As promised, YouTube Music now offers podcasts. In the US, you can launch the Android or iOS app to stream audio or video podcasts without a Premium or Music Premium subscription. Shows will play in the background, and you can cast them to other devices like speakers.

The feature is reaching American users "gradually," YouTube says, so don't be surprised if you have to wait a little while to see the podcast section. The format is coming to other regions, although YouTube hasn't provided a timeline. And before you ask: paying members will still have to listen to host-read ads.

The addition may seem odd when Google already has a Podcasts app. This unifies listening for YouTube Music subscribers, though — and, of course, theoretically entices you to sign up. This could make the app a more viable alternative to Spotify if you're paying for on-demand music and want everything in one place.

YouTube has been ramping up its podcast efforts across the board, including an Explore page for non-Music users. Just don't count on the service producing a swath of originals like Spotify. The rival has dropped some of its originals, and has been expanding distribution of Gimlet shows to other platforms. The podcast industry isn't as hot as it once was, even if there's still plenty of demand.

It should now be easier to deduce whether Twitter has restricted the visibility of a tweet over a possible violation of the company's hateful conduct policy. Twitter has started applying a label to tweets that it believes breaks those rules, as it recently pledged to do.

When Twitter detects a tweet that may violate the policy, it will limit the reach of the post and apply a label that reads "Visibility limited: this tweet may violate Twitter's rules against hateful conduct." The company plans to expand the labels to include more types of policy violations in the coming months.

Twitter says it may limit the visibility of rulebreaking tweets by excluding them from search results, as well as from the For You and Following timelines. Such tweets may be downranked in replies and it may not be possibly to reply to them, retweet them, bookmark them or pin them to profiles.

Twitter noted that it may incorrectly label a tweet as one that violates its rules, so the authors of such tweets can effectively appeal the decision by providing feedback. However, the company said it may not acknowledge the feedback or restore the tweet's typical reach.

The company is taking a looser approach to moderation under current owner Elon Musk as it has adopted a "Freedom of Speech, not Freedom of Reach" philosophy. For instance, it quietly updated the hateful conduct policy this month to lift a ban on misgendering and deadnaming transgender people.

Starting on April 25th, advertisers using Microsoft's social media management tool will no longer be able to access Twitter on their dashboard. As Mashable has first reported, the tech giant has announced on its Advertising platform page that its Digital Marketing Center's Smart Campaigns with Multi-platform tool will no longer support the social network in a few days' time. The announcement comes almost a month after Twitter revealed how much users will have to pay to access its API. While the company wasn't that forthcoming when it came to pricing for enterprise customers, Wired previously reported that the cheapest package available for them cost $42,000 a month. 

Although Microsoft could easily afford to pay that, it seems to have chosen to drop Twitter instead. Removing support for the website on its social media management tool means advertisers will no longer be able to use it to create, manage or schedule draft tweets, as well as to view past tweets and engagements. Microsoft has noted in its announcement that other social media channels, such as "Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn will continue to be available."

After Microsoft's announcement, Elon Musk responded to a tweet reporting its decision with a threat to take legal action against the company. "They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time," Twitter's owner wrote. He didn't elaborate on how Microsoft illegally trained anything using Twitter data, but it's worth noting that the tech giant is a key backer of ChatGPT developer OpenAI. The executive co-founded OpenAI back in 2015, but he distanced himself from the organization and has been vocally criticizing the chatbot and AI as a whole as of late. Musk also recently revealed his plans for his own AI company that could rival OpenAI and Google. 

Whether Musk's lawsuit threat would actually materialize remains to be seen. Regardless, Microsoft's decision came at a very bad time for Twitter. The website has been steadily losing advertisers since Musk took over, and according to digital marketing analysis firm Pathmatics by Sensor Tower, less than half of its top 1,000 advertisers spent money on ads in January. 

YouTube already bans videos that directly promote eating disorders, but now it's clamping down on content that may unintentionally encourage that behavior. To begin with, the service banning videos on eating disorders that feature "imitable" behavior or weight-oriented bullying. The company will also restrict informative and artistic videos containing disorders (such as someone discussing their recovery) to users 18 and older.

You'll also see crisis resource panels for eating disorders in more places. While they already appear in search results in nine countries (including the US, Canada and UK), you'll now see them underneath relevant videos in those areas. Viewers in the US may be encouraged to call or chat with the National Eating Disorder Association in the US.

The new approach will initially be viewable today and reach more people in the weeks ahead. YouTube says this is an "ongoing" effort.

