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Instagram and Threads moderation is out of control

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Image: The Verge On Threads, the topic of “Threads Moderation Failures” is trending . Some users complain their accounts are being deleted or restricted for linking to articles with controversial topics. Instagram and Threads boss Adam Mosseri is directly replying to some complaints and said he’s “looking into it.” And I’m one of many people who’s had their account deleted for allegedly being a child — which I am not. Moderation is a perennial problem on social media, but based on social media posts and The Verge staff’s own experiences, Meta is currently banning and restricting users on a hair trigger. One of my colleagues was locked out of her account briefly this week after joking that she “wanted to die” because of a heatwave. Others, like Jorge Caballero, say the automated system has added fact checks with mistakes to material it detects as political, as well as throttling posts with factual information for events like hurricanes. Some hav
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Meta’s going to put AI-generated images in your Facebook and Instagram feeds

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Image: Meta If you think avoiding AI-generated images is difficult as it is, Facebook and Instagram are now going to put them directly into your feeds. At the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, the company announced that it’s testing a new feature that creates AI-generated content for you “based on your interests or current trends” — including some that incorporate your face. When you come across an “Imagined for You” image in your feed, you’ll see options to share the image or generate a new picture in real time. One example (embedded below) shows several AI-generated images of “an enchanted realm, where magic fills the air.” But others could contain your face... which I’d imagine will be a bit creepy to stumble upon as you scroll. GIF: Meta The examples at the very top of this article include captions that say you can “imagine yourself” as a video game character or an astronaut exploring space. Both images appear to use a person’s photos
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Mark Zuckerberg says there’s ‘no causal connection’ between social media and teen mental health

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Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pushing back on the idea that social media directly harms teen mental health. During an interview with The Verge ’s Alex Heath , Zuckerberg said that “the majority of the high-quality research out there suggests that there’s no causal connection at a broad scale between these things.” This echoes the statement Zuckerberg gave in front of Congress in January during a hearing about child safety, where he argued that existing research hasn’t shown a causal link between social media and poor teen mental health. As my colleague Adi Robertson pointed out at the time , it’s difficult to prove causal links, and research shows social media could cause both negative and positive impacts on an adolescent’s mental health. “The academic research shows something that I think, to me, fits more with what I’ve seen of how the platforms operate,” Zuckerberg told The Verge . “But it’s counter to what a
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Instagram is putting every teen into a more private and restrictive new account

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Image: Meta Starting today, Instagram will begin putting new and existing users under the age of 18 into “Teen Accounts” — a move that will affect how tens of millions of teens interact with the platform. The new account type automatically applies a set of protections to young users, and only users 16 years of age and older can loosen some of these settings. For starters, the accounts of all minors on Instagram will be private by default (not just teens under 16) and will come with some of Instagram’s existing restrictions for young users, such as those that prevent strangers from direct messaging them . But other new features are coming, too, including a Sleep Mode that silences notifications from 10PM to 7AM. “This really standardizes a lot of the work that we’ve done, simplifies it, and brings it to all teens,” Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, said during an interview with The Verge . “It provides essentially a set of protections that are in
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You might start seeing Instagram comments on Threads soon

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Illustration: The Verge Instagram might roll out a way to share comments on other Instagram posts to Threads, according to Alessandro Paluzzi, who often reverse engineers Meta’s social media apps to find coming features. Paluzzi shared an image showing that when commenting on an Instagram post, there could be a new dropdown menu that lets users choose to share the comment only to Instagram or “also share on Threads.” Meta has made a few moves to integrate Threads with its other platforms in the past, such as showing Threads posts on Instagram or Facebook (and, later, letting users opt out of that). The Twitter-like short-posting social network also lacks DMs of its own, but users can still receive or send messages through Instagram. The bigger effort, of course, is Meta’s slow work integrating Threads with the fediverse. The company’s moves to do so include being able to actually see replies from the fediverse under their posts, and, more recently, ot
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Meta fed its AI on almost everything you’ve posted publicly since 2007

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Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta has acknowledged that all text and photos that adult Facebook and Instagram users have publicly published since 2007 have been fed into its artificial intelligence models. Australia’s ABC News reports that Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh, initially rejected claims about user data from 2007 being leveraged for AI training during a local government inquiry about AI adoption before relenting after additional questioning. “The truth of the matter is that unless you have consciously set those posts to private since 2007, Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007 unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private,” Green Party senator David Shoebridge pushed in the inquiry. “That’s the reality, isn’t it?” “Correct,” Claybaugh responded. Meta’s privacy center and blog posts acknowledge hoover
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Facebook and Instagram are making AI labels less prominent on edited content

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Meta will hide the “AI Info” label in a menu if an image has been edited with AI. | Image: Meta Meta is updating how it labels content on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads that has been edited or manipulated using generative AI. In an updated blog post , Meta announced that its “AI Info” tag will appear within a menu in the top-right corner of images and videos edited with AI — instead of directly beneath the user’s name. Users can click on the menu to check if AI information is available and read what may have been adjusted. Meta previously applied the “AI Info” tag to all AI-related content — whether it was lightly adjusted in a tool like Photoshop that includes AI features or fully AI-generated from a prompt. The company says the changes are being introduced to “better reflect the extent of AI used” across images and videos on the platforms. Image: Meta This label was introduced in July after Meta’s previous “Made with AI” label was
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