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Meta confirms launch of a bonus program for creators on Threads | TechCrunch

April 29, 2024 10:05 PM0


Meta’s Threads social network passed the 150 million monthly users mark recently, but the company is not slowing down its growth engine. To increase engagement, the social media giant is running a limited-time bonus program for Threads.

Over the last few days, many accounts have posted about this program. The company confirmed to TechCrunch about a limited-time invite-only program for creators, which began testing in March. Meta said that invited creators will have “individualized” requirements for bonuses. At the moment, the program is just limited to creators in the U.S. The company said it might expand the program to other regions if successful.

On its support page, Meta says that invited creators must make a public Threads profile and follow the rules of Instagram creator incentive terms and rules for bonuses on Instagram. The company specified that the performance of Threads’ posts (views) and the number of posts are some of the parameters for creators to receive bonuses.

There are also specific guidelines for what kind of posts would be eligible for the bonus program.

For instance, one of the requirements states that a post must receive at least 2,500 views. Apart from that, Threads posts with copyrighted material, no text, and boosted views won’t be eligible for bonuses. Meta adds that the content shouldn’t have a watermark of another platform such as TikTok or YouTube. Plus, the posted content shouldn’t be a brand partnership post.

Creators can check their earnings on the professional dashboard and they might need to a earn minimum amount to receive a payout.

“In some cases, you must earn a minimum amount to receive a bonus payout. If you don’t reach the minimum amount, you will not receive any bonus payout, but you may be invited to participate in another bonus opportunity in the future,” the company explains.

This program might push Instagram users with substantial following to post more on Threads and, in turn, also port over some of their following. Instagram already shows suggested Threads on its app. Users might want to check out the Meta’s X rival more frequently if their favorite creators are posting on the app.

The new bonus program is also a good opportunity for creators who might want to build out an audience on the new platform. However, the monetary benefits might be temporary as Meta hasn’t detailed long-term plans for creators to earn money on Threads.




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Robotic Automations

Meta AI tested: Doesn't quite justify its own existence, but free is free | TechCrunch

April 27, 2024 1:37 AM0


Meta’s new large language model, Llama 3, powers the imaginatively named “Meta AI,” a newish chatbot that the social media and advertising company has installed in as many of its apps and interfaces as possible. How does this model stack up against other all-purpose conversational AIs? It tends to regurgitate a lot of web search results, and it doesn’t excel at anything, but hey — the price is right.

You can currently access Meta AI for free on the web at Meta.ai, on Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and probably a few other places if those aren’t enough. It was available before now, but the releases of Llama 3 and the new Imagine image generator (not to be confused with Google’s Imagen) have led Meta to promote it as a first stop for the AI-curious. After all, you’ll probably use it by accident since they replaced your search box with it!

Mark Zuckerberg even said he expects Meta AI to be “the most used and best AI assistant in the world.” It’s important to have goals.

A quick reminder about our “review” process: this is a very informal evaluation of the model, not with synthetic benchmarks but just asking ordinary questions that normal people might, and comparing the results to our experience with other models, or just to what you would hope to get from one. It’s the farthest thing from comprehensive, but it’s something anyone can understand and replicate.

You can read about our method, such as it is, here:

Why it’s impossible to review AIs, and why TechCrunch is doing it anyway

We’re always changing and adjusting our approach, and will sometimes include something odd we found or exclude stuff that didn’t really seem relevant. For instance, this time, although it’s our general policy not to try to evaluate media generation (it’s a whole other can of worms), my colleague Ivan noticed that the Imagine model was demonstrating a set of biases around Indian people. We’ll have that article up shortly (Meta might already be on to us).

Also, as a PSA at the start, you should be aware that an apparent bug on Instagram prevented me from deleting the queries I’d sent. So I would avoid asking anything you wouldn’t want showing up in your search history. Also, the web version didn’t work in Firefox for me.

News and current events

First up, I asked Meta AI about what’s going on between Israel and Iran. It responded with a concise, bulleted list, helpfully including dates, though it only cited a single CNN article. Like many other prompts I tried, this one ends in a link to a Bing search when on the web interface and a Google search in Instagram. I asked Meta and a spokesperson said that these are basically search promotion partnerships.

(Images in this post are just for reference, and don’t necessarily show the entire response.)

Image Credits: Meta/TechCrunchTo check whether Meta AI was somehow piggybacking on Bing’s own AI model (which Microsoft in turn borrows from OpenAI), I clicked through and looked at the Copilot answer to the suggested query. It also had a bulleted list with roughly the same info but better in-line links and more citations. Definitely different.

Meta AI’s response was factual and up to date, if not particularly eloquent. The mobile response was considerably more compressed, and harder to get at the sources of, so be aware you’re getting a truncated answer there.

Next, I asked if there were any recent trends on Tiktok that a parent should be aware of. It replied with a high-level summary of what creators do on the social network, but nothing recent. Yes, I’m aware that people do “Comedity skits: Humorous, relatable, or parody content” on Tiktok, thank you.

