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Facebook regularly deals with accusations of anti-conservative bias, but a new report suggests it may have been particularly forgiving. Washington Postsources say Facebook has limited punishment for Donald Trump allies who repeatedly violate rules against misinformation, in some cases removing strikes that could have led to reduced News Feed distribution or even bans. The social network pulled a repeat infraction claim against Donald Trump Jr. on Instagram due to fear of a “backlash” from the penalties that would follow, according to the reported insiders.
Other Trump family members also had strikes removed, the sources said. A pro-Trump PAC (America First Action) and other organizations that have repeatedly posted known false information also appeared to have escaped consequences. Facebook said it would label some posts that break its rules, but the Post found examples of clearly false claims from Rush Limbaugh, Gateway Pundit and others that hadn’t received those disclaimers.
Facebook spokeswoman Andrea Vallone didn’t directly challenge the report, noting the social media giant wouldn’t penalize accounts in “rare cases” when a rating wasn’t “appropriate or warranted.” The representative stressed that “many” pages the Post found had been punished for spreading falsehoods, but declined to say how or what the thresholds were to avoid opportunities for “gaming the system.”
If accurate, the exceptions wouldn’t be surprising. Like Twitter and other internet heavyweights, Facebook is aware that Trump and Republicans currently hold power that could lead to regulation and other legal action. Trump’s order demanding a rethink of the Communications Decent Act’s Section 230 is widely considered retaliation against Twitter for fact-checking one of his posts, and Facebook itself caught flak from Senate Republicans for limiting a New York Post story making hotly disputed allegations against Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
Stlll, this isn’t going to help quiet accusations that Facebook has separate standards for different people and groups. Critics have contended that Facebook is allowing misinformation to spread as a consequence, and that it shouldn’t have to fear retaliation when allegations of free speech violations haven’t held up in court. Its bid to please both sides of the American political discourse may have ultimately stoked tensions.
In August, Instagram repeatedly deleted a series of photos of Nyome Nicholas-Williams that showed the Black plus-size model with her arms over her bare chest. Nicholas-Williams argued that Instagram censored her while simultaneously allowing similar photos of thin, white women to stay up on the platform with little or no penalty. "Millions of pictures of very naked, skinny white women can be found on Instagram every day," shetold The Guardian at the time. "But a fat black woman celebrating her body is banned? It was shocking to me. I feel like I'm being silenced." Other Black, plus-size and marginalized creators found Instagram did the same with their photos, and the enforcement action led to a groundswell of online activism centered around the #IWantToSeeNyome hashtag.
A spokesperson for Instagram told The Guardian it had made a mistake when it deleted the photos. “As we looked into this more closely, we realized it was an instance where our policy on breast squeezing wasn’t being correctly applied,” they said. “Hearing Nyome’s feedback helped us understand where this policy was falling short, and how we could refine it.”
In a follow-up with Engadget, a spokesperson for Instagram said photos that show a person squeezing their chest, with a distinct change in the shape of the breasts, are still against the company’s rules. The company says it will continue to censor those to protect users under the age of 13. In instances where there might be some doubt, Instagram says it will instruct its reviewers to leave the content up.
“We are grateful to our global community for speaking openly and honestly about their experiences and hope this policy change will help more people to confidently express themselves,” Carolyn Merrell, global head of policy programs at Instagram, told Engadget. “It may take some time to ensure we’re correctly enforcing these new updates but we’re committed to getting this right.”
For her part, Nicholas-Williams welcomed the announcement. “Hopefully this policy change will bring an end to the censorship of fat black bodies,” she wrote in an Instagram post celebrating the victory.
Earlier this week, Facebook finally released its latest attempt at a TikTok rival. It’s calledInstagram Reels, and as its name suggests, it’s actually a feature that lives inside Instagram, without an app of its own. While incorporating Reels directly inside an already popular app gives it a good chance at succeeding, it also adds clutter and bloat to the Instagram experience, and after trying it out, risks confusing users.
At first glance, Reels looks and feels extremely similar to TikTok. The username, caption and audio track are displayed on the lower left, and the way you flip through videos feels identical as well (you swipe up to scroll to the next video). It doesn’t hurt that Instagram has done a good job in seeding early access to influencers who are also big on TikTok; most of the early Reels’ content has the same kind of dances and amusing lip sync memes, if not direct copies of the videos that were already previously posted on the rival video app.
Creating Reels will instantly be familiar to anyone who has used TikTok. You can speed up or slow down your videos, add AR effects and, of course, add audio tracks. If you want, you can also use the audio of someone else’s Reel to create your own video, which is an important element on TikTok that has helped make songs like Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ go viral. Reels also has an align or “ghost” tool that is useful for making video jump cuts, a popular TikTok technique.
