The web version of Threads could soon be much more useful. Meta is starting to test custom Tweetdeck-like feeds that will allow users to track multiple topics, searches and accounts in a single view.

People who are part of the test can set “pinned columns” that will track updates around specific topics, tags, accounts or search terms. Users can also opt to have these columns automatically refresh with new content. Based on screenshots shared by Mark Zuckerberg, the new Threads columns look a lot like Tweetdeck, the desktop app long favored by Twitter’s power users. The app is now called X Pro and only available to X’s paid subscribers.

The test is the latest sign Meta is looking to make Threads a more reliable source for real-time information. The company has also added a “recent” tab and trending topics to search. But being able to track multiple feeds of updates at once is even more useful. It could also address long-running complaints about Threads’ algorithmic “for you” feed, which tends to surface a random mix of days-old posts and bizarre personal stories from unconnected accounts.

It’s not clear how many people will be part of Meta’s initial test of the feature, though Adam Mosseri said the company is looking for feedback on the changes. But the company has often rolled out major Threads changes to small group of users first before making them more widely available.

Meta’s Oversight Board has accepted its first case involving a post on Threads and it will allow the group to weigh in on the debate over the role of political content on Threads. The board, which started taking appeals from Threads users earlier this year, announced its first case involving Meta’s newest app.

The case stems from a post by a Japanese user who was replying to a screenshot of a news article about Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and allegations of tax evasion. The reply, according to the board, included “several hashtags using the phrase ‘drop dead.’” Meta’s content moderators removed the post, citing the company’s rules against inciting violence. But after the user appealed to the Oversight Board and had the case accepted, Meta reversed course, saying that the post didn’t violate its rules after all.

All that may sound like a fairly typical case for the board, which regularly reviews Meta’s content moderation decisions and pushes the social media company to change its policies. But it’s the first time the group will apply that same process to Threads. And the board has suggested it will use the case to weigh in on the company’s controversial decision to stop showing political content in its algorithmic recommendations on Threads and Instagram.

“The Board selected thi case to examine Meta’s content moderation policies and enforcement practices on political content on Threads,” the Oversight Board wrote in a statement. “This is particularly important, in the context of Meta’s decision not to proactively recommend political content on Threads.”

As usual, it will likely be several months before we see the Oversight Board’s decision actually play out in any policy changes at Meta. In the meantime, the board is seeking public comment on “how Meta’s choice not to recommend political content on Threads and Instagram newsfeeds, or pages not followed by users, affects access to information and political speech.”

Threads is inching closer to becoming an actually useful source for real-time news and updates. The app is finally rolling out the ability to search posts in order of recency, after testing the feature last month.

“In an effort to make it easier to find timely, relevant content on Threads, we’re introducing a Recent tab for your searches,” Instagram’s Adam Mosseri wrote in an update. “Search results here are still evaluated for quality, but you can now see them in chronological order.”

The change has been a long requested one from users hoping Meta’s app will one day be a source of breaking news and real-time information the way that Twitter historically functioned. Being able to search for topics and keywords and find the most recent results is key to finding up-to-date details and commentary about breaking news, sports and anything else happening in real time.

On the other hand, Meta has also made it clear that it would prefer “news” to not be what Threads is known for. Mosseri has said he doesn’t want to “encourage” hard news on Threads and the company actively discourages political content. Threads’ default “for you” algorithm is also known for surfacing days-old posts, random personal stories and other content that’s not exactly timely.

It’s also worth pointing out that Threads’ new recency filter in search is not the same as the “latest” search filter on X. As Mosseri noted in his post, Meta still hides an unknown number of posts in search results that have been “evaluated for quality,” so Threads search will never surface all of the posts containing your search terms. But being able to at least find posts that aren’t a few days old should make looking for timely information a lot less frustrating.

A group of TikTok creators have joined the legal fight to keep the app from being banned in the United States. Eight creators have sued the US government in an effort to block a law requiring TikTok's parent company ByteDance to sell the service. 

The lawsuit claims that the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” is unconstitutional because it violates the First Amendment rights of the creators who depend on the platform. “They have found their voices, amassed significant audiences, made new friends, and encountered new and different ways of thinking—all because of TikTok’s novel way of hosting, curating, and disseminating speech,” it states. “The Act’s ban of TikTok threatens to deprive them, and the rest of the country, of this distinctive means of expression and communication.”

The lawsuit comes one week after TikTok filed its own lawsuit against the government. According to The Washington Post, the company is “covering” the legal fees for the creators participating in the latest suit. It’s also strategy that has worked for the company in the past. A group of Montana-based TikTok creators sued the state over an attempted statewide ban last year. That effort was ultimately successful and the ban never went into effect. The Montana creators were represented by the same law firm currently repping the eight creators involved in the latest suit.

