If there was ever any doubt about just how much of a threat TikTok poses to Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg recently cleared things up when he cited the competitor as the reason Facebook lost users for the first time ever. Now, the company is ready to push its TikTok clone into more parts of its social network as it tries to counter those declines.

The social network is officially launching “Facebook Reels,” the Facebook-centric version of the feature that first launched on Instagram last year. The company has already been experimenting with Reels in Feed and encouraging users to cross-post their videos across the services for some time. But with the latest launch, Reels will be available as a standalone feature on Facebook in more than 150 countries.

Facebook will also be pushing Reels into even more parts of its app. In addition to placing Reels at the top of users’ Feeds, the company will allow users to share Reels inside of Stories and enable users to turn Stories posts into Reels. Facebook Watch, which has typically focused on longer form video, will also host Reels content, as will Groups. And the company says it will start experimenting with recommending “suggested Reels” in some users' Feeds. In other words: Reels will be in just about every surface of Facebook where users typically view and share video.

The expansion will be a major test for the company, which has made competing with TikTok and luring more young adults to its platform a top priority. And Zuckerberg has made clear that he believes Reels is the best way to win over those users, many of whom are increasingly spending their time on TikTok rather than Facebook. During Meta’s earnings call earlier this month, Zuckerberg said the company was “in the middle of a transition on our own services towards short form video like Reels.”

Facebook

To further incentive Reels creators, Facebook is also making monetization features available to more people. Monetization features currently include banner ads and sticker ads, but the company plans to start testing Stars, which allow fans to buy “gifts” for creators. The moneymaking tools could help the company differentiate from TikTok, which has recently been criticized for low creator fund payouts.

On the other hand, Facebook could still have a tough time standing out from its main competitor. Instagram has already had to discourage users from simply reposting old TikTok content as Reels. Reels also offers dramatically fewer editing and creative tools relative to TikTok, though Facebook now says it’s working on additional features like the ability to save posts as drafts.

Snapchat is adding a new location-sharing feature as it looks to build up its safety features. The app is introducing live location sharing, which allows users to share their exact whereabouts with select friends for short periods of time.

The Snap Map has had location sharing for years, but the current version of the feature only updates the location when the Snapchat app is opened. The new “live location” will allow select friends to see exactly where you are in real-time for a set period of time, much like Apple’s “Find My” app. Location details can be shared for 15 minutes, one hour or eight hours at a time.

Snap says the optional feature could make it easier to meet up with friends, or help people “stay safe” in situations when they may want the extra reassurance of knowing a friend or family member can see where they are. The company notes users will need to be friends, and mutually opt into the live location sharing in order to use it.

The update comes as Snap has tried to build up its safety features in recent months. The company recently announced it would limit friend recommendations for teens in an effort to deal with drug dealers targeting teenage users. The app is also expected to launch new parental control features later this year.

YouTube is eyeing new measures to tackle misinformation on its platform. Among the changes being considered, according to Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan, are updates that would effectively “break” sharing features for videos with “borderline content.”

The change would be a major shift for the platform, though it’s not clear if the company will actually take such a step. Mohan described the possibility in a lengthy blog post outlining the company’s approach to preventing misinformation from going viral. In the post, he noted that so-called borderline content — “videos that don’t quite cross the line of our policies for removal but that we don’t necessarily want to recommend to people” — can be particularly challenging to deal with.

That's because YouTube aims to remove these videos from its recommendations, but they can still spread widely when shared on other platforms. “One possible way to address this is to disable the share button or break the link on videos that we’re already limiting in recommendations,” he wrote. “That effectively means you couldn’t embed or link to a borderline video on another site.”

Mohan added that the company was still wrestling with whether or not it should take this more aggressive approach. “We grapple with whether preventing shares may go too far in restricting a viewer’s freedoms.” He said an alternative approach could be adding “an interstitial that appears before a viewer can watch a borderline embedded or linked video, letting them know the content may contain misinformation.”

If YouTube were to prevent sharing of some videos, it would be a dramatic step for the platform, which has repeatedly cited statistics claiming that less than 1 percent of views on borderline content comes from recommendations. But critics have pointed out that this doesn’t fully address the issue, and fact checkers and misinformation researchers have cited YouTube as a major vector of misinformation. Last month, a group of 80 fact checking organizations signed an open letter to the video platform urging it to do more to stop harmful misinformation and disinformation.

