I’ve enjoyed the sliding image carousels on Threads — although it still lacks a toggle to disable autoplaying video — and now Meta’s Twitter-like app can hold up to 20 photos in one post.
That matches the upgrade Instagram announced in August and should be enough for your next visually provocative masterpiece.
NBC News reports the following statement from an unnamed Meta spokesperson:
After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets. Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity.
The move follows warnings by the Biden administration that RT is part of Russian disinformation campaigns targeting the 2024 US election and a State Department notice last week saying, “[W]e now know that RT moved beyond being simply a media outlet and has been an entity with cyber capabilities.”
The update will start impacting Facebook and Instagram users in the UK over the coming months, meaning any public posts, comments, and photos on adult accounts (including those featuring children) will be scraped.
Meta says this will bring its generative AI products to the UK “much sooner,” and help them to reflect “British culture, history, and idiom” ...whatever that bloody means.
With exceptions for users under 18, posts that weren’t set to public, or EU accounts that opted out.
Now ABC reports on Australian senator David Shoebridge’s question to Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh.
Shoebridge: “...Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That’s the reality, isn’t it?”
Claybaugh: “Correct.”
Bill Belichick, the longtime Patriots coach who famously never said anything interesting in public for like three decades, just joined Instagram — sorry, Instaface — in the absolute most chaotic way possible. The cuts! The dad jokes! The second slide!
Can’t help but notice Tom Brady hasn’t followed him yet.
Meta told TechCrunch it’s not actually testing ads in Threads yet, but it’s getting more underpinnings in place — now including this “Sponsored” badge that might appear next to an advertiser’s (or sponsored creator’s) username. It was spotted by developer Alessandro Paluzzi.
Threads boss Adam Mosseri confirmed in April that ads are coming; last we heard, it might not be till next year.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook and Instagram are still running ads that promote online marketplaces for illegal drugs — including cocaine, hallucinogens, and prescription opioids — months after the publication first noted that Meta was facing a federal investigation for doing so.
Meta says it will continue working with law enforcement, and will “invest resources and further improve our enforcement” to combat this type of activity.
Casey Newton shines a light on the increasingly common social media scam that primarily targets teen boys in his most recent Platformer newsletter:
But when a terrifying scam comes along that has led to at least 20 confirmed deaths in the past two years, a whole stack of investigations can’t seem to get a conversation going. [...] Perhaps the surgeon general, instead of his new ham-fisted campaign against every risk that social media presents, could warn parents about this one.
[Platformer]
