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Google and Twitter veteran maps out a Twitter alternative • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Apps, gabor cselle, Social, social media, Startups, TwitterNo Comments

Twitter’s new CEO and owner Elon Musk is rattling the cage at his social network and ruffling a lot of feathers both inside and outside of the company. But while some in the tech world describe that kind of chaos as a garbage fire, others see it as something very different: an opportunity. Years-old federated social networks, legacy social platforms that have their own issues, and a cacophony of pre-existing fringe efforts are all emerging as possible alternatives to Twitter. And in that vein, so are completely new ideas. One of these is being hatched by Gabor Cselle, a repeat founder who wants to build what he described to me as “a new Twitter.” In true Valley hustle style, Gabor is still honing in on small details like a name and what, exactly, all this will entail. He’s doing that in real-time, with a multi-tabbed Google Doc that you can view. But as a first step to gathering interest for his New Twitter, Gabor has put together a sign up list for people to register their interest as he works away. (Note: The name on the sign-up page, T2, appears to be an abbreviation for Twitter 2, but Gabor says this is just a placeholder name.) Now you might be asking yourself, why pay attention to this? Isn’t Gabor getting a little ahead of himself here? He doesn’t have a name, or even a product, yet. Well, yes. Gabor is in that sense just one of hundreds of millions of founders out in the world noodling on ideas. But there are a few things that set him and his alt-Twitter effort apart. For starters, he’s a repeat founder who sold his first company, the YC-based mobile email startup reMail, to Google. His second company, the native advertising startup Namo Media, he sold to Twitter itself. He’s worked on products at those two titans between and after those acquisitions, and that experience — he focused on Timeline, new-user onboarding and logged-out experiences at Twitter; and on many, many different consumer ideas a director at Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator project — has given him a taste of what’s interesting, and what is not. And also what works, and what does not. Gabor left Google in July 2022 and has since been tweeting out his daily journey to figure out what to do next. (Day 106, for example, was spent at ZebethMedia Disrupt, where he came to see Paul Davison, another hustler, talk about the highlights of Clubhouse and the low lights of Highlight.) His public journal has been giving Gabor some Twitter-style viral momentum and attention and, naturally, insight into conversation about Twitter itself. He tells me that Elon’s initial mobilization to buy Twitter led to a huge whir of interest among his friends and contacts, who chattered in downcast tones about how the whole place would fall apart. Then, Musk did buy it. And then, the layoffs hit — a tipping point for Gabor. “I had been thinking about a new Twitter for a while,” he said. “But after multiple friends of mine still at the company were laid off last week, I thought to myself, ‘This is the thing I’ve been thinking about for so long! Maybe this is the time.’” Gabor is long on big-picture ideas at the moment. “I want to build the next public square for discussion. I want it to be delightful and fun, rewarding and valuable, and safe from harassment,” he tells me. “We’ve had 15-20 years of content moderation experience on the internet now, and so let’s build that in.” He’s also a big fan of Andrew Chen’s Cold Start concept. For his own cold start, Gabor is focusing first on coalescing a critical mass of people — a community to hit the ground running when “T2” launches. According to the Google Doc, this is currently set to be September 2023, a date Gabor tells me he might try to move up. He’s even had some investor interest, which he has been building via iMessage. That inbox includes a former Twitter-exec-turned-investor who he will not name, who has already texted asking how much money Gabor would like to have to get this new bird off the ground. And he’s had plenty of unsolicited advice. Twitter is great for that. “Someone asked last week, why doesn’t someone just start a new Twitter? It would only take 3 days and $50 million,” he said. “That’s what got me first to ask what a roadmap might look like. I think for me it wouldn’t be a three-day build, but it also doesn’t take $50 million.” This brings up many other questions… not least why he thinks he can build what Twitter has never managed to build itself. For now, his hunch is that creating something from scratch will be easier than trying to fix something that’s already big and in operation, and that it definitely won’t be as simple as just bringing together what he calls “the best people,” but also not impossible. “I think right now I’m seeing this empty space,” he said, “and I want to be in that space.” Sign up here if you want to take a gander, too.

