Look I know this pandemic has been a long, depressing slog, and even if you’ve masked up, done the social distancing, and have managed to stay virus-free, we’re all good and frazzled at this point. So it’s understandable that now that we have vaccines available, everyone’s impatient to get one.
But when you finally get the jab, resist the urge to post a humblebrag on Instagram or any other social media platform, because identity thieves may be watching. And, you don’t want to be the newly-vaccinated person whose selfie provides scammers with a template to make fake vaccination record cards (because if you think isn’t already happening, you would be mistaken).
“Some of you are celebrating your second COVID-19 vaccination with the giddy enthusiasm that’s usually reserved for weddings, new babies, and other life events,” the Federal Trade Commission wrote in a blog post on Friday. “You’re posting a photo of your vaccination card on social media. Please — don’t do that! You could be inviting identity theft.”
Not only does the card have the vaccinated person’s name and birth date on it, it also includes when and where you got the shot. Unless all your social media accounts are set to private, you’re handing out a lot of free data about yourself you may not want randos on the internet to know.
The New York Times talked to some privacy experts who said a savvy scam artist could pretend to be a healthcare official to trick people who have received the first dose of the vaccine into thinking they need to pay for the second dose, and get the victims’ credit card information. And, someone could use the photo of your vaccination card to recreate the cards and possibly sell counterfeit versions— something that’s apparently already happening in the UK.
As part of its Vaccinate with Confidence campaign, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a plan for states to hand out stickers to the newly-vaccinated, an excellent visual to share on social media instead of your vaccination card.
So if you have been vaccinated against the coronavirus, please accept my congratulations! We’re all happy for you. But we don’t need to see your vital information all over our social feeds.
Not long after it blocked Facebook, Myanmar has now ordered mobile networks and internet service providers to block Twitter and Facebook-owned Instagram in the country as well. The southeast Asian country’s military seized power in a coup earlier this week, detaining its civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi along with other government officials.
Facebook users had reportedly been using the social media platform to protest the coup, sharing photos of themselves giving the three-finger salute that’s become associated with resistance in the area.
“All mobile operators, international gateways and internet service providers in Myanmar received a directive on 5 February 2021 from the Myanmar Ministry of Transport and Communications (MoTC) to, until further notice, block the social media platforms Twitter and Instagram,” Norwegian telecom company Telenor said in a statement late Friday. The company provides mobile services in Myanmar.
Myanmar’s Ministry of Information issued an ominous statement on Tuesday, a day after the military seized power, instructing people not to spread rumors on social media, CNN reported. “Some media and public are spreading rumors on social media conducting gatherings to incite rowdiness and issuing statements which can cause unrest. We would like to urge the public not to carry out these acts and would like to notify the public to cooperate with the government in accordance with the existing laws,” the statement read.
Rafael Frankel, Facebook’s director of public policy, APAC emerging countries, said in a statement to The Verge that the company was “extremely concerned” by the shutdown orders, and urged authorities to unblock access immediately. “At this critical time, the people of Myanmar need access to important information and to be able to communicate with their loved ones,” Frankel said.
A Twitter spokesperson echoed that concern, saying in an email to The Verge that the order “undermines the public conversation and the rights of people to make their voices heard. The Open Internet is increasingly under threat around the world. We will continue to advocate to end destructive government-led shutdowns.”
Update February 6th, 11:13AM ET: Adds statements from Facebook and Twitter
Snap says its TikTok competitor, Spotlight, had 100 million users in January 2021, just two months after it launched. The figure would suggest a surprisingly successful debut for the service, which has taken over the far-right tab inside of Snapchat.
TikTok likely still has a significant lead on the new service, though. TikTok said it had 100 million monthly users in the United States alone as of June 2020, and signs suggest the app has only continued to grow since then. (On the other hand, Instagram’s leader has said he’s “not yet happy with” Reels, its shortform video competitor.)
Snap has put a lot of money behind Spotlight in order to help the section catch on. The company promised to give away $1 million per day to creators for more than a month in order to get people posting videos, filling the service with fun stuff to watch. The initiative seemingly worked, with some creators seeing the service as a quick way to make a lot of cash. Creators are now uploading an average of 175,000 videos per day, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said in prepared remarks for investors.
“While it is still very early in the development of this new content platform, we are highly encouraged by the initial results and excited about the potential for Spotlight to further expand our monetization opportunity in the future,” Snap CFO Derek Andersen said in prepared remarks.
The feature is still far more limited than TikTok. Exploration options are limited, and you can’t remix sounds or go down a rabbit hole of dance videos to a popular song, bot features that have helped TikTok continue to grow.
It’s also worth noting that Snap gave the figure in terms of monthly users when the company has long placed a focus on daily users overall. That suggests the daily usage of the feature is a good amount lower, given that someone only needed to open the tab once in January to be considered a monthly user. Snap now boasts 265 million daily users overall, up from 249 million the prior quarter, the company said in its Q4 2020 earnings release.
Instagram has disabled hundreds of accounts that were stolen as part of online hacking operations designed to gain access to and sell rare and coveted usernames, the company tells The Verge. Both TikTok and Twitter also took action on some of the accounts belonging to the same hackers, reports journalist and cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs.
