Facebook has taken steps to ensure that users most at risk of being hacked don't lose their accounts to bad actors. The social network has updated its Protect program that was designed to provide extra security features to human rights activists, politicians, journalists and other at-risk users. In a press call with reporters, Facebook announced that it'll start requiring users part of the program to switch on two-factor authentication. 

The website will start implementing the new rule over the coming months all over the world — for members in the US, the requirement will take effect sometime in mid-to-late February. Facebook explained that it worked on making the enrollment and use of two-factor on its website "as frictionless as possible for these groups of people by providing better user experience and support." It admitted that it may take time for all users to be able to comply with the new rule, since not everyone actively uses its platform. But Facebook and its parent company seem to be pleased with what they'd seen in early testing.

Meta's head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher said:

"So far, it's actually going very, very well we're seeing well above 90% of people successfully enabling ahead of that mandatory period."

Facebook first tested Protect back in 2018 and offered it to American politicians ahead of the 2020 US Elections. It expanded the program's scope and opened it up to more users after that— in my case, I was locked out of my account until I activated it. The website is now on track to make the program available in more than 50 countries by the end of year, including the US and India, where most of its users are based.

Gleicher said over 1.5 million users had enrolled in the program so far, and 950,000 had already switched on 2FA. He also said that 2FA is an underutilized feature on the platform, with only 4 percent of the website's monthly users enabling it. Even so, there are no plans to require people outside of the Protect program to switch it on.

Meta/Facebook is today updating the world on how its efforts to remove fake and adversarial networks from its platform are going. The social network has released a new report saying that it has successfully closed down a number of networks for Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB). But in addition to networks of fake profiles all working in tandem, the company has also shed some light on how it deals with additional threats. This includes Brigading — the use of negative comments and counter-posting to drown out an individual’s posts — and Mass Reporting, where Facebook’s own anti-harassment tools are used as a weapon. This is another step beyond the broader tactics the company announced back in September, where it pledged to combat broader social harms that took place on its platform.

With Brigading, the company took down what it describes as a “network of accounts that originated in Italy and France” which targeted medical professionals, journalists and public officials. Facebook says that it tracked the activity back to a European anti-vaccine conspiracy movement called “V_V,” adding that its members used a large volume of fake accounts to “mass comment on posts” from individuals and news agencies “to intimidate them and suppress their views.”In addition, those accounts posted doctored images, superimposing the swastika onto the faces of prominent doctors and accusing them of supporting nazism.

In Vietnam, Facebook took down a network that was being used to target activists and users critical of the local government. The network would submit “hundreds — in some cases thousands — of complaints against their targets through our abuse reporting flows.” Attackers also created duplicate accounts of the users they intended to silence and then reported the real account as an impersonator from the fake account. Facebook added that some of these fake accounts were automatically detected and disabled by the company’s automatic moderation tools.

As for the more old-fashioned methods of Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior, the company took down networks in Palestine, Poland, Belarus and China. The first was reportedly tied to Hamas, while the second two were crafted to exacerbate tensions during the humanitarian crisis on the border there. In a call with reporters, Facebook said that the Polish network had very good operational security and, so far, it has not been able to tie it to a real-world organization. The Belarusian network, on the other hand, had much poorer operational security, and so the company has tied the activity to the Belarusian KGB.

The final network, out of China, has prompted Facebook to publish a deep dive into the activity given the depth of what took place. In its report, the company says that a group created a fake profile of a Swiss biologist called Wilson Edwards who posted material critical of the US and WHO. 48 hours later, and his comments were picked up by Chinese state media, and engaged with by high-level officials. But there was no evidence that Wilson Edwards existed, which prompted the platform to close the account.

Researchers found that Edwards’ was “the work of a multi-pronged, largely unsuccessful influence operation,” involving “employees of Chinese state infrastructure companies across four continents.” Facebook wanted to make it clear that Edwards’ comments were not engaged with organically, and it was only when the posts were reported by state media did things suddenly rise in prominence.

One thing that Facebook did identify is the use of guides which were used to train potential network members. The V_V network, for instance, published videos through its Telegram channels that suggested that users replace letters in key words so that it wouldn’t be picked up by automatic filtering. The people behind the Chinese network, too, would sometimes inadvertently post notes from their leaders, written in Indonesian and Chinese, offering tips on how best to amplify this content.

