Porn bots are more or less ingrained in the social media experience, despite platforms’ best efforts to stamp them out. We’ve grown accustomed to seeing them flooding the comments sections of memes and celebrities’ posts, and, if you have a public account, you’ve probably noticed them watching and liking your stories. But their behavior keeps changing ever so slightly to stay ahead of automated filters, and now things are starting to get weird.

While porn bots at one time mostly tried to lure people in with suggestive or even overtly raunchy hook lines (like the ever-popular, “DON'T LOOK at my STORY, if you don't want to MASTURBATE!”), the approach these days is a little more abstract. It’s become common to see bot accounts posting a single, inoffensive, completely-irrelevant-to-the-subject word, sometimes accompanied by an emoji or two. On one post I stumbled across recently, five separate spam accounts all using the same profile picture — a closeup of a person in a red thong spreading their asscheeks — commented, “Pristine 🌿,” “Music 🎶,” “Sapphire 💙,” “Serenity 😌” and “Faith 🙏.”

Another bot — its profile picture a headless frontal shot of someone’s lingerie-clad body — commented on the same meme post, “Michigan 🌟.” Once you’ve noticed them, it’s hard not to start keeping a mental log of the most ridiculous instances. “🦄agriculture” one bot wrote. On another post: “terror 🌟” and “😍🙈insect.” The bizarre one-word comments are everywhere; the porn bots, it seems, have completely lost it.

Really, what we’re seeing is the emergence of another avoidance maneuver scammers use to help their bots slip by Meta’s detection technology. That, and they might be getting a little lazy.

Screenshots by Engadget

“They just want to get into the conversation, so having to craft a coherent sentence probably doesn't make sense for them,” Satnam Narang, a research engineer for the cybersecurity company Tenable, told Engadget. Once scammers get their bots into the mix, they can have other bots pile likes onto those comments to further elevate them, explains Narang, who has been investigating social media scams since the MySpace days.

Using random words helps scammers fly under the radar of moderators who may be looking for particular keywords. In the past, they’ve tried methods like putting spaces or special characters between every letter of words that might be flagged by the system. “You can't necessarily ban an account or take an account down if they just comment the word ‘insect’ or ‘terror,’ because it's very benign,” Narang said. “But if they're like, ‘Check my story,’ or something… that might flag their systems. It’s an evasion technique and clearly it's working if you're seeing them on these big name accounts. It's just a part of that dance.”

That dance is one social media platforms and bots have been doing for years, seemingly to no end. Meta has said it stops millions of fake accounts from being created on a daily basis across its suite of apps, and catches “millions more, often within minutes after creation.” Yet spam accounts are still prevalent enough to show up in droves on high traffic posts and slip into the story views of even users with small followings.

The company’s most recent transparency report, which includes stats on fake accounts it’s removed, shows Facebook nixed over a billion fake accounts last year alone, but currently offers no data for Instagram. “Spammers use every platform available to them to deceive and manipulate people across the internet and constantly adapt their tactics to evade enforcement,” a Meta spokesperson said. “That is why we invest heavily in our enforcement and review teams, and have specialized detection tools to identify spam.”

Screenshots by Engadget

Last December, Instagram rolled out a slew of tools aimed at giving users more visibility into how it’s handling spam bots and giving content creators more control over their interactions with these profiles. Account holders can now, for example, bulk-delete follow requests from profiles flagged as potential spam. Instagram users may also have noticed the more frequent appearance of the “hidden comments” section at the bottom of some posts, where comments flagged as offensive or spam can be relegated to minimize encounters with them.

“It's a game of whack-a-mole,” said Narang, and scammers are winning. “You think you've got it, but then it just pops up somewhere else.” Scammers, he says, are very adept at figuring out why they got banned and finding new ways to skirt detection accordingly.

One might assume social media users today would be too savvy to fall for obviously bot-written comments like “Michigan 🌟,” but according to Narang, scammers’ success doesn’t necessarily rely on tricking hapless victims into handing over their money. They’re often participating in affiliate programs, and all they need is to get people to visit a website — usually branded as an “adult dating service” or the like — and sign up for free. The bots’ “link in bio” typically directs to an intermediary site hosting a handful of URLs that may promise XXX chats or photos and lead to the service in question.

Scammers can get a small amount of money, say a dollar or so, for every real user who makes an account. In the off chance that someone signs up with a credit card, the kickback would be much higher. “Even if one percent of [the target demographic] signs up, you're making some money,” Narang said. “And if you're running multiple, different accounts and you have different profiles pushing these links out, you're probably making a decent chunk of change.” Instagram scammers are likely to have spam bots on TikTok, X and other sites too, Narang said. “It all adds up.”