The Facebook-owned platform set its sights mainly on the community surrounding OGUsers, a website well-known for trafficking in stolen usernames and helping facilitate the hacking of these accounts through methods like SIM swapping, which is when a user gains control of someone’s phone number and uses it to reset passwords and take control of social media handles. News of Instagram’s enforcement was first reported on Thursday by Reuters.
“Today, we’re removing hundreds of accounts connected to members of the OGUsers forum. They harass, extort and cause harm to the Instagram community, and we will continue to do all we can to make it difficult for them to profit from Instagram usernames,” a Facebook spokesperson tells The Verge. The disclosure is notable because it’s the first time the platform has publicly shared information regarding moderation against username hackers. Earlier this week, Instagram released a new feature that lets people recover deleted posts, in the event a hacker takes control of their account and wipes it clean.
Krebs reported on Thursday that the crackdown was something of a joint effort, with Twitter and TikTok also taking action against popular OGUsers community members at the same time on those companies’ respective platforms (although it’s unclear how much coordination there was between the three companies or how far-reaching TikTok and Twitter’s enforcement was).
“As part of our ongoing work to find and stop inauthentic behavior, we recently reclaimed a number of TikTok usernames that were being used for account squatting,” TikTok told Krebs in a statement. “We will continue to focus on staying ahead of the ever-evolving tactics of bad actors, including cooperating with third parties and others in the industry.”
In addition to disabling the accounts that were stolen, rendering them worthless, the social platforms have also disabled some accounts of well-known OGUsers middlemen who act as intermediaries during username transactions by holding funds in escrow in exchange for a cut of the fee, reports Reuters.
OGUsers made headlines last summer when a small cohort of hackers affiliated with the site allegedly participated in an unprecedented Twitter hack that involved resetting the passwords on the accounts of dozens of high-profile individuals and companies, including Elon Musk and Barack Obama, and using their access to run a bitcoin scam. Like the individual at the center of the Twitter hack, then-17-year-old Graham Ivan Clark, many of the hackers Instagram is cracking down on today and those who frequent OGUsers are minors, often drawn into the community by the allure of stealing and retaining a rare username of their own.
These usernames tend to be single words — in rare cases, individual letters or numbers — and they can fetch tens of thousands of dollars on underground markets for stolen digital goods. And because platforms like Instagram and Twitter have rules barring the buying and selling of accounts, the hackers interested in procuring one of these coveted handles often resort to illegal means to obtain them. SIM hacking is a popular method, but standard phishing as well as sustained online harassment, extortion, and even swatting are other known techniques, notes Reuters.
Myanmar’s government has blocked access to Facebook in the country, after users turned to the company’s services to protest this week’s military coup. In a statement given to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook confirmedthat the country’s telecoms providers had been ordered to block its services, adding, “We urge authorities to restore connectivity so that people in Myanmar can communicate with family and friends and access important information.” Myanmar’s government has ordered the services to be blocked until Sunday.
The block comes after users reportedly turned to the social network to protest after the military ousted elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and detained her along with other members of her party. The WSJ notes that users on Facebook were sharing photos of themselves banging pots and pans as a sign of protest, as well as images of a three-fingered salute — a gesture that’s become a sign of resistance in the region.
Telecoms provider Telenor confirmed to Nikkeithat it has followed the government’s orders, saying it has “decided to comply with the directive, while expressing grave concerns regarding breach of human rights.” The WSJ reports that an internet monitoring organization, NetBlocks, confirmed that Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp are all unavailable via the state-owned Myanmar Posts and Telecommunications’ network.
Facebook is an integral part of Myanmar’s internet ecosystem. “For the majority of Myanmar’s 20 million internet-connected citizens, Facebook is the internet” was how a report from 2018 put it, and Nikkei notes that Messenger is the primary communications channel for most of its citizens. It’s believed around half of the country’s population holds a Facebook account, meaning any attempt to block the service is a significant move.
This close relationship between Myanmar’s internet and Facebook has created problems. In 2018, Facebook admitted that it hadn’t done enough “to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence,” after critics said its platform had played a role in genocidal violence in the country. Facebook said it was investing in “people, technology and partnerships to examine and address the abuse of Facebook in Myanmar.”
Instagram might try to emulate another element of TikTok’s design with a new vertical feed for Stories, TechCrunch reports. Navigating with vertical swipes up and down would make stories behave more like Reels, the shortform video feature the company added to better compete with TikTok.
The vertical stories feed is not currently being tested, Instagram confirmed to TechCrunch, but code for the change is already in development based on this screenshot developer Alessandro Paluzzi shared. It’s not much to go on, but it does show Instagram is at least considering the adjustment to its ever-expanding features.
Mimicking Reels (which, in turn, was heavily “inspired” by TikTok) would unify Instagram’s various feeds in some sense. If Stories became a vertical experience, it would not only match Reels, but also the app’s original feature: scrolling the feed. IGTV would still function a bit differently, though; those videos are buried in a vertical grid in profiles but feature horizontal navigation once you start watching.
In an interview with Instagram head Adam Mosseri for the Decoder podcast, he said 2020 was about “placing a bunch of bets,” while 2021 would be about “delivering on those commitments and simplifying the experience.” The company is already testing changes to what kind of content can be added to stories, and changing how those stories are displayed could be the next step in that simplification process.