Elon Musk addresses Twitter advertisers in a meandering Q&A • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Elon Musk, Social, TwitterNo Comments

New Twitter owner Elon Musk joined a Twitter Space today to address concerns from advertisers about changes at the company. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s nascent foray into running a social media platform has been tumultuous, from launching unfinished products, to alienating advertisers, to laying off half of its staff. Twitter’s Client Solutions Leader, Robin Wheeler moderated the hour-long conversation with Musk, Trust & Safety Head Yoel Roth, and International Advertising Bureau CEO David Cohen. For the most part, Musk repeated many of the same talking points that he has been peddling since he initially launched his bid for Twitter. “We really want to be, as I’ve mentioned before publicly, sort of the digital town square, where that is as inclusive as possible… Like, can we get 80% of humanity on Twitter, and talking, and maybe, ideally, in a positive way?” Musk asked at the top of the call. “Can we exchange… instead of having violence, have words, and maybe once in a while people change their minds? The overarching goal here is like, how can we make Twitter a force for good for civilization?” If Musk wants to get 80% of humanity on Twitter, he has his work cut out for him. If Twitter’s estimate of 237.8 million monetizable daily active users is correct, then 3% of the world’s population currently uses Twitter daily. Musk also addressed the questions around his plan to verify any user who is willing to pay $8 per month for a blue check. “The issue is that creating a fake account is extremely cheap, it maybe is a tenth of a penny,” he said. “By charging $8 a month, it raises the cost of a bot or troll by somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000.” He obliquely nodded at the idea that only a certain number of accounts connected to an individual phone number or credit card can be verified. “Wouldn’t a state actor have $8 million a day to create a million fake accounts? Well, yes, they’ve got the budget. But here’s the problem. They don’t have a million credit cards, and they don’t have a million phones. That’s the actual kicker. There’s no way to overcome that. And we will be vigorously pursuing any impersonation,” he said. With regard to the verification process, Musk laid out clearly: “Someone has to have phone, a credit card and $8 a month. That’s the bar.” Musk has continued doubling-down on the idea that by verifying as many users as possible — and charging users for that privilege — it will be more difficult to see posts from users who don’t pay to be verified. “Over time, maybe not that long of time, when you look at mentions and replies and what not, the default will be to look at verified. You can still look at unverified, just as in your gmail or whatever, you can still look at the probable spam folder,” Musk said. “You can still look at all the others, but it will be defaulted to the highly, highly relevant category, which will be verified.” Since before Musk’s acquisition, Twitter has offered a separate feed for verified users that only shows notifications from fellow blue checks. In terms of other product updates, Musk elaborated on some plans for how Twitter can get more into commerce and payments. He also reiterated his previous statements about investing in creator monetization, though existing creator features have not been quite successful for Twitter thus far. With major advertisers listening to the call, Wheeler pivoted the discussion to ask about content moderation and brand safety. Last week, a report revealed that IPG — one of the world’s largest advertising companies, with customers such as Coca-Cola, American Express, Johnson & Johnson, Mattel and Spotify — issued a recommendation for clients to temporarily pause their spending on Twitter because of moderation concerns. The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), a coalition of platforms, advertisers and industry groups fighting harmful content on social media, also said it was monitoring Twitter’s handling of content moderation. Yet Musk’s comments were vague and did not specifically address these groups’ concerns. “It stands to reason that if somebody’s advertising, that they do not want super negative information right next to their ad,” Musk said. “We all kind of work hard to make sure that there’s not bad stuff right next to an ad.” He also said that Twitter is working to increase the relevance of ads. When asked about hate speech, Musk responded, “I don’t think having hate speech next to an ad is great.” Musk was equally avoidant when asked about his plan to create his own content moderation council. Musk has continually said that this group will represent a diverse set of viewpoints, but did not state what kinds of people or groups will be on the board. After a meeting with human rights groups last week, Musk committed to including representatives from groups that suffer from hate-fueled violence. But Musk said today that it might take a few months to put this council together. Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months. We will keep what works & change what doesn’t. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 9, 2022 Roth commented on how enforcement policies might change soon, too. “For many years, the only thing that Twitter could do was delete tweets and ban accounts,” he said. “One of the directions that we’re trying to build towards is having more tools in our toolbox to be able to reduce the harmful impacts of content without always having to go to that step of a ban. And so in the coming days and weeks, you’re going to see us start to introduce some of these new concepts and frameworks for content moderation.” Roth elaborated: “There’s a lot of other stuff that we can do, from warning messages, to interstitials, to reducing the reach of content, that we haven’t fully explored in the past. And you’re going to see us move