In addition, Facebook has announced that it has launched a tool, through CrowdTangle, to enable OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) researchers to study disinformation networks. This includes storing any content taken down by the company, allowing a small list of approved third parties the chance to analyze it. Access has, so far, been limited to teams from the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council, Stanford Internet Observatory, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Graphika and Cardiff University.

Facebook believes that offering greater detail and transparency around how it finds these networks will enable researchers in the OSINT community to better track them in future.

Australia could soon make life difficult for internet trolls — if at a significant cost. Reutersreports Prime Minister Scott Morrison has unveiled plans for legislation that, in some cases, could force social networks to reveal the identities of trolls and others making defamatory comments. A complaint mechanism would require online platforms to take these hostile posts down. If they don't, the court system could order a given site to provide details of the offending poster.

Morrison likened the current internet to a "Wild West" where anonymous attackers could "harm people." If that can't happen in real life, there's "no case" for it happening online, the Prime Minister said.

The proposed laws come weeks after Australia's High Court ruled media companies could be held liable for comments on Facebook posts. CNNlimited access to its Facebook pages in the country over those liability concerns. The intended legislation would take this a step further by mandating certain actions if a post is deemed harmful.

The move raises privacy questions. Anonymity might help trolls, but it also protects political dissenters and other innocuous critics — will Australia make sure any identity disclosure laws aren't used to discourage challenges to authority, as they are in China? And without examples of the legislation, it's unclear just what would constitute an offense serious enough to warrant revealing an identity.

Spotify is testing a new feature called Discover that lets users scroll through a feed of vertical videos and skip or like them, much as you do on TikTok, TechCrunch has reported. The feature was spotted in the latest version of Spotify's beta iOS TestFlight build by Chris Messina, who tweeted that it appeared as a fourth icon in Spotify's iOS toolbar. 

Discover looks to be a way for users to find new music in an intuitive, rapid way, by swiping up and down to move through the feed. You can tap on a heart to like the song, or hit the three-dot menu to bring up Spotify's standard information card about the song. 

The format may use Spotify's Canvas format, Messina notes. That allows artists to create videos to go along with songs, rather than just static images, and appears on certain songs instead of the standard album art when you play a video. They can be in the form of standard video and mixed media, along with 2D and 3D graphics. In pitching the feature, Spotify tells artists that Canvas boosts key engagement metrics like sharing, adding to playlists and visiting profile pages. 

Spotify confirmed to TechCrunch that it's testing the feature, but declined to share further details like how it would curate feeds. "At Spotify, we routinely conduct a number of tests in an effort to improve our user experience," a spokesperson said. "Some of those tests end up paving the way for our broader user experience and others serve only as an important learning. We don’t have any further news to share at this time."

Spotify is far from the first platform to flatter TikTok through imitation. Instagram's Reels and YouTube Shorts are virtual clones of TikTok, and even Netflix recently introduced a TikTok-like comedy feed called Fast Laughs. It's not clear yet if Spotify's discovery feature will make it out of beta, but it looks like a useful way to find new music.

A set of carefully-worded warnings directed to the right accounts could help reduce the amount of hate on Twitter. That’s the conclusion of new research examining whether targeted warnings could reduce hate speech on the platform.

Researchers at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics found that personalized warnings alerting Twitter users to the consequences of their behavior reduced the number of tweets with hateful language a week after. While more study is needed, the experiment suggests that there is a “potential path forward for platforms seeking to reduce the use of hateful language by users,” according to Mustafa Mikdat Yildirim, the lead author of the paper.

In the experiment, researchers identified accounts at risk of being suspended for breaking Twitter’s rules against hate speech. They looked for people who had used at least one word contained in “hateful language dictionaries” over the previous week, who also followed at least one account that had recently been suspended after using such language.

From there, the researchers created test accounts with personas such as “hate speech warner,” and used the accounts to tweet warnings at these individuals. They tested out several variations, but all had roughly the same message: that using hate speech put them at risk of being suspended, and that it had already happened to someone they follow.

“The user @account you follow was suspended, and I suspect this was because of hateful language,” reads one sample message shared in the paper. “If you continue to use hate speech, you might get suspended temporarily.” In another variation, the account doing the warning identified themselves as a professional researcher, while also letting the person know they were at risk of being suspended. “We tried to be as credible and convincing as possible,” Yildirim tells Engadget.