The YouTube exec hinted at other changes to come as well. He said the company is also considering adding “additional types of labels to search results” when there’s a developing situation and authoritative information may not be available. The company is also looking to beef up its partnerships with “with experts and non-governmental organizations around the world” and invest in technology to detect “hyperlocal misinformation, with capability to support local languages.”

Nick Clegg, the former UK politician turned Facebook executive, has been promoted. Clegg is now the President of Global Affair at Meta, a position that reports directly to Mark Zuckerberg.

Clegg was already seeing much of Meta’s policy positions as VP of Global Affairs and Communication, a position that reported to COO Sheryl Sandberg. But the new title underscores how much Zuckerberg has relied on the former Deputy Prime Minister as Facebook deals with numerous scandals, investigations and the prospect of increased government regulation.

He first joined Facebook in 2018, after his political career abruptly imploded. Facebook officials had hoped he could help the company improve its tarnished reputation following Cambridge Analytica, and guide its interactions with lawmakers and government officials.

Since then, Clegg has played a significant role in some of Facebook's most controversial decisions in recent years, including its handling of Donald Trump’s suspension. Clegg was also the chief spokesperson for the company’s much-maligned decision to exempt politicians from fact checking. Elevating Clegg now could also help shield Zuckerberg and Sandberg from future controversies as he becomes the face of Meta’s policies. The former politician will also likely continue to represent the company at hearings and other interactions with government officials.

“Nick will now lead our company on all our policy matters, including how we interact with governments as they consider adopting new policies and regulations, as well as how we make the case publicly for our products and our work,” Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook. “As Nick takes on this new leadership role, it will enable me to focus more of my energy on leading the company as we build new products for the future, and it will support Sheryl as she continues to focus on the success of our business.”

The new role comes amid some bigger changes at the company now known as Meta. Besides an impending pivot from social networking to the metaverse, the company also just rebranded its News Feed to “Feed” and informed employees they will now be known as “Metamates.”

In a comment on Zuckerberg’s Facebook post, Clegg wrote that the company is at “an important inflection point.” “Our existing, and future, products will continue to be a subject of intense societal interest and debate. I am hugely looking forward to playing a role in that debate on our behalf, and ensuring that we have the right policies to both reflect our responsibilities and to support the building of innovative new products for years to come!”

Facebook’s “News Feed” is no more. After more than 15 years, the company is officially renaming its central feature, which will now be known simply as “Feed.” The company announced the name change in a tweet.

The change, which comes just months after Mark Zuckerberg announced he was renaming the company to Meta, is yet another sign Facebook is trying to shift the perception of its core products. In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said the new moniker was meant “to better reflect the diverse content people see on their Feeds.” They added that the new name won’t change how the feature works in the app.

Still, the removal of "news" from the name will likely be seen as symbolic of the company's changing priorities as it looks toward a future centered on the metaverse, not its social networking app. Facebook’s handling of news stories has long been a thorny issue for the company. Company executives have for years argued that news is only a “small percentage” of what people share on the platform, and the company completely reoriented its feed in 2018 to focus on Facebook friends rather than publishers. (That change came with its own unintended consequences, according to Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. ) 

More recently, Facebook has tried to counter perceptions that polarizing content, particularly from far-right personalities, dominates its Feed. The company has published reports on “widely viewed content,” that argue political content isn’t that popular. And in response to a widely cited Twitter account that ranks the top Facebook Pages using analytics data from CrowdTangle, the company has published its own take on which publishers have the biggest reach on the platform. Those questions have also been central to researchers' fight to understand how content spreads on Facebook. Of course, a superficial name change doesn't resolve any of those issues, but it could help Facebook further bolster its claims that the company is embarking on a new era that won't be defined by the social networking app now seeing declining engagement.

Nearly a year after introducing Reddit Talk, the company is expanding its live audio chats to desktop and adding several new features to make the conversations easier to find and participate in.

When it first launched last April, the audio chats were only available on mobile and Reddit users had to listen in live if they wanted to catch the conversation. That’s now changing, though, as Reddit Talk is now available in desktop browsers, and chats are now recorded so users can stream the conversation after it’s ended. Reddit is also adding commenting abilities, so participants can chime in without having to use the “raise hand” feature and wait for the moderator to open their mic.

