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TikTok debuts first augmented reality filter that uses iPhone 12 Pro’s LIDAR camera

TikTok has released its first augmented reality filter that can utilize the iPhone 12 Pro’s LIDAR sensor for an enhanced confetti effect that realistically settles on people or objects in your room.

The effect itself is just a somewhat belated 2021 ball drop (which feels like it would have been a lot more useful a few days ago.) But the ball drop filter is just the start, with TikTok promising to “develop more innovative effects in 2021.” And the fact that one of the most popular video platforms in the world is jumping onboard with support for one of the marquee features on Apple’s more pricey and premium smartphones is certainly notable.

To ring in 2021 we released our first AR effect on the new iPhone 12 Pro, using LiDAR technology which allows us to create effects that interact with your environment – visually bridging the digital and physical worlds. We’re excited to develop more innovative effects in 2021! pic.twitter.com/6yFD2FfHta

— TikTokComms (@tiktok_comms) January 6, 2021

TikTok isn’t the only major company with eyes on Apple’s LIDAR tech. Snapchat, one of the other major players when it comes to augmented reality filters, already added support for Apple’s LIDAR sensor back in October, allowing creators to build their own enhanced AR filters for the app.

You can now try on makeup from your home with the power of AR

Google’s new shopping feature will let people virtually try on makeup, the company announced in a blog post. Another feature will show the products on various models.

Only lipstick and eyeshadow are part of the feature. It is also limited to a few brands, such as L’Oreal, MAC Cosmetics, Black Opal, and Charlotte Tilbury.

You can see what various shades look like on various skin tones.

Image: Google

To try it out, you can search for the line you’re eying. If it’s a supported brand, you’ll see a new card that shows a model, and the specific shade that they’re wearing.

To change the shade, you use a list at the bottom; to change the model, you use the list at the top. It looks like Google and their partners have included models with a pretty wide range of skin tones to make it easier to find someone who matches you.

If you want to see what it would look like on you, there’s be a “Try it on” button. Clicking that will launch the camera, and then digitally apply the makeup. As with the models, you can change shades.

The interface lets you choose which color you’d like to “try on”.

On the left is the AR preview of NYX’s Vivid Brights Sugar Rush eye shadow, and on the right is me actually wearing NYX’s Vivid Brights Sugar Rush.

Mitchell Clark

(It’s worth noting that my makeup skills are a bit rusty, but you can get the idea of how well the shade maps into real life.)

The facial tracking works about the same as a Snapchat filter, which is to say pretty well, but not perfectly. For instance:

Like any AR, it’s not perfect.

This feature is rolling out when people may be hesitant to go to a physical store and use a communal tester. I didn’t order the products, so I can’t say how true the AR is to real life, but it should at least give you a better idea of how the shade will work with whatever look you’re going for.

Google has some examples in their blog posts of what you can try on. Some of the ones I found the most striking were the Stila Glitter and Glow and NYX Vivid Brights Creme eyeshadows, and the Revlon Lip Polish Vinyl Ultra HD lipstick — talk about a name that appeals to tech enthusiasts.

The year Instagram became Facebook

Instagram spent much of the past eight years fighting to maintain its independence from Facebook. In 2020, the fight was over.

Instagram has rolled out a series of features that are thoroughly Facebookian in nature. They’re largely focused around getting you to use the app for longer (and also tend to feel messy and incomplete). It’s hard not to see this as the moment that Instagram succumbed to Facebook’s worst tendency: a focus on growth at all costs, even if it means making a product that’s less enjoyable to use.

The changes are numerous. Facebook Messenger was integrated into Instagram DMs, a beat-for-beat TikTok clone was created and given its own section within the app, the primary “post a photo” button was tucked away into a corner, and an entire tab was given over to shopping.

The most telling change was one of the less explosive ones: it was a tweak to the app’s classic photo feed. Instagram now displays an endless row of algorithmically recommended posts once you get through the pictures your friends put up. (On my feed, I’m mostly presented with vibey pictures of European models, with some ads mixed in between.)

