You can now add your avatar as a secondary Instagram profile pic, though people will have to know they can tap your standard pic to be able to see it. It’s a little thing, but indicative of Meta’s broader efforts to encourage people to use its avatars in its apps and in the metaverse.
There’s a long history of internet posts getting people into legal trouble, but this entry is unusual because it’s Britain’s prime minister Rishi Sunak.
This promotional video on his Instagram showed him riding in a car without a seatbelt on. The New York Times reports that violation can result in a fine of up to £500 (about $620 US), and said Sunak’s office confirmed he would pay without specifying an amount.
I don’t know if it actually ever got off the ground or if I just know a bunch of millennials who wanted to briefly re-live the glory days of AIM away messages, but my Instagram friends have pretty much all stopped posting notes within a week of launch. I don’t know about you, but I just can’t stand having to go to the DMs section to see them.
Are your buddies still using notes? Let us know in the comments.
If you’re old enough to remember the words “via Hiptop,” then you’ll recognize that instead of being tweet-like, the new Instagram Notes feature takes inspiration from Twitter’s predecessor — AOL Instant Messenger away messages.
The pop-up statuses are hidden away (for now) in the Instagram messages window, but for the Elder Millennial / Young Gen X generation, it’s a return to the days of flirting via vague but also specifically targeted song lyrics.
You can send 60-character notes on your chat Inbox that will appear at the top of the page — if your friends know to look for them. We tried them out to find out how IG’s new Notes actually work.
A Broadway musical tried to court extremely online fans of artists like BTS and Blackpink. It didn’t quite succeed.
Zuck is speaking at The New York Times’ DealBook conference today, and said that Reels is growing, according to Meta’s internal metrics.
It’s hard to track how we’re doing against TikTok, but metrics suggest Reels is half the time of TikTok globally, outside of China. We don’t aspire to be half of anything but that’s better than we were a year ago.
That’s quite a bit different than the picture painted by The Wall Street Journal in September: it reported on internal Meta docs that indicated Reels usage on Instagram was less than one-tenth the size of TikTok.
Business and creator accounts can now schedule posts up to 75 days out in the app itself. Scheduling tends to be the number one feature people managing social accounts ask for—as they don’t really want to be working on Christmas just to post that cute Reel they recorded weeks ago. Hopefully one day this feature will arrive for the rest of us.
When you block someone, you can now block all accounts they currently have (or may make in the future). Meta says this should lead to just a bit less manual blocking... like, say, 4 million fewer manual blocks per week.
Instagram’s word blocking feature is also getting updated to catch more intentional m1ssp3llings of words meant to avoid filtering. Plus, they’ll catch story replies now, too.
Forbes has done a deep-dive into the sometimes explicit and disturbing Facebook and Instagram ads for erotic fiction apps, and the connections those companies have to ByteDance and Tencent.
The piece also looks into how Meta’s failing to uphold its guidelines. Some of the examples in the report are very disturbing, and it’s hard to believe they were ever allowed to run.
