While many people were turning to Twitter on Sunday to watch the World Cup finals unfold, the company introduced a new policy banning "free promotion" of competing social media websites. Moving forward, Twitter says it will remove links to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Tribel, Post, Nostr and Donald Trump's Truth Social from accounts whose "main purpose" is to promote content on those platforms. As a result of the policy, users can no longer use their Twitter bio to link to their other social media profiles, nor can they post tweets that invite their followers to follow them elsewhere. Additionally, the company is restricting the use of third-party aggregators like Linktree and Link.bio.  

Developing... 

Twitter has announced through its Safety account that it has "identified several policies where permanent suspension was a disproportionate action for breaking Twitter rules." The website has already started reinstating accounts that were suspended for violating those rules, the tweet continued, and it will lift more suspensions every week over the next month. Twitter didn't specify the policies it's talking about and which accounts will be reinstated. But upon checking, the accounts of Mastodon and the journalists recently banned due to the website's new doxxing rules are up and running again. 

To understand what happened, we have to go back a few days. The website banned several accounts over the past week, starting with @ElonJet, the account that tracked flights of Elon Musk's private jet using publicly available data. Other accounts that also tracked the planes of government agencies and high-profile individuals were banned, as well. 

On his account, Musk announced that any account "doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended." In a follow-up tweet, he said that a car carrying his child was "followed by crazy stalker" and that he was taking legal action against Jack Sweeney, the college student who ran @ElonJet, and "organizations who supported harm to [his] family." As of this writing, the @ElonJet account is still suspended. 

Shortly after that, Twitter also suspended the account of its rival social network Mastodon when it tweeted a link to the account tracking Musk's jet on its own service. It's worth noting that Twitter seems to have started flagging posts containing the word "Mastodon" as "sensitive content" days before this happened. Users also found themselves unable to post links to Mastodon servers.

In addition to Mastodon, Twitter suspended the accounts of several journalists who report on Elon Musk and the social network itself. Most of them talked about Sweeney or linked to @ElonJet in some way, and based on Musk's responses to questions about the event, the journalists were suspended due to Twitter's new doxxing rules. One of the banned journalists, The Washington Post's Drew Harwell, posted a screenshot of the tweet that the website had flagged for doxxing: It was a report about Mastodon's suspension for tweeting a link to it service's own @ElonJet account.

Following the journalists' suspensions, Musk posted a poll asking people whether he should reinstate the accounts of users who doxxed his exact location in real time "now" or "in 7 days." The "now" option won, and Musk promised that those accounts will be restored. So far, Twitter has reinstated Harwell's account, along with the accounts of The New York Times'Ryan Mac, Mashable'sMatt Binder, The Intercept'sMicah Lee and CNN'sDonie O'Sullivan. Keith Olbermann's account is still suspended, and it's unclear if Twitter will lift @ElonJet's suspension in the coming days. 

Several journalists across various publications have found themselves unable to access their Twitter accounts tonight. They've been suspended on the website, and according to NBC News Senior Reporter Ben Collins, one thing they had in common was that they covered the social network and Elon Musk, who once described himself as a "free speech absolutist." Collins listed the suspended journalists' accounts on a Twitter thread, including CNN'sDonie O'Sullivan whose last tweets included his interview with Jack Sweeney, the college student who ran the @ElonJet account. 

The Washington Post's Drew Harwell has also been suspended, as well as The New York Times'Ryan Mac whose last tweets also talked about Sweeney and Twitter's policy changes after @ElonJet was suspended. Mashable'sMatt Binder also found himself suspended after retweeting a post doubting Musk's claim that he and his son were followed by a "crazy stalker" and another about how Twitter's new head of trust and safety invited a QAnon-adjacent group to discuss a partnership. 

Developing...

Instagram’s BeReal clone is now official. Meta introduced “Candid Stories,” a new feature with Instagram Stories that recreates BeReal’s signature once-a-day selfies.

BeReal, which originally launched in 2019, has gained a steady following over the last year, particularly among teens and Gen Z users. The app markets itself as a more authentic alternative to mainstream social media platforms, since it only allows once-daily posting and has limited ways for users to interact with one another.

Like BeReal, Instagram’s Candid will prompt users once a day to share a selfie, and users will only be able to see their friend’s Candids once they have uploaded their own. Candid selfies, like BeReal posts, will snap a photo with both a device’s front and rear-facing cameras simultaneously.

Meta has been working on a version of Candid since at least this summer, when a feature called “candid Challenges” was spotted in the app. The company said at the time it was an “internal prototype.” Snapchat and TikTok have also launched takes on BeReal in recent months.