Screenshot by Engadget

The harms from spam bots go beyond whatever headaches they may ultimately cause the few who have been duped into signing up for a sketchy service. Porn bots primarily use real people’s photos that they’ve stolen from public profiles, which can be embarrassing once the spam account starts friend requesting everyone the depicted person knows (speaking from personal experience here). The process of getting Meta to remove these cloned accounts can be a draining effort.

Their presence also adds to the challenges that real content creators in the sex and sex-related industries face on social media, which many rely on as an avenue to connect with wider audiences but must constantly fight with to keep from being deplatformed. Imposter Instagram accounts can rack up thousands of followers, funneling potential visitors away from the real accounts and casting doubt on their legitimacy. And real accounts sometimes get flagged as spam in Meta’s hunt for bots, putting those with racy content even more at risk of account suspension and bans.

Unfortunately, the bot problem isn’t one that has any easy solution. “They're just continuously finding new ways around [moderation], coming up with new schemes,” Narang said. Scammers will always follow the money and, to that end, the crowd. While porn bots on Instagram have evolved to the point of posting nonsense to avoid moderators, more sophisticated bots chasing a younger demographic on TikTok are posting somewhat believable commentary on Taylor Swift videos, Narang says.

The next big thing in social media will inevitably emerge sooner or later, and they’ll go there too. “As long as there's money to be made,” Narang said, “there's going to be incentives for these scammers.”

The Mozilla Foundation and dozens of other research and advocacy groups are pushing back on Meta’s decisions to shut down its research tool, CrowdTangle, later this year. In an open letter, the group calls on Meta to keep CrowdTangle online until after 2024 elections, saying that it will harm their ability to track election misinformation in a year where “approximately half the world’s population” are slated to vote.

The letter, published by the Mozilla Foundation and signed by 90 groups as well as the former CEO of CrowdTangle, comes one week after Meta confirmed it would shut down the tool in August 2024. “Meta’s decision will effectively prohibit the outside world, including election integrity experts, from seeing what’s happening on Facebook and Instagram — during the biggest election year on record,” the letter writers say.

“This means almost all outside efforts to identify and prevent political disinformation, incitements to violence, and online harassment of women and minorities will be silenced. It’s a direct threat to our ability to safeguard the integrity of elections.” The group asks Meta to keep CrowdTangle online until January 2025, and to “rapidly onboard” election researchers onto its latest tools.

CrowdTangle has long been a source of frustration for Meta. It allows researchers, journalists and other groups to track how content is spreading across Facebook and Instagram. It’s also often cited by journalists in unflattering stories about Facebook and Instagram. For example, Engadget relied on CrowdTangle in an investigation into why Facebook Gaming was overrun with spam and pirated content in 2022. CrowdTangle was also the source for “Facebook’s Top 10,” a (now defunct) Twitter bot that posted daily updates on the most-interacted withFacebook posts containing links. The project, created by a New York Times reporter, regularly showed far-right and conservative pages over-performing, leading Facebook executives to argue the data wasn't an accurate representation of what was actually popular on the platform.

With CrowdTangle set to shut down, Meta is instead highlighting a new program called the Meta Content Library, which provides researchers with new tools to access publicly-accessible data in a streamlined way. The company has said it’s more powerful than what CrowdTangle enabled, but it’s also much more strictly controlled. Researchers from nonprofits and academic institutions must apply, and be approved, in order to access it. And since the vast majority of newsrooms are for-profit entities, most journalists will be automatically ineligible for access (it’s not clear if Meta would allow reporters at nonprofit newsrooms to use the Content Library.)

The other issue, according to Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle’s former CEO who left Meta in 2021 is that the Meta Content Library isn’t currently powerful enough to be a full CrowdTangle replacement. “There are some areas where the MCL has way more data than CrowdTangle ever had, including reach and comments in particular,” Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle’s former CEO who left Meta in 2021 wrote in a post on Substack last week. “But there are also some huge gaps in the tool, both for academics and civil society, and simply arguing that it has more data isn’t a claim that regulators or the press should take seriously.”

In a statement on X, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said that “academic and nonprofit institutions pursuing scientific or public interest research can apply for access” to the Meta Content Library, including nonprofit election experts. “The Meta Content Library is designed to contain more comprehensive data than CrowdTangle.”

