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Brands Could Further Pull Back From Elon Musk’s Twitter After Paid Blue Ticks Fuel Imposters
Twitter’s attempt to implement a paid account verification service has attracted imposters spreading misinformation, which experts said could lead major brands to further pull back from the social media platform owned by billionaire Elon Musk.
On April 20, Twitter moved to boost profits by removing the once-coveted blue check marks from accounts and charging $8 (roughly Rs. 655) a month to users who wish to buy a Twitter Blue subscription to retain their verified status.
Musk’s latest initiative was met with a wave of imposter accounts sharing harmful misinformation. Some organizations have already stopped using Twitter, including the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) with 1.3 million followers. Both AT&T Inc and Volkswagen AG told Reuters they had paused Twitter ads and had not yet resumed as of April.
Twitter has been hit by a massive decline in advertising since the acquisition but Musk told the BBC last month most of the advertisers are returning to the platform.
Data from outside research firms and statements from several advertisers show Twitter’s ad business may not be bouncing back that quickly.
“Twitter Blue is a mess. This is more chaos and confusion for brands who were already wary of impersonation. They don’t want to remain on a platform where they feel vulnerable,” said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence.
Since Musk bought Twitter in October and began making rapid changes, brands have been debating whether they should keep advertising on the platform. Enberg said Twitter’s removal of legacy checkmarks could prompt some companies to stop tweeting and maintaining their profile.
“There’s little incentive for brands to keep an organic presence when they think their brand is at risk, and especially on a platform where it’s not going to drive any meaningful impact,” she said.
Rachel Moran-Prestridge, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, said Twitter’s checkmarks for years gave users confidence an account was legitimate.
“Without this verification, users have to do much more heavy lifting to try to ascertain whether the account is who they say they are,” she told Reuters in an email.
In a move that furthered confusion, Twitter on April 22 appeared to give some high-profile users a verification mark.
Within the next 48 hours, all but 110 of the most-followed Twitter accounts suddenly had verification through Twitter Blue, indicating Twitter likely gifted the check marks, independent researcher Travis Brown told Reuters.
Neither Twitter nor Musk has commented on the return of the verification marks for a select few users.
An emailed request for comment to Twitter returned an automated reply with a poop emoji.
Reuters is a partner of Twitter’s Community Notes fact-checking project.
A fake account posing as Disney Junior UK, now a defunct TV channel, last week was issued a gold checkmark used for “verified organizations”. The Walt Disney Co told Reuters it contacted Twitter and the account was suspended.
New York’s MTA said last Thursday it “does not pay tech platforms” and would stop tweeting service alerts and information.
“The reliability of (Twitter) can no longer be guaranteed,” the MTA said in a statement.
GRADUAL PULLBACK
Since the initial rollout of the Twitter Blue service in November, imposter tweets have spread harmful misinformation.
US drugmaker Eli Lilly and Co watched its stock tumble over 4 percent and was forced to apologize after a Twitter user impersonating its official account posted “insulin is free.”
Imposter Twitter accounts also tarnished the online reputations of Lockheed Martin Corp and Nintendo Co Ltd. Last month, Twitter told advertisers in an email that businesses spending less than $1,000 (roughly Rs. 81,855) per month on Twitter ads must be subscribed to Twitter Blue or pay to be part of the verified organisations program to keep running ads on the platform, according to Matt Navarra, a social media consultant who has worked with Meta and Mozilla.
Eric Yaverbaum, CEO of the New York-based PR agency Ericho Communications, said more brands are likely to pull away if Twitter does not implement a stringent user verification model.
“Brands have already stopped ads on Twitter, many won’t come back, and I have a feeling more companies will put an end to advertising on the platform,” Yaverbaum said in an e-mail to Reuters.
Some brands have already taken countermeasures against online impersonation by retaining the services of brand reputation management companies.
Social Impostor CEO Kevin Long said a number of factors attract online impersonators to a celebrity or brand.
“Just because you had – or will have – a blue verification mark does not deter the imposters from creating accounts,” Long, whose company took down over 8,000 bogus accounts across major platforms, told Reuters in an email.
“The volume of imposter accounts seems to depend on several things — Is the client doing a high profile event that week? Is the client in the news for some reason – good or bad? My experience is this is across all social platforms.”
© Thomson Reuters 2023
The Vivo X90 Pro has finally made its debut in India, but is the company’s flagship smartphone for 2023 equipped with enough upgrades over its predecessor? We discuss this and more on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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YouTube will roll out a slew of artificial-intelligence-powered features for creators, the latest effort from parent company Alphabet to incorporate generative AI — technology that can create and synthesize text, images, music and other media given simple prompts — into its most important products and services.
Among the new products YouTube announced Thursday is a tool called Dream Screen that uses generative AI to add video or image backgrounds to short-form videos, which the company calls Shorts. It also announced new AI-enabled production tools to help with editing both short- and long-form videos on its platform.
“We’re unveiling a suite of products and features that will enable people to push the bounds of creative expression,” Toni Reid, YouTube’s vice president for community products, said in a blog post timed to the announcement Thursday. The Google-owned video platform first announced that it was developing the tools in March.