As of February 2021, Spotify boasts 155 million Premium subscribers and 345 million monthly active users. The platform has long been the world’s most popular music streaming service, and with good cause – it got in on the ground floor and its simple interface and vast library make it a compelling choice even in the face of stiff competition from Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, YouTube Music, Amazon Music Unlimited and others.
But are you getting the most from your Spotify membership?
We’ve compiled a list of our favourite Spotify features, tips and tricks to help you get the most out of the service – from mastering offline listening to getting the best possible sound quality, sharing your music to filtering your recommendations. Some of these are only for Spotify Premium subscribers only though, so if you want the full experience, you’ll have to cough up the £9.99 per month…
Spotify Connect: what is it? How can you get it?
Tidal vs Spotify: which is better?
Set up
1. Get the best sound quality
First things first: head to the settings menu (below your account name, top right, and although it’s set to ‘automatic’ by default, you can change the music quality – choose Low (24kbps), Medium (96 kbps), High (160 kbps) or Very High (320 kbps). Admittedly, these aren’t going to sound as sweet as lossless Tidal Master or Qobuz files, and taking the Very High path might take up more of your data allowance to stream. But that’s a small price to pay for better listening.
2. Save music for offline listening
Spotify Premium users can download tracks to listen to offline. Not only does this save you valuable data, it also means you can listen where you don’t have mobile reception. Win-win. Save your playlists in the best possible quality, naturally. Hit the three dots then select ‘download’ on Android, or select the playlist then hit ‘download’ at the top on Apple.
3. Create a new playlist
To create a new playlist, head into the playlist category in ‘Your Library’. At the top you’ll find an music icon with a plus sign on it (Android), or tap ‘Edit’ and then ‘Create’ (iOS) start your brand new playlist. On the desktop app, you’ll see a plus-sign and ‘New Playlist in the bottom-left, underneath any playlists you’ve already created.
4. Transfer your music from other apps
You can transfer your existing playlists on other music services to Spotify. The Soundiiz website is a great way to get it done and supports all the services you’d expect.
Interface
5. See your stats
Click on your profile icon in the top left to see who’s following you and who you’re following. It will also show your most recently listened-to artists and public playlists.
6. Sort your now-playing queue
Cue tracks in Spotify by selecting ‘add to queue’ from the three dots next to the track title. On iOS? You can also swipe right on a track to add it to your now-playing playlist.
7. Search for your favourite tunes
Want to find a track from your own library? On mobile, pull down on the screen when you’re in any of the sub-categories (albums, playlists, artists) in the ‘Your Library’ tab to reveal a search bar at the top, complete with filter options. This searches your own saved tracks rather than the whole of Spotify (which is done via the main ‘Search’ icon at the bottom).
8. Listen using the web interface
Not allowed to install software on your work computer? No problem. Head to play.spotify.com and you can listen without installing the Spotify desktop app (or relying on your phone). Take that, overzealous IT department.
9. Master keyboard shortcuts
Did you know you can control Spotify using just your keyboard? The Space bar is play/pause, next track is Control-Right (Control-Command-Right on a Mac), back is Control-Left (Control-Command-Left on a Mac), Volume is Control-Up or -Down (Command-Up or -Down on a Mac) and to create a new playlist press Control-N. And that’s just scratching the surface.
Check out the full list here.
Organising your music
10. Build your own library
There are a couple of ways to build your music library. Adding your favourite tracks to playlists is one way, saving music to your own library is another. Add tracks, albums, artists radio stations, podcasts and playlists by hitting the plus/save sign (either next to the song in the desktop app, or by tapping the three dots on mobile), then access your music via ‘Your Library’.
11. Add music that isn’t on Spotify
Missing out on those artists that are absent from Spotify? Add them yourself. Go to Spotify’s ‘Preferences’ on the desktop app, scroll down and click ‘Add a Source’, then select a folder containing your own music files. You can then see them in your Spotify library – they’ll be under ‘Local Files’ in the left sidebar.
12. Recover a deleted playlist
Spotify’s Account website can help restore playlists that you’ve deleted. Log in, go to ‘Account Settings’, and select ‘Recover Playlists’. Hey presto.
13. Find clean and explicit versions of songs
If you think a lyric sounds unlike the witty line you remember, chances are an expletive was swapped out in favour of a less explicit word. Spotify can help you track down the original. Scroll down and select the pull-down menu on the right-hand side. If it says ‘1 More Release’, that could well be the explicit version.
Music curation
14. Follow some friends
Is your pal always first with the best new music? You can piggyback off their hard work by following them on Spotify. This way you’ll be able to see what they’re listening to, and pass those killer tracks off as your own discoveries. (We suppose they are, in a way.) Select ‘Find Friends’ to locate them, and instantly expand your listening.
15. Share music with friends using Spotify Codes
Spotify Codes is another way to share music. Scan a code on your friend’s phone to download a tune, or import a code posted by an artist to hear their latest single. You can also scan a code from a poster, flyer or billboard. Tap the ‘…’ context menu next to a song, and you’ll see a Spotify Code appear at the bottom of the album artwork. Use the ‘Camera’ icon to scan it, or tap the Code-enhanced artwork and save it to ‘Camera Roll’ for uploading to a social network.
