Tag Archives: author_name|Karissa Bell

Bluesky hits 20 million users

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Bluesky has passed the 20 million user mark as the app continues its recent surge in growth. The decentralized service, which reached 15 million users less than a week ago, has just about tripled its user base in the last three months.

Though it’s still far smaller than its rivals Threads and X, Bluesky’s current momentum is notable. The app has had several days over the last week where it added a million new users in a single 24-hour period. That’s similar to the growth rate of Threads, which has been getting a million new sign-ups a day for “going on three months,” according to an update last week from Meta’s Adam Mosseri. Threads reached 275 million monthly users earlier this month and has added at least 15 million since the start of November.

And while Bluesky remains the underdog, there are other signs it’s gaining momentum. Bluesky has been the top app in Apple’s App Store for the last six days and has been the top non-gaming app in Google Play for four days, according to data provided by analytics firm App Figures. Meta’s Threads is currently in the number two spot on the App Store. 

Though Bluesky has experienced other periods of significant growth over the last year, the recent surge is far bigger than what the open-source service has previously seen. The latest growth for Bluesky seems to be at least partially furled by mounting frustration from some X users. There was a significant spike in traffic to Bluesky on November 7, the day after the presidential election, according to a report from analytics company SimilarWeb. That spike seemed to coincide with a surge in users trying to deactivate their accounts on X. 

Bluesky has also been keen to differentiate its policies from its larger rivals. Last week, the company pledged that it would not use its users’ content to train generative AI. X’s new privacy policy allows it to work with third-parties to train AI models on users’ past tweets. Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber has also said that she doesn’t want to “enshittify the network with ads.” Threads, meanwhile, reportedly plans to start experimenting with its first ads in January.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/bluesky-hits-20-million-users-143920955.html?src=rss

Instagram will let you ‘reset’ your recommendations

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If your Instagram recommendations have been feeling a little stale, you’ll soon have a way to make the app’s algorithm forget everything it thinks it knows about you. Meta is testing a new feature that will allow users to reset the algorithmic suggestions that power the app’s feed, Reels and Explore section.

The company described the feature as a “test,” but said the update “will soon roll out globally.” With the change, users will be able to “reset suggested content” from the content preferences section in Instagram’s settings. This will, according to Meta, allow you to “start fresh” and provide an opportunity to re-tune the app’s suggestions.

But while this may help you get an Instagram feed that better reflects your current interests, Meta notes that doing this kind of “reset” doesn’t delete any of your data from the app or change how the company serves you ads. (Instagram has a separate setting to personalize ad preferences.)

Meta is framing the change as part of its push to bring new safety features to teens, even though the feature will be available to all users. “We want to give teens new ways to shape their Instagram experience, so it can continue to reflect their passions and interests as they evolve,” the company wrote in a blog post. The service has previously faced criticism over its recommendations, which EU regulators have suggested could encourage “addictive behavior.”

The company notes that it has other teen-specific features meant to prevent its younger users from seeing inappropriate content. It recently introduced “teen accounts,” which have stricter privacy settings, and attempts to block certain types of harmful content from appearing in their feeds.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/instagram-will-let-you-reset-your-recommendations-120022492.html?src=rss

America’s ‘news influencers’ skew conservative, Pew report finds

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It’s no secret that non-traditional news sources are becoming an increasingly relevant part of the already fractured online media environment. But a new report from Pew Research and the Knight Foundation offers a more complete picture of what the growing crop of “news influencers” on social media believe.

Titled “America’s News Influencers,” the report is based on a survey of 10,000 US adults, as well as an analysis of 500 “news influencers.” Pew defined the latter group as “individuals who regularly post about current events and civic issues on social media and have at least 100,000 followers” on Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok or YouTube.

The report highlights the growing popularity of these accounts, particularly among younger Americans. The researchers note that 20 percent of US adults report “regularly” relying on influencers as a news source, and that the number climbs to 37 percent for people between the ages of 18 and 29.

It also offers new insights about the people behind these influential accounts. The researchers found that news influencers are far more likely to be men and “slightly more likely” to identify with the political right than the left. (Pew notes that about half of the influencer accounts studied didn’t explicitly identify with a political ideology.)

But regardless of political affiliation, it’s clear that influencers are tapping into a real demand for non-traditional news sources. “There's no partisan split,” says Galen Stocking, a senior researcher at Pew. “Republicans and Democrats are saying they're getting news regularly from news influencers at roughly the same rate.”

