TikTok recently pulled a tool that allowed researchers and others to study the popularity of hashtags on its app. The change, first reported by The New York Times, came shortly after researchers published a report using data from the tool that criticized the company.

As The New York Times points out, the tool was one of the few publicly-accessible methods of tracking details about the popularity of specific hashtags. TikTok, like other social media companies, has made it difficult for outsiders to track how content spreads in its app.

The tool in question is a feature called Creative Center, which provides data about the popularity of hashtags to would-be advertisers and others. Researchers at Rutgers’ Network Contagion Institute had used Creative Center’s search function to track hashtags deemed “sensitive” to Chinese government interests. The researchers compared the prevalence of the hashtags between TikTok and Instagram and concluded that many "sensitive" topics were "dramatically underrepresented on TikTok" compared with Instagram.

Soon after the report was published, the researchers said the search feature in Creative Center disappeared without an explanation. “Search capacity for Hashtags has itself now been removed from the user interface entirely, which NCRI discovered to have occurred on Christmas day, days after this report’s initial release,” they wrote in an addendum to the report. They added that TikTok had also disabled direct access to a number of “sensitive” topics they had previously tracked, including hashtags related to US politics and other geopolitical issues.

In a statement to The New York Times, TikTok confirmed the change. “Unfortunately, some individuals and organizations have misused the Center’s search function to draw inaccurate conclusions, so we are changing some of the features to ensure it is used for its intended purpose,” a company spokesperson said.

The dust-up is the latest example of mounting tensions between social media companies and researchers trying to study thorny topics like misinformation. Meta has also found itself at odds with researchers, and reportedly plans to deprecate CrowdTangle, a tool widely used by researchers and journalists to study how content spreads on Facebook. X has also greatly restricted researchers’ access to data since Elon Musk took control of the company, making its once open APIs prohibitively expensive to most groups.

In TikTok’s case, the company may be particularly sensitive to what it considers improper use of its tools. The company has for years denied that it aligns its content policies with the interests of the Chinese government as numerous government officials have called for the app to be banned. More recently, the company faced increased scrutiny over its handling of content related to the Israel-Hamas war — criticism that was also fueled by what the company said was an inaccurate portrayal of hashtag data.

That said, the company has made some concessions to researchers. TikTok began offering an official Research API to some academic institutions last year, and reportedly plans to make the tools available to some civil society groups that have questioned the company’s content moderation practices.

But for researchers, the move to abruptly cut off a tool will likely fuel more questions about just how willing the company is to work with them. “This lack of transparency is of deep concern to researchers,” the NCRI researchers wrote.

The official X account belonging to the Securities and Exchange Commission was briefly “compromised,” the regulator said, after an apparently rogue post on X temporarily juiced bitcoin prices. 

On Tuesday, the SEC’s official X account tweeted that bitcoin ETFs had been approved “for listing on all registered national securities exchanges.” The tweet included an official-looking graphic featuring a quote from SEC Chair Gary Gensler. However, Gensler himself quickly clarified from his X account that the post from @SECGov was the result of a "compromised” account.

“The @SECGov twitter account was compromised, and an unauthorized tweet was posted,” Gensler wrote. “The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products.”

Screenshot via X

The confusion comes as the SEC is, in fact, considering whether to approve spot bitcoin ETFs, investment funds that hold the cryptocurrency. The regulator is expected to make a decision Wednesday in a process that has been closely watched by crypto investors.

Naturally, the now-deleted tweet from the SEC’s official (and gray check-verified) account on X prompted a momentary surge in bitcoin prices, followed by a steep decline. The post and subsequent clarification from Gensler “wiped out over $50 million of leveraged derivatives trading positions within an hour,” according to and analysis from CoinDesk.

For now, it’s unclear exactly how the SEC’s X account was “compromised.” In a statement, an SEC spokesperson told Engadget that “the unauthorized tweet regarding bitcoin ETFs was not made by the SEC or its staff.” The regulator has so far given no indication about whether it intends to approve any spot bitcoin ETFs this week.

