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X will soon stop allowing users to hide their blue checkmarks, and some users are not happy.

Previously, a blue tick on Twitter was a mark of a notable account, providing some assurance to followers of the account's authenticity. But then Elon Musk decided to start charging for the blue tick instead, and mayhem ensued as a wave of imposter accounts began jokingly posing as brands.

After that, paying for a blue checkmark began to attract derision, as non-paying users passed around a meme under blue-checked posts, saying, "This MF paid for Twitter." To help spare paid subscribers this embarrassment, X began allowing users to hide their blue check last August, turning "hide your checkmark" into a feature of paid subscriptions.

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Discord had long been strongly opposed to ads, but starting this week, it's giving video game makers the ability to advertise to its users. The introduction of so-called Sponsored Quests marks a notable change from the startup's previous business model, but, at least for now, it seems much less intrusive than the ads shoved into other social media platforms, especially since Discord users can choose not to engage with them.

Discord first announced Sponsored Quests on March 7, with Peter Sellis, Discord's SVP of product, writing in a blog post that users would start seeing them in the "coming weeks." Sponsored Quests offer PC gamers in-game rewards for getting friends to watch a stream of them playing through Discord. Discord senior product communications manager Swaleha Carlson confirmed to Ars Technica that Sponsored Quests launch this week.

Discord shared this image in March as an example of the new type of ads. (credit: Discord)

The goal is for video games to get exposure to more gamers, serving as a form of marketing. On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that it viewed a slide from a slideshow Discord shows to game developers regarding the ads that reads: "We’ll get you in front of players. And those players will get you into their friend groups."

Enlarge / A promotional image for Sorry for Your Loss, which was a Facebook Watch original scripted series. (credit: Facebook)

Last April, Meta revealed that it would no longer support original shows, like Jada Pinkett Smith's Red Table Talk talk show, on Facebook Watch. Meta's streaming business that was once viewed as competition for the likes of YouTube and Netflix is effectively dead now; Facebook doesn't produce original series, and Facebook Watch is no longer available as a video-streaming app.

The streaming business' demise has seemed related to cost cuts at Meta that have also included layoffs. However, recently unsealed court documents in an antitrust suit against Meta [PDF] claim that Meta has squashed its streaming dreams in order to appease one of its biggest ad customers: Netflix.

Facebook allegedly gave Netflix creepy privileges

As spotted via Gizmodo, a letter was filed on April 14 in relation to a class-action antitrust suit that was filed by Meta customers, accusing Meta of anti-competitive practices that harm social media competition and consumers. The letter, made public Saturday, asks a court to have Reed Hastings, Netflix's founder and former CEO, respond to a subpoena for documents that plaintiffs claim are relevant to the case. The original complaint filed in December 2020 [PDF] doesn’t mention Netflix beyond stating that Facebook “secretly signed Whitelist and Data sharing agreements” with Netflix, along with “dozens” of other third-party app developers. The case is still ongoing.

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Unsealed court documents have revealed more details about a secret Facebook project initially called "Ghostbusters," designed to sneakily access encrypted Snapchat usage data to give Facebook a leg up on its rival, just when Snapchat was experiencing rapid growth in 2016.

The documents were filed in a class-action lawsuit from consumers and advertisers, accusing Meta of anticompetitive behavior that blocks rivals from competing in the social media ads market.

"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (who has since rebranded his company as Meta) wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.

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Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users' consent, a Glassdoor user named Monica was shocked to discover last week.

"Time to delete your Glassdoor account and data," Monica, a Midwest-based software professional, warned other Glassdoor users in a blog. (Ars will only refer to Monica by her first name so that she can speak freely about her experience using Glassdoor to review employers.)

Monica joined Glassdoor about 10 years ago, she said, leaving a few reviews for her employers, taking advantage of other employees' reviews when considering new opportunities, and hoping to help others survey their job options. This month, though, she abruptly deleted her account after she contacted Glassdoor support to request help removing information from her account. She never expected that instead of removing information, Glassdoor's support team would take the real name that she provided in her support email and add it to her Glassdoor profile—despite Monica repeatedly and explicitly not consenting to Glassdoor storing her real name.