Pew’s researchers did, however, uncover some notable differences between platforms. While most of the 500 influencers they studied were active on multiple platforms, X was by far the most popular with 85 percent of influencers having a presence on the platform formerly known as Twitter. News influencers on X were also more likely to “explicitly identify with the political right (28 percent) than the left (21 percent),” the report says.

In fact, that trend holds true for almost all of the platforms in the study. On Instagram, 30 percent of news influencers identified with the right while 25 percent identified with the left. YouTube had a similar split with 28 percent right-leaning influencers and 21 percent left leaning. On Facebook, it was even more pronounced. “Influencers on Facebook are particularly likely to prominently express right-leaning views: There are three times as many explicitly conservative news influencers (39%) as liberal ones (13%) on the site,” the report notes.

news influencers
Pew-Knight Initiative

TikTok, meanwhile, looks somewhat different. It was the only platform to have a slightly higher share of left-leaning news influencers, at 28 percent, compared with 25 percent on the right. It also had the highest share of women news influencers at 45 percent.

While the report doesn’t attempt to unpack what the greater share of conservative voices may mean, Stocking points out that the social media users surveyed by Pew also expressed some differences in how they perceive the content shared by news influencers. “There's actually a pretty interesting gap where the moderates within the parties are less likely to say that it helps them better understand current events,” Stocking tells Engadget.

Pew’s researchers are far from the first to note that the political right is often more prominent on social media. A 2021 report from Media Matters found that posts from Facebook pages aligned with the political right consistently outperformed those from “nonaligned and left-leaning pages.” Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found in 2022 that conservative news was more visible on the platform then known as Twitter.

And while Pew doesn’t speculate about whether platforms themselves are incentivizing certain viewpoints, the researchers note that their findings are at odds with what many on the right believe about mainstream social media. “Many Republicans have long believed that social media sites censor conservative viewpoints,” the report says. “But overall, more news influencers explicitly present a politically right-leaning orientation than a left-leaning one (27% vs. 21%) in their account bios, posts, websites or media coverage.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/americas-news-influencers-skew-conservative-pew-report-finds-150002876.html?src=rss

Roblox restricts DMs for kids under 13 and beefs up parental controls in safety push

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Roblox is adding new restrictions to younger kids’ accounts and revamping its parental control features as part of a push to beef up the safety features on its platform. The changes come after damaging reports about the company’s safety practices and amid a broader industry reckoning over online platforms’ effect on kids.

Now, Roblox is drastically limiting the ability of its youngest users to interact with others on its service. The company plans “over the next few months” to bar all kids under 13 from exchanging private messages with other users outside of specific games or experiences. The company will continue to allow younger kids to see messages publicly broadcast within games and experiences, but they won’t be able to message other users without parental permission.

The added restrictions follow a previous update in which the company barred kids under 13 from accessing certain types of experiences. This included unrated experiences, as well as “Social Hangouts and Free-form User Creation experiences.”

Roblox is also making it easier for parents to set up and tweak their parental control preferences. With the changes, some of which were previously detailed by Bloomberg, parents will be able to monitor their children’s Roblox usage and settings from their own devices. Previously, Roblox’s parental control features required parents to make adjustments on their child’s device. Now, parents are able to get push notification when their kids want approval for specific actions like joining an experience with a higher maturity rating. Parents will also be able to keep tabs on their kids’ screen time stats and set daily limits, after which the app will be inaccessible.

The changes are Roblox’s latest effort to address safety concerns about its service. A report in Bloomberg Businessweek earlier this year detailed what it described as Roblox’s “pedophile problem,” noting that “since 2018, police in the US have arrested at least two dozen people accused of abducting or abusing victims they’d met or groomed using Roblox.” Hindenburg Research, a firm known for short-selling, also recently published a report in which it accused Roblox of failing to protect children from being targeted by predators.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/roblox-restricts-dms-for-kids-under-13-and-beefs-up-parental-controls-in-safety-push-120031833.html?src=rss

Meta is testing custom feeds for Threads

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As the competition between Bluesky and Threads heats up, Meta is adding a new feature to Threads that will likely look familiar to Bluesky users: custom feeds. The Meta-owned service is starting to test a feature that allows users to pin topic-based feeds to the home screen of the app.

The change will give people additional feeds beyond the algorithmic “for you,” which will remain the default view, and their “following feed.” Users can add custom feeds by searching a keyword like “skincare” and then tapping the “...” menu and selecting “create new feed.” These feeds can be further customized by adding specific profiles of people whose posts you want to see in that feed. Users are able to add up to 128 custom feeds in the app, a Meta spokesperson said, though it’s still only a test for now so not all users have access to it just yet.

