Media Perception Of Social Workers

Image: Meta If you think avoiding AI-generated images is difficult as it is, Facebook and Instagram are now going to put them directly into your feeds. At the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, the company announced that it’s testing a new feature that creates AI-generated content for you “based on your interests or current trends” — including some that incorporate your face. When you come across an “Imagined for You” image in your feed, you’ll see options to share the image or generate a new picture in real time. One example (embedded below) shows several AI-generated images of “an enchanted realm, where magic fills the air.” But others could contain your face... which I’d imagine will be a bit creepy to stumble upon as you scroll. GIF: Meta The examples at the very top of this article include captions that say you can “imagine yourself” as a video game character or an astronaut exploring space. Both images appear to use a person’s photos

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pushing back on the idea that social media directly harms teen mental health. During an interview with The Verge ’s Alex Heath , Zuckerberg said that “the majority of the high-quality research out there suggests that there’s no causal connection at a broad scale between these things.” This echoes the statement Zuckerberg gave in front of Congress in January during a hearing about child safety, where he argued that existing research hasn’t shown a causal link between social media and poor teen mental health. As my colleague Adi Robertson pointed out at the time , it’s difficult to prove causal links, and research shows social media could cause both negative and positive impacts on an adolescent’s mental health. “The academic research shows something that I think, to me, fits more with what I’ve seen of how the platforms operate,” Zuckerberg told The Verge . “But it’s counter to what a

Image: Meta Starting today, Instagram will begin putting new and existing users under the age of 18 into “Teen Accounts” — a move that will affect how tens of millions of teens interact with the platform. The new account type automatically applies a set of protections to young users, and only users 16 years of age and older can loosen some of these settings. For starters, the accounts of all minors on Instagram will be private by default (not just teens under 16) and will come with some of Instagram’s existing restrictions for young users, such as those that prevent strangers from direct messaging them . But other new features are coming, too, including a Sleep Mode that silences notifications from 10PM to 7AM. “This really standardizes a lot of the work that we’ve done, simplifies it, and brings it to all teens,” Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, said during an interview with The Verge . “It provides essentially a set of protections that are in

Illustration: The Verge Instagram might roll out a way to share comments on other Instagram posts to Threads, according to Alessandro Paluzzi, who often reverse engineers Meta’s social media apps to find coming features. Paluzzi shared an image showing that when commenting on an Instagram post, there could be a new dropdown menu that lets users choose to share the comment only to Instagram or “also share on Threads.” Meta has made a few moves to integrate Threads with its other platforms in the past, such as showing Threads posts on Instagram or Facebook (and, later, letting users opt out of that). The Twitter-like short-posting social network also lacks DMs of its own, but users can still receive or send messages through Instagram. The bigger effort, of course, is Meta’s slow work integrating Threads with the fediverse. The company’s moves to do so include being able to actually see replies from the fediverse under their posts, and, more recently, ot

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta has acknowledged that all text and photos that adult Facebook and Instagram users have publicly published since 2007 have been fed into its artificial intelligence models. Australia’s ABC News reports that Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh, initially rejected claims about user data from 2007 being leveraged for AI training during a local government inquiry about AI adoption before relenting after additional questioning. “The truth of the matter is that unless you have consciously set those posts to private since 2007, Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007 unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private,” Green Party senator David Shoebridge pushed in the inquiry. “That’s the reality, isn’t it?” “Correct,” Claybaugh responded. Meta’s privacy center and blog posts acknowledge hoover

Meta will hide the “AI Info” label in a menu if an image has been edited with AI. | Image: Meta Meta is updating how it labels content on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads that has been edited or manipulated using generative AI. In an updated blog post , Meta announced that its “AI Info” tag will appear within a menu in the top-right corner of images and videos edited with AI — instead of directly beneath the user’s name. Users can click on the menu to check if AI information is available and read what may have been adjusted. Meta previously applied the “AI Info” tag to all AI-related content — whether it was lightly adjusted in a tool like Photoshop that includes AI features or fully AI-generated from a prompt. The company says the changes are being introduced to “better reflect the extent of AI used” across images and videos on the platforms. Image: Meta This label was introduced in July after Meta’s previous “Made with AI” label was

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta, Snap, and TikTok have founded a new program called Thrive to help stop the spread of graphic content depicting or encouraging self-harm and suicide. Thrive enables participating companies to share “signals” to alert each other of violating content on their platforms. Thrive is built in conjunction with the Mental Health Coalition, a charitable organization that says it works to remove the stigma around mental health discussions. Meta says it provides the technical infrastructure behind Thrive that enables “signals to be shared securely.” It uses the same cross-platform signal sharing tech used in the Lantern program, which is designed to help fight child abuse online . Participating companies can share hashes that match the violating media to signal it to each other. Meta says it’s already made such content harder to find on its platform but that it’s trying to leave room for people to discuss their mental healt

Image: Instagram Instagram is adding a handful of new features to direct messages, including photo editing capabilities and stickers. Users will be able to edit photos by drawing on them or adding stickers before sending them via DM, similar to editing features that already exist for Instagram Stories. The company also said users will be able to make their own custom stickers from existing photos and use them in DMs. Put together, the photo editing tools in chats are expanding to be closer to Stories. Instagram is also adding new chat themes that change the look and design of DMs, like a fall theme or one promoting a new album by pop star Sabrina Carpenter. Users can also now add a birthday cake icon to Notes, the away status-like blurb that is visible at the top of users’ DM inboxes. Direct messaging has been an area of growth for Instagram, according to company head Adam Mosseri , so it’s not surprising that there’s an emphasis placed on new tools and f

Image: Instagram Instagram is adding the ability to leave comments on Instagram Stories, the ephemeral posts that many people use even more than traditional posts these days. Previously, replying to an Instagram Story sent a private message visible only to the person who posted the content. The addition of comments adds a more public way to respond to Stories. The ability to comment in the first place is more limited, though: only people who follow the poster and who the poster follows back will be able to leave a comment. Instagram explains how most of it works in this video . Just like Stories, the comments are temporary and will last for up to 24 hours; Instagram spokesperson Emily Norfolk says users will have the option to turn comments on or off for any Story they share. It’s not clear whether comments will be archived after a Story post expires, but we’ve asked Instagram for clarification. Instagram has steadily added new features to surfaces like