Truth Social, Donald Trump’s Twitter-like social media platform, will launch in the App Store on February 21st, according to Reuters. The date comes courtesy of a post seen by the outlet on a test version of the network. Responding on Friday to a question from a beta user on when the platform would open to the public, a verified account tied to Truth Social chief product officer “Billy B” told people to mark the 21st on their calendars.

“We’re currently set for release in the Apple App Store for Monday, February 21st,” the executive said, according to Reuters. Incidentally, the 21st marks the Presidents' Day holiday in the US.

Provided the network doesn’t suffer a hiccup like the one it did last fall when a prankster claimed the “donaldjtrump” username and posted an image of defecting pig, the launch will mark Trump’s return to social media. Twitter and Facebook banned the former president following the January 6th attack on the US Capitol.

Before a test version of Truth Social was pulled down last fall, the website’s code showed it ran on a mostly unmodified version of open-source software Mastodon. In October, the Software Freedom Conservancy accused The Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) of violating Mastodon’s AGPLv3 license by not sharing the platform’s source code. The website added a dedicated section containing a ZIP archive of its source code two weeks later.

Based on the posts seen by Reuters, Truth Social won’t stray too far from the Twitter formula. People can use the network to post “Truths,” the platform’s equivalent to tweets, and it's possible to reshare posts on one's timeline to expand their reach. The executive who answered questions from beta users said the company was working on a verification policy that it would publish “in the coming weeks.” He also mentioned TMTG was also working on a direct messaging feature that would come later.

Facebook rebranded itself as Meta in order to fully embrace virtual reality via the Oculus platform, so how is that actually going? The company reportedly told employees that its primary social VR platform for the Oculus Quest headset, Horizon Worlds, has grown ten times to since December, according to The Verge.

Meta's chief product officer Chris Cox said that since Horizon Worlds was rolled out widely in early December in the US and Canada, its monthly user count has expanded to 300,000 people. That includes both Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues, a separate live event VR app with the same mechanics, a company spokesperson confirmed. It doesn't include the VR conferencing app Horizon Workrooms, however.

Horizon Worlds was first launched as an Oculus social platform called Facebook Horizon back in 2019, and launched into beta later on. Users appear as avatars with an upper body only, and can build their own custom worlds. Earlier this week, Meta announced that 10,000 of those worlds have been built so far and its Facebook group for creators numbers over 20,000. 

The company seems intent on avoiding issues like harassment rampant in Facebook, having introduced "personal boundaries" to Horizon Worlds and Venues earlier this month. It's also dealing with technical issues as some users couldn't access Horizon Venues during a virtual Foo Fighters concert. 

Still, growth so far seems solid, given that access to the site currently requires an Oculus Quest headset, with the latest Quest 2 model priced at $299. However, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta planned to bring a version of Horizon Worlds to mobile phones later in 2022 in a bid to expand the user base. Depending on how well that works, it could provide a big boost to membership. 

Twitter hasn't been having a good day. As The Vergereports, code sleuth Jane Manchun Wong and other users have noticed a partial Twitter outage today (February 17th) that has led to missing tweets, including on profile pages. The social network's status page shows nothing wrong, but Downdetector indicated a surge in user-reported problems around 11AM Eastern. Most of the alerts came from people in the Easter US.

Twitter told Engadget it was investigating the problem and would follow up. The company's support account also told users about a "rise in cases." It's still possible to view many tweets and create new posts, at least as of this writing. Wong noted that Twitter "mitigated" the situation by reverting a code switch.

This is the second incident so far this month. On February 11th, the company suffered and fixed a "technical bug" that prevented people from posting or loading timelines. It's unclear if the failures are related, but this likely isn't what the company would want as it tests a long-form article feature and ditches a two-factor provider linked to secret surveillance operations.

Twitter is expanding access to its Safety Mode by bringing the beta to around 50 percent of accounts in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand. The company started testing the feature in September with a small number of people. It's expanding the beta to additional English-speaking countries to gain more insights and look into ways of making further improvements.

