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Threads, Meta's Twitter alternative, is now live and already proving incredibly popular. It's very much a work in progress, with lots of features missing, but the developers are working hard at bringing these to the app.

One question I've seen asked quite a few times is how to add a second account to Threads, and it's definitely not as obvious as it could be. The process is easy enough though, just follow these steps.

Not to be outdone by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg has taken to Instagram to announce the rollout of a paid-for Meta Verified program. While it is already possible to receive a Twitter-style blue tick of verification on Facebook and Instagram, the new subscription service will give users the opportunity to pay for the badge.

Echoing the claims of Musk, Zuckerberg says that "this new feature is about increasing authenticity and security across our services". With a charge of between $12 and $15 per month, there is obviously a financial benefit for Meta as well.

It is quite some time since Facebook was hit with the "free the nipple" campaign that demanded the company stop censoring or removing images of breastfeeding women. But now Meta is facing new recommendations from its independent Oversight Board to update the Adult Nudity and Sexual Activity Community Standard that it applies to Facebook and Instagram content to ensure it is "governed by clear criteria that respect international human rights standards".

The recommendation comes as the Oversight Board overturned Meta's decisions in 2021 and 2022 to remove content posted by a couple -- one of whom is transgender, the other non-binary -- for violating Sexual Solicitation Community Standards. Meta is criticized for taking a simplistic view of gender, with the Board saying that it is "unclear how the rules apply to intersex, non-binary and transgender people, and requires reviewers to make rapid and subjective assessments of sex and gender, which is not practical when moderating content at scale".

For anyone invested in social media, copyright infringement is a big deal. Users must be able to protect their intellectual property from imposters and opportunists trying to ride their coattails. As such, most platforms invite content owners to report infringement, but this useful function has joined the long list of communication channels cybercriminals exploit.

Trustwave researchers have found criminal gangs are impersonating Instagram’s copyright report emails in phishing campaigns, angling to trick users into sharing their details.

Following a backlash from ordinary users, as well as influencers and celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, Instagram has announced that it is rolling back a number of recent changes to the social platform.

One of the new features that caused widespread irritation was a TikTok-aping video-focused recommendation system which means users were no longer seeing as much content from accounts they actually follow. Another unpopular change was a new full-screen view for posts. Instagram owners Meta says that after the rollback it will "take the time" to get the changes right.

Like most social media platforms, Instagram has a minimum age for users -- in this instance, it is 13 years old. But verifying ages online -- particularly for non-adults -- has long proved difficult. Now Instagram thinks it has come up with a solution.

As part of measure to enforce age limits more strongly, Instagram is preparing to use a variety of techniques to confirm that younger users are the age they claim to be. One of the options that will be available to such users is uploading a video selfie which will be shared with age-checking agencies.

For people with less sense than money, there are NFTs to waste hard-earned cash on. But Meta is introducing a new way to part fools from their money -- Avatars Store.

These will be available for Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, and will give users the opportunity to buy digital clothes with which to adorn their avatar. Attempting to justify the selling of more digital fluff, Mark Zuckerberg insists that "digital goods will be an important way to express yourself in the metaverse and a big driver of the creative economy".

Meta has announced a temporary change in its hate speech policies, meaning that users in some countries will be allowed to post content that would otherwise have been banned. The change means that users of Facebook and Instagram will be able to promote violence against Russian soldiers, as well as call for the death of President Putin, without fear of censorship.

Posts that include violent speech such as "death to the Russian invaders" are to be permitted in numerous countries, but there is the matter of the context of the invasion of Ukraine to keep in mind. At the same time, the privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has surprised many by announcing that it will downrate sites that publish Russian propaganda and disinformation.

The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, has revealed details of tests that are currently underway that will change the way feeds are displayed on the platform. Among the options that are on the way is the much-requested ability to see a chronological feed.

In all, there are three feed viewing options that are undergoing testing -- something Mosseri describes as giving "you more control over your Instagram experience". Of the three views, two of them allow for chronological scrolling through posts.

Instagram has been busy adding new options and features recently, with no fewer than three rolling out this week. Head of the visual social network, Adam Mosseri, shares details about Instagram Playback, Reels Visual Replies, and Profile Embed.

Instagram Playback is a perfect end-of-year feature, giving users the ability to share their favorite Stories from the year in a new post. The company has also made it possible to reply to commends with Reels, and -- assuming you live in the right part of the world -- to embed a miniature version of your Instagram profile in websites.

Meta recently announced that the protection, privacy and security offered by end-to-end encryption will not be coming to Facebook Messenger or Instagram until some time in 2023. Until then, anyone looking to send secure messages through Meta's platform will have to turn to WhatsApp.

What was not made particularly clear at the time of the announcement, however, is just why there is such a delay. Now Meta has opened up and revealed some of the thinking behind holding back on the roll-out of end-to-end encryption across all of its messaging services.

WhatsApp users may enjoy the benefits of end-to-end encryption, but the same cannot be said of messages sent via Facebook or Instagram. What's more, this is not going to be changing any time soon.

While Meta (or Facebook as it was at the time) previously announced plans to introduce encrypted messaging to the Facebook and Instagram platforms, there was heavy criticism from campaigners and organizations for child safety. Now the company has said end-to-end encryption will not be arriving until 2023.

In October, the internet was shaken by the Facebook outage that affected dozens of big-name companies, as well as millions of brands and businesses that advertise on Facebook’s platform. Because of something as simple as a misconfigured Domain Name System (DNS) record, every device with the Facebook app integration started DDoS-ing recursive DNS resolvers -- DDoS meaning "Distributed Denial of Service." This, in turn, caused overloading in countless cases across the board.

You might be thinking to yourself, "So, what? A few sites were offline for a couple of hours." But the outage brought to light other issues. Communications for the very Facebook employees that could fix this issue were crippled. Some of these hindrances went so far that people were unable to enter buildings because the physical badge system wasn't even online.

Almost a decade after killing off support for previews of Instagram posts within tweets, Twitter and Instagram have finally made friends, relented and decided to bring the feature back.

The reappearance of Twitter Card previews is something that will be welcomed by people who cross-post between Instagram and Twitter. It comes as great news for anyone who was irritated by Instagram's decision to stop displaying previews of tweeted content back in 2012.

History will treat Monday and Tuesday as days the tech world would love to forget. 

Monday was Black Monday for those who rely on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. All of these Facebook-owned properties went down for around eight hours, leaving a lot of people confused and services such as Twitter booming with the extra traffic. This was a critical outage that even affected Facebook employees and their internal systems, making it impossible for many people at Facebook to use anything they needed to get their jobs done.