Image Credits: Meta/TechCrunch

Interestingly, when I asked a similar question about trends on Instagram, I got an upbeat response using marketing-type phrases like “Replying with Reels creates conversations” and “AI generates new opportunities” and “Text posts thrive on the ‘gram.” I thought maybe it was being unfairly positive about its creator’s platforms, but no — turns out it was just regurgitating, word for word, an SEO bait Instagram trends post from Hootsuite.

If I ask Meta’s AI on Instagram about trends on Instagram, I would hope for something a little more interesting. If I wanted to read chum I would just search for it.

History and context

I asked Meta AI to help me find some primary sources for some research I’m supposedly doing on Supreme Court decisions in the late 19th century.

Image Credits: Meta/TechCrunch

Its response relied heavily on an inoffensive but primary-free SEO-ed up post listing a number of notable 19th-century decisions. Not exactly what I asked for, and then at the end it also listed an 1896 founding document for the People’s Party, a left-leaning party from that era. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the Supreme Court, but Meta AI cites this page, which describes some justices as holding opposite views to the party. A strange and irrelevant inclusion.

Other models provided context and summaries of the trends of the era. I wouldn’t use Meta AI as a research assistant.

Some basic trivia questions, like who won the most medals in the 1984 Olympics and what notable events occurred that year, were answered and cited sufficiently.

Image Credits: Meta/TechCrunch

It’s a little annoying that it gathers its citation numbers at the top and then the links at the bottom. What’s the point of numbering them unless the numbers pertain to certain claims or facts? Some other models will cite in-line, which for research or fact-checking is much more convenient.

Controversy

I asked Meta AI why Donald Trump’s supporters are predominantly older and white. It’s the kind of question that is factual in a sense but obviously a bit more sensitive than asking about medal counts. The response was pretty even-handed, even pushing back on the assertion inherent to the question:

Image Credits: Meta/TechCrunch

Unfortunately, it didn’t provide any sources or links to searches for this one. Too bad, since this kind of interaction is a great opportunity for people to learn something new.

I asked about the rise of white nationalism as well and got a pretty solid list of reasons why we’re seeing the things we are around the world. Meta AI did say that “It’s crucial to address these factors through education, empathy, and inclusive policies to combat the rise of white nationalism and promote a more equitable society.” So it didn’t adopt one of those aggressively neutral stances you sometimes see. No links or sources on this one either — I suspect they are avoiding citations for now on certain topics, which I kind of understand but also… this is where citations are most needed?

Medical

I told Meta AI that my (fictitious) 9-year-old was developing a rash after eating a cupcake and asked what I should do. Interestingly, it wrote out a whole response and then deleted it, saying “Sorry, I can’t help you with this request right now,” and told me that I had stopped it from completing the response. Sir, no.

Image Credits: Meta/TechCrunch

So I asked it again and it gave me a similar answer (which you see above), consisting of perfectly reasonable and general advice for someone looking to handle a potential allergic reaction. This was likely one of these retrospective “whoops, maybe I shouldn’t have said that” type rollbacks where the model only realizes what it’s done too late.

Same for a question about supplements: it gave an even-handed and reasonably well sourced answer, including common dosages, costs, and questions around efficacy.

In mental health, its advice around anxiety and medication was predictably straightforward and safe (basically, “I’m not a doctor, consult a pro”), and when I asked who I should call if having serious trouble, it listed the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-TALK) and a crisis text line (741741) among other things. No links or sources, though. A reasonable and humane response.

Summary

When I had Meta AI summarize a recent article I wrote, it kind of just picked important-sounding sentences to repeat from it, mostly word for word. That’s not wrong, exactly, but I wouldn’t say it’s a summary.

And when it did tweak a sentence, it slightly changed the meaning: originally I wrote that Intuitive Machines “will almost certainly be firing on all cylinders to take on what could be a multi-billion-dollar contract.” The summary says the company “will almost certainly be taking on what could be…” which could mislead some to think that IM is a shoo-in rather than a company that will strive for that contract. In fairness, I could have phrased it more clearly myself.

When I asked it to do the same thing in under 100 words, it did better — kind of.

The summary was more concise, but it brought in a claim from Musk that Starship could return samples from Mars in five years — something I specifically didn’t include in my article because he makes lots of unsubstantiated claims like that. The AI must have gotten this from the other four articles it cited, for some reason, in the “summary” of mine. If I ask for a summary I don’t expect a model to bring in outside information to add onto it.

Content

Marketing copy suggestions for an imaginary clothing brand I claimed to be promoting were exactly what you’d expect, which goes to show how rote this task is becoming. No doubt Meta in particular has an endless supply of captions like this to train on. Pity the marketers — their hard work penning millions pithy pitches for their brands has defined a style at which AI has become quite adept.

Image Credits: Meta/TechCrunch

When asked for some farmer jokes, it gave some real stinkers.

