Heardle, a music trivia game that popped up following the massive success of Wordle, has a new owner. Spotify has announced it's buying the game. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. As The Verge notes, Heardle is Spotify's first game acquisition.

Heardle is a straightforward game of name that tune. Players are given six attempts to guess a popular song. They hear one second of the intro at first. Heardle lets them hear a little more after each incorrect guess (they can also skip turns). There's only one song each day for everyone to guess.

Whether or not you correctly identify the song, you can click through to hear the full track after finishing a round. That caught the attention of Spotify, which is pegging Heardle as a music discovery tool. Until now, the game has been using music hosted on Soundcloud.

“We are always looking for innovative and playful ways to enhance music discovery and help artists reach new fans,” Spotify's global head of music Jeremy Erlich said. “Heardle has proven to be a really fun way to connect millions of fans with songs they know and love and with new songs... and a way to compete with their friends as to who has the best musical knowledge. Since its debut, the game has quickly built a loyal following, and it aligns with our plans to deepen interactivity across the Spotify ecosystem.”

As The New York Times did with Wordle after it bought that game, Spotify says it will keep Heardle free to play for everyone and retain the existing look and feel. The font Heardle uses has been updated to align with Spotify's branding, however.

The integration between Heardle and Spotify has already started in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Players in those countries can listen to each day's song on Spotify instead of Soundcloud. The game is now hosted on Spotify's website too. Players who want to keep their stats will need to visit the old site to transfer them over.

Spotify says players in other countries will soon be able to play Heardle in other languages. It plans to eventually "integrate Heardle and other interactive experiences more fully into Spotify to allow music lovers to connect more deeply with artists and challenge friends."

However, the transition doesn't seem to be going entirely smoothly. Some players have claimed they can't accessHeardle in their location. Conversely, some say they can now play for the first time as Soundcloud isn't available where they are.

Twitter is opening its conversation-leaving feature to everyone. Now, all Twitter users will be able to use the service’s “unmention” feature, the company announced.

Twitter describes “unmention” as the ability to leave an unwanted conversation on the platform. When used, it unlinks the user’s handle from the Twitter thread, so they will no longer be tagged in future tweets, and others won’t be able to reply to them from the same thread. Though it won’t prevent others from continuing to jump into the conversation, it will at least shield the person’s replies and notifications.

The feature has been in the works for more than a year. Twitter first teased the idea last summer, saying it was meant to prevent the kind of “unwanted attention” that can often lead to harassment. It started testing it in April, but it was limited to a small group of users on the web only. Now, with the update, anyone will be able to remove themselves from a thread regardless of whether they are using Twitter’s apps or website.

The update is the latest way Twitter has tried to give users more ways to control how people can interact with them, particularly at moments when they may be more susceptible to harassment. The service has also added reply-limiting features, and has been testing a “safety mode,” which can automatically block problematic accounts.

It's not just that one uncle who's not allowed at Thanksgiving anymore who's been spreading misinformation online. The practice began long before the rise of social media — governments around the world have been doing it for centuries. But it wasn't until the modern era, one fueled by algorithmic recommendation engines built to infinitely increase engagement, that nation-states have managed to weaponize disinformation to such a high degree. In his new book Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare, David Sloss, Professor of Law at Santa Clara University, explores how social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have become platforms for political operations that have very real, and very dire, consequences for democracy while arguing for governments to unite in creating a global framework to regulate and protect these networks from information warfare.

David Sloss

Excerpted from Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare, by David L. Sloss, published by Stanford University Press, ©2022 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All Rights Reserved.

Social Media, Misinformation, and Democratic Governance

Governments were practicing disinformation long before the advent of social media. However, social media accelerates the spread of false information by enabling people to reach a large audience at low cost. Social media accelerates the spread of both misinformation and disinformation. “Misinformation” includes any false or misleading information. “Disinformation” is false or misleading information that is purposefully crafted or strategically placed to achieve a political goal. 