X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

SAG-AFTRA, the union representing thousands of performers, has struck a deal with an AI voice acting platform aimed at making it easier for actors to license their voice for use in video games. Under the deal, which was announced during a press event at CES 2024, SAG-AFTRA members will be able to work with Replica Studios to license their voice to game studios.

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union's top negotiator, said that the agreement “paves the way for professional voiceover artists to safely explore new employment opportunities for their digital voice replicas.” The agreement comes as Hollywood is still grappling with the use of AI. Last year, SAG-AFTRA reached a deal with Hollywood studios that included AI protections following a months-long strike. As a result, studios are now required to pay actors (and obtain their consent) before using an AI-generated version of their likeness.

SAG-AFTRA’s latest agreement with Replica Studios seems to follow a similar framework. According to Crabtree, the agreements cover the creation of so-called “digital voice replicas” and how they can be used by game studios and other companies. The deal has provisions for minimum rates, safe storage and transparency equirements, as well as “limitations on the amount of time that a performance replica can be employed without further payment and consent.”

Notably, the agreement does not cover whether actors’ replicas can be used to train large language models (LLMs), though Replica Studios CEO Shreyas Nivas said the company was interested in pursuing such an arrangement. “We have been talking to so many of the large AAA studios about this use case,” Nivas said. He added that LLMs are “out-of-scope of this agreement” but “they will hopefully [be] things that we will continue to work on and partner on.”

SAG-AFTRA’s deal with Replica only covers a sliver of the game industry. Separately, the union is also negotiating with several of the major game studios after authorizing a strike last fall. “I certainly hope that the video game companies will take this as an inspiration to help us move forward in that negotiation,” Crabtree said.

We're reporting live from CES 2024 in Las Vegas from January 6-12. Keep up with all the latest news from the show here.

We didn’t have to wait long to get more details about Sony's new mixed reality headset. Just after Sony teased the “spatial content creation” device onstage at CES 2024, we got a fresh look, and a few more details about the headset during Siemens’ keynote in Las Vegas.

The two companies are teaming up on the device as part of a broader vision to enable an “industrial metaverse” where mixed reality plays a central role in businesses’ manufacturing and design processes. It’s still not clear what the device is actually called — Siemens’ press release refers to it only as “Sony’s new spatial content creation system,” — but the company shared that the headset will be available beginning “later in 2024.”

We also got a new look at the headset itself which, according to Siemens, is equipped with “4K OLED microdisplays.” And, as we noted during Sony’s keynote, the device will be enabled with some unusual-looking controllers. It appears there’s one worn on the finger and another, larger controller that looks more like a typical VR controller.

The two companies also showed off a number of potential use cases for the tech. For example, Red Bull Racing’s engineering and design teams will use the headset to visualize the cockpit of a Formula One car (the Red Bull rep onstage said it was still “early days for us at the moment” regarding the tech).

Siemens is pitching the headset as a tool to enable what the company has dubbed the “industrial metaverse,” which CEO Dr. Roland Busch defined as “an immersive space where people and AI can collaborate in real time to solve real world problems.”

The keynote seemed to confirm that the headset is intended to be used in industrial and professional settings rather than consumer ones. As expected, this is not an Apple Vision Pro competitor. But it could still open up some interesting new possibilities for mixed reality that may be more appealing than VR workstations.

We're reporting live from CES 2024 in Las Vegas from January 6-12. Keep up with all the latest news from the show here.

Newsletter platform Substack has removed "some" pro-Nazi publications from its platform following weeks of pressure over its content moderation rules.The takedowns include five newsletters flagged to the company by Platformer, which was first to report the news.

The move comes amid growing pressure on the newsletter company after it repeatedly declined to remove publications promoting white nationalist and pro-Nazi views. In November, The Atlantic reported that it found “scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack,” some of which were monetized by their authors.

Substack, which has landed in hot water over its refusal to ban Nazis in the past, responded to the article and ensuing controversy by doubling down on its stance. “I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views,” Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie wrote in December. “But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.”