But there are a few important differences between the two. For one thing, Reels are limited to 15 seconds, while TikTok videos can be as long as 60 seconds when you string four 15-second videos together. Additionally, you can’t post “Duets” -- which are side-by-side video responses -- on Reels like you can on TikTok. TikTok also has a few features that are designed for newbies, like templates that let you create photo slideshows and prompts to add text to your video. TikTok can even sense what it is that you’re taking a video of and offer an audio track suggestion to match. Another neat feature is that you don’t actually need to be a TikTok user to watch TikTok videos; you can just launch the app and view them without signing up. You can’t do that with Reels; you need to have an Instagram account to view the videos.
Perhaps the most standout difference, however, is that Reels doesn’t really, well, stand out. The feature is not at all apparent when you launch Instagram. Instead, you have to head on over to the Explore tab, where Reels is given its own dedicated section at the top. From there you have to then tap it again to watch the videos. That’s at least two more taps needed to get to your video feed, compared to TikTok where the main feed is there the second you launch it.
In a way, it makes sense that Reels is tucked away in Explore; after all, you don’t want it to mess up the main feed of photos. But this also makes it a little harder to access. It’s this kind of strange juxtaposition that highlights one of the biggest problems with Reels: it feels like an interloper in the already-cluttered Instagram experience.
The way that Reels implements its feed is an example of how it doesn’t really quite fit inside Instagram. With Reels, there is only one main Explore feed, which is generated via a combination of curated videos, popular reels across a variety of topics, plus ones that are based on your interests and the content you’ve liked and commented on. On TikTok, however, there are two feeds; one is the “For You” page, which is algorithmically-generated and personalized, and the other is for the people you’re Following. With Reels, there is no “Following” tab. Following a user on Reels just makes their photos show up on your main feed, the same as it would be if you followed anyone on Instagram.
That means that if you “followed” somebody on Reels because of their cool dance moves, you would then see the rest of their photo/video content on your main feed. But just because you want to see somebody’s cool dance moves doesn't mean you want to see their vacation photos. Sure, you can mute their posts, but that’s yet another step you need to take to customize your feed. You can also just tap on an individual user account to see their collection of Reels in a separate tab, but again, that’s yet another action you have to take.
One of the reasons for this awkwardness is that, fundamentally, TikTok and Instagram have slightly different purposes. TikTok is mostly known for sharing funny and fashionable memes with a strong entertainment element. Instagram, on the other hand, is largely known as a photo-sharing platform, which tends to have a more personal feel. For a regular user, the marriage of these two concepts doesn’t quite work.
Of course, there are outliers such as brands and wannabe influencers, and for them, Reels could be their ticket to Instagram stardom. As Engadget Senior Editor Karissa Bell said on TikTok, its aforementioned “For You” feed is one of the reasons that unknown personalities can gain a huge following just from a single video going viral. If Instagram were to implement a similar algorithm for its own Reels feed -- therefore surfacing lesser-known users with potentially viral content -- then this could result in the same thing. In fact, Instagram’s VP of Product Vishal Shah has said that the recommendations in Reels will be “separate” from the rest of Explore, with the idea that “Reels is a way for [new creators] to get discovered.”
Instagram has tried something like this before with IGTV, to mixed results. It was supposed to take on YouTube, with longer original content mixed in with your usual Instagram photos and videos. Unlike Reels, Instagram gave IGTV its own app, and is experimenting with commercials to bring ad revenue to influencers. But it doesn’t seem to have taken off the way that Instagram wanted, seeing as the company removed the IGTV button from its main interface this year because “very few” people used it. It’s safe to say that IGTV hasn’t exactly become a huge YouTube rival.
Perhaps the biggest reason Facebook is incorporating Reels into Instagram is that it worked so well with Stories. After all, Stories is a copy of Snapchat in the same way that Reels is a copy of TikTok, and Stories turned out to be a huge success for Instagram. Plus, Facebook did try to do a standalone TikTok clone called Lasso, but it just didn’t get enough users. Why not just tack on these extra features to an app that already has over a billion users instead of trying to get people to use a standalone one?
But Snapchat and TikTok are very different apps. The reason Stories worked so well is that Snapchat back then was a little obtuse and difficult to understand, while Stories was easier to grasp. Plus, Stories have that aforementioned intimate feel that tends to be familiar to a lot of Instagram users who are already used to sharing personal photos and videos.