Google has been under pressure to show results and practical applications for its generative AI products. Some critics have been wary the company, which has long been seen as a leader in artificial intelligence, was falling behind upstarts like OpenAI or rival Microsoft, and that the products Google was rolling out weren’t yet ready for public consumption. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and a new Bing chatbot from Microsoft — which has invested $13 billion (nearly Rs. 1,08,100 crore) in OpenAI since 2019 — have been wildly popular and gained mainstream favour.
Over the past few months, Google launched its own ChatGPT competitor, Bard, and released a steady flow of updates to the product. It’s also incorporated experimental generative AI features into its most important services, including its flagship search engine, in what the company calls its experimental “search generative experience.” The product generates detailed summaries based on information it’s ingested from the internet and other digital sources in response to search queries.
The announcement of the new features also comes as YouTube is locked in fierce competition with ByteDance‘s TikTok and Meta Platforms‘s Instagram Reels to gain more share of the vertical, short-form video market. YouTube said it now sees more than 70 billion daily views on Shorts, and the new generative AI tools appear to be aimed at attracting even more users and creators and gaining a competitive edge over its rivals.
The company also announced YouTube Create, a mobile app aimed at helping the platform’s creators make video production work easier. The app includes AI-enabled features like editing and trimming, automatic captioning, voiceover capabilities and access to a library of filters and royalty-free music. The app is currently in beta on Android in “select markets,” the company said, and will be free of charge.
Beyond creation, YouTube said it would also provide creators with more tools to get AI-powered insights, help with automatic dubbing of videos and assist with finding music and soundtracks for videos.
© 2023 Bloomberg LP
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WhatsApp has begun rolling out support for a new feature that will allow you to log in to your account using the biometric authentication mechanism on your smartphone. The messaging service will soon allow you to create a passkey — a kind of login credential that eliminates the need to use or remember a password — on your device and use it to securely log in to apps and services using the facial recognition or fingerprint scanner on your device.
Feature tracker WABetaInfo spotted the new passkey feature on WhatsApp beta for Android 2.23.20.4 on Tuesday, that is rolling out to beta users. However, not all users who have updated to the latest beta release will have access to the feature, which is reportedly rolling out to a “limited number of beta testers”. Gadgets 360 was unable to access the feature on two different Android smartphones that are both enrolled in the beta program.
The new Passkeys feature on WhatsApp
Photo Credit: WABetaInfo
The new passkey feature is described as a “simple way to sign in safely” to WhatsApp in a screenshot shared by the feature tracker. This suggests that it could be used to help sign in to other devices via secure authentication on your primary device.
Authenticating using passkeys isn’t a novel concept and the technology is slowly gaining traction online— Google already allows you to log in to a new device by using fingerprint-based biometric authentication for passkeys in place of a password. These passkeys are securely stored on your device and used when biometric authentication is provided.
The screenshot posted by WABetaInfo also states that WhatsApp will store the passkey in the device’s password manager — for most users, that would be the device’s default password store that is handled by Google with autofill support. The feature is also expected to make its way to iOS, where it is likely to be stored in the iOS Keychain.
It is currently unclear whether WhatsApp will also support storing passkeys in third-party apps like Bitwarden, 1Password, or Dashlane. We can expect to learn more about how the feature works when it is rolled out to more users in the beta program and the feature is expected to arrive on all smartphones on the stable channel in the future.
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Britain urged Meta not to roll out end-to-end encryption on Instagram and Facebook Messenger without safety measures to protect children from sexual abuse after the Online Safety Bill was passed by parliament.
Meta, which already encrypts messages on WhatsApp, plans to implement end-to-end encryption across Messenger and Instagram direct messages, saying the technology re-enforced safety and security.
Britain’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman said she supported strong encryption for online users but it could not come at the expense of children’s safety.
“Meta has failed to provide assurances that they will keep their platforms safe from sickening abusers,” she said. “They must develop appropriate safeguards to sit alongside their plans for end-to-end encryption.”
A Meta spokesperson said: “The overwhelming majority of Brits already rely on apps that use encryption to keep them safe from hackers, fraudsters and criminals.
“We don’t think people want us reading their private messages so have spent the last five years developing robust safety measures to prevent, detect and combat abuse while maintaining online security.”
It said it would update on Wednesday on the measures it was taking, such as restricting people over 19 from messaging teens who do not follow them and using technology to identify and take action against malicious behaviour.
“As we roll out end-to-end encryption, we expect to continue providing more reports to law enforcement than our peers due to our industry leading work on keeping people safe,” the spokesperson said.
Social media platforms will face tougher requirements to protect children from accessing harmful content when the Online Safety Bill passed by Parliament on Tuesday becomes law.
End-to-end encryption is a bone of contention between companies and the government in the new law.
Messaging platforms led by WhatsApp oppose a provision that they say could force them to break end-to-end encryption.
The government, however, has said the bill does not ban the technology, but instead, it requires companies to take action to stop child abuse and as a last resort develop technology to scan encrypted messages.
Tech companies have said scanning messages and end-to-end encryption are fundamentally incompatible.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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