The political objectives of a disinformation campaign could be either foreign or domestic. Prior chapters focused on foreign affairs. Here, let us consider domestic disinformation campaigns. The "Pizzagate" story is a good example. In fall 2016, a Twitter post alleged that Hillary Clinton was "the kingpin of an international child enslavement and sex ring." The story quickly spread on social media, leading to the creation of a discussion board on Reddit with the title "Pizzagate." As various contributors embellished the story, they identified a specific pizza parlor in Washington, DC, Comet Ping Pong, as the base of operations for the child sex operation. "These bizarre and evidence-free allegations soon spread beyond the dark underbelly of the internet to relatively mainstream right-wing media such as the Drudge Report and Infowars." Alex Jones, the creator of Infowars, "has more than 2 million follows on YouTube and 730,000 followers on Twitter; by spreading the rumors, Jones vastly increased their reach." (Jones has since been banned from most major social media platforms.) Ultimately, a young man who believed the story arrived at Comet Ping Pong with "an AR- 15 semiautomatic rifle... and opened fire, unloading multiple rounds." Although the story was debunked, "pollsters found that more than a quarter of adults surveyed were either certain that Clinton was connected to the child sex ring or that some part of the story must have been true."

Several features of the current information environment accelerate the spread of misinformation. Before the rise of the internet, major media companies like CBS and the New York Times had the capacity to distribute stories to millions of people. However, they were generally bound by professional standards of journalistic ethics so that they would not deliberately spread false stories. They were far from perfect, but they did help prevent widespread dissemination of false information. The internet effectively removed the filtering function of large media organizations, enabling anyone with a social media account — and a basic working knowledge of how messages go viral on social media — to spread misinformation to a very large audience very quickly. 

The digital age has given rise to automated accounts known as "bots." A bot is "a software tool that performs specific actions on computers connected in a network without the intervention of human users." Political operatives with a moderate degree of technical sophistication can utilize bots to accelerate the spread of messages on social media. Moreover, social media platforms facilitate the use of microtargeting: "the process of preparing and delivering customized messages to voters or consumers." In summer 2017, political activists in the United Kingdom built a bot to disseminate messages on Tinder, a dating app, that were designed to attract new supporters for the Labour Party. "The bot accounts sent between thirty thousand and forty thousand messages in all, targeting eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in constituencies where the Labour candidates needed help." In the ensuing election, "the Labour Party either won or successfully defended some of these targeted districts by just a few votes. In celebrating their victory over Twitter, campaign managers thanked... their team of bots." There is no evidence in this case that the bots were spreading false information, but unethical political operatives can also use bots and microtargeting to spread false messages quickly via social media. 

In the past two decades, we have seen the growth of an entire industry of paid political consultants who have developed expertise in utilizing social media to influence political outcomes. The Polish firm discussed earlier in this chapter is one example. Philip Howard, a leading expert on misinformation, claims: "It is safe to say that every country in the world has some homegrown political consulting firm that specializes in marketing political misinformation." Political consultants work with data mining companies that have accumulated huge amounts of information about individuals by collecting data from a variety of sources, including social media platforms, and aggregating that information in proprietary databases. The data mining industry "supplies the information that campaign managers need to make strategic decisions about whom to target, where, when, with what message, and over which device and platform."

Political consulting firms use both bots and human-operated "fake accounts" to disseminate messages via social media. (A "fake account" is a social media account operated by someone who adopts a false identity for the purpose of misleading other social media users about the identity of the person operating the account.) They take advantage of data from the data mining industry and the technical features of social media platforms to engage in very sophisticated microtargeting, sending customized messages to select groups of voters to shape public opinion and/or influence political outcomes. "Social media algorithms allow for the constant testing and refinement of campaign messages, so that the most advanced techniques of behavioral science can sharpen the message in time for those strategically crucial final days" before an important vote. Many such messages are undoubtedly truthful, but there are several well-documented cases where paid political consultants have deliberately spread false information in service of some political objective. For example, Howard has documented the strategic use of disinformation by the Vote Leave campaign in the final weeks before the UK referendum on Brexit. 

