In 2024, four billion people — about half the world’s population — in 64 countries including large democracies like the US and India, will head to the polls. Social media companies like Meta, YouTube and TikTok, have promised to protect the integrity of those elections, at least as far as discourse and factual claims being made on their platforms are concerned. Missing from the conversation, however, is closed messaging app WhatsApp, which now rivals public social media platforms in both scope and reach. That absence has researchers from non-profit Mozilla worried.

“Almost 90% of the safety interventions pledged by Meta ahead of these elections are focused on Facebook and Instagram,” Odanga Madung, a senior researcher at Mozilla focused on elections and platform integrity, told Engadget. “Why has Meta not publicly committed to a public road map of exactly how it’s going to protect elections within [WhatsApp]?”

Over the last ten years, WhatsApp, which Meta (then Facebook) bought for $19 billion in 2014, has become the default way for most of the world outside the US to communicate. In 2020, WhatsApp announced that it had more than two billion users around the world — a scale that dwarfs every other social or messaging app except Facebook itself.

Despite that scale, Meta’s focus has mostly been only on Facebook when it comes to election-related safety measures. Mozilla’s analysis found that while Facebook had made 95 policy announcements related to elections since 2016, the year the social network came under scrutiny for helping spread fake news and foster extreme political sentiments. WhatsApp only made 14. By comparison, Google and YouTube made 35 and 27 announcements each, while X and TikTok had 34 and 21 announcements respectively. “From what we can tell from its public announcements, Meta’s election efforts seem to overwhelmingly prioritize Facebook,” wrote Madung in the report.

Mozilla is now calling on Meta to make major changes to how WhatsApp functions during polling days and in the months before and after a country’s elections. They include adding disinformation labels to viral content (“Highly forwarded: please verify” instead of the current “forwarded many times), restricting broadcast and Communities features that let people blast messages to hundreds of people at the same time and nudging people to “pause and reflect” before they forward anything. More than 16,000 people have signed Mozilla’s pledge asking WhatsApp to slow the spread of political disinformation, a company spokesperson told Engadget.

WhatsApp first started adding friction to its service after dozens of people were killed in India, the company’s largest market, in a series of lynchings sparked by misinformation that went viral on the platform. This included limiting the number of people and groups that users could forward a piece of content to, and distinguishing forwarded messages with “forwarded” labels. Adding a “forwarded” label was a measure to curb misinformation — the idea was that people might treat forwarded content with greater skepticism.

“Someone in Kenya or Nigeria or India using WhatsApp for the first time is not going to think about the meaning of the ‘forwarded’ label in the context of misinformation,” Madung said. “In fact, it might have the opposite effect — that something has been highly forwarded, so it must be credible. For many communities, social proof is an important factor in establishing the credibility of something.”

The idea of asking people to pause and reflect came from a feature that Twitter once implemented where the app prompted people to actually read an article before retweeting it if they hadn’t opened it first. Twitter said that the prompt led to a 40% increase in people opening articles before retweeting them

And asking WhatsApp to temporarily disable its broadcast and Communities features arose from concerns over their potential to blast messages, forwarded or otherwise, to thousands of people at once. “They’re trying to turn this into the next big social media platform,” Madung said. “But without the consideration for the rollout of safety features.”

“WhatsApp is one of the only technology companies to intentionally constrain sharing by introducing forwarding limits and labeling messages that have been forwarded many times,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told Engadget. “We’ve built new tools to empower users to seek accurate information while protecting them from unwanted contact, which we detail on our website.”

Mozilla’s demands came out of research around platforms and elections that the company did in Brazil, India and Liberia. The former are two of WhatsApp’s largest markets, while most of the population of Liberia lives in rural areas with low internet penetration, making traditional online fact-checking nearly impossible. Across all three countries, Mozilla found political parties using WhatsApp’s broadcast feature heavily to “micro-target” voters with propaganda, and, in some cases, hate speech.

