Instagram will require users to share their birthday, an update the company says is meant to protect young people using its app. The photo app already asks new users to provide a birthday when they sign up, a requirement that’s been in place since the end of 2019. But people who previously signed up may not have shared the information.

But over the “next few weeks” Instagram will begin prompting users who haven’t previously shared a birthdate to do so. While they will initially be able to dismiss the prompts, the app will eventually require birthdays from everyone.

For now, there’s two scenarios in which users will be asked for their birthdays. First, the app will show a notification “a handful of times.” A separate prompt may also appear if users try to view a post that’s hidden behind a warning screen. These warnings appear on “sensitive content” that might not break Instagram’s official rules, but could be considered borderline, such as “suggestive” images or photos of medical procedures. Users will no longer be able to view these posts until they provide a birthday, and younger teens may not be able to see these posts at all.

Instagram

The company also says it will use artificial intelligence to detect when a user may have provided a false birthday, and that some users may be asked to “verify” their age. “In the future, if someone tells us they’re above a certain age, and our technology tells us otherwise, we’ll show them a menu of options to verify their age,” the company says. “This work is still in the early stages, and we look forward to sharing more soon.”

The changes are the latest as Instagram has tried to beef up security and privacy features for its youngest users. The company has also said it will switch to making younger teens’ accounts private by default, and has limited advertisers’ ability to target the demographic. It also recently introduced features to prevent adult strangers from messaging teens. Instagram has also said it’s in the early stages of thinking about a version of its service for users under the age of 13, which has prompted concern from lawmakers and other officials.

Twitter is finally starting to roll out Ticketed Spaces, a feature that allows creators to charge for access to its live audio chat feature. The company began taking applications for the feature in June, but had yet to flip it on until this week. 

However, it sounds like it could still be awhile until many people gain access to the feature. Twitter said that the initial rollout will be iOS only and limited to just “some” hosts who have previously applied.

Those who do gain access could make a decent amount of cash from the feature, assuming they can find a big enough audience willing to pay. Twitter has said that hosts can keep up to 97 percent of their first $50,000 in earnings and up to 80 percent on anything over $50,000. Hosts are also able to set their own prices for tickets and choose how many tickets to make available.

Ticketed Spaces is just one of several monetization features Twitter is working on as it looks rto shift its platform to be more creator-friendly. The company is also experimenting with Super Follows, in-app tipping and paid newsletters.

Apple has agreed to change several rules that govern its App Store as part of a settlement with developers who filed a class action lawsuit against the company. The most significant change is that Apple is “clarifying” that developers are permitted to email users “about payment methods outside of their iOS app.” The company has also agreed to publish transparency reports detailing App Store rejection rates and the app review process.

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Snapchat is upgrading its visual search features, and putting them at the center of its app. The app is now rolling out changes it announced back in May during its Partner Summit event. The updates include more prominent placement of the “scan” feature — now located directly under the camera’s shutter button — and new capabilities that will suggest lenses and music based on your surroundings.

Snap has been experimenting with visual search, called “scan” since 2019. The feature allows Snapchat users to identify plants and music, solve math problems, and scan food and wine labels with the in-app camera. But up until now, much of this functionality was easily overlooked as it required a few extra taps to access. With the update now rolling out, “scan” visible whenever the camera is open.

Snapchat’s also adding a few new features it previewed earlier this year, like the ability to shop for outfits by pointing the camera at articles of clothing. It’s also adding Camera Shortcuts, which will suggest a combination of augmented reality lenses and music based on your surroundings. For example, pointing the camera at your pet may suggest AR lenses meant to work with dogs and music to go with your clip.

Though Snap has been working on its “scan” capabilities for some time, the fact that it’s now making the feature much more prominent underscores how big a priority it is for the company. Snap has also integrated scanning abilities into its latest AR Spectacles, which can similarly suggest lenses based on what’s around you (unlike previous versions of Spectacles, the newest ones aren’t for sale just yet). Visual search also help Snap compete for creative talent with rivals like TikTok and Instagram (which also happens to be working on its own visual search feature). The company told The Verge that it’s working on adding camera shortcuts to Spotlight to make it easier for people to riff on other users’ clips.