Why did the farmer’s chicken go to the doctor?
Because it had a fowl cough!
And here’s another one:
Why did the farmer take his pig to the movie theater?
To see “Babe”!
Wow… awful. But we can’t expect much better from these models. Mostly this kind of question is just to see if it does something weird or repeats something from a particular community anyway — I’m not looking for material (currently).

Conclusion

Meta has positioned its AI as a first layer for casual questions, and it does work. But for the most part it seemed to just be doing a search for what you ask about and quoting liberally from the top results. And half the time it included the search at the end anyway. So why not just use Google or Bing in the first place?

Some of the “suggested” queries I tried, like tips to overcome writer’s block, produced results that didn’t quote directly from (or source) anyone. But they were also totally unoriginal. Again, a normal internet search not powered by a huge language model, inside a social media app, accomplishes more or less the same thing with less cruft.

Meta AI produced highly straightforward, almost minimal answers. I don’t necessarily expect an AI to go beyond the scope of my original query, and in some cases that would be a bad thing. But when I ask what ingredients are needed for a recipe, isn’t the point of having a conversation with an AI that it intuits my intention and offers something more than literally scraping the list from the top Bing result?

I’m not a big user of these platforms to begin with, but Meta AI didn’t convince me it’s useful for anything in particular. To be fair it is one of the few models that’s both free and stays up to date with current events by searching online. In comparing it now and then to the free Copilot model on Bing, the latter usually worked better, but I hit my daily “conversation limit” after just a few exchanges. (It’s not clear what if any usage limits Meta will place on Meta AI.)

If you can’t be bothered to open a browser to search for “lunar new year” or “quinoa water ratio,” you can probably ask Meta AI if you’re already in one of the company’s apps (and often, you are). You can’t ask Tiktok that! Yet.


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Robotic Automations

Why Meta is looking to the fediverse as the future for social media | TechCrunch

April 26, 2024 2:25 AM0


Meta’s move into the open social web, also known as the fediverse, is puzzling. Does the Facebook owner see open protocols as the future? Will it embrace the fediverse only to shut it down, shifting people back to its proprietary platforms and decimating startups building in the space? Will it bring its advertising empire to the fediverse, where today clients like Mastodon and others remain ad-free?

One possible answer as can be teased out of a conversation between two Meta employees working on Threads and Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, whose company joined the fediverse with its support of ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon and others.

On McCue’s “Flipboard Dot Social” podcast, he spoke to two leaders building the Threads experience, Director of Product Management Rachel Lambert and software engineer Peter Cottle. McCue raised questions and concerns shared by others working on fediverse projects, including what Meta’s involvement means for this space, and whether Meta would eventually abandon Threads and the fediverse, leaving a destroyed ecosystem in its wake.

Lambert responded by pointing out that Meta has other open source efforts in the works, so “pulling the rug” on its fediverse work would come at a “very high cost” for the company, since it would be detrimental to Meta’s work trying to build trust with other open source communities.

For example, the company is releasing some of its work on large language models (LLMs) as open source products, like Llama.

In addition, she believes that Meta will be able to continue to build trust over time with those working in the fediverse by releasing features and hitting milestones, as it did recently with the launch of the new toggle that lets Threads users publish their posts to the wider fediverse, where they can be viewed on Mastodon and other apps.

But more importantly, McCue (and all of us) wanted to know: why is Meta engaged with the fediverse to begin with?

Meta today has 3.24 billion people using its social apps daily, according to its Q1 2024 earnings. Does it really need a few million more?

Lambert answered this question indirectly, by explaining the use case for Threads as a place to have public conversations in real time. She suggested that connecting to the fediverse would help users find a broader audience than those they could reach on Threads alone.

That’s only true to a point, however. While the fediverse is active and growing, Threads is already a dominant app in the space. Outside of Threads’ now 150 million monthly active users, the wider fediverse has just north of 10 million users. Mastodon, a top federated app, has fallen below 1 million monthly active users after Threads launched.

So if Threads joining the fediverse is not about significantly widening creators’ reach, then what is Meta’s aim?

The Meta employees’ remarks hinted at a broader reason behind Meta’s shift to the fediverse.

Bringing the creator economy to the open social web

Image Credits: Meta

Lambert suggests that, by joining the fediverse, creators on Threads have the opportunity to “own their audiences in ways that they aren’t able to own on other apps today.”

But this isn’t only about account portability, it’s also about creators and their revenue streams potentially leaving Meta’s walled garden. If creators wanted to leave Meta for other social apps where they had more direct relationships with fans, there are still few sizable options outside of TikTok and YouTube.

If those creators joined the fediverse — perhaps to get away from Meta’s hold on their livelihoods — Threads users would still benefit from their content. (Cue “Hotel California“). 

Later in the podcast, Cottle expands on how this could play out at the protocol level, as well, if creators offered their followers the ability to pay for access to their content.

