Facebook plans to dish out over $1 billion to creators across its platforms through the end of 2022, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. "We want to build the best platforms for millions of creators to make a living," he wrote in a Facebook post. "Investing in creators isn't new for us, but I'm excited to expand this work over time." The aim is to "reward creators for great content they create on Facebook and Instagram."

The company will pay all kinds of creators, including those who are just starting to share their own content and build an audience. Facebook will offer creators more ways to earn payouts when they hit certain milestones and provide "seed funding" for some of them to make content.

Facebook will add Bonus sections to the Instagram app later this summer and the Facebook app in the fall where creators can learn about various programs, including details on eligibility and how to apply. Some of those programs are already available to invited creators, such as bonuses for running ads on Facebook live streams, and for video and gaming creators who reach certain earnings milestones with Stars (Facebook's Twitch Bits-style tipping currency) over the next few months.

Facebook

As for Instagram, invited creators can receive bonuses when they sign up to run IGTV ads (they'll also get a cut of ad revenue), sell a certain number of badges on live streams and make great Reels that perform well. Facebook will roll out more incentive programs in the coming months. The payouts build on Facebook's other monetization options, including fan subscriptions, paid online events and creator shops.

A billion dollars is a significant war chest for Facebook as it looks to lure creators away from rival platforms like YouTube, Substack (with Bulletin newsletters), Twitch and TikTok. In June, Zuckerberg said Facebook won't take a cut of creators' earnings through 2022, perhaps providing them with more of an incentive to switch to Facebook's products. The company has signed exclusive deals with Facebook Gaming creators over the last few years, too.

Facebook has been rolling out more ways for creators to make and share content. It's clearer than ever that attracting and rewarding influencers is an important part of Facebook's strategy. If there were any doubt that the creator economy is thriving, that billion-dollar figure might be enough to change some skeptics' minds.

AT&T and Facebook Reality Labs are joining forces to work on "collaborative video calling" as well as augmented reality experiences in Facebook’s apps. They're using Spark AR, a platform from Facebook that powers AR experiences across devices and the company's apps.

Their first AR collaboration is a promo for Space Jam: A New Legacy. Using your phone, you can bring Lola Bunny, Daffy Duck and Tweety into your space via a website, AT&T's Instagram profile or Facebook. You can use the front or rear camera to take a picture with them or create a video with a custom intro from Bugs Bunny. AT&T says its 5G network can boost the "performance and reliability for each AR experience," with the help of more vivid graphics and shorter load times.

The Facebook partnership is one of a slew of 5G collaborations that AT&T will discuss at an event on Wednesday. The provider has partnered with Boingo to bring 5G+ (aka millimeter wave 5G) to airports across the US, including John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia, Chicago O’Hare, Los Angeles Airport and Denver International Airport. They plan to roll out 5G+ in seven airports this year and 25 by the end of 2022 with the aim of reducing network congestion. AT&T, which suggests you might use the network to quickly download a bunch of TV show episodes right before a flight, has already switched on 5G at Tampa International Airport.

AT&T has also teamed up with an app called Bookful for 5G-powered AR reading experiences with characters from kids' books leaping out of the screen. In addition, it's working with Warner Bros., Ericsson, Qualcomm, Dreamscape and Wevr on a proof-of-concept Harry Potter virtual reality experience called Chaos at Hogwarts.

As protests continue in Cuba over the country’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the surrounding economic fallout, the Cuban government has moved to restrict access to social media and messaging platforms. According to NetBlocks, an organization that tracks internet access, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Telegram have all been at least partially blocked on the Caribbean island since Monday. As of Tuesday afternoon, it appears the restrictions are still in place, with Reuters reporting that people in Havana don’t have access to mobile data at the moment. We’ve reached out to Facebook and Telegram for confirmation on the outages, and we’ll update this article when we hear back from the companies.

Mobile internet access is relatively new to Cuba. It was only in late 2018 that the country’s socialist government started rolling service out across the island. At the time, President Miguel Diaz-Canel, the politician protestors are demanding resign, said greater internet access would help Cubans “defend their revolution.” However, Cuba to dissent is not new. We’ve seen governments in countries like Mynamar and Iran use similar strategies when they faced protests in the past.

Facebook is working on a new way to highlight authoritative information within Groups. The platform is starting to roll out a new “expert” label for group members who have expertise in an area related to the group’s interests.

With the change, which Facebook says is available to “select” Groups, an admin can invite a group member to be a group “expert.” If the person accepts, then they’ll get a badge next to their name similar to the way group moderators and admins are identified.

Notably, being a group “expert” doesn’t grant you extra control of group features, or higher visibility within a group. Instead, Facebook is billing it as a way for group admins to highlight members who are likely to have helpful insights to share with the rest of the group. Experts can also host question and answer sessions or live audio rooms. 

