Instagram has been building out its creator subscription program this year and now it's slotting a couple of key pieces into place. Creators can now share subscriber-only feed posts. Those Reels and photos will have a purple badge with a crown symbol to make them stand out. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said this was the feature he's had the most requests about from creators in the program.

Also new is a subscriber chat option. Influencers can hop into group DMs with up to 30 subscribers, perhaps in an attempt to persuade them to spend more time chatting on Instagram instead of, say, Discord. The group chats are powered by Messenger and creators can start them from their inbox or a Story. They'll automatically end after 24 hours. Fans will have access to a subscriber home tab on a creator's profile as well. Paywalled content will be centralized there, including photos, Reels and archived Lives.

Mosseri says tens of thousands of creators in the US now have access to the subscription program, which enables them to charge fans up to $100 per month to access exclusive content. Instagram started testing creator subscriptions in January with paywalled Stories and livestreams. Subscribers also get a purple badge that appears next to their usernames on comments and in DMs.

Parent company Meta is offering creators other incentives to build an audience and share content on Facebook and Instagram. Last month, Meta said it won't charge a commission on earnings creators make through the apps until 2024. The company previously stated it wouldn't take a cut of their Facebook and Instagram incomes through the end of this year.

Instagram

Twitter's recent troubles include more than its battle with Elon Musk. The social media giant has suffered a global outage that started shortly after 8AM Eastern. Users reported a variety of glitches, including generic "error" messages and even broken website alerts. The issue affected both Twitter's web version as well as apps, including third-party clients.

We've asked Twitter for comment. The company's status page made no mention of platform outages as of this writing.

Developing...

A much-loved YouTube account featuring calm hip-hop beats is back online today, after two popular radio live streams (the oldest of which has been playing non-stop for two years) got yanked from the platform due to bogus copyright claims. In a tweet, the owner of the Lofi Girl channel — which has been streaming relaxing ambient music since 2017 — announced that the streams have relaunched after a nearly 48-hour hiatus. 

The origin of the DMCA claims came from FMC Music, a Malaysian record label. After receiving a counterclaim from the creators of Lofi Girl, YouTube manually reviewed FMC’s complaint and came to the conclusion that the record label had no ownership over the music.

“Confirmed the takedown requests were abusive & terminated the claimants account 😔 we've resolved the strikes + reinstated your vids – it can sometimes take 24-48 hours for everything to be back to normal! so sorry this happened & thx for your patience as we sorted it out,” wrote YouTube on Twitter, in response to Lofi Girl’s request on Monday that the streams be reinstated.

But FMC Music is alleging that it is also a victim in this affair. A spokesperson from the label told local news site Malaysiakini that hackers broke into its YouTube account to file the copyright infringement claim. The record label said that it reported the incident to Google. Its YouTube account has since returned back online.

The relatively unknown record label was hit hard with online abuse over the weekend, as fans of Lofi Girl flocked to its social media channels and demanded to know why it filed the fake claim. Most of Lofi Girl’s largely Gen-Z and younger Millennial fanbase rely on the music to study, relax or meditate.

In an ironic twist, Lofi Girl also has a considerable Malaysian fanbase, who were also quite unhappy about the channel’s removal. In a Reddit thread on r/Malaysia entitled, “Who the hell is FMC Music Sdn Bhd Malaysia and why did they copywrite strike lofi girl?”, a despondent fan urged others to “make some noise” on the record label’s socials.

“For context, I was studying while listening to lofi girl before both of their streams got taken down by a certain FMC Music Sdn Bhd Malaysia. Now their livestreams can't be accessed in Malaysia. What gives them the right to take down the best channel on youtube,” wrote the user.

Malicious copyright strikes are hardly a new incident on YouTube. Game creater Bungie decided to take one creator to court after they allegedly filed nearly 100 fake copyright claims. Lofi Girl noted that an accidental takedown in 2020 also took the account offline, and called for a stronger vetting process for DMCA claims at YouTube. “This event has shone a light on an underlying problem on the platform: It’s 2022, and there are countless smaller creators out there, many of which engaged in this discussion, that continue to be hit daily by these false claims on both videos and livestreams,” Lofi Girl wrote in a tweet.

It's not just that one uncle who's not allowed at Thanksgiving anymore who's been spreading misinformation online. The practice began long before the rise of social media — governments around the world have been doing it for centuries. But it wasn't until the modern era, one fueled by algorithmic recommendation engines built to infinitely increase engagement, that nation-states have managed to weaponize disinformation to such a high degree. In his new book Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare, David Sloss, Professor of Law at Santa Clara University, explores how social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have become platforms for political operations that have very real, and very dire, consequences for democracy while arguing for governments to unite in creating a global framework to regulate and protect these networks from information warfare.