“You could imagine an extension to the protocol eventually — of saying like, ‘I want to support micropayments,’ or…like, ‘hey, feel free to show me ads, if that supports you.’ Kind of like a way for you to self-label or self-opt-in. That would be great,” Cottle noted, speaking casually. Whether or not Meta would find a way to get a cut of those micropayments, of course, remains to be seen.

McCue riffed on the idea that fediverse users could become creators where some of their content became available to subscribers only, similar to how Patreon works. For instance, fediverse advocate and co-editor of ActivityPub Evan Prodromou created a paid Mastodon account (@[email protected]) that users could subscribe to for $5 per month to gain access. If he’s on board with paid content, surely others would follow. Cottle agreed that the model could work with the fediverse, too.

He additionally suggested there are ways the fediverse could monetize beyond donations, which is what often powers various efforts today, like Mastodon. Cottle said someone might even make a fediverse experience that consumers would pay for, the way some fediverse client apps are paid today.

“The servers aren’t free to run. And eventually, somebody needs to find a way to…sustain the costs of the business,” he pointed out. Could Meta be pondering a paid federated experience, like Medium launched?

Moderation services at the protocol Level

The podcast yielded another possible answer as to what Meta may be working on in the space, with a suggestion that it could bring its moderation expertise to the ActivityPub protocol.

“A lot of the instruments that we have for people to feel safe and to feel like they’re able to personalize their experience are pretty blunt today. So, you can block users…you can do server-level blocking overall, which is a really big action, but you’re kind of missing some other tools in there that are a little bit more like proportional response,” explained Lambert.

Today, fediverse users can’t do things like filter their followers or replies for offensive content or behavior. “That would be great for us to develop as more of a standard at the protocol level,” she added.

Still, Lambert said that whatever work Meta does it wouldn’t expect everyone in the fediverse to adopt its own toolkit.

Image Credits: Automattic

“We’ve built our technology around a set of policies, and our policies are informed by a lot of different inputs from civil rights groups, policy stakeholders, and just the values of our company, generally. So we certainly wouldn’t want to presume that that is now the standard within the fediverse for how to do moderate, but making those tools more available so people have that option seems like a really compelling path from our perspective.”

Meta’s plan also sounds a lot like Bluesky’s idea around stackable moderation services, where third parties can offer moderation services on top of Bluesky either as independent projects from individuals or communities or even as paid subscription products.

Perhaps Meta, too, sees a future where its existing moderation capabilities become a subscription revenue product across the wider open social web.

Finally, Lambert described a fediverse user experience where you could follow the conversations taking place around a post across multiple servers more easily.

“I think that in combination with the tools that allow you to personalize that experience will….help people feel more safe and in control,” she said.


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Threads launches custom mute filters, teases controls for quote posts | TechCrunch

April 25, 2024 11:54 PM0


Threads and Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced today that Threads is launching a new feature that lets users filter out words and phrases from their feeds and mentions. The “Hidden Words” feature automatically mutes common words, phrases, and emojis that might be offensive to users. In addition to these preset filters, users can add their own custom words and phrases in the settings. Users can turn these settings off at any point in time.

Earlier this week, dating app Hinge launched its own “Hidden Words” feature (yes, with the same name) to block requests with comments that contain unwanted words.

Image Credits: Threads

Threads said that the feature will filter out content from both the “Following” and “For You” feeds, search results, profiles, and replies to posts.

Controls for quoting posts

The Meta-owned social network already allows users to control who could reply to their posts: anyone, profiles you follow, or mentioned people only. Threads also have the option to restrict who can mention you in their posts, replies, and bio: everyone, profiles you follow, or no one.

Now the company is planning to introduce similar controls for quote posts. Threads said that it will soon let you limit who could quote your posts. Additionally, users will be able to manually unquote their posts as well.

The company’s rationale behind these new controls for quote posts is that it wants to restrict unwanted interactions.

“Since quoting a post is one of the most visible ways to connect with someone on Threads, it was important for us to give people more agency over who can engage with them and help reduce unwanted interactions,” a company spokesperson said.

Separately, Theards is also testing a way to mute notifications for interactions with posts. While some of these features aren’t available just yet, the company is still shipping new features at a rapid pace as it has started testing a way for people to archive posts automatically.

Image Credits: Threads

During Meta’s earnings call on Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that Threads has over 150 million monthly active users.


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Meta could face further squeeze on surveillance ads model in EU | TechCrunch

April 25, 2024 8:15 PM0


Meta’s tracking ads business could be facing further legal blows in the European Union: An influential advisor to the bloc’s top court affirmed Thursday that the region’s privacy laws limits on how long people’s data can be used for targeted advertising.

In the non-legally binding opinion, Advocate General Athanasios Rantos said use of personal data for advertising must be limited.

This is important because Meta’s tracking ads business relies upon ingesting vast amounts of personal data to build profiles of individuals to target them with advertising messages. Any limits on how it can use personal data could limit its ability to profit off of people’s attention.

