The White House has launched covid.gov, a dedicated website for COVID-19 guidance, including resources for treatment and testing. The site is meant to be a “one-stop shop” for all things related to COVID-19, including testing and treatment options, masks and vaccines. The website also provides county-level data from the CDC about community spread of COVID-19.

The website includes a new “test-to-treat” locator that connects people with testing sites and treatment options in their area. “This program creates one-stop-shop locations where people can get a COVID-19 test and receive an oral antiviral treatment, if appropriate for them because they test positive and face high risks from COVID,” the White House wrote in a statement. “Since the launch earlier this month, there are now over 2,000 Test-to-Treat locations nationwide, including in pharmacy-based clinics, federally-qualified community health centers (FQHCs), and long-term care facilities.”

While much of the information on covid.gov has already been available, the White House says it’s the first time that it’s brought all of its COVID-19 guidance and resources into one place. For example, it links to both vaccines.gov as well as the USPS site to order free COVID tests. It also includes links to find “high quality” masks, and resources on how to wear them.

LinkedIn is building more tools for its growing base of creators. A year after introducing a dedicated “creator mode” profile setting, the company is adding a suite of new analytics and video features meant to help creators boost their following on the platform.

The updates include more detailed analytics for closely tracking the performance of individual posts, as well as account-level stats meant to help creators “understand who’s reading and engaging” with their content. LinkedIn is also adding tools to help creators boost their presence and get more eyes on the content they’re already creating. Users will not have the option to turn on post notifications for creators they follow, and creators who write newsletters for the platform will be able to highlight their writing directly on their profile.

Finally, the company is updating its tool for profile videos, which allow users to record short introductory videos that appear alongside their profile photos. The feature now includes a series of prompts meant to guide creators and others about what to include in the clips. (Importantly, unlike LinkedIn Stories, which the company killed last year, profile videos are not ephemeral.)

LinkedIn

Though LinkedIn may not be the platform most associated with the booming creator industry, the company has been steadily ramping up its efforts to bring in creators. In addition to “creator mode” profiles, the company has also been encouraging influential users to create longer-form content with newsletters and, most recently, podcasts. So far, it seems these efforts are gaining some traction on the platform. The company says that more than 5.5 million users have so far enabled “creator mode,” and followers are up 30 percent overall for people using creator mode.

Notably, LinkedIn is still behind many of its peers in launching monetization features for creators. The company announced a $25 million creator fund last year, but so far only a small group of creators have had access to it. But building out more tools to support creators behind the scenes, like better analytics and increasing the visibility of their content, could be important groundwork should the company decide to build additional monetization features.

Ukraine's Ministry for Digital Transformation has launched an NFT collection to help fund its military. The project was first announced in early March, but the NFT collection, called “ Meta History Museum of War,” is now live. The collection is meant to be an “NFT museum” documenting the history of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The collection is currently comprised of 54 NFTs documenting the events of the first three days of the war. The illustrations were done by Ukrainian and international artists, and each one references a tweet documenting some aspect of the invasion and the world’s response to it.

“The formula of each NFT is clear and simple: each token is a real news piece from an official source and an illustration from artists, both Ukrainian and international,” Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation writes on its Meta History Museum of War website. “The NFT’s will be created in chronological order, according to the events so the true history will be saved and cherished.”

The NFT Project is the latest way Ukraine has turned to digital assets to fund its defense. The country has collected more than $100 million in cryptocurrency donations since the start of the war, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently signed a bill officially legalizing the crypto industry.

The European Union has reached an agreement to adopt the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a sweeping antitrust law meant to rein in Apple, Google, Meta and other tech giants. Lawmakers reached a “provisional” agreement on the law Thursday, following hours of negotiations, the European Parliament wrote in a statement.

The law could have far-reaching implications, some of which could extend beyond Europe. Most notably, one of the primary provisions of the DMA is that messaging providers would need to make their services interoperable with other services, “EU lawmakers agreed that the largest messaging services (such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage) will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms, if they so request,” the EU Parliament said following the agreement.

It’s unclear for now if this requirement would also apply to interoperability between the large messaging platforms themselves. Parliament wrote that the interoperability provisions for social networks “will be assessed in the future.”

