X has, once again, quietly changed its rules around deadnaming and misgendering without an explanation. With the latest change, it seems that there will be no penalties for misgendering or deadnaming people on X after al, except in cases when it may be “required by local laws.”

The update, which was first spotted by Mashable, comes after X appeared to reinstate some aspects of Twitter’s former policy, which fell under its hateful conduct rules. Prior to Elon Musk’s takeover, Twitter had barred targeted deadnaming and misgendering. That section of the company’s rules then disappeared last April. Then, last week, ArsTechnica noted that the policy was quietly updated to indicate that X would “reduce the visibility of posts that purposefully use different pronouns to address someone other than what that person uses for themselves, or that use a previous name that someone no longer goes by as part of their transition.”

While it wasn’t a full reversal of the earlier policy — under the company’s previous leadership, intentional misgendering was grounds for a suspension — it seemed that there once again would be penalties for this type of harassment. Now, that section of Twitter’s rules is prefaced with “where required by local laws.”

As with so much of what happens at X, there is significant confusion about the policy as the company’s rules seem to change based on the whims of Musk rather than a considered process. This was on display over the last fewldays as Musk fielded several complaints from right-wing personalities about last week’s change. On Thursday, Musk told one such account that the update “is just about repeated, targeted harassment of a particular person.” But by Saturday, Musk was offering a new explanation. “Turns out this was due to a court judgment in Brazil, which is being appealed, but should not apply outside of Brazil,” he said.

X didn’t respond to a request for comment about the policy or why it was changed twice in a matter of days. But Musk is known to be sympathetic to people who regularly engage in anti-trans harassment. One of his first moves after taking over the company was to reinstate a number of accounts banned for violating the company's previous hateful conduct policy. He has also repeatedly mocked people who specify their pronouns and publicly criticized X staff for attempting to apply the company’s “freedom of speech, not reach” policy to a transphobic documentary.

X has updated its abuse and harassment page in January, and it has added a new section that explains its new rule against intentionally using the wrong pronouns for a person or using a name they no longer go by. As noticed by Ars Technica, the new section entitled "Use of Prior Names and Pronouns" states that the service will "reduce the visibility of posts" that use pronouns for a person different from what they use for themselves and those who are now using a different name as part of their transition. 

The social networking service formerly known as Twitter removed its longtime policy against deadnaming and misgendering transgender individuals just as quietly back in April 2023. GLAAD CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said at the time that X's decision was "the latest example of just how unsafe the company is for users and advertisers alike." It's worth noting that Elon Musk, the website's owner, has a history of liking and sharing anti-trans posts and talking points. 

Under the new policy, X will only act on a post if it hears from the target themselves "given the complexity of determining whether such a violation has occurred." That puts the onus on the target who might end up being blamed for not reporting if they choose to distance themselves from the abuse. Jenni Olson, GLAAD's senior director of social media safety, told Ars that the organization doesn't recommend self-reporting for social media platforms. Still, policies clearly prohibiting the deadnaming and misgendering of trans people are still better than vague ones that don't clarify whether or not they're in violation of a platform's rules, Olson said. 

X reduces the visibility of posts by removing them from search results, home timelines, trends and notifications. These posts will also be downranked in the replies section and can only be discovered through the authors' profiles. Finally, they will not be displayed on the X website or app with ads adjacent to them, which could prevent a repeat of the ad revenue losses the company suffered last year. In late 2023, advertisers pulled their campaigns from the website just before the holidays after Media Matters published a report showing ads on the website right next to antisemitic content.

In early April, the Facebook News tab will start disappearing for users in the US and Australia. Meta has announced that it's deprecating the dedicated tab found in the bookmarks section of its social network as part of its efforts to "align [its] investments to [its] products and services people value the most." The company already retired the News tab in the UK, France and Germany in early December 2023, explaining that it's funneling its resources to other things that people want to see more of, such as short form videos. 

In Meta's new post, it said the number of people using the News tab in the US and Australia over the past year has dropped by 80 percent. News makes up less than three percent of what users see on Facebook apparently, and it's just not a big part of their experience. "We know that people don’t come to Facebook for news and political content — they come to connect with people and discover new opportunities, passions and interests," the company wrote. 