Separately, Facebook is also testing a feature that would allow group admins to proactively find expert voices for their group. That test, which is starting with groups related to fitness and gaming, allows individuals to identify themselves as experts in a particular topic. In these cases, group admins will be able to search for experts who aren’t already members of their group and invite them to join. The experts will also have the ability to automatically invite “recently engaged Page followers” to join any group in which they join as an expert.

Experts is the latest of several changes to Facebook Groups in recent months. The company has also taken steps to get moderators to shoulder more responsibility in ensuring group members follow Facebook’s rules, and introduced new tools to limit toxic conversations. While dedicated “experts” won’t directly impact these efforts, the addition of more knowledgeable voices could free up time for group admins.

Mozilla is back with a new privacy-oriented browser update that plays nice with the world's biggest social network. With the release of Firefox 90, you can now use your Facebook details to login to websites in Private Browsing or Strict Mode. 

The change is made possible due to Smartblock 2.0, the new version of the improved third-party tracking blocker that was introduced with Firefox 87. For the uninitiated, the feature fixes up web pages that are broken by Firefox's content protections by replacing tracking scripts with "stand-ins" that allow sites to render normally.

Until now, SmartBlock would restrict scripts on Facebook as a "known tracker" that was collecting your data (or your device's data) across the web. Of course, that meant you couldn't use the pervasive "Connect with Facebook" option on other sites, which makes signing up to an online service a cinch. 

Realizing that millions of users don't want to be cut off from the quick login function, Firefox has made it so that Smartblock quickly unblocks Facebook scripts to allow you to sign in with your details as usual. On websites where you don't use the function, Firefox continues to block Facebook's trackers. 

After a limited release in India late last year and a US beta at the start of 2021, YouTube is expanding the availability of Shorts, its TikTok competitor, to the than 100 countries. When the company first introduced the format, anyone could view a Short. However, only those in about two dozen countries could access the tools YouTube created for filming and editing Shorts. With today’s announcement, the company is making those tools widely available, meaning you’re likely to see more and more of the clips appear on the platform.

YouTube’s embrace of short-form videos comes just as TikTok itself becomes a bit more like YouTube. At the start of July, the company, following months of testing, gave all of its users the ability to record clips up to three minutes long. In dropping its 60-second limit, TikTok said its goal was to give creators more flexibility, especially for those making cooking and beauty tutorials.

Facebook “lost” an important policy for three years and only noticed after the Oversight Board began looking at the issue, according to the latest decision from the board. In its decision, the board questioned Facebook’s internal policies and said the company should be more transparent about whether other key policies may have been “lost.”

The underlying case stems from an Instagram post about Abdullah Öcalan, in which the poster “encouraged readers to engage in conversation about Öcalan’s imprisonment and the inhumane nature of solitary confinement.” (As the board notes, Öcalan is a founding member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which Facebook has officially designated as a “dangerous organization.”)

Facebook had initially removed the post, as Facebook users are barred from praising or showing support for dangerous organizations or individuals. However, Facebook also had “internal guidance” — created partially as a result of discussions around Öcalan’s imprisonment — that “allows discussion on the conditions of confinement for individuals designated as dangerous.” But that rule was not applied, even after the user’s initial appeal. Facebook told the board it had “inadvertently not transferred” that part of its policy when it moved to a new review system in 2018.

Though Facebook had already admitted the error and reinstated the post, the board said it was “concerned” with how the case had been handled, and that “an important policy exception” had effectively fallen through the cracks for three years.

“The Board is concerned that Facebook lost specific guidance on an important policy exception for three years,” the group wrote. “Facebook’s policy of defaulting towards removing content showing ‘support’ for designated individuals, while keeping key exceptions hidden from the public, allowed this mistake to go unnoticed for an extended period. Facebook only learned that this policy was not being applied because of the user who decided to appeal the company’s decision to the Board.”

The board also chastised Facebook for not being transparent about how many other users may have been affected by the same issue. Facebook told the board it wasn’t “technically feasible” to determine how many other posts may have been mistakenly taken down. “Facebook’s actions in this case indicate that the company is failing to respect the right to remedy, contravening its Corporate Human Rights Policy,” the board said.

The case highlights how Facebook’s complex rules are often shaped by guidance that users can’t see, and how the Oversight Board has repeatedly challenged the company to make all its policies more clear to users.