David Sloss

Excerpted from Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare, by David L. Sloss, published by Stanford University Press, ©2022 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All Rights Reserved.

Social Media, Misinformation, and Democratic Governance

Governments were practicing disinformation long before the advent of social media. However, social media accelerates the spread of false information by enabling people to reach a large audience at low cost. Social media accelerates the spread of both misinformation and disinformation. “Misinformation” includes any false or misleading information. “Disinformation” is false or misleading information that is purposefully crafted or strategically placed to achieve a political goal. 

The political objectives of a disinformation campaign could be either foreign or domestic. Prior chapters focused on foreign affairs. Here, let us consider domestic disinformation campaigns. The "Pizzagate" story is a good example. In fall 2016, a Twitter post alleged that Hillary Clinton was "the kingpin of an international child enslavement and sex ring." The story quickly spread on social media, leading to the creation of a discussion board on Reddit with the title "Pizzagate." As various contributors embellished the story, they identified a specific pizza parlor in Washington, DC, Comet Ping Pong, as the base of operations for the child sex operation. "These bizarre and evidence-free allegations soon spread beyond the dark underbelly of the internet to relatively mainstream right-wing media such as the Drudge Report and Infowars." Alex Jones, the creator of Infowars, "has more than 2 million follows on YouTube and 730,000 followers on Twitter; by spreading the rumors, Jones vastly increased their reach." (Jones has since been banned from most major social media platforms.) Ultimately, a young man who believed the story arrived at Comet Ping Pong with "an AR- 15 semiautomatic rifle... and opened fire, unloading multiple rounds." Although the story was debunked, "pollsters found that more than a quarter of adults surveyed were either certain that Clinton was connected to the child sex ring or that some part of the story must have been true."

Several features of the current information environment accelerate the spread of misinformation. Before the rise of the internet, major media companies like CBS and the New York Times had the capacity to distribute stories to millions of people. However, they were generally bound by professional standards of journalistic ethics so that they would not deliberately spread false stories. They were far from perfect, but they did help prevent widespread dissemination of false information. The internet effectively removed the filtering function of large media organizations, enabling anyone with a social media account — and a basic working knowledge of how messages go viral on social media — to spread misinformation to a very large audience very quickly. 

The digital age has given rise to automated accounts known as "bots." A bot is "a software tool that performs specific actions on computers connected in a network without the intervention of human users." Political operatives with a moderate degree of technical sophistication can utilize bots to accelerate the spread of messages on social media. Moreover, social media platforms facilitate the use of microtargeting: "the process of preparing and delivering customized messages to voters or consumers." In summer 2017, political activists in the United Kingdom built a bot to disseminate messages on Tinder, a dating app, that were designed to attract new supporters for the Labour Party. "The bot accounts sent between thirty thousand and forty thousand messages in all, targeting eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in constituencies where the Labour candidates needed help." In the ensuing election, "the Labour Party either won or successfully defended some of these targeted districts by just a few votes. In celebrating their victory over Twitter, campaign managers thanked... their team of bots." There is no evidence in this case that the bots were spreading false information, but unethical political operatives can also use bots and microtargeting to spread false messages quickly via social media. 

In the past two decades, we have seen the growth of an entire industry of paid political consultants who have developed expertise in utilizing social media to influence political outcomes. The Polish firm discussed earlier in this chapter is one example. Philip Howard, a leading expert on misinformation, claims: "It is safe to say that every country in the world has some homegrown political consulting firm that specializes in marketing political misinformation." Political consultants work with data mining companies that have accumulated huge amounts of information about individuals by collecting data from a variety of sources, including social media platforms, and aggregating that information in proprietary databases. The data mining industry "supplies the information that campaign managers need to make strategic decisions about whom to target, where, when, with what message, and over which device and platform."

Political consulting firms use both bots and human-operated "fake accounts" to disseminate messages via social media. (A "fake account" is a social media account operated by someone who adopts a false identity for the purpose of misleading other social media users about the identity of the person operating the account.) They take advantage of data from the data mining industry and the technical features of social media platforms to engage in very sophisticated microtargeting, sending customized messages to select groups of voters to shape public opinion and/or influence political outcomes. "Social media algorithms allow for the constant testing and refinement of campaign messages, so that the most advanced techniques of behavioral science can sharpen the message in time for those strategically crucial final days" before an important vote. Many such messages are undoubtedly truthful, but there are several well-documented cases where paid political consultants have deliberately spread false information in service of some political objective. For example, Howard has documented the strategic use of disinformation by the Vote Leave campaign in the final weeks before the UK referendum on Brexit. 