Safety Mode is a setting that will automatically block accounts that Twitter thinks may be using harmful language. Those accounts won't be able to interact with you for seven days. There's a way for users to manually review the tweets and accounts Twitter found questionable, and to unblock that account if there wasn't actually a problem. Accounts that users follow or interact with often are never autoblocked. The idea is to cut down on harassment and prevent people from having to go through the process of manually reporting offending tweets and accounts and waiting for Twitter to take action.

A Twitter spokesperson told Engadget that, since the company started testing the feature in September, it discovered some people need or want more help to snuff out unwanted interactions. Going forward, its systems will keep a look out for possibly harmful or uninvited replies, and prompt users in the beta to switch on Safety Mode if it believes they might benefit. The idea is that there'll be fewer instances of people having to endure unwanted interactions.

Facebook’s “News Feed” is no more. After more than 15 years, the company is officially renaming its central feature, which will now be known simply as “Feed.” The company announced the name change in a tweet.

The change, which comes just months after Mark Zuckerberg announced he was renaming the company to Meta, is yet another sign Facebook is trying to shift the perception of its core products. In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said the new moniker was meant “to better reflect the diverse content people see on their Feeds.” They added that the new name won’t change how the feature works in the app.

Still, the removal of "news" from the name will likely be seen as symbolic of the company's changing priorities as it looks toward a future centered on the metaverse, not its social networking app. Facebook’s handling of news stories has long been a thorny issue for the company. Company executives have for years argued that news is only a “small percentage” of what people share on the platform, and the company completely reoriented its feed in 2018 to focus on Facebook friends rather than publishers. (That change came with its own unintended consequences, according to Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. ) 

More recently, Facebook has tried to counter perceptions that polarizing content, particularly from far-right personalities, dominates its Feed. The company has published reports on “widely viewed content,” that argue political content isn’t that popular. And in response to a widely cited Twitter account that ranks the top Facebook Pages using analytics data from CrowdTangle, the company has published its own take on which publishers have the biggest reach on the platform. Those questions have also been central to researchers' fight to understand how content spreads on Facebook. Of course, a superficial name change doesn't resolve any of those issues, but it could help Facebook further bolster its claims that the company is embarking on a new era that won't be defined by the social networking app now seeing declining engagement.

Tinder has launched a new feature that could bring back memories of dating in the pre-smartphone era. It's a new Fast Chat experience called Blind Date that pairs members before allowing them to view each other's profiles. Tinder says its purpose is to give users a "low-pressure way to put their personality first," since they'll have to rely on conversation to make a first impression. 

The mode, which was perhaps partly inspired by the popularity of Netflix dating show Love is Blind, pairs people up based on their answers to random icebreaker questions, such as "I put ketchup on ____." Participants then enter a timed chat with their only knowledge of each other being their answers to those questions. If they end up matching after the timer runs out, their profiles will be revealed to each other. 

Tinder says members who used Blind Date made 40 percent more matches than those using another Fast Chat feature with visible profiles in an early test. It could be a great way to meet new people a user might have otherwise ignored. But it could also be a brutal experience, as there's also the risk of getting ghosted and rejected once profiles and looks are revealed — users can always choose to get paired with someone new.

The dating app's new Blind Date feature is now available in Explore in the US and will eventually make its way to users around the world. 

Most Twitter users can only create videos up to 140 seconds in length, but even so, some people apparently still don't have time for that. Luckily, Twitter has announced that it's testing playback speeds varying from .25x to 2x on Android or the web, similar to what you can do on YouTube, Netflix and other platforms.

Folks like myself (in France, on Android) with access to the feature will see a gear at the top of a video, next to the closed caption option. Selecting that allowed me to choose from a fairly granular range of speeds with sound pitch adjusted so you don't get the "Chipmunks" effect. It could be useful to folks with short attention spans or if you need to slow down a video to hear a word, to name a couple of potential use cases.

