable but no one else should need to handle your waste.”

Parks across the country have dealt with a lot of similar issues over the past few years as the tradeoff to the major uptick in visitors following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Americans turned to outdoor activities such as visits to nearby state and national parks as lockdowns and social distancing policies became the norm for months, and unfortunately, some of those visitors haven’t followed proper outdoor etiquette. So, please, leave your fireworks and golf clubs back at the house the next time you take a trip to some of our country’s greatest natural wonders.

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Since January 2020, Twitter’s internal statistics cite over 11,000 accounts suspensions and nearly 100,000 post removals for spreading COVID-19 misinformation. Examples included erroneously promoting ivermectin as a viable alternative COVID-19 treatment and spreading conspiracy theories such as claims that vaccines contained 5G microchips. Last week, Twitter quietly ended its pandemic misinformation moderation policy.

Although the policy update is dated November 23, Twitter has yet to make an explicit public announcement regarding the reversal. News of the change has trickled down to the public via users, reporters, and media outlets.

[Related: Twitter overwhelmed by NSFW spam during protests in China.]

“… [A]s the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines expands around the world at varying degrees of pace and scale, people continue to turn to Twitter to discuss what’s happening and find the latest authoritative public health information. As such, we continue to prioritize removing or annotating potentially harmful and misleading information to ensure that users can readily find credible information during this critical phase,” the platform’s COVID-19 policy page still reads. At the top of the page, a statement now says the platform “is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.”

Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk has previously expressed strong opposition to pandemic lockdown procedures, vaccine mandates, and masking—procedures which are repeatedly proven to slow the deadly virus that has already claimed an estimated 6.6 million lives, per World Health Organization data.

The company’s swift change comes as Musk continues his campaign of reinventing the social media platform to reflect his interpretation of a totally “free speech” environment. Musk recently reinstated the personal accounts of Ye (formerly Kanye West), Jordan Peterson, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene following past suspensions for antisemitic, transphobic, and misleading pandemic-related statements, respectively.

[Related: Elon Musk Twitter layoffs have begun.]

Upon taking control of the social media company following his $44 billion acquisition, Musk almost immediately conducted massive layoffs. This led to the dissolution of entire teams dedicated to areas such as human rights, accessibility, news curation, and moderation. Earlier today, reports surfaced indicating the downsizing also decimated Twitter’s department focused on child sexual abuse materials, reducing it to a “skeleton crew” of less than 10 people for the entire website. Musk has previously stated eliminating CSAM was his “Priority #1” for the platform.

Both former employees and security experts warn that Twitter’s current team of around 2,000 people (down from 7,500 pre-Musk’s takeover) will not be able to handle engineering and content problems as they arise. Over the weekend, NSFW spam from China inundated the site in what some perceived to be a coordinated attack to obfuscate realtime coverage of the country’s ongoing protests. Around the same time, re-uploaded video clips of the deadly 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque mass shooting proliferated due to a lack of moderation teams.

Yesterday, Musk began tweeting a series of messages alleging that Apple had threatened to remove Twitter from its App Store, “but won’t tell [Musk] why.”

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Yesterday, a security lapse from 2021 cost the Facebook’s parent company, Meta, approximately $275 million thanks to Irish regulators enforcing the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a law passed in 2018 meant to better safeguard European consumers’ privacy. Last April, hackers collected over 500 million of the social media users’ names, locations, and birth dates via a vast data scraping scheme, and then turned around to sell the information on an online hacking forum. This is a violation of the GDPR’s rule requiring companies so safeguard personal info.

The massive fee is only the latest in a string of heavy financial penalties levied against what was once the world’s most dominant social media site. As The New York Times reports, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission previously fined Meta $400 million in September for its “mistreatment of children’s data,” less than a year after the same authorities charged the company $235 million for various violations related to its messaging service, WhatsApp.

[Related: Meta lays off more than 11,000 employees.]

The EU’s GDPR law is far more restrictive than American legislation when it comes to citizens’ online data privacy. Currently, the US lacks a comprehensive federal data privacy law, although there have been recent pushes for similar regulation. EU law, however, allows for heavier fines that otherwise may not be enacted stateside. Because major tech companies such as Meta, Twitter, and Google all have their EU headquarters located in Ireland, Europe often turns to its Data Protection Commission for enforcement and penalties.

Last year, Facebook rebranded its parent company Meta as part of an attempt to pivot towards CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s goals of realizing his vision of a “metaverse.” Although it’s currently unknown if Meta will appeal this week’s verdict as it has for the previous two decisions, the newest headache comes within weeks of it laying off over 11,000 global employees in what CEO Mark Zuckerberg described as the “one of the worst downturns” in the company’s history. Meta’s stock has dropped precipitously in recent months, and reported a 50-percent decline in quarterly profits last month. “I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here. I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted,” Zuckerberg wrote in his letter announcing the decision.

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As a wave of unprecedented citizen protests over China’s revived “zero COVID” response spread throughout major cities, so did an overwhelming flood of “Not Safe For Work” (NSFW) spam posts from what appear to be countless, long-dormant Twitter bot accounts. First highlighted by multiple security researchers over the weekend and subsequently confirmed by The Washington Post this morning, the situation is only the most recent example of Twitter’s dangerously strained oversight and maintenance capabilities in the wake of Elon Musk’s dramatic $44 billion acquisition and internal shakeup last month. Yesterday, Twitter also suffered from a largely un-flagged proliferation of re-uploaded videos of the deadly 2019 mass shooting at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand.

[Related: Former Twitter employees warn of platform’s imminent collapse.]

Musk more than halved the company’s global workforce from 7,500 to just over 2,000 since assuming leadership, a reduction many experts and former employees warn opens up one of the world’s most popular social media platforms to numerous content, engineering, and security issues. As one ex-staffer told WaPo, among the many staff cuts and department shutterings included the resignation of “all the China influence operations and analysts,” leaving a massive blindspot across the country.

Overwhelming keyword searches for major cities like Shanghai, Urumqi, and Chengdu with NSFW content makes it much more difficult for people looking for reliable realtime information on developing events in those areas. “50 percent porn, 50 percent protests,” one anonymous US government contractor and China expert described their Twitter feed to WaPo. “Once I got 3 to 4 scrolls into the feed… [it was] all porn.”

[Related: Elon Musk completes purchase of Twitter, fires CEO.]

“Search the name of any major city in Chinese… and you’ll see thousands of nsfw escort ads,” Mengyu Dong, a Stanford University researcher, tweeted on Sunday. Dong continued by explaining that, although similar ads have existed for years, they have not been shared nearly as frequently as over this past weekend, and recent posts often came from years’ long dormant accounts. Analysis from another account specializing in publicly available Chinese data seemed to show that suspected spam accounts at one point comprised over 95 percent of the “Latest” results after searching “Beijing” in Chinese, adding that, “They tweet at a high, steady rate throughout the day, suggesting automation.”

On Friday, Musk tweeted screenshots of presentation slides he claimed were from a recent “company talk,” one of which included the caption “Reported impersonation spiked, then fell” alongside a line graph citing “Twitter Internal” data.

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Twitter’s basic functionalities may not last through the end of the month due to unaddressed glitches, disorganization, and an overall devastating attrition of employees, according to sources familiar with the matter. Experts and former employees warn that Twitter may become unrecognizable and unusable in a matter of weeks.

The estimate comes from numerous former company engineers speaking out in the wake of Elon Musk’s most recent ultimatum sent to the remaining staff, as well as the firing of several veteran engineers who have been critical of Musk in internal Slack channels. “You’re seeing you can only push the workers so far before they’re going to revolt,” Melissa Ingle, a senior data scientist contractor recently laid off by Musk, told MIT Technology Review earlier today. “These people have options. They’re successful in their careers. They don’t want to be put through this.”

On Wednesday, Musk sent an internal email demanding those still employed to commit to a “extremely hardcore” work environment involving “long hours at high intensity” in order to build what he dubbed a “breakthrough Twitter 2.0.” “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” he wrote in his email, alongside a link to a Google Form agreement which, if not checked “Yes,” would supposedly constitute a formal resignation. The ultimatum has reportedly backfired. Additionally, lawyers representing a former Twitter staff stated Musk’s previous lay-off strategies may violate state labor laws.

“The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried,” Musk tweeted shortly before 11pm last night, almost six hours past his Google Form ultimatum’s deadline.

[Related: Elon Musk completes purchase of Twitter, fires CEO.]

Preceding Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform in October, Twitter boasted an estimated global workforce of roughly 7,500 employees, including various software engineers responsible for maintaining the site’s basic operations, as well as teams dedicated to users’ newsfeed curation, communications, accessibility features, machine learning, and human rights issues. Earlier this month, Musk laid off around half of the entire workforce, and axed many of the aforementioned departments. The total count of remaining Twitter employees is currently unknown, but some estimates point to a number in the low hundreds.

“If [Twitter] does break, there is no one left to fix things in many areas,” an unnamed internal source explained to Reuters this morning.

Since its debut in 2006, Twitter has become a nexus for cultural events, political discussions, and social movements, while simultaneously drawing criticism for its handling of misinformation, targeted harassment, and hate speech. Last night, a Twitter Spaces event co-organized by Buzzfeed reporter Katie Notopoulos garnered almost 200,000 listeners during the group audio chat’s hours-long discussion on the site’s legacy, as well as of its particular importance within Black and disabled spaces.

[Related: Elon Musk Twitter layoffs have begun.]

Shortly following yesterday’s afternoon deadline to opt into Musk’s “Twitter 2.0,” the company announced it was closing its offices until Monday. “Please continue to comply with company policy by refraining from discussing confidential company information on social media, with the press or elsewhere,” read an email seen by CNBC.

As of writing, Musk’s Twitter bio no longer mentions his involvement with the company.

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The social media landscape’s dramatic shakeup continued this morning as Meta announced a 13 percent reduction in its global workforce. In all, more than 11,000 employees are being laid off, in response to what CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg recently called “one of the worst downturns” in the company’s history.

The New York Times reports that the majority of staff cuts manifested within Meta’s recruiting and business teams alongside a hiring freeze extension through Q1 2023. Those affected will receive a severance equal to 16 weeks of their base pay, plus an additional two weeks for every year employed at Meta. Healthcare benefits for themselves and their families will extend for six more months, as well.

[Related: How social media companies can benefit from election misinformation.]

Meta’s steep fall comes as competitors like TikTok establish themselves as younger generations’ social media platform of choice, while Zuckerberg’s team continues to pitch consumers on VR/AR products like the Meta Quest 2 alongside its burgeoning “metaverse.” An industry-wide decrease in digital advertising from previous all-time highs during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic also factored into Meta’s ongoing woes—something Zuckerberg reportedly didn’t expect. “Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended … Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected,” he wrote in a public letter posted to Facebook’s news blog this morning.

[Related: Meta’s new AI tool can predict protein shapes.]

Going forward, Meta reportedly plans to focus on more targeted areas of development, particularly artificial intelligence systems, advertising, and a continued push for its metaverse. It’s currently unclear if, and when, the workforce reduction and strategic reorientation will be noticeable for everyday users of Facebook and Instagram. PopSci has reached out to Meta representatives for comment, and will update accordingly.

This year alone, company stock worth has dropped roughly 70 percent, while Meta reported a 50-percent decline in quarterly profits just last month. “I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here. I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted,” Zuckerberg wrote in his letter. “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”

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This story is developing.

Elon Musk is wasting no time following through on rumors of his promise to gut Twitter’s workforce. Upon his recent $44 billion purchase of the social media platform, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO floated firing about half of the company’s roughly 7,500 employees. In an internal, unsigned email sent to staff yesterday and subsequently circulated online, it was conveyed that “in an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global work force.” A few employees already reported receiving termination notices on Thursday, with many more announcing wholesale shutdowns of various departments early this morning.

As reported by Gizmodo, at least five former employees are already readying a class action lawsuit against Twitter for failure to comply with California’s WARN Act, “a law that requires large employers to provide 60 days of notice to employees before mass layoffs.” Meanwhile, as many as 1 million users have already deactivated their Twitter accounts, according to MIT Technology Review.

Based on former employee tweets and news outlet sources, the cuts as anticipated appear to affect roughly half the workforce, including product trust and safety, policy, curation, AI, data science, research, social good, machine learning, and vital engineering teams. The Washington Post also notes via anonymous sources that Twitter’s entire communications team now consists of just two people.

A running list of what areas Twitter HQ is shuttering can be found below, along with brief explanations of their functions. Any former or current Twitter employees are encouraged to reach out to PopSci by emailing editorial@popsci.com and/or andrew.paul@recurrent.io

Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability (META) Team

Confirmed via former Twitter employee Joan Deitchman, the META team (not relation to Facebook’s parent company) was responsible for “researching and pushing for algorithmic transparency and algorithmic choice… studying algorithmic amplification… [and] inventing and building ethical AI tooling and methodologies.”

The department’s dissolution could make it more difficult to understand how Twitter’s algorithms decide what stories and trends are pushed more than others, as well as decrease transparency in the ways the company decides to mitigate and address AI bias.

Curation Team

Confirmed via former employee, Andrew Haigh, the Curation Team’s recently launched website described its focus as being “responsible for highlighting and contextualizing the best events and stories that unfold on Twitter… including Topics, Trends descriptions, and Moments, makes it easy for customers to experience only-on-Twitter conversations and get the most out of the platform, regardless of which accounts they follow.” Another former team member, James Glynn, was the group’s Senior Curation Lead dedicated to “Misinfo, Elections, [and] Crisis Situations.”

Decreased focus on how stories and news cycles are both promoted, described, and fact-checked could make it much harder for Twitter users to trust trending topics’ veracity and objectivity.

Accessibility Experience Team

Confirmed by former engineering manager, Gerard Cohen, Accessibility Experience pretty much concerned what the name implies—making Twitter’s interface and interactions as intuitive to users as possible, regardless of physical access issues. Most recently, the team introduced the “Alt Text” feature for images, which provided descriptions of tweeted media for users with vision impairments and issues. “We had so much more to do, but we worked hard! There aren’t very many people that have had the opportunity to make such an important global platform like Twitter accessible, but we understood the mission,” Cohen wrote on Twitter.

The lack of a dedicated accessibility team might mean far less support for users who could benefit from interface accommodations and upgrades. This, hypothetically, may minimize who can use Twitter.

Human Rights Team

Shannon Raj Singh, now former Human Rights Counsel at Twitter, tweeted today that the entire team has been cut from the company. The team was focused on protecting Twitter users, journalists, and activists facing human rights violations around the world, including those in the midst of conflicts like those in Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. According to Singh’s tweet, the team had also implemented the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights.

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A new, in-depth study from Bloomberg published on Thursday analyzed thousands of social media posts from some of America’s controversial politicians, and the results are stark. When compared to other topics, candidates’ baseless claims surrounding US election fraud conspiracies are an engagement boon not only for themselves, but the social media companies that allow the content.

After reviewing all Facebook and Twitter content posted by every Republican running this year for Senate, Congress, governor, attorney general, and secretary of state, the report found that the two platforms, despite previously flagging election falsehoods, “did not have any context added to the misleading posts” at the time of analysis. These posts were identified via trawling for keywords and phrases like “rigged election” and “illegitimate president,” and vastly outperformed candidates’ content about other subjects like border security and the economy.

[Related: It’s possible to inoculate yourself against misinformation.]

“Nearly 400 election-denying posts from Republican candidates on Facebook collected at least 421,300 total likes, shares and comments across the platform, and reached as many as 120.4 million people,” writes Bloomberg, citing the Facebook-owned analysis tool, CrowdTangle. Bloomberg adds that, “On Twitter, 526 tweets promoting the Big Lie [a popular nickname given to the 2020 stolen election conspiracy] carried at least 401,200 shares on the platform.”

As another example, just six Twitter posts about from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Trump loyalist from Georgia, garnered over 163,000 likes, retweets, and replies. Rep. Greene’s personal Twitter account was permanently banned in January 2022 following repeated inflammatory and false content, although her official political account remains online.

[Related: The complex realm of misinformation intervention.]

The outsized online attention doesn’t only benefit those perpetuating these lies, but the mediums themselves. Social media companies like Meta (which owns Facebook) and Twitter rely on user engagement as their chief profit source. The longer people spend on their platforms and engaging with posts, each other, and advertising, the more personal data can be harvested and subsequently sold to third-party companies for targeted marketing and other purposes. Whether intentional or not, the financial benefits are too lucrative to ignore. It’s a toxic loop—one that erodes public health and institutional trust.

For their part, companies like Facebook rebut these claims, with a Meta spokesperson telling Bloomberg that, “Meta has invested a huge amount to help protect elections and prevent voter interference, and we have clear policies about the kind of content we’ll remove, such as misinformation about who can vote and when, calls for violence related to voting, as well as ads that encourage people not to vote or question the legitimacy of the upcoming election.” Following Elon Musk’s recent $44 billion purchase of Twitter, hate speech soared on the platform while its content enforcement team was largely curtailed.

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Elon Musk is wasting no time ushering a dramatically new era for Twitter after assuming ownership of the social media platform last week. Although rumors continue to swirl around the future of verified accounts, free speech, content moderation, as well as the return of previously banned accounts including the former President of the United States, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has so far only asked the public’s input on one potential update: The return of the beloved short-form video sharing platform, Vine.

“Bring back Vine?” Musk tweeted on October 30 alongside a Yes/No poll for his nearly 113 million followers.

Less than a day later, Axios additionally reported that multiple anonymous sources indicated Musk has instructed Twitter engineers to begin planning a Vine revitalization with an eye to release by the end of the year.

[Related: Elon Musk completes Twitter purchase, fires CEO.]

Founded in 2012, Twitter acquired Vine mere months before the app’s official launch in January 2013. Within two years, the platform amassed over 200 million users and a devoted fan base surrounding the platform’s short video format. Twitter announced it was disabling Vine’s upload feature on October 26, 2016, eventually reducing it to an internet archive of previously uploaded content before shuttering the site completely in 2019. Although never as profitable or ubiquitous as its parent company or other major social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, its online cultural influence lived on via countless memes, as well as the current, similarly video-oriented giant, TikTok.