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There are some circumstances where government officials are allowed to block people from commenting on their social media pages, the Supreme Court ruled Friday.

According to the Supreme Court, the key question is whether officials are speaking as private individuals or on behalf of the state when posting online. Issuing two opinions, the Supreme Court declined to set a clear standard for when personal social media use constitutes state speech, leaving each unique case to be decided by lower courts.

Instead, SCOTUS provided a test for courts to decide first if someone is or isn’t speaking on behalf of the state on their social media pages, and then if they actually have authority to act on what they post online.

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Meta is discontinuing data analysis tool CrowdTangle on August 14. The closure will come three months ahead of the next US presidential election and three years after it was reported that the platform used for spotting misinformation on Facebook and Instagram was causing internal strife.

Meta acquired CrowdTangle in 2016. CrowdTangle has been used by researchers, reporters, and government officials to identify trends about conspiracies and other forms of misinformation spreading through Facebook. Meta is going to replace CrowdTangle with a technology currently under development called Meta Content Library, but it will only be available to academic and nonprofit researchers. For-profit organizations, like many news organizations, will lose access, as The Wall Street Journal points out.

Previously, CrowdTangle had some features available to the public, like Live Displays, which tracked how people discussed trending topics on certain social media channels like Facebook Pages. Journalists working at for-profit news outlets were able to apply for access to the full CrowdTangle service, as were publishers, including music labels, content creators, and public figures.

We've been following the annual Dance Your PhD contest for several years now, delighting in the many creative approaches researchers have devised to adapt their doctoral theses into movement—from "nano-sponge" materials and superconductivity to the physics of atmospheric molecular clusters and the science of COVID-19. This year's winner is Weliton Menário Costa of the Australian National University for his thesis "Personality, Social Environment, and Maternal-level Effects: Insights from a Wild Kangaroo Population." His video entry, "Kangaroo Time," is having a bit of a viral moment, charming viewers with its catchy beat and colorful, quirky mix of dance styles and personalities—both human and kangaroo.

As we reported previously, the Dance Your PhD contest was established in 2008 by science journalist John Bohannon. It was previously sponsored by Science magazine and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and is now sponsored by the AI company Primer, where Bohannon is the director of science. Bohannon told Slate in 2011 that he came up with the idea while trying to figure out how to get a group of stressed-out PhD students in the middle of defending their theses to let off a little steam. So he put together a dance party at Austria's Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, including a contest for whichever candidate could best explain their thesis topics with interpretive dance.

The contest was such a hit that Bohannon started getting emails asking when the next would be—and Dance Your PhD has continued ever since. It's now in its 16th year. There are four broad categories: physics, chemistry, biology, and social science, with a fairly liberal interpretation of what topics fall under each. All category winners receive $750, while Costa, as the overall champion, will receive an additional $2,000.

Enlarge / The Supreme Court of the United States in Washington, DC, in May 2023. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

The US Supreme Court today heard oral arguments on Florida and Texas state laws that impose limits on how social media companies can moderate user-generated content.

The Florida law prohibits large social media sites like Facebook and Twitter (aka X) from banning politicians and says they must "apply censorship, deplatforming, and shadow banning standards in a consistent manner among its users on the platform." The Texas statute prohibits large social media companies from moderating posts based on a user's "viewpoint." The laws were supported by Republican officials from 20 other states.

The tech industry says both laws violate the companies' First Amendment right to use editorial discretion in deciding what kinds of user-generated content to allow on their platforms and how to present that content. The Supreme Court will decide whether the laws can be enforced while the industry lawsuits against Florida and Texas continue in lower courts.

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Reddit filed to go public on Thursday (PDF), revealing various details of the social media company's inner workings. Among the revelations, Reddit acknowledged the threat of future user protests and the value of third-party Reddit apps.

On July 1, Reddit enacted API rule changes—including new, expensive pricing —that resulted in many third-party Reddit apps closing. Disturbed by the changes, the timeline of the changes, and concerns that Reddit wasn’t properly appreciating third-party app developers and moderators, thousands of Reddit users protested by making the subreddits they moderate private, read-only, and/or engaging in other forms of protest, such as only discussing John Oliver or porn.

