It’s time to admit that most social media companies have not been able to solve their peskiest problem. It’s about how to depend less on advertising revenue.

Bots are a prime example. They have been rampant on X, formerly Twitter. In studies from just a few short years, it was estimated that up to 15% of Twitter accounts are nameless and anonymous bots. In a recent report, the percentage was estimated to be closer at 20%.

No one can be sure. What we do know is that bots don’t have a credit card, and they inflate the perception of any social media network’s vitality. The accounts are not active and do nothing but waste time. Elon Musk nearly walked away from the Twitter agreement a year earlier because of fake and bot accounts. It seems that he was correct.

His company, meanwhile, has been in a shambles over the past year. A recent report found the company has lost millions of users — almost 12% since a year ago. Losing users in the attention economy is equivalent to losing revenue.

Bots don’t sign up for subscriptions, and that seems to be the trend lately as a way to deal with the crisis. Musk announced recently a tier system for premium accounts. One plan does not require you to view ads. It’s possible that we will have to accept the fact social media subscriptions won’t go away.

Does it work? I’m not sure if Elon Musk himself knows the answer to that question.

Meta continues to consider a Facebook subscription in Europe. This change is more about EU regulations rather than bots. However, it shows a disturbing trend of forcing social media users to pay to use them. The company’s revenue has increased, and it has recovered from dire predictions a year earlier.

We will still have to decide if the subscription fees are worthwhile. While Facebook has rebounded considerably, there’s still the question of how long the company can sustain their advertiser model and when it will start to fail again. X provides a great example of the potential outcomes. The number of users has decreased and there is still a bot problem. Meta doesn’t have to look far to see what happens when a social media company starts losing users right and left.

The ungated environment is a big reason why X failed. In my own scrolling lately, I’ve noticed how the feed is a cluttered, confusing, and unfiltered mess. TikTok, for example, can adapt to me based solely on the micro-interactions I make and show videos based off of that. Facebook also does this with sponsored content.

Social media providers need to deliver more value first before they charge us for subscriptions. Subscriptions force us to answer the question of value, and so far — at least for me and most of my friends and family — there’s no way we’re going to pay for X’s mindless barrage.

How much would you pay to use social media if you didn’t have to look at ads?

That’s an important question to ask right now.

One report at Engadget theorized that the social media app formerly known as Twitter (now called X) might offer three different subscription “tiers” for those who hate ads. Bloomberg reported that a user of X had sifted some iOS code.

The code appears to reveal three different plans of payment, Basic, Standard, or Plus. No one knew how much the plans would cost. Basic was to show all ads. Standard showed about 50% less ads. And Plus did not display any ads.

Meta continues to ponder the idea of charging Facebook European users a fee per month (possibly as low as $14) in order to circumvent legal concerns related to gathering private data.

My take on all of this: We’re not exactly talking about Netflix here in terms of value. The social media companies are doing a terrible job at providing extras and perks that make a monthly subscription worth it.

Twitter and Facebook’s business models have been based on keeping things as similar as possible. This keeps us scrolling mindlessly.

Here’s what I mean by that:

Introducing new features makes sense for Apple or Samsung when they release new phones, because then we’re more likely to upgrade. New features on social media are counterintuitive. This is the ultimate goal. You can also check out our other blog posts.Introduce something new and novel. It not only makes us interested, but it also pleases advertisers. We may decide to make use of the new features, if there is any real benefit. We might break out of our trance and do something worthwhile and productive, which means we won’t look at the ads as much. It’s supposed to be a slogfest with no real value.

In recent years, I’ve noticed how more and more Facebook ads show up on my feed, likely due to more targeting. Facebook puts me in a category where I am more likely to be exposed to advertisements the minute that I engage with any content. Facebook has fewer friends posting these days. That means more ads. It’s content that counts, not value or purpose.

X, on the other hand, continues to experience a loss of advertisers. It is now looking at ways to improve revenue. It’s getting more and more dire, according to Reuters, because each month since Elon Musk took the helm, advertising have steadily declined.

The only way to make money is by charging for services.

What will it cost? I’m guessing the X Plus subscription plan might cost about $16 per month, or twice the current X Premium charge of $8 per month. It’s unclear what that really means other than not seeing ads, because there are few extra features even available. I’ve mentioned this many times now, but social media apps need to start offering more value and incentives. They might succeed if the apps can offer something that is worth paying for.

I’m guessing that until then most people are going to just accept the advertisements.

We’ve been doing that now for a decade…plus.

Watching a livestream feels a bit dated these days.

For one thing, the technology involved has been around for a while. I remember watching a livestream of a graduation ceremony almost a decade ago, and the basic concept has not changed. Usually, you need a phone or a camera system like the SlingStudio to make it all work.