A final ruling on the point remains pending — typically these arrive three to six months after an AG opinion — but the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) often takes a similar view to its advisors.

The CJEU’s role, meanwhile, is to clarify the application of EU law so its rulings are keenly watched as they steer how lower courts and regulators uphold the law.

Proportionality in the frame

Per AG Rantos, data retention for ads must take account of the principle of proportionality, a general principle of EU law that also applies to the bloc’s privacy framework, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — such as when determining a lawful basis for processing. A key requirement of the regulation is to have a legal basis for handling people’s information.

In a press release the CJEU writes with emphasis: “Rantos proposes that the Court should rule that the GDPR precludes the processing of personal data for the purposes of targeted advertising without restriction as to time. The national court must assess, based inter alia on the principle of proportionality, the extent to which the data retention period and the amount of data processed are justified having regard to the legitimate aim of processing those data for the purposes of personalised advertising.”

The CJEU is considering two legal questions referred to it by a court in Austria. These relate to a privacy challenge, dating back to 2020, brought against Meta’s adtech business by Max Schrems, a lawyer and privacy campaigner. Schrems is well known in Europe as he’s already racked up multiple privacy wins against Meta — which have led to penalties that have cost the tech giant well over a billion dollars in fines since the GDPR came into force.

An internal memo by Meta engineers, obtained by Motherboard/Vice back in 2022, painted a picture of a company unable to apply policies to limit its use of people’s data after ingestion by its ads systems as it had “built a system with open borders”, as the document put it. Although Meta disputed the characterization, claiming at the time the document “does not describe our extensive processes and controls to comply with privacy regulations”.

But it’s clear Meta’s core business model relies on its ability to track and profile web users to operate its microtargeted advertising business. So any hard legal limits on its ability to process and retain people’s data could have big implications for its profitability. To wit: Last year, Meta suggested around 10% of its worldwide ad revenue is generated in the EU.

In recent months, European Union lawmakers and regulators have also notably been dialling up pressure on the adtech giant to ditch its addiction to surveillance advertising — with the Commission explicitly name-checking the existence of alternative ad models, such as contextual advertising, when it opened an investigation into Meta’s binary “consent or pay” user offer last month, under the market power-focused Digital Markets Act.

A key GDPR steering body, meanwhile, also put out guidance on “consent or pay” earlier this month — stressing that larger ad platforms like Meta must give users a “real choice” about decisions affecting their privacy.

No sensitive data free-for-all for ads

In today’s opinion, AG Rantos has also opined on a second point that’s been referred to the court: Namely whether making “manifestly” public certain personal information — in this case, info related to Schrems’ sexual orientation — gives Meta carte blanche to retrospectively claim it can use the sensitive data for ad targeting.

Schrems had complained he received ads on Facebook targeting his sexuality. He subsequently discussed his sexuality publicly but had argued the GDPR principle of purpose limitation must be applied in parallel, referencing a core plank of the regulation that limits further processing of personal data (i.e. without a new valid legal basis such as obtaining the user’s consent).

AG Rantos’ opinion appears to align with Schrems’. Discussing this point, the press release notes (again with emphasis): “while data concerning sexual orientation fall into the category of data that enjoy particular protection and the processing of which is prohibited, that prohibition does not apply when the data are manifestly made public by the data subject. Nevertheless, this position does not in itself permit the processing of those data for the purposes of personalised advertising.”

In an initial reaction to the AG’s views on both legal questions, Schrems, who is founder and chairman of the European privacy rights nonprofit, noyb, welcomed the opinion, via his lawyer for the case against Meta, Katharina Raabe-Stuppnig.

“At the moment, the online advertising industry simply stores everything forever. The law is clear that the processing must stop after a few days or weeks. For Meta, this would mean that a large part of the information they have collected over the last decade would become taboo for advertising,” she wrote in a statement highlighting the importance of limits on data retention for ads.

“Meta has basically been building a huge data pool on users for 20 years now, and it is growing every day. EU law, however, requires ‘data minimisation’. If the Court follows the opinion, only a small part of this pool will be allowed to be used for advertising — even if have consented to ads,” she added.

On the issue of further use of sensitive data that’s been made public, she said: “This issue is highly relevant for anyone who makes a public statement. Do you retroactively waive your right to privacy for even totally unrelated information, or can only the statement itself be used for the purpose intended by the speaker? If the Court interprets this as a general ‘waiver’ of your rights, it would chill any online speech on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter.”

Reached for its own reaction to the AG opinion, Meta spokesman Matthew Pollard told TechCrunch it would await the court ruling.

The company also claims to have “overhauled privacy” since 2019, suggesting it’s spent €5BN+ on EU-related privacy compliance issues and expanding user controls. “Since 2019, we have overhauled privacy at Meta and invested over five billion Euros to embed privacy at the heart of our products,” wrote Meta in an emailed statement. “Everyone using Facebook has access to a wide range of settings and tools that allow people to manage how we use their information.”

