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Social Media Firms Introduce Few Changes Ahead of Upcoming US Midterm Elections
Social media companies are offering few specifics as they share their plans for safeguarding the US midterm elections. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are generally staying the course from the 2020 voting season, which was marred by conspiracies and culminated in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.
Video app TikTok, which has soared in popularity since the last election cycle while also cementing its place as a problem spot for misinformation, announced Wednesday it is launching an election center that will help people find voting locations and candidate information.
The center will show up in the feeds of users who search election-related hashtags. TikTok is also partnering with voting advocacy groups to provide specialized voting information for college students, people who are deaf, military members living overseas and those with past criminal convictions.
TikTok, like other platforms, would not provide details on the number of full-time employees or how much money it is dedicating to US midterm efforts, which aim to push accurate voting information and counter misinformation.
The company said it is working with over a dozen fact-checking organizations, including US-based PolitiFact and Lead Stories, on debunking misinformation. TikTok declined to say how many videos have been fact-checked on its site. The company will use a combination of humans and artificial intelligence to detect and remove threats against election workers as well as voting misinformation.
TikTok said it’s also also watching for influencers who break its rules by accepting money off platform to promote political issues or candidates, a problem that came to light during the 2020 election, said TikTok’s head of safety Eric Han. The company is trying to educate creators and agencies about its rules, which include bans on political advertising.
“With the work we do, there is no finish line,” Han said.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, announced Tuesday that its approach to this election cycle is “largely consistent with the policies and safeguards” from 2020.
“As we did in 2020, we have a dedicated team in place to combat election and voter interference while also helping people get reliable information about when and how to vote,” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, wrote in a blog post Tuesday.
Meta declined to say how many people it has dedicated to its election team responsible for monitoring the midterms, only that it has “hundreds of people across more than 40 teams.”
As in 2020, Clegg wrote, the company will remove misinformation about election dates, voting locations, voter registration and election outcomes. For the first time, Meta said it will also show US election-related notifications in languages other than English.
Meta also said it will reduce how often it uses labels on election-related posts directing people toward reliable information. The company said its users found the labels over-used. Some critics have also said the labels were often too generic and repetitive.
Compared with previous years, though, Meta’s public communication about its response to election misinformation has gone decidedly quiet, The Associated Press reported earlier this month.
Between 2018 and 2020, the company released more than 30 statements that laid out specifics about how it would stifle US election misinformation, prevent foreign adversaries from running ads or posts around the vote and subdue divisive hate speech. Until Tuesday’s blog post, Meta had only released a one-page document outlining plans for the fall elections, even as potential threats to the vote persist.
Twitter, meanwhile, is sticking with its own misinformation labels, though it has redesigned them since 2020 based in part on user feedback. The company activated its “civic integrity policy” last week, which means tweets containing harmful misinformation about the election are labeled with links to credible information. The tweets themselves won’t be promoted or amplified by the platform.
The company, which like TikTok does not allow political advertisements, is focusing on putting verified, reliable information before its users. That can include links to state-specific hubs for local election information as well as nonpartisan public service announcements for voters.
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WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger to Get AI Assistants; Meta Shows Off Image Generation Tool Emu
Meta showcased a host of new products and services, including the Meta Quest 3 mixed reality headset and a pair of smart glasses made in collaboration with Ray-Ban, at its Meta Connect annual conference on Wednesday. Alongside the hardware, the company also announced its own AI assistant, Meta AI, and a variety of AI experiences across Meta’s suite of apps and devices, including AI stickers in Meta apps and AI editing tools for Instagram. Meta AI, a conversational generative AI assistant much like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Bing, will be available on WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram.
Meta AI will be powered by the company’s custom model that borrows from Meta’s large language model, Llama 2. The AI assistant, Meta said, will provide real-time information in response to text-based queries, trawling the internet via Bing search. Meta AI will also generate images based on text prompts. The AI assistant can help plan hiking trips with your friends in a group chat, prepare recipes, or help with your shopping list. Users can type in “@MetaAI /imagine” inside their chat box and follow it up with descriptive text prompts for what they want the AI assistant to do. Meta AI is also coming to the company’s latest devices, the Meta Quest 3 and the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
In addition to its default AI assistant, the company also showed off AI avatars with distinct personalities. Meta is bringing 28 AI characters, each with a unique backstory and behaviour. These AI characters can be conversed with in WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, and will also include some public figures and influencers that Meta has partnered up with for their likenesses. Famous people coming as AI characters include Dwayne Wade, Kendall Jenner, Mr. Beast, Snoop Dogg and more.
Emu can generate stickers based on user prompts
Photo Credit: Meta
Meta is calling its image generation tool ‘expressive media universe’, or Emu. The tool can also quickly generate AI stickers based on a user’s text prompts inside apps like WhatsApp or Instagram to share with friends. “It’s high-quality, photorealistic,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the presentation. “But, one of the coolest things is the Emu generates that fast. It’s not a minute. It takes five seconds to generate one of these,” he added. This custom sticker generation feature will roll out to select English-language users over the next month in WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and Facebook Stories.