Though it’s only taken up a handful of cases so far, the Oversight Board has repeatedly criticized Facebook for not following its own rules. “They can't just invent new unwritten rules when it suits them,” board co-chair Helle Thorning-Schmidt told reporters after they said Facebook was wrong to impose an “indefinite” suspension on Donald Trump. The board has also criticized Facebook for not alerting users to key parts of its policies, such as its “satire exception.” It’s pushed the company to clarify its hate speech policies, and how it treats speech from politicians and other high-profile figures.

Facebook has 30 days to respond to the Oversight Board in this case, including several recommendations that it further clarify its “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” policy and update its transparency reporting process.

Twitter has shared concepts for four features that could give users more control over who can see, read and find their accounts, and it wants feedback from the public on what it showed off. The first of those features would make it easier for those with protected accounts to make their tweets publicly viewable in instances where they want to reply to non-followers. “If you have a protected account and reply to someone who isn’t following you, you may not know they can’t see your reply,” Lena Emara, Twitter people experience designer, wrote in a thread. So one idea is to include a prompt that reminds people of that fact, as well as give them the option to easily switch their tweets to public.

Twitter

Another potential feature would help those with multiple accounts. A mockup Emara shared shows an interface element that would allow you to switch to a different account directly from Twitter’s main composition window. What’s more, the new interface would allow you to see, at a glance, the name, handle and privacy status of your accounts all in one place.

The two other concepts Emara shared focus more on privacy. One of those details a feature that would periodically touch base with users to see if they’re happy with their current discoverability and conversation settings and make it easy to tweak them as needed without visiting the app’s settings menu. Lastly, the second one would create a system for notifying you when people search for your username and give you more control over whether your account is discoverable that way. That’s something that could be significant for limiting online harassment.

Twitter

As with the last time Twitter showed off several concept features, everything you see above “are just ideas and not being built (yet?).” They may never mature into features the company ships. That said, the feedback Twitter collects could inform other tools the company builds in the future.

Twitter has lost its liability protections against user-generated content in India due to its failure to comply with the country's IT rules, the Indian government said in a court filing. The move could leave the company's executives vulnerable to criminal charges over objectionable material on its platform, according to TechCrunch.

Indian police have filed at least five cases against the company or its officials, including some related to child pornography and blasphemous content. A report was recently filed to police in the state of Uttar Pradesh against Twitter’s head in India, Manish Maheshwari, over the publication of a map of India that showed the disputed region of Kashmir as a separate country. 

Twitter has been in a standoff with the Indian government over its new internet regulations, called the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, announced in February. They dictate that social media companies must remove content within 36 hours of a legal notice and use automated processes to take down offensive material. Platforms must also appoint three full-time executives — who are required to be Indian residents — for compliances, grievances and coordination with law enforcement. 

Twitter's resident grievance officer Dharmendra Chatur was the first casualty of the dispute. The exec stepped down from the post in late June. The company has previously stated that it needed more time to comply with the law. Meanwhile, Twitter has bowed to the government's demands to take down accounts with links to the farmers' protests that erupted in India last year. However, it has also drawn the ire of officials over its decision to label tweets by members of the ruling BJP party as "manipulated media." 

After months of threats, the Indian government has now officially declared that Twitter has lost its immunity against user-generated content. In a filing dated July 5th, the IT Ministry told the High Court in New Delhi that its decision was a result of Twitter's breach of the IT act. We have reached out to Twitter for comment.

India's information and technology minister Ravi Shankar recently praised other US tech giants for abiding by the rules. As part of their respective compliance reports, Facebook claimed to have taken action against 30 million pieces of content between May 15th and June 15th; its subsidiary Instagram took down about two million posts during the same period; and Google said it had removed 59,350 objectionable posts.

Facebook is testing new prompts to reach users who may be “becoming an extremist.” The in-app messages, which Facebook has confirmed is a test, direct users to resources aimed at combating extremism.

CNN first reported the new prompts, which have been spotted by Twitter users in recent days. One version is aimed at people who may know someone falling into extremism. “Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming an extremist,” it reads. 

Another prompt appears to warn users who may have encountered extremist content on the platform. “Violent groups try to manipulate your anger and disappointment,” it says. “You can take action now to protect yourself and others.”

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed the messages are “part of our ongoing Redirect Initiative work.” The initiative is part of a broader effort by Facebook to fight extremism on its platform by working with groups like Life After Hate, which helps people leave extremist groups. The prompts will send users to Life After Hate or other resources, according to CNN.

It’s not clear how Facebook is determining which users may be most likely to be affected by extremism, but the issue has become a hot-button topic for Facebook. The company was widely criticized for not doing enough to prevent QAnon and other fringe groups from using its platform to grow their followings. Facebook has also been accused of downplaying its role in enabling the events of January 6th. And when the Oversight Board recommended the company conduct its own inquiry into the issue, the company said investigations should remain in the hands of law enforcement and elected officials.