Meta announced on Thursday that Facebook users can now create multiple profiles. The company will let you add an @username for up to four additional personal profiles attached to your main account. After creating a new alias, you won’t need to log out and back in to switch between them. Facebook first began testing the feature last July.

The company suggests picking profiles for your personal life, work and any specific interests or communities you want to spin out of your main account. “Whether you’re new to Facebook or a longtime user, you may want to keep your personal and professional relationships separate, or you may want to keep one profile tied to a community you’re a part of and another profile just for friends,” Meta wrote in its announcement blog post. “Creating multiple personal profiles lets you easily organize who you share with and what content you see for the various parts of your life.”

Meta says each profile will have its own unique feed with pertinent content based only on that profile’s interests. “Think one profile for the foodie scene you love and another one to keep up with your friends and family,” the company wrote. The company says Instagram’s success with a similar feature inspired the move, and beta testing the feature taught Facebook that many people like having a clearer organization of friends, groups and interests “to engage with the audience they believe is most relevant.”

Each new profile will start fresh with Facebook’s default privacy and notification settings, so you may want to change them manually for each one. In addition, your primary Facebook account won’t reveal that you have extra profiles.

The feature comes with some restrictions. First, Facebook’s Dating, Marketplace, Professional Mode and payments won’t be available to your secondary profiles at launch. In addition, messaging for extra usernames will only be available in the Facebook app and on the web. (Messenger support for additional profiles will arrive “in the coming months.”) Finally, only eligible adult accounts can make new profiles. Remember: Your new handles are bound by Facebook’s policies, meaning you can’t misrepresent your age or location.

The feature begins rolling out globally on Thursday and will continue over the coming months.

If you're a premium subscriber to the social media site X, formerly Twitter, you now can hide your likes tab from the public, the company said in a tweet.

When enabled, the tab for likes is supposed to disappear completely from an X Premium user’s profile. The new feature can be turned on when you change your preferences through the early access period.

This move is the latest appeal Musk’s X is making to paying patrons. It's a continuation of X’s galvanized effort to appeal to more subscribers, especially considering the company’s US advertising revenue is down 60 percent, and also a way for premium subscribers to hide the fact that they are liking hateful or otherwise questionable tweets. You can subscribe as a premium member for as little as $8/month or $84/year, which will also grant you early access to new features, and of course the verified blue check mark.

We may see more public figures and officials take up X on their premium offering after this announcement. Historically, we have seen PR crises ensue for politicians like Ted Cruz, who forgot his likes were public when in 2017, his account “hearted” a pornographic clip that left the internet howling.

Bluesky, one of the most notable alternatives to the platform formerly known as Twitter, has just hit a million users. That's admittedly tiny compared to the number of users on major social networks, but it's a big deal for a service that remains inaccessible to most people until today. Bluesky team member Rose Wang, who has announced the milestone on X, told TechCrunch that the service's app reached a million downloads in July. However, those interested in getting in on the action at Bluesky will have to secure invite codes to log in, and it's only now that enough people were able to create accounts for the social network to be able to announce that it has reached 1 million users. 

Bluesky first burst into the scene as a decentralized social network (previously) funded by Twitter and backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Shortly after it launched in closed beta, it rolled out the ability for users to choose their own algorithms so that they can customize their timelines. And in its bid to remain ad-free, it started offering a paid domain service as a way for users to verify their identity. It's unclear when the app will open to the public, and, upon checking, some codes are still being sold on eBay for hundreds of dollars. 

Meta, on the other hand, chose to make Threads available to everyone from the get-go, even though it was still lacking a number of critical features. Threads reached 100 million users merely a week after it became available in July, but keyword search only started rolling out earlier this month. 

Thank the social media makers. Meta’s Threads is officially rolling out a keyword search feature in the United States, alongside many other countries including India, Canada, Mexico and the UK. This has been one of the most asked-for tools since the platform launched in July. Keyword search appeared last week as a beta in New Zealand and Australia, and it looks that beta was a success given today’s announcement.

Keyword search, known as hashtags or text search in some circles, is vital for connecting with communities and for following real-time events. Oddly, Threads is the first major Twitter/X competitor to integrate the feature, which could spell even more trouble for Elon Musk’s beleaguered social media site.

A Meta representative told Engadget that keyword search is being integrated into both mobile apps and the recently-launched web app, so you’ll have your pick of where to search for Star Trek fans or whatever it is you’re into. The company said it’s working on bringing the search function to other languages and countries in the near future. Before this update, you could only use search to look for active Threads accounts.

Meta has been aggressive about adding features to Threads, which is good because the app had an extremely strong start but has fizzled since the initial launch. Maybe this latest update will entice users to return to the service.