Elon Musk details his vision for a Twitter payments system • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Apps, Elon Musk, Fintech, payments, Social, TwitterNo Comments

Elon Musk detailed his vision for Twitter’s plan to enter the payments market during a live-streamed meeting with Twitter advertisers, hosted on Twitter Spaces on Wednesday. The new Twitter owner suggested that, in the future, users would be able to send money to others on the platform, extract their funds to authenticated bank accounts, and later, perhaps, be offered a high-yield money market account to encourage them to move their cash to Twitter. The new remarks followed a report this morning by The New York Times which confirmed Twitter last week had filed registration paperwork that would allow it to process payments. The report cited Twitter’s filing with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), noting that a business would need to register before it could conduct money transfers, exchange currency or cash checks. In today’s meeting, Musk explained how paid verification, which Twitter is rolling out now with its revamped Twitter Blue subscription, as well as support for a creator ecosystem could pave the way for a payments system on its platform. He stressed that, initially, Twitter would need to make fundamental technology architecture changes in order to better support video. The company was recently reported to be working on a “Paywalled Video” feature that would allow creators to charge for access to their content. This suggests Twitter could be moving into a space where it may try to compete more directly with various social media video providers, like TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and others. The Washington Post saw mockups of this concept where a tweet with a video could be unlocked for as little as $1.00. It said creators may be able to choose from preset prices, like $1, $2, $5, or $10 when paywalled videos were launched. As a result, creators would end up with a cash balance as they began to monetize their content. In addition, Musk noted that Twitter’s paid verification program would help in its plan for payments because anyone who subscribed to Twitter Blue would have already been verified by the “conventional payment system.” That is, Twitter Blue subscribers have to sign up using a credit or debit card and have their payments processed through the app stores’ in-app purchase system, which helps to combat fraud. Musk then explained how this payments system could scale saying that, once users gained a cash balance, Twitter could prompt them to move that money on its platform. It could even make a small donation to users’ accounts to get them started. “Now we can say, okay, you’ve got a balance on your account. Do you want to send money to someone else within Twitter? And maybe we pre-populate their account…and say, okay, we’re gonna give you 10 bucks. And you can send it anywhere within Twitter,” Musk said. Later, the user could move their money out of Twitter by transferring it to an authenticated bank account, he added. In the longer term, however, Musk appeared to be toying with the idea of establishing bank accounts on Twitter’s platform that would pay a high-interest rate to attract users. This could become a competitor, perhaps, to Apple’s recently launched Savings Account for its cardholders, various fintechs or other payment providers, like PayPal and Venmo, which encourage their users to retain cash balances within their own ecosystems. Explained Musk, “the next step would be this offer for an extremely compelling money market account where you get an extremely high yield on your balance.” If such a system existed, he believed people would move cash to Twitter. “And then add debit cards, checks, and whatnot and…just basically make the system as useful as possible. And the more useful and entertaining it is, the more people will use it,” he said. The move to enter the payments business also ties to Musk’s larger plan to turn the social media platform into an “everything app” or “super app” called “X.” While that plan today is still fairly vague, the general sense is that Musk aims to combine payments, social networking, entertainment and other things into one experience, similar to China’s WeChat (though that plan could be misguided.) Musk has experience in payments, of course, as he founded an early digital payments company X.com. It’s not surprising that he would try again, given the opportunity Twitter presents. His ideas about Twitter payments, however, may not have been good fodder for a conversation with advertisers who are already worried about Twitter’s long-term commitment to their goals, given the company’s move into subscriptions which signals a desire to reduce reliance on ad dollars. Musk tried to assuage these fears by saying that Twitter was thinking about protecting advertisers’ brand safety in the longer term, not just about its ability to drive short-term sales.