It bears emphasis that disinformation does not have to be believed to erode the foundations of our democratic institutions. Disinformation "does not necessarily succeed by changing minds but by sowing confusion, undermining trust in information and institutions, and eroding shared reference points." For democracy to function effectively, we need shared reference points. An authoritarian government can require citizens to wear masks and practice social distancing during a pandemic by instilling fear that leads to obedience. In a democratic society, by contrast, governments must persuade a large majority of citizens that scientific evidence demonstrates that wearing masks and practicing social distancing saves lives. Unfortunately, misinformation spread on social media undermines trust in both government and scientific authority. Without that trust, it becomes increasingly difficult for government leaders to build the consensus needed to formulate and implement effective policies to address pressing social problems, such as slowing the spread of a pandemic.

Blizzard is ending development on Heroes of the Storm. In a brief blog post published on Friday, the studio said it plans to support the MOBA “in a manner similar” to games like Starcraft II. Moving forward, Blizzard said fans can expect the company to continue to release patches that address bugs and balance issues “as needed.” However, it has “no plans” to add new content to the in-game shop – which, for the time being, will continue to operate.

“To our Heroes community, we say, ‘thank you,’” Blizzard said, noting it will gift a free in-game mount to players with the game’s next patch. “You continue to be one of our most passionate communities, we’re grateful for your continued dedication and support, and as always, we look forward to seeing you in the Nexus.”

Friday’s announcement effectively caps off what’s been a slow death for the Blizzard-universe MOBA. In 2018, former studio president J. Allen Brack said the studio had made the “difficult” decision to move some of the staff that had been working on Heroes of the Storm to other projects. Since then, the cadence of new content slowed to a trickle. The game’s most recently added hero came in 2020. Blizzard’s abrupt decision to end its support of the Heroes of the Storm esports scene also left many pros bitter with the company.

This week, Devindra and Senior Writer Sam Rutherford dive into the Supreme Court’s latest EPA ruling, which severely limits the agency’s ability to curtail power plant emissions. Devindra also chats with ProPublica reporter Lisa Song about what this means for the EPA and other federal agencies. (Basically, it makes fighting climate change much harder.) Also, we discuss Apple’s new lockdown mode, which adds an extreme layer of security to your devices, and why Gen Z is so Minion crazy.

Listen above, or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcasts, the Morning After and Engadget News!

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• How bad is the Supreme Court’s EPA ruling? – 1:49

• Apple is building a lockdown mode for an “extreme” level of security – 27:43

• Axie Infinity hack was traced back to a fake LinkedIn job offer – 32:39.359

• Toyota has run out of EV tax credits in the US – 37:51

• God of War Ragnarok will be released on November 9, 2022 – 46:14

• WTF is going on with all the Minions memes? – 48:02

• Working on – 51:32

• Picks – 1:03:49

Livestream

Credits
Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Sam Rutherford
Guest: Lisa Song from ProPublica
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien
Livestream producers: Julio Barrientos
Graphic artists: Luke Brooks and Brian Oh

Rockstar Games confirmed that GTA VI, if that's what's the next entry in the series is going to be called, has been in the works earlier this year when it announced the release date of GTA V and GTA Online for the PS5 and the Xbox Series X|S. Now, in a post detailing a major update coming to the GTA Online experience, the developer said that it's been "steadily moving more development resources" towards the next Grand Theft Auto title over the past few years. The company has done so, because it understands the "need to exceed players' expectations," but it has had to make changes to how it supports Red Dead Online as a result. 

The biggest change for Red Dead players is that the developer will no longer roll out major themed updates like in previous years. As GameRant explains, that means no more new Specialist Roles, missions and game modes, as well. The company will still build upon existing modes and add new Telegram Missions, which are solo activities players can do to get rewards, this year. But going forward, Rockstar will focus on showcasing previously added Roles and missions during Red Dead Online's monthly events.