The researchers found that the warnings were effective, at least in the short term. “Our results show that only one warning tweet sent by an account with no more than 100 followers can decrease the ratio of tweets with hateful language by up to 10%,” the authors write. Interestingly, they found that messages that were “more politely phrased” led to even greater declines, with a decrease of up to 20 percent. “We tried to increase the politeness of our message by basically starting our warning by saying that ‘oh, we respect your right to free speech, but on the other hand keep in mind that your hate speech might harm others,’” Yildirim says.

In the paper, Yildirim and his co-authors note that their test accounts only had around 100 followers each, and that they weren’t associated with an authoritative entity. But if the same type of warnings were to come from Twitter itself, or an NGO or other organization, then the warnings may be even more useful. “The thing that we learned from this experiment is that the real mechanism at play could be the fact that we actually let these people know that there's some account, or some entity, that is watching and monitoring their behavior,” Yildirim says. “The fact that their use of hate speech is seen by someone else could be the most important factor that led these people to decrease their hate speech.”

It didn't take long for Netflix to greenlight more Arcane. Deadlinereports Netflix has renewed the League of Legends-based series for a second season now in production. Core stars Ella Purnell (Jinx), Hailee Steinfeld (Vi) and Katie Leung (Caitlyn) are already set to reprise their roles.

There's no mystery behind the decision: the show is a success. Co-creators Christian Linke and Alex Yee said they were "beyond happy" with the reaction. The numbers also back them up — the first season of Arcane racked up nearly 34.2 million viewing hours in its first week on Netflix's new top 10 chart, making it the second-most popular TV series in any language behind Narcos: Mexico (almost 50.3 million).

The popularity isn't a shock. Both Netflix and League creator Riot Games heavily promoted the show, to the point where LoL included multiple crossovers. You knew Arcane was available if you were even vaguely interested in the game that inspired it. And yes, it helps that Arcane happens to be well-received by many accounts.

The renewal doesn't necessarily hint at a new wave of game-inspired Netflix shows. It does, however, suggest that relatively high-budget game productions have a healthy future at the streaming pioneer. Don't be surprised if Netflix takes more chances on projects like this.

After introducing its "tip jar" feature to all iOS users over 18, Twitter has brought the feature to Android as well. The idea is that if you see a particularly entertaining or informative tweet, you can send money to the creator's Cash App, Patreon, Paypal, Bandcamp and Venmo from directly within the app. 

Twitter first introduced tip jars in May, then rolled it out widely to iOS users in September. A similar feature is available inside Twitter's Clubhouse-like "Spaces" feature, letting creators charge for "tickets" to its live access features. Twitter also recently opened "super follows" to select creators, allowing them to monetize tweets and provide exclusive content, along with a subscription service that could eliminate publications’ paywalls on the platform.

On top of using regular money via payment services, Twitter may soon let you tip others using Bitcoin. According to a leak, Twitter is planning to use the Lightning Network to enable Bitcoin payments with high speed and relatively low fees.

Last week, Twitter’s “premium” subscription service made its debut in the United States. Twitter Blue is a $3 monthly subscription that buys subscribers access to additional features, like an undo button and ad-free news articles.

For now, Twitter Blue comes with a fairly limited set of extra features designed for the people who spend the most time on the service. According to Twitter’s Sara Beukpour, this group includes “verified longtime Twitter users” as well as “news lovers” and other “super tweeters.” In other words: the 25 percent of Twitter’s user base who send 97 percent of all tweets.

“I actually bet many of them are you,” Beykpour said during a briefing with a group of tech reporters last week. Of course I signed up immediately.

And after a little more than a week with Twitter Blue, I’m not sure it’s worth $3 a month for most people. The features are mostly useful, but it’s frustrating that not everything works the same way across Twitter’s app and website. But there are undoubtedly useful features, and I am intrigued by what might come next for “premium Twitter.” For now, though, here’s a look at what $3 buys you.

‘Undo’ tweets

Of all the features in Twitter Blue, the “undo” button has gotten the most hype. Twitter will likely never give us an actual edit button, so this is probably the closest we’ll ever get. And if you’re prone to typos or tweeting-and-then-instantly-regretting, this feature alone might be worth the subscription. I say might because the “undo” can also be incredibly confusing, and doesn’t always work as you expect.

