Social

There are few things more iconic online than the Facebook Like button. Found underneath every post on the social media platform, the button has become a handy way for sites to encourage engagement.

But now Meta has announced plans to discontinue two of its Facebook Social Plugins in the early part of next year. Specifically, it is the Facebook Like button that appears on external websites, as well as the Facebook Comment button. This is quite a change for the social media giant to come up with out of the blue, so what is the thinking behind it?

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.

Having someone sliding into your DMs on Instagram could be about to look a little different. The social media platform is rolling out the ability to adorn direct messages with stickers as well as freehand drawing.

As this has been in testing for a reasonable amount of time already, these options may already be familiar to subsets of Instagram users – but now they are rolling out to everyone. If you are yet to experience these new messaging tools, they may not be quite what you expect them to be.

Online scams are nothing new, but there are now more channels through which they can be run. Among them are social platforms like WhatsApp and Messenger, and it is sad fact that older users are more likely to fall victim

This is precisely why Meta is rolling out a new system of warnings that appear in its messaging apps. The aim is to make users think twice about who they connect to and who they share information with as part of Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

Most of the talk about teenagers using social media centers around keeping them safe or restricting what they are able to do. In many regards Instagram is no different, but now younger users are being given something extra.

Instagram’s design team has proudly announced the users with Teen accounts will be able to choose between a number of “aesthetics” for the app. Not available to anyone with a non-Teen account, the new option allows teenagers to select a different icons for the app, designed by Carlos Oliveras Colom.

Meta has confirmed that the Windows and Mac versions of its Messenger desktop app are to be discontinued. While no reason has been given for the deprecation, the company is probably trying to cut back on the number of products it has to develop and support.

There are just two months to go until the Messenger desktop apps cease to function, and users should start to see notifications to this effect when they log in.

Meta has announced major changes to Instagram that it will be hoping will keep regulators satisfied. Like all social media platforms, Instagram has long been under pressure to do more to protect younger users from seeing inappropriate content; with this in mind, Meta says Teen Accounts will be guided by the PG-13 movie rating.

What this means in practice is that teenagers should only be able to “see content that’s similar to what they’d see in a PG-13 movie, by default”. Acknowledging that this will not be enough to keep everyone happy, parents will also have the option of making controls stricter if they feel it necessary or preferable.

Meta has announced an update to Facebook algorithms which may achieve something quite rare – actually surfacing content that people genuinely want to see. The change affects Reels specifically, and users are being given far greater control over what they see in their feeds.

As well as making it easier to indicate a preference for a particular type of video – or, indeed, express a dislike for others – the update makes it possible to prioritize displaying new content. This is not the end of the story; there are also new “friend bubbles” which Meta hopes will encourage users to engage in conversations about content on the platform.

Meta has announced that it is launching a subscription service in the UK that will let users of Facebook and Instagram pay to avoid ads.

The plan has already been rejected by the European Union, but this does not affect post-Brexit UK. Separate subscription tiers are available for the social platforms’  mobile apps and the web. For anyone unwilling or unable to pay, the Facebook and Instagram experience will remain riddled with ads.

Facebook is primarily about staying in touch with people, but Facebook Dating is about starting relationships. It seems unlikely that Facebook is the first place people think of when it comes to finding partners, and Meta has just decided to add new features to Facebook Dating and use it as a reason to remind the world of its existence.

Despite the rather older demographic that Facebook generally attracts, Meta says that “hundreds of thousands of young adults in the US and Canada create Facebook Dating profiles every month”. It is for these people that a dating assistant and Meet Cute feature are being added.

For a long time the alternative social media platform Mastodon has relied heavily on donations to keep running. The non-profit organization also makes use of grants, but now it has announced plans to branch out into new areas of making money.

The plan is important to achieve financial sustainability, and as part of this Mastodon says that it is “now ready to expand on the success of providing these services to organisations”.

Mastodon is to roll out the ability to quote other people’s posts in your own posts on the decentralized social platform. This is something that has been a very long time coming, with Mastodon having talked about it for months.

The reason it has taken so long for post quoting to become a reality is because of the protections that have been built-in. Specifically, users have controls over who is able to quote their posts in order to avoid “dunking” – the phenomenon that sees mass quoting used for negative purposes.

Bluesky was one of the social media platforms that enjoyed a surge of interest as people voted with their feet against Elon Musk. Still somewhat in its infancy, Bluesky continues to evolve and is slowly adding features that are common on many of its rivals.

The latest addition is bookmarking, or Saved Posts, a simple way to save a post so you can easily return to it at a later time. Unlike liking a post, bookmarking or saving is not public, so no other user will be aware of what you would like to look at again.