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Instagram rolls out Live broadcasts for close friends

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Image: Instagram Instagram is introducing a way to livestream to a smaller, more private audience. Beginning today, Instagram users will be able to host Live broadcasts only available to their curated list of Close Friends. Up to three other accounts can join the Live broadcast and stream with the original user. The feature rolls out globally. Until this point, beginning a Live broadcast meant that anyone could tune in and watch it if your account was public, and all followers could watch the stream if you had a private account. Live videos are a popular feature for influencers and celebrities chatting with followers or fan accounts streaming live footage from concerts — in other words, content that’s more geared toward wide audiences and for public consumption. The ability to go live only to a small group of people feels closer to a giant FaceTime call than to a public livestream — and, indeed, use case examples offered by the company are decidedly more int
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TikTok is copying Instagram again with Whee

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Image: TikTok TikTok recently launched a new Instagram-like photo-sharing app called Whee, as spotted by Android Police and APKMirror founder Artem Russakovskii. TikTok is explicitly positioning Whee as an app for sharing photos with only your closest friends. “Capture and share real-life photos that only your friends can see, allowing you to be your most authentic self,” according to Whee’s Google Play description . “Whee is the best place for close friends to share life moments.” Screenshots of the app listing feature things like a photo viewfinder, a list of friends to message, and a feed — and many of the photo captions highlight how the features are for connecting with friends. It seems that TikTok is still testing the waters with this new app. It’s currently available on Android in “more than a dozen countries,” but not the US, Android Police reports . I’m also not seeing it on the iOS App Store. TikTok and parent company ByteDance didn’t immediate
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Instagram is testing ‘unskippable’ ads that you can’t scroll past

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Instagram is testing “ad breaks” that force you to stop and look at an ad for a period of time before you can continue scrolling. Several X and Reddit users reported seeing the feature, and Instagram spokesperson Matthew Tye confirmed to The Verge that ad breaks are being tested. Tye said Instagram would “provide updates should this test result in any formal product changes.” One Redditor spotted the feature when scrolling through stories and posts. After a certain amount of scrolling, Instagram prevented them from going further until they looked at an ad. As shown in the screenshot, Instagram displays an “ad break” icon with a countdown timer that shows how long until you can start scrolling again. When the user tapped the icon for more information about the feature, Instagram showed a message saying, “Ad breaks are a new way of seeing ads on Instagram. Sometimes you may need to view an ad before you can keep br
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Social media users are blocking celebs to support Palestine

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Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images Every Met Gala has some sort of controversy, whether it’s about the dress code and theme , the guest list , or a now-infamous brawl in an elevator at an afterparty. Because this is 2024, it’s only fitting that the outrage began this year because of a TikTok audio track. In a now-deleted video, an influencer named Haley Kalil shows off her elaborate floral dress and headpiece as she prepares to host a pre-Met Gala red carpet event. Her misstep was using an audio snippet in the background taken from the 2006 film Marie Antoinette , in which the titular character smirks and delivers one of the most famous (and spurious) one-liners of history: “Let them eat cake.” The sound has been circulating on TikTok for months, mostly used in makeup tutorials, fashion videos, and things of that nature. The backlash was swift and brutal. Audiences compared the event to The Hunger Games , a dystopia where the wealthy sit back a
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Instagram and Facebook under EU investigation for causing child addiction and harm

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The EU is concerned that Meta’s algorithms may cause “behavioral addictions in children.” | Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge The European Union has opened a formal investigation into Meta over concerns that it isn’t doing enough to safeguard the mental and physical health of children who use its Facebook and Instagram social media platforms. The probe announced by the European Commission on Thursday will assess whether Meta has breached rules under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), noting that Facebook and Instagram’s UI and algorithms may cause “behavioral addictions in children” and create “rabbit-hole effects.” The EU is also concerned that Meta isn’t doing enough to prevent minors from accessing inappropriate content, and that its age-verification tools may not be “reasonable, proportionate, and effective.” Today we open formal #DSA investigation against #Meta . We are not convinced that Meta has done enough to comply with the DSA obliga
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Instagram’s co-founder is Anthropic’s new chief product officer

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Mike Krieger has a long history in tech and AI. | Photo by Jerod Harris / Getty Images for Vox Media As Anthropic tries to take on the AI giants, it has a new big-name executive on board: the company announced this morning that Mike Krieger is its new chief product officer. Krieger, of course, was one of the co-founders of Instagram and spent the last few years working on Artifact , an AI news-reading app that was recently acquired by Yahoo . Krieger will oversee all of Anthropic’s product efforts going forward. It’s an important moment for the company to push hard on product, too: it recently released the Claude app for iOS, long after a bunch of its competitors were available on mobile, and just announced support for use in Spanish, French, Italian, and German. Anthropic, which was founded by ex-OpenAI employees, has been seemingly primarily focused on building out its core technology for the last few years but seems to understand that it needs to turn all
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Instagram introduces new interactive stickers for Stories

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Image: Instagram Instagram announced a handful of new features to Stories , including new interactive ways to share music, photos, and videos. The most intriguing new feature is called Reveal and, when applied, blurs the contents of a story post. The only way viewers can see the post is by DMing the person who shared it. Instagram head Adam Mosseri has said that direct messages are an increasingly important part of the platform and that stories and DMs account for most of Instagram’s growth. Requiring a DM to view content is the next evolution of that — and will no doubt be used as an engagement hack by creators hoping to boost their stories’ engagement. Image: Instagram Another feature, Frames, puts a Polaroid overlay on to images that start out gray. When users shake their phone, a photo appears — like what many people do with actual Polaroid pictures. Which is amusing, because you’re actually not supposed to shake Polaroids, and th
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