Instagram is working on making its search function more intuitive. The app is experimenting with changes that allow users to search for content based on topics rather than account names or hashtags.

Up until now, Instagram’s search has been fairly rudimentary. Typing “kittens” into the search bar would turn up results for specific accounts or hashtags, for example, but you’d have to jump around different pages to actually find kitten content. But with the update, searching for topical content on Instagram will be more like Pinterest, with a grid of photos and videos related to that topic.

“We've been experimenting with what we are internally calling interest search,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a video posted to Twitter. He added that the new search results are available for “a range of topics and a range of languages” but that Instagram is still “working to expand” the feature. For now, users can browse the new results by looking for search terms that have a magnifying glass next to them.

Instagram has teased other major updates to its search features in recent months. The app is also working on a visual search feature that would allow users to find products using the in-app camera, though the company hasn’t shared additional details.

YouTube has removed 1 million videos for dangerous COVID-19 misinformation since February 2020, according to YouTube’s Chief Product Officer Neal Mahon.

Mahon shared the statistic in a blog post outlining how the company approaches. misinformation on its platform. “Misinformation has moved from the marginal to the mainstream,” he wrote. “No longer contained to the sealed-off worlds of Holocaust deniers or 9-11 truthers, it now stretches into every facet of society, sometimes tearing through communities with blistering speed.”

At the same time, the Youtube executive argued that “bad content” accounts for only a small percentage of YouTube content overall. “Bad content represents only a tiny percentage of the billions of videos on YouTube (about .16-.18% of total views turn out to be content that violates our policies),” Mahon wrote. He added that YouTube removes almost 10 million videos each quarter, “the majority of which don’t even reach 10 views.”

Facebook recently made a similar argument about content on its platform. The social network published a report last week that claimed that the most popular posts are memes and other non-political content. And, faced with criticism over its handling of COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation, the company has argued that vaccine misinformation isn’t representative of the kind of content most users see.

Both Facebook and YouTube have come under particular scrutiny for their policies around health misinformation during the pandemic. Both platforms have well over a billion users, which means that even a small fraction of content can have a far-reaching impact. And both platforms have so far declined to disclose details about how vaccine and health misinformation spreads or how many users are encountering it. Mahon also said that removing misinformation is only one aspect of the company’s approach. YouTube is also working on “ratcheting up information from trusted sources and reducing the spread of videos with harmful misinformation.”

Facebook’s first messaging app is officially 10 years old, and the company is celebrating the occasion with a handful of new features and birthday-themed updates.

Messenger is introducing “birthday” versions of several of its existing features, such as birthday soundmoji, AR effects, stickers, chat themes and other effects. Users will also be able to send cash to friends as a “birthday gift” with Facebook Pay, which is essentially like any other person-to-person payment in Messenger but adds some new celebratory animations.

The app is also adding a new type of mini game to chats with “poll games.” The feature allows friends in group threads to weigh in on lighthearted polls that ask which member of the chat is “most likely” to do something like miss a flight or fight zombies. Both the new birthday effects, poll games, and birthday gifting are rolling out now. Messenger also previewed a new “word effects” feature coming “in the near future” that allows users to pair an emoji with a specific word or phrase in order to trigger an in-chat animation similar to iMessage’s special effects.

The updates underscore just how much Messenger has changed in its first decade of existence. Originally launched in 2011, the app evolved from a basic chat app to one so bloated with features it’s been redesigned at leastthree times in the last two years. It’s been home to many of Facebook’s more ambitious — though not always successful — features over the years.