As Google starts to make its latest video-generation tools available, the company says it has a plan to ensure transparency around the origins of its increasingly realistic AI-generated clips. All video made by the company’s new Veo model in the VideoFX app will have digital watermarks thanks to Google’s SynthID system.

SynthID is Google’s digital watermarking system that started rolling out to AI-generated images last year. The tech embeds imperceptible watermarks into AI-made content so that AI detection tools can recognize that the content was generated by AI. Considering that Veo, the company’s latest video generation model previewed onstage at I/O, can create longer and higher-res clips than what was previously possible, tracking the source of such content will be increasingly important.

During a briefing with reporters, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said that SynthID watermarks would also expand to AI-generated text. As generative AI models advance, more companies have turned to watermarking amid fears that AI could fuel a new wave of misinformation. Watermarking systems would give platforms like Google a framework for detecting AI-generated content that may otherwise be impossible to distinguish. TikTok and Meta have also recently announced plans to support similar detection tools on their platforms and label more AI content in their apps.

Of course, there are still significant questions about whether digital watermarks on their own offer sufficient protection against deceptive AI content. Researchers have shown that watermarks can be easy to evade. But making AI-made content detectable in some way is an important first step toward transparency.

Catch up on all the news from Google I/O 2024 right here!

It’s no secret that Meta is eager to prove itself as an AI company, and it might be eyeing a new hardware project to help it get there. The company is in the early stages of “exploring” designs for AI-enabled headphones, according to a new report in The Information.

The company is reportedly calling it “Camerabuds,” because the headphones or earbuds (the company is considering both designs) would have two outward-facing cameras that would be able to detect the wearer’s surroundings and power real-time AI features. In that way, it sounds a but like what the company has done with the multimodal AI features in its smart glasses.

For now, it’s unclear if such a project would actually move forward and Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly “seen several possible designs for the device” but hasn’t been “satisfied” with any so far. Internally there are also engineering concerns, like issues around battery life and heat, as well as the myriad of privacy issues that come with camera-enabled wearables. People with long hair could also pose a potential challenge as their locks would block the cameras’ view.

As The Information points out, Meta has a somewhat mixed track record when it comes to hardware projects. It killed its lineup of smart speakers, called Portal, in 2022 and axed a long-rumored camera-enabled smartwatch. But the most recent version of its Ray-Ban-branded smart glasses, which feature Meta AI, have been more positively received. The company hasn’t disclosed how many pairs it’s sold, but Zuckerberg has said that there's been “high demand” and that the glasses have seen better and more sustained engagement than the first-generation shades.

Putting Meta AI into another piece of hardware would also be very much in line with the company’s ambitions to compete with other leading AI firms. While AI-specific hardware like Rabbit’s R1 and Humane’s AI Pin have so far been underwhelming, Meta is likely hoping that putting its latest AI features into a device people are already used to wearing, like headphones, will be an easier sell. 

Google is teasing an intriguing new AI feature one day ahead of its I/O developer conference. The company shared a brief video on X that appears to show a new camera-powered AI feature that’s able to recognize what’s in the frame in real time.

The video, which is labeled as a “prototype,” shows what appears to be a Pixel device with the camera open viewing the keynote stage at I/O. The person holding the camera asks, “hey, what do you think is happening here?”

A voice replies that “it looks like people are setting up for a large event, perhaps a conference or presentation.” It’s also able to identify the “IO” letters as being tied to Google’s developer conference and mentions “new advancements in artificial intelligence.” As the two voices go back and forth, a text transcript appears on the screen.

It’s not exactly clear what the feature is, though it bears some similarities to Google Lens, the company’s camera-powered search feature. What’s shown in the teaser video, however, appears to be working in real-time, and responding to voice commands much like the multimodal AI in Meta’s smart glasses. The fact that the demo is shown on a Pixel device is also intriguing as Google often releases new AI-powered features on its Pixel lineup first.

While it’s somewhat unusual for Google to preview one of its announcements so soon before its big keynote, it’s likely not a coincidence that the company dropped the video right as OpenAI showed off similar capabilities with its new GPT-4o model during a live event. Whatever Google has in store, though, we don’t have much longer to wait to get the full details. Google I/O kicks off tomorrow, May 14, and Engadget will be covering the keynote live from Mountain View.

Just in case there was any doubt about how Jack Dorsey really feels about Bluesky, the former Twitter CEO has offered new details on why he left the board and deleted his account on the service he helped kickstart. In a characteristically bizarre interview with Mike Solana of Founders Fund, Dorsey had plenty of criticism for Bluesky.