In a statement, an Apple spokesperson said the company was "concerned" about some aspects of the law. "We remain concerned that some provisions of the DMA will create unnecessary privacy and security vulnerabilities for our users while others will prohibit us from charging for intellectual property in which we invest a great deal," the spokesperson said. "We believe deeply in competition and in creating thriving competitive markets around the world, and we will continue to work with stakeholders throughout Europe in the hopes of mitigating these vulnerabilities.”

Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

The DMA also prohibits companies from “combining personal data for targeted advertising” without explicit consent, a move that could limit Meta and others’ ability to serve targeted ads to users. As The New York Times points out, there are still many questions about how European lawmakers will enforce these new rules and the companies in question are likely to raise legal challenges.

Earlier proposals of the law also included provisions that would change how Apple and Google ran their app stores. Under the proposed rules, Apple would have to allow users to install apps from other stores, and both Apple and Google would be required to allow developers to bypass their companies; storefronts and use their own billing. It’s unclear if those provisions were included in the latest agreement. The European Parliament will hold a press conference Friday, when they are expected to share more details.

Google News is the latest major service to be blocked in Russia. The country’s telecom regulator Roskomnadzor has blocked Google News, according to Reuters, which cited a report from state media outlet Interfax.

The regulator said it was blocking the news service because it “provided access to numerous publications and materials containing inauthentic and publicly important information about the course of the special military operation on the territory of Ukraine,” according to Interfax.

Russia has already blocked Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in recent weeks.

We’ve reached out to Google for comment.

A chronological feed is once again available on Instagram. More than five years after the company first switched to an algorithmically-ranked feed, the app is bringing back the ability for users to see feed posts ordered by recency. The app is rolling out the change now to all users globally, after first confirming that new versions of the feed were in the works last December.

Importantly, the new chronological option is not on by default, and there’s no way for users to ditch the algorithm entirely. Instead, people can now move between three different versions of their feeds: the algorithmic “home” feed, which remains the default; a “following” feed, which orders accounts you follow in reverse chronological order; and “favorites,” which is a feed of up to 50 favorited accounts. You can move between the three feeds by tapping on the 

Even though the chronological feed isn’t on by default, the fact that it’s coming back at all is a major reversal for Instagram, which has for years defended its decision to switch to an algorithmic feed despite years of complaints and conspiracy theories about "shadowbans."

As recently as last June, Instagram published a lengthy blog post detailing how its ranking algorithm works. In the blog post, Instagram’s top executive, Adam Mosseri, wrote that at the time Instagram moved away from a chronological feed in 2016, “people were missing 70% of all their posts in Feed, including almost half of posts from their close connections.”

But “the algorithm” has become a sticky subject for Instagram, which is facing scrutiny for the impact it has on teens’ mental health. In particular, the way that the app ranks and suggests content to young people has gotten outsized attention from lawmakers, some of whom have proposed legislation to regulate algorithms.

Instagram has also gotten more aggressive in inserting “suggested posts” and Reels into users’ feeds in recent months, as Facebook’s popularity starts to dip. By rolling out new versions of its feed now, Instagram can both head off complaints about its new recommendations-filled approach, and claim that it’s offering users a “choice” about whether or not they use its ranking algorithm.

YouTube’s existing policies are not enough to discourage creators from posting “problematic” content. That’s one of the findings of new research from Cornell Tech on how YouTubers make money.

YouTube has long used the threat of demonetization to encourage creators to follow its rules. Creators who violate its policies or who veer into so-called borderline content — videos that don’t outright break the rules but come close enough the company stops recommending them — are at risk of losing access to monetization features.

But researchers at Cornell and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne found that demonetization may not always have the intended effect. That’s because it’s still exceedingly easy for creators who have been demonetized to direct viewers to other money-making platforms like Patreon.

Moreover, they found that YouTubers who traffic in extreme and “problematic” content are significantly more likely to employ “alternative monetization” sources than their peers. According to their findings, 61 percent of “fringe channels” used an alternative monetization source, compared with just 18 percent of channels overall.

At the same time, the researchers found that demonetizing a channel tends to result in creators producing more content — not less. And demonetization may even result in more divisive and extreme content because they are now trying to appeal to “committed audiences” rather than the general YouTube viewer.

