Facebook Gaming is letting more creators play licensed music in the background while streaming gameplay. Streamers who have partner status have been able to spin tracks from a broad range of publishers and labels since last September, and now Level Up creators can do so too.

Level Up is a step below partner status. Creators in the former group can monetize their streams with Facebook's Stars currency, ads and paid subscriptions. They also get access to tools to build their audience and features like being able to stream in 1080p at 60 frames per second. Partners get extra perks, such as a partner badge, early access to new products and more personalized support from Facebook.

Streamers in both categories can play songs from hundreds of music labels, publishers and societies, including big hitters like Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. As well as live broadcasts, the deals cover archived streams and clips viewers make from streams.

Creators aren't limited to predetermined playlists, so they can play almost any song they like. Facebook notes that streamers don't have the right to use certain songs, though, and it'll flag those to creators with a notification. The streamer can remove that restricted song from their playlist to avoid running into trouble.

Elsewhere, Facebook says its systems are better at detecting the difference between having music in the background while you're playing games and having music as the focus of the stream, like hosting a radio show, which isn't allowed.

To mark the expansion, Facebook is hosting several streams in which celebrity DJs will select the background tracks while creators play games. DJ Khaled and Diplo are among those taking part in the special streams, which take place throughout this month.

In 2018, Disney fired Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn over tweets he wrote between 2008 and 2012. While the company later rehired Gunn, he’s just one of many people for whom an old social media post came back to haunt him. In recent years, some Twitter users have turned to tools like TweetDelete.net to avoid something similar happening to them. Twitter could soon also offer its own solution to the problem.

Sharing part of its product roadmap with Bloomberg, the company said it plans to eventually test a feature that would allow people to automatically archive their tweets after a predetermined amount of time. The tool is currently in the concept phase and doesn’t have a release date, but Twitter said it’s considering a number of time options, including 30, 60 and 90 days.

The decision to give people the ability to archive their tweets is part of a broader “social privacy” push Twitter told Bloomberg is about giving people more control over their identity on the platform. To that end, the company plans to test a feature this month that will allow people to remove followers. By the end of the year, it will also trial a tool that gives individuals the option to remove themselves from public conversations people mention them in.

Twitter told Bloomberg many of the above tools come in response to creative workarounds its users have found to make up for missing features. For instance, people have found you can remove someone as a follower by blocking and unblocking them. Building on a concept it shared back in July (seen above), the company also plans to prompt people to review whether their accounts are public or private.

It will be interesting to see if Twitter decides to only give some users the option to archive their tweets. After all, the platform acts as a kind of public record, giving people a way to keep politicians accountable for things they said in the past.

It didn't take long for YouTube to claim another milestone for its music services, although its significant isn't quite so clear. The Google-owned brand said it had racked up a combined 50 million YouTube Premium and Music subscribers roughly a year and a half after reaching the 20 million mark. It's also the "fastest growing" music subscription service, according to YouTube's music chief Lyor Cohen.

Certain markets were stronger than others. Cohen touted "impressive growth" in Brazil, India, Japan, Russia and South Korea. He didn't provide numbers for those countries or the US. 

That figure still makes YouTube smaller than Spotify, which claimed 165 million Premium subscribers as of June 2021. Apple hasn't divulged its Music subscriber numbers since June 2019, when it had 60 million, while Amazon last touted 55 million Music customers (only some of them paying for Unlimited) in January 2020. Still, these figures in isolation would suggest YouTube is quickly becoming a major force in music streaming.

There are concerns about the claims, though. YouTube didn't indicate how many were Music or Premium subscribers, or how they used it. While you get YouTube Music with a Premium subscription, that doesn't mean you're using Premium for music — you might just want to get rid of ads and download videos. YouTube's tally also includes people using free trials, so the number of paying customers is likely lower. Samsung offers two to four months of free YouTube Premium access with new phones, for instance, but many of those users will drop Premium after the trial is over.

The data still hints competition in the music streaming world is heating up, with relatively small outfits like YouTube and Amazon Music posing more of a threat to incumbents like Spotify and Apple. However, it could take a long while before YouTube is large enough to make the heavyweights nervous.

Twitter is finally flipping the switch on “Super Follows,” its new subscription feature that allows creators to charge their followers for exclusive content. Starting today, the company is making the feature available to a “small group” of creators, with plans to expand the lineup in the coming weeks (Twitter has been taking applications for Super Follows since June).