Finally, Reddit is trying to make the audio chats easier to find by adding a “live bar” to the top of the app that highlights conversations happening in real time, similar to the way Twitter pushes live chats in Twitter Spaces to the top of its users’ timelines.

Reddit

With the expansion, Reddit is pushing live audio to be a more central part of its platform. It’s not clear yet just how widely used Reddit Talk is, but in a blog post the company says that it’s seen “250% growth in daily active listeners.” The company also notes that more than 1,000 subreddits have enabled the feature so far, including r/cryptocurrency, r/wallstreetbets and r/space.

Instagram is making it a whole lot easier to remove posts, comments and other activity from the platform. The photo sharing app is rolling out new account controls that allow users to bulk delete comments and posts, and review past interactions and search activity.

The features will be available in a new section of users’ profiles called ”your activity.” The goal, according to Instagram, is to make it easier to revisit and delete past interactions. While it was technically possible to delete past likes, comments and posts from Instagram in the past, the only way to do so without deleting your account altogether was to manually wade through your past posts one by one.

Now, the “your activity” section will offer shortcuts to view past timeline and Story posts, as well as likes and comments on other users’ feeds. There are also shortcuts to review time spent in the app, search history, link clicks and account-level activity like username changes.

Instagram first previewed the changes in December, noting at the time that it could be “particularly important for teens to more fully understand what information they've shared on Instagram.” The app has come under renewed pressure to create more safety features for younger people in recent months, and making it easier to remove past activity could be seen as one way to “depressurize” the app.

TikTok is beginning to test ways to age-restrict some types of content in its app amid a push to beef up safety features for teens. The work is in an early stage, but the company says the goal is to shield younger users from mature content or other potentially inappropriate videos.

TikTok, like other social media apps, has recently faced increased scrutiny for how it handles user safety, particularly for children and younger teens. At a Congressional hearing last fall, the company’s VP of Public Policy hinted that the app was working on new ways “to enjoy content based on age appropriateness.” Now, the company has shared a few more details of what that may look like.

TikTok, long known for its eerily precise recommendation algorithm, is working on features that would be able to classify content based on “content maturity and thematic comfort zones,” according to Tracy Elizabeth, TikTok’s global issue policy lead. “When the system is fully launched, content that we've identified as containing overtly mature themes could be restricted from teens,” she said during a briefing with reporters. “And for content that has less … mature themes, our community members are going to be able to choose the comfort zones or content maturity that they would prefer to skip or opt into.”

Elizabeth didn’t elaborate on how the company was determining a video’s maturity level, saying the work was in an “innovation phase.” But she said it could eventually resemble the ratings used for film, television and video games. “We know that there’s family-ish content, there’s teen-ish content, there’s adult-ish content,” she said. “What we’d like to do is … say ‘here you go: you can pick for yourself what is that category that you feel most comfortable with.’” She added that parents could also control these preferences for their children via TikTok’s “Family Pairing” settings.

Separately, TikTok is also working on a feature for creators that would allow them to indicate whether their videos are intended for adults or younger users. This could help further inform TikTok’s recommendations to ensure that more mature content stays out of the feeds of younger users.

While TikTok is now running a small test of the age restrictions, it could still be some time before the features are widely available, and Elizabeth noted they are still taking shape. “A lot of this we haven’t fully decided how we’re going to do it,” she said.

Outside of those features, TikTok also shared an updated set of community guidelines. Under the new rules, TikTok is giving suicide hoaxes and dangerous challenges its own section in an effort to make the policy more visible. The company is also expanding the type of content it bars under its eating disorder policy. The new rules will prohibit videos that promote “disordered eating,” like extreme calorie counting, short term fasting, overexercise and other “under-recognized signs of a potential problem.”

Finally, TikTok is also updating its rules to explicitly ban “deadnaming, misgendering, or misogyny as well as content that supports or promotes conversion therapy programs.” The company says it already removed these types of posts in the past, but that the rules weren’t specifically outlined in its public-facing community guidelines.

TikTok is beginning to test ways to age-restrict some types of content in its app amid a push to beef up safety features for teens. The work is in an early stage, but the company says the goal is to shield younger users from mature content or other potentially inappropriate videos.