WhatsApp’s encrypted nature also makes it impossible for researchers to monitor what is circulating within the platform’s ecosystem — a limitation that isn’t stopping some of them from trying. In 2022, two Rutgers professors, Kiran Garimella and Simon Chandrachud visited the offices of political parties in India and managed to convince officials to add them to 500 WhatsApp groups that they ran. The data that they gathered formed the basis of an award-winning paper they wrote called “What circulates on Partisan WhatsApp in India?” Although the findings were surprising — Garimella and Chandrachud found that misinformation and hate speech did not, in fact, make up a majority of the content of these groups — the authors clarified that their sample size was small, and they may have deliberately been excluded from groups where hate speech and political misinformation flowed freely.

“Encryption is a red herring to prevent accountability on the platform,” Madung said. “In an electoral context, the problems are not necessarily with the content purely. It’s about the fact that a small group of people can end up significantly influencing groups of people with ease. These apps have removed the friction of the transmission of information through society.”

Hollywood has really begun flexing its video game adaptation muscle in the wake of the spectacular success of the Fallout TV show and The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Even indie publishers are getting some of those sweet, sweet development contracts. Case in point? The hit third-person shooter El Paso, Elsewhere is being adapted into a feature length film, as reported by Deadline.

Academy Award nominee LaKeith Stanfield is in talks to both star and produce. Stanfield is known for a slew of great films, like Sorry to Bother You, Judas and the Black Messiah and The Book of Clarence, among others. Di Bonaventura Pictures and Colin Stark will also produce.

The game has players control a drug-addicted vampire hunter as he tracks down a blood-sucking ex-girlfriend who’s set on ending the world. The movie will follow a similar story structure, according to Deadline. The indie title has been praised for being a fantastic homage to third-person action shooters like the Max Payne series, though one that absolutely oozes surreal charm. In other words, it makes sense as a movie.

Of course, this is just the latest video game adaptation to ping our radar. Fallout, The Last of Us and Twisted Metal have all been renewed for second seasons. The Super Mario Bros. Movie is getting a sequel and The Legend of Zelda is finally being adapted into a movie. More recently, it was announced that the horror-tinged fishing sim Dredge is being turned into a movie, as is the action game Sifu.

There are also upcoming cartoons based on Splinter Cell, Vampire Survivors and Golden Axe. That's not all. There are upcoming movies based on Borderlands, Minecraft, Gears of War and so many others, not to mention the multimodal Sonic the Hedgehog cinematic universe. Video games and Hollywood are finally besties, after decades of false starts. Now, give me a series adaptation of the Dreamcast-era “virtual pet” Seaman, you cowards.

The second installment in EA's Star Wars Jedi series is coming to Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass and EA Play this week. Subscribers can continue Cal Kestis' journey in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor on April 25, almost a year to the day after its debut. If you haven't checked out the first steps of Cal's adventure, it might be best to get started with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, which is also available through those services.

Jedi: Survivor picks up five years after the events of the previous game, with Cal continuing his fight against the Empire. This time around, you have five lightsaber stances to make use of, while the maps are larger than in Jedi: Fallen Order (at least the sequel includes fast travel). While Jedi: Survivor was generally well-reviewed, the PC port had notoriously poor performance out of the gate — an issue that developer Respawn Entertainment has tried to remedy through updates.

A third game is in the works, but there will be a different figure in charge. Stig Asmussen, the director of the first two entries, left EA to set up his own studio.

The European Union (EU) has opened a second formal investigation into TikTok and has accused the platform of running afoul of the region’s Digital Services Act (DSA), according to a report by TechCrunch. The probe involves the addictive nature of TikTok Lite, which is a smaller version of the app that takes up less memory on a smartphone and was built to perform over slower internet connections.

TikTok Lite launched earlier this month in France and Spain and includes a design aspect that allows users to earn points by watching and liking videos. These points can be exchanged for stuff like Amazon vouchers and TikTok’s proprietary digital currency, which is typically used to tip creators. The EU’s Commission has expressed concern that this type of "task and reward" design language could impact the mental health of young users by "stimulating addictive behavior.”