“On the one hand, weakening the link between exposure and earnings may allow higher-quality content to be produced,” they write in the paper. “On the other, it may also encourage creators to embrace divisive rhetoric … Even if videos are demonetized by YouTube for breaching their policy, it could be that, due to alternative monetization strategies, creators still have substantial financial incentives to create content espousing false, hateful, and divisive narratives.”

The researchers say that platforms like Patreon, as well as lesser-known sites like SubscribeStar, need more scrutiny as they are becoming more popular across YouTube, not just with “problematic” streamers.

The issue of how to handle borderline content, and how far YouTube should go in discouraging it isn’t a new issue. Last month, YouTube’s Chief Product Officer Neal Mahon said the company was wrestling with whether to take more aggressive steps to prevent problematic YouTube content from going viral on other platforms. One idea under consideration, he said, would be to “break” sharing on these videos so they can’t spread as easily.

Instagram tags are no longer just for other accounts. The app is expanding its product tagging feature so that any user can tag specific items within their post. Up until now, product tagging has only been available to businesses and creators, but over “the next few months,” Instagram will allow all US users to access the tags.

Tagging a product works the same way as tagging another account — users can add them to feed posts by tapping on specific areas of their image. Product tags are available for businesses that have a shop on Instagram.

While creators often use product tags in sponsored content or posts promoting businesses they partner with, people using the product tags won’t get anything if one of their followers makes a purchase via their post. The company says the feature is intended to help people “support their favorite small businesses.”

However, Instagram is experimenting with affiliate shops, which allow creators to earn a commission when their followers make a purchase, elsewhere in its app. And company executives have suggested they want to expand the app’s revenue-generating features to more people over time as part of their ambition to grow a “creator middle class.”

Facebook’s policy banning deepfakes was the latest to be put to the test amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On Wednesday, the company confirmed it has removed a video that purportedly showed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, but was actually a shoddy deepfake.

“Earlier today, our teams identified and removed a deepfake video claiming to show President Zelensky issuing a statement he never did,” Meta’s head of Security Policy Nathaniel Gleicher said in a statement. “It appeared on a reportedly compromised website and then started showing across the internet.” He said the company pulled the video in line with its “manipulated media” policy, which has banned the use of deepfakes for more than two years.

Fact-checking website Snopes reported that the video, which it described as “poorly done,” also aired on a Ukrainian TV station that was reportedly hacked. The site also noted that there were obvious signs that the footage was fake, like the fact that Zelensky’s head didn’t “seem to quite fit on his neck.” Zelensky himself also debunked the video on his Instagram account.

Meta is introducing new “parental supervision” features for Instagram and virtual reality. The update will be available first for Instagram, which has faced a wave of scrutiny for its impact on teens and children, with new parental controls coming to Quest headsets over the next few months.

On Instagram, the controls will be part of a new “Family Center,” where parents can set time limits and access information about their teen’s activity on the app. For now, parents will be able to see a list of accounts their teen is following, as well as which accounts follow them. Parents will also be notified if their teen reports another user.

Notably, the update is for now only available in the United States and parents will only be able to access the parental control features if the teens “initiate supervision” within the app themselves. Teens will also need to approve any parental requests for parental supervision. “Over the next few months we’ll add additional features, including letting parents set the hours during which their teen can use Instagram, and the ability for more than one parent to supervise a teen’s account,” Instagram Head Adam Mosseri writes in a blog post.

Instagram

The new features, which were first promised back in December, arrive after Instagram was forced to “pause” work on a dedicated app for kids younger than 13 after a whistleblower disclosed internal research documenting Instagram’s impact on teens’ mental health. The disclosures prompted lawmakers to push Meta to end work on Instagram Kids entirely. So far, Meta executives have declined to do so.

Mosseri said the company also plans to add similar parental control features to its Quest headsets so parents can also set limits on their children’s activities in virtual reality. Those features, which won’t launch for a few more months, will enable parents to restrict VR content rated for ages 13 and up and set other limits on VR purchases. Meta is also working on a “Parent Dashboard” for the Oculus app so parents can keep tabs on what their children are watching and how much time they are spending in VR.