Meta’s accounting of the most popular content on Facebook continues to be a confusing mess to untangle. The company released the latest version of its “widely viewed content report,” which details some of the most-viewed Facebook posts in the United States.

And, once again, the latest report raises questions about the company’s ability to limit the spread of what Meta euphemistically refers to as “lower-quality posts.” Between January and March of this year, six of the top 20 most popular links on Facebook were from a spammy website that has since been banned by the company for inauthentic behavior.

“In this report, there were pieces of content that have since been removed from Facebook for violating our policies of Inauthentic Behavior,” the company wrote in a blog post. “The removed links were all from the same domain, and links to that domain are no longer allowed on Facebook.”

The links all came from a Vietnam-based “news” site called Naye News. Unfortunately, Facebook didn’t share details about the actual URLs that went viral and were later removed, so there’s not much we can glean about the actual content. What we do know is that Naye News, which as Bloomberg reporter Davey Alba points out has never before appeared in a widely viewed content report, was able to reach a vast number of Facebook users before the company banned it. Links to Naye News appeared six times on the list of the top 20 URLs, including the two top spots. Together, these links got more than 112 million views, according to the report.

This website wasn’t the only source of questionable content that made it into the top most-viewed list. The fourth-most popular link on the list was a YouTube clip from a town hall meeting with Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, featuring a nurse making provablytly false claims about COVID-19 treatments.

During a call with reporters, head of Facebook Integrity Anna Stepanov, said that links to the YouTube video were demoted in News Feed after it was debunked by fact checkers. The company also added warning labels to discourage it from being reshared. “Without these features, this link would likely have received even more reach,” Stepanov said.

But even with those measures, the link was still viewed more than 22.1 million times on Facebook. That’s more than the number of views on the original YouTube video, which currently has about 6.5 million views.

Meanwhile, another URL on the report, which got 12.3 million views, is a link to a website called “heaveemotions.com,” that now redirects to a website that appears to be meant to trick visitors into installing malware. On Facebook though, the link originally rendered a preview with meme-style text that reads: “They told me the virus is everywhere. I told them so is God. Can I get an Amen? I Bet you won’t repost.”

Screenshot/ Facebook

It’s not the first time overtly spammy content has appeared in one of these reports. In the last version of this report, the top Facebook Page was one later removed by the company for breaking its rules. Reporter Ryan Broderick later identified the page’s origins as a Sri Lankan content farm.

The reports, which Meta began releasing in part to rebut data suggesting far-right personalities consistently dominate the platform, are one of the only windows the company offers into what’s popular on Facebook. That’s been a key question for researchers trying to study the platform and how information, and misinformation, spreads across it. But researchers have also raised questions about how Meta was compiling these reports, which in the past have surfaced bizarre results.

Notably, Meta now says it’s changing the way it evaluates what content is the most “widely viewed” on its platform. Previous reports identifying the top links on Facebook were based on any public post that contained a URL, even if the was just appended to the body of a text post. This meant that popular Pages could effectively spam their followers with random links — like to a website representing former Green Bay Packers football players — embedded in a text or photo post.

Researchers had widely criticized this approach as a widely distributed text post with a link at the end is a lot different than a link post in which the linked content is fully rendered as a preview. Now, Meta is reversing course. “Moving forward, links will need to render a preview in order to be counted as a view, as that more accurately represents what people are seeing.”

Even so, these reports are still only a limited look at what’s most popular on Facebook. The company says the list of the top 20 most-viewed links — the list that included Naye News and COVID-19 misinformation — “collectively accounted for 0.03% of all Feed content views in the US during Q1 2022.” But as always with Facebook, its sheer size means that even a fraction of a percent can equate to millions of views. At the very least, these reports show that it’s still relatively easy to game Facebook’s algorithms and spread “low quality” content.