For now, creators can set monthly rates of $2.99, $4.99 or $9.99 in order to access “subscriber-only” tweets. Twitter says it will eventually incorporate other features, such as Spaces and newsletters. But until then the feature essentially amounts to.. paying for tweets, which might explain why the company is trying it out with just a few people to start. The initial lineup includes:

• @MakeupforWOC who will offer “client-level treatment” for subscribers with skincare questions

• @myeshachou who will provide exclusive “behind-the-scenes stories”

• @KingJosiah54 who will offer “in-depth sports analysis”

• @tarotbybronx who will provide Super Followers with “astrology, tarot, and intuitive healing advice” and “extra spiritual guidance”

Of course, if you’re especially interested in one of these topics or just a dedicated fan, there is an upside to buying a subscription. You’ll be able to interact with creators in a smaller, and slightly more private, forum. That could be useful if, for example, you’re hoping to get some personalized skincare advice. On the other hand, asking fans to pay for the kind of content they’re used to getting for free might be a tough sell.

Super Follows is one piece of Twitter’s strategy to reshape its platform as a destination for creators. Outside of subscriptions, the company is also experimenting with letting creators sell tickets to audio chats in Spaces. Twitter is also working on a newsletter platform — it acquired Revue earlier this year — and has opened up tipping features in its app.

Twitter is experimenting with its most aggressive anti-harassment features to date. The company will start testing “Safety Mode” a new account setting that automatically blocks accounts using “potentially harmful language.” Twitter first previewed the feature back in February during its Analyst Day presentation, but is now starting to make it available to “a small feedback group.” It’s not clear when it might be available more widely.

When enabled, Safety Mode will proactively block accounts that are likely to be the source of harassment for a period of seven days. Twitter says the system is designed so that accounts of people you know or frequently interact with won’t be blocked, but trolls will.

“Safety Mode is a feature that temporarily blocks accounts for seven days for using potentially harmful language — such as insults or hateful remarks — or sending repetitive and uninvited replies or mentions,” Twitter writes in a blog post. “When the feature is turned on in your Settings, our systems will assess the likelihood of a negative engagement by considering both the Tweet’s content and the relationship between the Tweet author and replier.”

While Twitter has taken several steps in the past to address its long-running harassment problem, Safety Mode is notable because it takes more of the burden off of the person being harassed. Instead of manually blocking, muting and reporting problematic accounts, the feature should be able to catch the offending tweets before they are seen.

Because it’s still in a relatively early stage, Twitter says it’s likely to make at least some mistakes. And users are able to manually review the tweets and accounts flagged by Safety Mode, and reverse faulty autoblocks. When the seven-day period ends, users will get a notification "recapping" the actions Safety Mode took. 

Facebook wants in on the predictive games trend. The social media giant has launched a Fantasy Games feature in the US and Canada with "free, simple" sports and pop culture prediction titles. The fantasy sports offerings let you predict winners for matches, top players and other stats. MLB Home Run Picks asks you to predict the team with the most home runs in a given day, for instance, while La Liga Winning Streak challenges you to predict daily wins in the Spanish soccer league for as long as possible.

You can also guess the victors in reality TV shows like Survivor and The Bachelorette. There are promises of other pop culture games, although Facebook didn't cite examples.

Fantasy Games are currently available through Facebook's Android and iOS apps. You'll find them both through the bookmarks menu as well as through notifications in the News Feed.

Facebook clearly isn't interested in direct competition with for-money fantasy game services like DraftKings and FanDuel, at least not right now. However, there are still plenty of incentives for the social network to launch Fantasy Games. The feature could keep you coming back, boosting ad revenue as well as your overall engagement with Facebook. It also opens the door to paid fantasy games in the future. Still, this might hit the spot if you've been tempted by fantasy sports but don't want to spend real money.

LinkedIn is ditching Stories. The company will shut down the feature by the end of September, a year after rolling it out. As it turns out, ephemeral posts aren't a perfect fit for every social network. Perhaps with ROI and KPIs in mind, LinkedIn says its users want videos that stay on their profiles permanently, not ones that vanish.

"In developing Stories, we assumed people wouldn’t want informal videos attached to their profile, and that ephemerality would reduce barriers that people feel about posting," Liz Li, LinkedIn's senior director of product wrote. "Turns out, you want to create lasting videos that tell your professional story in a more personal way and that showcase both your personality and expertise."

As such, the company's going back to the whiteboard. It's taking what it learned from Stories (such as users wanting creative tools to liven up videos in a professional way) to create a "reimagined video experience across LinkedIn that’s even richer and more conversational."

Just about every major social network hopped on the Stories bandwagon after the likes of Snapchat and Instagram found huge success with the format. Although the feature has proven a hit on the likes of YouTube and Facebook, Stories haven't taken off on every platform. Twitter recently shut down Fleets, its take on Stories, less than nine months after launching the feature.

