Facebook’s TikTok clone is no longer just for Instagram. As of today, the social network is officially bringing Reels to the main Facebook app. With the change, users can create Reels directly from Facebook, and the company will recommend the short-form videos in all users’ News Feeds.

Facebook has been testing out various ways of bringing Reels out of Instagram for awhile, and began testing cross-posting features last month. Now, it’s also testing a feature that allows Reels creators on Instagram to promote their videos in Facebook’s News Feed directly, even if they don’t use the app.

Reels has become increasingly important to facebook and its efforts to challenge TikTok. The company has been steadily adding features to the service, and is attempting to lure creators with the promise of payouts for hitting certain milestones. Now, the company is adding a new "invite-only" bonus program to coincide with Reels' launch on Facebook and encourage creators to start posting on the social network. 

Facebook

But it’s the potential challenge to TikTok that could be most significant for the company. Documents reported by The Wall Street Journal show that Facebook has been struggling to incentivize teens and younger users to post original content. Internally, the company is reportedly worried about ceding influence to TikTok, where teens spend much more time than on Facebook’s apps.

Promoting Reels in the main Facebook app, which is already not especially popular with teens, may not seem like the most direct way to solve that. But getting more eyes on users’ Reels will help the feature grow even if its top users don’t spend much time on Facebook itself.

Amazon is challenging Google's Nest with a $60 Alexa-enabled Smart Thermostat. The thermostat is Energy Star certified and enables users to control their home's temperature and use Alexa to set custom routines for heating and cooling.

Amazon partnered with Honeywell on the device, which is designed to work with “most” existing 24V HVAC systems, according to the company. Additionally, some people may be eligible for rebates via their utility provider, which could bring the price down to as low as $10, Amazon said. 

The Smart Thermostat is available now for pre-order, though it's not clear when it's expected to ship. 

Developing...

Follow all of the news from Amazon’s fall hardware event right here!

Facebook will publish two internal slide decks detailing its research into how Instagram affects teens’ mental health sometime “in the next few days.” Speaking at an online event hosted by The Atlantic, the company’s policy chief Nick Clegg said the company would release the data to Congress before making it available to the public.

“We're just making sure that all the Ts are crossed and the Is are dotted so that we can release it both to Congress and then to the public in the next few days," Clegg said of the slides, some of which have already been made public. His comments more than 10 days after The Wall Street Journalpublished an investigation into how Instagram affects the teens who use it. Citing internal research conducted by Facebook, The Journal wrote that “Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage” of teens, particularly teenage girls.

The investigation prompted immediate pushback from lawmakers, many of whom were already wary of Facebook’s handling of child safety, and its plans to build a version of its service for children under 13. On Monday, Instagram said it would “pause” that work in order to create more “parental supervision tools.” Members of Congress responded saying they want the company to end the project entirely. Facebook’s head of safety is scheduled to testify at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the subject Thursday.

Now, Facebook seems to be hoping that releasing more of its underlying research could help address concerns from lawmakers and others. In a separate statement published Sunday, the company’s top researcher suggested that The Wall Street Journal had mischaracterized its research. Clegg went a step further Monday, saying that the reporting based on documents “leaked by someone who clearly feels they have some points to make.”

“If you read the decks, and then compare it with some of the assertions that, you know, Instagram is toxic for all teens and so on, I don't think any reasonable person … would say that the research sustains that claim,” Clegg said. “When the dust settles people will see that we're just sincerely trying to kind of — like external researchers — are trying to work out what the complex relationship is between individuals, given their own individual circumstances, and their lives and their use of social media.”

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the company would release “two decks” that were central to The Journal report, but didn’t elaborate on the timing of the release.

But the decks alone are unlikely to quiet Facebook’s critics. For one, Facebook’s own rebuttal of The Wall Street Journal reporting appears to undermine the significance of its own research. “This research, some of which relied on input from only 40 teens, was designed to inform internal conversations about teens’ most negative perceptions of Instagram,” Facebook VP Pratiti Raychoudhury wrote. “It did not measure causal relationships between Instagram and real-world issues.”

It also raises questions about how Facebook will present the data it does make public. Last month, the company released a report on “widely viewed content” on its platform. The report was meant to rebuff criticism that News Feed favors polarizing content. But researchers outside the company quickly poked holes in the report, and said it was emblematic of Facebook’s larger transparency issues, particularly when it comes to working with outside researchers.