TikTok, like other social media apps, has recently faced increased scrutiny for how it handles user safety, particularly for children and younger teens. At a Congressional hearing last fall, the company’s VP of Public Policy hinted that the app was working on new ways “to enjoy content based on age appropriateness.” Now, the company has shared a few more details of what that may look like.

TikTok, long known for its eerily precise recommendation algorithm, is working on features that would be able to classify content based on “content maturity and thematic comfort zones,” according to Tracy Elizabeth, TikTok’s global issue policy lead. “When the system is fully launched, content that we've identified as containing overtly mature themes could be restricted from teens,” she said during a briefing with reporters. “And for content that has less … mature themes, our community members are going to be able to choose the comfort zones or content maturity that they would prefer to skip or opt into.”

Elizabeth didn’t elaborate on how the company was determining a video’s maturity level, saying the work was in an “innovation phase.” But she said it could eventually resemble the ratings used for film, television and video games. “We know that there’s family-ish content, there’s teen-ish content, there’s adult-ish content,” she said. “What we’d like to do is … say ‘here you go: you can pick for yourself what is that category that you feel most comfortable with.’” She added that parents could also control these preferences for their children via TikTok’s “Family Pairing” settings.

Separately, TikTok is also working on a feature for creators that would allow them to indicate whether their videos are intended for adults or younger users. This could help further inform TikTok’s recommendations to ensure that more mature content stays out of the feeds of younger users.

While TikTok is now running a small test of the age restrictions, it could still be some time before the features are widely available, and Elizabeth noted they are still taking shape. “A lot of this we haven’t fully decided how we’re going to do it,” she said.

Outside of those features, TikTok also shared an updated set of community guidelines. Under the new rules, TikTok is giving suicide hoaxes and dangerous challenges its own section in an effort to make the policy more visible. The company is also expanding the type of content it bars under its eating disorder policy. The new rules will prohibit videos that promote “disordered eating,” like extreme calorie counting, short term fasting, overexercise and other “under-recognized signs of a potential problem.”

Finally, TikTok is also updating its rules to explicitly ban “deadnaming, misgendering, or misogyny as well as content that supports or promotes conversion therapy programs.” The company says it already removed these types of posts in the past, but that the rules weren’t specifically outlined in its public-facing community guidelines.

Tinder says it will no longer charge older users more to use Tinder+, following a new report questioning the dating app’s practice of charging older users “substantially more.”

The report, from Mozilla and Consumers International, detailed just how much Tinder+ pricing can vary based on users’ age. The report relied on “mystery shoppers” in six countries — the United States, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Korea, India and Brazil — who signed up for Tinder+ and reported back how much the app charged for the subscription. According to the report, Tinder users between the ages of 30 and 49 were charged an average of 65.3 percent more than their younger counterparts in every country except Brazil.

Tinder’s age-based pricing for Tinder, which gives users access to premium features like unlimited likes, has long been a source of controversy for the dating app. When it launched, the company said it charged older users more because younger people were more “budget constrained.” Since then, the dating app has been hit with at least one class action lawsuit over the practice.

But though Tinder had pledged to end the practice in some areas, like California where the class action suit originated, the company continued to offer different rates in many countries. The latest report from Consumers International highlights just how much the dating app’s subscription pricing could vary. In New Zealand, where the mystery shoppers were quoted a total of25 different prices, the lowest quoted price was $4.95, while the highest was $24.54, according to the report. In the Netherlands, there were 31 different prices, with the lowest at $4.45 and the highest at $25.95.

Now, Tinder says it plans to abandon its age-based pricing altogether. In a blog post published Sunday, Tinder said younger users were offered subscriptions at different rates in order to “make Tinder affordable for those in school or early in their careers.” The company said it ended the practice in the US, Australia and UK, and that it plans on “eliminating age based pricing for all of our members in all markets by the end of Q2 this year.” The company says it never used other personal or demographic info to determine rates.

In a statement, a Tinder spokesperson said the report from Consumers International was “deeply flawed and contains completely false and outrageous allegations,” but didn’t specify what those were. The spokesperson added that the company’s internal pricing tests could have “impacted the findings,” and noted that prices are “typically” lower on Tinder’s website than in App Stores due to Apple and Google’s commission structure.

Going forward, Tinder says it plans to offer more “a la carte” features, rather than pricier subscriptions that bundle multiple capabilities. The app also recently introduced “coins” to allow users to make one-off in-app purchases.