Facebook is planning to reduce political content in the News Feed starting today, it confirmed to Engadget. The move, which was first reported by Axios, follows tests in the US, Canada, Brazil and Indonesia earlier this year, where Facebook limited political content. The company plans to expand the tests to Costa Rica, Sweden, Spain and Ireland.

"These changes are in response to common feedback from our community," a Facebook spokesperson told Engadget. "We conduct ongoing research with people to hear what parts of Facebook are working well for them, and to gather feedback about what we could be doing better. One of the themes we’ve heard is that some people feel that there’s too much political content in their News Feeds. We hope these changes address this feedback and preserve the ability for people to find and interact with political content on Facebook, while respecting their appetite for it at the top of their News Feed."

Facebook says some engagement signals are better than others at indicating which posts people deem interesting or valuable. As a result, the company is expanding some tests related to engagement signals. The tests put less importance on how likely a user is to share or comment on political content. "At the same time, we’re putting more emphasis on new signals such as how likely people are to provide us with negative feedback on posts about political topics and current events when we rank those types of posts in their News Feed," Facebook wrote in an updated blog post.

The changes could reduce the level of misinformation on Facebook, if the algorithms are able to effectively detect and de-emphasize all political content. Political campaigns might have to rethink their strategies of how to reach voters too. On the flip side, the move could come as a blow to news organizations, especially those focused on politics, given the volume of traffic Facebook can drive to websites.

The switch could also make Facebook a less hostile place for users. Political discussions can quickly get heated, which might put off those who use the service largely for keeping in touch with their loved ones and sharing pictures of their kids. For what it's worth, Facebook claimed in November political content makes up just six percent of what users see.

"We’ve learned that these changes will affect public affairs content more broadly and that publishers may see an impact on their traffic," Facebook said. "Knowing this, we are planning a gradual and methodical rollout for these tests, but remain encouraged, and expect to announce further expansions in the coming months."

The reported changes follow other moves that Facebook has made to make political content less visible. It stopped recommending civic and political groups to users earlier this year after temporarily pausing those recommendations ahead of the 2020 US election.

The Islamic State's propaganda arm used Amazon Web Services to host content promoting extremism, according to The Washington Post. Nida-e-Haqq, the group's media arm, posted messages on the website in the Urdu language, including ones celebrating the recent suicide bombing in Kabul that killed 170 people. Since Amazon's policy bars clients from using its services to incite violence and terror, the company pulled the website after The Post alerted it to its existence. 

The website Amazon disabled provided content for the Nida-e-Haqq app, which recently showed an image of the Kabul bomber wrapped in a suicide vest. It's currently password-protected and not viewable, but it's been active since at least April, based on the online domain records The Post saw. Amazon spokesperson Casey McGee told the publication in a statement: "(F)ollowing an investigation, we have disabled a website that was linked to this app as it was in violation of the AWS Acceptable Use Policy." 

Taliban and extremist-related content is the latest issue social networks, and clearly, hosting services like Amazon's, have to grapple with. The organization has been using services like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and WhatsApp to spread its message, and the websites now have to decide if they need to update their policy on how to deal with Taliban content and to make sure their existing rules on violence and terror are properly enforced.

Amazon didn't say how Nida-e-Haqq managed to evade detection for at least four months when it wasn't even trying to hide what kind of content it posted, but it's very much possible that the company simply didn't know the website existed. As The Post said, Amazon may not be proactively policing its clients' content, relying instead on the complaints it gets. 

Back in January, it suspended Parler's AWS hosting services after it found multiple posts on the social network "that clearly encourage and incite violence." Parler sued Amazon, claiming antitrust violations, but the company said it sent the website several warnings about violent posts on its platform before the takedown. Ultimately, a judge shot down Parler's attempt to get AWS to restore its service, citing the dangers posed by "inflammatory rhetoric" found on the social network.

YouTube is making good on its promise to bring picture-in-picture viewing to iOS users. TechCrunchreports that YouTube is promising PiP viewing to all iPhone and iPad users in the US, starting with volunteers using Premium. You'll have to opt into the test through the experiments website on your computer, but you're all set after that — you can watch clips in a floating window while you check your social networks or otherwise get things done.

Premium testing ends on October 31st. You might have to reinstall the YouTube app if the feature isn't available right away.

The company hasn't said when it plans to enable PiP for non-Premium subscribers. This is still a step forward, mind you. YouTube's web-only support was limited at best — this should expand the audience and put YouTube's app more on par with competing video services.