RIP ZebethMedia’s Official Twitter Badge (11/9/22-11/9/22) • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in parody, Social, TwitterNo Comments

For a few hours this morning, ZebethMedia was recognized by Elon Musk’s newest plaything, Twitter, as a news organization with enough merit to warrant a highly-coveted “official” designation. We regret to inform our readership that this elite classification has since been rescinded… along with the designation on all other accounts that earned this momentous honor. This morning, Twitter began rolling out a grey “official” badge. Since the blue checkmark can soon be purchased for $8 per month, this designation was intended to denote important accounts to protect them against impersonation (essentially, the same purpose that the blue check used to serve). But after a blissful few hours of acknowledgment from our new bird app overlords, our official check has moved on to a better place. When tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee posted about his own grey official badge, Chief Twit Elon Musk replied, “I just killed it.” The Tesla and SpaceX CEO followed up, “Blue check will be the great leveler.” Musk then took to his own account to explain: “Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months. We will keep what works & change what doesn’t.” Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months. We will keep what works & change what doesn’t. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 9, 2022 Esther Crawford, the product manager who announced the roll out of official badges last night, said that this reversal may be temporary: “The official label is still going out as part of the @TwitterBlue launch — we are just focusing on government and commercial entities to begin with. What you saw [Musk] mention was the fact that we’re not focusing on giving individuals the ‘Official’ label right now.” For now, those of us at ZebethMedia HQ remain hopeful for our future as a Super Extra Verified account. “We at ZebethMedia were thrilled to be recognized as official by Twitter. We will always look back on our time as official with fond recollection and a sense of immense pride,” said Managing Editor Darrell Etherington in a statement. ZebethMedia has had a blue check on Twitter for at least ten years, an in-depth investigation into the Wayback Machine revealed. Though its tenure as an “official” account was short-lived, sources inside of ZebethMedia say that these meaningful memories will not be forgotten. “Despite no longer being official, we will continue, as a brand, to act in such a manner as we hope reflects the high honor of the mantle now that we’re once again reduced to just a single checkmark,” Etherington added. “Special thanks to our community for sticking with us through this trying time.”

Twitter begins to roll out grey checkmarks for high-profile accounts • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Apps, grey checkmark, Social, social media, Twitter, verificationNo Comments

A day after announcing that it’d denote high-profile accounts in a way distinctive from the blue checkmark now available to all Twitter Blue subscribers, Twitter has begun to roll out new badges that denote particular categories of official accounts, including government accounts, major media outlets and some public figures. The move is an attempt to safeguard against information spreading and impersonation on the platform as Twitter grapples with the fallout of expanding eligibility for its blue checkmark, which was previously reserved for vetted, expressly-ID-verified Twitter users. The new badges — a grey checkmark beneath the old blue verification checkmark — designate accounts as “Official,” in line with what app researcher Nima Owji revealed less than a week ago in Twitter’s public code. Accounts including ZebethMedia’s and several government officials, among them U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mitt Romney (R-UT), show the grey check as of this morning. But from a cursory search, there doesn’t appear to be much rhyme or reason to how the badges have been applied. For example, The Wall Street Journal’s account initially didn’t have a grey badge; The Information’s still doesn’t. Nor does Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s. Image Credits: Twitter Those oversights will be addressed in the coming days presumably — Twitter no doubt has thousands, if not millions, of high-profile accounts to comb through and vet. It’s work it made for itself — as alluded to earlier, the recently-launched Twitter Blue plan that grants subscribers a blue checkmark doesn’t include ID verification, a flaw Twitter users including comedians Sarah Silverman and Kathy Griffin exploited in the past week to show how easy it is to pose as another account. Silverman, Griffin and others who created satirical handles were banned following Musk’s unilateral decision over the weekend to permanently bar from the platform impersonators who don’t make it clear that they’re engaging in parody.