The Facebook parent is also bringing new AI-powered image editing tools, specifically two new features — Restyle and Backdrop — that utilise technology from the Emu tool. Restyle acts as a kind of custom filter that works based on user prompts. Based on single descriptor or a more detail prompt, Restyle will edit your images to reflect a particular mood. And as the name suggests, Backdrop will let users change the background of their images based on custom prompts. Images created using both tools will carry markers that indicate the image is AI-generated. Meta said that Restyle and Backdrop were coming soon to Instagram but did not provide a concrete release date for the same.
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Meta Smart Glasses in collaboration with Ray-Ban were introduced on Wednesday alongside the Meta Quest 3 and other products. Users can livestream videos to Facebook and Instagram using the smart glasses, hands-free. The frame comes with a 12-megapixel camera sensor and an LED unit. This smart wearable succeeds the Ray-Ban stories, which were the company’s first smart glasses and was released in September 2021. However, unlike AR/VR headsets, the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses do not feature a display unit.
Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses with standard lenses start at $299 (roughly Rs. 24,999), while Polarized lenses and transition lenses are priced at $329 (roughly Rs. 27,400) and $379 (roughly Rs. 31,500), respectively. It is offered in 150 different custom frame and lens design combinations.
The Ray-Ban Meta Smart glasses are currently available for pre-orders in 15 countries, including the US, Canada, Australia, and European markets. The sale of the smart glasses will start from October 17 in these regions. Meta has not revealed the India launch date of the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses.
Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses specifications, features
A 12-megapixel sensor and an LED light, which doubles as a recording indicator are placed within two circular cutouts on either side of the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses frame. Users can use the camera to take photos with a resolution of 3,024 x 4,032 pixels and 1080p videos of up to 60 seconds. With the Meta View app, the users can then share these media files to any other image/ video sharing apps.
The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses also enable first person perspective livestreaming in which a user can stream whatever they are looking at with the glasses on in real time, to their respective Instagram and Facebook profiles. Users can also use the ‘Hey Meta’ prompt to enable handsfree functions.
Even though the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses do not come with a display, the company claims, that compared to Ray-Ban Stories, the dual open-ear speakers in the new glasses offer less audio leakage and is said to bring up to 50 percent louder sound, deeper bass, and more clarity.
The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses are powered by the new Qualcomm Snapdragon AR1 Gen1 Platform SoC and packs 32GB of inbuilt storage. Claimed to be sleeker in design than its preceding model, Meta says that the glasses come with up to four hours of battery life, and an additional 32 hours with the charging case. One full charge is claimed to take 75 minutes. The glasses also come with an IPX4 rating.
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WhatsApp is redesigning the chat interface on the Android version of its application, according to details shared by a feature tracker. The popular chat service is working on changing some of the colours in the app — this change will also affect how the app looks in dark mode. Meanwhile, some of the icons and buttons in the app are also being updated along with new colours. A redesigned version of WhatsApp for iOS is also in the works, with similar changes to colours and icons in the app.
On version 2.23.20.10 of WhatsApp beta for Android, feature tracker WABetaInfo spotted a refreshed version of the app’s interface that is still being developed by the Meta-owned chat platform. This means that you won’t be able to try out the new interface, even if you install the latest version of the app.
The redesigned chat list screen with updated icons and colour accents
Photo Credit: WABetaInfo
WhatsApp is working to introduce a redesigned camera icon in the main chat screen, while the solid video call and voice call, and camera icons inside individual chats and group chats have been replaced with outlines of the older ones. WABetaInfo has also shared screenshots showing the new icons in both light and dark modes.
The screenshots published by the feature tracker also show a new green colour in use across the app, that is slightly brighter than the existing shade. This applies to both the dark and light modes and includes the floating action button at the bottom right corner of the screen and the WhatsApp text at the top of the app.
The updated chat interface with updated icons, without the green bar at the top
Photo Credit: WABetaInfo
Last month, the feature tracker revealed that WhatsApp was planning on replacing its iconic green bar at the top of the app with white — allowing the app interface to turn black or grey in dark mode. Earlier this year, WhatsApp moved the chat, calls, and other tabs to the bottom of the app on Android, to match the app’s functionality on iOS.
These changes to the icons and colour palette were previously spotted by the feature tracker on WhatsApp beta for iOS 23.19.1.72. Both the iOS and Android versions of the app are expected to gain support for chat filters such as All, Unread, Contacts, and Groups. However, just like the changes to the colours and icons in the app, there’s no word on when we can expect to see the new chat filters on WhatsApp for iOS and Android.
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