Recently, Meta announced an improved version of the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. The new model lets you talk to an AI bot and are more comfortable to wear.

The one feature that caught my eye has to do with livestreams. When the product comes out October 17, we’ll be able to stream directly from the glasses to Facebook or Instagram with just a quick double-tap on the stem. Meta announced that you can also view comments using the smart glasses and even listen to live comments.

That quick access using smart glasses that you are already wearing (as opposed to fishing out your phone and finding the livestream option in the app) could be a game changer. While the idea of recording videos or snapping photos from smart glasses is not exactly new, the livestream feature will make it so easy to share live video that it might become more popular — or at least a bit more common.

There’s a few hurdles to making that happen, though.

One is obvious — not many of us are wearing glasses all day. For someone like me who wears them anyway, it makes more sense. It’s not by accident that these are also available as sunglasses, which should appeal to anyone who happens to be outside.

A second hurdle is that, in my experience, anything you wear to record video can produce strange results. At a tech conference a few years back, I wore a little recording device on my shirt and snapped photos and recorded video clips all day. Most of them didn’t turn out. With glasses, at least you are looking in the direction of the recorded video, but sudden head movements and other factors might not be the best for a livestream. At an outdoor concert, you might not want to do a recording for longer than one song, preferring to be able to glance around instead.

I like the idea of spontaneous recording, though. There’s not as much of a delay since you don’t have to grab your phone, open the app, hunt around for the livestream option, and start recording. At a skatepark on a sunny day, if you see a family member doing a cool new trick, you can do a quick double-tap to start the livestream for anyone to see.

This type of “in the moment” recording could change how we use social media. Some of the most amazing moments in life happen in an instant — the arc of the sun as you drive along a road, a toddler taking a few steps for the first time. By the time most of us say “grab a phone” those moments are gone, in a split second.

I’ll be curious to try the device and see if spur of the moment livestreams, video, and photos are easier to capture, at least for outdoor use. If the product is successful and we start seeing more livestreams, I could see the idea catching on quickly.

We’ll see if that happens.

Last week, Washington Post reporters Naomi Nix and Sarah Ellison published a piece titled, “Following Elon Musk’s lead, Big Tech is surrendering to disinformation.” Facebook, YouTube, and X have been “abandoning their most aggressive efforts to police online falsehoods,” they write. The reporters call attention to how employees are “now asked to spend more of their time figuring out how to minimally comply with a booming list of global regulations” rather than creating new ways to keep content trustworthy and free from abuse.

The negative effects of online abuse and disinformation on people are clear, so why do the largest platforms appear to be doing the bare minimum to keep people safe and why do they appear indifferent towards finding solutions? It comes down to a fundamental flaw in the way social media platforms have operated from the beginning: they believe engagement is everything.

For more than 20 years, major social media platforms have been built around a core revenue model: advertising and the sale of valuable user data. That approach has made platforms’ goals simple: find users who will add and engage with content; keep them there at all costs; bring in more users; and sell ads or data. Rinse and repeat.

Psychologists at Cambridge University have shown that negative posts garner more engagement than those that are more benign in nature. At the same time, advertisers are conditioned to seek out the largest, most engaged communities as a way to get their messages in front of the greatest numbers. As an unintended consequence, platforms are often incentivized to look the other way when things get hateful: anger, hate and abuse fuel the engagement metrics that advertisers want.

There is also evidence that the most “engaging” content is not necessarily the best for ad conversions, which is the main revenue-driver for most social platforms. Consumer behavior studies by the Association for Consumer Research and the Kellogg School of Management indicate that better positive environments and experiences are better drivers of conversions and purchasing decisions. Better moods lead to better recall of information, in ads as well as content, and more thoughtful consideration of new products and ideas.

Even though evidence proves this to be the case, it is hard to pivot companies away from entrenched practices. Efforts to address harm and abuse have historically happened at the margins, putting trust and safety teams at odds with platform leadership. It is no secret that actions such as removing accounts and discouraging sensationalist content can have a dampening effect on the engagement numbers needed to drive revenue. Compliance with global regulations like the EU Digital Service Act will, initially, only nominally help improve the experience of consumers until there is a new organizing principle for platforms.

There have been past efforts to look at metrics beyond engagement. Facebook, where I previously worked, explored a measurement called Meaningful Social Interactions that prioritized posts from friends over those that were simply viral. However, in response to falling engagement overall, MSI was quickly reverted to serve that old master: engagement. The Facebook Papers suggested it resulted in a deepening of echo chambers.