Meta slashes expenses on reduced hiring and capex investments • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in CAPEX, expenses, Facebook, meta, metaverse, SocialNo Comments

Meta’s body blow layoff announcement will see the parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp making its first-ever major layoffs as a company, cutting 11,000 employees, 13% of its total; predictably investors are responding favorably, bumping the stock up by over 5% in pre-market trading. While the dust settles and we start to get an idea of how specific departments, products and regions are being impacted, Meta’s also released some updated financials for 2023 that detail billions shaved off of its expenses estimates on the back of reduced hiring and less capex spending in areas like metaverse. In an 8-K filing today, the company confirmed it will reduce hiring next year, shaving off between $1 billion and $2 billion off its 2023 total expenses range as a result. Overall expenses for 2023 are now estimated at between $94 billion and $100 billion, versus its previous range of $96 billion to $101 billion. “The updated range reflects our plan to add fewer employees in 2023 than we previously expected as we are significantly slowing our hiring trajectory through the beginning of 2023,” Meta said, expanding on words from CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his open letter, which referred to a “hiring freeze” in Q1. (The expenses figure includes $2 billion in charges due to reduced office facilities, which Meta had previously disclosed.) Meta also noted in the 8-K that it is narrowing capital expenditures for 2023 by $2 billion at the top end. Capex estimates are now between $34 billion and $37 billion, versus $34 billion and $39 billion previously. Meta doesn’t detail here which areas will be hit by those cuts — capex can include any number of things such as data centers and network infrastructure, as well as Meta’s costly “metaverse” effort — but it does note that the latter of these is not looking very bright. “We continue to anticipate that Reality Labs operating losses in 2023 will grow significantly year-over-year,” Meta said. Again, it doesn’t specify numbers, but Reality Labs (the division that houses the metaverse operation) accounted for $285 million in revenues in Q3, just 1% of the company’s total for that period. The company’s ambitions to grow metaverse and other new lines of business have been a big pull on Facebook’s balance sheet. For context, in 2020, the company sunk $15.72 billion into capex, a figure that ticked up in 2021 to $19.24 billion. In 2022, capex looks to be even more outsized against a stark backdrop of sluggish revenue due to declining returns on its core advertising business: Meta estimated in Q3 that 2022 capex would be in the range of $32 billion and $33 billion. “In this new environment, we need to become more capital efficient,” Zuckerberg wrote in his note today. “We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas — like our AI discovery engine, our ads and business platforms, and our long-term vision for the metaverse. We’ve cut costs across our business, including scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking our real estate footprint. We’re restructuring teams to increase our efficiency.” Revenue ranges previously provided by Meta for Q4 revenue — between $30 billion and $32.5 billion — are unchanged, it said in the 8-K filing today, as are the ranges it provided for overall expenses in 2022, which are between between $85 billion and $87 billion.

Twitter will add an ‘official’ badge to high-profile accounts in lieu of verification • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in SocialNo Comments