This is a simple growth hack (see: Facebook injecting news stories and your friend’s friend’s dad’s questionable political group post into your News Feed), but it’s the kind of cheap trick that Instagram had avoided for a decade. It seems plainly antithetical to a goal outlined by Instagram’s founding CEO, Kevin Systrom, who said that any time spent on the app “should be positive and intentional.” At the time, Instagram was adding an alert that told you when you were out of new posts in the feed, which served as a gentle nudge that you might be able to close the app and move on to something else.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg increasingly applied pressure on Instagram over the years to, in essence, play more like Facebook, despite an initial promise to leave the company alone, as detailed in Sarah Frier’s No Filter, a chronicle of Instagram’s rise. The pressure culminated in Instagram’s co-founders walking out the door in late 2018, when they were replaced by Adam Mosseri, who previously ran Facebook’s News Feed. While the app mostly had a quiet 2019 on the surface — it tweaked the camera interface, hid like counts, and restricted more problematic content — behind the scenes, there was a significant shake-up of Instagram’s top leadership taking place, and more orders were starting to come down from Facebook proper, The Information reported last year.

That set the stage for this year, when those changes became visible to users. The home screen layout, which — aside from the addition of story bubbles at the top — had largely stayed unchanged since Instagram’s founding, has been shuffled around to make room for two new initiatives. The most notable of those, Reels, is a TikTok ripoff with no original ideas that’s purely meant to crush an innovative and competing product. The other addition, the Shop tab, presents an underwhelming array of product posts in a way that mixes the confusion of a Pinterest page with the blandness of Google Shopping ads.

None of this is to say Instagram has been “ruined” or even changed all that dramatically on the surface. The app has always been teeming with brands and influencers, Stories had ruthlessly sidelined Snapchat as the hot new app years ago, and Instagram’s aesthetic has long since gone from cultural phenomenon to ubiquitous cliche. It’s still fun to look through your friends’ photos, and the new features aren’t strictly bad — Reels offers creators another avenue to promote their work, and shopping is an obvious, if undercooked, addition to Instagram.

The difference is that so many of Instagram’s prior changes felt like Instagram. In 2020, the changes felt like new services shoehorned into Instagram so that the moment we got bored, we could find our next distraction without closing the app. If that feels familiar, maybe it’s because that’s what Facebook does, too. This year, Instagram didn’t just build more services — its service starting demanding more from you.

Briefly informed: social media, AI, airlines, astronaut

FTC requests information on the handling of user data from Facebook & Co The US authority for competition law and consumer protection Federal As part of an extensive investigation, Trade Commission asked a total of nine well-known social networks and video streaming companies to provide information on their business practices in connection with the use of user data. Companies include Amazon, Facebook, Reddit, Snap as the parent company of Snapchat, Twitter, Google parent Alphabet, YouTube, Discord, and Bytedance as the TikTok owner. In detail, the FTC is interested in user tracking and the extent to which personal data and demographic information are used for advertising purposes.

Automated AI decisions should be contestable In view of the increasing influence of algorithms on business, society and politics, the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights FRA has spoken out in favor of stricter regulation of systems for artificial intelligence. “AI is not infallible,” said the agency’s director Michael O’Flaherty. It is made by people – and this mistake also happened. Therefore, citizens should know “when AI is used, how it works and how automated decisions can be challenged”.

Our weekday news podcast delivers the most important news of the day compressed into 2 minutes. Anyone who uses voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant can also hear or see the news there. Simply activate the skill on Alexa or say to the Google Assistant: “Play heise top”.

Airlines prepare for a new start The outgoing General Director of the global airline association IATA, Alexandre de Juniac, has once again put huge pressure on to restart the aviation industry in to accelerate the coming months with the help of mass corona rapid tests. The pandemic took the airlines with it almost last year, but so far only a few have gone under. Only if the corona vaccines, which are about to receive European approval, are distributed quickly and significantly more passengers are allowed to travel with the help of negative rapid tests, the IATA expects by the middle of the year 2021 a recovery in ticket demand.

ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer should 2017 Fly to the ISS with SpaceX Matthias Maurer should 2021 to be flown by SpaceX to the International Space Station as the second ESA astronaut. The German will then live for six months on the outpost of humanity and carry out scientific experiments, said the European Space Agency. Maurer was 2015 accepted into the ESA astronaut corps and has been since 2017 officially part of the team. He is the only one in the group – to which Alexander Gerst also belongs – who has not yet been in space.