By pulling the News tab in Australia, the company will also stop paying publishers in the country for their content after their current deals end. A few years ago, Facebook blocked news links in the country in response to the then-proposed law that would require companies like Meta to pay media organizations for their content. The company unblocked news links just a few days later after it started striking deals with Australian media organizations.

According to The Age, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission believes that Google and Meta inked deals with dozens of outlets, including Guardian Australia and News Corp Australia, worth about $200 million a year. Meta is responsible for around one-third or $66 million of that total amount, meaning its decision is bound to have a huge impact on the news business in the country. And there seems to be no room for negotiation: The company made it clear in its announcement that it's not going to enter new commercial deals for traditional news content in any of the regions where it has already removed the News tab. 

Meta has not blocked news links in the aforementioned countries, however, and Facebook users can still access any that's been posted on the social network. Publishers can also continue posting links to their stories on their official pages as usual. 

Substack newsletter writers and readers can now send direct messages to each other. The company says this was a highly requested feature and it adds to the platform's slate of social networking tools.

You'll find DMs in the Chat tab on the app and website. You can start a private conversation from that tab, someone's profile page or by selecting the Share option on a note or post. When you get a DM, Substack will let you know in the app and by email.

By default, DMs from people you're connected to will land in your inbox and those from others will drop into a Requests folder. Writers can restrict incoming DM requests to paid or founding subscribers. Free subscribers who try to message you will then see a prompt to become a paid subscriber. Writers can include a "send a message" button on their posts if they wish.

If you've blocked or banned someone, they won't be able to send you a DM. You can also turn off DMs entirely by disabling message requests in your settings. If you receive a message that breaks Substack's rules, you can report it. 

Substack has added a number of social networking features over the last year or so, such as the X-like Notes function for short-form posts. It also last week updated a system that allows writers to recommend other scribes to readers.

The platform came under fire last month over its handling of pro-Nazi content. It removed five newsletters that promoted white nationalist and Nazi views. However, some prominent newsletter writers left Substack in protest over its approach to content moderation.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the company’s recent issues with its AI-powered Gemini image generation tool after it started overcorrecting for diversity in historical images. He called the turn of events “unacceptable” and said that the company’s “working around the clock” on a fix, according to an internal employee memo published by Semafor.

“No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes,” Pichai wrote to staffers. “And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.”

Pichai remains optimistic regarding the future of the Gemini chatbot, formerly called Bard, noting that the team has already “seen substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts.” The image generation aspect of Gemini will remain paused until a fix is fully worked out.

This started when Gemini users began noticing that the generator began cranking out historically inaccurate images, like pictures of Nazis and America’s Founding Fathers as people of color. This quickly became a big thing on social media, with the word “woke” being thrown around a whole lot.

Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president for knowledge and information, did not lay the blame on wokeness, but rather a series of tuning errors. Basically, the model was fine-tuned to allow for diverse groups of people in pictures, but “failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range.” This led to controversial images like people of color showing up as Vikings and Native American Catholic Popes.

Raghavan also said that the model became more cautious over time, occasionally refusing to answer certain prompts after wrongly interpreting them as sensitive. This accounts for reports that the model refused to generate images of white people.

It sounds like the company was trying to both please a global audience and ensure the model didn’t fall into some of the traps of rival products, like creating sexually explicit images or depictions of real people. Tuning these AI models is extremely delicate work and the software can easily be led to make ridiculous errors. It’s what they do. In any event, I’d prefer a historically inaccurate Catholic Pope over unexpected violent imagery any day of the week. Chalk this up as yet another reminder that AI still has a long way to go. 

As for Gemini, the company promises the image generator will return in the near future, but it still requires a suite of fixes and tests to make sure this never happens again, including “structural changes, updated product guidelines, improved launch processes, robust evals and red-teaming and technical recommendations.”

Google has been quietly striking deals with some publishers to use new generative AI tools to publish stories, according to a report in Adweek. The deals, reportedly worth tens of thousands of dollars a year, are apparently part of the Google News Initiative (GNI), a six-year-old program that funds media literacy projects, fact-checking tools, and other resources for newsrooms. But the move into generative AI publishing tools would be a new, and likely controversial, step for the company.