16. Make a collaborative playlist
Maybe you’re putting together a set list for a friend’s wedding or a party. Start a collaborative playlist and everyone can chuck in their tuppence-worth, no matter how misguided. Right-click on the playlist name, and it’ll give you the option of making it collaborative. Then grant friends access to it, and brace yourself for some terrible choices. Alternatively, you can make a playlist secret, too.
17. Let the Radio option open your ears to similar artists
Stuck for what to listen to? ‘Radio’ can help. On desktop, select it from the left-hand pane, then choose ‘Create new station’ and pick an artist, album or playlist you like. Radio will then serve up a selection of artists/songs similar to your choice, that you’ll (hopefully) like. On mobile? Hit the three dots top right when on an artist, album or song and then select ‘Go to Radio’.
18. Filter out the chaff
Yes, of course you want to listen to James Brown. No, you don’t want anything from his Lost ’80s years. Thankfully you can filter out the wilderness era. Type the artist name in the search bar followed by the years that you want to hear (with no spaces). For example “James Brown year:1970-77”.
19. Sort out your search
Use the word “Not” after your search term to omit artists you don’t want, and the “+” symbol or “And” to include those you do.
20. Listen to Spotify’s Weekly Discover Playlist
This is a playlist of 30 tracks Spotify compiles based on your listening habits. It tends to be scarily good. It updates every Monday and sits in the ‘Made For You’ section (or in Browse – Discover, or you could simply type ‘Discover Weekly’ into the search bar). There’s also the Release Radar playlist that updates every Friday with brand new music releases.
21. Listen to your Daily Mixes
Too impatient to wait a whole week? Spotify now offers six Daily Mix playlists that are tailored to users’ listening habits.
22. Check out the What Hi-Fi? playlist
And we have to mention our own playlist… Each month, we update our Spotify playlist so you can see what we’ve been listening to over the past four weeks. It’s a great mix of tunes we use to test our review kit, as well as a few personal favourites from the team. You know it makes sense.
Connecting other devices
23. Listen through your home cinema speakers
Using the Google Chromecast streaming dongle, you can play Spotify through the speakers attached to your TV. Just select ‘Chromecast’ from the ‘Devices Available’ section of the Spotify app and get playing.
24. Control it with your voice
Good news. The Amazon Echo and Echo Dot speakers play nice with Spotify. Just connect your Spotify account in the Alexa app, and then start barking commands like “Alexa, play me some Bowie on Spotify!” and the Echo will do as it’s told. You’ll be grooving to Let’s Dance in no time. If you set Spotify as your preferred streaming service, you won’t even need to request Spotify by name, either. Apple users can control music playback by asking Siri, too.
25. Send music to your speakers with Spotify Connect
Premium subscribers can use their phone as a remote control and play music on connected Spotify Connect speakers, such as Sonos – although certain devices (the PlayStation 4, for example) are happy to work with Spotify Free. Play a song on your phone and make it fullscreen. Select the ‘speaker’ icon at the bottom of the screen, then select your speakers. Instant house party.
26. Listen in your Uber
Connect your Spotify account in the Uber app and you can then take control of your car’s stereo (assuming your driver has allowed it). They’ll love your choice of music, we’re sure…
More features
(Image credit: Spotify)
27. Share songs instantly with anyone
Heard a song you just have to send to a friend? Tap the three dots, then ‘Share’, then send it on to the social media platform (Facebook, Instagram Stories, Skype even), your WhatsApp groups, or simply copy the song link.
28. Preview music on iOS
Tap and hold the title of a track, album or playlist, and you’ll get a preview. On a playlist or album you’ll see the first five tracks – slide over each piece of cover art and you can preview each song.
29. Use private listening to hide your guilty pleasures
Not everyone needs to know about your love of Wang Chung. If you want to keep your listening private, click ‘Settings’ (top right), then ‘Private Session’ on Android or ‘Settings’ then ‘Social’ then ‘Private Session’ on iOS. That way, friends won’t know you’ve spent all morning blissing out to big-haired saxophone-heavy ’80s cheese.
30. Make a playlist tailored to your running speed
Spotify can also pick tracks that are close to the same tempo as your running speed. Start running, pick a running playlist from the ‘Browse’ screen, and Spotify will use your phone’s sensors to select songs to suit your stride. See it in action here.
31. Link to a specific part of a track
If there’s a great solo you want to alert someone to, you don’t have to tell them to skip to 2:53 in the track. Just send them a link and they’ll jump right in at the relevant part. On desktop, copy the track’s URI (uniform resource identifier) by right-clicking the track and selecting ‘Copy Spotify URI’. Then paste it into an email or text message, and add ‘#time2:53’ to the end. When the respondent clicks it, they’ll be transported to exactly the part you were talking about. Magic.
32. Find out about live gigs
OK, large gatherings aren’t the thing right now, but looking ahead: Spotify can help you see your favourite act in the flesh. To see when an act might be playing near you, click ‘Browse’ on your desktop app, then ‘Concerts’ to see which acts you’ve listened to are playing nearby. Going to be out of town? Just change your location to see what’s happening near you.