It bears emphasis that disinformation does not have to be believed to erode the foundations of our democratic institutions. Disinformation "does not necessarily succeed by changing minds but by sowing confusion, undermining trust in information and institutions, and eroding shared reference points." For democracy to function effectively, we need shared reference points. An authoritarian government can require citizens to wear masks and practice social distancing during a pandemic by instilling fear that leads to obedience. In a democratic society, by contrast, governments must persuade a large majority of citizens that scientific evidence demonstrates that wearing masks and practicing social distancing saves lives. Unfortunately, misinformation spread on social media undermines trust in both government and scientific authority. Without that trust, it becomes increasingly difficult for government leaders to build the consensus needed to formulate and implement effective policies to address pressing social problems, such as slowing the spread of a pandemic.

Meta is changing course on its controversial requirement for users of its virtual reality headsets to log in with a Facebook account. Instead, they'll need a new Meta account, which won't need to be linked to Facebook. The company will start rolling out the new account next month for existing and new Meta Quest users. Those with a legacy Oculus account will need to have a Meta account to keep using their headset after January 1st, 2023.

The company stressed that a Meta account is not a social media profile, saying that it "lets you log into your VR devices and view and manage your purchased apps in one place." It noted that future devices will require Meta accounts too.

There is a social aspect to the new account type though, at least for VR headsets. When you create a Meta account, you'll need to create a Meta Horizon profile with the username, avatar, profile photo and so on that you'll use in the company's vision of the metaverse.

Oculus friends will become your followers and you'll automatically follow them back. You can, of course, unfollow people and stop others from following you. You'll still have the option of linking your Meta account to Facebook and Instagram, so you'll be able to chat with friends in the VR version of Messenger or find some buds to play games with. 

While Facebook has a one-account-per-person rule, the company is fine with you having multiple Meta accounts. Perhaps you'll have one for virtual meetings and another for hanging out with friends.

The new accounts will offer privacy controls, including the option to make your profile private and manually approve follower requests. Users aged between 13 and 17 will have private profiles by default.

This is an important shift for Meta as it continues to place more focus on its vision of the metaverse. However, Meta is said to have scaled back its metaverse ambitions in the last few months, having reportedly killed off some Reality Labs projects and put a planned dual-camera smartwatch on hold. 

Still, there are at least some positives of Meta divorcing VR from its social media apps. Folks who are interested in Meta Quest but want nothing to do with Facebook will no longer need an account for the latter.

Twitter is experimenting with a new feature that allows two accounts to co-author a tweet. The company is calling it a “CoTweet,” which it’s now testing with “select” accounts in the United States, Canada and Korea.

With a CoTweet, two accounts can be linked as the author of a single tweet, which will appear on both accounts’ timelines. Much like the collabs feature introduced by Instagram last year, CoTweets seem to be geared more toward brands and creators than the typical Twitter users.

“CoTweets help authors share the spotlight, unlock opportunities for engaging new audiences, and enhance their established partnerships,” Twitter explains on its website. The feature was first spotted earlier this year by reverse engineer and developer Alessandro Paluzzi, who shared some details about it back in February.

Now, Twitter has expanded the test, at least for now. A Twitter spokesperson said that CoTweets is currently a “temporary experiment,” but didn’t indicate if, or when, the feature may be more widely available. “We’re testing CoTweets for a limited time to learn how people and brands may use this feature to grow and reach new audiences, and strengthen their collaborations with other accounts,” the spokesperson said.

The British army is investigating an apparent hack after its official Twitter and YouTube accounts were compromised on Sunday. News of the breach was first reported by Web3 is Going Great. According to the blog, both accounts were simultaneously compromised to promote two different cryptocurrency scams.

Although it has since been scrubbed, the army’s verified Twitter account was briefly changed to look like a page for The Possessed, a project involving a collection of 10,000 animated NFTs with a price floor of 0.58 Ethereum (approximately $1,063). During that time, the account tweeted out multiple links to a fake minting website. It’s possible the hack is part of a broader campaign to leverage the recent popularity of The Possessed. On Saturday, the project’s official Twitter account warned its followers of another verified account that was similarly hacked to promote a NFT scam using The Possessed brand.

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget

Over on YouTube, the army’s channel has been made to look like a page for Ark Invest. As of the writing of this article, the channel is livestreaming videos that repurpose old footage of Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey and Ark CEO Katie Wood discussing cryptocurrency. The clips feature an overlay promoting “double your money” Bitcoin and Ethereum scams. According to Web3 is Going Great, a similar scheme netted scammers $1.3 million this past May. It’s unclear who is behind the attacks.

