Media Perception Of Social Workers

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Instagram is testing a new feature that will let you add songs to the photo carousels you post to the platform. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the news on his Instagram broadcast channel , noting that it’s already available in a “few countries with more to come.” While Instagram already has a similar feature that lets you add songs to individual photos, I feel like it makes more sense to add to a carousel of pictures. Instead of listening to a music clip while looking at a single photo, you now have more time to listen to the song as you swipe through multiple photos in a carousel. Image: Instagram Here’s how it looks when you add a song to a Note. Aside from that, Zuckerberg also mentioned that Instagram is testing a way to add music to Notes, the AIM-like feature that lets you share a status with friends . In the brief video posted to Zuckerberg’s channel (as shown above), you can see h...

After seven years at Snapchat, I finally learned the truth about why our most important apps seem destined to disappoint us. Ellis Hamburger was a reporter for The Verge between 2012 and 2014 before leaving to work at Snapchat. After leaving Snap last year, he went to work at The Browser Company. We asked Ellis to write about what he learned during his time working for one of the hottest social media startups of the 2010s. Disclosure: Ellis is a current Snap shareholder. I thought this time would be different. More specifically, I thought Snapchat would be different. I spent more than seven years there, writing almost everything from in-app copy to pitch decks, trying to make Snapchat different from every other social media app. And then, the other day, I received a push notification from the app telling me to wish my nemesis a happy birthday. This might read as normal or even expected to most of you, but I recognized the notification for what it really was: a de...

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Your Instagram bio can now include up to five links, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a post on his Instagram channel on Tuesday. “Probably one of the most requested features we’ve had,” he wrote. You can add links by editing your profile in the mobile app, where you can give them titles and reorder how they’ll appear. However, if you’ve added more than one link, anyone visiting your profile will still have to click through a “[Your first link] and 1 other” message to see that list of links. That means that, if you have more than one link you have to feature on either your Instagram profile or already use a “Link in bio” service like Linktree, people are going to have to do an extra click to see your links no matter what. Still, it’s a handy feature to have built into Instagram and one that could make the platform more enticing to people looking for a new home in the aftermath of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter . Met...

A screenshot of Artifact, the new news app from Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. | Image: Artifact Last week, I observed here that journalists have mostly continued to post on Twitter as if everything is normal there . That’s less true today than it was then — good on NPR and PBS for showing some spine and suspending their use of the platform — but there’s no doubt that it continues to be the digital broadcast destination of choice for many or even most reporters. As I noted in that piece, one reason for Twitter’s stickiness is the sense that none its alternatives have yet to reach critical mass. And while that’s clearly true, it’s also the case that there is probably more talent working on new social networks at this point than at any moment since the early 2010s. Mastodon, Post, T2, and the Untitled Meta Social Network are just a handful of the projects that have begun springing up since Elon Musk’s ill-fated takeover of Twitter last...

Image: Instagram Instagram announced a slew of new features for its TikTok competitor Reels today, including a new way to edit videos and find trending content. The biggest change is in the video editing process. Users will now be able to tweak uploaded video clips, audio, stickers, and text overlays all in the same screen instead of having to do it in separate steps. Stills shared by the company show a timeline editing feature similar to what TikTok has, which helps when lining up audio and video clips and makes transitions smoother. Instagram users will also have a new way to find trending videos. Trends and challenges that are easy to recreate are part of what made TikTok an incubator for viral content, and until now, there wasn’t a quick way to see what was gaining traction on Reels. A new Reels page gathers hashtags and songs that are trending on Instagram, along with how many videos use that particular audio. Users can then save the audio for later or ...

Photo by Juho Sarvikas‏ / HMD Global I miss the phone. No, not that slab in my pocket that we call the smartphone. Yes, that device can act like a phone. But it also doubles as a portable laptop, camera, alarm, console, TV, wallet, and so many other things — I’m not sure what it is. But one thing’s for sure: calling an iPhone just a “phone” has never felt quite right. It’s easy to lose sight of just how utterly vast a smartphone’s capabilities are. Hidden inside our pockets is a powerful machine that seems like it really can do everything, everywhere, all at once. There’s a reason the courts recently restricted FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried to just a dumb phone. A smartphone is a powerful tool, especially in the hands of a math nerd who lost billions of other people’s money overnight. And while my smartphone has improved my life immensely — and I’m not about to get rid of it — it’s also made some things worse. Namely, my brain. The smartphone lets us ea...