Media Perception Of Social Workers

Photo by Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has high hopes for Threads, his competitor to the company formerly known as Twitter . During Meta’s second quarter earnings call with investors on Wednesday, Zuckerberg was asked multiple times about Threads and his expectations for its long-term success. He said it’s a “weird anomaly in the tech industry that there hasn’t been an app like this for text-based convos that has reached 1 billion people,” echoing previous comments he has made both on Threads itself and during a recent interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman . Threads reached 100 million signups faster than any consumer software product in history, but it’s nowhere near reaching the 1-billion-user club yet. Its engagement is also estimated to have slowed significantly since that initial rush of signups, though Zuckerberg said last week that “tens of millions” of people were still using the app daily. According to Zuckerberg, the m

Image: The Verge The brand-new Following feed in Meta’s Threads won’t always stick around if it’s your preferred way to use the app. The much-needed Following feed is unfortunately a bit hidden: you can make it appear by tapping the home icon at the bottom of the screen or the Threads logo at the top. Once you see it, you can switch between “Following,” which shows posts in reverse-chronological order, and “For You,” which is the algorithmically sorted feed the app has offered since launch. But a few of us at The Verge noticed that Threads will occasionally rehide the Following feed and bring you back to the For You feed after you open the app. (You can test it for yourself by force closing and reopening the app.) Unfortunately, it sounds like that’s by design, based on a statement from Meta. “For You is the default experience when you open the Threads app,” Meta spokesperson Seine Kim tells The Verge . We’ve asked Kim if Meta plans to add a way to set Fol

Image: The Verge Threads is getting a “follows” tab, but it’s not the following-only feed that users have been asking for. As outlined in this post from Threads developer Cameron Roth , the new tab lives on the app’s activity page and only lets you see a list of users who recently followed you. Threads previously listed your recent followers in its “all” tab on the activity page, so this isn’t that big of a change — it just makes your new followers easier to find. There are also two other filters for “quotes” and “reposts,” letting you filter recent activity by who reposted or quoted your thread. Additionally, Threads is rolling out translations, which should come in handy if you follow people from different countries. While I’m not seeing the option myself just yet, Roth says the feature will appear at the bottom of a post, alongside the like, reply, repost, and share buttons. Other minor changes include the ability to get notifications from users you

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Instagram isn’t liable for copyright infringement when images are embedded on third-party websites, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled on Monday ( via Torrent Freak ). The decision came in response to a class action lawsuit filed by two photographers, Alexis Hunley and Matthew Brauer, who accused Instagram of violating copyright laws by enabling Time and BuzzFeed News to embed their copyrighted photos in online articles. In 2016, Time published an article titled “These Photographers Are Covering the Presidential Campaign on Instagram,” which included Brauer’s embedded Instagram photo of Hillary Clinton. BuzzFeed News similarly posted an embedded photo taken by Hunley in its 2020 article about the Black Lives Matter protests. The “server test” affirms a website isn’t liable as long as the copyrighted work isn’t stored on its server However, Hunley and Brauer argued BuzzFeed News and Time embedded

Image: Instagram Instagram is introducing updates to its Reels templates — a feature that allows users to make their own video based on someone else’s. The result could be a lot more content that looks exactly like everything else. Templates break down Reels into a preset format that users can drop their own photos and videos into — a sequence of five 0.7-second clips set over a specific song, for example. It’s an easy way to participate in viral trends while spending minimal time editing, and it also encourages the proliferation of content that is only slightly different from other videos — which I guess is the same thing. The updates to Reels templates are taking the copy-and-paste approach one step further: the presets will soon also include the text and transitions that the original video had, though users will be able to customize different elements if they don’t want their clip to be exactly the same. Instagram is also adding more ways to find templa

The Instagram head’s response to the feature request. | Screenshot: Jon Porter / The Verge Instagram head Adam Mosseri has responded to calls for a Threads home feed that only contains posts from accounts you follow, saying it’s “on the list” of features the platform would like to add. Mosseri sent the message in response to a post from YouTuber Marques Brownlee requesting the feature as well as to photographer Noah Kalina . Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also chimed in, posting a thumbs-up emoji in response to Brownlee’s request. Other features that Mosseri has said are “on the list” include support for editing posts , a translation option for different languages , and options to switch between different Threads accounts . If your early experience with Meta’s Twitter competitor is anything like mine, your home feed is likely filled with posts from random accounts recommended to you by the service’s algorithm alongside content from accounts you’ve actually dec