Meta

But BeReal isn’t the only platform Instagram is taking on with its latest update. The app is also introducing a new “Notes” feature, which allows users to append a 60-character status update to their profile in Instagram’s inbox. As with Candid, Instagram has been testing Notes for months, but the feature may have taken on new significance following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. The New York Times reported last week that some at Meta have suggested Notes could help the company compete with Twitter at a moment when many are searching for alternatives.

Instagram is also introducing a few other features geared toward getting users to interact in smaller groups. “Group Profiles” will allow groups of friends to create shared profiles with multiple contributors. Likewise, the app is testing “collaborative collections” so multiple people can share posts to the same space in the app.

Twitter has begun rolling out Community Notes to all of its users globally, the company announced on Saturday. Previously known as Birdwatch, the feature first debuted in 2021 under former CEO Jack Dorsey as means for the social media website to combat misinformation.

Community Notes takes a crowd-sourced approach to debunking misleading tweets. Moderators who are part of the program can append notes to tweets to add “context.” Regular users can then vote on whether they find the context “helpful.” Before today, only individuals in the US could see the notes. Twitter says it will start adding contributors from other regions soon.

Current company owner Elon Musk has positioned Community Notes as a critical element of his “Twitter 2.0” vision, claiming the feature will be “a gamechanger for improving accuracy on Twitter.” However, as with any crowd-sourced feature, there’s the potential for Community Notes to backfire if groups use the tool to promote partisan views.

The global rollout of Community Notes comes a day before the relaunch of Twitter Blue. Following a disastrous first attempt at paid account verification, Twitter announced on Saturday it would start rolling out its revamped subscription service again on Monday. This time around, subscribers will need to provide a number for verification purposes before the company will add a blue checkmark to their account. Additionally, users who change their handle, display name and profile photo will temporarily lose their blue checkmark while Twitter reviews their account.

Elon Musk has announced that Twitter is currently working on a software update that will give you access to a tool that can clearly show whether you've been shadowbanned. The term means different things for different platforms, but being shadowbanned typically makes your posts invisible to other users or makes your profile hard to find without your knowledge. Musk says the upcoming tool will also explain the reason why you've been shadowbanned and will give you instructions on how to submit an appeal. 

Instagram has just launched a similar feature with its latest update, letting you know whether you're currently blocked from recommendations. At the moment, it can only show if you've been blocked from recommendations in Explore, Feed and Reels, but Instagram is working on expanding the tool so that you can see if you're also blocked from showing up in "suggested accounts." 

Musk didn't talk about how Twitter will be implementing the feature, but he made the announcement shortly after Bari Weiss released part two of The Twitter Files. In the thread, Weiss said that Twitter used "Visibility Filtering," which is apparently just another term for shadowbanning, on some conservative personalities. Musk once called himself a "free speech absolutist." After taking control of Twitter, he started lifting the bans on several controversial users, including former President Donald Trump, The Daily Stormer'sinfamous neo-Nazi creator Andrew Anglin and other white nationalists. 

Advertisers have been fleeing the platform since Musk took over due to concerns about policy changes and the reinstatement of banned accounts. In a blog post late last month, Twitter assured advertisers that "none of [its] policies have changed." And according to a new report by Reuters, Twitter is gearing up to release a set of ad controls in an effort to lure advertisers back to the website. The controls, which could launch as soon as next week, will reportedly allow advertisers to prevent their ads from appearing above or below tweets with the specific keywords they choose.

Instagram’s latest update aims to help creators better understand one of the most frustrating aspects of the app: the dreaded “shadowban.” The app is updating its account status feature to help creators “understand if their account’s content is eligible to be recommended to non-followers.”

With the change, Instagram will allow anyone using a “professional” account to see when one of their posts has been blocked from recommendations. The notice will appear in the app’s “account status feature,” and tell users why the post has been blocked from non-followers. It will also offer creators the chance to appeal the decision if they think Instagram made a mistake.

For now, the feature only covers specific posts that have been blocked from recommendations in Explore, Feed and Reels. But the company says it’s working on expanding the feature so creators will know if they are blocked from suggestions at the account level as well, such as in search or “suggested accounts.”

Though Instagram avoids using the word “shadowban,” the change is clearly meant to address long-running complaints from creators about why their posts aren’t being distributed in the way they expect. To diffuse these concerns, the company has tried in recent years to better explain how its algorithm works, and pointed to its recommendation guidelines to help creators understand the inner workings of the app.