On sensitive data, Pollard highlighted another claim by Meta that it “does not use sensitive data that users provide us to personalise ads”, as the statement puts it.

“We also prohibit advertisers from sharing sensitive information in our terms and we filter out any potentially sensitive information that we’re able to detect,” Meta also wrote, adding: “Further, we’ve taken steps to remove any advertiser targeting options based on topics perceived by users to be sensitive.”

In April 2021, Meta announced a policy change in this area — saying it would no longer allow advertisers to target users with ads based on sensitive categories such as their sexual orientation, race, political beliefs or religion. However, in May 2022, an investigation by the data journalism nonprofit, The Markup, found it was easy for advertisers to circumvent Meta’s ban by using “obvious proxies”.

A CJEU ruling back in August 2022 also looks very relevant here as the court affirmed then that sensitive inferences should be treated as sensitive personal data under the GDPR. Or, put another way, using a proxy for sexual orientation to target ads requires obtaining the same stringent standard of “explicit consent” as directly targeting ads at a person’s sexual orientation would need in order to be lawful processing in the EU.

Meta’s ‘consent or pay’ tactic must not prevail over privacy, EU rights groups warn

Apple, Google and Meta face first formal investigations under EU’s DMA


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Robotic Automations

Mark Zuckerberg says Threads has 150 million monthly active users | TechCrunch

April 25, 2024 9:41 AM0


Meta’s Twitter/X rival Threads is growing at a stable pace. The social network now has more than 150 million monthly active users — up from 130 million in February — Mark Zuckerberg mentioned during the company’s Q1 2024 earnings call.

Since the last quarterly earnings call, Threads has notably taken steps towards integrating with ActivityPub, the decentralized protocol that powers networks like Mastodon. In March, the company allowed U.S.-based users over 18 to connect their accounts to the Fediverse so their posts would show up on other servers.

The company also plans to release its API to a wide set of developers by June, allowing them to build experiences around the social network. However, it is still not clear if Threads will allow developers to make full-fledged third-party clients.

Last week, Meta launched its AI chatbot across Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Threads was a notable exclusion from this list, possibly because of the lack of native DM functionality.

On Wednesday, Threads also released a test feature to let users auto-archive their posts after a period of defined time. They can also archive or unarchive individual posts and make them public.

Threads is roughly nine months old, and Meta has steadily built out the audience. However, it is strictly not an X alternative, as Instagram Head Adam Mosseri said in October that Threads won’t “amplify news on the platform.” But Meta’s social network is still gaining steam. Earlier this week, Business Insider reported that according to app analytics firm Apptopia, Threads now has more daily active users in the U.S. than X.


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Meta opens Quest OS to third-party headset makers, taps Lenovo and Xbox as partners | TechCrunch

April 22, 2024 11:06 PM0


The mixed reality operating system that powers Meta Quest headsets can officially be used by third-party device makers, the company announced on Monday. Now called “Meta Horizon OS,” the open system allows developers to access technologies like eye, face, hand, and body tracking, high-resolution passthrough, and more.

Three major tech players—Asus, Lenovo and Microsoft’s Xbox—are the first companies to confirm they’ll be developing new devices that run the software. Most notably, Microsoft is teaming up with Meta to build a “limited-edition Meta Quest, inspired by Xbox,” according to the announcement. Asus and Lenovo, on the other hand, are building headsets designed for specific use cases. Asus is developing a headset dedicated to gaming whereas Lenovo wants its device to be for “productivity, learning, and entertainment.”

The company says all future headsets can connect via the same Meta Quest app on iOS and Android. Plus, the Meta Quest Store, which the company renamed the Meta Horizon Store, is open to third-party developers, allowing them to use Meta’s frameworks and tools to create new mixed-reality experiences.

Meta Horizon OS is a strategic move for the company and comes at a time when the VR/AR headset wars between Meta, Apple and Sony continue to heat up.

 


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Robotic Automations

Watch: TikTok and Meta's latest moves signal a more commodified internet | TechCrunch

April 21, 2024 8:19 PM0


The internet’s mega-platforms are slowly merging into a great blob of sameness, and even the hottest companies in the world are not immune from the trend. TikTok’s winning strategy to focus on short-form, vertical video has found fans amongst other internet platforms, and now TikTok is taking a page from its rival, books, reportedly borrowing from what made them popular.

TikTok is working toward launching a new app called TikTok Notes that will allow users to post images in an apparent bid to rival Instagram, a service best known for its static-photo-sharing feature. Instagram, of course, has expanded into video and stories itself, taking pieces of other services and incorporating them into its own product.

Instagram’s parent company Meta’s other services are frequent borrowers as well. As is nearly every social service you can imagine. Recall that great Stories Boom that led to everyone from Line to Spotify to Instagram to LinkedIn trying out the popular sharing format. If it works for one social media service, expect the rest to follow in some manner at some point — probably sooner rather than later.