There are signs that brands and advertisers are beginning to question raw engagement as a focus. X has lost half of its advertising revenue and is now projected to lose roughly $2 billion in ad revenue this year—partly because the platform has become “a place where people can post racist, sexist, or otherwise harmful speech without much consequence,” as reported by Vox’s Shirin Ghaffary. (X does not appear to have responded to requests for comment on this topic.)

My hope is that the next generation of platforms will continue to push this shift forward and highlight the business value of engagement quality over quantity. I have started to see this approach work first-hand at T2, a social media site I founded with the goal of safety.

Hopefully, more platforms will recognize that a blind focus on engagement is not good for business. Brands have skin in this game, too. For their part, marketers must unlearn bad habits and broaden their thinking beyond raw engagement numbers. Instead, it has to be about the quality, not quantity of engagement.

X cannot quickly stamp out unchecked hate speech through regulatory checklist exercises, and attempts to do so will not bring advertisers back. What’s worse, the flood of negative press is adding to the company’s rapid brand erosion. Yes, Elon Musk should have seen the signs, but he’s not the only one who has been blinded by engagement metrics. It’s time for everyone to change their thinking.

Meta makes changes just days before deadline for users to feeds within the EU to ensure compliance with Digital Services Act.

By August 25, the company must comply with the DSA. This requires that platforms classified as Very Large Online Platforms give their users the choice to turn off personalized feeds and return to an algorithmic feed.

TikTok took a similar step earlier in the month. It removed personalized results from its For You page and automatically opted users aged 13-17 out of receiving personalized ads, based on previous activities.

Nick Clegg is the president of Global Affairs. He says that the DSA “is a huge deal, not only for European technology companies, but also for tech companies operating in the EU. It will have an impact on how Europeans feel when they turn on their mobile phones and laptops.”

EU users will only be able view Instagram Stories or Facebook Reels of accounts that they have followed, in order chronologically from latest to oldest. Search results are based solely on what they search for, not on previous activities.

Meta has also made changes in order to increase transparency, and to conform to the DSA. It’s expanding its Ad Library to display and archive all ads that target people in the EU, along with the dates the ad ran, the parameters used for targeting—age, gender, location and the like—and who the ad was shown to. The ads will be archived for one year.

In addition to its Why Ami Seeing This tool, Facebook has released 22 new system cards. These cards provide information on how AI systems determine what is relevant content and customize the system.

Meanwhile, two new tools for researchers—the Meta Content Library and API—will allow them to search, explore, and filter the publicly available content on a graphical user interface, or through a programmatic API.

Clegg said, “These new tools will allow us to access the widest range of content available on Facebook and Instagram compared to any previous research tool.”

The move brings a very different experience for EU users, compared with those elsewhere, such as the U.S. and the UK—and it’s more than possible that the company will eventually extend some of these privacy rights worldwide.

The company’s goal is to appear as a supporter of the DSA.

Clegg says that it is better to use tools like auditing and reporting to make large platforms such as ours accountable, than to try to manage individual content pieces.

It is important that in this new regulatory climate, the DSA maintains the primacy it holds over national laws and existing legislation to preserve its clarity and consistency, as well as the harmony of the experience people have on our platforms throughout the region.

Facebook has a lot of frauds, in case you didn’t know.

There are many examples of this: misleading information, factual mistakes, sneaky ads, etc. It’s all part of the social media landscape.

Most of us are aware of one particular scam, and some of us may have been fooled.

Cambridge Analytica was a totally unknown firm that ran an anonymous survey, but it was really more like a campaign. A class-action suit was filed and a settlement reached after people noticed.

This is your chance to shine.

You can claim if you used Facebook from 2007 until 2022. You can find the form here. There’s no catch, other than the fact that you must register for the settlement by August 25. After that, there’s very little chance you can make any claim.

It is necessary to enter the email address associated with your account. It took me forever to find mine, but the trick is to click your profile photo in the upper right corner of your browser, then go to Settings & Privacy > Settings > Meta Accounts Center > Personal details > Contact Info. There’s not much else to add to the form, and very little information about what comes next.

This type of massive settlement only comes up once in a while, and if it does, it’s rare that so many people would be able to make a claim.

There’s also a wide window for when you can claim you were a user, but the form mentions that you could be a user or someone who had an account that you deleted since then. There’s no way to tell how many people will be part of the settlement, how much money you would receive, or even any details about timing. You can register your PayPal or bank account to receive funds.

Settlement included massive payouts to FTC ($5 billion) and SEC ($100 million).

As a result of this lawsuit and settlement, many Facebook members began to question whether or not they want to continue using a platform that permits something as scandalous. The business model that requires users to accept ads, compromise their security and use free platforms has been scrutinized more than ever in recent years.

This new claim will it make any difference?