Protests went on for weeks and, at their onset, crashed Reddit for three hours. At the time, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said the protests did not have “any significant revenue impact so far.”

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The European Commission (EC) is concerned that TikTok isn't doing enough to protect kids, alleging that the short-video app may be sending kids down rabbit holes of harmful content while making it easy for kids to pretend to be adults and avoid the protective content filters that do exist.

The allegations came Monday when the EC announced a formal investigation into how TikTok may be breaching the Digital Services Act (DSA) "in areas linked to the protection of minors, advertising transparency, data access for researchers, as well as the risk management of addictive design and harmful content."

"We must spare no effort to protect our children," Thierry Breton, European Commissioner for Internal Market, said in the press release, reiterating that the "protection of minors is a top enforcement priority for the DSA."

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Lax content moderation on X (aka Twitter) has disrupted coordinated efforts between social media companies and law enforcement to tamp down on "propaganda accounts controlled by foreign entities aiming to influence US politics," The Washington Post reported.

Now propaganda is "flourishing" on X, The Post said, while other social media companies are stuck in endless cycles, watching some of the propaganda that they block proliferate on X, then inevitably spread back to their platforms.

Meta, Google, and then-Twitter began coordinating takedown efforts with law enforcement and disinformation researchers after Russian-backed influence campaigns manipulated their platforms in hopes of swaying the 2016 US presidential election.

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After more than a year as an exclusive invite-only social media platform, Bluesky is now open to the public, so anyone can join without needing a once-coveted invite code.

In a blog, Bluesky said that requiring invite codes helped Bluesky "manage growth" while building features that allow users to control what content they see on the social platform.

When Bluesky debuted, many viewed it as a potential Twitter killer, but limited access to Bluesky may have weakened momentum. As of January 2024, Bluesky has more than 3 million users. That's significantly less than X (formerly Twitter), which estimates suggest currently boasts more than 400 million global users.

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On Tuesday, Meta announced its plan to start labeling AI-generated images from other companies like OpenAI and Google, as reported by Reuters. The move aims to enhance transparency on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Threads by informing users when the content they see is digitally synthesized media rather than an authentic photo or video.

Coming during a US election year that is expected to be contentious, Meta's decision is part of a larger effort within the tech industry to establish standards for labeling content created using generative AI models, which are capable of producing fake but realistic audio, images, and video from written prompts. (Even non-AI-generated fake content can potentially confuse social media users, as we covered yesterday.)

Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg made the announcement in a blog post on Meta's website. "We’re taking this approach through the next year, during which a number of important elections are taking place around the world," wrote Clegg. "During this time, we expect to learn much more about how people are creating and sharing AI content, what sort of transparency people find most valuable, and how these technologies evolve."

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Last year, Reddit sparked massive controversy when it dramatically changed the prices and rules associated with accessing its API. The changes were so drastic and polarizing that they led to an epic protest from Reddit users and moderators that saw thousands of subreddits going private and engaging in other forms of inconvenience for weeks. Things got ugly, but Reddit still ushered in the changes, resulting in mounds of third-party Reddit apps announcing their permanent closure.

It's been about seven months since the changes, so I wanted to see what Reddit's third-party app ecosystem looks like now. Are surviving third-party Reddit apps that started charging users making money? Are developers confident they'll be able to keep their apps open for the long term?

And some apps are still available despite not charging a subscription fee. How is that possible?

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Some teens will now have their Facebook and Instagram accounts defaulted to a setting that blocks strangers from sending direct messages, Meta announced on Thursday.

This default setting is designed to stop teens under 16 ("or under 18 in certain countries") from receiving "unwanted contact," Meta said. In addition to restricting "adults over the age of 19 from messaging teens who don’t follow them" on Instagram, the new policy also blocks teens from receiving direct messages from other teens they do not follow. On Facebook, it restricts any accounts from contacting teens on Messenger who appear neither on their Facebook friends list or in their phone's contacts.

This change comes after a whistleblower, Arturo Bejar—a senior engineer who formerly led online security, safety, and protection efforts at Meta—told Congress last November that he returned to work for Meta as a consultant after discovering that his 14-year-old child and her friends "repeatedly faced unwanted sexual advances, misogyny, and harassment" on Instagram. According to Bejar, his subsequent research documented "staggering levels of abuse" targeting young users, with at least 13 percent of users aged 13–15 reporting that they received unwanted sexual advances in a single week.

