Category: Social & Online Media
Facebook’s ‘state-controlled media’ labels appear to reduce engagement
Facebook’s “state-controlled media” labels appear to reduce engagement with content from authoritarian nations. A new study reveals that, with the added tags, users’ engagement decreased when they noticed content labeled as originating from Chinese and Russian government-run media. However, the labels also appeared to boost user favorability of posts from…
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Telegram Stories are no longer limited to paid users
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. “Now when you…
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Instagram’s musical photo carousels are a lot like TikTok’s Photo Mode
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…
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Hitting the Books: The dangerous real-world consequences of our online attention economy
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,…
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The Morning After: Twitter rebrands itself as X and ditches the bird
In a series of tweets last Saturday, Musk said the company’s famous bird logo and name would soon disappear. The company will change from Twitter to “X.” According to Platformer, Musk emailed staff later over the weekend saying the company would become X and his note “was the last email…
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Meta’s Threads races to 100 million users in under a week
Meta's Twitter competitor is off to a flying start. Within just four days of the app going live on Wednesday evening, Threads already has more than 100 million users according Quiver Quantitative's Threads Tracker. It helps that Thread is a sibling app to Instagram and it's easy for the image-sharing…
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