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Showing posts from March, 2024

GLAAD report says Meta allows anti-trans hate to ‘flourish’ on its platforms

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Image: Vjeran Pavic GLAAD, the world’s largest LGBTQ+ media advocacy group, claims that Meta’s content moderation system is allowing an “epidemic of anti-transgender hate” to flourish on its platform. A new report published by the group says Meta has allowed dozens of anti-trans posts — including ones that call for violence against private individuals — to stay online. The organization says that LGBTQ+ people “experience an increasing number of well-documented real-world harms” due to “propaganda campaigns, driven by the anti-LGBTQ extremists that Meta allows to flourish on its platforms.” The report documents several examples of anti-trans content posted to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads between June 2023 and March of this year, all of which GLAAD reported via Meta’s “standard platform reporting systems.” Some of the posts used hateful anti-trans slurs, while others — including an Instagram post depicting a person being beaten with stones that have been re

Meta’s new opt-out setting limits visibility of politics on Instagram and Threads

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Illustration: The Verge Meta’s executives have been saying for a while that they don’t want to boost posts about politics in their apps. Now, an opt-out setting that limits recommendations of “political content” has been added to Instagram and Threads. You can find it under your “Content preferences” account settings in Instagram. From there, “Limit political content from people you don’t follow” is enabled by default. The setting applies to Threads as well since that app shares its account system with Instagram. Meta has framed this new setting as being good for user choice, and the company says it isn’t limiting the reach of political content from accounts people choose to follow. While the change was first announced in early February , Meta spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed to The Verge that it began widely rolling out last week. As of Monday, the company hasn’t sent any in-app notifications alerting people to the setting and the fact that it’s on by def

Facebook, Instagram, and Threads were all down

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Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are coming back online following an outage lasting about two hours. The three Meta-owned platforms stopped working for many users starting around 10AM ET. Some users experienced issues logging in to their Meta Quest headsets, too. Facebook logged users out of their accounts, while Instagram users couldn’t refresh their feeds, and Threads displayed a message saying, “Sorry, something went wrong. Try again.” Reports on Downdetector rapidly spiked for all three platforms , while network tracker NetBlocks noted the issue’s global impact. WhatsApp appeared to be unaffected and kept working. Meta acknowledged the issue on its status page with a message timestamped 10:17AM ET, reading, “We are aware of an issue impacting Facebook Login. Our engineering teams are actively looking to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.” As of 12:07PM ET, the status page said Meta is “recovering from an

Now everyone can edit their Instagram DMs

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Instagram We’ve all sent DMs on Instagram that we wish we had phrased differently or that included an awkward typo. Now, Meta has announced Instagram is giving users the ability to edit their direct messages up to 15 minutes after sending them. Prior to this update, the only option to undo the past was to delete the entire message. In order to edit a DM on Instagram, simply press and hold the sent message until the dropdown menu appears. Then, select “Edit.” The revised message will display the word “Edited” in the conversation, so if you’re hoping they just hadn’t noticed, you still might be better off deleting the original and resending. Image: Instagram A screenshot of a user’s chat history on Instagram in which they use the editing function. The editing function arrives on Instagram chats only a few months after Meta rolled it out for Messenger. Although cross-platform messaging between Instagram and Messenger hasn’t been