33. Listen to podcasts
Did you know you can listen to your favourite podcasts on Spotify? Well, now you do. Head to ‘Browse’ and then ‘Podcasts’ (on desktop) to follow your faves, and go to the Podcasts section in ‘Your Library’ to find all your saved podcasts.
Best music streaming services 2021: free streams to hi-res audio
11 of the best Spotify playlists to listen to right now
Instagram is disabling the ability to share (and reshare) posts from your feed to stories as part of a test to see how it changes engagement with the popular feature. The company announced the change in a notification banner sent to users in “select countries” where the test is being conducted, Social Media Todaywrites. We’ve reached out to Instagram for specifics on exactly which countries are participating and will update if we hear more.
“We hear from our community that they want to see fewer posts in Stories,” the notification starts. “During this test, you won’t be able to add a feed post to your Story.” Resharing posts to stories is a fairly common practice, though it does create situations where you’ll see a post in your feed and then immediately see that post duplicated in your friend’s stories.
However annoying this situation may be, it’s worth noting that sharing posts to stories is how many artists, businesses, and organizations get in front of users, due to Instagram’s algorithm favoring friends and family. For example, shoving feed posts in stories opens up the opportunity for the mutual aid organization in your neighborhood to get more donations. Taking away the ability to reshare is responding to a behavior Facebook and Instagram encouraged in the first place by placing stories so prominently in the app and offering the ability to share them.
For now, disabling reshares remains a test, much like the changes to likes the company considered and the variety of new app layouts it has prototyped. But the timing is a bit ironic: Twitter is currently testing the ability to share tweets to Instagram stories as stickers. So you might start seeing a lot more reshares in your stories from an entirely different social media platform.
For some of you on iOS, we’ll be testing sharing a Tweet as a sticker to Instagram too! Tap the Instagram icon in the Tweet share menu to add the Tweet as a sticker in a Story.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) December 10, 2020
Instagram is making it easier to bring back deleted posts. The company is rolling out a “recently deleted” feature in the app that’ll allow you to review content you’ve deleted, including photos, videos, reels, IGTV videos, and stories, and restore them. Instagram is positioning this feature as helpful against hacks, particularly if hackers gain control of an account and start deleting content. Starting today, users will need to confirm they’re the account owner through either text or email in order to permanently delete or restore content.
Deleted items will stay in the folder for 30 days, and if not touched, they will automatically delete after that point. Deleted stories are the exception, however: they will only stay in the recently deleted section for 24 hours before they’re permanently removed. To access the folder, navigate to Settings > Account > Recently Deleted.
Clearly, Instagram wants to give people chances to keep their content before permanently removing it. The app already offers an archive, or a way to keep posts without them being publicly available, and with this feature, it’s allowing people to keep their posts as an option, even if they want to initially delete them. Instagram benefits from having more content, and thereby more data, on users. The more it can encourage people to keep their posts, the better it is for the service.
Correction 2/2, 12:22 PM ET: This story initially stated that users need to confirm they’re the account holder in order to access the feature in general, but they actually only need to do so to permanently delete or restore content. We’ve updated to reflect this change.
A real-life trading floor is noisy. You can find traders shouting at each other, especially when the markets are volatile and stock is moving fast. That same environment has been replicated online this week, thanks to Discord.
Getting inside offers a surreal look at an emerging virtual trade floor where people are yelling at each other to invest into GameStop or AMC stocks. Dozens of people join the server every second, and one channel has a stream of memes that looks like pure chaos.
Welcome to the world of r/WallStreetBets.
The r/WallStreetBets Discord server.
Discord is usually the tool of choice for gamers to communicate with friends, Twitch streamers to grow a community, or just small groups of people to share similar interests. It’s a hugely popular app, with more than 100 million monthly active users. The Reddit community r/WallStreetBets has turned to Discord in recent weeks to organize and communicate in real time, as it seeks to force hedge funds into losing millions of dollars on their bets against struggling retail companies like GameStop and AMC.
Amateur traders are flocking to the Discord server to discuss stock movements, share memes, and participate in what feels like an online game. Every post is littered with emoji reactions that fly off the page within seconds, and the calls are full of people shouting “buy GameStop” or “hold GMC” as stock prices go up and down throughout the day.
At times it feels like it only takes one person to shout something on a call or spam a meme enough times for it to catch on and everyone to run with it. I witnessed hundreds of people hit Twitch yesterday to spam “save AMC” in a variety of live streams. Rapper Soulja Boy’s Twitch stream was swarmed with the messages, after calls to visit his stream. But the group failed to convince him to tweet about the struggling theater chain.
The Discord calls and many of the memes are often full of profanity or racial slurs, leading Discord to ban the r/WallStreetBets server last night. It quickly came back to life a few hours later, though, and has already amassed 200,000 members.
“Can we just get one minute of therapeutic silence,” asked someone on the main Discord call yesterday. A few seconds of silence passed before the ask was met with fart sounds, high-pitched music, and sound boards. The members often joke about the FBI or SEC listening in, which prompts many to spam the “FBI, open up!” audio meme.
