Wikipedia’s first desktop design update in a decade doesn’t rock the boat (updated)

Wikipedia is finally getting its first major redesign in a decade, but it may be notable precisely because of how little it changes the core experience. The newly launched rework looks very familiar, and instead eliminates some common hassles. A new sticky header provides quick access to search and article sections, while a revised search shows images and descriptions as you type. It’s easier to switch languages, and a table of contents helps you navigate content. TechCrunch also points to smaller tweaks, such as a collapsible sidebar that lets you remove distractions while reading.

The Wikipedia update is rolling out now for English users. Wikimedia has already made the update available to 300 of the 318 active languages on the site. It’s already the default for Arabic and Greek readers. The team is still asking for feedback, so don’t be surprised if the site continues to evolve.

Wikimedia Foundation makes clear that it hasn’t removed any functionality, and that the changes led to real-world gains in testing with international volunteer groups. Users searched 30 percent more often, and scrolled 15 percent less. The redesign is meant to modernize Wikipedia by making it more accessible to a “next generation” of internet users who may not be very familiar with the web, according to the creators. You may not pay much notice to the changes if you’re a diehard reader, then, but those just coming online may appreciate the ease of use.

Update 1/19 11:50AM ET: Wikimedia tells Engadget it “ultimately” didn’t introduce a larger default font with today’s rollout, but that it still hopes to make this change in the future. We’ve updated our story accordingly.

Twitter’s For You tabbed interface starts rolling out on desktop web browsers

Twitter’s “For You” tab, which debuted on iOS devices earlier this week, has begun rolling out to desktop web browsers. The new interface replaces the “sparkle” icon that previously allowed you to toggle between the platform’s algorithmically generated…

Twitter opens early access signups for organization verification

Twitter is now accepting signups for those who to be among the first to access the verification for organizations program. It was previously known as Blue for Business, the company said in its announcement, along with a link to the sign-up form. Organizations will have to submit their names, Twitter usernames and websites to be considered for the waitlist. They also have to indicate their size and the expected number of affiliated accounts. If you’ll recall, Musk previously announced that the website will roll out a feature that will give organizations the capability to identify accounts that are actually associated with them.

His announcement came after a rather disastrous launch of Twitter’s paid verification system, which gave rise to a bunch of verified trolls impersonating companies, celebrities and other high-profile personalities. This upcoming feature is meant to help address the issue and ensure that users claiming to be part of a specific organization are who they say they are. 

Musk also announced back then that the website will offer checkmarks in different colors: gold for companies, grey for government and blue for individuals. That will make posing as a company or a government agency difficult for random users. The company ultimately had to pause Blue’s initial rollout due to the influx of impersonators before relaunching it in December with an $11-per-month price tag. 

Twitter will publish its “tweet recommendation code” and will make tweet and account status visible “no later than next month,” Musk has revealed, as well. Presumably, that means users will know if they’ve been shadowbanned and their tweets aren’t showing up for other people. “Transparency builds trust,” he added. In addition, he announced that the website is moving the bookmark button to the tweet details page and is fixing its image auto-cropping feature next week.

Meta sues surveillance company for allegedly scraping more than 600,000 accounts

Meta has filed a lawsuit against Voyager Labs, which it has accused of creating tens of thousands of fake accounts to scrape data from more than 600,000 Facebook users’ profiles. It says the surveillance company pulled information such as posts, likes, friend lists, photos, and comments, along with other details from groups and pages. Meta claims that Voyager masked its activity using its Surveillance Software, and that the company has also scraped data from Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Telegram to sell and license for profit.

In the complaint, which was obtained by Gizmodo, Meta has asked a judge to permanently ban Voyager from Facebook and Instagram. “As a direct result of Defendant’s unlawful actions, Meta has suffered and continues to suffer irreparable harm for which there is no adequate remedy at law, and which will continue unless Defendant’s actions are enjoined,” the filing reads. Meta said Voyager’s actions have caused it “to incur damages, including investigative costs, in an amount to be proven at trial.”

Meta claims that Voyager scraped data from accounts belonging to “employees of non-profit organizations, universities, news media organizations, healthcare facilities, the armed forces of the United States, and local, state, and federal government agencies, as well as full-time parents, retirees, and union members.” The company noted in a blog post it disabled accounts linked to Voyager and that filed the suit to enforce its terms and policies.