In the latest, and somewhat confusing twist, Substack now says it has removed “some publications” but hasn’t changed its underlying rules. In a statement to Platformer, Substack’s founders said that an investigation “found that five out of the six publications you reported do indeed violate our existing content guidelines, which prohibit incitements to violence based on protected classes.” The founders said they were working on new moderation tools “so Substack users can set and refine the terms of their own experience on the platform.”

A Substack spokesperson also confirmed to Engadget that the company had removed “some” newsletters, though it wasn’t clear if the company had removed any others besides the ones reported by Platformer. "Substack regularly reviews reports of all potential content violations," the spokesperson said. “Substack did not change its policies."

Meanwhile, some prominent newsletter writers have already left the platform in protest and have reported cancellations among their paid subscribers. And it's unclear whether the company's latest act of moderation will be enough to reassure its critics. As Casey Newton, who runs Platformer noted, “this issue has raised concerns that go beyond the small group of publications that violate the company’s existing policy guidelines.”

If you’re active on Facebook or Instagram, you might have noticed prompts about a setting called “link history.” The feature allows users to keep track of all of the links they visit via Facebook and Instagram’s in-app browsers.

According to Meta, the feature allows users to ensure they “never lose” a link. “Easily get back to recent links you’ve visited with your Facebook browsing activity now saved in one place,” an in-app notification about the feature says.

But, as Gizmodo points out, the feature also gives Meta a convenient way to improve its targeted advertising, which has taken a hit following Apple’s crackdown on app tracking. “Keep in mind that when link history is on, we may use link history information from Facebook’s Mobile Browser to improve your ads across Meta technologies,” the company notes in a support article.

Instagram has a similar feature, which keeps tabs on links users visit via the app’s browser. Though it seems many users are just now discovering the settings, a Meta spokesperson confirmed the features began rolling out last summer.

Though link history is not enabled by default, it’s the kind of setting many people may opt into without giving much thought, especially because the company markets it as a way to avoid “losing” links. That’s sparked concern among some privacy advocates who worry Meta is using increasingly sneaky ways to gather data about users’ online activity.

The good news, however, is that it’s easy to double check if you have link history enabled, and opt-out if you do.

On Facebook, users will need to open a link from within the app and tap on … menu to open the settings from the in-app browser. Then, look for the “link history” toggle. If it’s on, you’ll need to turn it off, and then confirm via the pop-up that you want it disabled.

Screenshots via Facebook

The process on Instagram is pretty much the same: Head to the in-app browser’s settings, look for “link history” and confirm your choice.

Of note, though both apps will immediately delete your link history from their respective apps, Meta says it can take up to 90 days “to complete the deletion process.” This means your previous browsing activity could still play a role in your targeted ads for several weeks after you’ve disabled link tracking.

Of course, the company still has numerous other ways of tracking your online activity, so opting out of link history alone won’t be enough to fully take back control of your data. Privacy conscious ad-haters who live in the European Union, however, do have another option, though it may be even less appealing. Meta recently began offering the ability for EU users to opt out of Facebook and Instagram ads entirely, in exchange for a rather hefty monthly fee.

This year, tech companies have made concessions that would have once been unthinkable. Apple agreed to adopt the RCS protocol, allowing for text message interoperability with Android devices, and, after more than a decade it ditched the lightning port in its latest iPhone. Meta offered some users the choice to opt out of targeted advertising for a monthly subscription. TikTok, Meta, and Snap allowed some users to opt out of their recommendation algorithms entirely.

None of these concessions would have happened without pressure from the European Union. The bloc has long taken the lead in regulating “Big Tech” (or attempting to), but 2023 saw some of those efforts finally come to fruition.

The most immediate result of increased EU regulations this year came with the arrival of the iPhone 15 lineup, which was the first phone from Apple to support USB-C rather than its proprietary lightning port. The company may have eventually made the switch on its own, but it came in 2023 as a direct result of a European law that made USB-C the common charging standard.

"We have no choice as we do around the world but to comply to local laws," Apple exec Greg Joswiak said about the rules last year. (The regulation requires all new phones and other mobile devices to adopt USB-C by the end of 2024.)

