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Instagram is showing your friends which Reels you’ve liked

Mashable - Tue, 01/21/2025 - 17:24

I come to you bearing bad news: Instagram is showing your friends which Reels you've liked.

It might encourage more engagement on Instagram Reels, but at what personal cost to us all?

At the top right of the Reels, you might see some of your friends' profile photos with little hearts in the corner of their images. Click that, and you'll be taken to the "With friends" tab. Each video will show you which of your friends liked the video, with your friend's image and a heart overlaid on the image in the bottom right.

SEE ALSO: Instagram unveils Edits, a video editing app to rival CapCut

This new feature is intended to get you to stay on the app longer and encourage you to comment, like, and share Reels with your friends like you might with TikTok. And it's not the only effort Instagram is making to keep TikTok users on the app while TikTok is off the app stores (but still working on desktop and your phone if you have it downloaded already). The platform is reportedly paying influencers thousands of dollars to post on Reels before posting on TikTok. It replaced its classic square grids with rectangles to prioritize Reels; released a new video editing tool called Edits, much like TikTok's CapCup; and extended the maximum length of Reels to three minutes.

You can find out which Reels you've been inadvertently sharing with your friends by following a few steps.

Navigate to your profile and click the menu icon in the top right. Select "Your Activity," then select "Likes." This will show all of the posts and Reels you've liked. To only see the Reels you've liked, click the "All content types" dropdown and filter by Reels,

Meta’s Community Notes won’t apply to paid ads

Mashable - Tue, 01/21/2025 - 17:02

Wanna say something absurd on Facebook without anyone to tell your audience it's wrong? Make it a paid ad, I guess.

In early January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his platform would be getting rid of its fact-checkers in favor of Community Notes. It turns out, those Community Notes meant to keep posts factual and accurate won't apply to paid ads, Reuters reports, citing an anonymous source. The only content that community notes will apply to is "organic content," and fact-checking will still not apply to any content at all. As The Wall Street Journal first reported, aspects of the program might still change.

Meta's decision to move towards Community Notes, a decision that copies Elon Musk's move at X, was met with its fair share of criticism. Free Press Senior Counsel and Director of Digital Justice and Civil Rights Nora Benavidez said in a press release posted after Zuckerberg's announcement that content moderation isn't a "tool to repress free speech," but is, rather, "a principle that the platforms themselves developed to promote dialogue and protect truth for users."

"While Zuckerberg characterized the platform giant’s new approach as a defence of free speech, its real intentions are twofold: Ditch the technology company’s responsibility to protect its many users and align the company more closely with an incoming president who’s a known enemy of accountability," Benavidez said in the press release.

SEE ALSO: Mark Zuckerberg wants more 'masculine energy' in corporate America

Making paid ads exempt from the scrutiny of Community Notes nods towards something Zuckerberg has been pretty clear about since the beginning of Facebook: profit over people, every time.

When X decided to move towards community notes, it lost a significant amount of money in ad revenue, because community members could leave notes on paid ads that pointed issues such as dropshipping, mobile game ads that don't match the game play, and AI-related copyright issues. Meta, it seems, is working to avoid that type of ad loss by not allowing Community Notes on paid ads at all. It's not yet known if they'll be allowed on paid endorsements from celebrities and influencers.

It seems these decisions — removing fact-checkers in favor of Community Notes, lifting prohibitions on certain forms of hate speech, scrapping DEI initiatives, removing trans-inclusive features, and more — were made in haste to appease President Trump's administration. So it might take time to see how each of the changes roll out onto each platform.

CapCut, a Video-Editing App From ByteDance, Returns for U.S. Users

NYT Technology - Tue, 01/21/2025 - 16:53
Other apps from the company behind TikTok, including CapCut and Lemon8, went dark this weekend before flickering back. The federal law banning TikTok also applies to them.

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