It’s supposed to work pretty much like Gmail’s “undo send” feature. After you hit “send,” you’ll have a few seconds when you can see the tweet you just wrote, but it hasn’t actually been published. If you change your mind for whatever reason, you can hit “undo,” which takes you back to the tweet in the compose screen. Twitter gives you the ability to set how long this window is — it can range from 5 seconds to a full 60 seconds — and you can always opt to send it before the window runs out with an extra click.

Screenshot / Twitter

But undoing a tweet doesn’t always work the same way across Twitter’s app and website. On Twitter’s app, you can use the “undo” feature for almost any type of tweet: original tweets (tweets sent from the main compose window), replies, threads, quote tweets and polls. Essentially, you can “undo” almost anything you tweet, anywhere in the app. But that’s not the case on twitter.com, where the undo function only works with original tweets and replies, but not with quote tweets or threads. Unless you exclusively tweet from your phone, this means you have to remember which tweets are editable undoable and which aren't. A typo-ridden tweet can be undone, but an ill-advised quote tweet cannot.

There’s also the fact that it can take several steps to actually undo a tweet. In Twitter’s app, the default setting is that the first thing you see after you mash the tweet button is your tweet and an “undo” button. This gives you plenty of time to give it another read, even if you have a relatively short undo “window.” But on Twitter’s website, you can only undo by looking for a “view tweet” dialog at the bottom of the page and then navigating to the page with your tweet and the undo button. 

Sometimes, "view tweet" doesn't appear at all, and the only way to access the "undo" is to navigate to your profile and look for the pending tweet on your timeline. Not only is this a confusing extra step, but it also makes it harder to take advantage of the undo button at all. Is it still useful to have? I guess, but the unpredictability of it kind of gave me more anxiety than just not having it at all.

Reader mode and bookmark folders

The reader mode is probably the most underrated feature of Twitter Blue, and the one I’d argue would be most useful for all the site’s users, not just those willing to pay. It converts long threads into a much more readable stream of text, much like a browser’s reader view would. I hate those intrusive (and ethically dubious) third-party thread apps that “unroll” tweets into separate websites, but there’s a reason why those services are so popular: lengthy threads are difficult to read. Twitter’s service was never designed for essay-length tweet storms, and long threads are often cut off. Reader mode is a simple solution that is so effective I can’t believe it took them this long to make.

Screenshot / Twitter

It’s even better when paired with another new feature: bookmark folders. Now, when I come across an impossibly long tweetstorm I want to come back to later, I simply add it to my “to read” folder and keep scrolling. Except, again, bookmark folders are for now only supported in Twitter’s app. Head over to twitter.com and all your bookmarks are still a mess.

Ad-free news and ‘top articles’

My favorite Twitter Blue feature — and a large part of the reason why I will likely continue handing over $3 each month for it — is the “top articles” feature. The feature shows you a list of all the most-shared news articles by people in your Twitter network over the last 24 hours. If that sounds at all familiar, it’s because the feature is Twitter’s nod to Nuzzel, a once independent news app that also created feeds of articles based on what was being shared by people you follow on Twitter. But the original app was shut down when Twitter acquired Scroll, the news startup that had previously bought Nuzzel.

And while “Top Articles'' doesn't have all the functionality Nuzzel once did, it’s enough to scratch the itch for former fans of the app (a group that seems to be almost entirely made up of journalists as far as I can tell). But even if you never used Nuzzel, Top Articles is useful. It gives you a quick digest of what the people you follow are reading and tweeting about. Or, you know, you can just use it to figure out who is the main character of the day.

Screenshot / Twitter

Twitter’s acquisition of Scroll also powers another significant part of Twitter Blue: ad-free news articles. Scroll (and now Twitter) formed partnerships with hundreds of news outlets in order to offer ad-free browsing in exchange for a portion of users’ subscription fees. Now, Twitter lets subscribers view how much their own browsing has directed to those publishers. It’s an intriguing concept, and one that won Scroll a lot of praise before it was bought by Twitter.

It’s also the aspect of Twitter Blue I’m most curious to watch. As it stands now, it can feel a little disjointed. While stripping out ads is nice, it doesn’t include access to paywalled content, so it can be jarring to see an “ad-free with Twitter Blue” banner only to hit a paywall. However, Twitter has hinted that it may one day pursue more ways to access paywalled content — and a message in the app says paywall access isn’t included “right now” — so there’s good reason to hope that may one day change.