If we're honest, we're kind of obsessed with food here at Engadget. Senior news editor Billy Steele is a backyard pitmaster and has the finsta to prove it. Editor-in-chief Dana Wollman treats her NYT Cooking recipe box the way gamers treat their backlog. Commerce writer Nicole Lee has channeled her passions into Instant Pot, sous vide and rice cooker experimentations. And my transition into an Italian grandmother is nearly complete with my preference for laboriously homemade pasta sauce over the stuff in store-bought jars. We turn to foodie YouTube and TikTok late at night; we trade recipes in Slack; and we often use this stellar Guy Fieri emoji when things are, as the kids say, chef's kiss.

We live for food when we're not living for tech, so many of us jumped at the opportunity to cook for work. Enter Cooking Week, our first kitchen-focused series, where we explore the intersection of cooking and tech, while also testing out some of the most popular — and wackiest — kitchen gadgets available right now. We dove into the worlds of grills, immersion blenders and, yes, air fryers, and tried out some high-tech appliances that were intimidating at first, but that we eventually mastered.

Long-time Engadget readers will know that we've written about kitchen gadgets before. We've been able to squeeze in mentions of electric kettles and pizza ovens over the years, but we see Cooking Week as our first official love letter to food on Engadget. We hope that you enjoy reading these stories as much as we enjoyed writing them (or, even better, as much as we enjoyed eating the spoils of our testing).

Check out all of the Cooking Week stories right here.

Which of these has greenlit a documentary about HQ Trivia?

• Netflix

• CNN

• Quibi

If you read the headline and correctly chose CNN, congratulations! You've won some internet points, I guess.

An untitled documentary about the trivia app that everyone seemed to be playing a few years ago is scheduled for a 2023 release. It's based on a podcast by The Ringer called Boom/Bust: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia. As Deadline reports, CNN has lined up a director, Salima Koroma (Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street). 

HQ Trivia, which was built by the creators of Vine, debuted in August 2017 and it initially ran two live trivia games per day. The concept was pretty simple. Answer several questions correctly in a row and you'd split the prize pot. Along with the chance to win cash through a mobile app, charismatic main host Scott Rogowsky helped turn HQ Trivia into a phenomenon. At one point, more than 2.3 million people were playing the game simultaneously.

The good times didn't last, however. Co-founder Colin Kroll died in 2018, while Rogowsky departed in 2019 to host a baseball show on DAZN. The app ran out of money in early 2020 and shut down, though it returned a month later thanks to the help of an anonymous investor.

HQ Trivia is still around, though it now runs just one game per week. The latest edition had a commendable 21,000 players. However, at $1,500, the prize was a far cry from the $300,000 the app offered at one point when Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson was a guest host.

It also emerged during Warner Bros. Discovery's upfront presentation that Eva Longoria: Searching for Mexico is moving to CNN. The docuseries was initially a CNN+ exclusive, but the high-profile streaming service was killed less than a month after its debut.

The Biden administration may be struggling in its efforts to fight security-related misinformation. The Washington Postsources claim the Department of Homeland Security has "paused" a Disinformation Governance Board just three weeks after its April 27th announcement. Officials reportedly decided to shut down the board May 16th, but that decision appears to be on hold after a last-minute effort to retain board leader Nina Jankowicz. She resigned from the board and the DHS today (May 18th).

While the leakers didn't directly explain why the Disinformation Governance Board was frozen, they claim the White House neither had clear messaging nor a defense against misinformation and threats levelled against Jankowicz. The board was meant to examine approaches for fighting viral lies and had no power over content, but far-right influencers and outlets misrepresented it as a censorship tool and villainized Jankowicz. The campaigns led to harassment and threats against the board leader — in other words, the board was the victim of the very sort of attack it was supposed to prevent.

We've asked the DHS for comment. In a statement to the Post, the department said the board's role had been "grossly mischaracterized" and that Jankowicz had been targeted by "unjustified and vile personal attacks and threats." Previously, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and White House press secretary Jen Psaki have respectively tried to clarify the board's objectives and debunk falsehoods with little effect.