Likewise, it’s widely believed Apple’s decision to finally agree to support the RCS standard in iMessage was the result of political will within the EU. Apple had long been resistant to supporting RCS, which would finally modernize text messages between iPhone owners and their “green bubble” friends.

Apple hasn’t publicly said why it changed its stance. But Google and other companies were pressuring EU authorities to regulate iMessage like other “gatekeeper” services that fall under its authority thanks to the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Apple’s surprise announcement that it would support RCS after all came on the same day as the deadline for companies to challenge the EU’s gatekeeper rules. So Apple’s about face on RCS could reasonably be interpreted as an attempt to pacify EU regulators who could have taken more aggressive measures, like requiring iMessage to be fully interoperable with other chat apps like WhatsApp.

Notably, both of these changes will also benefit US users, even though they are a consequence of EU-specific regulations.“There's definitely a higher degree of protection to the consumer in Europe than there is in the US,” Carolina Milanesi, a consumer analyst with Creative Strategies, told Engadget. Those protections, she noted, often “cascade down” to other regions because it can be impractical to implement different standards across geographies.

In addition to the gains made under the DMA, most of the major social media apps — including Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram — fall under the purview of another EU law that went into effect this year, the Digital Services Act. Under this law, these companies are required to make detailed disclosures about disinformation and other harmful content, and explain how their recommendation algorithms work.

“If you force the social media industry to explain itself, to reveal to some degree its inner workings, it will have an incentive to not misbehave and/or incentive to self regulate more vigorously” explains Paul Barrett, deputy director of NYU’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

Whether these measures will actually make these services better for those using them, however, is less clear. There are still open questions about how the rules will be enforced. But there have been a few notable changes for EU-based social media users.

Snapchat, Meta and TikTok all now allow European users to opt out of their recommendation algorithms entirely. Snapchat also ended most targeted advertising for 13- to 17-year-olds in the bloc. Additionally, Meta was forced to allow EU users to opt-out of targeted advertising or choose no advertising at all (in exchange for a hefty monthly subscription.)

While these may not seem like monumental changes, they do strike at the heart of all of these companies’ business models. And it’s unlikely, if left to self-regulate as US policymakers have been content to allow them to do, that any of these companies would have voluntarily acted against their own self-interest.

When Elon Musk first took over Twitter, those of us in the tech media had all kinds of theories about how the acquisition might bring about the death of the 17-year-old platform.

Some posited that his inept attempts at cost-cutting would cause irreparable damage to Twitter’s infrastructure or that mass resignations would lead to catastrophic instability. But as is so often the case with Musk, predictions were in vain. Twitter did die this year, but the way it played out was both more boring and more stupid than anyone could have possibly imagined.

Musk killed Twitter by slowly making it useless for those who relied on it for real-time information, by choking off conversations from those not willing to pay, by flooding users’ timelines with spammy blue-check sycophants and renaming the company X. He killed it by re-platforming actual Nazis and far-right trolls and Alex Jones and boosting anti-semitism so loudly the site's largest remaining advertisers and most prominent users abandoned the platform in droves. Though you can still go to www.twitter.com and see a website that vaguely resembles the thing we used to call Twitter, it’s only a dull echo of what it once was.

- via Getty Images

The beginning of the end

While you could argue the death spiral began the second Musk walked into Twitter HQ carrying a sink 14 months ago, the platform we all knew began to die three months later, when Musk abruptly decided to ban third-party client apps from its platform and put the rest of its API behind an outrageously expensive paywall.

Twitter had long been an outlier among its social media peers for having a relatively open platform. It gave researchers tools to access the full history of all public conversations on Twitter. It allowed developers to build their own apps on top of its platform, which fostered a small but robust ecosystem of third-party Twitter clients.

Third-party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific had a relatively small (but devoted) following, but they also played a significant role in defining the culture of Twitter. In the early days of Twitter, the company didn’t have its own mobile app, so it was third-party developers that set the standard of how the service should look and feel. Third-party apps were often the first to adopt now-expected features like in-line photos and video, and the pull-to-refresh gesture. The apps are also responsible for popularizing the word “tweet” and Twitter’s bird logo.

