This week, X is tackling spam through a mix of approaches including removing Communities and upping the price to post using its API. Meta has improved account management by granting new access for third party platforms and making it easier to login to all your Meta accounts.
Meanwhile, Bieberchella lives on, inspiring this week’s word of the week (and a host of TikToks) – Hallelujah. And, #Booktok girlies unite – Alex Warren is officially team Xaden. Read on for more social media news.
Instagram launches Instants app
Image Credit screenshot from Google Play via TechCrunch
Instagram is testing a new app in Spain and Italy called “Instants”. The app lets users send disappearing photos and videos that can be viewed once and only last 24 hours. The only editing you can do is add text to the image and you can’t upload pics from your camera roll. Instagram is testing multiple versions of Instants including an in-app Instagram feature and the standalone app.
Communities had a great vision, but they were used by less than 0.4% of users—yet contributed to 80% of spam reports, financial scams, and malware on X. It occupied half the team's time some weeks, while the rest of the app suffered.…
X is shutting down its Communities feature due to too many spam posts and it becoming too difficult to manage. The feature was popular when it launched in 2021, when the platform was known as Twitter, but now less than 0.4% of users actually use the feature. Despite the low usage, 80% of spam reports, financial scams, and malware on X, originated on Communities.
TikTok creators can now add and remove keywords to their clips to help get their videos on user searches. TikTok automatically adds keywords to posts based on popular searches but now creators can edit these. Creators can also block certain keywords. TikTok will still maintain oversight over any suggestions, so creators don’t add non-relevant terms to their videos.
Meta is revamping its Meta Account management system to make it easier for users to sign in and manage accounts. The update will roll out over the next year and includes users being able to use one password and log in across all accounts. I know what you’re thinking – that’s the opposite advice the office IT team has told us for the last 15 years! Well, Meta reassures that the log-ins will be protected with Passkeys, multi-factor authentication and log in alerts.
X has announced that Premium subscribers on iOS will have early access to its AI chatbot, Grok taking charge of their timeline. The new feature allows users to pin topics and Grok will use them to pull in related posts on your feed. The feature is coming to Android users “very soon.”
Meta is updating Instagram’s API to give third party platforms more capabilities. These updates include: third party platforms being able to directly publish organic posts with paid partnership labels, new metrics added to the Instagram Graph API, aggregated metrics for crossposted content and the ability to like and unlike posts and comments through the API.
X has upped the cost to post links using its API from $0.01to $0.20. X has also increased the posting price to $0.15 per post. The change comes in response to the high volume of spam posts on the platform. The news has not gone down well with publishers – obviously – with Techmeme leading the way by stopping posting links altogether.
📚 The booktok girlies are not only excited about the new Fourth Wing book announcement but also that Alex Warren’s wife made him wear this T-shirt on stage to sing ‘Ordinary’…