While fans—and potentially Musk himself—are extremely excited at the prospect of Vine’s possible return, the app’s original developers have already warned the world’s wealthiest man that doing so won’t be as easy as it sounds. “This code is 6+ years old. Some of it is 10+. You don’t want to look there,” Sara Beykpour, a former Vine employee and later Twitter product manager, tweeted yesterday afternoon. “If you want to revive Vine, you should start over,” she added.

[Related: Musk threatens funding for Ukraine’s Starlink access.]

Apps require constant updating and management to keep up a host of regular issues including scalability, bug fixes, malware attempts, as well as keeping up with operating systems’ own developments and alterations.

The underlying, detail-oriented complexities of resurrecting a years’ dead online platform illustrates the real world challenges faced by Musk’s often seemingly off-the-cuff ideas and strategies. Yesterday, CNN reported on internal documents it obtained pointing towards the possibility of Twitter charging as much as $19.99 per month for verified users to retain their “Blue Checkmark” status. As of last year, approximately 400,000 of the platform’s users possess this status—less than 1 percent of all accounts. Even if every Verified users opted into the rumored new system, the annual generated revenue would add up to about $96 million, a fraction of the $1 billion in interest due on Musk’s loans taken to acquire the platform.

In a separate poll tweeted out asking how much users were willing to pay for verification, over 80 percent of respondents have said they wouldn’t pay at all. “Interesting,” Musk wrote in response to the tweet.

The post Vine could be next on the list for Musk to remake appeared first on Popular Science.

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UPDATE (November 1, 2022): Instagram announced via Twitter it resolved the issue at approximately 6pm ET on 10/31, citing a “bug” which caused “people in different parts of the world to have issues accessing their accounts and caused a temporary change for some in number of followers.”

Twitter won the award last week for most chaotic social media platform—but Instagram may be pushing for the title today. Earlier this morning, Instagram confirmed via tweet that many users are experiencing accessibility issues in the form of seemingly random account suspensions. “We’re looking into it and apologize for the inconvenience,” the message concludes alongside the hashtag “#instagramdown.”

As The Verge notes, many prominent Instagram accounts’ follower totals have dropped precipitously, with the social media company’s official account down over a million users since yesterday. Multiple users are taking to other social media platforms such as Twitter to detail their Instagram woes, usually alongside screenshots detailing their suspensions, which appear to be the generic flagged page seen when hit with the censor. As of 10:19 a.m. EDT, 7,000 reports of issues with the app have popped up.

One PopSci‘s staffer is experiencing the problem—their Instagram account was randomly and inexplicably suspended for roughly 2-3 hours before being restored, although they still are seeing app issues.

Instagram is owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the same parent company as Facebook.

The post Instagram is down for some users—here’s what we know so far appeared first on Popular Science.

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This story has been updated. It was originally published on December 1, 2020.

Lately I’ve experimented with another solution: reinventing how I use these sites. This doesn’t require you to delete your profiles and avoid social media entirely—changing your focus and doing a little cleanup to the list of people and accounts you follow can be enough to do the trick.

Instead, I’ve found Facebook’s Groups feature to be an incredible replacement for my usually-toxic feed. You can join small communities of people focused on a specific topic, which means the conversation rarely strays into dangerous territory. My wife and I have been most successful with local and neighborhood groups, like Being Neighborly (a general group with chapters across the US), Buy Nothing (where people in your neighborhood can give things away they don’t need), and the San Diego New Mom’s Network (where she can connect with other moms in the area and share things like hand-me-downs and helpful articles). You may even find your online fitness trainer has a group for all their clients and followers, or that your favorite small-time podcast has a close-knit community sharing that interest on Facebook. My wife is even part of a group created by fans of her favorite cooking blog.

[Related: Tips and apps for finding a virtual personal trainer]

To start looking, head to Facebook’s Groups page. If you’re lucky, you might find some good stuff in Facebook’s suggestions (click Discover on the left if you don’t see any), but you’ll most likely have to throw some searches out to see what comes up. Pop in some topics and limit the location to your city, or put your neighborhood’s name in the search terms. If your favorite podcast, blog, or YouTube channel mentions a Facebook group every week on the show, look it up and join.

Experiment with what you find, but the smaller and more specific the better. Large public “gaming” groups, for example, are probably going to be rougher around the edges than a private group dedicated to dads who play Rocket League. A few hundred to a couple thousand members is usually good—once you get more than that, you have a large enough group where toxicity and mob mentality start to slowly take over.

Mix a good selection of groups in with the few people you actually care about, and you’ll have a pretty decent feed that’s completely different from what you started with—and more focused on positive communities than bickering “friends” you don’t even know that well.

Twitter: Turn it into a news feed

When it comes to sheer levels of toxicity, Twitter may be even worse than Facebook. The platform was designed to be a fast-scrolling feed of quick posts sent from one person to many, which makes it a terrible place for any discussion that requires detail or nuance. Combine that with a high volume of politically-inclined folks and an algorithm that promotes controversy, and you’ve got a recipe for endless doomscrolling.

If you, like most people, use this platform to keep up with current events, you could just ditch Twitter and pick up a newspaper. But just as I reinvented my Facebook account, I turned my Twitter into a modern RSS feed.

[Related: Elon Musk completes purchase of Twitter, fires CEO]

This meant creating an entirely new Twitter account from scratch, and there was only one rule when it came to my feed—follow sites, not people. Instead of the unhinged rants of celebrities, politicians, and certain media colleagues of mine, I get the more reasoned, edited, fully-formed thoughts they put into articles and interviews. In other words, I get a surprisingly good collection of topics I’m interested in, without the vitriol. Now I can dock Twitter to the side of my monitor and let it scroll by with useful information as I work.

But using social media for news does encourage you to only follow the things you want to hear, creating what is known as the “filter bubble effect.” This is dangerous, as it turns your feed into a fertile ground for misinformation and confirmation bias, so it’s important to try to counter it. While some publications have multiple Twitter feeds for different verticals—PopSci has its own DIY account, hint hint—casting a wider net and following a publication’s main account ensures you get news you might not have otherwise seen, which is important in being a responsible, well-informed citizen. Plus, you’ll get cool stories about wasp venom you might not have sought out.

I still have a personal account that I occasionally check in on, tweet from, and use to joke around in my friends’ mentions. But most of the day, I can stick to keeping up on current events without feeling my blood boil.

Look to other social media sites you’ve ignored

While Facebook and Twitter are the most obvious doomscrolling culprits, all of this goes for other sites and social networks, so you may also want to rethink how you use those platforms.

The post How to banish toxic posts from your social feeds appeared first on Popular Science.

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This story has been updated. It was originally published on October 25, 2018.

Social media networks know a lot about you. In fact, that’s their primary job. They want to collect information about you and use that to sell advertisements that you can’t resist. In return for your data, these companies give you a chance to interact with other users and share your life no matter how interesting or banal. Think about all the secret interests Facebook thinks you want to see ads about. The results are sometimes hilariously wrong, but they can also be worryingly accurate. Your information is a product that companies use.

In a perfect world, this exchange would result in a harmonious civilization in which people find others with similar interests and we enjoy our hobbies in peace. In real life, however, our information crawls around the dark corners of the web, where it’s compromised, sold, leveraged, and otherwise abused. And that’s not even mentioning what happens when one of these social media sites flickers out of existence and takes all of your stuff with it.

This article provides a quick primer on how to see what data sites have collected about you, as well as how to download and delete it. It’s handy information to have before the next site shuts down or accidentally tells a bunch of bad guys your favorite movie and your cellphone number.

How to download your Twitter data

To grab your Twitter archive, head to the account settings page (Settings & privacy on the app) and click on Your account. Then, navigate to Download an archive of your data, where you’ll have to enter your password, log in, or otherwise verify you own the account. When you’re in, hit Request archive to ask for a ZIP file stuffed with your account information, history, activity, ads data, and other details. Once Twitter has processed your request, it’ll send you a link for downloading. You’ll need to have a confirmed email address if you want to go through with the process.

If you want an archive of everything you’ve ever done on Facebook, you can do that here (Settings > Privacy > Your Facebook information. To download a copy, click View next to Download profile information. From there, you can choose the file format, the quality of photos and videos, a date range, and the categories of data you want to grab. When you’re ready, scroll to the bottom of the page and hit Request a download. The resulting file will be big—like, multiple gigabytes big.

For a little more fun, go back to the Facebook information tab within the site’s privacy settings and select View next to Access profile information. There, choose Logged information and find Ads interests. Poke around on this page and hit See All Interests to see things that may surprise you. For instance, Facebook thinks I’m in the “established adult life” stage of my life, whatever that means. You may also be able to see a map of places you have been. Weird.

How to see Instagram ad preferences and download your data

If you want to see the topics Instagram thinks you’ll like when it comes to ads, tap the three lines in the upper right corner of the app, hit Settings > Ads > Ad topics. This page will give you a running list of things the app thinks you want to see advertised. The results are often kind of weird, and in some cases just plain wrong. But others are strikingly accurate.

Downloading your Instagram data is on a separate page: From the main menu (three lines), tap Your activity followed by Download your information. Enter an email and hit Request Download to get a link to all your stuff.

How to save your TikTok data

TikTok is the newest entry on this list, and downloading all your data from the short-form video app is straightforward. Just tap Profile at the bottom of the screen, hit the three lines in the top right, and select Settings and privacy. From there, choose Manage account at the top of the page and tap Download your data. Read the explanation, select your preferred file format, and slam that Request data button at the bottom.

How to archive your ancient Myspace account

“Why the heck is MySpace near the top?” you wonder as you scroll through this article. Well, mostly because every time some drama surrounding some other social media site hits the news, people inevitably remember their long-abandoned MySpace account. Unfortunately, MySpace doesn’t exactly make it easy to get your stuff from that account you probably haven’t touched in years.

You can download your songs (if Myspace didn’t lose them all in 2019) and/or videos by going to the separate Uploads pages for Music and Videos, finding the media you want to pull down, and clicking the pencil icon to get to the download menu. Maybe while you’re over there, delete your whole account. I wish I had done that ages ago because I don’t have any of my login information or my old email. Now I can visit myself on MySpace but not log in.

How to download your Apple data

In 2018, Apple gave users in the United States the ability to download their personal data, which made sense in light of its CEO’s big privacy speech. Apple is primarily a hardware company, so it doesn’t rely as heavily on collecting user data to make money. As a result, you might find that your Apple data is welcomely boring.

If you want to check it out, go to the Data and Privacy page and log in. Find where it says Get a copy of your data, and click the Request a copy of your data link underneath it. Choose everything you want bundled into the file and hit Continue to proceed.

If you go to the My Activity page, you will see a running tally of everything you have done using Google products. The sheer volume of entries on that page might be impressive. It likely includes every search you’ve requested, every time you’ve used Google Maps, all of the YouTube videos you’ve watched, and smart home functions you’ve done via app or a Google Assistant speaker. You can even listen to your Google Assistant voice requests.

[Related: How to secure your Google account]

Although viewing your Google activity is fairly easy, actually downloading it is a little harder. To do so, navigate to the Other activity page and find Download your data from My Activity. There’s a lot on this page, so your best bet will likely be to hit Cmd+F or Ctrl+F and search for “download”. From there, hit Download your data and move through the steps on the screen.

Now, if you want to delete this activity, you can do so by clicking Delete at the top of the page and selecting the dates you want to delete. So, if you want to erase your YouTube history after some questionable binge watching, you can do so. If you haven’t enabled Google’s auto-delete function, go to the Activity controls page and turn it on under the relevant categories.

Before you consider your Google account nice and tidy, you might consider doing its built-in privacy checkup, which will run you through your settings and show you what the company’s services are collecting.

How to save your Snapchat data

If you’re still using Snapchat (or you stopped, but want to know what information the company has about you), you can go into your app settings (tap your avatar, then the gear icon in the top right), scroll to the Account Actions heading, and tap My Data. Then, hit Submit Request and enter a valid email address. It will take a while for the company to put your data into a ZIP file (usually a couple hours) and then you’ll get a link that will start the download.

Once you log into your Microsoft account, You can head to the Privacy tab, where you can download various categories of your personal data. If you use a Windows computer, expect to find a bunch of information in there. Find the Manage your activity data heading and click any category to expand it. If there’s anything available, you should see a Download your data link. Click that, hit Create an archive, and when the archive is ready you can download it to your device.

How to view and delete Alexa voice recordings on Amazon

It’s easy enough to see most of the information about your Amazon account through the regular menus on the site or through the app, but you may not know that Amazon keeps audio from your Alexa requests and links them to your account. You can find them by going to the Alexa Privacy Settings page in a browser or tapping through Settings > Alexa Privacy > Review Voice History in the app. You cannot download them, but Amazon offers several ways to delete these recordings.

How to find out what data brokers know about you

While tracking down your info on specific tech and social media sites is relatively straightforward, finding the shadowy information that’s tracked, scraped, and extrapolated by data collection companies is much harder to pin down.

Acxiom, for example, is a large “marketing data” company that takes information about people on the web and forms profiles that marketers can use for targeted advertising. You used to be able to see the data it collects about you by creating an account at its AboutTheData website, but that feature is no longer available. Yes, you had to give them your personal information to see what personal information they had about you.

You can, however, opt out of Acxiom’s data collection practices. This will stop the company from tracking you further, but it won’t erase the information that’s already there.

Acxiom is just one company of many, though. Popular Science has its own advice on removing your personal information from the web, and Motherboard has a massive list of data brokers with links to help you opt out of their tracking. Motherboard’s list, though may now be out of date. Both are great resources, but it will likely take you at least a few hours to get the job done.

Some larger agencies will even make you send them a copy of your photo ID to prove your identity due to the sensitive nature of the data.

The big takeaway from all of this data is to keep an eye on your privacy settings when you use apps and sites. It’s still a maze of permissions and privacy agreements, but it’s actually easier now than it ever has been thanks to reforms like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. Be vigilant.

The post How to download your data from Twitter and other sites appeared first on Popular Science.

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Editor’s note (October 28, 2022): This story is developing…

Elon Musk has completed his multibillion dollar purchase of Twitter, reports The New York Times. Musk addressed the sale by posting to the social media platform late last night. The news comes after a months’ long saga filled with promises, teases, reversals, and legal threats surrounding the world’s wealthiest man. Already the CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, Musk now assumes de facto control of a chaotic social media platform recently revealed to have been hemorrhaging its most active and profitable users since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. His acquisition comes at cost of $44 billion—a price tag whose financing was shored up in recent weeks thanks in part to assuming $12.5 billion in debt via Wall Street banks.

[Related: Internal documents reveal how Twitter is losing its ‘heavy users.’]

According to multiple outlets, Musk has already reportedly fired at least four of the company’s top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Sega, and public policy lawyer Vijaya Gadde, who reportedly has been called Twitter’s “chief censor” by the right. Bloomberg reports that Musk has appointed himself Twitter’s CEO, although the role may be temporary. Per New York Times, sources indicate he is also taking the company private, a move that would disavow him from answering to shareholders and the need to regularly disclose company performance; this would also allow him to change Twitter’s service features without public oversight or knowledge. Musk has also hinted he would restore banned accounts, including that of Donald Trump, although the former President previously indicted he plans to stick with his own “free speech” alternative, Truth Social.

It is currently unclear what other changes are soon to come, and as CNBC notes, how Musk will fully finance the deal. The cryptocurrency exchange Binance confirmed it remains one of the deal’s initial backers, with CEO Changpeng Zhao saying in a statement that, “We’re excited to be able to help Elon realize a new vision for Twitter. We aim to play a role in bringing social media and Web3 together in order to broaden the use and adoption of crypto and blockchain technology.”

Although Musk has stated he envisions Twitter to become “X,” his long-desired, WeChat-inspired “everything app” that includes social media, private messaging, and widespread financial transactions, a recent post indicates he is currently more concerned with giving users a more personalized advertising experience. “Low relevancy ads are spam, but highly relevant ads are actually content!” he tweeted yesterday.

[Related: Musk threatens funding for Ukraine’s Starlink access.]

Apart from assurances as a “free speech absolutist” to turn Twitter into a “common digital town square,” Musk also floated pursing subscription partnerships, and gutting the social media platform’s over 7,500 person staff by 75-percent. In the days leading up to Friday’s acquisition finalization, Musk also suggested Ukraine cede contested regions to Russia, flip-flopped on a decision to withhold Starlink internet satellite access to the country, and welcomed Kanye West back onto Twitter following the latter’s temporary ban for antisemitic comments.

“That said, Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” he said in the same note posted yesterday via his Twitter account.

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ALGORITHMS are what they eat. These intricate pieces of code need nourishment to thrive and do accurate work, and when they don’t get enough bytes of good-quality data, they struggle and fail. 

I encountered a malnourished algorithm when I looked at my 2022 Spotify Wrapped and saw my favorite artist was Peppa Pig. I frowned, befuddled. Why did Spotify think the cartoon piglet was my latest obsession? Then I remembered I’d spent a week with my 2-year-old niece over the summer, and how playing Peppa Pig songs on my phone was the only way to keep her entertained. 

Well, that made more sense. 

But I soon realized that the little porker had mucked up even more than my year in review: My recommendation algorithm was a mess as well. For weeks, at least one out of the four Daily Mix playlists the platform put together for me included compilations of music for kids. 

It was annoying, but I wondered if, maybe, my niece’s obsession was actually a useful way to deal a staggering blow to the detailed profile tech companies have on each of us. After all, if Spotify, Instagram, Google, or any other platform thinks I’m someone I’m not, they’ll show me ads that are relevant to that fake version of me—but not to the real me. And if they happen to provide my data to a third party, like a data broker, they’ll be handing them details describing someone who doesn’t exist, with my true likes and interests buried in a mountain of Peppa Pig songs. Weaponizing this mistaken identity can help us hide in plain sight and, by extension, protect our privacy.

