Media Perception Of Social Workers

Instagram’s direct message function is getting a big infusion of features today , including scheduled direct messages that you can prewrite and set to send on a later date, up to 29 days in advance. You can also now pin up to three messages to the top of the chat. Meta says the changes are intended to help with messaging people who live in different time zones or to keep important messages (read: memes) visible in busy group chats where things are easily missed. A few more incoming DM-specific features include the ability to invite friends to a group chat with a QR code, plus message translations with support for 99 languages. You can translate any individual message and see the result inline as if your friend originally sent it. Another fun addition is sharing music natively within the app, which would allow you and your friends to listen to the same song simultaneously, or share them asynchronously without using links or otherwise navigating away from Instagram. You ca...

Instagram is beginning to test a button that “gives people a private way to signal that they don’t feel good about that particular comment,” Instagram boss Adam Mosseri says in a post on Threads . The button, based on a screenshot from a Threads user , is a downward-facing arrow next to the like button in comments. If you see the button and press it, however, people won’t know that you did so, and there won’t be a dislike count shown, according to Mosseri. However, “eventually, we may integrate this signal into comments ranking to move disliked comments lower down,” Mosseri says. “Our hope is that this might help make comments more friendly on Instagram.” “We’re working on ways to help people better control their Instagram experience and what they’re seeing on the app,” Instagram spokesperson Christine Pai says in a statement. “We’re testing a new button next to each comment on a Reel or Feed post for people to privately signal they don’t feel good about that partic...

As Twitter continues to flail about under Elon Musk, all eyes are on the newly launched Instagram Threads as a potential replacement. Meta launched Threads on iOS, Android , and the web on July 5th — a little bit ahead of schedule . Two days in, Mark Zuckerberg said Threads has registered over 70 million accounts , and it’s still growing. In an interview about Threads with The Verge , Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri explains why the platform wants to take on Twitter. “Obviously, Twitter pioneered the space,” Mosseri says. “And there are a lot of good offerings out there for public conversations. But just given everything that was going on, we thought there was an opportunity to build something that was open and something that was good for the community that was already using Instagram.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Verge (@verge) Rumors about the new Meta-owned platform were swirling for months, wit...

It’s been more than two years since Elon Musk officially took over as the owner of Twitter — now X — and while a lot of platforms rushed in to try and be the next big microblogging service, many haven’t survived. Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky have all proven to be viable alternatives, but places like Pebble (formerly T2) and Post News didn’t make it. Threads is perhaps the likely successor, having reached 275 million monthly users as of October 2024, and it seems committed to fediverse integration by building features around the ActivityPub protocol. Bluesky, which relies on its own decentralized AT Protocol for social networking, continues to grow and saw a surge of users after the 2024 election, though with somewhere north of 14.5 million use rs , it’s still well behind Threads. Mastodon, which also uses the ActivityPub protocol, was already well-established by the time Musk bought Twitter but has struggled to grow its active user ba...

Nearly everyone seems to be suddenly freaking out about the rise of DeepSeek. Meta isn’t worried, though. That was CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s message to investors during his company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday. During the Q&A portion of the call with Wall Street analysts, Zuckerberg fielded multiple questions about DeepSeek’s impressive AI models and what the implications are for Meta’s AI strategy. He said that what DeepSeek was able to accomplish with relatively little money has “only strengthened our conviction that this is the right thing to be focused on.” Zuckerberg noted that “there’s a number of novel things they did we’re still digesting” and that Meta plans to implement DeepSeek’s “advancements” into Llama. DeepSeek caused a massive sell-off in AI stocks due to fears that models will no longer need as much computing power. Zuckerberg tried to dispel concerns that the billions of dollars he’s spending on GPUs will go to waste: “I continue to think ...

Meta is making sweeping changes to its content moderation policies , including abandoning third-party fact-checks in favor of X’s crowd-sourced “Community Notes” approach and loosening restrictions on topics like immigration and gender identity. Under the updated Hateful Conduct policy, for example, calling gay and trans people “mentally ill” is now allowed, while an explicit ban on referring to women as “household objects” has been removed . Policy chief Joel Kaplan says that in pursuit of “More Speech and Fewer Mistakes,” Meta will focus more on preventing overenforcement of its content policies and less on mediating potentially harmful — but technically legal — discussions on its platform. The company is also ending its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement appeals to many of the new administration’s talking points . Zuckerberg, who has visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago multiple times since the election and attended the inauguration, ha...