TikTok is rolling out its Instagram competitor, TikTok Notes, in select markets.
The app is available on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store in Canada and Australia, the company said.
Starting today, TikTok Notes is available for download and limited testing in Australia and Canada.
— TikTokComms (@TikTokComms) April 17, 2024“We hope that the TikTok community will use TikTok Notes to continue sharing their moments through photo posts.
Earlier this month, TechCrunch reported that the Bytedance-owned company’s Instagram competitor is likely to be named TikTok Notes.
The Oversight Board, Meta’s semi-independent policy council, it turning its attention to how the company’s social platforms are handling explicit, AI-generated images.
Tuesday, it announced investigations into two separate cases over how Instagram in India and Facebook in the U.S. handled AI-generated images of public figures after Meta’s systems fell short on detecting and responding to the explicit content.
In other words, after two reports, the explicit AI-generated image remained on Instagram.
The second case relates to Facebook, where a user posted an explicit, AI-generated image that resembled a U.S. public figure in a Group focusing on AI creations.
Meta’s response and the next stepsIn response to the Oversight Board’s cases, Meta said it took down both pieces of content.
Meta said on Monday that it plans to “temporarily” shutter Threads in Turkey from April 29, in response to an interim injunction imposed by the Turkish competition authority last month over the way Meta shares data between Threads and Instagram.
In 2022, Turkey imposed a $18.6 million fine on Meta for combining user data across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Initially, the only way Meta allowed users to delete a Threads profile was by deleting their whole Instagram account, though it later introduced a separate mechanism for those wishing to ditch their Threads profile only.
Turkish regulators had announced the investigation on the way Meta linked Threads with Instagram in December, concluding last month that there was a strong case to answer for.
The latter of these options means a user’s profile can be resurrected when and if Threads is available in the country again.
Apart from testing Meta AI chatbot with users in countries like India on WhatsApp, the company is also experimenting with putting Meta AI in the Instagram search bar for both chat with AI and content discovery.
The search query in the search bar leads you to a conversation in DM with Meta AI, where you can ask questions or use one of the pre-loaded prompts.
Separately, a few users TechCrunch talked to were able to ask Meta AI to search for Reels suggestions.
Meta confirmed its Meta AI experiment on Instagram with TechCrunch.
You can find a ton of posts about the quality of Instagram search.
TikTok is working towards launching a new app called TikTok Notes that will allow users to post images in an apparent bid to rival Instagram, a service best known for its static-photo sharing feature.
Instagram, of course, has expanded into video and stories itself, taking pieces of other services and incorporating them into its own product.
As is nearly every social service you can imagine.
If it works for one social media service, expect the rest to follow in some manner at some point — probably sooner rather than later.
Expanding a feature set can bolster engaged time, and therefore how much revenue a social media service can earn.
Meta has announced it’s testing new features on Instagram intended to help safeguard young people from unwanted nudity or sextortion scams.
This includes a feature called Nudity Protection in DMs, which automatically blurs images detected as containing nudity.
Nudity screensNudity Protection in DMs aims to protect teen Instagram users from cyberflashing by putting nude images behind a safety screen.
But Meta is taking a further step of not showing the “Message” button on a teen’s profile to potential sextortion accounts, i.e.
For example, in July 2021 Meta switched to defaulting young people’s Instagram accounts to private just ahead of the UK compliance deadline.
If you haven’t been seeing much political content on Instagram lately, there’s a reason for that.
Since March, Instagram and Threads have instituted a new default setting that limits political content you see from people you’re not following.
Hundreds of creators, convened by GLAAD and Accountable Tech, have signed an open letter demanding that Instagram make the political content limit an opt-in feature, rather than on by default.
Instagram’s definition of political content leaves a lot of room for interpretation, which stokes further concern among these creators.
“Removing political recommendations as a default setting, and consequently stopping people from seeing suggested political content poses a serious threat to political engagement, education, and activism,” the letter says.
TikTok’s upcoming Instagram competitor app for sharing photos could be named TikTok Notes, according to screenshots posted by users.
Over the last few days, TikTok users have been getting pop-up notifications about a new TikTok Notes app to share photos.
The notification says that the company is launching “a new app for photo posts” called TikTok Notes soon and users’ existing photo posts will be shared on the app.
Looks like TikTok is launching a new app for photo posts called 'TikTok Notes'.
TikTok is also experimenting with different formats like 30-minute-long videos and even text posts like X and Threads.
Despite its similarities, Instagram Threads is no X.
The traffic surge drove #earthquake to the top of X’s Trends section, followed by other areas of impact, like “East Coast,” “Long Island,” “Philly,” “Manhattan” and “Brooklyn.” Meanwhile, earthquake-related terms didn’t register on Threads’ trends section until closer to 2 p.m.
That’s not to say people weren’t discussing the earthquake on Threads — many were.
Around 1 p.m. on Friday, TechCrunch reached out to Instagram to ask why the earthquake didn’t make it into Threads’ top trends.
The phone kept buzzing, and there was, ‘earthquake, earthquake, earthquake.
For the second time in just over a month, Meta’s apps including WhatsApp, and possibly Messenger and Instagram, are facing outages and intermittent issues.
WhatsApp also confirmed the outage in an update to its X account.
(In our own tests, Meta’s apps were loading and we could send messages via WhatsApp which indicates either the outages were not global in nature or they’ve already been fixed.)
This is not the first time Meta’s apps have seen a sizable outage this year.
At the time, Meta’s status page had signaled problems with products like Ads Manager as well.
