Instagram

The two dating companies paused advertising on the platform after The Wall Street Journal found their ads appearing next to explicit and child-sexualizing content in Reels feeds.

The WSJ got this information by setting up test accounts that followed young gymnasts, cheerleaders, and influencers. When looking through Reels, the outlet discovered that Instagram surfaced “served jarring doses of salacious content to those test accounts, including risqué footage of children as well as overtly sexual adult videos” alongside ads for major brands, including Match, Bumble, Disney, and Walmart.

The attorneys general of 33 states sued Meta in October, but many details of what executives allegedly knew about the impacts of Facebook and Instagram on youth mental health were redacted. The New York Times reports a version with more details has been unsealed, and you can read all 233 pages here.

Between the first quarter of 2019 and the second quarter of 2023, Meta received over 1.1 million reports of under-13 users on Instagram via its underage reporting webform and in-app underage reporting process. These processes were only a few of many ways that Meta acquired actual knowledge of under-13 users on its Social Media Platforms. Despite this actual knowledge, Meta disabled only a fraction of those accounts and routinely continued to collect children’s data without parental consent,

In a statement, Meta says the lawsuit “mischaracterizes our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents.”

Instagram boss Adam Mosseri shared on his broadcast channel that the ability to save reels posted by all public accounts to your camera roll is now available globally. If your Instagram account is public, this FAQ notes that you can opt-out on individual posts or for your entire account (anyone under 18 is opted out by default).

After some testing, Mosseri announced this was live in the US in June, and now it’s everywhere. Similar to TikTok, downloads are available under the share button, and any reel you download will be watermarked with the poster’s Instagram name.

Over the last year, Meta has added AIM status-like features to Instagram and WhatsApp and today announced it's rolling out Notes (using the same name as Instagram’s feature) for Messenger globally.

You can’t post them from the desktop, but a support document explains how to add or remove Notes via iPhone, iPad, or Android device by clicking the thought bubble next to your profile picture. If you don’t remove them manually, the messages expire after 24 hours.

I’ve long forgotten about the feature since it first rolled out in 2020 as a way to curate recommendations — but now it’s going away. Developer Alessandro Paluzzi first spotted the change, which Instagram spokesperson Mari Melguizo later confirmed to The Verge, saying Guides will be transferred into private saved collections:

We are sunsetting the Guides feature and are converting all existing guides into private saved collections. Usage is low and we are always looking at ways to simplify the app. People can access their saved collections via ‘Saved’ in the profiles settings tab.

Meta’s CEO posted this picture to Instagram Friday night, saying, “Tore my ACL sparring and just got out of surgery.”

He was apparently training for his next competitive MMA match. Recovery from this type of injury takes up to a year for professional athletes, so an executive closing in on 40 could be out of action for a while. On the plus side, maybe this will keep Elon Musk from randomly threatening to show up at Zuckerberg’s house for a brawl.

Spotted by Engadget, Meta’s newest sticker feature is a lot like the one built into the iPhone Messages app in iOS 17 — Instagram detects and cuts out an object from a photo so you can place it over another.

According to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, who shared the test on his IG Updates broadcast channel, when the feature rolls out, you can make stickers from your own images or “eligible images” from others. Sounds like a fun new way for me to annoy The Verge’s Alex Cranz.

It’s a “small” test, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said on his Instagram broadcast channel, which included the below picture. In his own post on his own broadcast channel, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the polls will be rolling out to everyone “soon.”

In response to a post on Threads by The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri says the blocking of “covid” searches is only temporary and that the platform is “working on it:”

I don’t have an ETA to give you unfortunately, but it is temporary and we are working on it. We’re just getting pulled in a lot of directions at once right now. The biggest safety focus right now is managing content responsibly given the war in Israel in Gaza.

Shortly after Threads rolled out its search feature, Lorenz reported that Threads is blocking searches related to “covid” and “long covid.” Mosseri has previously said that Threads is “not going to do anything to encourage” politics or “hard news.”

Meta’s incomplete answers about news on Threads are coming up again due to recent events and how things are (increasingly not) working on the platform formerly known as Twitter. In a response to The Verge’s Mia Sato today after that edit button-adding update, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said it “won’t proactively recommend news content to people who don’t seek it out.”

During his weekly AMA today, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri again reiterated that his team is not presently developing an iPad version of the app.

“Not working on it right now,” he said. “I think it’s a good thing to do at some point. But we have only so many people working at Instagram, so we’ve got to pick the most important things to do to improve Instagram at any given moment. And right now, it’s not quite making the cut.”

That’s my best guess as to what he said over some loud airplane cabin noise, at least. (Might I recommend buying some wired EarPods for these situations, Adam?)

Seeing as how much work there is to do on Threads, I can’t imagine the iPad app will become a reality anytime soon.

Or nearly $17/mth to use both. That’s what Meta is reportedly pitching EU regulators who want Zuck and Co to stop using personal data to target ads at European citizens without their consent. The bloc’s users could have three options by the end of this month: pay up, use for free but agree to personalized ads, or quit, with the latter looking very tempting.

Well, this video is weirdly hypnotic. I think I watched it four times in a row? Anyway, uh, the Fed’s on Instagram and Threads.

Adam Mosseri asked about Artifact supporting publishers in a post on Threads — so my colleague Alex Heath asked him in an audience question.

“We’ve tried to come at this from a publisher friendly perspective,” Mike Krieger said. Artifact thrives if the publisher ecosystem “is healthy and thriving,” so that approach is a long-term play.

“It’s about recognizing what needs to exist several years from now for you to have a viable product,” Krieger said