After bombarding people’s feeds with unwanted content, Instagram has realized its mistake. The social media platform is testing out ways for users to have more control over what pops up on their Explore page and regular feed by informing the app on what they don’t want to see.
Truth Social, the social media platform backed by Donald Trump, is still not available on the Google Play Store. That’s because Google has yet to approve the app due to violations of standards and inadequate content moderation.
The company informed Truth Social earlier this month about “several violations of standard policies in their current app submission and reiterated that having effective systems for moderating user-generated content is a condition of our terms of service for any app to go live on Google Play,” a Google spokesperson told Axios. “Last week, Truth Social wrote back acknowledging our feedback and saying that they are working on addressing these issues.”
Devin Nunes, Truth Social’s CEO, said last week that it was up to Google to determine when the Android version of the app would be available on the store. However, Google asserts that Truth Social will need to resolve the moderation issues first. Google reportedly has concerns over certain content on the platform, including incitements of violence and physical threats.
The platform does apply a label to some posts indicating that the content “may not be suitable for all audiences.” However, at least some content alluding to violence does not feature the banner.
Truth Social’s iOS app debuted on February 20th. Two days later, it emerged that Truth Social was censoring some content and kicking out certain users, so moderation is not a foreign concept to the company. Truth Social hasn’t offered a way to sideload the Android app, even though there’s nothing to inherently stop it from doing so.
There are broader issues at the company, such as an investigation into how it became publicly traded. It’s said to owe a vendor $1.6 million too. On top of that, two key executives resigned soon after the iOS app went live.
Update 8/30 2:43PM ET: A previous version of this story suggested Android users couldn’t access Truth Social via the web. However, the social network has had a web app since May.
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Elon Musk’s lawyers today filed a motion to delay his trial against Twitter by a month, arguing they need more time to process recent claims by whistleblower Peiter Zatko, the former head of security at Twitter. With the motion, Musk’s legal team is attempting to amend its counterclaims against Twitter, using details from Zatko’s legal complaints against the company. The trial between Musk and Twitter is currently scheduled to begin in October, and the motion filed today would delay it into November.
This is the same tactic that Musk is using to try to end his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter altogether. Twitter originally sued Musk in July in an attempt to force him to follow through on their multibillion-dollar acquisition agreement, and Musk counter-sued, attempting to get out of the sale. Musk’s legal team this morning filed a notice with the Securities and Exchange Commission asking to kill the acquisition agreement, citing Zatko’s recent allegations of security deficiencies at Twitter. Zatko’s claims build on Musk’s original argument to end his Twitter takeover, which accused the company of dramatically underestimating the number of bot accounts on the network.
Zatko filed complaints last week with the SEC, Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission accusing Twitter of gross negligence when it comes to information security. Zatko accused the company of encouraging the propagation of spam accounts in the name of increasing user numbers, downplaying the amount of bot profiles on the platform, and running the whole enterprise on outdated software. There is already movement in Congress to investigate these claims.
Twitter said in court filings that Zatko’s accusations are riddled with inconsistencies and lack context. The company has long argued that spam accounts make up less than 5 percent of Twitter’s total user numbers. Musk, and now Zatko, argue the true figure is much higher.
A town in New Mexico is facing a triple punch of climate impacts from wildfire, drought, and intense rainfall. The city of Las Vegas, New Mexico is set to run out of drinking water in September, thanks to pollution and debris from the largest wildfire in state history.
Instagram is giving users more ways to tweak their suggested posts amid a backlash to the app’s aggressive shift toward recommendations. The app is testing a new option that will allow users to use keywords and emoji to mute certain topics from appearing in suggested posts.
The change will block posts in which the users’ keywords, which can include emoji as well as words and phrases, appear in the caption or hashtag for a post. “You can use this feature to stop seeing content that’s not interesting to you,” Instagram writes in a blog post. Users can customize their filter words from the app’s settings. The company notes that people can also opt to snooze all recommendations entirely.
Instagram is also testing a new way to weed out unwanted posts from the app’s Explore section. With the change, users can select multiple posts at a time and mark them all as “not interested.” This will hide those posts, and block out similar recommendations in the future, according to the company.
While both new options require a bit of extra work, the changes could bring some relief for users’ who have been frustrated by the quality of Instagram’s recommendations as the app has taken increasingly aggressive steps to become more like TikTok. Instagram’s top exec Adam Mosseri said last month the company would tone down the number of recommended posts and halt its experiment with a full-screen feed. Both changes have been deeply unpopular, prompting viral memes criticizing the company’s efforts to copy TikTok.
Regardless of criticism, Meta’s leaders have been clear that they intend to shift both Facebook and Instagram’s feeds from mostly friend content to more posts from AI-driven recommendations. But the new controls could help the company eventually improve the quality of those suggestions, which might make them more palatable to users in the long run.
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