A camouflage suit made out of bad data 

Feeding the algorithms in your life bad data is called data poisoning or obfuscation, and it’s a technique that aims to obscure your true identity by generating a large quantity of inaccurate information. The concept refers to synchronized attacks that deliberately seek to erase or alter the datasets fueling a platform’s algorithms to make them underperform and fail. This requires specific skills and know-how, as well as a lot of computing power.

You may not have any of those things, but you can use the same principle to protect yourself from constant surveillance online. The images you see, the posts you like, the videos you play, the songs you listen to, and the places where you check in—that’s all data that platforms collect and use to build a profile of who you are. Their goal is to understand you as much as possible (better than you know yourself) so they can predict what you’ll want and need. Tech companies and advertisers don’t do this for altruistic reasons, of course, but to show us ads that they hope will manipulate us into spending money—or make us feel or vote a certain way. 

The easiest way to engage in data poisoning is to use a name, gender, location, and date of birth that is not yours when you sign up for a service. To advance beyond that baseline, you can like posts you don’t actually like, randomly click on ads that don’t interest you, or play content (videos, music, movies, etc.) that’s not to your taste. For the last of those options, just press play on whatever platform you’re using, turn off your screen, turn down the volume, and let it run overnight. If you want to throw off YouTube, use the autoplay feature and let the site go deep down a rabbit hole of content for hours and hours while you sleep or work. Finally, whenever you have to answer a question, like why you’re returning an item you bought online, use “other” as your default response and write whatever you want as a reason.

Where data poisoning can fail

If this all sounds too simple, you’re right—there are some caveats. Using fake information when you sign up for something might be pointless if the platform builds and refines your profile by aggregating numerous data points. For example, if you say you’re in California but consume local news from Wisconsin, list your workplace in Milwaukee, and tag a photo of yourself on the shore of Lake Michigan, the platform’s baseline assumption that you live in the Golden State won’t matter much. The same thing will happen if you say you were born in 1920, but you like content and hashtags typically associated with Generation Z. Let’s face it—it’s totally plausible for an 82-year-old to be a huge Blackpink fan, but it’s not terribly likely. And then there’s the risk that a service or site will require you to provide real identification if you ever get locked out or hacked.

Playing content that doesn’t interest you while you sleep may throw off the recommendation algorithms on whatever platform you’re using, but doing so will also require resources you may not have at your disposal. You’ll need a device consuming electricity for hours on end, and an uncapped internet connection fast enough to stream whatever comes through the tubes. Messing with the algorithms also messes up your user experience. If you depend on Netflix to tell you what you watch next or Instagram to keep you updated on emerging fashion trends, you’re not likely to enjoy what shows up if the platform doesn’t actually know what you’re interested in. It could even ruin the entire app for you—just think what would happen if you started swiping left and rejecting all the people you actually liked on a dating app.  

Also, just as eating one salad doesn’t make you healthy, your data poisoning schemes must be constant to make a long-lasting impression. It’s not enough to click on a couple of uninteresting ads here and there and hope that’s enough to throw off the algorithm—you need to do it repeatedly to reinforce that aspect of your fake profile. You’ve probably noticed that after browsing an online store and seeing the brand or product you were interested in plastered on every website you visited afterward, the ads were eventually replaced by others. That’s because online ads are cyclical, which makes sense, as human interest comes and goes. 

But the biggest caveat of all is uncertainty—we just don’t know how much damage we’re doing to the data tech companies and advertisers are collecting from us. Studies suggest that poisoning a minimal amount of data (1 to 3 percent) can significantly affect the performance of an algorithm that’s trying to figure out what you like. This means that even clicking on a small percentage of uninteresting ads might prompt an algorithm to put you in the wrong category and assume, for example, that you’re a parent when you’re not. But these are only estimates. The engineers behind Google, Facebook, and other big online platforms are constantly updating their algorithms, making them an ever-moving target. Not to mention this code is proprietary, so the only people who know for sure how effective data poisoning is are working for these companies, and it’s highly unlikely they would reveal their vulnerability to this technique. In the case of Google’s AdSense, for example, advertisers pay per click, and if they knew their money was paying for fake clicks (even just a few), it could jeopardize Google’s authority to reach audiences and sell products. 

Does any of this matter?

Not knowing whether poisoning your data is actually doing anything to protect your privacy might make you think there’s no point in trying. But not all is lost. Anecdotal evidence—my Spotify Wrapped, YouTube’s sometimes wacky recommendations, Netflix’s occasionally baffling genre suggestions, and ads that think you’re interested in buying a product because you clicked on something accidentally—makes it clear that platforms are not immune to our white lies, and bad data is not innocuous. There’s also a very telling experiment by privacy researchers Helen Nissenbaum and Lee McGuigan at Cornell Tech, that proved AdNauseam, an extension banned from the Chrome Store that automatically clicks on all ads on a page to throw off Google’s profiling algorithm, is effective and that the Big G cannot tell the difference between real and fake clicks.

Maybe you need to read this to believe it, but we don’t need to comply with everything online platforms ask of us. Data poisoning is neither dishonest nor unethical. It’s us users reclaiming our information in any way we can. As Jon Callas, a computer security expert with the Electronic Frontier Foundation told me, we have no moral obligation to answer questions tech companies have no right to ask. They’re already accumulating thousands of data points on each and every one of us—why help them? 

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether data poisoning is highly or barely effective. We know it does something. And at a time when companies don’t have our best interests at heart and regulation is light years behind thanks to the billions of dollars tech companies spend lobbying elected officials, we the users are on our own. We might as well use every strategy we can to protect ourselves from constant surveillance. 

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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A trove of internal research first revealed by Reuters on Tuesday presents a grim outlook for Twitter, mere days before a federal judge’s deadline for Elon Musk to complete a $44 billion acquisition of the company. According to the report, an in-house company study titled “Where Did the Tweeters Go?” describes that the app’s most frequent (and subsequently profitable) users—dubbed “heavy tweeters”—are in “absolute decline” since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Companies like Twitter earn the vast majority of their revenue through the monetization of their users’ data and online preferences, which can be amassed and subsequently sold to third-parties for advertising purposes. As such, the more you use an app such as Twitter, the more valuable you are to the app maker for generating desirable data troves. Twitter’s “heavy tweeter” is defined by the company as someone who visits the platform almost daily and posts at least three-to-four times a week. As such, although this category reportedly only covers 10 percent of monthly overall users, they generate 90 percent of all tweets and half of the company’s global revenue stream.

[Related: Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter (again).]

The report doesn’t include concrete numbers, but it describes Twitter’s English-speaking base as declining by a “devastating” percentage. According to the company report, the platform amassed more ad money from the United States than every other market combined in its last fourth quarter. Still, English-speaking users continue to abandon the app for competitors like Instagram and TikTok.

The emergency is exacerbated in a number of other ways, including shifting audience interests. Twitter has long been one of the few social media platforms to allow “Not Safe For Work” content like pornography, a medium most mainstream advertisers generally avoid. Unfortunately for the company, audience interest in this kind of explicit material has risen on the app, and now makes up about 13 percent of Twitter’s posts, according to an additional report seen by Reuters. This, coupled with a decreased interest in subjects like cryptocurrency following the market’s dramatic crash earlier this year, makes the remaining English users less ideal for advertisers—and thus less profitable for Twitter.

Friday is the last day for Musk to close a deal for the purchase of the social media platform. If he fails to do so, a November start date will be set for trial between the social media platform and the world’s wealthiest man.

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Coded language is nothing new—but the scale at which it can be deployed via social media is essentially unprecedented. Observers often compare online content moderation to games of Whack-a-Mole, in which platforms can barely stem the influx of targeted misinformation, conspiracy theories, propaganda imagery, and hate speech.

As a report from Bloomberg last week detailed, antivaxxers in particular are becoming increasingly reliant on coded language, often using emojis to convey prohibited misinformation and propaganda on social media platforms such as Facebook. What’s more, a former Facebook exec overseeing public policy says it is becoming clear that current AI moderation programs aren’t up to challenge—and there’s reason to believe they may never be.

“All these systems that these platforms continue to build are frankly still very much in their infancy of being able to do some of the stuff that they would like them to be able to do,” Katie Harbath, CEO of the tech policy strategy group, Anchor Change and a Nonresident Senior Fellow for the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab who previously served for ten years as Facebook’s head of public policy, tells PopSci.

[Related: The complex realm of misinformation intervention.]

Meeting and conversing within groups and pages with vague names like “Died Suddenly,” Bloomberg notes antivaxxers continue to peddle patently false COVID-19 misinformation using phrases like “eaten the cake” to refer to taking vaccines. “Sometimes, users claim that loved ones have taken four or five ‘slices’ of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, using emoji for pizza, cupcakes and various fruits to express their point,” adds the report.

Context is key for flagging and removing prohibited content, something that is made even more complicated for AI monitoring programs by the introduction of emoji code languages. AI content moderation utilizes machine learning algorithms to identify, flag, and if needed, remove content it identifies as problematic—typically sexually explicit or violent images and writing, but coded language and emojis are still often an Achilles’ Heel for them. “[M]achines can still miss some important nuances, like misinformation, bias, or hate speech. So achieving one hundred percent clear, safe, and user-friendly content on the Internet seems almost impossible,” explains a rundown from data annotation service Label Your Data.

Harbath says that the challenge for tackling both emojis and coded language is twofold, both for AI systems and human overseers. “One, you have to retrain your moderators to be able to try to understand that context, and to figure out if they are trying to use this emoji,” she says. “That can be challenging, based on how much [context and material] the content moderators do or do not get.” Harbath says that these moderators often only see a single post or message at a time, depriving them of potentially vital context for enforcement decisions.

[Related: It’s possible to inoculate yourself against misinformation.]

Trying to get ahead of these groups presents its own challenges, as well. Harbath explains that updating or broadening a moderator system’s classifiers and nomenclature can also lead to higher false positives, creating new headaches and complications while simultaneously doing more harm than good. “Most people use emojis in a relatively benign way,” she says, “… It’s a constant fight that all the platforms have to deal with.”

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, chose to cite its successes in this realm when reached for comment on the issue. “Attempts to evade detection or enforcement are a sign that we are effectively enforcing our policies against COVID misinformation,” Aaron Simpson, a policy communications manager at Facebook, writes via email. Simpson also notes that, since the pandemic’s onset, Facebook has removed “more than 27 million pieces of content” for violating polices regarding COVID-19 misinformation across both Facebook and Instagram. Facebook alone counts approximately 241 million Americans on its platform as of this year.

Despite these many issues, there are still silver linings. AI programs continue to improve their efficacy, and given its very nature, coded language is generally only used by people already “in the know,” and therefore isn’t necessarily pivotal for recruitment efforts or spreading propaganda. It may be small consolation, but people like Harvath are wary of the alternatives, urging for more digital literacy programs as opposed to such tactics as outright prohibiting emojis.

“You could go wholesale on banning that stuff altogether, but then they would just go [back] to coded words,” says Harvath. “You’re pretty much getting to the point of, like, ‘Just shut the internet down.'”

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This article was originally featured on KHN.

Watch enough TikTok videos and you’re sure to see one extolling a special kind of do-it-yourself dentistry. Not about brushing and flossing, except maybe flossing with strands of your hair. These are videos on drilling into your teeth and cementing gems to them or filing your teeth to reshape them.

People have been styling their teeth for centuries across the globe throughout North and South America, Africa, and Asia. But social media — particularly TikTok, where everything old and new is nip/tucked into short videos with trendy sounds and served up fresh to young eyes — has breathed life into trends like tooth gems. Celebrities such as Drake, Rihanna, and Bella Hadid wore them years ago. Now, some TikTok influencers are selling DIY gem kits.

But it doesn’t stop there. There are DIY tooth replacement kits and bedazzled grills available online for under $25, and recipes for homemade toothpaste and whitening treatments. The TikTok hashtag #DIYdentist has 2.6 million views. It’s enough to make any licensed dentist or orthodontist cringe.

The professionals wholeheartedly agree that DIY dentistry is a very bad idea. Dental care can be expensive, and orthodontic treatment is usually considered cosmetic and not covered by dental insurance — which 65 million Americans don’t have. And, according to the 2020 “Annual Review of Public Health” report, people who are low-income, uninsured, members of racial minority groups, immigrants, or living in rural areas are more likely to have poor oral health.

So, is the high cost of dental treatment driving these viral trends among young people, or is it the lure of supposedly painless, instantly changed smiles?

Dr. Ruchi Sahota, a Fremont, California, dentist and spokesperson for the American Dental Association, said she can understand why patients want to try DIY dentistry at home. “I just don’t know how [they] could do it safely,” she said, especially altering the shape of their teeth. While filing teeth is something a dentist might do to smooth out imperfections or create space between teeth during treatment for braces, for instance, some people are doing it themselves to smooth away chips in teeth or create vampire-like fangs for aesthetic reasons. “When we practice dentistry, we do it with the background information of years of training, X-rays, and the experience that helps us decide when and how to do the treatment,” Sahota said.

Even tooth gems applied correctly with oral bonding materials are troublesome, she said, because they “are adding something to your teeth that will also attract bacteria. You’re increasing your risk of cavities, of gum infections. And you’re increasing your risk of chipped teeth, of inflammation inside your mouth.”

DIY prices are certainly part of the allure. On Amazon, a 25-piece tooth gem kit was selling for $12.99 from Tondiamo, a brand that also sells children’s earwax removal tools, waterproof adhesive bandages, and chainsaw chains. The kit comes with 10 rhinestones, a mini-LED keychain to cure the adhesive, four wooden sticks, five disposable applicator brushes, and five cotton rolls.

But no instructions.

Reviews on Amazon complained of the gems not sticking. Some suggested using nail glue — which is toxic and can damage tooth enamel. But among Amazon’s “frequently bought together” suggestions: a bottle of epoxy resin glue.

A gold-plated, single-tooth grill front for $7.98 from TCOTBE and a set of silver-plated, brass fronts for $10.99 from OOCC both advertised that “one size fits most,” but reviewers said otherwise. “Save your money and use foil (old school way) if you want a grill lol,” one buyer warned. Bleeding gums were a common complaint among the reviewers.

Perhaps the most bizarre DIY find was a temporary tooth repair kit for under $25 from CZsy. It came with plastic “veneers” in different shapes for missing teeth, and moldable plastic beads for repairs.

It also did not come with printed instructions, but these were buried in the product description on Amazon’s site:

1. Drop into hot water above 130 degrees for about two minutes.
2. Shape the size what you want.

No company information or websites could be found for some of these brands, but the products had one thing in common: a bar code sticker reading “Made in China.” Instead of responding to a request by KHN for an explanation of its policies, Amazon removed the listing for replacement teeth. The other items were still available to order at publication time.

It’s not just DIY dentistry giving licensed professionals a toothache. Vendors touting certificates to apply composite veneers and partials — dentures that replace missing teeth when someone still has multiple natural teeth in place — are sprouting up on social media. Vendors like Marie’s Beauty Bar in Philadelphia will apply composite veneers over less-than-perfect smiles — in this case, starting at $1,999 per hour with a $499 deposit — as a lower-cost alternative to porcelain veneers, which require shaving down the natural teeth. The merchant advertises veneer training for $5,999. Marie’s Beauty Bar did not respond to emails or voice messages seeking comment.

DIY dentistry isn’t just a phenomenon of young people on social media. “There are teens, adolescents, even adults that are trying these things,” said Dr. Amber Bonnaig, a dentist in Marietta, Georgia, and a state director for DentaQuest, a Boston company. “A major contributing factor is lack of access to dental care.”

DIY can appear a viable alternative, especially since a person with severely damaged teeth, in severe pain, or with mounting dental bills from repairing DIY damage rarely displays the disappointing results on TikTok. Social media users, for the most part, display carefully curated highlights, not adverse reactions.

“The ‘cool thing’ right now is all these hacks to make things supposedly easier or more accessible,” she said. Caveat emptor, or let the buyer beware, she cautioned. Reviews from influencers who often receive free services in exchange for promotional posts may be biased. Bonnaig warned that complications could occur many days, weeks, or months after treatment.

Even when people aren’t daring to drill their own teeth, they can do damage with other social trends like drinking “healthy Coke,” a concoction of balsamic vinegar — which has a higher acid content than the actual soft drink — and flavored carbonated water. It’s a recipe for severe erosion of tooth enamel.

Sahota has seen what these viral trends can do. “Patients have been drinking or swishing with lemon water, or maybe apple cider vinegar, and that has caused acid or erosions on their teeth,” she said. “The patients will say, ‘Oh, yeah, you know, I saw online that, you know, this will be better for my health. And so I’ve been doing it every night.’ That’s when I’ll bring a mirror and show them exactly what the effect of that trend has made on your teeth.”

Such low-cost hacks may end up costing patients far more in the long run. Sahota suggested that consumers looking for safe ways to enhance their smiles can scour the products on the Mouth Healthy site that sports the ADA seal of acceptance. Bonnaig and Sahota both implore patients to discuss their oral and cosmetic concerns with a dentist.

Every tooth and every mouth is unique, and there is no safe one-size-fits-all DIY hack. “You can have a beautiful smile,” Sahota said, “even if it’s not perfect.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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Parler has entered an “agreement in principle” to be purchased by Ye, the rapper, producer, and fashion designer formerly known as Kanye West. The announcement this morning comes via the conservative alternative social media platform’s parent company, Parlement Technologies, which notes that a definitive deal is expected to close by the end of the year. Founded in 2018 to supposedly foster a “truly non-cancelable environment” for users—a promise that routinely protects categorically inaccurate information and hate speech—Parler is part of a burgeoning alternative online ecosystem for reactionary media figures and politicians, as well as their followers.