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Handling of user data: US consumer authority requests information from Facebook & Co

As part of a far-reaching investigation, the US antitrust and consumer protection agency, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), asked a total of nine well-known social networks and video streaming companies to provide information on their business practices in connection with the use of user data put. The companies the FTC wrote to on Monday include Amazon, Facebook and its subsidiary WhatsApp, Reddit, Snap as the parent company of Snapchat, Twitter, Google parent Alphabet, YouTube, Discord and Bytedance as the TikTok owner.

As stated in the FTC notice, companies should provide information on how they collect and use personal data of their users . In detail, the FTC is interested in user tracking and the extent to which personal data and demographic information are used for advertising purposes. The companies should explain on what basis which advertisements are displayed to consumers and whether they apply algorithms or data analyzes to personal data. In addition, the FTC is calling for clarification on how they measure user engagement and what measures they use to promote it. The aim is for companies to show how these practices affect children and young people.

“Social media and video streaming companies track users everywhere via apps on their mobile devices that are always available these companies monitor where users go, what people they interact with, and what they do. But for what purpose? ” FTC commissioners Rohit Copra, Rebecca Slaughter and Christine Wilson believe that too much remains “dangerously opaque” about the industry, a joint statement said. Together with FTC Chairman Joseph Simons, the three commissioners had decided to request the information. The panel’s fifth commissioner, Noah Phillips, voted against. Although he also sees the overriding goal of shedding light on the business practices of big tech companies, the information requested is too detailed.

No prosecution measure The investigation now initiated by the FTC is not related to any law enforcement measure. The information provided by the companies could, however, be used to initiate possible action against the social networks and video streaming companies.

The FTC as an independent authority has the right to obtain information from US companies in order to to prevent unfair and unfair business practices if necessary and to ensure a functioning market.

Of the four big tech companies Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, the FTC had 2020 Obtained extensive information on the business conduct of the companies in order to also investigate possible effects under antitrust law. The FTC filed a competition lawsuit against Facebook in December because Facebook is said to have bought Instagram and WhatsApp in order to secure its own dominance in the market.

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Snapchat is releasing Bitmoji Paint, a massively multiplayer online painting game

Today, Snapchat is getting a new original game called Bitmoji Paint. As the name suggests, the game involves Bitmoji — those cutely grotesque customizable avatars — and painting. It’s Snap Inc.’s second title from its internal games studio, which began putting out games last year. “Our goal with Bitmoji has always been to be the world’s avatar, to give people a digital version of themselves that represents them and lets them be themselves online,” says Ba Blackstock, co-founder of Bitmoji. “And so now with games, it’s also letting people play together in a really new and fun and exciting way.”

Bitmoji Paint places players on a gigantic, pixelated grid, and lets them paint those squares as a shared canvas. Zoom out, and you get pixel art. You get there by pressing the rocket icon or through search; the first thing you’ll see are floating islands in space, which are different servers you can join with hundreds of other players. There are three modes — move, paint, and map — and users can also interact with other players around the world using stock emotes. There’s also a voice chat function in Snap’s game menu so you can talk to your friends while you’re scribbling. Creations persist, so you can keep working on the things you’ve started.

“A lot of the playability in the game is things like simple scribbles,” says John Imah, head of games and entertainment partnerships at Snap. “You can send fun messages, and also even [make] giant landscapes, all these things are all possible in Bitmoji Paint.” He’s been playing the game for a while now and says he’s excited for the world to see it, and then to see how people have fun with it. (As far as moderation goes, players can’t see each other’s Snap IDs unless they’re already friends, and the company emphasized that it’ll provide easy access to reporting tools.)

Snap has used games and unique filters to pull people into its app and stand apart from competitors like TikTok and Instagram. Its recent anime lens went viral outside the app and was used 3 billion times in its first week. That said, to hear Imah tell it, the games program has already been a big success. “To date, we’ve had more than 100 million Snapchatters play our games, which we’re incredibly proud of,” he says. “An average of 20 minutes are played per player every day, when they’re playing Bitmoji Party,” Imah says. Sounds like Bitmoji Paint has some large shoes to fill.