Fediverse support in Meta Threads is up and running in beta. Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Thursday that adult Threads users in eligible countries can now turn on sharing to the fediverse — including Mastodon and other ActivityPub services. Before today’s wider beta rollout, Meta had been testing the cross-platform compatibility with a handful of accounts since late last year.

The fediverse is a collection of decentralized online communities (servers) that speak the common “language” of ActivityPub. This lets each hub maintain its own rules and members while still allowing posts, likes and other content to appear on others. Meta promised to support the fediverse when Threads launched last year.

In a post from December, Zuckerberg framed the integration as a way to let the young platform’s content reach more eyeballs. “Making Threads interoperable will give people more choice over how they interact and it will help content reach more people,” he wrote. “I’m pretty optimistic about this.”

The feature is opt-in. If you toggle fediverse sharing on, people on other ActivityPub servers can search for and follow your profile, see and interact with your posts and share them with users in their (or any other) compatible fediverse community. Their interactions will be shared with Threads.

There are some limitations while the cross-platform compatibility is in beta. Although likes from different platforms will appear on Threads, replies and follows from those communities won’t. In addition, polls and posts with reply controls can’t be shared with non-Threads communities. So, for now, the integration is doing little more than pushing Threads posts to Mastodon and other fediverse communities, along with a few extras.

You can activate the feature in the Threads app. Head to Account Settings > Fediverse sharing and follow the instructions to opt in and check it out. Meta says the test is only available in the US, Canada and Japan to start.

Just as it did in the US last year, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) is transitioning HBO Max to just Max in Europe, folding in Discovery+ content and live sports in the process. Max will first be available on the continent in the Nordics, Iberia and central and eastern Europe on May 21. It will hit Poland, the Netherlands, France and Belgium shortly afterward (curiously, the streaming service will still be called HBO Max in the Netherlands and Belgium, even though it includes Discovery and sports content there).

This will be the first time that WBD's streaming service will be available in France and Belgium, and those are the first new territories for the platform in over two years. All told, Max will soon be available in 25 European countries and 65 countries and territories globally as it aims to compete with the global reach of Netflix.

In the countries where Max is available in Europe, that will be the only place where viewers can watch every moment of the 2024 Paris Olympics (Peacock is streaming more than 5,000 hours of live action from the event in the US). The Olympic Games will be available on all Max subscription plans on the continent.

As in the US, Max will be available in several tiers in Europe. There will be a basic ad-supported plan in select countries and a standard plan, with the option to stream on two devices simultaneously in Full HD resolution and up to 30 downloads for offline viewing. The premium plan offers 4K streaming with Dolby Atmos on up to four devices at once, and up to 100 downloads for offline viewing. Pricing will vary by country.

There will be a sports add-on that includes Grand Slam tennis, cycling’s Grand Tours, 24 Hours of Le Mans, livestreams of linear networks Eurosport 1 and Eurosport 2 and lots more. Max will also offer live linear networks in some countries on select plans, including CNN International in France and Poland.

In many cases, HBO Max will update to Max automatically, though some users will be prompted to download the new Max app. Current HBO Max subscribers will retain their profiles and viewing history after the switch. Eurosport and Discovery+ subscribers will receive details on how to sign up for Max.

Meanwhile, WBD revealed that the second season of Game of Thrones spin-off House of the Dragon is coming to HBO and Max in the US on June 16, and the following day in Europe. The company also released a pair of "dueling" trailers for the season that show the story from the perspectives of the Green and Black Councils, respectively.

Threads has begun testing swipe gestures to help users improve the algorithm that populates the For You feed. It’s reportedly called Algo Tune as, well, it helps people tune their algorithms. It’s pretty rare when any social media site, particularly one run by Meta, allows users to adjust the parameters by which the great and powerful algorithm operates, so this feature is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

It works a lot like Tinder and other dating apps. If you don’t like something on your feed, you swipe left. If you like a post and want to see more like it, you swipe right. That’s pretty much it. The algorithm is allegedly tuned over time by these responses, adjusting your feed to provide more of the content you want and less of the stuff you don’t want. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls it an “easy way to let us know what you want to see more of on your feed.”

This is just an experiment, for now, so the feature’s only rolling out to a select number of Threads users. The company also hasn’t released any specific information as to how all of the swiping actually influences the algorithm, but that’s par for the course when it comes to these things. The algo must remain protected at all costs.