According to Adweek, the program is currently targeting a “handful” of smaller publishers. “The beta tools let under-resourced publishers create aggregated content more efficiently by indexing recently published reports generated by other organizations, like government agencies and neighboring news outlets, and then summarizing and publishing them as a new article,” Adweek reports.

It’s not clear exactly how much publishers are being paid under the arrangement, though Adweek says it’s a “five-figure sum” per year. In exchange, media organizations reportedly agree to publish at least three articles a day, one weekly newsletter and one monthly marketing campaign using the tools.

Of note, publishers in the program are apparently not required to disclose their use of AI, nor are the aggregated websites informed that their content is being used to create AI-written stories on other sites. The AI-generated copy reportedly uses a color-coded system to indicate the reliability of each section of text to help human editors review the content before publishing.

Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement to Adweek the company said it was “in the early stages of exploring ideas to potentially provide AI-enabled tools to help journalists with their work.” The spokesperson added that the AI tools “are not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating and fact-checking their articles.”

It’s not clear what Google is getting out of the arrangement, though it wouldn’t be the first tech company to pay newsrooms to use proprietary tools. The arrangement bears some similarities to the deals Facebook once struck with publishers to create live video content in 2016. The social media company made headlines as it paid publishers millions of dollars to juice its nascent video platform and dozens of media outlets opted to “pivot to video” as a result.

Those deals later evaporated after Facebook discovered it had wildly miscalculated the number of views such content was getting. The social network ended its live video deals soon after and has since tweaked its algorithm to recommend less news content. The media industry’s “pivot to video” cost hundreds of journalists their jobs, by some estimates.

While the GNI program appears to be much smaller than what Facebook attempted nearly a decade ago with live video, it will likely raise fresh scrutiny over the use of generative AI tools by publishers. Publications like CNET and Sports Illustrated have been widely criticized for attempting to pass off AI-authored articles as written by human staffers.

Meta’s Oversight Board is expanding its purview to include Threads. The group announced that Threads users will now be able to appeal Meta’s content moderation decisions, giving the independent group the ability to influence policies for Meta’s newest app.

It’s a notable expansion for the Oversight Board, which up until now has weighed in on content moderation issues related to Facebook and Instagram posts. “Having independent accountability early on for a new app such as Threads is vitally important.,” board co-chair Helle Thorning-Schmidt said in a statement.

According to the Oversight Board, user appeals on Threads will function similarly to how they do on Instagram and Facebook. When users have “exhausted” Meta’s internal process, they’ll be able to request a review from the Oversight Board. Under the rules established when the board was formed, Meta is required to implement the board's decisions regarding specific posts, but isn’t obligated to adhere to its policy recommendations.

Adding Threads’ content moderation to the board’s scope underscores the growing influence of the Twitter-like app that launched last summer. Threads has already grown to 130 million users and Mark Zuckerberg has speculated that it could one day reach a billion users.

Officially, Threads has the same rules as Instagram. But Meta has already encountered some pushback from users over its policies for recommending content. Threads currently blocks search terms related to COVID-19 and other “potentially sensitive” topics. The company also raised some eyebrows when it said last week that it wouldn’t recommend accounts that post too much political content unless users choose to opt-in to such suggestions.

Regardless of whether the board ends up weighing in on those choices, it will likely be some time before Threads users see any changes as the result of the board’s recommendations. The Oversight Board only accepts a tiny fraction of user appeals, and it can take several weeks or months for the group to make a decision, and many more months for Meta to change any of its rules as a result of the guidance. (The board can, in some cases, expedite the process.)

Despite quickly amassing more than 100 million users, Meta’s Threads hasn’t exactly broken through to the zeitgeist the way its main rival, X/Twitter, did. It’s arguably still awaiting its plane-on-the-Hudson moment. Nevertheless, Meta is doing what it can to bring attention to and keep eyes on the text-based platform, including by displaying popular threads on Facebook and Instagram.