By now showing users exactly why their content is being removed from recommendations, the company is hoping creators will be able to take steps to “fix” their mistakes. At the very least, it could give creators some satisfaction to see an acknowledgement that their content has indeed been reduced in visibility, and provide the opportunity to ask for a second look. An Instagram spokesperson said review teams will work “as quickly as possible,” but didn’t say how long the step could take.

In a video posted to Twitter, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the company was making the change in the “spirit of transparency” and said the company was on a “longer path to try and be more transparent” with users. Additionally, he said Instagram is also testing a feature that will alert users when the app is experiencing a bug.

The company has talked about notifications for service outages in the past, but the latest version will also alert users if there are bugs affecting specific features like Stories, according to images shared by Mosseri. He cited past bugs with “unfortunate timing,” that cause people to “assume the worst,” about the company. The feature will be only a test within the United States to start.

YouTube is rolling out Twitch-style custom global emotes for comments and live chats. Threeindependentillustrators created the first batch of emotes, which are focused on gaming, though it appears that they work on any type of channel. YouTube plans to develop emotes for other types of communities in the future.

To use the emotes, click on the smiling face icon in comments or a live chat. If you have a membership to a channel that offers its own custom emoji, you'll see YouTube's global emotes below those. As with Twitch's emotes, you can start typing the name of a YouTube emote (such as :cat-orange-whistling: or :text-green-game-over:) in the chat and the autocomplete function will show the emote and emoji options. The first emotes also include a buffering icon and text reading "GG" (i.e. "good game").

Twitch has long offered global emotes in chats. It might take a while before YouTube has emotes with the same level of cultural cachet as PogChamp, Kappa or ResidentSleeper, but it's off to a decent start.

Three years after bringing Facebook Dating to the US, Meta is finally adding a way for users to verify their age. As it did when it began testing age verification on Instagram this past summer, Meta is once again turning to a company called Yoti for help. If Facebook’s automated systems suspect a minor is trying to use Facebook Dating, the website will prompt that individual to provide more information. Users can prove they’re old enough to use the service either by submitting a copy of a photo ID card or a video selfie. In the latter case, Meta will share a video still with Yoti “and nothing else.” Yoti’s machine learning algorithm estimates your age based on your facial features. Once the company shares its estimate with Meta, Yoti will delete the image.

Yoti’s technology is controversial for a few reasons. To start, like other neural networks, it’s something of a black box. Yoti has said it doesn’t know exactly which facial characteristics its software uses to make judgments. The AI is also more likely to incorrectly estimate someone’s age depending on their gender and skin tone. In general, it’s the least accurate when examining female faces with dark skin and the most accurate when looking at light-skinned males. However, Meta claims it has found a lot of success using Yoti's software. On Instagram, for instance, it says that the technology has stopped 96 percent of teens from changing their birthdays to make it seem like they are over the age of 18. In the case of Facebook Dating, it’s also one of those instances where whatever concerns people have with the technology may be outweighed by the fact it’s being used to protect minors from online predators.

Facebook Dating age verification is currently only available in the US. Meta says it will bring the feature to more countries once it has had time to do more testing.

Twitter has restored the account of Andrew Anglin, one of America’s most notorious neo-Nazis. The creator of the white supremacist website The Daily Stormer had been banned from the social media platform for nearly a decade. His return would appear to be part of Elon Musk’s offer of “general amnesty” to users who had “not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.” Anglin, it should be noted, is currently in hiding while attempting to avoid a 2019 court order to pay $14 million for leading a harassment campaign against Jewish residents in Montana.

Shortly after regaining control of his account, Anglin tweeted a defense of Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. “Saying you love Hitler is not even a big deal,” Anglin said, referencing Ye’s recent InfoWars interview. “No one cares about that. The man died 80 years ago.” Ye’s now-infamous interview with Alex Jones saw the rapper declare his “love” for Adolf Hitler and deny that the Holocaust had ever happened. Anglin later tweeted an endorsement of Ye’s 2024 presidential campaign.

The reinstatement comes in the same week Twitter suspended Ye for tweeting a photo of the Star of David merged with a swastika. Anglin is only one of a few prominent white nationalists to return to Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover of the company. One estimate by software engineer Travis Brown suggests Twitter has restored as many as 12,000 accounts since October 27th, including those belonging to Richard Spencer and Patrick Casey.

The return of even just one avowed neo-Nazi is likely to reinforce fears from civil rights groups, advertisers and governments over Elon Musk's handling of the platform. On November 26th, the billionaire claimed hate speech impressions had recently decreased compared to October last year. However, findings from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League and other groups that study online platforms suggest that there’s been a dramatic increase in the prevalence of hate speech on Twitter since Musk’s takeover.