The Commission hasn’t yet confirmed any breaches of the DSA, but has suggested that it might impose temporary measures to force parent company ByteDance to suspend TikTok Lite in the EU while it continues the investigation. The company has until April 24 to argue against these potential measures, so the app’s still available for EU residents. However, ByteDance failed to provide the EU with a risk assessment document regarding TikTok Lite after being asked last week.

This failure to comply with the DSA could open the company up to steep penalties of up to one percent of its total annual income and periodic penalties of up to five percent of daily income. The Commission hasn’t indicated if it plans on issuing these fines as the investigation continues.

"We suspect TikTok Lite could be as toxic and addictive as” light cigarettes, Thierry Breton, the commissioner for the EU Internal Market, wrote in a press release announcing the probe. “We will spare no effort to protect our children."

ByteDance has yet to respond to the investigation and the potential of TikTok Lite being banned in the EU. This latest inquiry follows a more comprehensive probe issued back in February. That wide-ranging investigation focuses on addictive algorithms, age verification issues, default privacy settings and ad transparency.

February’s probe is ongoing, but ByteDance was already forced to make concessions to allow TikTok to operate in the EU. The company had to give users the choice to disallow algorithms from powering the For You Page and instituted new harmful content reporting options. It also suspended personalized ads for EU users aged 13 to 17.

As for America, the controversial TikTok ban keeps inching closer to reality. The US House of Representatives tucked a revised version of the bill into this weekend’s foreign aid package. Under this new proposed legislation, ByteDance would have one year to sell off TikTok before it would be banned from app stores. It’s now heading to the Senate and will likely be voted on this week. However, it remains to be seen if the Senate will even keep the stuff about TikTok in the foreign aid package. President Biden has previously said he would support a TikTok ban if Congress passes it.

In a huge move for the mixed reality industry, Meta announced today that it's opening the Quest's operating system to third-party companies, allowing them to build headsets of their own. Think of it like moving the Quest's ecosystem from an Apple model, where one company builds both the hardware and software, to a hardware free-for-all like Android. The Quest OS is being rebranded to "Meta Horizon OS," and at this point, ASUS's Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand is working on a new "performance gaming" headsets, while Lenovo is working on devices for "productivity, learning and entertainment." (Don't forget, Lenovo also built the poorly-received Oculus Rift S.) 

Developing...

In Tolkien's Middle-earth of orcs and Nazgûl, "cozy" isn't exactly the first word that springs to mind. And yet, Tales of the Shire is an upcoming cozy life sim set in the universe of The Lord of the Rings. Several months after the game was announced, developer Weta Workshop (which worked on the special effects for all six of Peter Jackson's Middle-earth films) and publisher Private Division have offered a first proper look at it with a new trailer.

The clip opens with a narration noting that, while Hobbits have been known for "tales of courage and brave deeds in dark times," things will be much lighter here. You and your Hobbit will explore Bywater, decorate a home, make friends, cook, grow crops, go fishing (of course) and much more. You'll get to enjoy what appears to be a very chill existence in The Shire. The stylized, cartoony art style lends itself to the warm atmosphere that Weta Workshop is trying to project.

Tales of the Shire is coming to PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S later this year.

It’s never good to recommend a comedy by saying it makes you weep, but somehow Bluey, a comedy for kids, feels more real and more truthful than anything else on TV. I see so much of myself in Bandit’s triumphs and failures as he tries to parent his two daughters. I nod along to all of his unsuccessful parenting tactics that, I’ll admit, I’ve also tried on my own two kids. And then, at the end of so many episodes, I’ll realize that the front of my t-shirt is wet with tears because I've been crying.

There can’t be many people unfamiliar with Bluey, the biggest kids’ TV series on the planet, if not the biggest series overall. Each seven-minute episode is a slice-of-life sitcom about the Heelers, a family of anthropomorphic dogs living in Brisbane, Australia. Bluey and her younger sister Bingo live with parents Bandit and Chilli. The show started out focused on the playtimes the kids would have with each other or their parents. But it quickly sprawled out to create a rich world in the vein of The Simpsons, with a whole city’s worth of storylines. It can now regularly relegate the Heelers to the background to focus on the show’s deep cast of characters.