“Ye has become the richest Black man in history through music and apparel and is taking a bold stance against his recent censorship from Big Tech,” Parler said in its statement. Ye is actually not the richest Black man in history, or even today—there are multiple other Black billionaires who outrank him including Oprah Winfrey and African cement magnate Aliko Dangote.

[Related: Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter again.]

Parler’s shakeup comes barely a week after both Twitter and Instagram temporarily suspended Ye for posting antisemitic remarks, including a promise to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE [sic].” Earlier this month, Vice leaked unaired footage from an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson that showed West espousing additional antisemitic tropes, alongside recounting his divinely-inspired plans for “kinetic energy” cities and his belief that his children have been replaced by “fake actors.” An episode of HBO’s unscripted series, The Shop: Uninterrupted, featuring Ye was also later pulled for similar content, and his existing business partnerships with Adidas and Gap are reportedly being reevaluated.

“This deal will change the world, and change the way the world thinks about free speech,” Parler CEO George Farmer added via an additional statement posted on the platform. “Ye is making a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space and will never have to fear being removed from social media again.” Farmer is currently married to vocal conservative media figure Candace Owens, who is reported to be currently working as an “adviser” for Ye.

[Related: All the recent Twitter news you may have missed.]

While far from the most widespread or even recognizable social media option, Parler was extremely popular with rightwing users leading up to the January 6 insurrection attempt. Perpetrators utilized the app to organize and coordinate their push to overturn the 2020 Presidential election’s verified, legal results as well as using the app inside the breached Capitol building. Apple and Google banned Parler from their respective app stores in the ensuing fallout, but was reinstated by the former in April 2021 and the latter just last month.

A study earlier this year published via Slate found that “Parler’s business model, platform design features, and content management system—which gave outsized influence to high-profile Republican politicians… combined to make the social media platform and its users especially vulnerable to high levels of manipulation and exposure to what Facebook and researchers refer to as coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

The business deal announcement echoes a similar, ongoing saga between Elon Musk and Twitter. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has waged an on again/off again courtship to purchase the social media platform over the past year, citing vows to retool it into another “free speech” haven.

As of writing, Ye’s Parler account—created earlier today—has only 1,700 followers and zero posts.

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Debates surrounding the creative integrity, originality, and even legality of AI-assisted artwork are by now as common as the images themselves, with many communities going so far as to outright ban their usage in effort to save everyone a lot of time and potential headaches. While some might find the latest group to take a stance on the burgeoning AI art industry might seem a bit odd, their history makes them a somewhat predictable addition to Team No Thanks.

As first spotted by Motherboard, the newest anti-AI art individuals are the moderators behind the biggest subreddit dedicated to all things Dune. First introduced by author Frank Herbert via the 1965 novel of the same name, the “Duneiverse” now encompasses dozens of books, board and video games, as well as multiple media adaptations including last year’s blockbuster film directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Timothée Chalamet, Oscar Isaac, and Zendaya. Earlier this week, r/Dune mods issued a proclamation earlier this week banning all AI artwork from their 234,000 member message board. “We acknowledge that many of these pieces are neat to look at, and the technology sure is fascinating, but it does technically qualify as low-effort content,” reads their post published on Wednesday. “[E]specially when compared to original, ‘human-made’ art, which we would like to prioritize going forward.”

[Related: Novel with AI-made art gets US copyright.]

Programs like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion employ advanced machine learning techniques to their generate artwork. After being given a human-entered text prompt, these AI systems build a “new” picture by synthesizing datapoints and common features between millions of archived image examples. While many outputs are less than ideal, they are generally pretty entertaining, and sometimes extremely impressive. Critics such as r/Dune’s moderators know that the backend of these systems are incredibly complex and illuminating, but a person’s usage of them are as simple as thinking up a creative phrase to illustrate.

Of course, banning troublesome AI is incredibly familiar territory for diehard Dune fans. A major event in the epic sci-fi space opera’s 30,000-plus year timeline, The Butlerian Jihad refers to a multigenerational, universe-spanning war once waged between humans and “thinking machines.” The struggle’s conclusion results in the destruction and future prohibition of all artificial intelligence and advanced computer systems—millions of lives are lost, a new interstellar feudal society is established, and psychedelic spacetime drugs are discovered, all of which eventually leads to Timothée Chalamet riding atop a giant sandworm.

[Related: Tips for using Dall-E mini, aka Craiyon.]

Alright, so we’re skipping a few steps there, but you get the idea. In any case, r/Dune will no longer allow your DALL-E “Pikachu using a Bene Gesserit pain box” pictures. That said, the moderators have set up an entirely new subreddit, r/DuneAI, expressly made for all your AI Duneiverse fan art.

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Elon Musk threatened to cut off Ukrainian armed forces’ funding for vital Starlink terminals on Friday morning, suggesting that he is “merely following [the] recommendation” of a Ukrainian diplomat’s recent Twitter reply. On October 3, the multibillionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX suggested the country cede the entirety of Crimea to Russia via multiple social media polls, prompting Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany to tell Musk to, in so many words, back off.

Musk’s hint comes shortly after CNN relayed news this week that his satellite internet company recently informed the Pentagon it could no longer afford to continue offering aid to the nation, whose citizens have pushed back against invading Russian forces since February. Ukrainian military officials have repeatedly voiced their troops’ reliance on the satellite internet access.

[Related: Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter (again).]

Unlike other forms of communication, Starlink’s satellite internet allows Ukrainian forces to coordinate and remain connected across the country even without standard cellular data and ground internet infrastructures. Using the company’s (pricey) terminals and antennae, users instead rely on a network of thousands of orbital satellites—far from Russian weaponry—to ensure they not only stay online, but are able to coordinate campaigns like drone and artillery strikes. Without them, Ukraine is “really operating in the blind in many cases,” explained one policy expert, per CNN’s report.

Despite Musk’s implication that the tipping point for Starlink cutting services to Ukraine could be due to Melnyk’s retort, the decision may be far more related to finances than word choice. “Though Musk has received widespread acclaim and thanks for responding to requests for Starlink service to Ukraine right as the war was starting, in reality, the vast majority of the 20,000 terminals have received full or partial funding from outside sources,” CNN exclusively reported in its summary of a recent letter delivered to the Pentagon from SpaceX. The US government, the UK, and Poland have already funded a combined 85-percent of all terminals made available to the Ukrainian military, per SpaceX’s own figures as seen by CNN.

[Related: The shuffling Optimus robot revealed at Tesla’s AI Day.]

SpaceX estimates that an entire year’s worth of Starlink terminals and support would run Ukraine and its allies $380 million. Musk is worth $212 billion, along with SpaceX which is valued at $127 billion—$2 billion of which was raised this past year. The day after Musk’s Twitter polls, he offered to buy the social media platform once again for $44 billion, after attempting to back out of the business acquisition earlier this year.

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On the internet, you can find just about anything—and quite a bit of it is misinformation. Online-derived falsities can range from silly to outright dangerous, and all of it can capture the minds of lots and lots of people if it catches wind on social media. 

While social media giants have taken different approaches, with varying success levels, one unique way that Twitter is using its own users to fish out less-than-true facts from their feeds is a program called Birdwatch. And as of this morning, the fact-checking notes that Birdwatch contributors place on questionable statements will now be visible to Twitter users across the entire country.

[Related: Whistleblower tells Congress that Twitter has a spy problem.]

The service, which expanded last month with hopes of bringing on 1,000 more contributors a month, is more or less a peer-to-peer fact checking service. It is kind of like sharing notes on a Google document with your classmates. You may have written something down incorrectly, but if you’re lucky, one of your peers may be able to add a suggested correction and context to a comment that isn’t quite accurate. 

But, with millions and millions of users, having just anybody throw their thoughts in the ring isn’t always the best way to go. Birdwatch contributors go through a vetting process that helps determine how helpful their comments are. A “rating impact” score supposedly makes sure that the fact checkers let into the fold continue to do a good job at the risk of having their Birdwatching abilities revoked.

This is a feature of the “bridging algorithm” Twitter integrated into the program that finds consensus among multiple groups for content that is highlighted, versus just running it like a popularity contest based on number of upvotes. “This is a novel approach. We’re not aware of other areas where this has been done before,” Twitter Product VP Keith Coleman tells TechCrunch. In testing, apparently people are 20-40 percent less likely to agree with a “misleading” post after viewing Birdwatch notes compared to those who just saw the tweet. 

[Related: Twitter’s fact-checking program might be headed to your feed.]

But, all of this does come with concerns—research from nonprofit media institute Poynter found that the most “prolific” Birdwatcher user’s notes are more likely to mark tweets critical of conservative politicians as “misleading” while marking similar tweets critical of left-wing politicians as “not misleading.” Additionally, less than half of Birdwatch comments include a source, according to the Poynter research. As recently as last month, the community allowed a QAnon account into the project.

This all follows news that buyer Elon Musk is back in his attempts to purchase Twitter. What that means for Birdwatch, and for Twitter in general, is for now, up in the air. 

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Facebook users reportedly can soon better hone their Feeds through the introduction of “show more” and “show less” toggle options within posts. The update comes from Meta’s Newsroom blog earlier today, which details how users can qualify certain content with these two relevancy ratings, as well as how it all works.

“Selecting Show more will temporarily increase the ranking score for that post and posts like it. If you select Show less, you’ll temporarily decrease its ranking score,” explains the post, while adding that it’s not an entirely altruistic decision. “By offering more ways to incorporate direct feedback into Feed ranking, we’re making our artificial intelligence systems smarter and more responsive.”

[Related: Facebook’s latest feed change, explained.]

For now, Facebook users will occasionally see the “show more” and “show less” options on certain posts, but can soon access the update by clicking every post’s three-dot menu in its upper right-hand corner. Meta also notes that the addition will soon be tested within Reels, as well. As The Verge notes, Facebook users can already hide posts, which in turn lets the platform know it needs to reduce the amount of related content it suggests. Users can also highlight “favorite” friends to follow, as well as muting individuals, pages, and groups.

The new announcement is the latest in a string of Meta platform updates purportedly meant to draw users back to its own algorithm-based feeds as it weathers the rapid rise of competitors like TikTok. Last month, Meta-owned Instagram also announced its testing of a new way for users to make make lists of keywords and emoji they aren’t interested in seeing. Earlier this summer, Facebook also bowed to consumer criticism and brought back a separate Newsfeed option dedicated solely to one’s family and friends, as opposed to a mix of suggested content.

[Related: How to improve your Facebook News Feed.]

But despite Meta touting its new customization preferences, similar features aren’t always as helpful as they first appear. As noted in a recent report from Mozilla, the designers of the privacy-focused Firefox internet browser, YouTube has long offered similar “Interested” and “Not Interested” toggles for its suggested videos, but further investigation indicates they are largely ineffective. In the study, nearly 23,000 participants collectively rated almost 568,000,000 recommended videos on the platform, only to find that their decisions did very little to sway algorithms’ future suggestion decisions.

“[R]esearch suggests that YouTube is not really that interested in hearing what its users really want, preferring to rely on opaque methods that drive engagement regardless of the best interests of its users,” the study’s authors wrote at the time. Of course, YouTube and Facebook are owned by two very different Big Tech giants, so the latter’s new recommendation features could still provide real improvements for users (unless Mozilla proves otherwise).

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According to Bloomberg, Washington Post, and NBC, Elon Musk has decided to reverse course, and is offering to move forward with his acquisition of Twitter at his original $44 billion offer of $54.20 per share. The move comes after months of backtracking attempts from Musk, during which time the CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX alleged the social media company misled him and investors regarding the platform’s total user count, as well as the supposed severity of its bot problem. Since then, Musk and Twitter have been involved in a legal scuffle regarding the deal, with the latter attempting to hold him to his initial price point.

[Related: All the recent Twitter news you may have missed.]

Accepting the original proposal would likely avoid a headline-dominating trial between the two sides in which both Musk and Twitter executives would be expected to testify—one that many legal experts suggest Musk would lose. Last week’s pretrial release revealed text conversations comprising of hundreds of messages held Musk and prominent Big Tech, political, and media personalities including venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, and podcast giant Joe Rogan regarding Twitter’s future.

“Are you going to liberate twitter [sic] from the censorship happy mob?” Rogan is shown to have texted Musk at one point, to which Musk replied, “I will provide advice, which they may or may not choose to follow.” Another redacted individual speaking with Musk urged him to reinstitute previously banned “right winger” accounts. Elon Musk has previously said he would allow Donald Trump back on the platform.

[Related: The shuffling Optimus robot revealed at Tesla’s AI Day.]

As The Wall Street Journal notes, Musk’s newest about-face doesn’t ensure a done deal:

There are no guarantees they will reach a deal—or that the unpredictable Mr. Musk will follow through with his proposal and close the transaction. The five-day trial, set to begin Oct. 17, could still go forward as planned. Mr. Musk was set to be deposed later this week as part of the preparations for the trial.

Both parties purportedly have until the end of the day to present a plan forward to their judge. Elon Musk has long described himself as a “free speech absolutist,” and voiced his intentions to make Twitter reflect this, were he in charge of the company. Yesterday, he floated his solution to Russian ongoing invasion of Ukraine which included ceding territory to Vladimir Putin.

Update 10/04/22: The SEC has published Elon Musk’s letter of intent to purchase Twitter “and adjourn the trial and all other proceedings related thereto pending such closing or further order of the Court.”

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The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced today it is charging Kim Kardashian with “unlawfully touting” a cryptocurrency to her 225 million Instagram followers last year. Kardashian was paid $250,000 for the social media shoutout. Despite Kardashian including “#AD” at the bottom of her post promoting an altcoin called EthereumMax on June 12, 2021, the SEC explained that investors were not made fully aware of the sponsored content’s origins. The celebrity, reportedly worth $1.4 billion, is being fined approximately $1.27 million in repayments and penalties.

[Related: Bitcoin will not be going green anytime soon.]

The SEC has pushed for closer federal regulation of crypto and other virtual assets for years, and Kardashian’s brief, murky partnership is just one of the cases they have shined a light on. “This case is a reminder that, when celebrities or influencers endorse investment opportunities, including crypto asset securities, it doesn’t mean that those investment products are right for all investors,” SEC Chair Gary Gensler said via an official press release. “We encourage investors to consider an investment’s potential risks and opportunities in light of their own financial goals.”

“ARE YOU INTO CRYPTO??? THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE BUT SHARING WHAT MY FRIENDS JUST TOLD ME ABOUT THE ETHEREUM MAX TOKEN,” Kardashian posted to Instagram last year, around the same time as other paid EthereumMax endorsers, including boxing champion Floyd Mayweather, Jr. and former NBA star Paul Pierce, posted similar messages on social media. Both Mayweather and Pierce are involved in similar legal issues stemming from the sponsorship deals.

[Related: The Ethereum ‘merge,’ explained.]

If you hadn’t heard of EthereumMax (EMAX), the altcoin pushed by Kardashian last year, until today—you aren’t alone. As recounted by the SEC, the owning company’s “numerous direct statements that the EMAX tokens would rise in value” via “touting future deals and relationships that would ‘drive value'” haven’t amounted to literally anything. At current rates, a single EMAX token is worth roughly $0.00000000467 at the time of reporting: a 7-percent bump over yesterday’s valuation thanks to the recent headlines.

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Update 10/19/22: Apple has restored VKontakte to its App Store after receiving proof that it is not currently “majority owned or controlled by a sanctioned entity.”

Tens of millions in Russia lost their ability to download one of the country’s most popular social networks earlier this week. Apple announced Tuesday that it removed VKontakte (VK) from its global App Stores. Apple explained via spokesperson to The Verge that the decision is meant to comply with the UK government’s most recent round of sanctions against Russian elites—some with ties to VK—following a series of “illegal sham [election] referendums in Ukraine.”

“These apps are being distributed by developers majority-owned or majority-controlled by one or more parties sanctioned by the UK government,” Apple spokesperson Adam Dema said in a statement to The Verge. “In order to comply with these sanctions, Apple terminated the developer accounts associated with these apps, and the apps cannot be downloaded from any App Store, regardless of location.”

[Related: Meta says it’s shut down a giant Russian misinformation network.]

However, users who have already downloaded the app may continue to use it on Apple devices. “In addition, you can use the mobile version of the site m.vk.com and desktop version with full functionality,” VKontakte wrote in an official press release translated from Russian and published Tuesday, adding that the company “will continue to develop and maintain iOS applications. Our experts are doing everything to maintain and continue to improve user comfort.”

Apple’s drastic restrictions are only the latest in a long line of Western divestments from Russia in the wake of its ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Earlier this year, the company announced that it would cease selling physical products in the country. Additional businesses including Netflix, Microsoft, TikTok, and Roku have all introduced their own restrictions in service, access, and product availability.

[Related: 7 tips and tricks to become a Telegram power user.]

Founded in 2006 by Pavel Durov, VK is now Russia’s second-largest internet company. It is ostensibly the country’s equivalent to Facebook, and offers a suite of services including email, messaging, and marketplace apps. Durov was pushed out in 2014 for “refus[ing] to cooperate with the authorities,” and now oversees the privacy-focused communications app, Telegram. As of writing, VKontakte is still available on the Google Play Store.

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When you download an app, you generally expect the that it is the same version that everyone else is already using. That may be the case within individual countries, but a new study from a group of researchers at the University of Michigan surveying the global app availability landscape not only determined a wide array of discrepancies in both availability and features, but also identified how users’ privacy and security varies even when using the same app in various countries.

“While our study corroborates reports of takedowns due to government requests, we also found many differences introduced by app developers,” notes co-author Renuka Kumar in a summary for The Conversation. “We found instances of apps with settings and disclosures that expose users to higher or lower security and privacy risks depending on the country in which they’re downloaded.”

[Related: A ‘Data safety section’ is coming to Google Play Store.]