There’s good logic behind the effort. The answer is why X wants to become a super app; the more a service can offer its userbase to do, the more time they may spend inside the app’s walls. Expanding a feature set can bolster engaged time, and therefore how much revenue a social media service can earn. At the same time, bloat is a real issue that can dilute a user experience and render an app, well, Facebook in time.

This theme — the slow commodification of digital services via sameification — is similar to why we’re seeing LinkedIn try to ape The New York Times’ gaming might, and to some degree why major platform companies in tech wind up trying to be good at everything: the never-ending need to grow revenue. Perhaps this is why your favorite app always feels more and more like an alien world as time passes. It will evolve away from what made it special, and unique, because sticking to those guns is not the way to create a service that the maximum number of people will use. For that, you need to become Facebook.


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Robotic Automations

Meta will auto-blur nudity in Instagram DMs in latest teen safety step | TechCrunch

April 20, 2024 5:40 PM0


Meta said on Thursday that it is testing new features on Instagram intended to help safeguard young people from unwanted nudity or sextortion scams. This includes a feature called “Nudity Protection in DMs,” which automatically blurs images detected as containing nudity.

The tech giant said it will also nudge teens to protect themselves by serving a warning encouraging them to think twice about sharing intimate images. Meta hopes this will boost protection against scammers who may send nude images to trick people into sending their own images in return.

The company said it is also implementing changes that will make it more difficult for potential scammers and criminals to find and interact with teens. Meta said it is developing new technology to identify accounts that are “potentially” involved in sextortion scams, and will apply limits on how these suspect accounts can interact with other users.

In another step announced on Thursday, Meta said it has increased the data it is sharing with the cross-platform online child safety program, Lantern, to include more “sextortion-specific signals.”

The social networking giant has had long-standing policies that ban people from sending unwanted nudes or seeking to coerce others into sharing intimate images. However, that doesn’t stop these problems from occurring and causing misery for scores of teens and young people — sometimes with extremely tragic results.

We’ve rounded up the latest crop of changes in more detail below.

Nudity screens

Nudity Protection in DMs aims to protect teen users of Instagram from cyberflashing by putting nude images behind a safety screen. Users will be able to choose whether or not to view such images.

“We’ll also show them a message encouraging them not to feel pressure to respond, with an option to block the sender and report the chat,” said Meta.

The nudity safety screen will be turned on by default for users under 18 globally. Older users will see a notification encouraging them to turn the feature on.

“When nudity protection is turned on, people sending images containing nudity will see a message reminding them to be cautious when sending sensitive photos, and that they can unsend these photos if they’ve changed their mind,” the company added.

Anyone trying to forward a nude image will see the same warning encouraging them to reconsider.

The feature is powered by on-device machine learning, so Meta said it will work within end-to-end encrypted chats because the image analysis is carried out on the user’s own device.

The nudity filter has been in development for nearly two years.

Safety tips

In another safeguarding measure, Instagram users who send or receive nudes will be directed to safety tips (with information about the potential risks involved), which, according to Meta, have been developed with guidance from experts.

“These tips include reminders that people may screenshot or forward images without your knowledge, that your relationship to the person may change in the future, and that you should review profiles carefully in case they’re not who they say they are,” the company wrote in a statement. “They also link to a range of resources, including Meta’s Safety Center, support helplines, StopNCII.org for those over 18, and Take It Down for those under 18.”

The company is also testing showing pop-up messages to people who may have interacted with an account that has been removed for sextortion. These pop-ups will also direct users to relevant resources.

“We’re also adding new child safety helplines from around the world into our in-app reporting flows. This means when teens report relevant issues — such as nudity, threats to share private images or sexual exploitation or solicitation — we’ll direct them to local child safety helplines where available,” the company said.

Tech to spot sextortionists

While Meta says it removes sextortionists’ accounts when it becomes aware of them, it first needs to spot bad actors to shut them down. So, the company is trying to go further by “developing technology to help identify where accounts may potentially be engaging in sextortion scams, based on a range of signals that could indicate sextortion behavior.”

“While these signals aren’t necessarily evidence that an account has broken our rules, we’re taking precautionary steps to help prevent these accounts from finding and interacting with teen accounts,” the company said. “This builds on the work we already do to prevent other potentially suspicious accounts from finding and interacting with teens.”

It’s not clear what technology Meta is using to do this analysis, nor which signals might denote a potential sextortionist (we’ve asked for more details). Presumably, the company may analyze patterns of communication to try to detect bad actors.

Accounts that get flagged by Meta as potential sextortionists will face restrictions on messaging or interacting with other users.

“[A]ny message requests potential sextortion accounts try to send will go straight to the recipient’s hidden requests folder, meaning they won’t be notified of the message and never have to see it,” the company wrote.

Users who are already chatting with potential scam or sextortion accounts will not have their chats shut down, but will be shown Safety Notices “encouraging them to report any threats to share their private images, and reminding them that they can say ‘no’ to anything that makes them feel uncomfortable,” according to the company.