“We are aware of a breach of the army’s Twitter and YouTube accounts and an investigation is underway,” an army spokesperson told The Guardian. “We take information security extremely seriously and are resolving the issue. Until the investigation is complete it would be inappropriate to comment further.”

While 2022 has seen its share of crypto hacks, few have targeted government organizations like the British army. To date, most have involved groups like Yuga Labs, the creator of the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection. In April, the project’s official Instagram account was compromised in a $2.4 million phishing scam. BAYC’s Discord community has also fallen to two separate phishing attacks in 2022.

Non-fungible tokens have arrived on Facebook. Meta has confirmed to TechCrunch that it has started giving select creators in the US the power to post digital collectibles on their profiles. While it's unclear if and when the feature will make its way to more users — Meta called the release a "slow rollout" — company CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously said that Meta was going to test NFT support on the social network. Meta Product Manager Navdeep Singh has posted photos on Twitter of what NFT integration would look like on Facebook's, and similar to Instagram's implementation, creators will have a digital collectibles tab on their profile where they can show off their NFTs.

Creators will be able to post their collectibles as status updates that people can comment on and react to, and clicking on them shows information on the artwork. According to Decrypt, Facebook will allow users to link their compatible digital wallets with the website, similar to how they can do so on Instagram. At the moment, Facebook supports NFTs minted on Ethereum and Polygon, though it will soon support Solana and Flow NFTs, as well. 

Meta started testing NFT integration on Instagram in May, promising additional related features, such as allowing users to display their pieces as augmented reality stickers in Stories. NFTs are perhaps a more fitting addition to Instagram than Facebook, based on the platforms' userbase, but Meta is determined to make them a part of its products. Zuckerberg wrote in the post announcing the arrival of digital collectibles on Instagram: "We're starting building for NFTs, not just in our metaverse and Reality Labs work, but also across our family of apps."

It looks like Meta truly is making a big push for Reels. Social media consultant Matt Navarra has posted a screenshot on Twitter showing a notice for an experimental Instagram feature that says all video posts would be shared as Reels on the app. If your account is public, that means anyone can discover your video and use your original audio to create their own Reel. Only friends would see your video if your profile is private, but other users can still create a remix with your Reel and download it as part of their remix. The only way to ensure nobody uses your Reel for remixes is to turn the option off in Settings or to disable it for each video you post.

As TechCrunch notes, this move doesn't come as a surprise when the TikTok-style videos have quickly become a popular format on both Instagram and Facebook. When he revealed the company's fourth quarterly earnings report for 2021, Mark Zuckerberg said that Reels is now Meta's fastest growing content format. Meta chief product officer Chris Cox called Reels a "bright point" for the company, as well, in a recent memo shared with employees warning them about "serious times" ahead due to slowing growth. He also said that one of the projects Meta intends to focus on for the second half of 2022 is monetizing Reels as quickly as possible. 

Apparently, time spent viewing the short-form videos has more than doubled since last year, with 80 percent of that growth coming from Facebook. That's why the company will go as far as to redesign Instagram's and Facebook's home pages to better incorporate the short videos. Turning all video posts into Reels would give the company more content to circulate, which in turn would translate to more time viewing videos on the platform and bigger potential ad earnings for when the format is finally monetized. That said, not all experimental Instagram features make it to wide release, and it remains to be seen whether this one will survive the testing phase.

Facebook is experimenting with a new audio feature for Groups. The company is testing audio channels, which will bring Discord-like voice chats to Groups, Facebook shared in a blog post.

Facebook has already had audio features for Groups with rooms. But unlike that feature, which is meant for one-time audio chats, audio channels are dedicated spaces where group members can speak with each other at any time, much like Discord.

The change is one of several updates the social network is testing. The company is also experimenting with other types of “channels,” essentially sub-groups within each Facebook Group, where members can discuss specific topics. There are community chat channels, which organize group message threads around topics relevant to a given group; as well as community feed channels, which are topic-based spaces within the group.

Facebook is also testing a new sidebar that will make all users’ Groups more prominent in its app (and have dedicated shortcuts for creating new channels). For now, all of these features are tests that will only be available to a small subset of users, but the company intends to roll out the changes more broadly over time.

The updates come as Facebook is eyeing bigger changes for its main app. The company is working on a broader redesign that would reorient users’ feeds around AI-driven recommendations more than their existing social graphs. At the same time, the new sidebar is meant to ensure that Groups remain prominent and easily accessible once the app’s main feed changes.