There is a chance the board could survive depending on a Homeland Security Advisory Council review. If the reports are true, though, the US government may have to rethink its anti-disinformation efforts if they're going to survive both criticism and internal scrutiny.

TikTok is rolling out a feature that will make it easier for users to give appropriate credit to a creator who inspired one of their videos. A new button that's rolling out over the next few weeks will allow you to tag, mention and credit a video in the description.

Users have long been able to tag each other, but this is a bigger push to encourage them to give proper credit to the original work. When you riff on someone else's dance move, joke, meme or audio, adding attribution for their TikTok will be more straightforward.

After you create or edit a TikTok, you'll see a new "video" icon on the posting page. Tap that, and you'll be able to choose a video that you've favorited, liked or posted, or that shares the same sound as your TikTok. Once you pick a video that inspired you, TikTok will add it as a mention in the caption. The app will explain the crediting feature after you tap the video icon for the first time. Users will also be notified when one of their videos is tagged in this way.

TikTok

"Today, we're introducing new tools to better enable creator credit and equitable attribution for our creator community and content originators," Kudzi Chikumbu, TikTok's creator community director, wrote in a blog post. "These features are an important step in our ongoing commitment to investing in resources and product experiences that support a culture of credit, which is central to ensuring TikTok remains a home for creative expression."

Attribution (or lack thereof) is a thorny issue on TikTok and other platforms. Last June, many Black creators on TikTok went on strike. They stopped sharing dance challenges and instead called out the lack of credit they were receiving in an attempt to gain more recognition.

Rick Lewis, for instance, appeared in one TikTok as though they were about to share a dance they created for a Megan Thee Stallion song, before flipping the bird at the camera and switching to a caption that read "Sike. This app would be nothing without Black people." Their TikTok, inevitably, was co-opted by another creator, who racked up nearly a million views (twice as many as Lewis' original) with their spin on it.

The move follows the rollout of the YouTube Shorts remix feature, which automatically includes attribution for the original video's creator. TikTok's approach, however, will require users to manually add credit for the original work.

Meanwhile, Chikumbu says TikTok is working to lift up the creators of trends through initiatives like its Originators series. The Creator Portal also stresses the importance of including proper attribution for trend originators, including tips on how to find them.

It hasn't been a great spring for Sony in terms of new product leaks. The company's new flagship headphones, the WH-1000XM5, broke cover early, as did its latest earbuds. Today, the company officially announced the LinkBuds S: a set of $200 true wireless earbuds with active noise cancellation (ANC) and a host of handy features. Sony says they're designed for a "never off wearing experience," with transparency mode allowing you to tune into your surroundings as needed. 

Joining the open wear LinkBuds that debuted earlier this year, the LinkBuds S have a more "traditional" closed design. The shape is similar to Sony's other recent earbuds, the flagship WF-1000XM4 and the $100 WF-C500. The LinkBuds S are much smaller though, making them more comfortable to wear for longer periods of time, which also serves Sony's mission of all-day use. In fact, the company claims the LinkBuds S are "the world's smallest and lightest, noise-canceling, hi-res" true wireless earbuds. And the IPX4 rating means they can withstand workouts too. 

Inside, 5mm drivers deliver "powerful bass and stunningly clear vocals," according to Sony. The company's Integrated Processor V1, which is also on the WH-1000XM5 headphones, works to maintain sound quality, minimize distortion and bolster noise cancellation. The LinkBuds S also support high-resolution listening via Sony's LDAC codec and DSEE Extreme upscaling. The latter technology recovers finer details that are typically lost to compression of digital audio content. A low-latency mode is on the way for gaming and Sony is working with Niantic to bring spatial audio and head tracking to the AR mobile game Ingress.