The addition is an acknowledgment that videos can affect people in "different ways," YouTube says. Ideally, this will minimize the chances of helpful video creators inadvertently fostering eating disorders in at-risk viewers.

Whether or not this works as intended is another matter. YouTube's enforcement hasn't always been consistent, and it has occasionally had to reverse policies (such as one limiting profanity in monetized videos) that inadvertently punished certain creators. Gaming and LGBTQ video producers, for instance, have complained that YouTube has demonetized clips that aren't harmful. With that said, the updated policy is focused on limiting access to videos, not removing their money-making potential.

Twitter may have a looser stance on bans under Elon Musk, but it's still willing to flag content that runs afoul of its rules. The social network will label tweets it believes are violating its Hateful Conduct policy. You'll see a notice that Twitter is limiting the "visibility" of the problematic post with an opportunity to learn more.

The labels will cover more types of policy violations in the months ahead. Users can initially provide "feedback" on a label if they feel it was in error, but they'll have to wait until sometime in the future to formally appeal decisions. The company stresses that the labels only apply to individual tweets, not an entire account.

Twitter sees this as a reflection of its Musk-era "freedom of speech, not freedom of reach" philosophy where it more often shies away from outright bans in favor of limiting exposure to content. Theoretically, this prevents offensive speech from spreading without completely silencing users on the platform. It also promises greater transparency to address concerns of "shadow bans" that limit reach without someone's knowledge. Musk has lifted bans on a number of high-profile accounts, including former President Trump's, although it was willing to temporarily suspend Ye despite lifting a permanent ban in November.

The move might not please some. Advocacy groups have criticized Twitter for not doing enough to protect frequent targets of hate, such as the LGBTQ community. While offenders can still face bans if they're "bad actors" or violate the law, they're more likely to stay on the service. This also isn't certain to satisfy advertisers leaving Twitter over concerns their ads may run alongside objectionable material. And while it will address concerns over possible censorship, it won't necessarily please those who see labels as tarnishing a post's worth.

Two weeks ago, Netflix confirmed it was taking a rare opportunity to livestream Love Is Blind's season 4 reunion. However, when the time came, what was an exciting prospect became a source of frustration as technical difficulties led to canceling the reality dating show's real-time viewing.  

At first, subscribers were told there would only a few minutes of delay, but Netflix finally pulled the plug after over an hour. The streaming service soon tweeted an apology: "To everyone who stayed up late, woke up early, gave up their Sunday afternoon… we are incredibly sorry that the Love Is Blind Live Reunion did not turn out as we had planned. We're filming it now and we'll have it on Netflix as soon as humanly possible. Again, thank you and sorry."

The show is incredibly popular, with Nieman reporting it was 2022's eighth most streamed original show. The reunion, hosted by real-life couple Nick and Vanessa Lachey, checks back in with Love Is Blind contestants months after filming has finished. If you're not familiar with it's premise, the show follows 30 men and women who date each other over 10 days from inside pods that prevent them from seeing each other. The idea: Avoid letting any physical aspects weigh in on how they feel. All in all, it made sense for Netflix to choose Love Is Blind for a livestream but the streaming service just couldn't hold up the technical end of the bargain.

Frustrated users responded with calls for Netflix to lower its subscription prices and to resume shipping DVDs as it was more their "speed." Other brands got in on the fun — if you can call it that — with Paramount+ tweeting that it was "pouring one out" for Netflix's social team and Tile asking if Netflix lost the remote and offering to send a tracker. 

Early in the morning, Netflix tweeted an update alongside a photo of the Love Is Blind cast with a "promise" that the reunion will be available to stream today at 3PM ET. 

This was only Netflix's second attempt at live-streaming, with Chris Rock's comedy special Selective Outrage airing live in March. Netflix also owns the rights to stream the Screen Actor Guild Awards live on its platform in 2024. We'll have to wait and see how the company's next attempt goes. 

Months after Ye dropped his bid, Parler has a new owner... and is out of commission for the time being. Starboard, the owner of pro-conservative news outlets like American Wire News, has shut down Parler on a temporary but indefinite basis after completing its acquisition of the social network from Parlement Technologies. The buyer says it will conduct a "strategic assessment" of the platform during the downtime, and hopes to integrate Parler's audience into all its existing channels.

Starboard isn't shy about its strategy. While it still sees a market for communities that believe they've been censored or marginalized, it considers a Parler revamp virtually necessary. "No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more," the company says.