The feature is similar in many ways to Bluesky’s custom feeds, which the company introduced last year. But while there are dozens of user-created algorithmic feeds in the app, making a new one is still a technical process. Meta’s version of the feature, however, is more straightforward. It could also address some users’ complaints about Threads’ main algorithmic feed.

The latest Threads feature comes as Bluesky has had a particularly good month. Though the service is still far smaller than Threads, which has more than 275 million users, Bluesky, which has just under 17 million users at the time of this writing, has been gaining momentum. The decentralized service added a million new users in the week following the election, and added another million new sign-ups in a single day this week. That’s striking considering Threads has also been growing by about a million users a day, according to a recent post from Instagram chief Adam Mosseri. If Bluesky is able to sustain that level of growth for very long, Meta may feel even more pressure to borrow some ideas from its smaller rival.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-is-testing-custom-feeds-for-threads-183948414.html?src=rss

Snapchat will let parents track their kids through Family Center

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Snapchat is adding new location tracking abilities to its parental control features. The changes will give parents new visibility into their children’s Snap Map settings and allow them to keep tabs on their whereabouts.

The new features, which will be available “over the coming weeks,” will be added to Snapchat’s Family Center, the app’s portal for parental control features. With the updates, parents will be able to request to view their child’s location or share their own. Parents can also opt to receive “travel notifications” when their child leaves specific places, like their school or home.

Separately, Family Center, which already allows parents to keep tabs on who their children are chatting with, will also allow them to see who their teen has shared their location with in the app’s Snap Map.

That feature could help address some criticism the company has faced about the role its app’s location sharing abilities has played in crucial safety issues. Snapchat’s location sharing has come under particular scrutiny by safety advocates who have alleged it had enabled teens to connect with strangers, including drug dealers and potential predators. The feature was called out in a lawsuit brought by New Mexico’s Attorney General earlier this year over alleged safety lapses at the company.

In its latest update, Snap notes that it bars all users from sharing their location info with users who aren’t already their friends. And the company says it plans to push additional reminders to users about their Snap Map settings “prompting them to be extra thoughtful about their” choices.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/snapchat-will-let-parents-track-their-kids-through-family-center-130004215.html?src=rss

Bluesky surges to 15 million users after getting a million sign-ups in one week

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Bluesky may still be the underdog in the race for alternatives to X, but the once Twitter-affiliated service is gaining momentum. The app just passed the 15 million user mark after adding more than a million new users over the last week, the company said in an update.

While Bluesky is still considerably smaller than Threads, which with 275 million users is its biggest rival, there are signs that Threads users have been increasingly curious about the upstart. “Bluesky” has been a trending topic on Threads in recent days and an in-app search suggestion shows there are more than 19,000 posts about “Bluesky.” Bluesky itself has also made a push to win over Threads users in recent weeks by posting regularly on the Meta-owned service.

That effort seems to be working. A month ago, Engadget noted, the service had just under 9 million users. Its mobile app also has the top spot in Apple’s App Store, followed by Threads and ChatGPT. Its recent success also seems to be driven, at least in part, by frustration with Elon Musk and X following the US presidential election.

A recent report from web analytics company SimilarWeb found that “more than 115,000 US web visitors deactivated their accounts,” on November 7, “more than on any previous day of Elon Musk’s tenure.” The report also noted that “web traffic and daily active users for Bluesky increased dramatically in the week before the election, and then again after election day,” with Bluesky at points seeing more web traffic than Threads. (Threads’ mobile usage, however, is still “far ahead” of Bluesky.)

Traffic for Threads and Bluesky according to SimilarWeb.
SimilarWeb

“In the US, Bluesky got more web visits than Threads in the immediate aftermath of the election,” the report notes. “For context, it’s important to note that both services are app centric, even though they support a web user interface.”

On its part, Bluesky seems intent on distinguishing itself from its larger, billionaire-controlled rivals. The company, which began as an internal project at Twitter before it spun off into an independent entity, has experimented with novel features like custom feeds, user-created moderation services and “starter packs” for new users.