Another key difference from the first set of LinkBuds is the addition of ANC. On the LinkBuds S, there's enough noise-blocking ability to reduce background clamor, but Sony is clear the tech isn't as robust as the WF-1000XM4. While this new model doesn't let the outside world in by design, it's equipped with transparency mode to get that job done. What's more, the company's Adaptive Sound Control can be configured to change noise canceling and ambient sound settings based on your activity or location. Plus, Sony's handy Speak-to-Chat feature is available here, which automatically senses your voice, pauses the audio and activates ambient sound mode when you begin to talk. 

Sony

The main feature Sony is hyping for the LinkBuds S is called Auto Play. True to the rumors, this tool automatically plays or resumes audio based on your activity when you put the earbuds in or complete a call. If you're on a walk, for example, you can have a specific playlist selected for that behavior. Auto Play is limited right now in two ways. First, it's only available in the Sony Headphones Connect app on Android right now. The company plans to bring it to iOS in early June. Second, it only works with Spotify and soundscape app Endel. 

For calls, Sony says its Precise Voice Pickup Technology "optimally controls the microphones on both earbuds." Combined with a mesh cover for the mics, the company explains that you can expect clarity walking down a busy street or on a windy day. These claims vary widely from product to product, so we'll be sure to put this through its paces during our review. Other convenience features include compatibility with voice assistants, a full suite of customizable touch controls and support for both Google Fast Pair and Windows Swift Pair. 

In terms of battery life, Sony says you can expect up to six hours of use with active noise cancellation enabled. There's another 14 hours in the charging case too, but the company didn't specify any non-ANC listening times. The case doesn't support wireless charging, but it does offer a quick-charge option. Just five minutes will give you an hour of use. 

The LinkBuds S are up for pre-order starting today with general availability starting May 20th. You'll have black and white color options to choose from at most retailers, but Best Buy will carry an exclusive beige (Ecru) version. This $200 model will sit in the middle of Sony's true wireless lineup, with the flagship WF-1000XM4 at the top and the affordable WF-C500 below. The open design LinkBuds also occupy the mid-range for $20 cheaper, and Sony plans to deliver the Auto Play functionality to that model via firmware update. 

Russia is supposedly using its invasion of Ukraine to try new technology on the battlefield. As Reutersreports, the Russian government says it's using a new wave of laser weapons to counter the Western technology aiding Ukraine's self-defense. Deputy prime minister Yury Borisov claimed Russia was using prototypes for a drone-destroying laser weapon, Zadira, that can burn up drones. One test incinerated a drone 3.1 miles away within five seconds, according to the official.

A more established system, Peresvet, reportedly blinds satellites up to 932 miles above Earth. This was already "widely deployed," Borisov claimed. The deputy leader maintained that new lasers using wide electromagnetic bands could eventually replace traditional weapons.

This isn't the first reported use of cutting-edge tech in the war against Ukraine. CNNnoted that Russia has fired multiple Kinzhal hypersonic missiles at Ukrainian targets. This variant of the Iskander short-range ballistic missile can be launched from a fighter jet (the MiG-31K). Russia has maintained that Kinzhal is virtually impossible to stop due to its very high speed, but US and UK officials have dismissed its effectiveness and argued that it's really just an air-launched variant of a conventional weapon.

As with those hypersonic weapons, it's difficult to know how well the lasers work in practice. Russia has routinely made false claims about its overall capabilities and the war in Ukraine, where it has struggled to gain ground despite a large military. However, these uses may be less about turning the war around and more about symbolism — Russia wants to boast about its technological prowess and discourage further material support for Ukraine.

It was last August that Saints Row developer Volition unveiled its vision for a more grounded reboot of the open-world series. The new title was intended as a swerve away from the series’ trademark preposterousness and juvenalia. Now, with the game set to debut on August 23rd, the team would like to clarify that just because it’s grounded, doesn’t mean it’s not going to be fun. Saints Row hasn’t suddenly become a po-faced exploration of organized crime, and it remains just as cartoonish as you may expect, it’s just a bit more grounded in its cartoonishness.