After last night’s Discord server ban, r/WallStreetBets is rebuilding its Discord community, but a split has emerged. There are now two Discord servers, with an unofficial one at 88,000 members.
Misinformation is common throughout these Discord servers. In the official one, a discussion broke out about the potential for a US-led war to impact stock markets. “There is going to be a war, 100 percent,” claimed one Discord user. “I’m going to bring my gaming chair into the war,” joked another. Fake Elon Musk memes are also as popular as the man himself among this group. “The only thing I want in life is for Elon Musk to tell me I’m beautiful,” said one Discord user praising the Tesla CEO.
Among all the chaos and fake Elon Musk memes, there is some relative organization on the server with calmer heads providing tips to amateur traders. “Only put money in that you can afford to lose,” is a common piece of advice. New members often join and want to know what stock to invest in, but are quickly met with “we are not financial advisors” or “buy what you feel like buying” responses.
I’ve also witnessed what sound like day traders teaching people the basics of options, market retracements, and how to create charts with technical indicators and overlays. Robinhood has made buying and selling stocks as easy as posting a photo to Instagram, and those new to this experiment are eager to learn more.
Others, who have clearly been part of the r/WallStreetBets community for more than a few days, are also quick to advise new members not to try trial broker accounts with fake money for too long. “You need to get used to the emotional reality of a market open,” said one Discord member.
The advice is often interrupted by excitement as GameStop or AMC shares reach new highs. At one point this morning GameStop hit $420 a share in premarket trading, which was met by cheers and surprise on the Discord call.
I personally spend large parts of my day on Discord, but I’ve still never seen anything quite like the r/WallStreetBets server — even in groups with 300,000 members. Dozens of people join every second, and at times it has forced Discord to crash on my high-end gaming PC or take up lots of CPU resources. Even on my iPhone it kills my battery and makes my phone hot to touch.
The question now is how long this mass organized movement can continue on Discord, and the amount of time left in the grand GameStop stock price game. After a ban for “hateful and discriminatory content,” the official r/WallStreetBets Discord server seems less chaotic. But r/WallStreetBets describes itself as “like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal,” and a lot of the Reddit comments contain offensive language.
r/WallStreetBets feels like The Button, an online meta-game that first appeared on Reddit for April Fools’ Day in 2015. Redditors rushed to push a button on a 60-second timer that would reset every time it was clicked. It inspired devotion and obsession much like this GameStop stock rally, and even spawned religions and cults.
The Button ended more than two months after its introduction when the timer finally hit zero with no attempts to reset it. There’s no timer here on this Discord and Reddit trade floor experiment, and nobody really knows exactly how and when it’s going to end.
A new web standard is playing off of California’s powerful privacy law
On today’s internet, information is nearly impossible to control. It’s become commonplace for a single website visit to spill over into targeted ads (often for something you’ve already bought) or unexpectedly canny spam emails. It’s assumed that information from your browsing history will be available to target your Instagram ads, and despite nominal commitments to privacy, tech companies have mostly given up trying to stop those data flows.
Privacy groups are hoping that a new standard, called Global Privacy Control, will change that. It’s designed as a global opt out, a general signal that users want as little data collection and sharing as possible. In particular, the GPC standard will let users signal that they don’t want services to share their data with third-party data brokers, something that is outside the reach of most modern privacy tools. The team hopes that this new signal will give users a way to protect their data after it’s been collected and ensure personal information doesn’t travel too far.
“When you go to a website right now, you don’t know if they’re selling data on the back end,” says DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg, a central player in the project. “But we’re hoping that this signal will stop them from doing that, because it will be legally binding.”
The GPC standard sprang from a powerful but little-noticed provision in the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which was strengthened further with the passage of the California Privacy Rights Act in November. A provision in the law gives Californians the right to opt out of having their personal information sold by the sites they visit. Crucially, the law interprets “sell” as including any exchange of value, which could include being read broadly enough to go beyond outright data broker sales and into the endemic tracking pixels that power much of the advertising you see online.
“That right is supposed to prevent any third-party tracking,” says Ashkan Soltani, who worked on drafting the CCPA and CPRA and has been a pivotal force in drafting the new standard. “There hasn’t been too much enforcement of it but more importantly, people don’t know about it and find the button, so not many people opt out…But the CCPA also has in it the right for users to opt-out through a global privacy control.”
Global Privacy Control is meant to automate that opt out, letting users click a single button on their browser instead of hunting for the opt out on every website they visit. Starting today, browsers from Brave and DuckDuckGo will send the GPC signal by default, and DuckDuckGo plugins will let you bring the same signal to Firefox and Chrome. Privacy Badger, Abine, and Disconnect.me have made similar moves to build the standard into their products. All told, project organizers estimate that 40 million users worldwide will be sending out the GPC signal through one product or another, giving them surprising political muscle when future privacy rules are written.
Site partners like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Meredith Corp have also agreed to respect the signal, and Automattic (the company that owns WordPress) will honor GPC in its self-hosted sites and internal ad network, spanning hundreds of thousands of sites. It’s a small group compared to the billions of Chrome and Safari users out there, but it will provide a proof-of-concept for the more private web the GPC team is trying to build.