Parler launched in 2018 as a self-proclaimed free speech alternative to Twitter, which some conservatives claim is biased against right-wing views. It had few rules or moderation controls. Like Gab, though, it also became a haven for people with extreme views. Parler drew flak in January 2021 after word that people involved in the Capitol attack used the social platform to coordinate. Apple and Google kicked Parler off their respective app stores until it improved moderation and kept out users inciting violence.

Ye offered to buy Parler from Parlement in late 2022 after being banned from Twitter for antisemitic posts, but called off the deal in mid-November through a mutual agreement that cited the star's "business difficulties" as a factor. Soon after, Parlement laid off most of its staff. The firm is pivoting to cloud services for businesses that believe they could be knocked offline for their content.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Starboard chief Ryan Coyne says he expects to keep users on Parler despite rivalries with other sites, such as former President Trump's Truth Social. However, the absence of a revival date doesn't leave members many options. For now, they'll have to use other platforms to express themselves.

For Twitter Blue users in the US, the website’s 280-character limit has been a thing of the past since February when it gave them the ability to post 4,000-character tweets. Now, the company has more than doubled that limit and has launched support for tweets up to 10,000 characters in length. In addition, the website now supports bold and italics text formatting, allowing content creators to use those elements to break up potentially huge blocks of text. Twitter chief Elon Musk first announced that the website is making long-form tweets even longer in early March, almost a month after the initial 4,000-character expansion. 

While a 10,000-character limit sounds excessive for most casual users — that’s around 2,000 words, or a pretty lengthy essay — Twitter likely introduced the capability for people looking to make money off their posts. The company has just rebranded “Super Follows” as “Subscriptions,” allowing users to charge people $3, $5 and $10 a month for exclusive content, including subscriber-only chats in Spaces. Twitter also promised not to take any of their earnings for the next 12 months. 

By increasing the character tweet limit for Blue users, as well as allowing them to post “hours long videos,” Twitter is giving creators more ways to keep their subscribers engaged. At the same time, getting users to spend more time on the website means more opportunities to serve them with ads that would make the company more money. That said, Super Follows never quite took off, and it remains to be seen whether this iteration of the subscription service will fare better.

Turning a radio show or any other live broadcast into a podcast isn't quite as simple as uploading the exact same file somewhere else. Downloading an episode from a radio platform, yanking ads, dropping in ad markers, making other edits and uploading it as a podcast typically takes up to an hour, Spotify said. To take some of the sting out of that process, the company has released a tool that can automatically create podcast episodes from existing broadcasts.

Spotify is using tech from Whooshkaa, a company it bought in 2021, to power the tool. Users of Megaphone, Spotify's podcasting platform for businesses, will have access to it. Several publishers are already using Megaphone to convert radio broadcasts into podcasts, including Fox News Audio. The tech can identify existing ad marker locations, and publishers can replace or reposition them before the podcast episode goes live.

According to data from Pew Research that Spotify cited in its announcement, Gen Z folks prefer to get news through digital mediums, such as podcasts. As such, radio publishers could use this kind of tech to reach new audiences without adding too much more to their workload. Spotify says more than half of Gen Z and millennials in the US use the platform, while it has more than 500 million users globally.

For consumers, the tool will likely bring an even wider selection of podcasts to Spotify. It could give YouTubers and Twitch streamers who host live podcasts an easy way to make their discussions available on Spotify too.

Twitter is teaming up with eToro, a social trading network, to expand financial information available on the site and make it easier for users to buy stocks and crypto. As CNBC reports, the existing $Cashtag format, which previously allowed finance-inclined users to click a financial hashtag of sorts to see more data on particular stocks, will be expanded to show more real-time data. That data will continue to be provided by TradingView, a market tracker and existing eToro partner.

The updated search also brings an eToro button under the live price charts, taking users away from Twitter to get more information and potentially invest. Anyone can look through the stats, but eToro will prompt visitors to create an account before being able to part with their money. 

Twitter is openly trying to diversify its offerings, with "additional market insights and greater access to investment capabilities," Chris Riedy, VP of Global Sales & Marketing at Twitter, said in a statement. According to Twitter, the first quarter of 2023 saw 498 million tweets revolving around finance or business.

Since Elon Musk took over as CEO, 80 percent of the company's workforce have been let go in a bid to cut costs. An updated subscription model was launched soon after, promising Blue ticks, fewer ads and increased tweet visibility for $8 per month, while developers were forced to begin paying for a basic API or lose access to the company's firehose. This came after over 500 advertisers reportedly paused spending on Twitter.

While eToro isn’t directly integrated into the social media platform, the tie-in could potentially benefit Twitter financially in the form of referral bonuses.