In India, deepfakes of Bollywood actors asking for a party's votes are doing rounds. These are not authorized videos and are not very good edits either. However, these videos are still present on X, and maybe on WhatsApp and Telegram.
Even if original posts on platforms are removed, the distribution is hard to stop in markets like India, and parties are aware of this.
NEW: Meta AI is blocking election-related queries in India. The company started testing Meta AI across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger in India last week.
Google also previously blocked election-related queries on its Gemini chatbot.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/19/meta-ai-is-restricting-election-related-responses-in-india/
The report was closed automatically within 48 hours of the initial report, as Instagram didn’t review it.
The user appealed again and got no response and the image was left up on Instagram.
Instagram only removed the image after the Oversight Board accepted the case and notified the company.
NEW: Meta’s Oversight Board takes up a case where Instagram failed to remove an explicit AI-generated image of an Indian female public figure even after a user reported it.
NEW: Elon Musk plans to charge a small fee to new users to enable posting on social networks to curb the bot problem.
X started testing a “Not A Bot” program in New Zealand and the Philippines last year, charging new users $1 per year.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/15/elon-musk-plans-to-charge-new-x-users-to-enable-posting/
Instagram is testing an AI-powered search bar with pre-populated suggestions. Now, queries take you to a DM conversation with Meta AI. But the most interesting part is that you can ask the bot for content recommendations like Reels.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/12/meta-is-testing-an-ai-powered-search-bar-in-instagram/
Meta is testing its Meta AI chatbot in markets like India and Nigeria after rolling it out to the US last year. At the moment, it only supports the English language.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/11/whatsapp-trials-meta-ai-chatbot-in-india-more-markets/
I wrote about @fancypat's app Palmsy, which is a fun "social network" that lives on your device and gives you fake likes. But the posts go nowhere.
Then there is the question of Threads itself. While Meta hasn’t had a great track record with third-party apps, it has committed to building an API. But we just don’t yet if the company will allow third-party clients.
Principal developer at Iconfactory, which made Twitterrific, Ged Maheux said that the company learned its lesson the hard way and have started to diversify its revenues. Plus, it is making a new social app called Planetary, aiming to bring different feeds together.
Developers are hopeful about the future with decentralized network, but they are unsure if they can rely on development for social platforms as a primary source of income.
Tom Coates, the co-founder of decentralized app Planetary, said that in the early days of the social web, platforms were open to alternative experiences. But over time, platforms like Instagram proved that closed ecosystems benefit companies more.
Apollo for Reddit maker Christian Selig told me that continued collaboration between social networks and developers feel like “a bit of a distant memory.”
New from me: Last year, social network started tightening their terms around user data, especially when it came to third-party app development. Both X (previously Twitter) and Reddit put heavy limits on APIs. I talked to many third-party social developers to understand how they are approaching app-making for social networks.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/09/social-network-api-apps-twitter-reddit-threads-mastodon-bluesky/
India crossed the mark of 2 billion "made in India" smartphones (a lot of them assembled admittedly) in 2022. However, it still lags behind China and Vietnam in terms of export.
16% of "made in India" phones were exported last year, meaning a large chunk of local production is about satisfying local demand.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/14/make-in-india-2-billion-mobile-assemble/
It's amazing that Twitter will rebrand its app to X, but most likely will ignore the Twitter Lite app because the previous management did that as well.
To help us raise more funds for our development efforts, we are launching a new line of merchandise for Mastodon including t-shirts, mugs, enamel pins, and stickers.
you awake from a deep trance,
step away from the phone
to go to your desktop
and join a new social network