There is still a long way to go before GPC is available outside the cloistered world of web privacy tools. None of the major browsers currently support GPC as a native privacy option, although Mozilla said it supports the effort. The team says they’ve submitted the standard to the W3C, but it will be a long road before it gets approved — with lots of opportunity for ad-friendly tech companies to throw a wrench in the works. The last time privacy advocates tried to build an opt-out system, this is where it fell apart, resulting in the short-lived Do Not Track standard of the mid-‘00s.
But GPC boosters like Weinberg say the CCPA and other pending privacy laws make things different this time. There’s a lot that still needs to happen before GPC has the force of law — in particular, the California attorney general will need to definitively state that the GPC counts as an opt out — but it would give the standard a power that Do Not Track never had.
“The CCPA has passed and the GDPR has provisions that we think map to this signal. So there’s a real case that those laws apply to Global Privacy Control, but it hasn’t been legally proven in the courts,” says Weinberg. “Ultimately, there will probably have to be court cases to fully establish what ‘sale’ means under CCPA and what ‘opt-out’ means under GDPR.”
The California attorney general declined to comment for this piece, although AG Becerra had expressed enthusiasm for the project before being nominated for a post in the Biden administration.
The biggest lingering question is the long-simmering push for a federal privacy law, which privacy advocates have been fighting to get through Congress since 2016. As long as GPC relies on California privacy law, it will only matter to California residents — but a federal privacy law could open the standard up to the entire country and potentially strengthen GPC’s protections further. There’s also increasing ambition to expand the opt-out signal beyond the web to apps and the Internet of Things, although such a move would be years away.
Even if GPC gets full backing from legislators and courts, it won’t mean an end to targeted advertising or even data sharing. There’s still a lot of targeting that can be done within a single site, and the online ad world will surely get creative in finding loopholes that let them share data further. But establishing a robust opt-out system on the web would still mean a powerful shift in the way personal data works online — and potentially a start to cleaning up the bewildering tangle of data-sharing agreements online. As partners roll out and momentum builds, Weinberg thinks time is on his side.
“Our view is that websites really have to respect it,” says Weinberg. “It’s only a matter of time.”
Apple’s new privacy feature requiring developers ask for permission to track iOS users for ad targeting is at last going live in the next iOS 14 beta with a planned full release some time this spring for non-beta users, the company tells The Verge.
The announcement coincides with Data Privacy Day, as well as a speech on privacy from Apple CEO Tim Cook later today at the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference in Brussels. Apple initially planned for the feature to go live with the launch of iOS 14 last fall, but it delayed its implementation to 2021 in September of last year to give developers more time to comply. Today’s announcement narrows the launch window to this spring, but Apple is not commenting further on when exactly we might see it to go live for everyone.
Called App Tracking Transparency, the new opt-in requirement will mark a significant shift in how mobile app developers are able to collect data on iPhone owners and share that data with other firms to aid in advertising. Prior to the change, Apple let iPhone owners dig into their settings to disable this type of tracking. Now, instead of forcing users to be proactive about disabling it, Apple will demand developers ask for permission or risk suspension or removal from the App Store if they don’t comply or try to skirt the rules.
The primary way advertisers are able to, say, know when you are shopping for a new hat on one app before serving you ads for that same hat on another app is that a unique identifying code, the so-called Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), is linked to your device, collected by the first app, and shared with the second. That allows those apps to serve targeted ads and to measure whether the ad actually worked, for instance if you ended up purchasing that hat you saw in an Instagram ad by clicking an ad for the company’s online store in Google Chrome.
Apple’s new opt-in requirement will make it so developers must have express consent from iOS device owners to allow their IDFA to be collected and shared across apps. App makers can still use other information you give them for the purpose of targeting advertising even if you opt not to let the app track you, but that information cannot be shared with another company for the purpose of ad tracking under Apple’s new policy. The sharing with other third-party companies is effectively what Apple refers to when it uses the word “tracking.”
Apple intends to strictly police any attempt to get around the opt-in requirement. For instance, it says app developers will not be allowed to disable app functionality of any kind if users say no to the opt-in, and that developers will also be barred from charging money or incentivizing users with in-app perks or giveaways to sway their decision one way or the other. Any app that tries to replace the IDFA with another identifying piece of information, like an email address, will be in violation of the opt-in requirement.
Apple says the rules will also apply to its own apps, and the company already lets users disable personalized advertising the company serves within the App Store, Apple News, and the Stocks app using data it collects from your device. (It’s worth noting that ad personalization is not the same as ad tracking, and mobile app companies can still personalize ads so long as they can disclose that with an App Store privacy label.) Apple has no history of sharing the information it collects with other companies, either, and it makes that clear in its ad personalization toggle in the iOS settings.
This is expected to affect both the companies that run ad networks, like Facebook, and the companies paying for the ads, like the aforementioned unnamed hat seller. That’s precisely why Facebook has come out as arguably the biggest opponent to Apple’s new privacy measures, which include not only this new opt-in requirement but also app privacy labels it launched on the App Store last month.
Facebook has positioned itself as a champion of small businesses that risk getting hurt by this privacy change, and small businesses do rely on Facebook’s ad network and its powerful targeting tools to reach customers. Past privacy changes to Apple’s mobile Safari browser did also have legitimate negative consequences for ad-supported businesses like news websites. (The Verge is an ad-supported news website.)
