Despite having trouble obtaining former President Donald Trump's records from Twitter (now X), the special counsel investigating the events of January 6th, 2020 was ultimately able to get his hands on vast amounts of information from the website.
Telegram launched its Stories feature to everyone today, following its availability to Premium users starting last month. Like Facebook Messenger’s Stories, they appear as expandable bubbles above your conversation. However, Telegram’s take is more customizable, providing granular control of who sees uploaded posts and for how long.
Instagram now lets you add music to photo carousels. Unveiled in partnership with pop star Olivia Rodrigo to promote her single “bad idea right?”, the feature allows you to pick licensed music to soundtrack your slideshows. In addition, the company announced that you can create Collabs with up to three co-authors and post audience-response prompts to Reels.
X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, is now letting users download videos from its website, as long as a couple of criteria are met. First, the creator must explicitly allow downloads for the content they post. Also, the ability to save videos from the website is exclusively available to verified users comprised mostly of people paying for Blue subscription.
TweetDeck has started showing signs that it will not escape Twitter's massive rebranding unscathed. If you take a look at the tool's landing page while logged out, you'll see "XPro" on the upper left corner of the website, indicating its new name.
YouTube has released several creation tools for Shorts, such as ones that give users the ability to remix most videos and add voiceovers, ever since it was launched in an effort to make it a more veritable TikTok rival. Now, the video-hosting platform is in the process of expanding its arsenal of creation tools even further.
The next internet video summary you see might not have been written by a human. YouTube is testing AI-generated video summaries that appear on search and watch pages. The text is meant to provide a "quick overview" of a clip to help you decide if it's worth watching. The company is quick to stress that these don't replace creators' own video descriptions.
If reality television has taught us anything, it's there's not much people won't do if offered enough money and attention. Sometimes, even just the latter. Unfortunately for the future prospects of our civilization, modern social media has focused upon those same character foibles and optimized them at a global scale, sacrifices at the altar of audience growth and engagement.
X (formerly Twitter) continues to struggle to keep advertisers on board, and the brands that have stuck around are seeing ads show up in unexpected places. As reported by Media Matters, brands such as Honeywell, Discovery, Showtime and USA Today are having their ads placed alongside tweets from The National Socialist Network account, a neo-Nazi group that actively advocates for violence and terrorism.