And while many of these apps had become less prominent in recent years, they were emblematic of the way that Twitter, at its best, empowered its users to shape the platform.

Likewise, having an open and readily-available API meant that Twitter, while not the largest social platform, could play an outsize role in shaping online culture. Because its firehose of data was easily accessible to researchers, the public conversations that happened there fueled studies into everything from global elections to public health.

By closing its API to developers and the research community, Musk made it clear he was not interested in using Twitter for anything that couldn’t make him a buck in the process. Twitter’s data was simply another part of the platform to commodify. Nearly a year later, making Twitter’s API inaccessible to all but those with the deepest pockets may not seem like even the tenth-most consequential change to happen under Musk, but it showed just how willing he was to alienate influential communities on Twitter. It was also a major warning sign of what was to come.

The blue check fiasco

If killing Twitter’s API was a quiet warning sign, the complete destruction of Twitter “verification” was a five-alarm fire. Twitter’s verification system was always flawed, but it hinged on the basic premise that the company had some evidence the accounts it verified belonged to the actual people claiming them and that those were people or organizations of some importance. When Musk rolled out his poorly thought out paid verification scheme last year, it went horribly and predictably wrong almost immediately because he failed to uphold any kind of identity check.

Despite the chaotic initial rollout, verification's now-meaningless status did not become fully apparent until this year. After a wave of thousands of spammers, scammers and Musk sycophants signed up for verification, Twitter began removing “legacy” verification from thousands of accounts.

The algorithmic boost provided to the new paid-for wave of blue checks, combined with the promise of a potential share of ad revenue, has drastically altered the dynamics of conversation on Twitter. Verified accounts are given priority ranking in replies and search results, regardless of the size of their following or their engagement — which has made Twitter even less relevant and useful. And the promise of potential ad revenue has incentivized the worst kind of engagement bait.

The result is that even the most carefully curated timelines have become filled with useless spam. And fraudsters are increasingly using pay-to-play verification to carry out scams targeting people trying to reach legitimate customer service channels.

X marks… the death of Twitter

If you were to look for a singular moment when Twitter died, however, it happened in July, when Musk announced that the company would now be known as X. The company changed its name, logo and everything formerly associated with the bird app.

This was more than an ill-considered rebrand. X, a letter with which Musk has long been fascinated, represented, literally, the end of Twitter. For as much as Musk has said it’s about creating an “everything app,” it’s also about fully severing any ties to the expectations and norms associated with Twitter. Want to break verification? Want to charge new users for the privilege of posting? Want to make news stories unreadable? Want to maliciously slow down links to competitors’ websites? Want to re-platform the most heinous peddlers of hate and conspiracy theories? Those actions may have been at odds with Twitter’s mission, but at X, it’s all just another Tuesday. As CEO Linda Yaccarino told CNBC “the rebrand represented really a liberation from Twitter.”

Justin Sullivan via Getty Images

It’s unclear if Musk will ever succeed at creating anything resembling an “everything app” where users will be able to use X to run their “entire financial world.” So far, users seem to have little interest in the somewhat random assortment of new features that have been introduced, like live shopping and aggregating job listings. What Musk has succeeded at, however, is reshaping the platform in his own image.

But if there was any doubt remaining about whether the platform had a chance, Musk has almost single handedly wiped out what remained of Twitter’s ad business. After boosting an antisemitic conspiracy theory and repeatedly failing to prevent ads from appearing near pro-Nazi content, many of the company’s largest remaining advertisers have halted their spending on the platform.

Musk, naturally, responded by telling advertisers “go fuck yourself,” while speculating that the loss of ad dollars could “kill the company.”

But it’s not just advertisers who have fled an increasingly toxic platform. Many of the biggest and most-followed accounts have stopped posting in recent weeks. X’s infrastructure continues to slowly crumble, with random features constantly breaking. Meanwhile, all this has only strengthened the growing number of X competitors, and especially the Meta-owned Threads app. Threads is surging, landing at number four on Apple’s list of most-downloaded apps of the year, despite a late summer launch. X, which has seen steady declines in traffic and engagement, did not make the list.