Last year, Chief Creative Officer Jim Boone and Lead Mission Designer Jeremy Bernstein said that the Saints Row series had burned out its narrative runway. After all, when your character has conquered the Earth, descended into Hell and fought a hair-rock opera duel with the Devil, street-level crime is going to feel like a big comedown. “I’ve been wanting to clarify that!” said Creative Director Brian Traficante, “I believe you can continue that runway [...] but we didn’t want to.”

“In terms of going back to the grounded tone, it took some time,” said Traficante, as the team sought to analyze and define “what is Saints Row?” That series-defining formula seems to focus on meshing fun gameplay, silly jokes, cartoonish violence and a hefty dose of reference gags. “At times, it’s a gag for a gag’s sake, but there’s a consciousness of making sure that it’s exactly what we want to do, and it’s the right time to do it,” he said. There was a focus on ensuring that there’s plenty of light moments to balance out the times in the story when things go dark.

Writer Jennifer Campbell said that the team abides by “the rule of making sure that you’re punching up, not punching down.” Campbell added that “we’re exploring a more diverse group of characters so it gives us a lot more avenues to explore, anyway.” Traficante said that the developers created “internal mechanisms” to help ensure that a broad group of people could weigh in on some of the edgier gags in the game. He added that the team wanted to craft jokes that would enable “everyone [to] be a part of the joke.”

Saints Row’s use of parody reached a fairly extreme level during the fourth game, where it ran a series of relationship-simulation sequences in the vein of Mass Effect. (Except, of course, the camera wasn’t cutting away as quickly when two characters decided to spend some alone time together.) These parodies are “definitely in the recipe,” said Traficante, but that they aren’t “front and center” in the new title, so players will need to hunt out the nods.

Volition

And players will spend a lot of time being encouraged to hunt through the world of Santo Ileso in pursuit of storytelling, gameplay and entertainment. The team has laced the city with randomly spawning discoverables, like a security fan loaded with cash, for you to find as you walk around. Traficante said that it takes testers around a week, playing full time, to work their way through the bulk of the title, which is vast and ever-growing.

As well as the breadth of the city, Volition also wanted to emphasize the depth of features like character customization. Users can expect a level of tweaking that looks to be beyond the level offered in, say, Cyberpunk 2077. You’ll be able to customize your appearance, voice and clothing, as well as the looks of your cars and weapons. And none of these features will be pay-to-use, mercifully, with everything instead unlocking the further into the game you progress.

Interestingly, the new title has a little less narrative freedom than some of its predecessors as a consequence of this richer, deeper world. This, says Jennifer Campbell, is to help imbue the game with a greater sense of purpose and meaning, bolstering the story. “We were really focused on keeping a causal chain, because you’re doing things in response to something,” she said. “You’re shooting at things because you did something earlier in the mission to elicit a response from an enemy faction,” she added, with the aim of putting “reason behind the things that we asked the player to do.” Players will feel that “their actions are affecting the game state.”

Having now seen around 45 minutes of gameplay footage, I can say that the new title focuses on a narrower definition of silly. You can melee an opponent, stick a grenade down their throat and then throw their body over to a group of enemies to blow them up. Or you can ask a friend in co-op play to pick up your car with a helicopter’s trailing electromagnet and drop you off at a mission location. There are piñata guns and footballs that stick to people hurling them up into the air, as well as a new wingsuit mechanic that enables you to bounce off a pedestrian to give yourself more flight time.

Certainly, the arrival of this Saints Row game feels like it’s going to be more of an event than it did previously. The enduring success of GTA Online’s ever-present crime simulation sandbox has sucked so much air out of the genre that having a new alternative should be a big deal: We haven’t had a true “GTA-like” game since 2016’s Watch Dogs 2. The one risk is that Saints Row is looking to perfect a game that users have now moved on from.

As one of the leading makers of Chromebooks, this spring Acer is refreshing its lineup with two new offerings in the Chromebook Spin 714 and the Chromebook Tab 510.