YouTube Music's latest redesign of the Now Playing page is making its way to iOS and Android devices everywhere. There's a new feature that brings an extra social element to the app. You'll now be able to read and post comments on the Now Playing page. That option was limited to playlists until now.

According to screenshots that 9to5 Google shared, some of the comments on the page may date back several years. As such, it seems like Google is populating the section with comments from related YouTube videos, for better or worse (probably worse).

The updated design is rolling out gradually, so you may not see it right away, but there are some other changes in store. The cover art is bigger and song titles and artist names now hug the left side of the screen. One other key thing to note is that there's now a carousel with buttons for comments, giving a track a thumbs up or down, saving songs to a playlist, sharing, downloading and the radio. Most of the previously available actions required an extra tap to access until now. The buttons look very similar to the ones you'll see below the YouTube video player. In addition, more of the controls should be easier to access as they're at the bottom of the screen.

The social network X plans to compete with LinkedIn by offering job listings and more, CEO Elon Musk said in a new post. To aid in that, it has started gathering information about users' jobs and education histories, along with biometric data for "safety, security and identification purposes," according to a new policy spotted by Bloomberg. The company previously created an official @TwitterHiring account, TechCrunch reported last month. 

"People send me LinkedIn links sometimes, but the cringe level is so high that I just can’t bring myself to use it, so I ask for the resume or bio to be emailed," said Musk (who is often mocked for his own cringe-worthy posts). "We will make sure that the X competitor to LinkedIn is cool."

On top of work history and education, X is collecting biometric information, though it didn't say what kind. "Based on your consent, we may collect and use your biometric information for safety, security, and identification purposes," the updated privacy policy states. Twitter confirmed the update to Bloomberg, without elaborating more.

Some verified organizations including Workweek have been able to post job listings in the form of scrolling cards under their bios, as TechCrunch noted. According to a screenshot posted by user Nima Owji last month, "Twitter [X] will let verified organizations import all of their jobs to Twitter by connecting a supported ATS or XML feed." Those listings may only work in the US for now, as they don't appear for myself in Europe. 

Elon Musk previously hinted at the feature in May, and X purchased a job-matching tech startup called Laski in May — the company's first acquisition under Musk. Workweek CEO Adam Ryan said the job posting feature was included in X's $1,000 per month "verified for organizations" package. 

The job listings might eventually connect with the work history and education data gathered. "We may collect and use your personal information (such as your employment history, educational history, employment preferences, skills and abilities, job search activity and engagement, and so on) to recommend potential jobs for you [and] to enable employers to find potential candidates," the policy states. However, it may also be used "to show you more relevant advertising." 

Biometric data is also relevant to Elon Musk's stated goal of ridding the site of inauthentic accounts. Gathering that data may draw attention from regulators, though. X is already facing a proposed class action suit for biometric data captured without consent, reportedly from every photograph containing a face that is uploaded to X, according to a suit seen by Bloomberg.

It looks like Instagram is about to significantly increase the maximum length of Reels posts, according to reputable mobile developer and leaker Alessandro Paluzzi. The current hard limit for these videos is three minutes, but screenshots provided by Paluzzi indicate a forthcoming leap to 10 minutes. This would effectively transform the social media site into a more robust video-sharing platform like YouTube.

This move would also allow Meta’s Instagram to further compete with rival TikTok, as the latter already lets users post videos up to ten minutes in length. TikTok and Instagram seem to be caught in some sort of ouroboros of mimicry, with one app regularly adopting features originally unveiled by the other.

As TikTok and Instagram vie for a share of the long-form video pie, YouTube’s moving in the opposite direction. It’s been making a push to gain more ground in the short-form video space, recently adding a suite of creator tools and a TikTok-esque music-discovery feed. The days when you could easily label Instagram as the “photo one”, TikTok as the “short video one” and YouTube as the “long video one” are gone. It looks like they all want to be “does everything one.”

Engadget reached out to Meta for clarification regarding the move toward long-form video content and will update this post when and if we receive a substantive response.

Meta will not suspend Cambodia’s former Prime Minister from Facebook and Instagram, declining to follow a recommendation from its Oversight Board. The board, which functions independently from the social media company, had recommended Meta suspend then-Prime Minister Hun Sen's Facebook and Instagram accounts for six months for inciting violence.  

In a response to the case published Wednesday, Meta said a long-term suspension “would not be consistent” with its policies. “Upon assessing Hun Sen’s Facebook Page and Instagram account, we determined that suspending those accounts outside our regular enforcement framework would not be consistent with our policies, including our protocol on restricting accounts of public figures during civil unrest,” the company wrote.

Meta’s handling of the high-profile case has been closely watched around the world, with many viewing it as a test of the company’s policies governing speech from politicians, who have historically had more leeway on the platform.