Red Dead Online players had complained about the lack of substantial updates in the past and about Rockstar's tendency to prioritize the Grand Theft Auto franchise over its other games. GTA is a massive moneymaker for the developer, though, so it doesn't really come as a surprise that Rockstar has chosen to put all its efforts towards making sure that fans will love GTA VI.

Meta is changing course on its controversial requirement for users of its virtual reality headsets to log in with a Facebook account. Instead, they'll need a new Meta account, which won't need to be linked to Facebook. The company will start rolling out the new account next month for existing and new Meta Quest users. Those with a legacy Oculus account will need to have a Meta account to keep using their headset after January 1st, 2023.

The company stressed that a Meta account is not a social media profile, saying that it "lets you log into your VR devices and view and manage your purchased apps in one place." It noted that future devices will require Meta accounts too.

There is a social aspect to the new account type though, at least for VR headsets. When you create a Meta account, you'll need to create a Meta Horizon profile with the username, avatar, profile photo and so on that you'll use in the company's vision of the metaverse.

Oculus friends will become your followers and you'll automatically follow them back. You can, of course, unfollow people and stop others from following you. You'll still have the option of linking your Meta account to Facebook and Instagram, so you'll be able to chat with friends in the VR version of Messenger or find some buds to play games with. 

While Facebook has a one-account-per-person rule, the company is fine with you having multiple Meta accounts. Perhaps you'll have one for virtual meetings and another for hanging out with friends.

The new accounts will offer privacy controls, including the option to make your profile private and manually approve follower requests. Users aged between 13 and 17 will have private profiles by default.

This is an important shift for Meta as it continues to place more focus on its vision of the metaverse. However, Meta is said to have scaled back its metaverse ambitions in the last few months, having reportedly killed off some Reality Labs projects and put a planned dual-camera smartwatch on hold. 

Still, there are at least some positives of Meta divorcing VR from its social media apps. Folks who are interested in Meta Quest but want nothing to do with Facebook will no longer need an account for the latter.

Twitter is experimenting with a new feature that allows two accounts to co-author a tweet. The company is calling it a “CoTweet,” which it’s now testing with “select” accounts in the United States, Canada and Korea.

With a CoTweet, two accounts can be linked as the author of a single tweet, which will appear on both accounts’ timelines. Much like the collabs feature introduced by Instagram last year, CoTweets seem to be geared more toward brands and creators than the typical Twitter users.

“CoTweets help authors share the spotlight, unlock opportunities for engaging new audiences, and enhance their established partnerships,” Twitter explains on its website. The feature was first spotted earlier this year by reverse engineer and developer Alessandro Paluzzi, who shared some details about it back in February.

Now, Twitter has expanded the test, at least for now. A Twitter spokesperson said that CoTweets is currently a “temporary experiment,” but didn’t indicate if, or when, the feature may be more widely available. “We’re testing CoTweets for a limited time to learn how people and brands may use this feature to grow and reach new audiences, and strengthen their collaborations with other accounts,” the spokesperson said.

The following article contains really significant spoilers for ‘A Quality of Mercy.’

We’re living in the age of the prequel, with studios exploiting every scrap of existing material where there’s an audience already in place to enjoy it. But the low-hanging fruit and easy cash a prequel promises severely limits the storytelling opportunities for those properties. Obi-Wan Kenobi can’t die (or do anything of consequence) during his own prestige miniseries since his fate was preordained in 1977. Ewan McGregor has to age into Sir Alec Guinness and die at Darth Vader’s hand, and that’s that. Sure, there are some things creative teams can play fast and loose with, but the big things – the ones that permeate the culture at large – are set in stone.