But in full-page newspaper ads and statements to the press, Facebook has gone a step further and cast Apple as a hypocrite trying to exempt itself from the rules it forces on other developers and as greedy for encouraging app business models that rely less on advertising and more on subscriptions, of which Apple would theoretically get a cut.
“Apple has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work, which they regularly do to preference their own,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on an earnings call on Wednesday. “This impacts the growth of millions of businesses around the world, including with the upcoming iOS 14 changes.” Zuckerberg added that, “Apple may say they’re doing this to help people but the moves clearly track their competitor interests.”
Apple has consistently defended its choice as a way to give users more freedom over their privacy and refuted Facebook’s claims it intends to hold its first-party software to different standards. The showdown has emerged as one of the largest and most visible tech company feuds in recent memory, though it’s clear now Facebook has little to no leverage in the situation despite its defensiveness and public posturing. The changes are imminent, and Facebook will be forced to comply as it was with the privacy labels last month.
To further hammer home its privacy philosophy, Apple has created a new online guide it’s calling “A Day in the Life of Your Data” that breaks down common ad tracking and targeting practices in the mobile app and web industries and presents statistics on the prevalence of these practices. Apple says the average mobile app contains six trackers that share your data with other apps, and that a “large and opaque industry has been amassing increasing amounts of personal data.”
“A complex ecosystem of websites, apps, social media companies, data brokers, and ad tech firms track users online and offline, harvesting their personal data. This data is pieced together, shared, aggregated, and monetized, fueling a $227 billion-a-year industry,” the guide reads. “This occurs every day, as people go about their daily lives, often without their knowledge or permission.”
In retrospect, stock memes were inevitable. Unfortunately, it looks like a lot of brokerages weren’t ready.
Vanguard, Charles Schwab, and Fidelity Investments, among others, have been experiencing outages, The Wall Street Journal reports. None of the brokerages would tell the WSJ specifically why the outages were happening. Also, Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade are restricting trading around GameStop and AMC, as individual investors pile into these companies, MarketWatch reports.
See, GameStop stock rose an astounding 1,600 percent in January alone, MarketWatch points out. What happened is a little complex, but basically boils down to traders gathering on Reddit, Discord, and elsewhere to encourage others to buy call options on the stock. The internet’s exuberance over GameStop has also affected AMC, Bed Bath and Beyond, BlackBerry, Tootsie Roll, and other companies. The trading action has further enriched some of the world’s richest people. It has also caught the attention of Janet Yellen, the US Treasury secretary.
Over the last decade, most of us have seen the power that social networks can bring to bear on politics, for instance, and media. Now, social networks are disrupting finance. The pandemic has more people day trading — 2020 was a record high in the volume of individual trading, Devin Ryan, an analyst with JMP Securities, told The Wall Street Journal. And collectives of retail traders can use platforms such as Discord, Twitch, and Reddit to coordinate their actions in real time.
Until recently, it was hard to imagine that doing a trade would be as easy as posting to Instagram, but here we are. And what’s more, trading is cheaper than ever — free at many brokerages — reducing further the amount of confidence an investor might need in a stock to buy options on it. Right now, Robinhood, a broker that allows free trades on stocks and options, is the most popular free app in Apple’s App Store.
The result of this frenzy is what appears to be a massive casino, but investors beware: at a casino, the house always wins.
Instagram is making its Stories feature more complete on the desktop. In a small interface refresh today, the company is updating its Stories feature so that it opens up to show a carousel of videos, which previews what’s cued up next and the content that just played. From this interface, viewers can click on whatever story they want to watch. It’s sort of like if the tiny circles at the top of users’ feeds went bigger and full-screen.
This is a minor change, but it rounds out the desktop feature and makes it more appealing to use, especially as people are on their computers more frequently while working from home. For the most part, Instagram has left Stories unchanged for years. The format is the same as always, with posts being ephemeral.
Most of Instagram’s changes to the format come in the form of creative tools, like stickers for small businesses and new fonts. For now, Instagram’s firmly focusing on Reels, its TikTok competitor, with Stories receiving small updates to keep it fresh.
Pinterest now displays a row of stories at the top of its home screen when you open up the app. It’s an interface that should look familiar to anyone who has used a social media app in the past few years: it’s the same tack taken by Instagram, Twitter, Facebook Messenger, and plenty more. The change will start appearing today on iOS and Android.
“Story Pins” were introduced to Pinterest in September. They worked like pretty much any other story format, with short videos posted back to back that you could tap to move between. Where they differed most was how you found them: Story Pins appeared like any other post on Pinterest, as just another box on various grids of pins.
Now, those Story Pins will have an easier time standing out. They’ll appear at the top of the home screen, and the app will even suggest stories from creators you aren’t following. The change ought to boost engagement on stories, and it’ll likely encourage creators to start posting stories to the app even more, too. Pinterest’s stories aren’t ephemeral like most other apps’, so once creators make them, the videos will stick around and build up a library for the service to keep promoting.
Pinterest still has one big limitation around Story Pins, though: not everyone can create them. They remain limited to approved businesses and creators for now.
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