I can’t say for sure. Sometimes I believe that the average Facebook user doesn’t know about any issues. Asking friends and family recently about this topic, most said they don’t care and don’t pay attention to it.

Perhaps they’ll do it now.

Conservative users on Facebook during the 2020 presidential election were more isolated and saw more misinformation than the platform’s liberal users, a series of papers published by Meta researchers and academics Thursday in Science and Nature found

Meta’s new social media platform Threads will shift focus to adding several new features a week, including a “following” feed and the ability to search for posts, after rolling out a fairly barebones—but popular—app to take on Twitter last week.

Topline

Instagram lead Adam Mosseri said in two Threads posts Friday that the new app would not encourage “politics and hard news” on its platform, a far cry from the promoted political content found on its rival platform Twitter.

The Key Facts

The Crucial Quote

“The goal isn’t to replace Twitter,” Mosseri said. “The goal is to create a public square for communities on Instagram that never really embraced Twitter and for communities on Twitter (and other platforms) that are interested in a less angry place for conversations, but not all of Twitter.”

Big Number

70 million. That’s how many sign-ups Threads hit Friday morning.

Key Background

Facebook’s struggles before 2021, when it eliminated such content from its platform, likely influenced Threads’ decision. According to a recent study, Facebook had spread false news quicker than any social website in the year 2020 during the build-up of the presidential elections. Separate 2021 research concluded that Facebook could have prevented over 10 billion views for popular pages which posted misinformation prior to elections. By early 2021, the social media site changed its algorithm to lessen the amount of political content in users’ feeds. Since then, the platform’s content has been in stark contrast with Twitter which, after Musk purchased it for $44 billion, encouraged political content. Musk, who stays active on the app, has encouraged politicians to engage with him on Twitter Spaces—allowing Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fl), launched his presidential campaign by using the feature of live audio. Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News anchorman, uses Twitter to post episodes of his independent commentary program. On Carlson’s first episode of the show, he said he and his team were “grateful” to be on Twitter and were told there were no “gatekeepers” on the platform.

Read More

Threads isn’t for news and politics, says Instagram’s boss (The Verge)

Meta Threads doesn’t need the ‘negativity’ of hard news and politics, exec says (CNBC)

Meta, Facebook’s parent, released Threads for pre-order at the iOS App Store. A bare-bones website version was also leaked this morning. That lets us take an advance look at the company’s answer to Elon Musk’s Twitter.

“Say more” with Threads, Meta says.

From the company’s App Store description:“Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow. Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things — or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world.”

Meta chose Instagram over Facebook as the base social network to power Threads. It’s not a great option for me personally (I barely use Instagram), but Instagram is a much more youth-focused, hip and growing property in the Meta portfolio. Early adopters are able to retain their Instagram username and follow people automatically.

Threads allows you to like a post with a heart-shaped symbol. You can also comment and re-thread (???Threads’ version of sharing or tweeting is a recycling symbol. There’s also the typical Instagram arrow to send a post to a specific person or group of people, or another social platform.

Threads will launch with fairly minimal and basic functionality at first, including the ability to control viewability of your threads to anyone, only profiles you follow, or only people you’ve mentioned in the thread. Oddly, there’s no option to limit viewability to people who follow you (at least based on the screenshots Meta has shared so far).

One thing that the internet has not missed is Threads’ extensive list of privacy disclosures: data that the app collects that Apple’s iOS App Store requires apps to share.

The long list reflects Meta’s deep knowledge of its users, especially multiplatform users who are also on Facebook, Messenger or WhatsApp. The following data “maybe be collected and linked to your identity” on Threads:

• Health & fitness
• Financial information
• Information about Contact Person
• Content created by users
• Browse history
• Usage data
• Diagnostics
• Purchases
• Find out where to go
• Contacts
• Search the history
• Identifiers
• Protecting sensitive information
• Additional Data

It’s a very long list, and might be a result of a cautious first-launch manager’s decision to add everything just for full disclosure safety, to be amended later. Using Threads, if you don’t, is still a significant privacy step, just like using Facebook and Instagram. Meta connects a variety of information about you to help target advertisements.

Twitter, on the other hand, isn’t much better. It requests almost as many data points for tracking and linkage.

After a brief blip in functionality, the web-based version of Threads has returned to its pre-launch state. The countdown shows the date of the launch. This is expected to be July 6th.

Meta is a social network that can import your friend graph from the very first day. It solves the issue of cold starts most startups face. In addition, you’ll likely eventually be able to cross-post across Meta properties, much as you can from Instagram to Facebook now, which could help content.

Another key factor: whether Twitter can get its act together under its new CEO Linda Yaccarino, who has defended the network’s odd decision to rate-limit access to content.