This is basically an admission, right? | Screenshot: Alex Cranz / The Verge Instagram Threads launched last night , and it’s the most commercial competitor to Twitter we’ve seen yet. While it will eventually tie into ActivityPub , the powerful decentralized network that Mastodon operates on, it’s just its own thing for now. And as with every microblogging platform that has popped up since Twitter began to shit the bed last year, one outstanding question has immediately presented itself: What do we call these things? No one seems to know! A number of people have been drawn to the word “post,” and post is a very accurate term. Your parents have heard of this word, and you can say it in polite company without having to explain yourself. But it’s also the name of one of these services, and frankly, it’s boring. It’s staid. Plus, apparently everyone on these new platforms is out to be an iconoclast, so on Bluesky they’re called “skeets” and Mastodon called them

Screenshot by Emma Roth / The Verge If you created an account when Instagram’s Threads app launched last night , one of the first things you might’ve noticed was the sheer number of celebrities, brands, and influencers populating your feed. From Gordon Ramsay to Michael Strahan and Jennifer Lopez, Meta pre-filled its new Twitter competitor with a boatload of well-known users to make the app feel less empty at launch. While Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri got spots on the app ahead of time, so did big names such as Mark Cuban, Shakira, and Seth Curry. Meta also got influencers like MKBHD, Lauren Godwin, Alan Chikin Chow, and Michael Le on board early, along with brands like Netflix, as well as Warner Bros. Discovery’s Shark Week, Animal Planet, and HGTV. Oddly, some of Instagram’s biggest influencers were still missing on Threads as of Thursday morning. As pointed out by Insider , only a small fraction of the top 20 most-followed acco

Illustration: The Verge Instagram’s new Threads app has already surpassed 100 million users, meaning it reached the milestone dramatically faster than even ChatGPT. OpenAI’s chatbot passed the mark after two months , but Threads, which only launched on Wednesday , got there in a matter of days. The number of users can be found in the Instagram app, which tracks the size of the Threads userbase. Threads proved to be an early hit almost immediately. In the first two hours, it hit 2 million users and steadily climbed from there to 5 million , 10 million , 30 million , and then 70 million . The launch has been “way beyond our expectations,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday. On Monday, Zuckerberg said in a Threads post confirming the milestone that the growth was “mostly organic:” Instagram head Adam Mosseri also posted about it , likewise noting that it took just five days to get there: Users aren’t just signing up: they’re posting, too. As of Thurs

Threads compose window and photo picker on iOS. | Image: Meta Instagram’s new Threads app seems like it could be a hit. Mark Zuckerberg said that the app has more than 30 million signups as of Thursday morning , and people who are checking it out are posting... er, threading... a lot, too. According to internal data I’ve seen, users have already posted more than 95 million threads (or tweets, depending on who you ask ) and dropped about 190 million likes. All that has happened in less than 24 hours. The app launched Wednesday evening on iOS and Android (significantly earlier than the original Thursday launch time ), and a lot of people are checking it out; it’s currently the top free app on the App Store. There’s still a lot missing from Threads. You can’t delete your Threads account without deleting your Instagram account , for example, and the app doesn’t have features like DMs, a reverse-chronological following feed, or a planned integration with t

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge This is Platformer , a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. Sign up here . In early December, when word first leaked out that Meta was considering new ways to challenge Twitter, I messaged Adam Mosseri. We were then two months into Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter, and it was clear that the social network I depended on the most was beginning to break. For my own sake, it felt important that something like Twitter continue to exist — a place to share news, jokes, and other short snippets of writing, in a chatty public place that gave me a sense of the daily conversation. And so I told Mosseri that I hoped Meta would go through with it. On one hand, the history of Facebook and Instagram offer plenty of reasons why the company might be poorly suited to run Twitter’s successor as well. There’s the litany of failures over the years related to content moderation, o

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge An important deadline just passed for the biggest tech platform companies in the world to notify the European Union (EU) that they are gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Seven companies have officially acknowledged they meet the criteria : Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance (TikTok), Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp), Microsoft, and Samsung. Companies on the list have a market capitalization of over €75 billion ($82 billion) and own a social platform or app that has at least 45 million monthly users or 10,000 active business users. The statement published by EU commissioner Thierry Breton says it “will now check their submissions and designate the gatekeepers for specific platform services by 6 September,” and after that, the companies will have just six months to comply with the DMA’s rules. Reuters reports that TikTok parent company Bytedance disputed its placement on the list and noted that