Variable playback speeds will work for "tweet videos, amplify videos, voice tweets, videos in DMs and video live replays, depending on their platform," Twitter spokesperson Joseph Nunez told The Verge. Twitter plans to expand the feature to iOS down the road. It's now in testing for select users, but there's no word on when Twitter might roll it out more widely. 

HitPiece may have already shut down its website after several artists spoke up about their work being used without their permission, but the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) isn't letting it off the hook. The organization has sent the attorney representing HitPiece a letter demanding the website and its founders to stop infringing on music IPs, to provide a complete list of site activities and to account for all NFTs that had been auctioned off. It also wants to know how much the website earned. HitPiece founder Rory Felton previously said that artists will get paid for sold digital goods that are associated with them, but the artists who spoke up are skeptical that they'll get anything.

In the letter, the group repeatedly called HitPiece a scam operation designed to exploit fans. RIAA's Chief Legal Officer Ken Doroshow said it used "buzzwords and jargon" to hide the fact that it didn't obtain the rights it needs and to make fans believe they were purchasing an article genuinely associated with an artist. Doroshow added: "While the operators appear to have taken the main HitPiece site offline for now, this move was necessary to ensure a fair accounting for the harm HitPiece and its operators have already done and to ensure that this site or copycats don't simply resume their scams under another name."

Although HitPiece branded itself as a platform for music NFTs, its founders claimed that it didn't actually sell any sound files. The RIAA argues, however, that it still used artists' name, images and copyrighted album art. Further, if it truly didn't sell any sound files, the RIAA says that "likely amounts to yet another form of fraud." 

Twitter is expanding its test of a "downvote" button to a select group of users around the world, it announced. The company said it received "positive feedback" from its initial experiments last July. "We learned a lot about the types of replies you don't find relevant and we're expanding this test –– more of you on web and soon iOS and Android will have the option to use reply downvoting," the company said in a tweet.

Twitter said that as before, the number of downvotes a reply gets will not be visible to the public, and users' downvotes will only be visible to them. In the first round of tests, Twitter offered different versions of downvoting. Some saw upvote and downvote buttons, while others only saw a downvote button next to the heart/like option. A third version showed testers thumbs up and down buttons instead. Twitter didn't say if the new global tests would offer the same options.

Twitter said that a majority of users "clicked the down arrow... because the reply was perceived as offensive, or because they perceived it as not relevant, or both." Downvoting also became the most frequently used way for people to flag content they don't want to see, the company added. 

Reddit has used downvotes since it started in 2005, as it referenced in a tweet reply to Twitter's initial downvote experiment. Facebook also tested downvotes back in 2018, but it never became a permanent feature. Instagram, meanwhile, lets users hide likes as a way to remove some of the negative pressure associated with the service.

Like, dislikes, downvotes and reaction emojis are often cited by social media critics as features that can either improve conversations or make them more toxic. So far, according to Twitter, the experiment has been positive. "People who have tested downvoting agree it improves the quality of conversations on Twitter," Twitter Safety said. "We're excited to see how others think of it as it becomes available to more of you."

Twitter increased its character limit over the years from 140 to 280 to give users more leeway with what they want to say. That's not always enough, though, which is why the term "tweetstorm" to indicate a series of interconnected tweets was coined. People also sometimes post images of lengthy statements instead. Based on a new discovery by Jane Manchun Wong, though, Twitter is working on a new feature that would cater to the needs of those who want to share their thoughts on the website in one lengthy article. 

Manchun Wong, known for finding experimental features within apps, discovered the existence of a "Twitter Articles" tab. The name itself signifies a long-form format for the social network that has long only allowed people to post bite-sized text messages, but its exact nature is a mystery for now. It's also unclear whether it will be available to everyone, if it does make it to wide release, or if it will be exclusive to Twitter Blue subscribers. 

Not everyone's keen on the idea either. Someone pointed out that it might reduce engagement on Twitter, since a thread of tweets often get multiple reactions and responses from the same users. A Twitter spokesperson told CNET that the company is "always looking into new ways to help people start and engage in conversations" and that it will share more soon.