Meta has fixed a bug that temporarily prevented some Threads users in Canada from reading and sharing news on the app, a company spokesperson told Engadget. Even though Meta pulled news content from Canadian users’ Facebook and Instagram feeds earlier this year, the block hasn’t carried over to Threads.

But a number of Threads users wondered if that had changed when they began to see alerts that suggested otherwise. “People in Canada can’t view this content,” a notice with Threads branding read. “Content from news publishers can’t be viewed in Canada in response to Canadian government legislation.”

It’s unclear how widespread the bug was or how long it was happening. Reports of the issue seemed to crop up on Monday, with some users still unable to view links as of Tuesday morning. “Well... that sucks. @meta is escalating their news blocking in Canada, previously only on Facebook and Instagram, now on Threads,” Pedro Marques wrote in a post Monday.

Screenshot via Threads

A Meta spokesperson told Engadget that the Online News Act’s framework doesn’t apply to Threads, at least for now. Still, the fact that the notice appeared at all has prompted speculation that the company could eventually block news content on Threads as well.

Over the last few years, the world’s largest tech companies have tussled with countries about paying for news. In 2021, for instance, Facebook stopped people in Australia from sharing news links, while Google threatened to stop showcasing content from Australian news publishers on Google News. Both companies, however, eventually reached agreements and agreed to start paying Australian news organizations.

In August, Meta started blocking news on Facebook and Instagram in Canada in response to the country’s Online News Act that requires platforms to pay news organizations to make up for lost advertising revenue. Google, which had earlier pledged to block news links in the country, eventually reached a deal with the country’s government and agreed to pay Canadian publishers around $100 million a year, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Though Meta has downplayed the significance of news on Threads — Instagram head Adam Mosseri said earlier this year the company didn’t want to “amplify news” on the platform — blocking news on Threads could have a more dramatic impact on Threads than it has in Instagram and Facebook. The app has grown to about 100 million users as more people look for Twitter alternatives.

Blocking news, though, could make the app a lot less useful for users and publishers, who have started to see more engagement from the service. “How will Threads replace Twitter when I can't even click on a news story in Canada without getting blocked by Meta,” a Threads user named dexter wrote after encountering the bug.

Flipboard is the latest mainstream app to officially join the fediverse, the collection of decentralized services that run on the ActivityPub protocol. The news reading app, which has been experimenting with Mastodon for nearly a year, now plans to become fully interoperable with Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse.

The news reading app is starting with the accounts of about two dozen publishers, including Polygon, Medium, Semafor, Kotaku and Mental Floss, whose Flipboard content will be discoverable across the fediverse. By next month, the company expects all public Flipboard accounts will be federated, meaning anyone on an ActivityPub-powered app will be able to view their posts and interact with them.

And beginning in April, according to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, all fediverse content will also be readily available within the Flipboard app itself. This means users will be able to use Flipboard browse content shared to Mastodon, Pixelfed (a photo sharing app kind of like Instagram), PeerTube (a decentralized video platform) and the rest of the apps that make up the fediverse.

Flipboard’s official entrance into the fediverse comes at a moment where there is increasing enthusiasm for ActivityPub within the social media industry. Last week, Meta announced that it was taking its first steps toward making Threads compatible with Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse. “I think you’ll probably have more than 150 million people in the fediverse by the end of the next year,” McCue tells Engadget, “You have millions of Flipboard users, millions of Threads users all joining this network ... it’s not going to take very long before this becomes the largest social network.”

McCue’s enthusiasm for Mastodon and the fediverse is especially notable given his once close ties to Twitter. The Flipboard CEO was a member of Twitter’s board between 2010 and 2012, and reportedly considered selling Flipboard to the company in 2015. But Elon Musk’s takeover of the company, and the disintegration of its API, prompted him to begin experimenting with Mastodon and Bluesky integrations earlier this year.

He now believes that momentum for the fediverse is so strong, Twitter may ultimately end up supporting ActivityPub too. “More and more companies will have to look at ActivityPub,” he predicts. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter ultimately decides they’re going to have to do this.”