Instagram

Zuck worked with T-Pain on a new version of “Get Low,” but the song initially wasn’t playing for me and some Verge colleagues on his Instagram carousel.

Now, the song works for me on iOS, but not on desktop. Meta spokesperson Sienna La Rocca confirms that this isn’t a copyright issue, however.

Update: The song is working on iOS but not on desktop.

In the coming days, Instagram and Facebook users within the bloc will be given the choice to receive “less personalized ads” that are full-screen and temporarily unskippable, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The offering, which Meta says is likely to negatively impact its business, follows pressure from European Union regulators who opposed users having to pay to avoid targeted ads.

Reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi dug up a menu within the app showing the option to “create An AI profile picture.” While you can already upload an AI-generated profile picture to Instagram, this would streamline the process.

Meta’s other apps — Facebook and WhatsApp — have been spotted working on a similar feature.

Over the weekend, several Threads users noticed seemingly random, out-of-context posts on their feeds — only to realize they were replies without the original post attached.

Fortunately, it looks like a fix may be on the way, as Instagram engineer Seth Kinast says the company is “investigating” the apparent bug.

“Social media is doing harm to our kids and I’m calling time on it,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said. “The onus will be on social media platforms to demonstrate they are taking reasonable steps to prevent access. The onus won’t be on parents or young people. There’ll be no penalties for users.”

Legislation will be introduced this month and would come into force 12 months after ratification.

Instagram is adding more filters for the inbox so creators can sort through endless DM requests. The update includes a way to filter by account type (verified accounts, businesses, etc.) and to sort by recency or the number of followers the sender has.

I’ve enjoyed the sliding image carousels on Threads — although it still lacks a toggle to disable autoplaying video — and now Meta’s Twitter-like app can hold up to 20 photos in one post.

That matches the upgrade Instagram announced in August and should be enough for your next visually provocative masterpiece.

NBC News reports the following statement from an unnamed Meta spokesperson:

After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets. Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity.

The move follows warnings by the Biden administration that RT is part of Russian disinformation campaigns targeting the 2024 US election and a State Department notice last week saying, “[W]e now know that RT moved beyond being simply a media outlet and has been an entity with cyber capabilities.”

The update will start impacting Facebook and Instagram users in the UK over the coming months, meaning any public posts, comments, and photos on adult accounts (including those featuring children) will be scraped.

Meta says this will bring its generative AI products to the UK “much sooner,” and help them to reflect “British culture, history, and idiom” ...whatever that bloody means.

With exceptions for users under 18, posts that weren’t set to public, or EU accounts that opted out.

Now ABC reports on Australian senator David Shoebridge's question to Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh.

Shoebridge: “...Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That’s the reality, isn’t it?”

Claybaugh: “Correct.”

Bill Belichick, the longtime Patriots coach who famously never said anything interesting in public for like three decades, just joined Instagram — sorry, Instaface — in the absolute most chaotic way possible. The cuts! The dad jokes! The second slide!

Can’t help but notice Tom Brady hasn’t followed him yet.