“Companies like Voyager are part of an industry that provides scraping services to anyone regardless of the users they target and for what purpose, including as a way to profile people for criminal behavior,” Jessica Romero, Meta’s director of platform enforcement and litigation, wrote. “This industry covertly collects information that people share with their community, family and friends, without oversight or accountability, and in a way that may implicate people’s civil rights.”

In 2021, The Guardian reported that the Los Angeles Police Department had tested Voyager’s social media surveillance tools in 2019. The company is said to have told the department that police could use the software to track the accounts of a suspect’s friends on social media, and that the system could predict crimes before they took place by making assumptions about a person’s activity.

According to The Guardian, Voyager has suggested factors like Instagram usernames denoting Arab pride or tweeting about Islam could indicate someone is leaning toward extremism. Other companies, such as Palantir, have worked on predictive policing tech. Critics such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation claim that tech can’t predict crime and that algorithms merely perpetuate existing biases.

Data scraping is an issue that Meta has to take seriously. In 2021, it sued an individual for allegedly scraping data on more than 178 million users. Last November, the Irish Data Protection Commission fined the company €265 million ($277 million) for failing to stop bad actors from obtaining millions of people’s phone numbers and other data, which were published elsewhere online. The regulator said Meta failed to comply with GDPR data protection rules. 

Netflix inches further into livestreaming as it snags the SAG Awards

Netflix is slowly starting to make more waves in the world of livestreaming, as the company has snagged the rights to broadcast the Screen Actors Guild Awards. This year’s ceremony will take place on February 26th and stream on Netflix’s YouTube channe…

Twitter is reversing its ban on political ads

In 2019, Twitter instituted a fairly strict ban on political and cause-based ads, effectively blocking politicians and organizations like PACs from running ads that prop up candidates, promote ballot measures or ask for donations. Now, the company is reversing that policy, announcing through the Twitter Safety account that it will relax those advertising rules.

Previously, almost all political ads were banned, and cause-based ads that covered subjects like climate change or abortion were subject to various restrictions. The latter were barred from being marketed to custom audiences and age groups, for instance — and while raising awareness to topics was permitted, advocating support for specific legislation was not.

The announcement didn’t go into detail about the ad rules, stating instead that the plan is bring Twitter more in line with the political advertising standards of “TV and other media outlets.” Although it’s not completely clear what that means, its worth noting that TV and broadcast markets that use the public airwaves are required to follow certain FCC rules regarding political advertising that Twitter may not be subject to.

Either way, the change could help Twitter make up for the advertisers who left in the weeks following Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform, which saw brands like GM, Audi, General Mills and others pause advertising. As for Twitter, the social media company says that its making the policy change because it believes that “cause-based advertising can facilitate public conversation around important topics.”

Google is making free anti-terrorism moderation tools for smaller websites

Meta isn’t the only tech heavyweight making tools to help root out terrorist content. The Financial Times has learned Google’s Jigsaw is developing a free tool to help smaller websites detect and remove extremist material. The project, built with the help of the UN-supported Tech Against Terrorism, makes it easier for moderator teams to deal with potentially illegal content. The effort has the assistance of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (founded by Google, Meta, Microsoft and Twitter), which offers a cross-service database of terrorist items. Two unnamed sites will test the code later this year.

As with Meta’s open source utility, Google’s tool is meant to assist sites that can’t afford to develop AI detection algorithms or hire a large moderation staff. That may be critical when the European Union’s Digital Services Act and the UK’s looming Online Safety bill will both require that site operators pull extremist content to avoid penalties.

Both Google and Tech Against Terrorism see their project as necessary to close a gap in countering online terrorist activity. Extremists and misinformation peddlers kicked off mainstream platforms frequently turn to smaller outlets that can’t always adequately police users. Ideally, this reduces the chances of terrorists finding safe havens.

There are limitations. Some social platforms have been reluctant to moderate content even when app store operators say it incites violence — Google’s tool won’t be very useful on websites that don’t want it. It also won’t stop terrorists from sharing material over well-encrypted messaging services or the Dark Web, where providers can’t easily snoop on data traffic. This might, however, make it harder to jump to online alternatives.

There’s never been a better time to stop tweeting

There’s never really been a shortage of reasons to spend less time on Twitter. Even before Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover, the platform was long plagued by misinformation, hate speech, harassment and other ills that made it less than welcoming.

There’s never been a better time to quit Twitter. The Elon Musk-induced chaos at the company has breathed new life into a crop of alternative platforms, and has inspired a new wave of competing efforts to win over disillusioned Twitter users.