Kumar and colleagues poured over data from globally popular apps across the top 22 app categories in the Google Play Store, and found a staggering amount of geoblocking—aka online restrictions based on geographic location. Of the 5,684 apps surveyed, 3,672 were found to be unavailable in at least one of the 26 countries included in the study. While some of these instances likely boiled down to copyright issues, many more were due to nations’ own laws regarding issues like online gambling and political leanings. “While the Indian government’s takedown of Chinese apps happened with full public disclosure, surprisingly most of the takedowns we observed occurred without much public awareness or debate,” wrote Kumar.

Apart from simple availability, the team found a wide spectrum of differences within the apps’ security and data privacy regulations. 127 apps varied depending on location in what they were allowed to access on users’ phones , “49 of which had additional permissions deemed ‘dangerous’ by Google.” Canada is listed as one of the countries requesting the most additional permissions, alongside Bahrain and Tunisia.

[Related: App usage stands at 4-5 hours a day.]

Over 100 of the studied apps featured differing privacy policies based on country, and particularly posed a problem to consumers living under California’s Consumer Privacy Act and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. To top it off, almost 30 apps using dangerous permissions “make no mention [on this usage], despite Google’s policy requiring them to do so.”

Researchers offered a number of recommendations to begin addressing these issues, including urging app makers to better moderate countries’ targeting features, provide more detailed app takedown transparency reports, increase app vetting, and push for better developer clarity regarding their decisions to change app policies. The team also suggested to “host app privacy policies themselves to ensure their availability when the policies are blocked in certain countries.”

While unsurprising, the report is a sobering reminder a major goal for many apps is to reach as many people (and their data) as possible. Hardly anyone reads all those Terms & Conditions litanies, but studies like this one might you pause before pressing download.

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Meta announced today that it has successfully dismantled what David Agranovich, the company’s director of threat disruption, called “probably the largest and most complex” Russian misinformation and propaganda social media campaign since the beginning of its invasion of Ukraine earlier this year.

As first reported by the Associated Press this morning, accounts on Facebook and Instagram, as well as non-Meta owned platforms like Telegram and Twitter, had been linking to websites that mimicked reputable European news sources such as The Guardian and Der Spiegel. Those sites, in turn, included fake stories with headlines like “Video: False Staging in Bucha Revealed,” referring to the confirmed Russian massacre of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians in April.

[Related: Russian gas and Europe’s energy crisis affects CERN.]

Meta explained that over 1,600 fake accounts were used throughout the summer to spread misinformation within countries including the U.K., Germany, Italy, France, and Ukraine. In at least a handful of occurrences, official Facebook accounts of Russian embassies in Europe and Asia amplified these stories. Still, Meta alleges its security experts were able to identify and cut off the campaign before it “gained a large audience,” according to the AP. Although the tactics have not yet been explicitly linked to the Russian government, the amplification by actual country diplomats, as well as the level of sophistication regarding timing and multi-language translation, points towards a highly organized and well-funded effort, says AP.

[Related: It’s possible to inoculate yourself against misinformation.]

Social media propaganda techniques are nothing new within the online ecosystem and continually present challenges to tech companies as bad actors evolve and shift tactics to evade detection. Critics often point to evidence that entities like Meta and Twitter aren’t doing enough to combat the dire situation, so this move to uncover the expansive operation and subsequently address it is crucial. Unfortunately, pro-Russian online actors are likely already hard at work on their next methods of misinformation.

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LinkedIn may have a reputation as a relatively boring social network—a virtual version of a networking happy hour filled with people wearing lanyards—but it’s in the news thanks to some recent research it undertook and the interesting findings it led to. 

A group of researchers from Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and LinkedIn recently published the results of a five-year-long study on social connections and job mobility in the journal Science. 

From 2015 to 2019, LinkedIn played with its underlying algorithm that powered its “People You May Know” feature by randomly varying the amount of weak and strong contacts suggested as new connections to 20 million of its users. LinkedIn measured mutual connections and interactions between users in order to correlate “strong ties” to close friends, and “weak ties” to more occasional acquaintances. 

In a series of micro-experiments that it later analyzed with other experts, it found that people were more likely to get jobs through “weak ties,” especially in more digital industries. This finding is in line with an influential sociological theory proposed in 1973 that said that casual contacts tend to be more important sources of new information and opportunities than close friends.

LinkedIn, a platform owned by Microsoft, had intended to use these insights to make a better algorithm for all of its users. And in its privacy policy, the company does note that users’ personal data could be used for research purposes. But experts recently voiced their concerns to The New York Times that these behind-the-scenes tweaks could have long-term negative consequences for users.

“The findings suggest that some users had better access to job opportunities or a meaningful difference in access to job opportunities,” Michael Zimmer, an associate professor of computer science and the director of the Center for Data, Ethics and Society at Marquette University told NYT. “These are the kind of long-term consequences that need to be contemplated when we think of the ethics of engaging in this kind of big data research.”

[Related: The fascinating and fraught ways researchers are studying modern friendships]

Transparency is not the only issue that these companies are grappling with. LinkedIn has also been dealing with emerging incidents of connection fraud, as a recent investigation by MIT Tech Review showed that scammers with false identities took advantage of mutual connections to gain their victims’ trust.

It’s not unusual for tech companies to pilot test various features on small groups of users. However, large-scale, undisclosed social experiments by big tech companies have historically been met with mixed receptions. A 2014 Facebook study analyzing how user moods could be influenced by manipulating News Feed content, for example, was met with backlash. OKCupid, that same year, also fessed up to fudging with compatibility scores in order to see its effects on user behavior on the site. 

On the other hand, Spotify is conducting more passive, observational studies, and YouTube and Twitter have both been actively testing out features like misinformation-identification education and crowd-sourced content labeling in an attempt to help users have better experiences on the platform. 

Modern psychologists and sociologists, too, are looking to use the internet and its various applications as a way to study friendships, social networks, online culture and its impact on behaviors. But psychology, as a field, has long contended with issues surrounding ethics in experiments and the concept of deceiving its participants. Many of the classical studies from the 1900s would, thankfully, not be possible to conduct today (just think of the twin experiments and the Stanford prison experiment). Understanding where the boundaries lie between researchers, tech platforms, and unwitting users is in some ways, simply a 21st century iteration of this ongoing challenge. 

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In one of their few areas of political overlap, both the former Trump and current Biden administrations have been concerned about how much access TikTok has to American consumers’ data and information. Unlike domestically based apps such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, both federal regulators and online watchdog groups repeatedly cite the numerous additional concerns stemming from the fact that one of the country’s most popular social media platforms is own by ByteDance, which is based in China.

After months of negotiations, however, The New York Times reported Monday morning that the Biden administration is closer than it’s ever been to reaching a tentative security agreement regarding future TikTok operations in the US, one that unlike Trump’s past demands, wouldn’t require TikTok’s Chinese tech giant owner, ByteDance, to sell it to a third-party. However, both the Justice and Treasury Departments remain skeptical of the initial deal’s efficacy and security.

[Related: What TikTok’s deal with Oracle could mean for user security]

As it stands, there are three major proposals on the table within the potential agreement. First, TikTok would agree to store American data solely on US-based servers, most likely from Oracle, who has had its own vested interest in the social media app for some time now. Secondly, Oracle would be tasked with monitoring TikTok’s content recommendation algorithms to ensure the Chinese government doesn’t surreptitiously attempt to influence American public sentiment via quirky choreographed dances and pet videos. Finally, the agreement requires the creation of a security expert board reporting directly to the US government in regards to domestic operations.

Both the Justice and Treasury Departments reportedly remain skeptical of the initial deal’s efficacy and security, however, and some lawmakers have already gone on record as stating the potential deal isn’t stringent enough. “Anything short of a complete separation” of TikTok from ByteDance “will likely leave significant national security issues regarding operations, data and algorithms unresolved,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the Intelligence Committee’s top Republican, said in a statement provided to The New York Times.

Regardless of possible revisions and capitulations, don’t expect a final deal to be reached between the US and China for at least a few months, if at all. The agreement is still far from certain, but the entire saga seems closer than it’s ever been to reaching a conclusion that could satisfy both sides of the situation.

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Iran has cut off most of its citizens’ social media access, according to reports from news organizations and watchdog groups. This comes following nationwide protests surrounding the suspicious death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman arrested last week for “unsuitable attire” the country’s morality police. Reuters reports that both WhatsApp and Instagram are now largely unavailable to Iranians as demonstrations escalate across the country—the largest protests since 2019’s unrest as a result of rising gas prices. While there are conflicting tallies, it is clear the latest wave of demonstrations has already turned fatal.

According to Netblocks, an organization tracking global digital rights, Instagram’s blacklisting marks a stark escalation in online censorship, since the Meta-owned social media platform is one of the only allowed in Iran, and as such is utilized by millions of its citizens. Reuters notes locals have also cited that entire mobile phone networks were offline. Iranian WhatsApp users reported only being able to send text messages, as both photo and video sharing options suddenly became unavailable. Both Twitter and Facebook have been banned in Iran for years.

[Related: How Instagram’s suggested posts algorithm works.]

“Observable connectivity was restored some 3.5 hours after the disruption came into place in Iran’s Kurdistan region, amid reports of at least four protesters killed by authorities,” NetBlocks explained in a blog post earlier this week. “Users have also reported the disconnection or severe slowing of internet service in multiple cities since the first disruption was registered on Friday 16 September 2022. The network disruptions are likely to severely limit the public’s ability to express political discontent and communicate freely.”

[Related: Best VPNs of 2022.]

Internet restriction is a common tactic for authoritarian regimes looking to stifle civil unrest, as it makes organizing much more difficult for protestors and dissident groups. During Iran’s 2019 demonstrations which eventually claimed over 1,500 lives, authorities shut down the nation’s internet for around a week.

While governments can make it increasingly difficult to access internet sources, people often find ways to circumvent the censorship, usually via the use of virtual private networks (VPNs), which essentially establishes a buffer between you and public networks in order to bypass restrictions and keep data secure from prying eyes.

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A new report from Mozilla, the makers of the privacy-focused Firefox browser, suggests that YouTube’s user controls are ineffective at controlling what people see on the platform—despite what Google claims. Using data from almost 23,000 volunteers, Mozilla was able to show that YouTube kept recommending similar videos even when people used the various different options to indicate that they didn’t want to see that kind of content. 

YouTube is the second-most popular website in the world (the first is Google) and according to Mozilla, an estimated 70 percent of the 1 billion hours viewed daily on the platform are as a result of algorithmic recommendations. Various reports have shown how the algorithm can polarize people and recommend misinformation and harmful content—something that Google claims it has worked hard to fix. In this study, Mozilla set out to test the effectiveness of the controls YouTube offers to users to manage the recommended videos they see. 

In a previous report released in July last year, Mozilla found that people were routinely recommended videos they didn’t want to see and felt that the controls available to them were ineffective. This new study used a browser plug-in Mozilla developed called RegretsReport to see if this was true. 

Mozilla looked at four different Google-suggested controls: Clicking that thumbs-down “Dislike” button, “Not interested,” “Don’t recommend channel,” and “Remove from watch history.” Meanwhile, users of the RegretsReport plug-in see a “Stop Recommending” button on YouTube videos. When they clicked it, the control-option (such as for the Dislike button) corresponding to their test group was sent to YouTube, while data about future recommended videos were sent to Mozilla. (There was also a control group where clicking the button did nothing.)

[Related: Why YouTube is hiding dislikes on videos]

Over the course of the study, 22,722 participants used the RegretsReporter, allowing Mozilla to analyze 567,880,195 recommended videos. To assess this huge amount of data, the researchers reviewed 40,000 pairs of recommended videos and rated their similarity. This allowed the team to quantitatively study whether the videos participants were being recommended were similar to videos that they had previously rejected. In other words, to look at whether YouTube’s tools effectively reduced the number of bad recommendations. 

For example, if someone saw an anti-vax video recommended to them, and clicked “Not interested,” and then got recommended a cat video, that would be a good recommendation. On the other hand, if they kept getting suggested anti-vax videos after indicating that they weren’t interested in them, those would be bad recommendations. Page 22 of the report [PDF] has some good visual examples.

Mozilla’s report found that no user control was especially effective at preventing unwanted recommendations. The “Don’t recommend channel” option had the biggest impact, preventing 43 percent of bad recommendations, with “Remove from watch history” preventing 29 percent, and “Dislike” and “Not interested” preventing 12 percent and 11 percent, respectively. Mozilla argues that its “research suggests that YouTube is not really that interested in hearing what its users really want, preferring to rely on opaque methods that drive engagement regardless of the best interests of its users.”

As a result of its findings, Mozilla is calling on people to sign a petition asking YouTube to fix its feedback tools and give users actual control over the videos they get recommended. It also has four specific recommendations for YouTube and policy makers based on its study. 

Mozilla suggests that YouTube’s user controls should be easy to use and understand, and be designed to put “people in the driver’s seat.” It also wants YouTube to grant researchers better access to data (so they don’t have to use browser extensions to study these kinds of things). Finally, it calls on policy makers to pass laws providing legal protections for those engaged in public interest.

Whether this report is enough to get Google to add some real user controls to YouTube remains to be seen. For now, it’s a fairly damning indictment of the ineffective controls that are currently in place. 

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Some Spotify users recently found a resourceful workaround to forgo paying for movies. As Fast Company first reported earlier today, the company’s “video podcast” ability is being exploited to illegally stream films like Minions: The Rise of Gru, Mean Girls, and Pinocchio—and Spotify, for one, is not entertained.

The loophole was apparently first noticed by TikTok users over the last week, who quickly brought the hack to viewers’ (and, naturally, Spotify’s) attention. The media streaming giant wasted no time in going after the offenders, and have since reportedly shut down at least the first round of pirated films available via the video podcast tool. “IP infringement is an industry-wide issue that we take very seriously. Any content that is provided to Spotify that infringes on third-party rights will be removed,” a spokesperson said in a statement provided to Fast Company, adding that the company “invests heavily in processes to detect and remove such content.”

[Related: Where to find new Spotify playlists when you don’t want to make your own.]

Online piracy is an eternal wild goose chase. Illegal streamers quickly adapted to hiding links to films in actual podcast descriptions. Those first round of links have since disappeared, but rest assured, where there is a will to pirate, there is a way. Digital piracy remains a major thorn in the side for both businesses and governmental regulators—a 2019 report from the Chamber of Commerce estimates the US loses approximately $29.2 billion in revenue annually to illegal distribution methods.

Spotify first announced its initial foray into podcasts back in 2015 as a means to keep up with competitors like Apple Music, Tidal, and YouTube. The company introduced video podcasts five years later in its bid to move past audio-only content, but stopped short of licensing shows and movies, à la Disney+ or Netflix. Earlier today, Spotify also announced the introduction of over 300,000 audiobooks to its media library—albeit titles users will have to purchase those individually, regardless of their current subscription tier.

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At a US Senate hearing yesterday on the impact of social media on homeland security, TikTok Chief Operating Officer Vanessa Pappas bore the brunt of the questioning (watch the hearing here, and read Pappas’ written testimony here). Lawmakers repeatedly asked her if American users’ data could be accessed by the government of the People’s Republic of China. This line of questioning stems from a small change to TikTok’s privacy policy last year that gave it permission to collect biometric data including “faceprints and voiceprints,” as well as a report from BuzzFeed News earlier this year on how US data could be accessed in China. 

TikTok’s relationship with ByteDance, its Chinese parent company, has long been an issue for the US government. Former President Donald Trump attempted to force ByteDance to sell the popular social media app to an American company in 2020, though it never happened. According to The New York Times, President Biden has been negotiating with TikTok in private over “steps that could mitigate the government’s concerns.” Apparently though, his efforts aren’t sufficient for TikTok skeptics.

In an effort to allay concerns over how it handled data, in June this year, TikTok announced that all US traffic was now being routed through American computer company Oracle’s cloud infrastructure. Some user data is still backed up to TikTok-owned servers in Singapore and Virginia for now, but the company says that it plans to delete them in the future. 

That same day, however, BuzzFeed News released a report detailing how “engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022, at the very least.” In one recording seen by BuzzFeed News, a director called one Beijing-based engineer a “Master Admin” with “access to everything.” Whether traffic was being routed through the US or not, ByteDance employees in the PRC seemingly had access to it, at least for a time.

With TikTok’s overall data handling processes under scrutiny, its decision to collect biometric data from US users is understandably drawing ire from lawmakers. In June last year, it updated its privacy policy to include a new section called “Image and Audio Information” as part of “information we collect automatically.” It stated that TikTok may “collect information about the images and audio that are part of your User Content,” listing examples like identifying objects seen or the words spoken in a post. Crucially, it also stated that TikTok “may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information as defined under US laws, such as faceprints and voiceprints, from your User Content.”

[Related: A look inside TikTok’s seemingly all-knowing algorithm]

Other than that, the privacy policy is incredibly vague on what the biometric data is being collected for and how it could be used. (It’s worth noting that this section is absent from the privacy policy for EU users where data protection laws are much stronger.)

According to TechCrunch, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona asked Pappas, TikTok’s COO, if biometric data from US users had “ever been accessed by or provided to any person located in China,” and if doing so was possible. Pappas avoided giving a direct answer, instead, according to TechCrunch, she explained that Tiktok didn’t use “any sort of facial, voice or audio, or body recognition that would identify an individual.” 

Pappas apparently elaborated, explaining that what TikTok called “biometric” data was only used to apply filters—like the ones that add sunglasses or dog ears to your videos—and was deleted from the user’s device immediately afterwards. 

This would seem to suggest that engineers in China would be unable to access the data as it doesn’t exist, however Pappas did not state that directly. 

As well as facing questions about biometric data handling, Pappas was also asked about reports that TikTok’s in-app browser could log keystrokes. She responded by saying that TikTok had not collected the contents of what was typed, and that it had been used as “an anti-spam measure.”