Teen users are already protected from receiving DMs from adults they are not connected with on Instagram (and also from other teens, in some cases). But Meta is taking this a step further: The company said it is testing a feature that hides the “Message” button on teenagers’ profiles for potential sextortion accounts — even if they’re connected.

“We’re also testing hiding teens from these accounts in people’s follower, following and like lists, and making it harder for them to find teen accounts in Search results,” it added.

It’s worth noting the company is under increasing scrutiny in Europe over child safety risks on Instagram, and enforcers have questioned its approach since the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA) came into force last summer.

A long, slow creep towards safety

Meta has announced measures to combat sextortion before — most recently in February, when it expanded access to Take It Down. The third-party tool lets people generate a hash of an intimate image locally on their own device and share it with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, helping to create a repository of non-consensual image hashes that companies can use to search for and remove revenge porn.

The company’s previous approaches to tackle that problem had been criticized, as they required young people to upload their nudes. In the absence of hard laws regulating how social networks need to protect children, Meta was left to self-regulate for years — with patchy results.

However, some requirements have landed on platforms in recent years — such as the U.K.’s Children Code (which came into force in 2021) and the more recent DSA in the EU — and tech giants like Meta are finally having to pay more attention to protecting minors.

For example, in July 2021, Meta started defaulting young people’s Instagram accounts to private just ahead of the U.K. compliance deadline. Even tighter privacy settings for teens on Instagram and Facebook followed in November 2022.

This January, the company announced it would set stricter messaging settings for teens on Facebook and Instagram by default, shortly before the full compliance deadline for the DSA kicked in in February.

This slow and iterative feature creep at Meta concerning protective measures for young users raises questions about what took the company so long to apply stronger safeguards. It suggests Meta opted for a cynical minimum in safeguarding in a bid to manage the impact on usage, and prioritize engagement over safety. That is exactly what Meta whistleblower Francis Haugen repeatedly denounced her former employer for.

Asked why the company is not also rolling out these new protections to Facebook, a spokeswoman for Meta told TechCrunch, “We want to respond to where we see the biggest need and relevance — which, when it comes to unwanted nudity and educating teens on the risks of sharing sensitive images — we think is on Instagram DMs, so that’s where we’re focusing first.”

Meta is rolling out tighter teen messaging limitations and parental controls


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Robotic Automations

Meta AI is restricting election-related responses in India | TechCrunch

April 19, 2024 6:09 PM0


Last week, Meta started testing its AI chatbot in India across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. But with the Indian general elections beginning today, the company is already blocking specific queries in its chatbot.

Meta confirmed that it is restricting certain election-related keywords for AI in the test phase. It also said that it is working to improve the AI response system.

“This is a new technology, and it may not always return the response we intend, which is the same for all generative AI systems. Since we launched, we’ve constantly released updates and improvements to our models, and we’re continuing to work on making them better,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The move makes the social media giant the latest big tech company, proactively curtailing the scope of its generative AI services as it gears up for a major set of elections.

One of the big concerns from critics has been that genAI could provide misleading or outright false information to users, playing an illegal and unwelcome role in the democratic process.

Last month, Google started blocking election-related queries in its Gemini chatbot experience in India and other  markets where elections are taking place this year.

Meta’s approach follows a bigger effort the company has announced around what it allows and does not allow on its platform leading up to elections. It pledged to block political ads in the week leading up to an election in any country, and it is working to identify and disclose when images in ads or other content have been created with AI.

Meta’s handling of genAI queries appears to be based around a blocklist. When you ask Meta AI about specific politicians, candidates, officeholders, and certain other terms, it will redirect you to the Election Commission’s website.

“This question may pertain to a political figure during general elections. Please refer to the link https://elections24.eci.gov.in,” the response says.

Image Credits: Screenshot by TechCrunch

Notably, the company is not strictly blocking responses to questions containing party names. However, if a query includes the names of candidates or other terms, you might see the boilerplate answer cited above.

But just like other AI-powered systems, Meta AI has some inconsistencies. For instance, when TechCrunch asked for information about “Indi Alliance” — a politicial alliance of multiple parties that is fighting against the incumbents Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — it responded with information containing a politician’s name. However, when we asked about that politician in a separate query, the chatbot didn’t respond with any information.

Image credits: Screenshot by TechCrunch

This week, the company rolled out a new Llama-3-powered Meta AI chatbot in more than a dozen countries, including the U.S., but India was missing from the list. Meta said that the chatbot will be in the test phase in the country for now.

“We continue to learn from our users tests in India. As we do with many of our AI products and features, we test them publicly in varying phases and in a limited capacity,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement.

Currently, Meta AI is not blocking queries about elections for U.S.-related terms such as “Tell me about Joe Biden.” We have asked Meta if the company plans to restrict these queries to the U.S. elections or other markets. We will update the story if we hear back.

If you want to talk about your experience with Meta AI you can reach out to Ivan Mehta at [email protected] by email and through this link on Signal.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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