Its latest test is out of a previous playbook too. The company is toying with letting users cross post from Facebook to Threads with ease. That could eventually make it easier for heavy Facebook users and/or content creators to share their thoughts, videos and photos on Threads without much more effort. As it stands, some users can share text and link posts from Facebook to Threads. There's no guarantee that Meta will deploy the feature in the long term or expand it to include images.

It makes sense for Meta to at least try this. Users have long been able to post stories and Reels to Facebook and Instagram simultaneously, so adding Threads to the mix is a logical step. Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that it's running the test, which is limited to iOS and isn't available in the EU. 

The opt-in approach is far more sensible than automatically sharing a user's Threads posts on Facebook, which Meta was doing for a while to boost awareness of the former. People often have different identities on Facebook and Instagram/Threads, even if they're tied to the same account. They might not want a highly political Threads post or dirty joke to show up in their friends' and family's Facebook feeds. At least this way they'll have the option to share a post on both platforms.

Tinder has announced it’s bringing an advanced ID verification system to the US, UK, Brazil and Mexico. This is part of an ongoing effort to reduce the number of catfish swimming around the old dating pool. The new system requires that users take a video selfie and upload a valid driver’s license or passport.

Tinder has long required users to take photos or video selfies as part of its verification process, which would provide a blue checkmark to illustrate authenticity. So the passport and driver’s license stuff is new. Once you upload the ID, Tinder will check to see if it lines up with your video selfie and the photos on your profile. It’ll also look at the date of birth on the license or passport to confirm your age.

If the idea of uploading your ID to a dating app gives you an icky feeling, you can still get verified with just a video selfie. However, your profile will get a blue camera icon badge, and not a blue checkmark.

Tinder started testing this system last year in New Zealand and Australia, and it must have worked out just fine, given the broader roll-out. The updated verification tool is coming to the UK and Brazil by spring and the US and Mexico by summer. In other words, catfish only have a few more months left to do their thing. That includes you, AI catfish.

This shouldn’t be confused with Tinder’s recently-abandoned background check feature, which was powered by the non-profit Garbo. Tinder and Garbo paired up to provide a robust background check tool on the app in 2019, to check users for histories of violence.

Garbo ended up breaking it off with Tinder’s parent company, Match Group, after disagreements over payments and how to best use the tool. Garbo’s CEO said she’d rather leave the partnership instead of allowing "the vision of Garbo to be compromised and relegated to a piece of big corporations’ marketing goals.”

YouTube just released a new feature that lets users remix music videos and turn them into Shorts. This allows you to adjust various parameters from a full-length music video to create something wholly unique. Does this sound like TikTok? It definitely sounds like TikTok.

Here’s how it works. Just tap “remix” on a music video. You’ll be presented with four options: Sound, Green Screen, Cut and Collab. You can only pick one, so choose wisely. The Sound tool does what you think. It strips the audio and lets you use it in your own YouTube Short. This is the kind of thing that’s hugely popular on TikTok, with many users lip-syncing to various audio clips. This Sound tool is available to any music video and most songs that were automatically uploaded to the platform.  

Green Screen takes things a step further. It turns the video into a background, which you can then dance in front of or whatever. The Cut tool just clips out a five second portion of the video that you can add to any Short. Finally, Collab creates a side-by-side video that places your Short next to the original content. YouTube says this is the perfect option when “you and your friends” want to show off choreography alongside the original artist.

The feature’s already available on the mobile app, though it may not have rolled out to every user yet. If you want to check, just open the app, click on a music video and look for that “remix” option. It’s worth noting that many of these features were already available to Shorts creators, but not in one handy tab.

YouTube/Lawrence Bonk

YouTube Shorts was already a TikTok-alike when it released back in 2021, but these features make it even more, uh, TikTok-ier. With that in mind, YouTube picked the perfect time to officially launch the toolset. Universal Music has pulled its roster from TikTok after a breakdown in financial negotiations. UMG artists include Taylor Swift, Drake, Billie Eilish and many more. 

This has forced TikTok creators to swap out music tracks, as anything sourced from Universal is automatically muted. The record label has accused TikTok of wanting to pay a “fraction” of rates offered by other social media sites. YouTube’s Remix tool has access to Universal’s entire roster.