Whether Pappas’ responses at yesterday’s hearing are enough to satisfy US lawmakers remains to be seen. The company, meanwhile, appears to be carrying on business as usual. Today, TikTok announced a new feature that it’s rolling out to users called “Now,” which allows them to capture moments with both the front and back camera (a hallmark of the up and coming app, BeReal).

According to Bloomberg, the national security review of TikTok is still ongoing, and despite the fact that it paints itself as a global company, it is still very much owned by ByteDance.

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In 2019, Meta (neé Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the creation of a standalone content oversight board. This board of 23 experts and civic leaders was tasked with reviewing controversial moderation decisions following pressure from critics and users concerning the company’s complex and seemingly uneven policies. According to Zuckerberg at the time, the decisions from his self-dubbed social media Supreme Court “will be binding, even if I or anyone at Facebook disagrees with it.” Since then, the board has issued a number of rulings on issues—including hate speech, misinformation, and nudity. But the group’s latest decision is perhaps its most damning yet of Meta’s internal company strategy and ability to tackle the ongoing moderation problem.

Earlier today, the Oversight Board announced its findings from an appeals process regarding the previous removal of a Columbian political cartoon depicting police brutality. In a statement published online this morning, the board explained why Facebook should remove the artwork from Facebook’s AI-assisted Media Matching Service banks, a system that uses AI-scanning to identify and remove flagged images that violate the website’s content policies. They also argued why the entire current system is massively flawed.

[Related: Meta could protect abortion-related DMs, advocates say.]

“Meta was wrong to add this cartoon to its Media Matching Service bank, which led to a mass and disproportionate removal of the image from the platform, including the content posted by the user in this case,” writes the Oversight Board, before cautioning that “Despite 215 users appealing these removals, and 98 percent of those appeals being successful, Meta still did not remove the cartoon from this bank until the case reached the Board.”

The Oversight Board goes on to explain that Facebook’s existing automated content removal systems can—and have already—amplified incorrect decisions made by human employees. This is especially problematic given the ripple effects of such choices. “The stakes of mistaken additions to such banks are especially high when, as in this case, the content consists of political speech criticizing state actors,” it warns. In its recommendations, the board asked that Facebook make Media Matching Service banks’ error rates public and broken down by content policy for better transparency and accountability.

[Related: Meta’s chatbot is repeating users’ prejudice and misinfo.]

Unfortunately, here is where the social media’s “Supreme Court” differs from the one in Washington, DC—despite being an independent committee, Facebook isn’t under any legal obligation to adhere to these suggestions. Still, in making the Oversight Committee’s opinions known to the public, Zuckerberg and Meta execs may at least face additional pressure to continue reforming its moderation strategies.

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A respected longtime figure within the hacking and infosec communities testified in front of Congress yesterday on a number of grave whistleblower complaints filed against his former employer, Twitter. Among other damning issues, Peiter Zatko (known as “Mudge” in the cybersecurity world), who was Twitter’s security lead from July 2020 to January 2022 , claimed that the FBI once warned the major social media platform it had unwittingly hired a Chinese spy as an employee, alongside similar incidents with both Indian and Saudi Arabian agents. Zatko also alleged that the accounts of every member of Congress—and the wider public, for that matter—were highly susceptible to cyberattacks at any moment given major lapses in Twitter’s security protocols.

“It doesn’t matter who has keys if you don’t have any locks on the doors. It’s not far-fetched to say an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all the senators in this room,” Zatko said during at one point during his nearly two-and-a-half hour testimony. During his interview, he also explained that Twitter’s estimated 4,000 engineers have consistent access to private user data such as phone numbers and IP addresses. As such, they are in prime positions for infiltration from bad actors and hostile foreign governments

[Related: Whistleblower comes forward with Twitter security claims.]

Zatko, a former Department of Defense employee, also alleges that Twitter’s top executives are well aware of these numerous security issues, but are slow to deal with any of them. Instead, he claims that they purportedly mislead the public, Congress, federal regulators, and even members of its board of directors. “They don’t know what data they have, where it lives, and where it came from, and so, unsurprisingly, they can’t protect it,” said Zatko.

Zatko argues that Twitter’s issues largely stem from being so far behind in cybersecurity, and a failure to properly update and maintain the systems required to protect its own data. “This fundamental lack of logging inside Twitter is a remnant of being so far behind on their infrastructure, the engineering, and the engineers not being given the ability to put things in place to modernize,” he explained.

[Related: Unpacking the bot issue behind the Twitter-Musk drama]

The latest whistleblower complaints come as Twitter faces increasing pressure from lawmakers and regulators over numerous issues ranging from security, to curbing misinformation, to even how it keeps track of the countless bots plaguing the platform. Elon Musk made headlines earlier this year after announcing his intentions to buy the company outright, but quickly reneged citing those aforementioned bot issues. Although critics argue his reasoning for dropping the deal doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny, these and other ensuing battles all but ensures Twitter has a long legal road ahead of it.

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Despite a company rebrand and continued assurances that the metaverse is on its way, Facebook has continued its steady decline in influence and reputation after years of data scandals and whistleblower privacy concerns. If that weren’t enough, the generational shift towards social media competitors like TikTok have only ensured the once ubiquitous platform’s further decline. Now, we’re beginning to see the ripple effects across the rest of the internet, as well.

As NBC News reported yesterday, a host of websites that once offered consumers the option to tie their logins to their Facebook account have quietly distanced themselves from the site. “We really just looked at how many people were choosing to use their social media identity to sign in, and that just has shifted over time,” Jan Felch, Dell’s chief digital and chief information officer, told reporters. “One thing that we see across the industry is more and more security risks or account takeovers, whether that’s Instagram or Facebook or whatever it might be, and I just think we’re observing people making a decision to isolate that social media account versus having other connections to it.”

[Related: How to delete Facebook without losing anything.]

The social media account pairing felt almost universal just a few years ago, when consumers, retailers, and companies like Facebook all found its simplicity and horizontal integration to be incredible useful for managing multiple sites’ profiles and purchases. Now, however, increased concerns surrounding privacy and data hacks alongside a more generalized distrust of Meta’s policies have reportedly resulted in a decreased reliance on Facebook accounts to serve as de facto credentials across other websites. NBC News notes that additional companies including Ford, Nike, Patagonia, and Twitch have all removed the Facebook login button option, as well.

This isn’t to say that cross-platform login woes are necessarily effecting other Big Tech corporations, however. Google logins, for example, remains incredibly popular for both consumers and businesses, with nearly 39-percent of users surveyed by LoginRadius earlier this year saying they prefer Gmail to other options.

For those of you looking to further divest yourself from Facebook’s clutches, it’s really not too difficult to make the leap and delete your account without sacrificing your archived data. Don’t worry, though—if you wish to rid yourselves of cringey high school memories, you can still do that, too.

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Signal announced earlier today that it has hired board member, Meredith Whittaker, to serve as the company’s first president, a move that indicates the popular encrypted messaging platform’s expanding plans to compete against bigger rival apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. Whittaker, a former Google manager for 13 years and founder of the company’s Open Research Group, left in July 2019 after speaking out and organizing employee protests against the company’s military contracts, consumer data collection practices, as well as its handling of issues like workplace sexual harassment and racism. Since then, she co-founded the AI Now Institute, a research organization focused on ethics within artificial intelligence industry.

“Throughout my career I’ve been guided by a commitment to alternative futures – how do we do otherwise, and what are the barriers and opportunities that efforts working to counter the surveillance business model face?” Whittaker wrote in a company blog post, adding that her encryption and private communications advocacy work “has been consistent and unwavering.”

[Related: Why you should switch to an encrypted messaging app like Signal.]

While both Telegram and WhatsApp each have considerably larger user bases, many experts consider Signal to be the most privacy-oriented of the three. It is currently the only one to offer end-to-end message encryption as a default setting, and unlike Telegram, doesn’t rely on cloud data backups. Meanwhile, critics have repeatedly raised issues with WhatsApp over sharing user data with its parent company, Meta, as well as its history of storing information like address book and profile photos which can be given to law enforcement via subpoena.

One of Whittaker’s first goals, according to today’s write-up in The Washington Post, is to help raise awareness and transparency of company costs in an order to generate a more community-focused revenue stream. Unlike its competitors, Signal is run by a nonprofit, and currently includes options for either a one-time donation upon signing up, as well as $5, $10, and $20 per month options.

[Related: Anyone can now sign up for DuckDuckGo’s private email service.]

“Signal is not made for pristine academic speculation, it is made to be used by real people, all over the world,” Whittaker said in her announcement. “And many millions do use it, turning to Signal for a safe and pleasant space where intimate, experimental, and private communication can happen outside of the surveillant gaze of dominant tech companies and states who can and do subpoena their data.”

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The Twitter discourse surrounding the potential addition of an “Edit Tweet” feature has existed pretty much as long as the social media platform itself, but the longest time it’s felt like more of a pipe dream than anything else. Twitter co-founder and former CEO, Jack Dorsey, even went so far as to surmise that it would “never happen” back in 2020. Today, however, it looks like the company is actually considering making the ability to fix those annoying typos and regretful hot takes a reality… but it’s going to (at least initially) cost you.

“The screenshot below may look a lot like an edited Tweet. That’s because it is, and you could be seeing more of them soon,” reads the opening of Twitter’s official Thursday morning announcement. Beginning today, the platform is internally testing an edit ability, and plans to extend the feature to a single country’s premium-paying Twitter Blue users later this month. “We’re hoping that, with the availability of Edit Tweet, Tweeting will feel more approachable and less stressful,” the blog post continues. “You should be able to participate in the conversation in a way that makes sense to you, and we’ll keep working on ways that make it feel effortless to do just that.”

[Related: These are the pros and cons of a Twitter edit feature.]

Twitter Blue currently runs you $4.99 per month—which just so happened to increase from $2.99/mo. earlier this summer. The subscription currently includes features like a customizable navigation bar, “Undo Tweet” option, and NFT profile pictures. If you’re suddenly considering signing up, you’re probably gonna have to wait a minute: Twitter Blue’s homepage is currently down at the time of writing.

As desirable an edit button is for many Twitter users, many critics are wary of the socio-political and ethical implications of a poorly executed update. “These platforms are big enough that no change you could make would be an unmitigated good for every single user,” Gennie Gebhart, activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told PopSci earlier this year. “With an edit button, you have to think what are the possibilities for harassment, for gaslighting, or for deception?”

[Related: Twitter announces new podcast integration.]

According to Twitter, however, current plans include the inclusion of a complete edit history for tweets, along with the ability to still see past iterations of a tweet. As it stands, the ability to edit one’s tweet will also only be available for the 30 minutes following initial publication, which may handle some of the worries surrounding the feature.

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Twitter has pushed its Spaces feature for a couple years now. Billed as an audio-focused group chat feature, Spaces basically amounts to a Clubhouse clone similar to other platform offerings like Facebook Messenger Rooms. The company hasn’t given up yet, however, as evidenced yesterday by an announcement that it will soon integrate podcasts as part of a complete Spaces redesign.

[Related: You may actually qualify to use Twitter’s Clubhouse competitor now.]

“Integrating podcasts into Spaces, where audio conversations happen on Twitter, is another way we’re continuing to invest in audio creators,” Twitter explained in the statement released on Thursday. The new format will also introduce personalized hubs that group content by thematic categories—News, Sports, Music, etc.—and include suggested shows based on users’ Twitter preferences, follows, and interactions. “Our internal research indicates that 45 percent of people who use Twitter in the US also listen to podcasts monthly, so we’ll automatically suggest compelling podcasts to help people easily find and listen to the topics they want to hear more about,” the announcement continued.

The podcast industry annually generates millions of dollars, and many companies are increasingly turning to the format. Both Spotify and Facebook both offer ways for their user base to tune into podcasts, so to see Twitter join in isn’t wholly surprising. Still, Twitter primarily remains a text-based platform, so it might be hard to convince consumers to start listening podcasts there rather than their current preferred mediums—especially after recent whistleblower allegations revealing just how insecure Twitter might actually be.

[Related: Whistleblower comes forward with Twitter security claims.]

For right now, Twitter’s redesigned Spaces tab incorporating podcasts is only available for a select “a group of global English-speaking audience on iOS and Android,” although Twitter indicates that it’s really only a matter of time before the update rolls out to more users.

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One of the world’s most popular social media apps is testing out new features to provide users with much more localized posts and recommendations. First reported by social media consultant and industry analyst, Matt Navarra, TikTok is tinkering with a “Nearby” feed within a handful of accounts in Southeast Asia that provides content creators the ability to add location tags to their video. It’s currently unclear if the vertical will only display videos that have been geotagged. A screenshot of the beta “Nearby” tab seen alongside the “Following” and “For You” feeds on the app homepage was subsequently provided earlier this morning by influencer marketing strategist, Brendan Gahan.

[Related: 7 tricks to make the most of TikTok.]

When using the “Nearby” feed, users could hypothetically browse for local businesses and restaurants based on their interests, as well as find new and more relevant accounts to follow. Reports of the newest potential feature come on the heels of TikTok also testing out a separate “Shop” feed earlier this summer that could consolidate consumers’ purchasing and product browsing within TikTok Shop.

[Related: Why TikTok’s algorithm is so addictive.]

Both additions signal potentially major new ways to utilize the app and further solidify TikTok’s standing within the social media ecosystem. Likewise, As TechCrunch also notes, the updated feeds would allow TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to play catchup with competitors already offering similar features such as Snapchat’s Snap Map and Instagram’s searchable map. Google has already admitted that the app is dramatically undercutting its own core products, Search and Maps, as younger audiences increasingly rely on TikTok for discovery purposes.

Of course, both of these experiments could dramatically change by the time of a more widespread rollout, or never actually see the light of day for the vast majority of users. Companies like TikTok test out new features in smaller, targeted markets all the time without them ever being fully implemented. That said, it’s hard to see how localized feeds and geographically focused content doesn’t make its way onto the app in some form or fashion.

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Pieter “Mudge” Zatko—one of the most respected names within hacking circles and the cybersecurity industry—just made life much harder for Twitter. In detailed, damning whistleblower complaints first published by The Washington Post and CNN earlier today, the social media platform’s former security chief alleges that the company has hidden reckless and lax security policies from the public, failed to properly assess its longstanding bot problem, as well as broken promises made to federal regulators and its own board of directors over a decade ago regarding user privacy guarantees.

Describing the issues as “extreme, egregious deficiencies,” Zatko also claims current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal fired him earlier this year after Zatko’s repeated attempts to address the problems. Zatko was hired by former company CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey in 2020 following the infamous hacking of multiple high-profile Twitter accounts including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Barack Obama.

[Related: Unpacking the bot issue behind the Twitter-Musk drama]

“This would never be my first step, but I believe I am still fulfilling my obligation to Jack and to users of the platform,” Zatko told The Washington Post, adding that he hoped “to finish the job Jack brought me in for, which is to improve the place.”

In the more than 200 pages of redacted documentation published between The Washington Post and CNN, Zatko provides federal regulators with numerous allegations of malfeasance and misdirection in pursuit of profit. Of the roughly 7,000 people employed by Twitter, around half of them allegedly have access to both sensitive user data like phone numbers, as well as the company’s own internal software controlling how the platform actually functions. According to Zatko, none of this access is closely monitored, nor are the potential thousands of laptops containing copies of Twitter’s entire source code.

Despite heavy fines and a 2010 agreement with regulators to better protect users’ personal information, Twitter has been accused of consistently misleading its users and the Federal Trade Commission regarding any ensuing reforms. These security lapses allegedly even at one point included the hiring a government agent at the pressure of the Indian government who subsequently had “access to vast amounts of Twitter sensitive data.”

And then there are the bots. Spam accounts have long been an issue for Twitter, although the company has consistently maintained they comprise less than 5 percent of all users. Zatko contends the company’s calculations are willfully inaccurate, and that executives are actually given bonuses as large as $10 million to increase user totals.

It’s unclear how this could potentially influence Elon Musk’s ongoing legal battle with Twitter over imploding efforts to purchase the company earlier this year. Despite initially claiming he wanted to buy the social media platform in part to work on its bot issues, Musk soon attempted to backpedal, arguing the company was withholding accurate statistics. Reports however indicate Musk scheduled a deposition with Zatko before the latter’s whistleblower complaints went public.

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This article was originally featured on PopPhoto.

Since 2016, Instagram’s algorithms have been a source of drama. Many users insist they want a chronological feed of the accounts they follow while the developers keep adding more algorithmically suggested content. 

Things came to a head a few weeks ago when a petition championed by the Kardashians for Instagram to stop trying to be TikTok solicited a reply from Instagram head Adam Mosseri. The uproar was so bad, that in an interview with Casey Newton from The Verge, Mosseri acknowledged users weren’t happy with the approach to suggested posts and said Instagram needed to “take a big step back and regroup.” 

In a slightly cringey blogpost involving a sci-fi loving alien, Instagram has explained more about how its controversial “Suggested Posts” feature works. Nothing about it is particularly groundbreaking, but it’s still interesting to see Meta (Instagram’s parent company) address the controversy head-on. 

Presumably, this blogpost is an attempt to rehabilitate how users think about suggested posts. By showing how the new sausage is made, Instagram is, perhaps, hoping that they can convince folks to love it. 

How Instagram suggests posts

Instagram has two systems for suggesting posts to users: “Connected” and “Unconnected”. 

The Connected system is what’s used to rank posts by the accounts you follow and interact with. It takes all the content that’s been posted since you last refreshed your feed and ranks it based on things like the amount of engagement it’s had and how much you interact with the other user. It’s then served up to you on your Home screen. 

The Unconnected system is what’s used to find suggested posts from users you don’t follow. It takes “implicit” signals from the kind of accounts you follow and content you interact with to generate “seed” candidates for its recommendation algorithm. 

Finding a seed

For example, if you often like PopPhoto’s posts, Instagram likely presumes you are interested in photography content and so may use PetaPixel’s Instagram account as a seed. Alternatively, it might latch onto the tech angle and use PopSci’s account. For new users, Instagram serves up popular content from across the network or uses the accounts that the accounts you follow as seeds, until it has enough of an idea of what you like.

