Tuesday Tune-Up #423

Tuneup
Nick Carolan


Facebook’s been sued (again)
If you need another reminder to do your taxes correctly, look no further. The US Internal Revenue Service has come after Facebook for some alleged shady behaviour, claiming in a lawsuit that Facebook owes a whopping $9 billion in unpaid taxes due to a deal the company made in 2010 with an Irish subsidiary. The IRS allege Facebook undervalued the intellectual property before selling it, allowing them to dodge billions in taxes.



Workplace from Facebook gets an upgrade
Facebook has added some shiny new insights tools to the administrator panel of its enterprise platform, Workplace from Facebook. Admins on the platform will now have access to five tabs – People, Content, Groups, Posts, and Connections – to help them better understand how employees are using the platform across their organisation. Facebook has also opened The Workplace Academy, a new training hub (in eight languages) for all Workplace users.




Forgot to add something to your tweet? Never fear…
We still can’t edit tweets, however, now you can add new tweets to old threads, so that’s kinda nice, right?




Are Twitter Stories on the way?
In acquisition news, Twitter has absorbed story-making platform Chroma Labs, hiring its seven employees and placing them in their Conversations division. As one of the only major social platforms without a Stories function, it appears this recent decision could’ve been made with a view to adding more visual storytelling to the text-based app. Twitter has confirmed that it will be shutting down Chroma Stories, which provides stylish templates and frames for Stories content, and that several members of the Chroma Labs team will be joining its product, design and engineering teams.




TikTok’s got a timer
TikTok confirmed that it is rolling out a Parent Safety Mode. A new release in the UK is allowing parents to decide how long they’d like their children to spend on the short-form video app. According to Cormac Keenan, Head of Trust and Safety at TikTok, the goal of this feature is to encourage the community to have “a healthy relationship with online apps and services.” The new controls will also give parents the option to restrict or turn off the direct message functionality and select the type of content children can see while using the app. The feature is expected to roll out to other markets in the coming weeks.



ANZ courts controversy with #LoveSpeech campaign
ANZ has set Twitter alight with its new #LoveSpeech campaign, but it’s not necessarily for the right reasons. As part of its annual Mardi Gras campaign, the bank shared a video featuring members of the LGBTQI* community reciting homophobic slurs that have been used against them with the intent of raising awareness around the harmful effect of these words, and were then surprised when people were harmed by these words. The video’s lack of a trigger warning wasn’t the only criticism the brand received, with many calling them out for pink-washing and hollow virtue signalling. The video was released to coincide with a browser extension called the ‘Hurt Blocker’, which replaces homophobic slurs with rainbow emojis.



Ones to watch
Facebook has internally prototyped a tabbed version of the News Feed for mobile that includes the standard Most Relevant feed; Facebook testing out a new format for its separate Stories discovery page; and TikTok is reportedly looking to add a new URL field into its profile bios.




This edition of the Tuesday Tune-Up was brought to you by Ashlee Brown.