More recently, Facebook has been weaving Messenger more tightly into its other services by pushing users to link their Instagram DMs with their Messenger account. Facebook wants to bring this same kind of “cross-app communication” to WhatsApp as well, though the company hasn’t said much about how or when it could happen. Likewise, it’s still not clear when Messenger will turn on end-to-end encryption as a default setting.

During a call with reporters, Facebook’s Messenger chief Stan Chudnovsky said that the rollout of encryption as a default is moving slowly in part due to the sheer number of features in the messaging app. “We need to rebuild all these features in [an] end-to-end encrypted environment, and make them fully capable,” he said, noting that Messenger is still continuously adding new features. “It's almost like we are constantly trying to catch up with ourselves.”

Facebook's introducing new tools to help people in Afghanistan lock down their accounts’ privacy settings. The “one-click” tool will activate privacy settings for timeline posts, and prevent profile photos from being downloaded or shared, Facebook’s Head of Security Policy Nathaniel Gleicher said in a statement.

The feature will encourage users to "limit what unknown people can see," according to screenshots shared by Gleicher. The tool won’t be available on Instagram, but the photo sharing app is pushing “pop-up alerts” that will explain ways to lock down those accounts as well.

Facebook

Gleicher added that the company is also temporarily hiding friends lists of accounts in the country, and he encouraged people with Facebook friends in Afghanistan to change privacy settings for their friends list as well. “We’re working closely with our counterparts in industry, civil society and government to provide whatever support we can to help protect people,” he said. “And we've stood up a special operations center to respond to new threats as they emerge.”

It took Facebook several hours to pull down a livestream from a man suspected of making a bomb threat at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. According to Politico, the unidentified man, who approached the Library of Congress in a pickup truck and told police he had a bomb in the car, streamed live on Facebook for multiple hours as police negotiated with him. The video "circulated widely" before Facebook finally took it down.

On Twitter, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed the company had taken down the stream and the man's profile and is "continuing to investigate" the matter. 

It's not the first time Facebook has had to scramble to prevent a disturbing live stream from spreading. In 2019, the company raced to pull down more than a million copies of a live stream recorded by a mass shooter in New Zealand, in an effort that took multiple days. 

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Back in March, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) published a report linking more than two-thirds of vaccine misinformation online to12 individuals. That statistic has been widely cited since, including by lawmakers and government officials, as proof that Facebook has failed to control lies about COVID-19 vaccines.

Now, five months later, Facebook says it has banned more than 36 accounts, groups, and Pages associated with these misinformation “superspreaders.” The company says it’s taken other actions to make other content associated with these individuals less visible, as well.

“We have also imposed penalties on nearly two dozen additional Pages, groups or accounts linked to these 12 people, like moving their posts lower in News Feed so fewer people see them or not recommending them to others,” Facebook said in a statement. “We’ve applied penalties to some of their website domains as well so any posts including their website content are moved lower in News Feed. Notably, some accounts associated with the group remain online, which Facebook says is because they are either “inactive,” not posting rule-breaking content or have only shared “a small amount” of such content.

Facebook has taken issue with the CCDH’s report since it was first published, disputing its methodology and its conclusion. In its latest statement, the social network said “there isn’t any evidence” to support the report’s claim that 73 percent of vaccine misinformation is linked to the group, which includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Joseph Mercola, Del Bigtree and other prominent anti-vaccine activists. Yet the report has become a headache for the company as it was cited by the US Surgeon General last month in a health advisory warning the public of vaccine misinformation online. Overall, the company has removed around 3,000 groups, pages and accounts for repeatedly breaking its rules against COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation during the pandemic, though the company still hasn’t shared stats on how often such misinformation is being viewed.

In a statement, CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed said that Facebook had “grossly misrepresented” the research. “Facebook has grossly misrepresented CCDH and Anti-Vax Watch's research while continuing to withhold the data that show how many of its users have been exposed to disinformation fueling vaccine hesitancy. CCDH and Anti-Vax Watch continue to be fully transparent about their methodologies, which rely on publicly available tools for tracking audience and content reach.”