Briefly informed: Economy, de minimis barrier, WireGuard, Spotlight-Snaps

Strong comeback of the German economy in the summer The German economy is stronger after the crash in the Corona crisis got going than initially assumed. The gross domestic product rose in the period from July to September by 8.5 percent compared to the second quarter, announced the Federal Statistical Office. According to preliminary data, the authority had assumed an increase of 8.2 percent. At the end of the year, however, the recovery is likely to pause due to the partial lockdown in Germany and restrictions in many other European countries in view of the increasing number of infections.

Artists are facing storm free content snippets A group of 576 artists appeals to politics not to play off copyright against them. Above all, the proposed “minor barrier” in the draft of the Federal Ministry of Justice for copyright reform, with which snippets of content such as memes in social media should become license-free and free of charge, must be dropped, demand the authors. “The Corona crisis hit us hard,” write the artists. It is all the more painful that they still do not receive adequate remuneration for their works in the only unrestricted market of online platforms.

WireGuard for Windows continues to take shape Shortly after each other, the WireGuard project released Windows versions 0.2 and 0.3 of its VPN software. An important innovation is a restricted view for regular users: With the Network Configuration Operator function, the project is aimed particularly at corporate users whose system administrators use WireGuard but do not want to give their users administrator rights. In addition, WireGuard for Windows can now be used on ARM and ARM 64 systems. With further changes and bug fixes, WireGuard should also run faster and more stable.

Snapchat starts TikTok for Snaps Snapchat is rolling out its new Spotlight function for Android and iOS with immediate effect. For Snapchat users, a new menu item in the form of a play button appears at the bottom right with which the videos can be played. To create a spotlight snap, select “Spotlight” on the send screen and add a hashtag if you wish. Spotlight is very reminiscent of TikTok or Reels from Instagram. There will be no public comment function for spotlight snaps – but you can share and like them with friends.

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Spotlight: Snapchat launches TikTok for Snaps

Snapchat is rolling out its new Spotlight function for Android and iOS with immediate effect. For Snapchat users, a new menu item in the form of a play button appears at the bottom right with which the videos can be played. To create a spotlight snap, select “Spotlight” on the send screen and add a hashtag if you wish. Spotlight is very reminiscent of TikTok or the Reels function of Instagram. There will be no public comment function for spotlight snaps – but you can share and like them with friends.

In addition, Snapchat announced that it would be giving away $ 1 million every day through the end of the year for the best spotlight snaps. The prerequisite is that the users are at least 16 years old and accept the conditions of participation. Whether a Spotlight Snap is successful depends, for example, on how long users have been looking at the Snap and how many likes it has received. The campaign is intended to create incentives to create and share creative videos.

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Bug on Twitter revealed: Fleets live longer than 24 hours

Anyone who wants to share something on Twitter that, as an exception, is not saved for eternity, has recently been able to do so with special, fleeting tweets: These contents called “fleets” (“fleeting tweet”: fleeting tweet) can text , Picture and video and should disappear after 24 hours. With this, the company wants to encourage particularly reluctant users to tweet. It’s just stupid that a bug apparently made the Fleets visible from afar even after this period, as has now become known. Twitter has now fixed the error.

Free access was possible via Twitter API A Twitter user published his discovery in several tweets on Friday. According to this, he was able to read fleets from public Twitter accounts after their expiration date with a developer app via the Twitter API. In addition, in this case there was no notification to the author of a fleet that it had been read and by whom (which is usually communicated). The discovery of the Twitter user was first reported by TechCrunch .

A Twitter spokesman confirmed according to the report TechCrunch reported the error, but did not go into detail. It was noticed that the contents of Fleets were still accessible after 24 hours via a “technical workaround”. TechCrunch was able to understand the readout of the fleets – apparently the gap has now been closed, because access via this API no longer works since Sunday, confirms The Verge .

Fleets stay for up to 30 Days saved However, the Twitter spokesman told TechCrunch also that fleets would disappear after 24 hours, but are still stored at the company. Fleets are kept on the Twitter servers for up to 30 days. Should one be informed of a rule violation by a Fleet content, this period could also be extended.