In the interview, Dorsey claimed that Bluesky was “literally repeating all the mistakes” he made while running Twitter. The entire conversation is long and a bit rambly, but Dorsey’s complaints seem to boil down to two issues:

1. He never intended Bluesky to be an independent company with its own board and stock and other vestiges of a corporate entity (Bluesky spun out of Twitter as a public benefit corporation in 2022.) Instead, his plan was for Twitter to be the first client to take advantage of the open source protocol. Bluesky created.

2. The fact that Blueksy has some form of content moderation and has occasionally banned users for things like using racial slurs in their usernames.

“People started seeing Bluesky as something to run to, away from Twitter,” Dorsey said. “It's the thing that's not Twitter, and therefore it's great. And Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd. … But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it. That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company.”

Dorsey also confirmed that he is financially backing Nostr, another decentralized Twitter-like service popular among some crypto enthusiasts and run by an anonymous founder. “I know it's early, and Nostr is weird and hard to use, but if you truly believe in censorship resistance and free speech, you have to use the technologies that actually enable that, and defend your rights,” Dorsey said.

A lot of this isn’t particularly surprising. If you’ve followed Dorsey’s public comments over the last couple years, he’s repeatedly said that Twitter’s “original sin” was being a company that would be beholden to advertisers and other corporate interests. It’s why he backed Elon Musk’s takeover of the company. (Not coincidentally, Dorsey still has about $1 billion of his personal wealth invested in the company now known as X.) He’s also been very clear that he made many of Twitter’s most consequential moderation decisions reluctantly.

Unsurprisingly, Dorsey’s comments weren’t well-received on Bluesky. In a lengthy thread, Bluesky’s protocol engineer Paul Frazee said that Twitter was supposed to to be the AT Protocol’s “first client” but that “Elon killed that straight dead” after he took over the company. “That entire company was frozen by the prolonged acquisition, and the agreement quickly ended when Elon took over,” Frazee said. “It was never going to happen. Also: unmoderated spaces are a ridiculous idea. We created a shared network for competing moderated spaces to exist. Even if somebody wanted to make an unmoderated ATProto app, I guess they could? Good luck with the app stores and regulators and users, I guess.”

While Dorsey was careful not to criticize Musk directly, he was slightly less enthusiastic than when he said that Musk would be the one to “extend the light of consciousness” by taking over Twitter. Dorsey noted that, while he used to fight government requests to take down accounts, Musk takes “the other path” and generally complies. “Elon will fight in the way he fights, and I appreciate that, but he could certainly be compromised,” Dorsey said.

TikTok is ramping up its efforts to automatically label AI-generated content in its app, even when it was created with third-party tools. The company announced plans to support content credentials, a kind of digital watermark that indicates the use of generative AI.

TikTok’s rules already require creators to disclose “realistic” AI-generated content. But that policy can be difficult for the company to enforce, particularly when creators use other companies’ AI tools. But because content credentials are increasingly used across the AI industry, TikTok’s new automated labels should be able to address some of those gaps.

Often described as a “nutrition label for digital content,” content credentials attach “tamper-evident metadata” that can trace the origins of an image and AI tools that were used to edit it along the way. That history can then be viewed by users if they come across a piece of AI-made content on a platform that supports the technology.

TikTok says it will be the first video platform to support content credentials, though it will take some time before these labels become commonplace since many companies are only just beginning to support the technology. (Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Adobe have all pledged to support content credentials. Meta has said its using the standard to power labels on its platform as well.)

However, it’s worth noting that content credentials and other systems that rely on metadata aren’t foolproof. OpenAI notes on a support page that the tech “is not a silver bullet” and that metadata “can easily be removed either accidentally or intentionally.” Labels also simply aren’t that effective if people don’t bother reading them. TikTok says it has a plan to address that too. The company has partnered with fact-checking organization MediaWise and human rights organization Witness on a series of media literacy campaigns meant to educate TikTok users about the labels and “potentially misleading” AI-generated content.

Meta is testing a new way to boost engagement on Threads using Instagram. The company is now testing the ability to cross-post photos from Instagram to Threads. Meta confirmed the experiment after a handful Threads users noticed the setting crop up in Instagram (TechCrunch was first to report the change).

According to the company, cross-posting from Instagram to Threads is optional, though users can opt to have automatically all new photo posts shared to their Threads account as well. (Those who are part of the test can tweak cross-posting settings in the Instagram app.)

Meta has been testing a number of features to boost the growth of Threads, which currently has 150 million users. The company has also experimented with cross-posting from Facebook to Threads and promotes Threads posts directly in Facebook and Instagram feeds, regardless of whether they use the app. It’s also encouraging creators to be more active on the app. Meta has been offering bonuses to creators in exchange for high-performing posts on Threads.