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Republican officials from 20 states, including 19 state attorneys general, are backing Florida and Texas in a Supreme Court battle over states' authority to regulate how social media firms moderate user-submitted content. The states on Monday submitted a brief arguing that they "have authority to prohibit mass communication platforms from censoring speech."

"The Federal Government knows it will be much more difficult for federal officials to induce social media companies to suppress speech if state law prohibits it," the Republican state officials wrote, pointing out that the US government previously submitted a brief opposing the state laws. The US opposition "shows that the Texas and Florida laws, far from infringing the First Amendment, in fact shield social media companies from government pressure and deprive government of the opportunity to control expression," the state officials wrote.

The Florida law would make it illegal for large social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to ban politicians, while the Texas law prohibits social media companies from moderating content based on a user's "viewpoint." NetChoice, a lobby group for tech companies, challenged both laws in court.

Enlarge / Utah high school student Hannah Zoulek sued Utah to block the Social Media Regulation Act from taking effect March 1. (credit: thefire.org)

A Utah high school student, Hannah Zoulek, has joined a lawsuit, fighting to block Utah's vague social media law from taking effect on March 1.

The Social Media Regulation Act requires platforms to verify user ages and then obtain parental consent for minors under 18 to maintain accounts. Once granted access to platforms, minors must be blocked from search results, and no ads can be displayed on their account. Platforms granting access will accept liability for designing any features that the state considers to be addicting or harmful to minors. The law also imposes a curfew blocking minors from accessing platforms between 10:30 pm and 6:30 am.

Because the law "fails to define what constitutes 'physical, mental, emotional, developmental, or material harms,' or what degree of harm gives rise to liability," platforms are left to "guess as to what behavior crosses the line," the complaint said. A platform may be ruled to be causing harm if a teenager gets a headache after scrolling for too long or becomes upset after friends don't like a selfie, the complaint said, "nobody knows."

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For the third time in less than a year, film studios with copyright infringement complaints against a cable Internet provider are trying to force Reddit to share information about users who have discussed piracy on the site.

In 2023, film companies lost two attempts to have Reddit unmask its users. In the first instance, US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler ruled in the US District Court for the Northern District of California that the First Amendment right to anonymous speech meant Reddit didn’t have to disclose the names, email addresses, and other account registration information for nine Reddit users. Film companies, including Bodyguard Productions and Millennium Media, had subpoenaed Reddit in relation to a copyright infringement lawsuit against Astound Broadband-owned RCN about subscribers allegedly pirating 34 movie titles, including Hellboy (2019), Rambo V: Last Blood, and Tesla.

In the second instance, the same companies sued Astound Broadband-owned ISP Grande, again for alleged copyright infringement occurring over the ISP’s network. The studios subpoenaed Reddit for user account information, including "IP address registration and logs from 1/1/2016 to present, name, email address, and other account registration information” for six Reddit users, per a July 2023 court filing.

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A federal judge blocked an Ohio state law that would prevent minors from using social networks without parental consent, calling it a "troublingly vague" law that likely violates the First Amendment. Ohio's "Parental Notification by Social Media Operators Act" affects websites including Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube.

"Foreclosing minors under sixteen from accessing all content on websites that the Act purports to cover, absent affirmative parental consent, is a breathtakingly blunt instrument for reducing social media's harm to children," US District Judge Algenon Marbley wrote in an order issued Tuesday. "The approach is an untargeted one, as parents must only give one-time approval for the creation of an account, and parents and platforms are otherwise not required to protect against any of the specific dangers that social media might pose."

While more in-depth arguments will be made later, Marbley called it "unlikely that the government will be able to show that the Act is narrowly tailored to any ends that it identifies." Marbley, a judge in US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, granted a motion for a temporary restraining order sought by tech-industry lobby group NetChoice. Marbley did not rule on NetChoice's related motion for a preliminary injunction but scheduled a February 7 hearing on the injunction request.

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Meta has begun hiding sensitive content from teenagers under the age of 18 on Facebook and Instagram, a company blog announced on Tuesday.