Starting at $750 (or $1,100 for the enterprise model), the Chromebook Spin 714 is the more premium of the two, featuring up to a 12th-gen Intel Core i7 CPU and a 14-inch 2560 x 1600 display. And as an added bonus, the Gorilla Glass used on its display includes an antimicrobial coating designed to resist stains and bacteria. At the same time, the screen's 16:10 aspect ratio gives you a little extra vertical screen space for productivity. 

Acer

Meanwhile, because the Spin 714 is part of Intel's Evo platform, the laptop includes good connectivity thanks to support for Wi-Fi 6E, an HDMI jack and dual Thunderbolt 4 ports. As for battery life, Acer is claiming up to 10 hours on a single charge, with fast charging that can add four hours of additional runtime after being plugged in for 30 minutes. And for people who want a quick and easy way to login to their laptop, there's also an optional fingerprint reader. 

But the feature that sets the Spin 714 apart from a lot of other Chromebooks is its stylus, which features 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity and has a built-in garage for easy storage. And despite having a flexible 360-degree hinge, the laptop has MIL-STD 810H durability designed to guard against drops and splashes. 

Alternatively, for people looking for a more affordable convertible Chromebook, there's the $400 Chromebook Tab 510. Instead of sporting a 360-degree hinge, the Tab 510 features a detachable 2-in-1 design powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 chip. That said, for those wanting to use the Tab 510 as a laptop-like hybrid, just remember its Keyboard Folio Case is an optional accessory. 

Acer

Sporting a 10.1-inch 1920 x 1200 screen, the Tab 510 is a lot more portable than the Spin 714, and it gets slightly better battery life too, with Acer promising 11 hours on a single charge. And in addition to its front-facing 5-MP webcam, there's 8-MP camera in back. However, even with its lower price, the tablet also supports MIL-STD 810H durability, along with bumpers on each corner and a reinforced chassis for even more rugged credibility. And similar to the Spin 714, the Tab 510 also comes with a built-in stylus.

In North America, the Chromebook Tab 510 is slated to go on sale sometime in July starting at $400, with the Chromebook Spin 714 arriving slightly later in August starting at $750. 

You don't need to pay a hefty sum (or go large) to get OLED in a laptop. Acer has unveiled a refreshed laptop line headlined by the Swift 3 OLED, an enhanced version of its thin-and-light mainstream portable. The highlight, as you'd guess, is a 14-inch "2.8K" display that promises OLED's signature high contrast, accurate color (100 percent of DCI-P3) and 500-nit HDR. Add in a 92 percent screen-to-body ratio and it might be a good fit if you want lush visuals without buying an exotic PC.

The Swift 3 OLED runs on 12th-gen Intel Core H-series chips with Iris Xe integrated graphics, PCIe Gen 4 SSDs and as much as 16GB of LPDDR5 memory. It ships to the US this July starting at $900. While we wouldn't call it a budget laptop, that's a relative bargain given the display tech.

Acer

The are upgrades for convertible machines, too. The 14-inch Spin 5 (shown at middle) comes with a 1600p display and configurations that offer up to a 12th-gen Core i7, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD. You'll also get two Thunderbolt 4 ports and an improved cooling system that should net more performance under heavy loads. Opt for the Spin 3 and you'll get 'just' a 1080p 14-inch display, but you'll also have the twin Thunderbolt 4 ports, SSD storage and a range of 12th-gen Core CPUs.

The updated Spin 5 arrives first, shipping in July with a $1,350 starting price. Acer delivers the new Spin 3 in August at an $850 base sticker.

And yes, Acer is expanding its eco-friendly Vero line. You'll find new 14- and 15-inch Vero laptops that meld 12th-gen Core, Thunderbolt 4 and 1080p displays with bodies made partly from recycled and ocean-bound plastic. Desktop users can spring for a 24-inch Veriton Vero all-in-one with up to a 12th-gen Core i9 and GeForce MX550 graphics. The Vero portables ship to the US in September starting at $750 regardless of size, while the Veriton Vero will wait until October to sell for $799.