Generating candidates

The next step is to generate a list of potential candidates from the seed. This is where the algorithm really kicks into gear. It uses various machine learning principles—like embeddings based similarity and co-occurrence based similarity—to find accounts and content that are similar to the seed. 

Selecting candidates

From this big list of candidates, Instagram has to pick which content to show you. To do this, it attempts to rank all the generated candidates based on what you’re most likely to enjoy or engage with. The AI uses a “plethora of features” to make these decisions, including things like how much engagement each post has, what kind of content it is, how popular the user is, and so on. 

And from that, the suggested posts appear on your Home page. 

Does this ‘Feel Like Home’?

According to Instagram, their guiding principle is that any suggested content “Feels Like Home.” The idea is that the algorithm should serve up the kind of content that you would curate for yourself—if you knew it existed. 

Of course, all the recent uproar—and Mosseri’s admissions—suggest that Instagram has thus far failed in that respect. Anecdotally, I’ve found the suggested posts to be a major annoyance. I snooze them for 30-days every time they pop back up. 

Still, it’s clear that this is the direction Instagram is going to continue to go. The blog post closes with the developers stating that, “Overall, we are committed as a team to deliver a personal, relevant, useful, and curation-worthy feed which prioritizes long term quality of the product.”

Maybe they should just bring back the chronological feed.

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It’s no big secret that tech companies like Meta, TikTok, and Google routinely keep a close eye on as much of its users’ activity as possible, but a new website tool is exposing just how sneakily (and creepily) they go about it. Last week, security researcher and former Google employee, Felix Krause, wrote an article explaining how businesses often inject a JavaScript code into third-party websites visited in apps like Instagram and Facebook to track pretty much everything you do and click. Following his readers’ understandably concerned responses, Krause subsequently built a website called InAppBrowser.com that shows you a sizable chunk of what all these companies can see—sizable, but unfortunately not comprehensive.

[ Related: “You have the power to protect your data. Own it.“ ]

Krause’s InAppBrowser can show you at least some of these shady tracking methods via opening the website inside an app. As he notes in his post, however, “There is no way for us to know the full details on what kind of data each in-app browser collects, or how or if the data is being transferred or used… [InAppBrowser] is stating the JavaScript commands that get executed by each app, as well as describing what effect each of those commands might have.”

To use InAppBrowser, all you need to do is copy its full website address (https://inappbrowser.com/) and paste it as a clickable link within the app of your choice. On Instagram, for example, you could make a dummy post (like an Instagram story created solely for the purpose of hosting the link), send a direct message with the link, or paste the link into your profile bio. Then just click the link within the app to open the in-app browser and see the results.

PopSci tested the site out within Instagram and received the following report:

As The Verge explains, “In-app browsers are used when you tap a URL within an app. While these browsers are based on Safari’s WebKit on iOS, developers can adjust them to run their own JavaScript code, allowing them to track your activity without consent from you or the third-party websites you visit.” Which, of course, is exactly what happens. Everything from keystrokes, to highlighted text, to clicked links can be monitored, potentially along with more private information like usernames, passwords, and phone numbers. While it can be unpredictable what companies like Meta would be doing with that info, Krause points out that bad actors could potentially exploit the security loophole with their own JavaScript inserts.

[ Related: “Apple pushes for more in-app ads” ]

Even though the InAppBrowser tool isn’t exhaustive, Krause made sure that its entire source code was available open-source on GitHub, a site that allows for future community access, analysis, and improvement. And while it’s unlikely that any of the companies will remove their JavaScript code anytime soon, so in the future it’s best to simply copy whatever link you want to visit and open it within your browser of choice.

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The award for weirdest TikTok trend of summer 2022 may go to “vabbing,” a supposed hack where people dab vaginal secretions on their skin like perfume, all for the art of seduction. If that sounds familiar, it’s because many animals spread bodily compounds called pheromones, both to communicate with each other and hook up with mates.

TikTok user Jewliah has shared multiple videos about her vabbing process and the successful results. With suitors buying her drinks, giving her gifts, compliments and attention, Jewliah claims the primping practice has changed her life.

So how did vabbing start? Well, although the trend is recent, the first few mentions of it in pop culture were in Tom Robbins’ 1976 novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues; in the book, a lesbian cowgirl gives a step-by-step guide to vabbing. But the act made waves in November 2018 after a mention on the “Secret Keepers Club” podcast by comedians Carly Aquilino and Emma Willman. On an episode of the show, they discussed a friend who used sweat from their testicles as “cologne,” which inspired a listener to try her own version of the experiment. Positive results ensued, and voila, the legend of vabbing lived on. 

With TikTok now picking up on this practice of enhancing “natural human pheromones,” more people are giving vabbing a spin. But can you really attract a partner by luring them in with your vaginal secretions? Well, Eva Garrett, an assistant professor of anthropology from Boston University, says it’s complicated. Garrett, whose research focuses on the evolution of smell in primates, explains that while others can be drawn to your natural scent, pheromones are likely not playing into the attraction.

“If someone thinks it’s (vabbing) going to help them find a date or partner, it might just be more of a placebo effect,” she explains.

[Related: Why can some people smell ants? Here’s the answer to TikTok’s latest mystery.]

But what exactly are pheromones? According to Garrett, they include any chemicals that produce a specific behavior in an animal of the same species. Some creatures release their pheromones by marking or rubbing their scent gland on areas around them to attract mates. Those compounds include nonvolatile odorants, which means the scent doesn’t travel through the air. Rather, it stays in the region where the animal placed it to alert others of its kind that it’s time to procreate. For instance, boars will release a pheromone in their saliva and froth at the mouth. The cue causes females to assume a sexual position for reproduction.

But it isn’t simply smelling the pheromones that changes the behavior of a potential mate—there’s a lot that goes into the process that humans aren’t equipped for, Garrett explains. Namely, we don’t have the well-developed Jacobson’s organ that pheromone-spreading mammals, reptiles, and amphibians use to detect chemical signals. The neuroanatomical system is typically connected to the nasal cavity through a network of nerves and ducts. Typically, animals will lick the area where a pheromone has been spread and stick their tongue up to the tops of their mouths, confirming the message with the Jacobson’s organ. 

With the lack of evidence of pheromones in people, Garret says it’s unlikely that vabbing works as a mate magnet. But she admits it’s possible that it can enhance one’s natural scent, which could be attractive to certain individuals. 

[Related on PopSci+: What’s the secret to sexiness?]

It’s true that social odorants play an important role in certain human bonds and behaviors. From mothers building relationships with babies through smell, to partners luxuriating in the smell of each other’s sweat, natural scent is something that nearly everyone experiences.

In fact, perfume, while synthetic, is meant to enhance one’s natural scent and can even reveal social information to other people. So, like Chanel N°5, Garrett says there’s a chance that rubbing vaginal secretions can entice someone who’s already intrigued by your natural scent.

In case that’s enough to make you want to try vabbing, Garrett says to remember to be safe by washing your hands before and after touching your genitals. “If you think it can help, it can’t hurt. But if you find that you don’t enjoy the scent of your vabbing then it could be a good sign to not.”

The post Does ‘vabbing’ work? The truth about vaginal pheromones. appeared first on Popular Science.

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TikTok has launched a new in-app AI-powered text-to-image generator called the “AI greenscreen” filter. First reported by The Verge, users can now type a prompt like “exploding galaxy flowers” and TikTok will create an abstract interpretation that can be used as a video background. 

AI text-to-image models like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, Google’s Imagen, and Midjourney are having a bit of a moment. It’s hard to avoid their output on social media (especially Twitter), where people share the weirdest and wildest things they are able to get the AI models to create. The results are undeniably impressive—and it’s going to be fascinating to see how these tools develop as they gather more input. 

Since Imagen isn’t yet open to the public, and DALL-E 2 and Midjourney are both in Beta, TikTok is now the AI text-to-image generator with the largest (potential) user base. With an app update, more than a billion people have access to the kind of tool that—until last week— was limited to a few million at most.  

[Related: The Dall-E Mini image generator’s ridiculousness might be its main appeal]

TikTok’s version, however, is much more limited. While DALL-E 2 and Midjourney can produce some incredibly well realized outputs, TikTok’s text-to-image generator is limited to more abstract interpretations of the prompt. In the examples we’ve seen, it produces color-appropriate backgrounds without much in the way of recognizable objects. 

By remaining relatively abstract, TikTok has managed to avoid many of the potential pitfalls associated with text-to-image generators, like displaying obvious biases in its output. 

With a community of more than a billion users who are known for experimenting with online art forms, it was probably a good idea that the developers played it safe. Recently, Meta platforms saw similar issues materialize when they let their chatbot learn from internet users.

[Related: 5 ways to get Craiyon, formerly Dall-E mini, to bend to your will]

Additionally, TikTok is infamous for the amount of misinformation on the platform. Providing users with a tool that could potentially be used to create misinformation-related content, would likely have attracted a lot of criticism. (Presumably, creating more abstract backgrounds also demands less intensive computational resources—another bonus for many users.)

Of course, none of this has stopped people from trying to push TikTok’s text-to-image generator to breaking point. Both The Verge and TechCrunch tried to get TikTok to violate its own community guidelines, with prompts like “assassination of Joe Biden,” “naked model on beach,” and “man killing another man.” In all instances, the background was clearly inspired by the prompt—flesh tones, bright oranges, and blues for the model on a beach; an abstract pattern of red, grey, and white for the murdering men—but it didn’t show anything remotely graphic. Regular users on TikTok have tried similar stunts, without much success. 

AI Greenscreen is available for TikTok users right now. Just tap the Effects option on the Camera screen and search for “AI Greenscreen”. It’s already being used in a few TikTok challenges. Specifically, users are entering their name into the generator to see what their “aesthetic” is. Others are entering their birthday—though we really can’t advise sharing that kind of information publicly.

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Facebook’s declining popularity among younger demographics is widely known by now, but a recent study just revealed how far the once all-encompassing social media platform has fallen from grace in teens’ eyes. According to the Pew Research Center’s new “Teens, Social Media and Technology” report surveying internet users aged 13-17, only about 32-percent of responders say they ever use Facebook. That’s a well over 50-percent decline from 2014-15’s estimated 71-percent usage.

Meanwhile, TikTok is remains the current social media platform to beat for Gen Z, with 67-percent of responders claiming to frequently visit the app. Two other social media platforms—Instagram and Snapchat—also saw sizable increases over the past eight years. Another result gleaned from the study shows that YouTube is by far the website teens utilize most, with 95-percent of those surveyed saying they frequent the platform.

[Related: Facebook will try to make its news feed more personal again.]

Check out Pew Research’s infographic below for a wider view of the current social media landscape (RIP, Vine).

The demographics among teenagers on social media has also shifted significantly, according to the report. “For example, teen boys are more likely than teen girls to say they use YouTube, Twitch and Reddit, whereas teen girls are more likely than teen boys to use TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat,” reads the study. “In addition, higher shares of Black and Hispanic teens report using TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and WhatsApp compared with White teens.”

Unsurprisingly, all this social media usage has generated some undesirable byproducts. For example, of the 95-percent of teens visiting YouTube, one-in-five of them say they use it “almost constantly,” while a little over half of survey takers say they’d have difficulty giving up their favorite social media haunts for good. Perhaps this shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise— access to smartphones skyrocketed for the age group since Pew last surveyed the landscape—from 72- to 95-percent of teens.

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When the time is right, you’ll probably want to give your kids a smartphone. This is a practical decision that requires education about the dangers of certain apps and websites and setting limits and protections to ensure children use their new device safely.

Both Android phones and iPhones have built-in system-wide safety measures that allow you to limit the sites your kids can see, the apps they’re allowed to run, or the time they spend on their device each day.

But some apps also have parental controls included—social media is no exception. These bespoke settings let you tailor an app to be suitable for your kids, keeping them away from inappropriate content and making sure they’re using social platforms responsibly.

There are some other configurations worth looking at in the Privacy menu (under Settings and privacy). For example, you can turn off comments and mentions, and prevent anyone else from sending a direct message to your child through TikTok (tap Direct messages then No one). These options aren’t PIN protected though, so your child could just change them back again.

If you also have a TikTok account, you can go further. From the Settings and privacy menu, pick Family Pairing to link your account to your kid’s. This gives you access to the screen time and restricted mode settings remotely, so you don’t have to keep grabbing your youngster’s phone every time you want to change something. It also lets you turn off direct messages remotely, so your kid won’t be able to turn them back on.

Most of the options you’re going to be interested in are on the Privacy menu. For example, you can disable message and group chat requests from users that your kid isn’t following,  (under Messages), as well as make the child’s account private, so follower requests have to be specifically approved (use the Private account toggle switch at the top). Unfortunately, your kid can undo any of these tweaks, whenever they want to.

There’s no way to really control what your child does on Instagram, but you can oversee their activity by making your own account and connecting it to theirs. To do this, open the app on your phone, go to the Settings panel and pick Supervision then Create invitation. Assuming your child accepts it, you’ll be able to see who they are following and who is following them, as well as how much time they’re spending on the app.

From the same Supervision menu you can set time limits if you want to. What’s more, if your kid reports someone on Instagram (for bullying, for example), they can choose to send a report to you through the Family Center as well as to Instagram. However, you won’t be able to read their messages, or if they’re posting privately, you won’t see their posts unless they’ve accepted your follow request.

To do so, you, as a parent, will need your own Snapchat account, so if you don’t have one, start there. Otherwise, open the app and go to your settings page by tapping your profile picture (top left) and then the cog icon (top right). Scroll down, and under Privacy Control you’ll find the new Family Center. This feature mostly allows parents and guardians to do three things: see who their kid is friends with, who they have been communicating with over the past seven days, and report abuse directly to the Snapchat team. It’s important to note that this will not grant access to any content kids share—that includes text messages and images.

Just like Instagram’s parental controls, Snapchat’s are opt-in, which means your kid will have to accept your invitation to join Family Center before you can see any of your child’s information. On top of that, the platform sends the invitation as a direct message, so if your kid has a private account where only friends can contact them, it won’t reach them. You’ll have to get them to add you as a friend first. You should also keep in mind that just like any other Snapchat message, Family Center invitations disappear immediately or after 24 hours after your kid sees it, depending on how they’ve set up their preferences. So if they don’t respond right away or within that time frame, you’ll have to send the invitation again.

Once they join, you’ll be able to check on your young’uns by visiting Family Center and tapping on a kid’s name. Teens will also have access to the feature in the same place, which means they’ll be able to see exactly what adults can see about them. Finally, keep in mind that Snapchat’s parental controls have age limits that count for kids and adults—anyone monitoring a minor’s account cannot be under 25 years old, while kids can only be between 13 (the youngest age allowed by the platform) and 18. 

From inside the app, tap the menu button (three horizontal lines, top right), then pick Settings & privacy and Settings. If you pick Your time on Facebook you’ll find tools for limiting how long your child spends in the app—you’ll need to reach an agreement on these together, as there’s nothing to stop your kid making further changes to these settings in the future.

[Related: Best parental control software of 2022]

It’s worth checking out the Profile information section (to see the information your child is sharing with the wider world) and the How people can find and contact you section (to make sure your child isn’t too easy to find on Facebook). Meanwhile, under Posts, you can set the visibility of anything your youngster posts on the social network.

Under Profile and tagging, you and your child are able to set who is able to tag (or mention) them in posts, and who is able to post on their Facebook profile—these are options that you might want to restrict in some way for youngsters. At the very least, you’ll be able to have a conversation about what sort of content your kid should be putting out into the world, and who might be able to see it.

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Earlier this week, a group of researchers, including several from Facebook-owner Meta, released a massive study on friendship and its impacts on economic mobility. In it, they analyzed the Facebook friends of 72 million US adults and used these online networks as a proxy for social capital, or the strength of an individual’s community. 

A significant observation they had was that poor children growing up in communities where cross-class friendships were more common were more likely to earn higher incomes as an adult (about a 20 percent increase on average) than poor children growing up in places where these types of friendships were not as common. 

This mobility pattern held even for neighborhoods with different median incomes. In fact, the commonality of cross-class friendships, also referred to as “economic connectedness” by the researchers, had a stronger impact on economic mobility than other factors like “school quality, family structure, job availability or a community’s racial composition,” The New York Times reported.  

The findings have been described in two studies published Aug 1 in the journal Nature (view part I and part II here). Additionally, the team has made their de-identified data openly available online, and visitors can go to the project site to browse at how social capital changes by ZIP code. 

Curious about what kind of information the team used for the analysis? Let’s take a closer look at how they did it.

Mining for friendships in Facebook logs

In May 2022, researchers from Harvard, Stanford, NYU and Meta began to collect raw, anonymized data from Facebook users in the US aged 25 to 44 who were active on the platform at least once in the last month. In their final analysis, their sample looked at the friendship links of 72.2 million users, which in comparison to the 2014-2018 American Community Survey, should represent about 84 percent of the US population from that age group. This demographic also appears to use Facebook more frequently than other age groups. 

They then aggregated user data and analyzed it in parallel with other public data, like information on economic mobility by census tracts. They also used data from the Opportunity Atlas related to race, ethnicity compositions, and median incomes by zip codes.

Here’s all the Facebook data researchers took into account: Individuals were assigned a zip code and county based on geographical data that they reported on their profiles, like hometowns, as well as enabled location histories. An algorithm then predicted an individual’s socioeconomic status through profile features like age, sex, language, relationship status, family, location information, college, donations, phone model price and mobile carrier, and variables related to the usage of Facebook (such as whether it was on the web or on a mobile device). The researchers then zoomed in on users’ high school friends by grouping together those who reported the same high school, or had overlapping connections who reported the same high school. “Because individuals tend to have many more friends on Facebook than they interact with regularly, we also verify that our results hold when focusing on an individual’s ten closest friends, where closeness is measured on the basis of the frequency of public interactions such as likes, tags, wall posts and comments,” the researchers wrote. 