Reels, on the other hand, feels very different; almost as if it were a clone of an entirely different app shoehorned into an existing one (which obviously it kinda is). Together with other elements like Stories, IGTV and a dedicated shopping hub, Reels is making Instagram feel as confusing and bloated as the Facebook app.
Also, while Stories is located front and center in Instagram, Reels is tucked away in a separate tab and is harder to find. It also lacks key features like Duets and is not all that friendly to newbies. Already, there is some confusion among Instagram users as to where the feature is and how to use it. While that’s not uncommon with new features, this is a sign that Reels might not be at all intuitive and therefore not all that welcoming to TikTok users.
If TikTok does end up being banned from the US, it’s entirely possible that users in the US will end up switching to Reels as a reasonable alternative. But social media is a fickle world, so nothing’s a sure bet. And if TikTok sticks around (in whatever form), then Reels risks being seen as a poor imitation, plus a confusing add-on to Instagram, thus alienating users of both platforms.
In but another evidentiary blow to the conservative mythology that social media platforms are biased towards them and actively silencing correct-wing voices, Buzzfeed studies that for the earlier two months Instagram’s algorithms were heavily favoring content generated by using the Trump reelection campaign.
Not simplest has the algorithm been returning extra Trump-company content on tag searches, Buzzfeed located, however that content has been overwhelmingly constructive with nary a negative connotation to be obvious. Especially, a tag seek for #JoeBiden lower back roughly 390,000 hits when run prior this week. These outcome also included a enormous quantity of hits from professional-Trump threads corresponding to #trump2020landslide and #democratsdestroyamerica. A identical search for #DonaldTrump lower back 7 million hits with nearly zero results coming from anti-Trump tags.
The Tech Transparency task first noticed the trojan horse and believes that it has been in outcome since at least June. “What we’ve noticeable with the associated hashtags with Biden is that there is a lot vitriol, that it seems to be benefitting President Trump,” director of the Tech Transparency task, Katie Paul, instructed Buzzfeed on Wednesday.
An Instagram spokesperson characterized the trouble as a ‘worm’ and pointed out that other non-political hashtags such as #menshair and #artofdrinks have been similarly impacted. “A technical error induced a number of hashtags to now not exhibit related hashtags,” the spokesperson said in a Tuesday announcement. “we have disabled this feature whilst we investigate.”
The Biden campaign declined to comment nevertheless a spokesperson for the Trump crusade “lambasted the malicious program as an illustration of alleged bias against conservatives on social media structures,” consistent with Buzzfeed.
That is a ways from the first time that conservatives have railed against what they perceive as bias, even when actively benefitting from it. Just final August facebook commissioned a 3rd-social gathering audit of its platform within the wake of three years of congressional Republican baseless wingeing about how the social media enterprise inherently promoted liberal content material. This, of path despite the fact that the website online’s top 10 everyday posts, as measured by means of fb itself, are overwhelmingly produced by fringe proper-wing shops like Ben Shapiro and Sean Hannity.
To be reasonable, nonetheless, Instagram’s suggestion algorithm is slightly rubbish to with. As Buzzfeed reporter Ryan Mac facets out above, the platform generally pops worrisome, conspiracy theory-associated hashtags for searches of noted figures akin to Chrissy Teigen.
It will also let you limit incoming direct messages to people you follow.
nstagram is getting more serious about curbing underage use. As of December 4th, the social network will start asking for your date of birth when you sign up, and will use the date from your Facebook profile if you're using that. This will help the service dissuade children under 13 from using the app (and thus violating COPPA), but will also let it create "age-appropriate and safer experiences" like child-oriented account control tutorials and privacy settings. You can expect those in the months ahead.
Your birthday and age won't be visible to other users.
You'll also be glad to hear that Instagram is tightening controls for direct messages. It's rolling out an option that will limit incoming direct messages and group invitations to the people you follow, instead of the all-or-nothing approach from before. Finally, you won't have to put up with spammers adding you to groups in the vain hope that you'll click their links. These changes should arrive in the "coming weeks."
The move follows a Facebook promise from last year that also included more proactive reviews of suspected underage accounts. We wouldn't be surprised if this is only mildly effective -- kids routinely lie in age checks, after all. It might discourage kids from signing up when they simply didn't realize there was a minimum age, though. And let's be honest -- this is partly a defense against regulators worried that Facebook and its brands aren't doing enough to protect kids' privacy.
While Instagram toldReuters that advertising wasn't a main reason for the age check, it won't be surprising if this enables marketing that wasn't always feasible before, such as alcohol ads for people over the legal drinking age. That could be a problem for children who fib about their age and start seeing ads for scotch, but Instagram could then blame the users for misrepresenting themselves.