Early access to new features and customization

Twitter has gotten much more public with the features it experiments with in recent years. The company at one point had a separate beta version of the app it used to try out new tweaks. That app is no longer available, but the “labs” feature of Twitter Blue feels in some ways like its successor. The company plans to make some experimental features available to Twitter Blue subscribers first, before deciding whether they should become full-fledged features available to more people.

For now, there are only two features that fall into this bucket: the ability to pin specific chats to the top of your DM inbox, and the ability to upload videos of up to 10 minutes (these longer videos are not entirely new, but accounts had to be approved by Twitter in order to have access to the feature). I appreciate having the option to do both, though I haven’t used either feature and I suspect most others won’t either.

Screenshot / Twitter

Finally, Twitter Blue also gives you the ability to make small tweaks to the look and feel of the Twitter app. For example, you can change the app icon or set a new color theme (the “theme” only changes small elements like the color of the tweet composer and the dot that appears when you have a new notification). You can also opt to rearrange the shortcuts in the bottom of the app’s navigation bar, which is kind of cool (especially if you want to, say, banish the Spaces Tab). But, again, these are small details that I can’t imagine most people bothering to change.

Is it worth it?

Whether or not you think all that is worth three bucks a month largely depends on how much you use Twitter (and how willing you are to pay for apps). While I don’t think it makes sense for most people, I think it’s pretty compelling for anyone who depends on Twitter for their job or otherwise falls into that extra-dedicated “super tweeter” category.

And while Twitter hasn’t offered any details around how many subscribers have signed up, the app has made about $180,000 since it first started offering Twitter Blue this summer, according to data provided by analytics firm Sensor Tower. That’s not much money for Twitter, but it does suggest there is a not-totally-insignificant number of people willing to try it out (and the service is still only available in four countries).

At a broader level, Twitter Blue raises important questions about how the company will prioritize new features. While the company has maintained that there will always be a free version of Twitter, it’s not difficult to imagine that the most exciting and useful updates could end up being locked behind a subscription. Twitter spent much of the last decade not really creating any meaningful new features at all, so it still stings a little to see the company add the kinds of features longtime users have long hoped for, only to restrict them to those willing to pay.

Over the past few years, Google has been trying to repair its reputation as a source for disinformation by launching multiple programs, particularly the Google News Initiative. Now, the company has teamed with PBS Student Report Labs (SRL) and other journalism organizations on programs designed to strengthen media literacy for students, educators and the public.

Google and Student Report Labs are creating educational resources aimed at teaching young people how to talk about misinformation with older family members and friends, Google wrote. "Through storytelling and co-production with students, we’ll explore the media literacy needs of different communities and generations, and how they can connect with each other to find solutions,” says SRL Founder Leah Clapman. As an example, Google referenced an SRL YouTube video called "What does a school board do?" (below).

Google also teamed with the News Literacy Project (NLP), a nonpartisan national education nonprofit, to again provide media literacy education to students, teachers and the public. Google aims to bring its "Newsroom to Classroom" initiative to more journalists and educators, helping NLP expand it to areas in California, Colorado, Texas, Iowa and Nebraska, "places hit particularly hard by the decline in local news," according to Google. 

Finally, Google is expanding its Spanish language outreach by teaming with Poynter's MediaWise project focused on students and seniors. It's joining forces with the team to translate their "How to Spot Misinformation Online" course in Spanish and creating a text-based version that will be delivered via SMS, "which is how many seniors find and share news," the company wrote. 

Google said the efforts will bolster its existing projects like Fact Check Explorer and "about this result" from Search. However, the company has a long way to go to assuage critics in the public and governments around the world that it's beating the misinformation that still plagues its various platforms. 

Twitter has acquired Threader. It’s one of a few apps that allow you to make threads easier to digest. By tagging Threader’s profile and typing “compile,” the bot will condense a series of tweets into an article-like form. “Today, we are bringing this experience to Twitter. We are both proud of what we’ve achieved together, especially as an independent team of two. We’re excited to bring the Threader experience to millions of people on Twitter,” the founders of Threader said.

As part of today’s announcement, Threader will shut down on December 15th, but its feature set will live on as part of Twitter Blue. Specifically in the Reader feature, which Twitter notes Threader co-founder Marie Denis helped build. Denis is joining the company's Longform team, where Twitter says she'll continue to work on ways to make it easier for people to read threads. Twitter did not disclose other terms of the acquisition. The deal follows the recent expansion of Twitter Blue to the US and New Zealand.