They measured economic connectedness by factoring in the links between family and friends on Facebook, and even looked at the groups they may share on the platform. They used these factors to calculate how much of a low income user’s friends were from high income households (see these percentages plotted geographically on a map here). They compared user income ranks to that of their parents’ as a measure of mobility. 

J. Loes Pouwels, an assistant professor at Radboud University in The Netherlands who was not involved in the research, says that the scope of the study and the amount of data they were able to extract was highly impressive—especially since it was low cost, not invasive, and objective. She points out that there was no recruiting needed, and there are no recall biases because they’re not asking people to list all of their friends off the top of their head, they’re just mining Facebook log data. 

“But at the same time, as a friendship researcher, I do think that data falls a bit short in tapping into the more qualitative aspects of friendships,” Pouwels says. “Are Facebook connections really your friends? Or are they more your connections? To what extent do they overlap?” For example, people could be connected with colleagues or classmates that they don’t regularly interact with or actually consider to be their friends in real life.  

Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at University of Oxford, says that Facebook connections are a valid way to measure modern friendships. For example, although people know that Facebook friends are not all equal, posts between users can provide some of the same context as face-to-face contacts or phone calls for the different quality friendships that a person has. Additionally, he notes that the average number of friends users have on Facebook (around 150) is the similar to the reported number from personal contacts.

Why researchers study friendships 

And although the economic perspective is an interesting lens to look at friendship through, it’s also worthwhile to consider the other impacts of these communities, which includes taking a closer look at the friendships themselves. “It’s important to study friendships because it’s an important element of how we experience our life,” Pouwels says. “What we know is especially in adolescence, the development and maintenance of positive friendship relationships is an important foundation for developing positive and supporting relationships later in life.” 

[Related: Can I offer you a nice meme in these trying times?]

Mass measurements made by algorithms can be useful for drawing generalized conclusions on aspects like economic mobility at the group level. However, outside of the fact that algorithms can sometimes be biased, they fail to capture details about the quality of these friendships, Pouwels notes, which are predictive of well-being and life satisfaction. It would be valuable, for instance, to factor in finer-grain questions like who these users consider their close friends, what types of interactions they’re having, are these negative or positive, do they find their friendships to be supportive or intimate, and how these friendships develop over time. 

But this can often be a daunting task in the digital age. Looking at the current teens, “you see that Facebook is no longer popular among them. They use, for example, Snapchat or Tik Tok. They’re moving to other platforms,” Pouwels says. “It’s sometimes hard, as adult researchers, to keep up with all the new developments that are there.” (For reference, a 2014 friendship study used data from MySpace, and a 2015 study looked at the platform Tumblr.) 

There has been one constant: The easiest and surest way to understand the dynamics of real world friendships is still to study them in a school or university setting. 

“[Social media] is getting more attention in friendship research, especially online friendship behaviors. That’s an interesting group because we know a lot of friendships are not only offline anymore but also online,” Pouwels says. These could be online gaming friends, or digital friendships that form through internet communities. “They’re currently understudied in typical peer-relations research because it is a challenge to collect those data via objective measures,” Pouwels says. 

But this new study with Meta is a good example, she thinks, of the potential there. “It’s getting more popular. But if you really want to get into people who you consider a good friend, then it’s important to tap into online behaviors, and you always need to combine it with self reports. It makes it a bit more difficult but I think there are more and more examples of great studies in this area.” 

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THE WORD “surveillance” can conjure up amorphous images of shadowy activities: spies locked in clandestine combat, security forces keeping tabs on anyone they deem dangerous. But surveillance also applies to governments knowing where your gym is and multinational corporations monitoring your shopping habits. Just thinking about how gargantuan the players are can leave you feeling powerless, insignificant—or a little of both.

The idea that these faceless organizations care about your penchant for scouring Etsy for the softest alpaca yarn (uh, just an example) can seem somewhat absurd. You commute to work, order takeout, hang out with family and friends, and generally lead a fairly normal, uneventful life. But they do care. Where you see basic information about yourself, they see dollar signs—a lot of them. Ad tech companies collect 72 million data points on the average American child by the time they’re 13, and Facebook alone is rumored to track 52,000 data points per user. They sculpt all of that info into a unique profile that companies can use to get you to buy stuff. What can you do about it? They have millions, even billions of dollars in resources, and you barely have the time and energy to work out three times a week. Well, there’s actually a lot you can do.

You are not insignificant

It’s easy to think that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Tech companies have even implied that wanting to keep things to yourself means those things may be wrong. In 2009, when a CBS journalist asked then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt whether people should treat the company as their best friend, he famously replied: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Putting aside the fact that this assertion is patently wrong in the physical world—who wants someone watching them in the bathroom?—it implies we have no right to privacy at all in the digital world.

A lack of privacy only helps the powerful: The digital bread crumbs you leave behind as you putter around the internet are a coveted delicacy to corporations. They can use it to make lots of money off you—whether they’re targeting you with ads or selling your information to other companies and data brokers, which may share those details with anybody who’ll pay them, including governments and law enforcement agencies. But getting you to spend money on things you probably don’t need may be one of the most benevolent uses of your data. Tomorrow, your location may give away how fast you drive, increasing your car insurance payments, and your smartwatch data might be interpreted as proof of poor health, limiting your access to vital healthcare.   

No matter how boring you think your life is, everything you do leaves a valuable data trail that’s actually more of a web. We live in a highly interconnected society where each of us is a node in an intricate network that blankets the world; that means it’s not just your data you’re sharing when you geotag your Instagram photos or give your contacts to any app that asks for them. Your data web includes you, but also the people around you—people who may not spend much time online, and even folks who have gone to great lengths to protect their own privacy.

Knowing that, you start to see the unrelenting push to share everything in a new light. The countless engagement options—such as emoji reactions, likes, comments, reposts, and even blocking—are also tools for apps and services to collect as much information as possible.

You are not powerless

With all the ways governments and corporations have to collect your data, protecting it might seem futile, especially if you haven’t given privacy much thought until now. Many of us who witnessed the dawn of social media didn’t know any better, and we ended up with embarrassing email handles and our entire college experiences memorialized on 60-photo Facebook albums posted by people we haven’t thought about since 2009 (uh, again, just an example). Even today, it’s all too easy to get excited about the latest shiny social toy as we share our every move with a sea of strangers online. So give up—they’ve got you, right? No. It’s never too late to fight back.

Take your dusty Facebook photos: For starters, you are not the same person you were a decade ago. You don’t like the same things, and your spending patterns have probably changed a lot too. If someone tried reaching you at the phone number you used to create your accounts back then, it’s possible a complete stranger would pick up the call. So just like the contact list on your old bedazzled Razr, that data is largely useless to Big Tech. 

Even a tweet, purchase, or upload you make today has an expiration date. The data you create now and in the future—the things you buy, where you go, where you get your information, the podcasts you listen to, the apps you download, the columns you read—is data you can do something about.

You matter

Not caring about what corporations or other potentially nefarious unknown parties do with your data is not an option. Data nihilism only puts us all on the worst end of a shitty deal. Day in and day out, we read about new glitches in app codes and unintentionally open backdoors, and we even welcome deliberately voyeuristic platforms that peep into our lives without our knowing. It’s scary enough to know how dangerous data can be today, but it’s even scarier to think about all the ways your information could be used to track and manipulate you in the future. 

And at a time when we’re overly primed to be polarized in our opinions—from our response to viruses to our hot takes on the latest Marvel movie—protecting our privacy is a battle that calls for all of us. We must join in a collective effort to protect it. 

We created this column, The Opt Out, to empower you to take back control of your data. If you don’t know where to begin, this is the starting line. In the coming months, we’ll be looking into how to protect your kids’ data when their school’s apps and programs are just as hungry as everything else, and how (if at all) providing false inputs can help you access what you want without giving away your personal details. We’re on this privacy journey together and, hopefully, your information will be a bit safer every month.

We hope you enjoyed The Opt Out, a new monthly column from PopSci+. Check back in September for the next in this series.

The post The Opt Out: You have the power to protect your data. Own it. appeared first on Popular Science.

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The COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone to quickly adapt their personal and professional lives to a virtual environment via a host of apps. Even as lockdowns have lifted and social distancing requirements ease, a new study shows most people across the globe are still spending between 4 and 5 hours a day on various apps—and often for longer periods of time than even at the height of the pandemic.

According to the analytics firm, data.ai, almost every one of the dozen countries surveyed in its latest overview is maintaining a dramatic increase in app usage since the pandemic’s onset. In Australia, for example, people spent an average of 3.6 hours per day on apps at the beginning of 2020, a number that has since increased 40 percent to around 4.9 hours today. Likewise, Singapore saw a similar percentage rise for its population—from 4.1 to 5.7 hours each day. Those rates have tapered somewhat in the United States, but we’re still averaging a solid 4.1 hours over here versus the 3.9 hours clocked in 2020.

The few countries currently experiencing a slight decrease in app addiction don’t appear to indicate a huge shift for post-quarantine living, however. As TechCrunch notes, these nations, such as Japan, South Korea, Mexico, and Canada, are still equal or above their averages before the pandemic’s onset, adding further evidence of the ongoing app-ification of everyday life.

[Related: How to use built-in parental controls on Instagram, TikTok, and more.]

It’s unsurprising to see such a steady rise in both app utilization and screen time. The COVID-19 pandemic forced a massive shift in the way society both operates and works, and in many instances, people seem to enjoy (or at least tolerate) that seachange. It will be interesting to see if these numbers continue to steadily rise, or if the growth largely slows down over the coming months. A rough average of between 4 and 5 app hours per day is a hefty amount of screen time already, even without taking the additional time most spend on social media, news sites, and streaming services.

There are copious amounts of studies and information on the negative effects of too much time in front of computer and phone screens. Still, with Indonesia and Singapore both nearing the 6 hour threshold, it’s not hard to envision even more time spent in-app. Some companies may already be taking notice—Twitter recently made a potential window into just how much energy and effort we’re putting into these spaces.

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Two new lawsuits allege that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, and a number of US hospitals violated medical privacy law HIPAA, according to The Verge. These lawsuits follow a report from The Markup published this June documenting how the Meta Pixel, an ad analytics tracking tool installed on many websites, potentially shared identifying patient data in a way that violated HIPAA. Both lawsuits were filed in the Northern District of California and argued that the use of the Meta Pixel on hospital websites allowed sensitive health information to be sent to Facebook. The lawyers for the plaintiffs are trying to get them classified as class action suits and demanding jury trials. 

But let’s step back a bit and answer some key questions: What is the Meta Pixel, how does it work, and why are hospitals’ installing it on their websites? And since they are, is that likely to be a HIPAA violation? 

The Meta Pixel is a free ad tracking tool from Facebook. According to research conducted by The Markup, approximately a third of the 80,000 most popular websites have the Meta Pixel installed. (Full disclosure: PopSci is one of them). This tool allows website owners to see analytics from Facebook and Instagram ads they run, and target Facebook and Instagram users who have visited their sites with ads. 

The Meta Pixel is automatically triggered when someone visits a website with it installed. If they’re logged into Facebook (and not using a browser that protects against third-party tracking), it sends information about who they are and what they do on the site to Facebook. (Even if they’re not logged in, Facebook has other ways of attempting to glean information about visitors through the Meta Pixel). What information is sent to Facebook is controlled by the website operator, and this is where the HIPAA troubles start. 

As part of The Markup’s Pixel Hunt investigation into Facebook ad tracking, it tested the websites of Newsweek’s top 100 US hospitals for 2022. It found the Meta Pixel installed on 33 of them, and all of them sent sensitive data to Facebook, including identifying information such as a visitor’s IP address, and when they attempted to schedule an appointment. 

[Related: How data brokers threaten your privacy]

“On the website of University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, for example, clicking the ‘Schedule Online’ button on a doctor’s page prompted the Meta Pixel to send Facebook the text of the button, the doctor’s name, and the search term we used to find her: ‘pregnancy termination,’” The Markup reported. 

For seven hospitals, the situation was even worse. The Meta Pixel wasn’t just installed on the public facing web pages, but also on the password-protected patient portals. For five of those websites, it documented real patient data—provided by volunteers who signed up to help the Pixel Hunt investigation using Mozilla’s ad-tracker tracking Rally plugin—being sent to Facebook. Some of that information included “the names of patients’ medications, descriptions of their allergic reactions, and details about their upcoming doctor’s appointments.”

According to The Markup, “former regulators, health data security experts, and privacy advocates” all expressed concern that the hospitals using the Meta Pixel on their patient portals may have violated HIPAA regulations. David Holtzman, a health privacy consultant who has previously served as a senior privacy adviser for the US government agency that enforces HIPAA, told The Markup that while he couldn’t say for certain, “it is quite likely a HIPAA violation.”

It’s important to note that Facebook itself is not subject to HIPAA as it is not a healthcare provider. Still, there is cause for legitimate scrutiny of how Meta handles sensitive data. Following a report in The Wall Street Journal and a New York Department of Financial Services investigation in 2019, Meta said it was introducing a tool to automatically filter out sensitive medical data sent by websites through the Meta Pixel. However, according to previous reporting by The Markup and leaked Facebook internal documents, it is unlikely that the tool is 100 percent effective at filtering out sensitive medical data. 

Medical providers, on the other hand, are bound by HIPAA. They are not supposed to share data with third-parties without express consent from the patient in question. From The Markup’s reporting, it seems unlikely that any of the hospitals obtained that. 

While the majority of hospitals documented by The Markup’s investigation removed the Meta Pixel from their patient portals after they were contacted (and some also removed it from their public websites), their past actions set the stage for these two lawsuits. 

As well as Meta, one of the lawsuits names University of California San Francisco and Dignity Health patient portals as defendants. Apparently, a patient claims her medical information was sent to Facebook where she was then served targeted ads relating to her heart and knee conditions. The other suit doesn’t name any other defendants, but claims at least 664 healthcare providers have sent medical data to Meta. 

We won’t know whether either case will become a class action or even proceed for a while yet, but it’s another bad story for Meta—which really can’t seem to catch a break. 

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Operating at a $10 million loss has Tinder rethinking its burgeoning relationship with the metaverse. As The Verge and elsewhere report, the dating app’s parent company, Match Group, recently announced a dramatic reversal from its previously announced plans for an expanded “Tinderverse.” The digital space would have purportedly included virtual reality meetups, video chats, and an AR experience dubbed “Single Town.”

The news follows an abysmal second financial quarter report, part of which is already being blamed on last year’s acquisition of the metaverse tech company, Hyperconnect. Match closed a $1.7 billion deal with the South Korean startup in June 2021, but has had little to show for it in the ensuing months.

“Given uncertainty about the ultimate contours of the metaverse and what will or won’t work, as well as the more challenging operating environment, I’ve instructed the Hyperconnect team to iterate but not invest heavily in metaverse at this time,” Match Group CEO Bernard Kim wrote in the company’s earnings report, adding, “We’ll continue to evaluate this space carefully, and we will consider moving forward at the appropriate time when we have more clarity on the overall opportunity and feel we have a service that is well-positioned to succeed.”

[Related: How to protect your identity online.]

It’s not surprising to see Tinder giving a cold shoulder to the metaverse right now. A $10 million quarterly loss is bad enough, but it’s even worse when compared to the $210 million in pre-tax earnings that the company saw this time last year. The drop isn’t entirely the fault of investments like Hyperconnect, however. Despite the public’s general return to normalcy in the months following Covid-19 lockdowns, the ability of dating companies like Tinder to attract first-time users has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to Kim. Those who downloaded Tinder before the pandemic still comprise the majority of app users, and it’s become already clear that metaverse features cannot roll out quickly enough to address Match Group’s immediate issues.

Much like the hype surrounding cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or NFT blockchain commodities, a lot of talk (and, more importantly, dollars) have been thrown into the nebulous world that is “the metaverse” over the past year. Very little has come of those promises so far. For all the dramatic talk about the metaverse’s potential social and commercial implications, it’s hard to move forward when the very concept remains both vague and difficult to package as something marketable to the general public.

That isn’t to say we won’t see some form of the metaverse (or, more likely, multiple companies’ versions of metaverse) materialize soon—just don’t expect to see it first arrive with dating apps like Tinder.

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Twitter has tested many controversial updates to its platform over the years, but few are likely to be as awkward as its newest experiment.  First uncovered by reverse engineers earlier this summer, the ability to showcase just how hopelessly addicted we all are to social media is now available to a few select, unlucky users in a limited beta rollout. Based on the available screenshots so far, the counter appears alongside your total number of tweets, and appears to be an average estimate of accounts’ activity versus precise tallies—a small victory, maybe.

According to a Twitter spokesperson speaking with TechCrunch yesterday, “[t]his is part of an ongoing experiment in which we want to learn how providing more context about the frequency of an account’s Tweets can help people make more informed decisions about the accounts they choose to engage with.” In other words, the new feature could potentially help people weed out the accounts either dominating or contributing very little to their timelines.

[Related: 3 Twitter alternatives, in case you’re looking.]

While a 2019 study conducted by the Pew Research Center indicates that the majority of Twitter accounts don’t actually tweet much (if at all), 10 percent of all users comprise roughly 90 percent of all activity on the popular social media platform. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of those tweets are related to politics, and tend to skew towards younger demographics.

The thought of knowing just how many times one tweeted recently might be a bit embarrassing for some users, but there may be a silver lining to the company’s new feature if it becomes more ubiquitous. Experts estimate that between 5 and 10 percent of Americans meet the benchmarks for social media addiction, a statistic routinely exacerbated by Twitter’s popularity. Perhaps being confronted with just how frequently we hop on the app will persuade some of us to rethink their next few tweets.
Of course, there’s a chance Twitter will kill the counter before it ever becomes a universal update—joining the ranks of that time people’s chronological timelines suddenly vanished.

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