Twitter had recently made the fleeting tweets available worldwide. The idea is not new and Twitter is getting involved with it relatively late: Snapchat ‘invented’ the volatile content several years ago, Instagram, which belongs to Facebook, took over the suggestion for its function called “Stories” soon afterwards. The subsequent deletion of messages that have already been sent is now integrated in various messaging apps.

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Snapchat officially launches in-app TikTok competitor called Spotlight

Snap is finally ready to compete with TikTok and will pay creators to post on the platform. The company is officially announcing a new section of Snapchat today called Spotlight that’ll surface vertical video content from users that’s more meme-like and jokey instead of the day-in-the-life content Snap previously encouraged. Imagine, basically, TikTok but in Snapchat.

To entice people to post snaps regularly, the company says it’ll divvy up $1 million between the most popular creators on the app per day through the end of 2020. This means if someone has a particularly viral video, they might earn a large chunk of the $1 million pot. It doesn’t matter whether that person has a massive number of subscribers; the amount people receive is primarily based on unique views compared to other snaps that day. Users can continue to earn from their video if it’s popular for multiple days at a time.

Spotlight, which will have its own dedicated tab in the app, is launching in 11 countries, including the US, UK, France, Germany, and Australia. The videos you’ll see in the section can be up to 60 seconds long and, as of right now, cannot be watermarked. That means people can’t just download their (or others’) viral TikToks and upload them to Snapchat. Once you tap into Spotlight, you’ll see snaps programmed to what Snapchat’s algorithm thinks you might enjoy. It bases this decision mostly on what you’ve viewed in the past and how long you’ve watched. Anyone can submit a snap, they’ll just have to tap “Spotlight” when posting to ensure it populates the section.

Although the format will be familiar to anyone who’s ever watched TikTok, Snap says it’s made specific decisions based on its user base. For one, Spotlight snaps won’t feature a public comments section, and profiles themselves are private by default, so Snapchatters can keep their accounts locked down while still posting content.

The Spotlight section has been hinted at for months, given that Snapchat announced music in snaps back in August. The app lacked a feed for these snaps up until now, however. The company already allows users to submit their snaps as part of a location that anyone can drop into and watch to get a feel of what’s happening in a given place at any moment. They appear in Snap Map. But unlike that feature, which is more documentary in nature, Spotlight is specifically designed for viral video formats.

With Spotlight, Snap is clearly acknowledging the success of TikTok’s short-form viral videos, similar to Instagram’s admission with its launch of Reels in August. In Instagram’s case, however, it plainly allows people to bring their TikTok content over to the platform. Snap is instead trying to encourage people to use its own creation tools and prevent monetization fraud by keeping people in its app. Stories used to be the format everyone wanted to copy, thanks to its success on Snapchat. Now, it’s the TikTok video.

Fleets are still visible on Twitter after 24 hours thanks to a bug

Twitter’s new ephemeral tweets, known as fleets, are supposed to last for only 24 hours. But a bug is causing fleets to not totally disappear, remaining accessible well past their expiration dates. First reported by TechCrunch, the bug allows fleets to be viewed and downloaded by other users, but without notifying the fleet’s author.

“We’re aware of a bug accessible through a technical workaround where some Fleets media URLs may be accessible after 24 hours,” a Twitter spokesperson said in an email to The Verge. “We are working on a fix that should be rolled out shortly.”

The “workaround” referenced appears to be a developer app that could scrape fleets from public accounts via Twitter’s API. The Twitter API doesn’t return URLs for fleets that are older than 24 hours, according to the company, and once the fix is rolled out, even if someone has a URL for active fleet, it won’t work after the expiration point.

And while fleets are only visible on users’ timelines for 24 hours, Twitter stores fleets on its back end for up to 30 days, longer for fleets that violate its rules and may require enforcement action, the company says. During that 30 day period, a fleet is available in a user’s Twitter Data downloads as long as Twitter is retaining a copy. The “seen by” action is typically only available when someone views a fleet via the Twitter app.

Twitter is a bit late to the disappearing content party— fleets are essentially its version of Instagram or Snapchat stories, They allow mobile Twitter users to briefly share text, videos, images, or other tweets. They’re not meant to be retweetable and you can’t directly “like” a fleet, but you can reply to one by tapping on it, which sends a direct message to the fleet’s creator.