Which is why it’s notable that Clegg would invoke “external researchers” in his defense of the company. If Instagram isn’t actually harmful to most teens, as the company is claiming, then researchers not on Facebook’s payroll may be positioned to credibly make that point. Yet researchers say the company has made data increasingly difficult to access. And in some cases, the company has actively blocked outsiders from studying its platform, like when it recently disabled the personal Facebook accounts of researchers at New York University and then provided “misleading” explanations about its reasons for doing so, according to the FTC. (Incidentally, the researcher at the center of that controversy is testifying in a separate Congressional hearing this week.)

They may seem like unrelated issues. But if Facebook had better relationships with researchers outside the company, and made more of its own findings public it might be better able to head off internal critics who “have some points to make.”

Twitter will soon make Spaces even more prominent in its app as it looks to add more creator-focused tools to the live audio feature. The company says it’s working on making conversations in Spaces easier to discover, and will begin to feature more Spaces at the top of users’ timelines.

It’s also working on a dedicated tab for the feature, where users can browse recommendations and upcoming Spaces. And it plans to add recording and playback features so users can listen to conversations after they have already ended. The company is also adding new ways for creators to monetize Spaces. In addition to Ticketed Spaces, which began rolling out in August, Twitter plans to start a dedicated fund for Spaces hosts. The program would provide “ financial, technical and marketing support” to “emerging audio creators” who frequently host Spaces, according to the company. 

Twitter

Twitter didn’t provide many details about how this program would work or how it will select creators to participate. But it’s yet another sign of how focused the company is on its live audio features. Even as rival Clubhouse has fallen in popularity in recent months, Twitter sees Spaces as a key part of its strategy to build monetization features for its users.

The company also previewed a new dashboard that would allow creators to keep tabs on their earnings from Spaces. Twitter also expanded its tipping features to include Bitcoin payments and said that all users will be able to send and receive tips on the platform.

Twitter

Elsewhere, Twitter says it plans to test a new feature that could help further minimize harassment or “unhealthy” conversations on the platform. Called “heads up.” The feature would provide “more context about a conversation’s vibes” before you jump in and start tweeting, said Twitter’s lead for conversational safety, Christine Su. She added that the feature would empower users to have more control over their interactions on Twitter much like the platform’s new features for managing replies and the new “safety mode.” The heads up feature will be “coming soon.”

Four months after Twitter first introduced in-app tipping, the company is expanding its “tip jar” feature in a major way. The company is opening up tipping to all its users globally, and for the first time will allow users to send and receive tips in Bitcoin.

With the update, Twitter users around the world will have access to tipping, which allows users to send each other cash through apps like Venmo, Cash App, or Bandcamp, GoFundMe and PicPay, a Brazilian mobile payments platform.Twitter users in the United States and El Salvador will have the additional option of sending and receiving tips with Bitcoin via Strike, a person-to-person payments app built on the Bitcoin Lightning Network. People in other countries will be able to receive tips via their Bitcoin address.

As with tips using traditional, non-crypto platforms, Twitter won’t take a cut of tips exchanged between users. Tipping is rolling out to all of Twitter’s iOS users beginning today, and will become available on Android “over the coming weeks.” 

Twitter

Twitter sees the change as an extension of its recent work to empower creators on its platform. “We want everyone to have access to pathways to get paid,” Twitter’s Esther Crawford said during a call with reporters. “Digital currencies that encourage more people to participate in the economy and help people send each other money across borders and with as little friction as possible help us get there.”

The move is also Twitter’s first big move into cryptocurrency, which founder Jack Dorsey has been a major proponent of. Crawford, who leads the company’s creator monetization efforts, also said the company is in the early stages of exploring an NFT authentication service, which would allow users to display NFT art on their profile.

Those plans are still in an experimental stage, but the idea is to support NFT creators by giving them a way to showcase NFTs on Twitter, and provide details about their ownership, Crawford said. “By allowing people to directly connect their crypto wallets, we can track and showcase our NFT ownership on Twitter,” she said. It's not clear exactly what this would look like, but she said it could take the form of a badge or another visual cue. “We are interested in making it somehow visually clear that this is a[n] authenticated avatar and, and then giving you some interesting info and insight about the provenance of that NFT.”

