Instagram

Mosseri says the app finds the most success in blending entertainment with interacting with friends. That could look like commenting on a public post about a sporting event and interacting with a friend in the comments, he says. That’s important since Meta noted in documents around 2018 that people were sharing less in their feeds, and public content was increasing. The FTC is trying to point out that even if posting to the apps has declined, there’s still friends and family interaction happening.

Meta, which purports to be a leader in AI, has been unable to stop the proliferation of deepfake advertisements impersonating Financial Times writer Martin Wolf on Facebook and Instagram. “Is it really that hard or are they not trying, as Sarah Wynn-Williams suggests in her excellent book Careless People?” Wolf asks. There’s also a fairly incredible graph showing the number of deepfakes skyrocketing after the FT told Meta about the scam. This article isn’t behind FT’s paywall— and it’s definitely worth your time.

After the acquisition, Systrom says he informed his board that Twitter had decided to restrict access to part of its API, which allowed people to find their Twitter friends on Instagram. A Twitter executive “made it clear that this is in direct retaliation to Facebook cutting off the same API access to Twitter. I can only imagine Jack + Dick are also not very happy about the acquisition.”

Prior to buying those nascent apps in 2012 and 2014, Facebook recognized both as significant competition, Federal Trade Commission attorney Daniel Matheson argues to open the government’s case.

You can now skip ahead in Reels by holding down on either edge of the screen, which plays the video at double speed. Reels started out with a 15-second cap but can now run for up to three minutes, so playback controls make sense.

The company is getting rid of a feature it introduced less than a year ago that gave users the ability to leave semiprivate and disappearing comments on grid posts and Reels. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the feature wasn’t widely adopted, and that the platform has become “too complicated” over the years.

During his weekly AMA, Instagram head Adam Mosseri acknowledged that “we really should build” a small-but-important feature that competitors like TikTok and YouTube offer: picture-in-picture (PIP). Maybe you’ll be able to multitask and watch reels soon.

Some Instagram users experienced an error within the last few days that flooded their personal Reels feeds with violent and NSFW imagery, some (but not all) of which was hidden behind content warnings.

The livestreaming platform announced that this week, every channel will get the ability to edit and share clips straight to Instagram.

From Alessandro Paluzzi, who recently posted screenshots of how writing Community Notes might look like on Threads, too.

Instagram’s chief says the changes reflect the domination of vertical content on the platform, and that highlighted stories should be coming to the grid in the future.

404 Media reports that trans and non-binary pride chat themes were “retired” this week and announcements scrubbed from the web — just as Meta is allowing more hate speech.

Leaked training documents obtained by The Intercept offer more details about Meta’s updated Hateful Conduct rules. Specific examples of speech Meta allows include “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit,” “Jews are flat out greedier than Christians,” and “Trans people are immoral.”