Media Perception Of Social Workers

Teens using supervised accounts will need parental permission to revert the changes. | Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta is introducing changes to Instagram and Facebook Messenger that aim to better protect minors from unwanted contact online, placing greater restrictions on who can message teens while giving parents more control over their children’s security settings. Notably, the company announced that by default, teens under the age of 16 (or under 18 in some countries) will no longer be able to receive messages, or be added to group chats, by users they don’t follow or aren’t connected with on Instagram and Messenger. These new updates build upon a series of safeguards that Meta has introduced over the last year as it battles accusations that its algorithms helped turn Facebook and Instagram into a “ marketplace for predators in search of children .” Unlike the previous restrictions, which only limited adults over 19 from DM’ing minors who ...

Image: Meta EU users will be able to unlink their Instagram and Facebook accounts, as well as other Meta services ahead of the bloc’s new Digital Markets Act (DMA) coming into force in March, the company has announced . The changes will apply in the European Union, European Economic Area, and Switzerland, and notifications informing users of the change will appear in the coming weeks. The changes mean that EU users will be able to use many of Meta’s services without their information being shared between them. People will be able to use Facebook Messenger as a stand-alone service without a Facebook account, for example, and if they’ve previously linked their Facebook and Instagram accounts they’ll be able to unlink them. ( Meta’s help page notes that linking accounts like this is used for features like targeting ads, personalizing content recommendations, and sharing posts). Less data linkage, but also less functionality Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Ga...

Instagram will be able to display HDR photographs taken with Samsung’s new Galaxy S24 phones, the two companies have announced. “Every photo and video you take, or view, will be shown in its full range of color and contrast, from the moment you snap the content, to the moment you post,” said Samsung’s VP of Intelligent Imaging, Dr. Hamid Sheikh, onstage at the S24 launch event. “In fact the Galaxy S24 series will be the first ever to have HDR enabled for photos on Instagram.” The app already supports HDR videos . HDR support was one of a handful of social media photography-focused features Samsung announced for its new phones, the Galaxy S24, S24 Plus , and S24 Ultra . The smartphone manufacturer also announced that Instagram, as well as rival Snapchat, would be able to make use of Samsung’s native camera features when taking photos directly from the social media apps. Image: Samsung Support for posting HDR photos on Instagram being announced ...

The Artifact news app. | Image: Artifact Artifact, the news app created by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, is shutting down just a year after launch . The app used an AI-driven approach to suggest news that users might like to read, but it seems it didn’t catch on with enough people for the Artifact team to continue making the app. “We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way,” CEO Kevin Systrom says in a blog post . The app is beginning to wind down today. Users can no longer add new comments or posts, and Artifact will still let you read news “through the end of February.” Since launching at the end of January 2023, Artifact has added a bunch of new and interesting features, like AI-powered article summaries , the ability to comment on articles within Artifact , and the ability to mark articles as clickbait (and ...

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta is restricting teens from viewing content that deals with topics like suicide, self-harm, and eating disorders, the company announced today. The content, which Meta says may not be “age appropriate” for young people, will not be visible even if it’s shared by someone a teen follows. If a teen searches for this type of content on Facebook and Instagram, they’ll instead be directed toward “expert resources for help” like the National Alliance on Mental Illness, according to Meta. Teen users also may not know if content in these categories is shared and that they can’t see it. This change is rolling out to users under 18 over the coming months. In addition to hiding content in sensitive categories, teen accounts will also be defaulted to restrictive filtering settings that tweak what kind of content on Facebook and Instagram they see. This change affects recommended posts in Search and Explore that could be “sensitiv...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Instagram is going to help you spice up your Notes by letting you post video Notes, Meta announced on Wednesday. Notes have so far been text-based, meaning they currently function like the AIM status messages of my millennial youth. (You can even share what song you’re listening to!) The addition of video gives you a little more room to be creative with your Notes, and you can add a text caption, too. But since video Notes can only be two-second loops, they probably aren’t going to replace Instagram Stories anytime soon. The company is also introducing additional ways to reply to Notes from your friends, including photos, videos, audio messages, stickers, and GIFs. If you reply to a Note, your friend will see that reply as a DM. Image: Meta Meta introduced Notes late last year , and they’ve apparently proven to be popular with teens . Personally, I currently prefer to make my short posts on anothe...

Illustration: The Verge On Friday, two days after Threads finally started publicly testing ActivityPub integration , Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared a thread on Threads detailing the company’s plans for its continued integration with the fediverse. Right now, it’s possible to follow a few Threads accounts (including Mosseri’s) from other platforms, but Meta has much bigger plans for Threads interoperability that Mosseri says will take “the better part of a year” to realize. Here’s what’s in the works, according to Mosseri. Mosseri says that the Threads team wants to make it so the option to follow a Threads account on other platforms is available to “all public accounts on Threads, not just a handful of testers.” The Threads team wants to let replies from other platforms show up inside of Threads. “It’s a bad experience now that I have to leave the Threads app to see replies I’m getting from the broader community,” Mosseri says . Threads is planning t...