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Meta is adding more parental controls for teen AI use

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An early look at Instagram’s parental controls for teen AI use. After enthusiastically rolling AI chatbots out everywhere , Meta has announced new options for parents to get an idea of how teens are chatting with the digital characters and set some limits on use. The move comes as Meta works to rehabilitate its image after disturbing reports of its tools’ romantic interactions with minors and faces growing scrutiny over chatbots’ impact on kids. The new controls will let parents stop their children from speaking with AI chatbots entirely or block access to specific characters they don’t like, Instagram lead Adam Mosseri and Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang wrote in a blog post announcing the changes on Friday. Meta’s AI assistant is a notable exception to this rule. The company says it will “remain available to offer helpful information and educational opportunities” with “age-appropriate protections in place.” Meta said parents will also be given some form of “insi...

Instagram is making all teen accounts ‘PG-13’

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Instagram’s PG-13-inspired rating will avoid recommending more types of content to teens. | Image: Meta Instagram is making a major update to teen accounts that will only allow them to view content similar to what you would see in a PG-13 movie. Under the new system , Instagram will continue to hide content containing nudity, sexual content, or suggestive poses from teens, but now it will also avoid recommending content with strong swear words and risky stunts across its platform. “Just like you might see some suggestive content or hear some strong language in a PG-13 movie, teens may occasionally see something like that on Instagram — but we’re going to keep doing all we can to keep those instances as rare as possible,” Instagram writes in an announcement on Tuesday. Last year, Instagram began putting all users under 18 into teen accounts, applying its existing restrictions on kids under 16 to a larger swath of young users. Teen accounts are private by default and c...

What’s going on with this Instagram promotion?

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The Ring is a fantastic horror film that still gives me the chills. I can easily recall the movie’s iconic poster , which features a white ring on a black background and a creepy title font — I didn’t see the movie until years after it first released, but even the thought of it frightened me. So I’m very confused as to why Instagram picked a similar vibe for the debut of Instagram Rings , a new “award” that’s intended to celebrate creators and creativity. Instagram has assembled a panel of judges, which includes Spike Lee, Marc Jacobs, Marques Brownlee, and, uh, Instagram head Adam Mosseri, to “nominate their favorite creators and vote for who they think deserves a spot on the final list.” The creators that win get a real, physical ring, and on their Instagram profile, they’ll get a special golden ring that appears around their profile picture, will be able to customize their profile backdrop color, and can “put their own twist” on the like button, according to Meta. The...

Instagram wants me to make content — I just want to post a photo

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Why just post a photo when you can encourage all your friends and followers to engage with it? Have you tried simply uploading a photo to Instagram lately? It's a minefield. Is that a Story, a Post, or a Reel? Do you want to add music? A caption? A prompt, which is… different than a caption, somehow? How about a poll? A fundraiser? More text, but this time on top of the image? Share it to Facebook? On and on and on. I have a simple request to anyone at Meta who is listening: please, just give us our photo sharing app back. The current Instagram app is more like three or four apps in a trenchcoat. There's the grid, which is probably what anyone over the age of 35 thinks of as Instagram. Then there's Stories - shamelessly copied from S … Read the full story at The Verge. * This article was originally published here

Meta will soon use your AI chats to personalize your feeds

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Meta will soon use your conversations with its AI assistant to personalize the ads you see on its platforms. The change, which goes into effect on December 16th, means you’ll also start seeing suggested posts, reels, and Facebook groups related to your AI text and voice chats, too. So if you ask Meta AI about hiking, Meta might learn that you’re interested in the topic and show recommendations for hiking groups on Facebook, posts from friends about local trails, or ads for hiking boots. Meta says it receives these same indicators when you perform other actions on its platforms, such as liking a post or page related to a certain topic. Meta says it won’t use AI conversations about religious views, sexual orientation, political views, health, racial or ethnic origin, philosophical beliefs, or union memberships to personalize content. “We have existing policies around the information that people might consider sensitive, and those will continue to apply,” Meta privacy head ...

Adam Mosseri’s ‘we’re totally not spying on you’ video is raising a lot of questions

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Today, the same day that Meta announced that it will soon use your AI chats to personalize the ads it shows you , Instagram head Adam Mosseri made a “myth busting” video attempting to set the record straight on a persistent rumor about Meta: “I swear, we do not listen to your microphone,” he says . Meta’s ad targeting systems can be eerily precise, sometimes showing you things that you feel like you’ve only discussed in a verbal conversation and would only be possible for Meta to know about if it was listening through a device’s microphone. It’s a perception that Meta has been trying to push back on for years: In 2016, the company, then known as Facebook, said that it “does not use your phone’s microphone to inform ads or to change what you see in News Feed.” In a 2018 Senate hearing, CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to the question on the topic with a direct “no.” In a support document titled “are Facebook and Instagram listening to your conversations without yo...

Instagram tests opening right onto Reels

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Instagram is testing a potentially major change to the app: making Reels the home tab of the app. As part of an opt-in test in India, Meta is making Reels and DMs the first two tabs on the app, according to Instagram head Adam Mosseri . Mosseri says that Reels and DMs have been a key driver of growth for Instagram over the past few years, which is why it’s “exploring” the change. In a video in his post, you can see how the new home tab would work. Part of the tab will look familiar, like the horizontal list of Stories to check out at the top, but when you start to scroll up, the layout shifts into what you might recognize from the current Reels tab, where pretty much the entire screen is filled with video. Photos from accounts you follow will still be included in this revised version of the home tab, Mosseri says, but the video doesn’t show how. Instagram has already been dabbling with this shift with its recently-launched iPad app , which opens into Reels from its ...