Twitter has previously experimented with NFTs or non-fungible tokens. The company recently released its own collection of NFTs, and Dorsey sold an NFT of his first tweet for $2.9 million earlier this year.

Facebook quietly pushed out changes to News Feed that’s “interfering” with the browser-based tools used by journalists and researchers, according toThe Markup, the nonprofit news organization behind Citizen Browser.

According to the report, Facebook has been adding “junk code to HTML features meant to improve accessibility for visually impaired users.” The resulting code prevents browsers from automatically collecting data about posts in News Feed, and may also be hindering screen readers used by blind and visually impaired users.

The change has affected both The Markup’s Citizen Browser, as well as New York University’s Ad Observer, a browser extension that has helped researchers study political ads and vaccine misinformation. These types of browser-based tools have become increasingly important to researchers trying to study issues like ad targeting and misinformation. Researchers say these tools, which allow users to make the posts from their feeds available to academics and journalists, is one of the only ways to access important data about how News Feed works.

Laura Edelson, lead researcher at NYU’s Cybersecurity for Democracy, which runs Ad Observer, said Facebook’s changes “had the effect of breaking Ad Observer” though they were able to find a workaround.

In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said that the company was “investigating” the claims. “We constantly make code changes across our services, but we did not make recent code changes to block these research projects,” the spokesperson said. “Our accessibility features largely appear to be working as normal, however, we are investigating the claimed disruptions.”

The code change is the latest dustup between Facebook and researchers who say Facebook has hindered their efforts to understand what’s happening on its platform. Last month, the company disabled the personal Facebook accounts of NYU researchers working with Ad Observer saying they broke the company’s privacy rules. (The FTC later rebuked Facebook for making “misleading” comments about its reasons for taking these actions.)

There are other implications to the changes. As The Markup and Edelson point out, the changes could affect screen readers, an important accessibility technology. They cite at least one instance of the code appearing to cause a screen reader to read out some of these “junk” characters. The changes may have also contributed to problems with some ad blockers.

The Oversight Board is pushing Facebook to provide more information on its controversial “cross-check” system, following a report that the company has allowed celebrities, politicians and other public figures to break its rules.

“In light of recent developments, we are looking into the degree to which Facebook has been fully forthcoming in its responses in relation to cross-check, including the practice of whitelisting,” the board said in a statement. “We expect to receive a briefing from Facebook in the coming days and will be reporting what we hear from this as part of our first release of quarterly transparency reports which we will publish in October.”

The statement comes one week after The Wall Street Journal reported on internal memos that raised significant issues with the “cross check” system. Facebook has said the rules are meant to provide an extra lawyer of scrutiny to potential rule-breaking posts from high-profile accounts. But according to The WSJ, these extra checks are often very delayed or don’t happen at all, effectively allowing famous people to break the platform’s rules without consequences. The report also stated that Facebook had ‘misled’ the Oversight Board when it said it was “not feasible” to share more information about cross check, and that the system only impacted a “small number” of accounts.

The cross check system was also one of the central issues in the decision about Donald Trump’s suspension from Facebook. “In our decision concerning former US President Donald Trump’s accounts, we warned that a lack of clear public information on cross-check and Facebook’s ‘newsworthiness exception’ could contribute to perceptions that Facebook is unduly influenced by political and commercial considerations,” the board writes. The group also notes that Facebook didn’t provide specifics data it had asked for about how cross check works.

It’s not clear how much more information Facebook plans to share with the Oversight Board. The company declined to comment on the board’s statement. But the Oversight Board says it will publish its first transparency report next month, which will provide an update on cross check, as well as its assessment of how Facebook is following its recommendations.

Tumblr is opening its paid subscription features to more users. Post+, the subscription offering it introduced in July, is moving into an open beta, the company announced. Until now, only a handful of creators had access to Post+, but with the next phase of the rollout, any US-based blogger can start experimenting with subscription-backed content (Tumblr says it plans to make Post+ available in more countries later this year). For now, Post+ allows bloggers to offer subscriptions at $2, $4, $6 or $10 a month, though creators can continue to offer a mix of free content as well.

With the update, Tumblr is joining an increasingly crowded field of companies hoping to lure users with the promise of subscription revenue. But the company is hoping it can carve out a niche among younger users eager to experiment with the kind of creative — and often deeply weird — content the blogging platform has long been known for.