Update November 22nd, 10:56 AM ET: Added comment from Twitter and additional details

“Fleets”: Twitter makes tweets with an expiration date available worldwide

Twitter is developing its platform with tweets that disappear on their own. The new “fleets” are automatically deleted after 24 hours, they cannot be retweeted or given public likes. You can only reply to this as a direct message, but not in the timeline, as product manager Kayvon Keykpour explained at the global launch on Tuesday.

The The idea behind this is to take away the fear of twittering from users who are still reluctant. Tests in Brazil, Italy, India and South Korea showed that people who were new to Twitter or rarely tweeted had received the format well, Beykpour emphasized.

Stories as Tweets The format is based heavily on the “Stories” function of Snapchat, which has now also been copied across Facebook apps such as WhatsApp and Instagram. The word creation “Fleets” stands for “fleeting tweets” (fleeting tweets).

Twitter is experimenting with its classic formats like the 280 characters long text contributions including spoken tweets and voice direct messages.

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What Twitter Fleets signals about the future of the company

I.

In March 2017, I drove down to the Instagram offices in Menlo Park to meet with founder Kevin Systrom. The subject of the meeting had not been disclosed to me in advance, and when we sat down in a conference room, Systrom had a surprise for me: his team had cloned Snapchat’s popular stories feature and planned to more or less import the design wholesale into Instagram.

It was a brazen move, particularly by the standards of American business, but it was undeniably effective: Instagram usage surged dramatically, and Snapchat plateaued. Soon stories started popping up everywhere: Tinder, Google Photos, LinkedIn, and Medium, to name a few. (A recurring joke holds that Excel will someday add stories; at this point, I wouldn’t bet against it.)

One place stories never showed up was an app where their inclusion felt obvious, at least to me: Twitter. CEO Jack Dorsey first envisioned the service as a way to share status messages, like the ones once found on AOL Instant Messenger, and statuses were the original ephemeral stories. Then in March, ephemeral tweets finally appeared on Twitter. The company called them Fleets, and after testing the feature in Brazil and India, it rolled them out globally yesterday.

Here’s Kurt Wagner in Bloomberg:

Company executives said research has shown that many users are too intimidated to post or engage with others on the service, which has led to an effort to find new ways to spark interaction.

“Tweeting, retweeting, engaging in conversation can honestly be incredibly terrifying,” said Nikkia Reveillac, Twitter’s head of research. “We do not know how others will react to us, we do not know if anyone will reply, and we do not know if anybody will even care.”

This is a version of what Systrom told me when introducing Instagram Stories. The central Instagram feed had become a place where users expected to find only the most highly polished, manicured photos of a person’s life; stories offered them a lower-pressure way to post. Fleets are designed to work the same way, and I suspect they will.

Twitter enters the ephemeral posting game with some real advantages on its side. One, the format is familiar — if you’ve posted an Instagram story, you already know how to post a fleet. Two, the real-time nature of Twitter lends itself to documenting photos and videos in the moment — something fleets excel at. (Twitter never really cracked photo or video sharing; I suspect Fleets will help it make inroads there.)

And three, tweets have always been best thought of as a mostly ephemeral format anyway. The old joke about Twitter is that it was where you would go to discuss what you had for breakfast. Now fleets are here, and there’s never been a better place to post your bowl of Cheerios.

Of course, Twitter has some disadvantages to contend with, too. The reason the format is familiar is because it’s already everywhere; fleets have a lot of competition, and many of those competitors already have rich and compelling feature sets. (Compared to what you can do with video on Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat, fleets are barely at the starting line.) Secondly, Twitter’s historically glacial pace of iteration means it could take Fleets a long time to catch up — and competitors will be inventing new creative tools all the while.

And third, it’s worth asking whether Twitter could have gotten a lot of the benefits of a story-like feature simply by giving users the option to make tweets ephemeral. Fleets look like a smart, if belated, way to fight the last war. Wasn’t the real leapfrog move here to take the Twitter graph and build the first “story-first” social app?

II.

One of the things Fleets copied from Instagram is the idea of one-tap story reactions: a heart, a fire emoji, a crying emoji, and so on. It’s interesting to think about this move in the context of Twitter’s long-stated desire to spur more “healthy conversations” on the platform.