It closed out its third season with last Sunday's “The Sign,” a (comparatively) epic 28-minute episode and this week with “Surprise,” a sweet little postscript. The former’s long running time was described as a dry-run for any potential Bluey movie, wrapping up a number of the show’s storylines. It focuses on a wedding taking place at the Heeler’s home in the shadow of the family’s plan to relocate to another city. I won’t spoil too much beyond saying “The Sign” is a story about the bigness of change and how that affects parents and kids alike. Much of it focused on Bandit’s decision to move for a better-paid job and the way that impacted Chilli and the two girls. It’s a complicated issue, especially because it highlights that parents often just want to do what’s best for the kids.

Ludo Studio

“Surprise,” meanwhile, focuses more on the mundane struggle of Bandit trying to play two different games with his daughters at the same time. Much as Bluey wants to be just seven minutes of silly fun, it can’t quite help but be honest about the emotional and physical labor of parenting. All Bandit wants to do is sit down and watch sport on the TV but his daughters won’t allow him that luxury. He’s chased around the house, forced to pretend to teach a tennis ball to ride a bike and then pelted with ping pong balls fired from a toy launcher. (Bluey’s happy to highlight how often Bandit will get hit in the groin as a consequence of whatever game the girls are playing.)

The payoff to all of that effort comes in the final half minute of the episode, which is when I started sobbing. As much as it may be pitched as a palate cleanser after the scale and emotional heft of the previous episode, the final moments offer a real (if pleasant) punch to the gut. I can’t help but feel plenty of parallels in Bluey’s life and that of my own (similarly-aged) daughter, and feel a lot of kinship with Bandit as well. If I’m one one-hundredth as good a parent as this silly cartoon dog who often gets it wrong, then I’ll feel like I’ve done a good job.

There’s been speculation that this third season may be the end for Bluey. Bloomberg reported the uncertainty around creator Joe Brumm’s future with the show, although producer Sam Moor has said it will continue in some form. Any delay would also risk that the child actors – who remain anonymous for their own safety — will age out of being able to play their roles. But in many ways, Bluey can’t not continue given the show is now a multi-billion dollar cash cow for the BBC, which owns a big chunk of the show’s rights.

I don’t want to say goodbye to Bluey and the Heelers, and I’d prefer they kept the cast as-is and let them grow up alongside Bandit and Chilli. That, to me, would be an honest thing to do, rather than indulging in the fakery that dogs so many TV shows which face this problem. But if they have to go, I’ll choose to remember Bluey’s three perfect seasons through the highs and lows of parenting.

North Korean animators may have helped create popular cartoons for Amazon Prime Video, Max and other streaming services. Researchers from the Washington-based 38 North project allegedly discovered a misconfigured cloud server on a North Korean IP address that contained thousands of animation files, as reported by Wired. US sanctions prohibit commercial activity with North Korean entities, due to human rights abuses and the advancement of its nuclear weapons program. 

The server included animation cells, videos and notes discussing the work, in addition to requested changes. Some images appear to be from the popular Prime Video superhero show Invincible and others from an upcoming Max children’s anime called Iyanu: Child of Wonder. The data, which was analyzed in part by the Google-owned security firm Mandiant, provides a glimpse into how North Korea likely skirts sanctions.

The researchers were able to analyze incoming connections to the server and noted access from three Chinese cities, suggesting front companies of some kind. “All three cities are known to have many North Korean–operated businesses and are main centers for North Korea’s IT workers who live overseas,” the report indicates.

Michael Barnhart, who works at Mandiant, said there was nothing in the research to indicate that Max, Amazon or any subsidiaries knew that the work was being handled by North Korean animators. It was likely subcontracted without their knowledge, as reported by Reuters. Barnhart has “high confidence” that the contracts were with Chinese companies who outsourced to animators who work on North Korea’s behalf.