“This is not reserved for professionals,” Tumblr’s Head of Product, Lance Willet, tells Engadget. “On other places — [when] I think of either Patreon or Substack, you gotta kind of start with your content and then go out and find people. We are flipping that around and saying: you already kind of have a niche, why not just start asking for people to become a supporter.”

What’s less clear is if the Tumblr user base will be willing to start paying for content they used to get for free. Just hours after the company first announced plans for Post+ in July, the company posted a message to its staff blog decrying the “targeted harassment and threats” creators were facing over their participation in the initial Post+ beta. But Willet says the company has also seen a large amount of interest from users who want to try the tools out. Post+, he says, is for anyone with a niche on Tumblr, from Gen Z “meme lords and shitposters,” to artists and podcasters and bloggers. “People can have five followers, or 15 or 500 — it doesn’t matter.”

Facebook has announced a new policy that allows it to take out networks of accounts engaging in “coordinated social harm.” The company said the change could help the platform fight harmful behavior it wouldn’t otherwise be able to fully address under its existing rules.

Unlike “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” which is Facebook’s policy for dealing with harm that comes from networks of fake accounts, coordinated social harm gives the company a framework to address harmful actions from legitimate accounts. During a call with reporters, the company’s head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher said the policy is necessary because bad actors are increasingly trying to “blur the lines” between authentic and inauthentic behavior.

“We are seeing groups that pose a risk of significant social harm, that also engage in violations on our platform, but don't necessarily rise to the level for either of those where we’d enforce against for inauthenticity under CIB [coordinated inauthentic behavior] or under our dangerous organizations policy,” Gleicher said. “So this protocol is designed to capture these groups that are sort of in between spaces.”

Gleicher added that the new protocols could help Facebook address networks of accounts spreading anti-vaccine misinformation or groups trying to organize political violence. In announcing the change, Facebook said it took down a small network of accounts in Germany that were linked to the “Querdenken” movement, which has spread conspiracy theories about the country COVID-19 restrictions and has been “linked to off-platform violence.”

Facebook said it could take “a range of actions” in enforcing its new rules around coordinated social harm. That could include banning accounts — as it did with the “Querdenken” movement — or throttling their reach to prevent content from spreading as widely.

The issue of how to handle groups that break Facebook’s rules in a coordinated way has been a difficult one for the company, which up until now has primarily focused on taking down networks that rely on fake accounts to manipulate its platform. The issue came up earlier this year following the January 6th insurrection as Facebook investigated the “Stop the Steal” movement. According to an internal report obtained by BuzzFeed News, Facebook employees suggested its existing policies weren’t equipped to handle “inherently harmful” coordination by legitimate accounts, which prevented it from realizing “Stop the Steal” was a “cohesive movement” until it was too late.

During a press call, Gleicher said that the “work on this policy started well before January 6th.” But he added that the company’s work against high-profile groups had informed their decision making. “If you think about our enforcement against QAnon-related actors, if you think about our enforcement against ‘Stop the Steal,’ if you think about our enforcement against other groups — we learned from all of them.”

Apple’s iOS 15, iPad OS 15 and watchOS 8 updates are dropping September 20th, days ahead of iPhone 13 lineup. The latest version of iOS adds new features for FaceTime and Messages, smarter notifications and a new LiveText feature.

With the update, iPhone and iPad owners can take advantage of FaceTime improvements, including the addition of spatial audio and noise reduction features to eliminate distracting background sounds, The revamped Messages app adds a new “shared with you” feature that makes it easier to track photos, music and news articles that are shared in chats with a dedicated section for shared content.

Apple is also changing up its notifications, with new tools to control how and when you receive push alerts. New “Focus” modes, allow you to tune out all alerts except for apps and people you specifically want to hear from, and you can set specific profiles for working, sleeping and other activities. These profiles can also change the arrangement of apps on your home screen based on the apps you’re most likely to use throughout the day.

One of the more intriguing features of iOS 15 is Live Text, which uses the camera to scan your surroundings and surface relevant information. If you point it at a whiteboard, for example, it could pull out the written text for you to share. It could also identify art, landmarks, plants and pets.

Notably, the initial release won’t include Apple’s new SharePlay features, which is expected in a later update. The company also recently confirmed it would delay iOS 15’s most controversial features: the planned child safety update that will allow the company to detect illegal child abuse imagery on users’ devices. Apple said earlier this month it was delaying the changes in order to “make improvements” to the widely-criticized system.

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