Ever since Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was announced, it was blighted by this same hard stop, one dictated back in November 1966. Movies aside, until 2018, Christopher Pike was little more than a pub trivia answer to the question “Who was the first captain of the Enterprise?” (It’ll provoke an argument between the folks who just about remember Jeffrey Hunter was there before William Shatner, while the folks who know Robert April was first sit smugly on the sidelines.) But Pike’s fate wasn’t necessarily immutable until the second season of Discovery reaffirmed that he was going to get his radiation dose. But that didn’t matter until the fans, production team and executives found that they liked Anson Mount, and could easily watch a whole series of pre-Kirk adventures with him on the Enterprise.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if the creative team looked for a way to prolong the series beyond its narrative end point. The show has already dangled a few ways that Pike could survive the incident, and made it clear that there are still seven years left to go. Seven years being the old-fashioned point where a TV show could make it in syndication, and the duration that all three Silver Age Trek series reached. Strange New Worlds could just as easily slow its timeline down and spend five, seven, ten or seventeen seasons filling the next six years of Pike’s life or find a way to remove such an arbitrary deadline.

And yet, the show’s season finale “A Quality of Mercy” decides to take advantage of the limits imposed upon it, making it clear to both Pike, and us, that there are no get outs. We begin at a base on the edge of the Romulan neutral zone, where the son of Commander Hansen will, when he grows up, be one of the cadets who dies in the radiation leak. Pike decides that it’s only logical to dissuade the kid from joining Starfleet and, therefore, save his life, but as he’s writing a letter to the boy to warn him of his fate, an older Pike appears in his quarters. And we know he’s older, because he’s wearing one of Robert Fletcher’s gorgeous 2278-era Starfleet uniforms, albeit restyled to suit the nu-Trek era.

Sadly, Admiral Pike isn’t here to congratulate his younger self on a job well done, but warn him of the consequences of futzing with time. Thanks to a Klingon Time Crystal from Boreth, Pike gets All Good Things-ed into his own future, six months after the radiation leak. If your fan antennae started tingling at the date, it’s because Pike is running the Enterprise in 2266, during the first season of classic Star Trek. In fact, it’s worse than that, because he’s been thrust straight into the episode of “Balance of Terror”, except he has to win the way his way instead of Kirk’s. As Pike says, the only way to discover why this future is terrible, is to live it.

(“Balance of Terror” is widely regarded to be one of the top three best episodes from the classic series. It’s the one where the Enterprise plays a tense game of cat-and-mouse with a new Romulan warbird equipped with a cloaking device and a powerful weapon capable of shredding starships in one shot.)

Now, if there’s one thing this episode does better than, well, most of nu-Trek, it’s the fact that all of the characters make smart choices. Pike, thrown into the future, instantly confides in Spock and when he’s met with resistance, immediately recommends a mind-meld. Caught up to speed, Spock becomes Pike’s co-confidant in the altered future, helping him to work out what exactly he needs to do here.

Pike’s survival has caused plenty of things to change in the timeline: James Kirk is the captain of the USS Farragut, which has survived in this version of the future. And, mercifully, the ship is in the vicinity, meaning that Kirk and Pike get to work together to solve the problem of the rogue Romulan Warbird with its devastating new weapon. Meanwhile, the beats from “Balance of Terror” get replayed – with Ortegas replacing Lt. Stiles as the on-bridge racist with angry eyes pointed at Spock.

Understandably, given the conflicts between Pike’s folksy diplomacy and Kirk’s more action-y approach, nobody wins. The Romulans get a signal out to the fleet, who realize that the Federation is weak enough to wage total war upon. In many ways, this episode serves up its own indictment of Pike, showing that his don’t-shoot-first approach has a limit. (And it also puts some clearer water between Pike and Kirk, since one was the replacement for the other back in the ‘60s.) Naturally, the episode ends with Pike opting to return to his own time and understand that he can’t simply back out of his preordained fate.