The social media app sure has been busy lately, adding new tools at a rapid clip. Threads finally rolled out trending topics to all users, after experimenting with the feature since February. Meta also recently previewed fediverse integration, which would allow Threads posts on fellow social media app Mastodon. The company’s also been testing some features that let users save drafts and take photos directly in the app.

It's been almost three years since we found out that former Naughty Dog and Visceral Games writer and creative director Amy Hennig was working on a Marvel game with her team at Skydance New Media. During Epic Games' State of Unreal showcase at the Game Developers Conference, a new story trailer shed some more light on the game, which is called Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra.

As the name suggests, it's set during World War II in Occupied Paris. You'll play as four characters in this story-driven action-adventure: a young Steve Rogers (better known as Captain America), T'Challa's grandfather Azzuri (the Black Panther of his era), US soldier and Howling Commandos member Gabriel Jones and Wakandan spy Nanali.

The trailer shows Captain America taking out some foes (presumably Nazis) with his shield as he looks for Black Panther, who we see scampering over rooftops. It ends with the pair clashing on a bridge, but what are the odds that they (along with Gabriel and Nanali) form a shaky alliance to battle a common enemy?

Skydance New Media is using Unreal Engine 5.4 to build the game. The trailer has some striking visual,s including highly detailed facial animations and environments, which are seemingly reflective of what the game actually looks like. "All the sequences you just saw in that trailer are pulled right out of our game, running real-time in Unreal Engine 5," Hennig said. 'No smoke and mirrors." We'll have to wait a little longer — until Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra arrives in 2025 — to see if Hennig's claims stand up.

Nineteen years after Jawed Karim uploaded the very first YouTube video, the awkward, 19-second clip in front of San Diego Zoo’s elephant enclosure is memorable today only because of what it represents: the start of a multibillion-dollar juggernaut that defines so much of what it means to be an online creator.

Today, YouTube is the most dominant social media platform by a sizable margin, especially among teenagers. Its influence is so vast it feels almost impossible to define. The service has birthed thousands of memes and internet personalities. Its recommendation algorithm has been credited with supercharging bizarre trends and viral misinformation.

But one of the most powerful ways YouTube has wielded its influence is through its Partner Program. The revenue sharing arrangement has generated billions of dollars for its most popular users and helped define the multibillion-dollar industry we now call the creator economy. Today, there are dozens of platforms and business models for making money via content creation, but it’s difficult to imagine any of them existing without YouTube’s Partner Program.

While YouTube is hardly the only platform that has made becoming an online creator feel like a viable career path, it has played an outsized role in creating and fueling the industry. When Google first introduced the Partner Program in 2007, there weren’t many ways to make a living from online content. The blogging industry was well established, but online media dynamics were already shifting away from independently run operations in favor of established platforms and brands.

YouTube, on the other hand, was a rising upstart in online media. Google had acquired the video service in 2006, before it had ads or even a mobile app. And when it announced it would make some of its most popular creators “partners“ in its business, it promised some of Google’s ad money could flow directly to the people making content.

It would take several more years for the Partner Program to grow into the money-printing machine it is now. But the Partner Program arrived, in 2007, when there was a growing demand for online video. Between 2006 and 2009, the audience for online video doubled, according to Pew Research, and YouTube was the biggest beneficiary. By the fall of 2009, YouTube was seeing more than one billion views a day.

That same year, YouTube made another important change to its monetization policies. It decided to spread the wealth so any single viral video could be eligible for revenue sharing, even if the creator wasn’t a partner, affirming that YouTube was the place to make money from viral content. In 2012, the Partner Program officially opened to everyone, and by 2014 there were one million creators making money from YouTube, according to The New York Times.

The flood of creators looking for a payout (and the sometimes scammy tactics that drove them) eventually led YouTube to again tighten its requirement for partner status in 2017. But YouTube had already cemented itself as the platform for amateur creators to turn their videos into a steady income. Today, there are more than three million channels with partner status, and the company has paid creators more than $70 billion in the last three years alone.

Of course, creators starting out now have many options available besides YouTube. Nearly every social media app offers some kind of monetization opportunity, though few have generated anything close to the eye-popping eight-figure sums made by YouTube’s top talent.

Other companies' creator funds, in which all creators draw payouts from the same pool of money fronted by the platform, have been underwhelming. YouTube star Jimmy Donaldson, better known as Mr. Beast, regularly tops the lists of YouTube’s highest earners. In 2022, he shared that he was making less than $10,000 a year from TikTok’s creator fund. And other apps’ monetization features, like tipping, subscriptions and virtual gifts, are difficult to scale.