Twitter is turning the famous blue checkmark into a symbol that denotes you’ve paid Elon Musk $8, rather than one that identifies public figures. But of course, if anyone with a spare $8 and a fragile ego can get verified, then the symbol is rendered meaningless, paving the way for trolls to go hard on impersonation gags. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO learned this himself first hand, so Twitter is introducing an “official” badge, a separate form of user verification than the blue check. A lot of folks have asked about how you’ll be able to distinguish between @TwitterBlue subscribers with blue checkmarks and accounts that are verified as official, which is why we’re introducing the “Official” label to select accounts when we launch. pic.twitter.com/0p2Ae5nWpO — Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) November 8, 2022 “Not all previously verified accounts will get the ‘Official’ label and the label is not available for purchase,” explained product manager Esther Crawford in a tweet. “Accounts that will receive it include government accounts, commercial companies, business partners, major media outlets, publishers and some public figures.” The official badge seems like it will essentially represent what blue checks used to denote…. which should not be confusing at all for over 200 million creatures of habit who log onto the bird app every day. “The new Twitter Blue does not include ID verification – it’s an opt-in, paid subscription that offers a blue checkmark and access to select features,” Crawford continued in a Twitter thread. “We’ll continue to experiment with ways to differentiate between account types.” App researcher Nima Owji spotted this feature in development less than a week ago as what remains of Twitter’s staff rushes to meet fast deadlines. Twitter initially planned to roll out its new system, in which anyone can buy themselves a blue check, on Monday. But the roll out was delayed until after Tuesday’s U.S. midterm elections in an attempt to curb abuse. The move was reportedly aimed at limiting the potential fallout of verified users impersonating political figures or news outlets claiming false results that may discourage others from voting. This “official” designation would attempt to safeguard this kind of deliberate misinformation from spreading, yet it’s a tall ask to educate over 200 million daily users about a new feature that will fundamentally change the way they identify and consume news on a platform that they may have been using for over a decade. Still, Twitter Head of Safety and Integrity Yoel Roth claimed that Twitter’s “core moderation capabilities remain in place” despite the company’s mass layoffs.

Twitter safety head suggests further ‘identity verification’ beyond paid verification may later be required • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Elon Musk, identity, Privacy, Social, Twitter, twitter blue, verificationNo Comments

Twitter’s head of Safety and Integrity Yoel Roth admitted in a Twitter thread that the company may have to further invest in “identity verification” that goes beyond the paid verification system that will accompany its revamped Twitter Blue subscription. Under Elon Musk, Twitter has rushed to release a new version of its Twitter Blue subscription whose key selling point will be the ability to purchase a verification badge by paying $7.99 per month. This change is meant to make Twitter verification more accessible to users who previously couldn’t get verified under Twitter’s old system, which only doled out the coveted blue-and-white badge to public figures, celebs, politicians, journalists, and other high-profile individuals. Twitter’s prior system vetted who received the checkmark through an internal process that would confirm the person was who they said they were, so other users on Twitter could be assured of that public figure’s identity. Now, Twitter seems to realize that real identity verification — the kind that can’t be bought for $8, that is — actually has its advantages. But it’s unclear where Twitter would draw the line in terms of who would require their identities to be further verified or how that would be accomplished. In a thread where Roth attempted to explain Twitter’s differing policies around parody (which is permitted), and impersonation (which is not), he also detailed how the company would tackle a situation where a number of verified, blue-badged accounts engaged in impersonation. This led to him sharing his thoughts about identity verification on Twitter, as well. Verification! Impersonation! Twitter Blue! There’s a lot going on around identity on Twitter — let’s break down what our policies are, and some of the big questions we still need to answer… — Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) November 8, 2022 The thread came about because large-scale impersonation is something that recently happened to Elon Musk himself. This week, a number of verified celebrities appropriated Musk’s screen name and profile picture to troll him. Musk responded by announcing a ban on any accounts pretending to be someone else and even booted one of the impersonators — comedian Kathy Griffin — off of Twitter entirely. (She later returned to the platform by using her late mother’s Twitter account.) Roth said that going forward, Twitter will deal with impersonation conducted by verified users as it has in the past — it would suspend those accounts engaging in the practice. When the new Twitter Blue subscription launches publicly, however, impersonation could become more difficult to enforce if there’s an increase in verified users for Twitter to keep its eye on. To address this, Roth said that Twitter will “ramp up proactive review of Blue Verified accounts that show signs of impersonating another user,” and then suspend them, if found. He also called for Twitter users to also report accounts engaged in impersonation. Of course, Roth’s Trust & Safety team has seen layoffs following Musk’s Twitter takeover, potentially making such enforcement a challenge. While the exec claimed that his team only saw 15% cuts, compared with 50% cuts for Twitter overall, it’s clear that many teams that played vital roles around managing misinformation on the service were impacted – including those that dealt with election integrity and public policy. It’s not understood how well the newly under-staffed teams would be able to keep up if a large number of users decided to engage in impersonation after becoming verified. Because of the potential for abuse, Twitter decided to delay the rollout of the revamped Twitter Blue system until after the U.S. midterms elections on Tuesday, The New York Times reported this weekend and Roth has now confirmed. What’s more, is that Roth seems to admit that simply asking users to pay for their blue badge isn’t a very robust form of identity verification and that Twitter may need to do more in this area in the future. (You know…like it used to, back when verification meant something more than “I have $8!”). Roth explained Twitter’s older system made verification both a signal of authenticity (you are who you say you are) and notability, meaning you’re important in some way. The exec said he supports getting rid of notability and instead focusing on “proof-of-humanness” — something that the $8 paid subscription feed could help with as it could weed out spammers and bad actors who don’t want to pay or go through the fraud checks involved with in-app purchases on the major app stores. However, Roth hinted that paid verification alone cannot work to verify identities entirely, suggesting that Twitter will need to do more work on this front in the future. “Long-term, I think we need to invest more in identity verification as a complement to proof-of-humanness,” wrote Roth. “Paid Verification is a strong (not perfect) signal of humanness, which helps fight bots and spam. But that’s not the same thing as identity verification,” he said. Roth didn’t go into further detail about what Twitter may need to do differently beyond paid verification through Blue to accomplish identity verification. Long-term, I think we need to invest more in identity verification as a complement to proof-of-humanness. Paid Verification is a strong (not perfect) signal of humanness, which helps fight bots and spam. But that’s not the same thing as identity verification. — Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) November 8, 2022 His statement, however, raises questions about what Twitter could have in mind here. Today, a number of social networks have begun to embrace facial recognition and A.I. to verify their users, which has raised privacy concerns. Instagram, for example, uses A.I. to scan “happy birthday” posts to see if a child may have lied about their age at sign-up. Yubo is asking all the users on its platform to verify their age with a facial scan. While those methods are focused on making sure minors haven’t lied about their ages on the platform, they could be put to use for other purposes. Video, in particular, comes in handy for identity verification — even Amazon was