That initiative, which dates back more than two years now, is a broad and somewhat amorphous effort to solve Twitter’s longstanding issues with harassment and abuse on the platform. One way you can do that is by structuring conversations at the product level — and encouraging users to reply to one another with heart and other sympathetic emoji can be an effective way of doing so.

Stories can also promote healthier conversations by making replies private. Much abuse goes down in the DMs, true, but there can be less incentive to harass someone if your reply is not visible right underneath the original post, racking up likes and retweets as more people see it.

Another way to structure conversations is to set boundaries around who can participate. That’s why I was struck by how Twitter is approaching the rollout of Clubhouse-style new audio chat rooms inside the app, called “Spaces,” which are due to begin testing later this year. The company is basically hand-picking the users it will allow to participate as it tests audio chat. Here’s Nick Statt at The Verge:

The company plans to start testing the feature this year, but notably, Twitter will be giving first access to some of the people who are most affected by abuse and harassment on the platform: women and people from marginalized backgrounds, the company says.

In one of these conversation spaces, you’ll be able to see who is a part of the room and who is talking at any given time. The person who makes the space will have moderation controls and can determine who can actually participate, too. Twitter says it will experiment with how these spaces are discovered on the platform, including ways to invite participants via direct messages or right from a public tweet.

Clubhouse has struggled with moderation issues since it launched earlier this year. Twitter’s move to start with women and other underrepresented users represents an intriguing effort to learn from Clubhouse’s mistake. And at least before it opens the floodgates to all users, that seems like a way to bring more good conversation onto the platform.

During a call with reporters yesterday, I asked Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s head of product, what he saw in audio. Notably, he led with its ability to generate empathy in conversations. Here’s what he told me:

“Our mechanics incentivize very short-form, high-brevity conversation, which is amazing and powerful and has led to all the impact that Twitter has had in the world. But it’s a very specific type of discourse, right? It’s very difficult to have long, deep, thoughtful conversations.

Audio is interesting for us because the format lends itself to a different kind of behavior. When you can hear someone’s voice, you can empathize with them in a way that is just more difficult to do when a you’re in an asynchronous environment. … We think audio is powerful, because that empathy is is real and raw in a way that you can’t achieve over text in the same way.”

Often when we are talking about how to build better social platforms, we discuss them in terms of what or who they should ban. What I like about Twitter’s moves this week is that they show another way platforms can move forward: by designing spaces for conversation with intention, announcing those intentions at launch, and then encouraging us all to hold them accountable to it as they go. The success of fleets or audio spaces is far from guaranteed. But in some important ways, they strike me as a true step forward.

This column was co-published with Platformer, a daily newsletter about Big Tech and democracy.

Twitter’s disappearing tweets, called Fleets, are now available for everyone

Twitter on Tuesday announced a global launch of “Fleets,” the ephemeral tweeting feature it first announced earlier this year and tested in various markets around the globe.

Now, any mobile Twitter user, regardless of where they live or what platform they’re on, will have access to the disappearing messaging feature, which will sit right at the top of the timeline in a row of Stories-like bubbles. Twitter hopes the new feature will help reduce the pressure around tweeting by letting users express more casual thoughts and feelings while also concerning themselves less with saying something profound or racking up likes and retweets. Fleets starts rolling out today on Android and iOS and should be available for everyone in the coming days, the company says.

“Through our tests in Brazil, Italy, India, and South Korea, we learned Fleets helped people feel more comfortable joining the conversation — we saw people with Fleets talk more on Twitter,” explain design director Joshua Harris and product manager Sam Haveson in a blog post. “Those new to Twitter found Fleets to be an easier way to share what’s on their mind. Because they disappear from view after a day, Fleets helped people feel more comfortable sharing personal and casual thoughts, opinions, and feelings.”

At its most basic level, Fleets is a Stories clone, borrowing all of the best ideas implemented by Instagram and Snapchat. You can share text, respond to others’ tweets, or post videos with the same background color and overlaid text options you get on other messaging apps with ephemeral features, with every message disappearing after 24 hours. You can also respond to others’ fleets by tapping on one and sending a direct message or emoji to the creator, which will start a DM conversation similar to how the story reply process works on Instagram. Twitter says it will also be introducing stickers and live broadcasting at some point in the future.