Starting now, Meta will begin removing content from feeds and Stories about sensitive topics that have been flagged as harmful to teens by experts in adolescent development, psychology, and mental health. That includes content about self-harm, suicide, and eating disorders, as well as content discussing restricted goods or featuring nudity.

Even if sensitive content is shared by friends or accounts that teens follow, the teen will be blocked from viewing it, Meta confirmed.

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There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: Archaeologists found two stone engravings in Jordan and Saudi Arabia that may represent the oldest architectural plans for desert kites.

During the 1920s, aerial photographs revealed the presence of large kite-shaped stone wall mega-structures in deserts in Asia and the Middle East that most archaeologists believe were used to herd and trap wild animals. More than 6,000 of these "desert kites" have been identified as of 2018, although very few have been excavated. Archaeologists found two stone engravings—one in Jordan, the other in Saudi Arabia—that they believe represent the oldest architectural plans for these desert kites, according to a May paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.

"The discovery of these very ancient representations highlights the question of the methods used by kite builders," the authors wrote. "Kites are large material structures that could not be designed without what we call today planning. The ability to transpose large spaces into a small two-dimensional surface represents a milestone in intelligent behavior. Such structures are visible as a whole only from the air, yet this calls for the representation of space in a way not seen at this time."

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Some TikTok users may have skipped reviewing an update to TikTok's terms of service this summer that shakes up the process for filing a legal dispute against the app. According to The New York Times, changes that TikTok "quietly" made to its terms suggest that the popular app has spent the back half of 2023 preparing for a wave of legal battles.

In July, TikTok overhauled its rules for dispute resolution, pivoting from requiring private arbitration to insisting that legal complaints be filed in either the US District Court for the Central District of California or the Superior Court of the State of California, County of Los Angeles. Legal experts told the Times this could be a way for TikTok to dodge arbitration claims filed en masse that can cost companies millions more in fees than they expected to pay through individual arbitration.

Perhaps most significantly, TikTok also added a section to its terms that mandates that all legal complaints be filed within one year of any alleged harm caused by using the app. The terms now say that TikTok users "forever waive" rights to pursue any older claims. And unlike a prior version of TikTok's terms of service archived in May 2023, users do not seem to have any options to opt out of waiving their rights.

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Reddit URLs are being manipulated to include a slur in the subdomain, and those URLs are coming up in Google Search results.

The Verge experienced the problem on Tuesday, reporting that while doing a Google search, Reddit results that came up had a URL that looked like this: "https://2goback-[slur].reddit.com/r/[the rest of the URL]".

One Reddit user posted about the problem on Monday, and other Redditors also noticed the issue (examples here and here).

Enlarge / Left: Reddit's old logo. Right: Reddit's new logo. (credit: Reddit)

Writing a long comment providing detail about Reddit's refreshed logo, mascot, and typeface this week, a Reddit employee seemingly rethought the post and opted to conclude it with choice words. The post's last line currently reads:

"Edit: Obligatory 'Fuck Spez' for karma."

The Reddit employee, going by Acidtwist on Reddit and known as Tavish, says they're Reddit's head of brand creative (Reddit says it doesn't disclose the real identities of its workers on Reddit).

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This week, some of the biggest tech companies found out that Section 230 immunity doesn't shield them from some of the biggest complaints alleging that social media platform designs are defective and harming children and teen users.

On Tuesday, US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that discovery can proceed in a lawsuit documenting individual cases involving hundreds of children and teens allegedly harmed by social media use across 30 states. Their complaint alleged that tech companies were guilty of negligently operating platforms with many design defects—including lack of parental controls, insufficient age verification, complicated account deletion processes, appearance-altering filters, and requirements forcing users to log in to report child sexual abuse materials (CSAM)—and failed to warn young users and their parents about those defects.

Defendants are companies operating "the world’s most used social media platforms: Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Google’s YouTube, ByteDance’s TikTok, and Snapchat." All of these companies moved to dismiss the multi-district litigation entirely, hoping that the First Amendment and Section 230 immunity would effectively bar all the plaintiffs' claims—including, apparently, claims that companies ignored addressing when moving to dismiss.