Instagram rolls out an in-app scheduling tool to all professional accounts • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Apps, Instagram, meta, SocialNo Comments

Instagram is rolling out an in-app scheduling tool to all professional accounts in its app, the company has announced. The new tool allows businesses and creators to schedule their posts in advance without having to use third-party apps or Creator Studio. Social media managers and creators have long relied on third-party tools to schedule posts on Instagram, so the new scheduling tool will likely be a game changer. The official launch comes a few weeks after the social network began testing the scheduling tool with select users. With the new tool, businesses and creators will be able to schedule posts, reels and carousels directly in the app up to 75 days in advance. Once you have created a post, you can access the scheduling tool by tapping “Advanced settings.” Then, you will see a new “Schedule this post” toggle. After you have selected the new option, you will be able to select the time and date that you want the post to go live. You then need to navigate back to the Instagram post flow and tap “schedule.” Creators and businesses will be able to see scheduled posts in the “Scheduled Content” section that is accessible via the hamburger menu. The section also lets you reschedule content if needed. The launch of the new tool isn’t exactly a surprise, given that app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi noted that Instagram was working on a scheduling feature back in July. Instagram hasn’t said when or if regular accounts will get access to the in-app scheduling tool, but ZebethMedia has reached out to learn more. It’s worth noting that anyone can switch to a professional account by navigating to their account settings. In addition to rolling out the new scheduling tool, Instagram also launched “Achievements” in reels. Creators will be able to unlock achievements in relation to specific actions when creating a reel, such as collaborating with another creator, engaging with their community by making reels more interactive, making more than one reel in a week or using trending audio and effects. Creators will be notified when they have unlocked an achievement after publishing their reel. They will also be able to keep track of the achievements they have and haven’t earned. Instagram is testing Achievements globally starting this week.