“You're probably used to being trapped in a single algorithm controlled by a small group of people, that's no longer the case,” Bluesky’s COO Rose Wang shared in a video aimed at new users Tuesday. “On Bluesky, there are about 50,000 different feeds … these feeds provide a cozy corner for you to meet people with similar interests. And you can actually make friends again, because you're no longer tied to a dominant algorithm that promotes either the most polarizing posts and or the biggest brands, and that's the mandate of Bluesky.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/bluesky-surges-to-15-million-users-after-getting-a-million-sign-ups-in-one-week-224213573.html?src=rss

Meta will reportedly bring ads to Threads as soon as January

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Threads could start getting ads much sooner than Meta has let on. The company is now planning to bring ads to its newest app “early next year” with the first ads arriving in January of 2025, according to a new report in The Information.

That suggests Meta is looking to start making money on the rapidly growing service far sooner than Meta executives have previously suggested. In August, when the app reached 200 million users, Mark Zuckerberg said Threads could become the company’s next billion-user service. He said making money off the app would be a "multi-year" effort. 

“All these new products, we ship them, and then there's a multi-year time horizon between scaling them and then scaling them into not just consumer experiences but very large businesses,” Zuckerberg said. In the company’s most recent earnings call, Meta CFO Susan Li said the company doesn’t “expect Threads to be a meaningful driver of 2025 revenue at this time.”

According to The Information, Meta is planning a slow rollout for ads on Threads. The company will start with “a small number” of advertisers in January. It’s unclear how quickly the effort may expand. "Since our priority is to build consumer value first and foremost, there are no ads or monetization features currently on Threads," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. 

Meta’s reported plans highlight just how quickly the service has grown in recent months. Threads has 275 million monthly users and is seeing more than 1 million new sign-ups a day, according to Zuckerberg. That makes it by far the largest of the X alternatives that have sprung up over the last couple years.

Bluesky, another popular Twitter-like service, has also seen significant growth recently, adding a million new users in the last week, the company said Tuesday. It is still much smaller than Threads with 15 million users. Like Threads, it also currently has no advertising and the company has said it plans to experiment with subscription-based features.

Update November 13, 2024, 2 PM ET: Added a statement from a Meta spokesperson. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-will-reportedly-bring-ads-to-threads-as-soon-as-january-183044211.html?src=rss

Elon Musk will lead a new ‘Department of Government Efficiency,’ Donald Trump says

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President-elect Donald Trump has named Elon Musk as the leader of a new “Department of Government Efficiency," that will “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” The Tesla CEO and owner of X will spearhead the effort along with former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump announced in a statement on Truth Social.

The scope of the role isn’t exactly clear. Trump’s press release said that “the Department of Government Efficiency will provide advice and guidance from outside of Government, and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before.” It also stated that “their work will conclude no later than July 4, 2026.”

Musk shared the news on X, but didn’t indicate how the role might impact his obligations at his various other companies. Musk, who poured millions of dollars into Super Pac boosting Trump’s campaign, has previously talked about his desire to work with Trump to cut government spending. He did, however, joke about potential "merch" for the operation. "Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of 'DOGE' for a very long time," Trump's statement said. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/elon-musk-will-lead-a-new-department-of-government-efficiency-donald-trump-says-015521217.html?src=rss

Canada orders TikTok to shut down its business operations in the country due to ‘national security risks’

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Canada has ordered TikTok to shut down its operations in the country, citing unspecified “national security risks” posed by the company and its parent ByteDance. With the move, TikTok will be forced to “wind up” all business in the country, though the Canadian government stopped short of banning the app.

“The government is taking action to address the specific national security risks related to ByteDance Ltd.’s operations in Canada through the establishment of TikTok Technology Canada, Inc,” Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne said in a statement. “The decision was based on the information and evidence collected over the course of the review and on the advice of Canada’s security and intelligence community and other government partners.”

Canada’s crackdown on TikTok follows a “multi-step national security review process” by its intelligence agencies, the government said in a statement. As the CBC points out, the country previously banned the app from official government devices. It also comes several months after the United States passed a law that could ban the app stateside. US lawmakers have also cited national security concerns and the app’s ties to China. TikTok has mounted an extensive legal challenge to the law.

In a statement, a TikTok spokesperson said the company would challenge Canada’s order as well. "Shutting down TikTok’s Canadian offices and destroying hundreds of well-paying local jobs is not in anyone's best interest, and today's shutdown order will do just that,” the spokesperson said. “We will challenge this order in court. The TikTok platform will remain available for creators to find an audience, explore new interests and for businesses to thrive."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/canada-orders-tiktok-to-shut-down-its-business-operations-in-the-country-due-to-national-security-risks-002615440.html?src=rss