In 2022, the FBI and the US Treasury issued an advisory to warn businesses about the risks of inadvertently hiring North Korean tech workers through this kind of outsourcing. A spokesperson for the US Treasury told Reuters that it has no comment on this particular allegation, but noted that North Korea's efforts to generate revenue for its weapons programs through abuses of the subcontracting system was an ongoing concern.

Amazon has directed inquiries to Skybound, the company behind Invincible. It says it has no knowledge of any North Korean entities working on its animation projects but has initiated an internal review to verify and rectify lingering issues. "We have also notified the proper authorities and are cooperating with all appropriate bodies," the Skybound’s head of corporate communications Hannah Cosgrove said. Max has not responded to requests for comment.

Anker's Soundcore Space A40 is the top recommendation in our guide to the best budget wireless earbuds, as it offers enjoyable sound and a meaty set of features for well under $100. If you're looking to buy a set on the cheap, take note: A new sale on Amazon has dropped the earbuds down to $49, which matches the lowest price we've seen. The earbuds technically have a list price of $100, but they've sold for $59 for most of 2024, so you're saving about $10 here. We last saw this discount about a month ago.

In an amusing bug, Amazon's product page currently lists the earbuds as a "Gildan Unisex-adult Fleece Hoodie Sweatshirt." Why? We have no idea. The correct name appears when you add the pair to your cart, however, so this shouldn't be any cause for alarm. (Unless you really want a new hoodie.) The deal itself is sold by Anker directly and applies to the black model; the blue and white versions are also on sale for $1 more. 

We recommend the Space A40 because it has the kind of feature set we expect from much more expensive earbuds. Its adaptive active noise cancellation (ANC) isn't quite on par with the absolute best from Sony or Bose — particularly when it comes to voices and higher-pitched sounds — but it's still superb for $50, and more than capable of muting the hum of an office or daily commute. The earpieces are small, comfortable and IPX4-rated, so they should hold up for all but the sweatiest gym-goers. Battery life comes in around eight hours per charge, with another 40 or so available through its case, which is easy to pocket and supports wireless charging. The pair can connect to two devices simultaneously, and there's a usable (if not superlative) transparency mode for letting in outside noise.

The Space A40 has a warm sound profile out of the box, with a noticeable but not overwhelming boost in the upper-bass region. The highs are a bit underemphasized, so some tracks won't sound as crisply detailed as they might on more expensive pairs. But it should be pleasant for most, and Anker's companion app includes an EQ for tweaking the sound if needed. The main downsides here are the mediocre mic, which isn't the clearest for phone calls, and the lack of in-ear detection, which means the earbuds won't automatically pause when you take them out of your ears.

If all of this sounds appealing but you'd prefer an AirPods-style shape with easy-to-grab "stems," Anker's Soundcore Liberty 4 NC is the runner up in our guide, and it's also on sale for $74.50. That's about $5 more than the pair's all-time low but $25 less than its usual going rate. This model sounds more bass-heavy by default, but it has just about all the same features, with slightly more extensive touch controls.

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Grindr has been sued for allegedly sharing personal information with advertising companies without users' consent. A lawsuit filed in London claims that the data included HIV statuses and test dates, ethnicity and sexual orientation, Bloomberg reports.

According to the class action-style suit, the alleged data sharing involved adtech companies Localytics and Apptimize. Grindr is said to have supplied the companies with user info before April 2018 and then between May 2018 and April 2020. Engadget has asked Grindr for comment.

In April 2018, Grindr admitted it had shared HIV data with Apptimize and Localytics following an investigation by BuzzFeed News and Norwegian non-profit SINTEF. It said it would stop the practice.

This isn't the only time Grindr has been accused of sharing users' personal information. A 2022 report from The Wall Street Journal indicated that precise location data on Grindr users was up for sale for at least three years. In addition, Norway's data protection agency fined Grindr $6 million in 2021 for violating the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. The agency said Grindr had unlawfully shared "personal data with third parties for marketing purposes."