Unsurprisingly, the number of YouTube-made multimillionaires has drastically changed teens’ ideas for career paths. In 2005, the year YouTube came online, teens said their top career aspirations were to become teachers or doctors, according to a poll conducted by Gallup. By 2021, YouGov found becoming a YouTuber or streamer was the top aspiration for Gen Z. In 2023, Morning Consult reported that 57% of Gen Z would like to pursue a career as an online creator “if given the opportunity.”

Polls like this often prompt a lot of eye rolls and snarky headlines. But it’s never been easier or more lucrative to be an online creator. At least one university offers a major in content creation and social media. Whether we like the idea of influencing as a career path, the industry of independent streamers, vloggers, newsletter writers, podcast producers, VTubers and others is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Meta is finally providing a bit of visibility into what kinds of conversations are happening on its Twitter competitor, Threads. The service is rolling out its “trending now” feature to all US users, Mark Zuckerberg said in a post.

The feature, which the company began testing in February, uses AI to surface a handful of topics “based on what people are engaging with right now.” Trends will appear in Threads’ search page and will also appear in between posts in users’ For You feeds.

For now, the feature is still fairly limited. Threads only shows five trending topics at any one time, which is likely an attempt to keep the list relatively curated and avoid some of the issues that have plagued the feature on Twitter and now X. Meta has said it employs human “content specialists” to review topics and ensure that trends comply with the company’s safety rules.

Still, the official arrival of trends brings a much-requested feature to the app. Up until now, users had very few ways to get insight into what others are talking about outside of what they can see in their own feeds. Trends also gives users a way to keep up with some news and current events on the platform, despite Meta’s reluctance to “encourage” news content on Threads.

Blizzard is finally making it easier to unlock new heroes in Overwatch 2. This is big news, as players regularly complain about how difficult it is to obtain new characters in the live-service shooter. Currently, people get new heroes by paying for and grinding through a battle pass, buying them outright or waiting until they become available as a reward for winning a certain number of games. That changes with the forthcoming season 10, as the company will make new and old heroes available for free to all players.

This not only pertains to Venture, a new hero created for season 10, but all of the game’s previously released heroes, like Mauga, Illari, Sojourn and Lifeweaver, among many others. New players will still have to complete the intro, but “once the heroes from the original Overwatch roster have been unlocked, all Overwatch 2 heroes will also become available.”

This will even extend to future heroes. The entire roster of Overwatch 2 characters will be playable in all game modes when season 10 officially begins this April.

This is just one change coming to how the game handles its battle pass, as suggested by director Aaron Keller in a video. Blizzard is also going to start selling mythic skins that were previously available only through a paid battle pass, though pricing and availability is still up in the air.

In addition, Overwatch Coins, the game’s dominant currency, will soon be easier to earn. Right now, people accrue coins by accessing a premium battle pass, completing weekly challenges or buying them outright. In season 10, they’ll become available in the free tracks of the game’s battle pass system. Fans will be able to earn up to 600 coins per season for free, up from 540.

Finally, there’s a new in-game competition called Clash, which was first announced at last year’s Blizzcon. This team-based PvP mode features five points lined up in a row, and the first team that captures all five points or reaches a maximum score wins. It looks like the full Clash mode won’t launch alongside season 10, but will come later this year and will include two dedicated maps.

Blizzard also previewed season 11 today, which is due later this year and will include a new Push map set in Peru, as well as a reworked version of the Rome-based Colosseo map.

Based on the synopsis for Stars Wars: The Acolyte, you can expect more than just the typical action scenes and sci-fi world building from the show. It seems to have a mystery-thriller slant to it that you could find appealing even if you're not a Star Wars fan but love that particular genre — and now Disney+ has released its official trailer to give you an idea of what you can expect. Stars Wars: The Acolyte's story is set at the end of the High Republic era, around a century before the events of Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace. 

It revolves around a former padawan played by Amandla Stenberg (Everything, Everything and The Hate U Give) who reunites with her old Jedi Master (Lee Jung-jae from the Squid Game) to investigate a series of crimes. They, of course, unearth more and more clues as they look into the crime spree, which Disney says will lead them "down a dark path where sinister forces reveal all is not what it seems..." As a big fan of the mystery and detective stories, it sounds promising, and I'd love it if Disney can nail the execution to give us a satisfying (and unpredictable) ending, as well. 

Stars Wars: The Acolyte will be available for streaming on Disney+ starting on June 4.