Social Media

After testing giving users control over the algorithm that controls the display of Reels on Instagram, Meta has now rolled out this personalization feature to everyone in the US.

With algorithms so easily thrown off by a rogue period of viewing, these new controls give users a way to redirect the algorithm back in the direction they would prefer. It is a quick and easy way to make it clear the type of content you are definitely interested in, as well as indicating the stuff that you really don’t want to see.

Meta has announced a series of major design changes to Facebook which it will be hoping will help it to maintain a place of significance in a swamped social media world. The changes are pretty much across the board, but changes to Feeds are likely to be most noticeable.

Revamps to the Feed, search, and navigation systems are consumer facing, but Facebook has not forgotten creators. Improvements have been made to streamline the creation of both Feed posts and Stories.

New analysis from enterprise-class domain registrar CSC reveals that for the past three years, seasonal IP infringements have risen sharply in Q4 and remained elevated through January, when post-holiday sales draw heavy consumer traffic.

The combination of high demand, gift-driven impulse buying, and deep discounting creates a perfect environment for cybercriminals to ply their trade. Over the holidays, fraudsters set up fake websites and lookalike domains impersonating legitimate brands.

A long-awaited change has landed in Instagram, providing users of the social media platform with a new way to share other people’s stories to their own timeline.

Instagram has stood apart from other social platforms in a number of ways, but notably in the lack of option for the sharing of other people’s public content. Now this is changing, helping to bring Instagram in line with other platforms, and giving users something they have been asking for for a very long time.

The latest Cyber Threat Intelligence Report from Hoxhunt looks at the quantity and quality of threats that bypass firewalls and email filters.

It finds attackers are improving their techniques to create more credible threats which are more likely to slip past defenses. Phishing techniques are improving with cleaner language, more convincing formatting and more believable workflow mimicry.

In a few short weeks, Microsoft is removing its Copilot chatbot from WhatsApp. The company says that while it has helped millions of people, the removal comes because of a change to Meta’s platform policies.

As of January 15, WhatsApp is purging all LLM chatbots from the platform, so Microsoft has little choice in the matter. The company stresses that Copilot itself is living on in plenty of other places, and has some helpful information for those who will be affected by the change.

Meta is giving all Facebook users the option of posting under a nickname in Facebook Groups. While the option to post anonymously already exists, the nickname option takes things a little further.

The use of a nickname still allows for a degree of anonymity, while simultaneously allowing for some expression of personality. Additionally, posting with a nickname makes it easier for other people to track things that have been posted by the same person.

Instagram users are in line for a better Reels experience thanks to a number of newly unveiled camera experiences. There is quite a lot to explore here, but perhaps the most significant change is the option of posting videos up to 20 minutes in length.

The word “creator” is bandied about quite liberally in Instagram’s announcement, giving you a good idea of where the new improvements are to be found right from the start. That said, the new features and options are not really limited to that esteemed breed: the digital creator.

New research from online protection company Malwarebytes exposes how social media and online marketplaces have become hotbeds for holiday shopping scams.

It finds that 51 percent of people encounter scams on social media weekly while an unlucky 27 percent meet scams daily. For marketplace shoppers, 36 percent are hit with a scam weekly and 15 percent experience one daily.

If you are a seasoned user of WhatsApp, brace yourself for a blast from the past. The company has just announced that it is bringing back one of its earliest features in a new and improved form.

What is returning is the About feature, a simple text field that can be used to share information about yourself, your availability, or anything else you can think of. It is not entirely dissimilar to the Notes feature of Instagram.

Creators on all social media platforms have a lot to worry about, but the theft or reuse of content must be near the top of the list. To help combat this, Meta has launched Facebook content protection to help prevent Reels from being stolen.

The automated tool can warn Facebook creators when their Reels are detected being reused on either Facebook or Instagram. If reuse is detected, creators have a number of options available to them, including blocking anything being used without consent.

Cast your mind back a few years – well, several, actually – and you may well remember Vine. The social network focused on short-form videos, and it was killed off nearly 10 years ago. Now, re-entering a very busy social arena, Vine is back.

This time, the platform is going by the name diVine, and it is partly funded by one of Jack Dorsey’s ventures. This is not just a relaunch of the old video sharing platform; there is an attempt to resurrect as much of the original content as possible.

The wide range of messaging apps now available is great in terms of choice, but it also means that you almost certainly have contacts scattered across a number of different platforms. In turn, this means that you have had to install a large number of app in order to ensure that you are able to contact everyone that you need to.

But this could soon be changing for WhatsApp users. Several years ago, there were various messaging apps that could be used to conduct cross-platform chats, so you could use one app instead of several. This looks to be the direction in which WhatsApp is heading.

If you are in a Facebook Group which is private, you might want to keep an eye on things. Meta has just announced that Group administrators will be getting a new option that will enable them to change their group from private to public.

While Meta is promoting this as a way for group admins to “grow their communities”, there will be obvious privacy concerns for people who joined particular groups precisely because they were private. Meta believes, however, that it has things in control, insisting that member privacy can be maintained even if the switch from private to public is made.

Instagram is borrowing an idea from TikTok, introducing a Watch History section that will be welcomed by many users.

While undeniably useful, pretty much the only thing that is surprising about this particular feature is that it has taken so long to appear in the app. It solves the problem of viewing a Reel within the app – and then never being able to find it again.