The company had originally asked the Oversight Board to weigh in on a video posted by Sen. The video was of a speech in which Sen told political opponents he'd "gather CPP (Cambodia People's Party) people to protest and beat you up." Meta had opted to leave up the video, citing its controversial newsworthiness policy, despite concluding it had violated the company’s own rules.

The Oversight Board overruled Meta’s decision and said the video should come down. The board also said that Sen should face a lengthy suspension. “Given the severity of the violation, Hun Sen’s history of committing human rights violations and intimidating political opponents, as well as his strategic use of social media to amplify such threats, the Board calls on Meta to immediately suspend Hun Sen’s Facebook page and Instagram account for six months," it wrote.

Meta complied, removing the video in response to the board’s decision, which is binding under the organization’s rules. The company had 60 days to respond to the board’s non-binding recommendations.

Developing…

The long-awaited web version of Threads has finally arrived. After announcing that its Twitter competitor would be accessible from browsers earlier this week, Meta’s rollout is finally underway. Instagram head Adam Mosseri confirmed Thursday the update is now live for all users.

That means if you’ve been impatiently refreshing threads.net in waiting for it to be available, you should check again. Up to now, many Threads users have been frustrated by the lack of a web version. Though it was possible to manually navigate to a specific user’s profile, people have been unable to browse their feeds, post, reply or even log in to their accounts from browsers. 

As the app has seen a significant drop-off in engagement following its initial launch, many have viewed the lack of a web version as a significant barrier to the app. Both Mark Zuckerberg and Mosseri have been promising a web version was high on their agenda for Threads, though Mosseri recently said the team was working out some bugs with the experience. 

Now that the web version is finally live, it will be interesting to see which of the many “missing” features Threads will get next. Users have also complained about the lack of content search — right now people can only search for users, not for specific posts — and hashtags, both of which help people discover new content on Instagram and Twitter.

One feature, however, that seems unlikely is the addition of DMs. Mosseri has said he’s reluctant to add another inbox to user’s lives, though he recently raised the possibility of incorporating Instagram DMs into the Threads experience. But he did confirm that post-editing features are in the works, so at least Threads users won’t have to wait more than a decade for an edit button.

Facebook’s “state-controlled media” labels appear to reduce engagement with content from authoritarian nations. A new study reveals that, with the added tags, users’ engagement decreased when they noticed content labeled as originating from Chinese and Russian government-run media. However, the labels also appeared to boost user favorability of posts from Canadian state media, suggesting broader perceptions of the country play into the tags’ effectiveness.

Researchers with Carnegie Mellon University, Indiana University and the University of Texas at Austin conducted the set of studies which “explored the causal impact of these labels on users’ intentions to engage with Facebook content.” When users noticed the label, they tended to reduce their engagement with it when it was a country they perceived negatively.

The first experiment studied 1,200 people with US-based Facebook accounts — with and without state-controlled media labels. Although their engagement with posts originating from Russia and China went down, it only had that effect if they “actively noticed the label.” A second test in the series observed 2,000 US Facebook users to determine that their behavior was “tied to public sentiment toward the country listed on the label.” In other words, they responded positively to media labeled as Canadian state-controlled and negatively toward Chinese and Russian government-run content.

Meta

Finally, a third experiment examined how broadly Facebook users interacted with state-controlled media before and after the platform added the labels. They concluded the change had a “significant effect” as the sharing of labeled posts dropped by 34 percent after the shift, and user likes of tagged posts fell by 46 percent. The paper’s authors also noted that training users on the labels (“notifying them of their presence and testing them on their meaning”) significantly boosted their odds of noticing them.

“Our three studies suggest that state-controlled media labels reduced the spread of misinformation and propaganda on Facebook, depending on which countries were labelled,” Patricia L. Moravec, the study’s lead, wrote in the paper’s summary.

However, the studies ran into some limitations in determining correlation vs. causation. The authors say they couldn’t fully verify whether their results were caused by the labels or Facebook’s nontransparent newsfeed algorithms, which downlink labeled posts (and make related third-party research exceedingly difficult in broader terms). The paper’s authors also note that the experiments measured online users’ “beliefs, intentions to share, and intentions to like pages” but not their actual behavior.

The researchers (unsurprisingly, given the results) recommend social companies “clearly alert and inform users of labeling policy changes, explain what they mean, and display the labels in ways that users notice.”

As the world grapples with online misinformation and propaganda, the study’s leads urge Facebook and other social platforms to do more. “Although efforts are being made to reduce the spread of misinformation on social media platforms, efforts to reduce the influence of propaganda may be less successful,” suggests co-author Nicholas Wolczynski. “Given that Facebook debuted the new labels quietly without informing users, many likely did not notice the labels, reducing their efficacy dramatically.”