Media Perception Of Social Workers

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Meta is shutting down all third-party face filters and AR effects on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, along with the tools used to create them, on January 14th, 2025. That includes any created by brands and other third parties, the company wrote in a blog post today. Meta’s own AR effects will continue to operate, however. The Meta Spark platform is used to create face filters like those you’d see on Snapchat or TikTok that make you look old or reimagine you as a cartoon character, as well as AR games and ads. Any videos that have used Spark-based AR effects will stay up on Facebook, Instagram, and in messages sent over Messenger, the company says in its FAQ about the change . Meta introduced its AR tools in 2017 , giving it an answer to AR features Snapchat already had. It’s been a popular part of the platform, and the change hasn’t gone unnoticed by the platform’s creators, as TechCrunch notes , pointing to complai...

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge A new feature announced by Instagram today will allow users to add a song on their profile — much like Myspace in the early 2000s. The music added to a user’s profile shows up in the bio area, according to screenshots shared by Instagram. A song will be featured on a profile until the user removes or replaces it. But unlike Myspace, songs won’t autoplay — people viewing a profile with a song can play and pause the track. Image: Instagram Users can add a song by going to the “edit profile” page, where they’ll be able to search for and select a track from Instagram’s library of licensed music that’s also available for things like Reels or posts. From there, users will be able to select a 30-second-long portion of the song to add. Instagram is launching the feature in collaboration with pop star Sabrina Carpenter, whose earworm hit “Espresso” has been inescapable this summer. Beginning today, Carpente...

Image: Becca Farsace / The Verge Instagram is a popular place to show off your latest photos, but if you’re a real photography enthusiast, it may not be enough. You may want a better-looking portfolio — not to mention feedback and suggestions from other photographers. One way to get that is to exhibit your work on a site specifically geared toward the visual arts. What follows are sites that offer amateur and / or professional photographers a space to showcase their images, solicit comments, have discussions, and possibly even sell some work. In other words, a community — one that offers critiques, support, and good conversation. Instagram Screenshot: Meta This may not be a typical Instagram feed, but it shows that you can search for and find some great photography. Instagram is included here because how could it not be? The well-known social network concentrates on visuals, both still and video, from the accounts that you follo...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Instagram is testing a potentially major change to profile pages: making the squares in your profile grid vertical rectangles. Some users recently spotted the test, and there have been indications from at least 2022 that the company has toyed with a rectangular grid. “The vast majority of what is uploaded to Instagram today is vertical,” Mosseri says in an Instagram story from Friday discussing the test. “It’s either 4 by 3 in a photo or 9 by 16 in a video, and cropping it down to square is pretty brutal.” Mosseri notes that “squares are from way back in the day when you can only upload square photos to Instagram,” a limitation Instagram removed all the way back in 2015 . Mosseri also knows that this profile change might be annoying for people who have spent a lot of time “curating and making sure everything lines up” but says that “I would really like to do better by the content today.” “We’re testing a vertical pr...

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Instagram has starting testing a new feature that looks a whole lot like Snap Map. This allows Instagram users to post text and video updates to a map based on where they were taken. The map is shared with friends, whose updates can all appear alongside each other. It is, pretty much, just the Snap Map feature, which was originally launched in 2017. The difference for now seems to be that Instagram may have much more limited privacy settings. Users have to choose a “specific group of people” to share their location with, such as “Close Friends or only followers they follow back,” Christine Pai, a Meta spokesperson, told The Verge . Snapchat allows public posts to Snap Map. Instagram’s feature is currently only available as a “small test” in a few markets, Pai said. The tool is opt in and includes controls over location sharing. “As always, we are building this feature with safety in mind,” Pai said. She didn’t immediate...

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Instagram is expanding the number of photos and videos that can be added to a single grid post, the company said today. Each carousel post can now have up to 20 photos or videos. Users could previously add up to 10 pieces of content to each carousel post — something that’s colloquially known as a “photo dump.” The carousel feature was first rolled out to users in 2017. Image: Instagram Instagram has slowly added more features to the carousel function, including the ability to pair songs with your slides and collaborative posts that allow multiple users to add their content. A higher ceiling could be helpful for this specifically, especially if several people are contributing to a single carousel post. The expansion brings Instagram more in line with TikTok, which currently supports posts of up to 35 photos. Though TikTok broke through as a shortform video app, photos have caught on surprisingly f...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Instagram is making “views” the primary metric across all of its formats, meaning that creators will be able to track the same metric across Reels, Stories, photos, and more. The change will roll out in the coming weeks, according to a post on Instagram’s creators account . View this post on Instagram A post shared by Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) “Historically we’ve shown different metrics for Reels vs. other posts, but we want to evolve this so it’s easier to understand how your content is doing regardless of the format,” Instagram chief Adam Mosseri writes in a post . A view is different than reach, Mosseri says in an accompanying video, because the same person can view the same piece of content multiple times. While views might be the new primary metric, Mosseri also recommends that creators keep an eye on sends per reach. Both are “probably the most important metrics for anybody try...

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge We’ve been living with social media for a long time now — Facebook opened up to the public in 2006 — and that means a lengthy trail of posts stretching back through the years. While this does let you take a nostalgic trip into the past with just a few clicks, it can also bring up some embarrassing and awkward memories. Maybe your Twitter takes from 10 years ago haven’t aged well, or there’s an ex-partner you’d rather not remember, or you’re heading for a job interview and don’t want your would-be employers to judge who you are now from your decades-old social media posts. Whatever the reason, you can find and delete ancient social media posts without too much difficulty using the web or mobile apps. (They say that anything on the internet is forever, of course, but you can do your best to at least somewhat mute your mistakes. Who knows? Maybe your potential new boss never heard of the Wayback Machine .) We’ve included ...