Right now, the company says there will be no indicator if someone screenshots one of your fleets, and anyone who follows you will be able to see what you fleet by visiting your profile if they don’t immediately see your bubble at the top of the timeline. So it’s not exactly right to think of Fleets as a fix-all remedy to social media outrage culture or the platform’s propensity to direct large numbers of individual actions toward a single target — what we colloquially call “getting ratioed” or piled on or canceled or whatever name or phrase you’d like to attach to briefly becoming an internet punching bag.

But what Fleets seem likely to help with is dividing the sheer volume of opinions that get trafficked on Twitter every minute of every day into more digestible formats. That may spark changes in how we communicate on the platform. Undoubtedly, some users will try to push the limits of what can be said or shown on a fleet versus a tweet. Twitter is sure to face fresh moderation challenges when deciding whether to write new rules or modify for combating, say, harassment or misinformation as it pops up in Fleets.

But most of us can just use Fleets to send out the one-off reaction or hot take and let it expire in the void like most dumb opinions do anyway, just as Instagram Stories lets you share unpolished and (dare I say) fleeting snippets of our daily lives that don’t have to be framed or filtered to perfection.

That’s, of course, assuming people on Twitter actually want to use this feature and actually follow through in any meaningful capacity. Part of the great stories takeover of social media that Snapchat inadvertently kicked off more than a half-decade ago meant products and services that never needed ephemeral messaging got it anyway — from Facebook’s main app to YouTube to even LinkedIn. Those Stories clones may stick around, but they inevitably become ghost towns.

It’s not immediately clear that Twitter needs a Stories take of its own. But if any platform can benefit from disappearing messages that lower the stakes and promote perhaps healthier and more stress-free communication, it’s the social media platform the sitting president of the US is actively using to undermine election results. If we can’t or won’t log off in 2020, then we all need to chill out a bit — and maybe fleeting is one way to do that and make the internet more bearable in the process.

Facebook’s Vanish Mode on Messenger and Instagram lets you send disappearing messages

Facebook’s latest take on a signature Snapchat feature is arriving today, and it’s called Vanish Mode. First announced as part of its big September redesign of Messenger, Vanish Mode is an ephemeral messaging mode for both Facebook Messenger and Instagram that will you let you send texts, photos, voice messages, emoji, and stickers that disappear immediately once they’re viewed by other parties and the chat window is closed.

Some users may have already noticed Vanish Mode in the chat settings on Messenger, as Facebook has been rolling out it slowly to some users since the redesign was announced two months ago. And on Instagram, some elements of Vanish Mode are already part of the core direct messaging feature set, including disappearing photos and videos once a piece of media has been viewed. Vanish Mode is similar in ways to Messenger’s existing secret conversation mode that lets you enter an end-to-end encrypted chat that’s saved only on your device, although the new mode is designed to delete anything sent forever once it’s been viewed.

For Facebook, ephemeral messaging still represents a way to attract younger smartphone users who have flocked to chat apps and platforms where they don’t have to post publicly and risk being haunted by social media posts later on in life. While Snapchat popularized ephemeral messaging among US teens with Stories and its DM design, Facebook has since adopted many of its rival’s features and implemented them throughout Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp for users of all age groups around the world.

Vanish Mode is just the latest of Facebook’s takes on the trend and a notable addition considering CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced last year his company would strategically shift away from the News Feed and public posts and more toward private messaging and groups.

Vanish Mode will appear in both apps as a distinct option you can turn on and off in the settings of any particular chat message or group thread. You can also enter the mode by swiping up on a chat window. The mode will then enable disappearing messages and other chat interactions, with the option to turn it off located at the top of the chat window or by swiping down again.

Facebook says the mode will be opt-in only, meaning you have to agree to enter Vanish Mode once another user in the chat or group has enabled it. Messenger and Instagram will also notify you when a screenshot of a chat is taken while the mode is enabled. Facebook says you can report individuals over Vanish Mode chat conduct, although it’s unclear how much of the conversation Facebook will be able to review for violations.

Vanish Mode should be available for Messenger in the US as well as some other countries starting today, Facebook says. And it will go live on Instagram in the US and other countries at a later date.