Competition emerges

Of all the alternatives out there, none have benefited as much as Mastodon. The open-source service was created in 2016, and first gained notoriety in 2017, when some Twitter users were upset with changes the company had made to the functionality of @-replies. At that time though, it didn’t gain much traction outside a small base of hardcore enthusiasts.

LOS ANGELES, CA - APRIL 08, 2021:Connor Matlen, 6, and his father Logan 45, of Hawthorne, spread their arms out to try and cover the length of American mastodon on exhibit at The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles that re-opened to the public after being closed for over a year due to the COVID-19 outbreak. The American mastodon existed from 2 million to 10,000 years ago. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Mel Melcon via Getty Images

That all changed from the second Musk announced he wanted to buy Twitter. Mastodon saw an immediate spike back in April and the momentum has only increased, according to the nonprofit. “Mastodon has recently exploded in popularity, jumping from approx. 300K monthly active users to 2.5M between the months of October and November, with more and more journalists, political figures, writers, actors and organizations moving over,” founder Eugen Rochko wrote in a recent blog post.

The service isn’t a perfect analog to Twitter. Its platform, which runs on thousands of servers, can make signing up a bit confusing. And a couple of the platform’s most popular servers, like mastodon.social, have at times halted new sign-ups due to surging demand.

But, as Rochko points out, the decentralized platform has become one of the top platforms of choice for some of Twitter’s most influential — and most followed — users. Tellingly, when Musk briefly imposed a ban on accounts promoting alternative social networks, Mastodon’s official Twitter account was the only social app to be suspended.

Mastodon is far from the only previously-niche app to get a boost from turmoil at Twitter. Other apps like CounterSocial, which has a Tweetdeck-like interface, and Tribel, which describes itself as a “pro-democracy Twitter alternative” have also seen an uptick in sign-ups.

There’s also a wave of competition from fresh upstarts. Post News, a new service from former Waze CEO Noam Bardin has also tried to capitalize on Twitter’s dysfunction. The service, which is currently invitation-only, rushed to launch an early version of its beta in November in hopes of drawing away disillusioned Twitter users. Post, which bills itself as a place “to discover, read, watch, discuss and share premium news content without subscriptions or ads,” has more than 610,000 people on its waitlist, according to Bardin.

ASHTON, MD- AUG 26: Bees at the entrance to their hive on a farm in Ashton, Maryland on August 26, 2022. Many are flapping their wings wildly in an act that's called fanning on overly hot days. Members of the colony operate in unison to keep the temperature in the hive as close to 95 degrees as possible. The bees are being raised by Brenda Kiessling with a method that's called
The Washington Post via Getty Images

Another app that’s emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, is Hive Social, an image-centric platform with a feed that looks more like Instagram than Twitter. The service was founded in 2019, and hit 1.5 million users in November, according to the company. The site has had some notable security issues, which it claims to have fixed, but has still managed to make an impression with Gen Z Twitter users.

Legacy platforms are also trying to seize the opportunity created by growing apathy for Twitter. Tumblr claimed to see a surge in new and returning users, according to Matt Mullenweg, CEO of parent company Automattic. The site has also made a habit of trolling Musk and his new policies for Twitter, including with the addition of a $7.99 “Important Blue Internet Checkmark” for users’ blogs. Mullenweg has also said Tumblr will adopt ActivityPub, the protocol powering Mastodon, to make the two services interoperable.

Meta is also keen to challenge its longtime rival. The company recently launched a new “Notes” feature within Instagram that allows users to share status updates at the top of their inbox. At 60 characters, it’s hardly a full-fledged Twitter alternative, but it might not be the last such feature we see from Meta. The New York Timesreports that the company has discussed several ideas to go after Twitter’s “bread and butter.”

The future for Twitter Quitters

It’s hardly the first time that unpopular decisions within Twitter have sparked an interest in alternatives. But in the past, surges to outside platforms have been relatively short lived. And most would-be competitors are still only a fraction of the size of Twitter.

Even with an influx of new users, Mastodon, Post News, Hive Social and Tumblr are still substantially smaller than Twitter. And, as unpopular and autocratic and Musk’s policy decisions seem, the idea of starting over on a new platform can feel daunting. Not everyone can easily rebuild their social graphs on alternative sites, and some may find the growing crop of Twitter clones to also be unwelcoming (this is especially true if you rely on accessibility features, as many of the newer platforms haven’t invested much in these features.)

Still, this particular moment feels different than other times when Twitter has struggled to keep disgruntled users around. For one, there are more choices than ever before for those looking for a reason to leave. But it’s also unique because there are more people actually active on these alternatives than ever before.