This is the second episode of Strange New Worlds co-written by the polarizing Akiva Goldsman, and many of his hallmarks are on full show here. There’s the misplaced reverence for franchise iconography, Great Man Of History mythologizing (this time with Spock) and a face off between two copy-and-paste CGI space fleets. Even so, given the risk of what this episode could have been, especially threading a new narrative through one of the sacred texts of the original series, this worked pretty well. (Given Goldsman’s previous Trek work, I’m giving all of the credit to showrunner and co-writer Henry Alonso Myers here.)

I can’t really give much comment on Paul Wesley’s performance as Kirk here, since he’s handed the most poisoned of chalices. William Shatner, even at his worst, never played Kirk as big as the stereotype has become, and Chris Pine’s performance dialed down Kirk’s bookish, warrior-poet side. Go too far on either side and it’ll become an impression, especially since he’s only got around 10 minutes of screentime in the whole episode. That’s why he essentially plays Kirk as someone who is both stalwart but also endlessly looking for a third option, emphasizing his inventiveness.

The episode ends with a twist – somehow, Number One’s past has been revealed (like when she just told everyone who would listen in "Ghosts of Illyria"), and she’s arrested by Starfleet. Pike nearly breaks a security guard’s hand preventing the arrest but is talked down by Una on the pad before he declares that things aren’t over. I’ll be very curious to see how this particular storyline gets resolved, especially considering my perpetual wondering about Rebecca Romijn’s absence from the show. The fact that Paul Wesley was tipped to recur in season two might suggest Kirk’s coming on board as her replacement, but that feels a bit too excessive in its fan service. 

Fundamentally, however, Strange New Worlds wraps up its first season with something that’s better than it had any right to be. As I wrote back at the beginning, the first five episodes all have something good going on, but often trip over their own shoelaces. Ever since “Spock Amok”, however, the show has started to find its feet, with less awkward dialogue, a more relaxed groove and the courage to go for high camp and comedy just as regularly as it does high drama. Every episode in the back half of the first season has been better than its immediate predecessor, even if there’s some very obvious kinks that still need to be worked out. Whisper it, friends, but, Strange New Worlds might actually be good?

The otherworldly dust has settled on season four of Stranger Things, which just wrapped up with a blockbuster pair of episodes. While The Duffer Brothers, who created the show, have one more season of the Netflix megahit to make, they're looking ahead to future projects.

Matt and Ross Duffer have set up a new production company as part of their partnership with Netflix. Fittingly enough, it's called Upside Down Pictures. The studio, which will be run by Ozark and Orphan Black producer Hilary Leavitt, will “aim to create the kind of stories that inspired the Duffers growing up — stories that take place at that beautiful crossroads where the ordinary meets the extraordinary, where big spectacle co-exists with intimate character work, where heart wins out over cynicism,” Netflix said.

The company and the Duffers also revealed some of the projects they have in the pipeline. For one thing, they're working on a stage play set in the world of Stranger Things. Emmy- and Tony-award winner Stephen Daldry, known for his work on The Crown and Billy Elliot, will direct the play. A live-action Stranger Things spin-off series is also in the works.

Intriguingly, Netflix is taking another stab at adapting the classic manga and anime series Death Note with the help of the Duffers. Unlike the poorly received 2017 movie, this will be a live-action show.

Also in the works under the wing of Upside Down Pictures are a series from Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance creators Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews and an adaption of Stephen King and Peter Straub‘s The Talisman. The production company and Netflix have teamed up with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and Paramount Television for the latter series.

Stranger Things is easily one of Netflix's biggest successes. Fans have already collectively viewed more than a billion hours of Stranger Things 4 alone. After Squid Game, it's only the second season of a Netflix show to hit that milestone within 28 days of release.

As such, it's not too much of a surprise that Netflix wants to expand the Duffers' remit to (hopefully) work their magic on more shows and movies. The company is having a rough year and is in desperate need of more big hits to draw in new subscribers and keep existing ones on board.