X has introduced Community Notes for videos, an existing program for crowdsourced moderation. “Notes written on videos will automatically show on other posts containing matching videos. A highly-scalable way of adding context to edited clips, AI-generated videos, and more,” the company said in a post. However it’s not all been good news for the app this week; Techcrunch reported that it’s been running unlabeled ads in Following feeds – it’s unclear whether the company has done this deliberately or if it’s a glitch in the system.
Snapchat adds new teen safety features
Snapchat has announced new safeguards for its app, aimed at better protecting teen users. The company says the new features will make it harder for strangers to contact teens, provide a more age-appropriate experience, crack down on accounts marketing inappropriate content and improve education for teens using its app. Snapchat will also introduce more resources for parents and families, including a new website and YouTube explainer series.
Threads expands search to English and Spanish-speaking countries
Threads is launching its search feature in most English and Spanish speaking countries, according to a post by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. This comes after testing of the feature in New Zealand and Australia, which has now officially launched in the UK, Argentina, India, Mexico, and the United States. Though Threads offered a rudimentary search feature when it launched, it would only surface Threads users. Now, it will also allow users to seek out keywords and topics being discussed on the platform.
X updates its terms to ban crawling and scraping
X has updated its terms of service to prohibit scraping and crawling — terms used to describe the extraction of data from a website. Scraping is about extracting data from one or more websites and crawling is about finding or discovering URLs or links on the web. Both methods are likely to have been banned by the company to fend off any AI models training on its data. The new terms, which are effective from September 29, ban any kind of scraping or crawling without “prior written consent.”
