Musk ‘sabotages’ other news outlets with delayed links on X
X users were outraged once again by the actions of owner Elon Musk, with the billionaire now seemingly sabotaging other news outlets on the platform. Users experienced a delay during the loading of links to external news outlets in a suspected attempt to encourage users to get their news from X rather than more trusted sources.
The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC have all been affected by these changes and have seen drops in their performances on posts that have a link back to their websites on X. It’s worth noting that Musk has had a personal issue in the past with these outlets and has heavily criticised them for their views on him.
Popular Twitter figure Tibo Maker recently posted “Tweets mentioning competitors and out-of-network URLs will get deboosted. So avoid mentioning competitors (no links to YT videos or IG reels). Using links to other tweets won’t hurt.”
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Introducing Fizz – the platform tailored for students
Created by two Stanford college dropouts in 2021, social media platform Fizz has been labelled as ‘One to watch’ by insiders due to the unique way in which it encourages students to engage on the platform.
Fizz is only available to college/university students and users can only access the Fizz community for their own college. On the app, students can publish text posts, polls and photos without a username or identifying information attached. Like Reddit, classmates can upvote or downvote what they see in their feed. Users can DM each other, choosing to reveal their identity if they so desire.
The platform is currently only available to students at Stanford University in California, however Fizz are looking to hit various other universities across America to create a hub for students throughout the country. According to Sunny Xun Liu, Associate Director of Stanford’s Social Media Lab, “Fizz supports open discussions about a wide range of topics” which is a key reason for its recent growth that led to the platform being boosted financially by investors, amounting to a total of $25m.
Find out more here.
Meta introduces ‘Shepherd’ system to keep AI in check
Meta is addressing the issue of inaccurate or deceptive outputs from generative AI tools with a solution termed “Shepherd,” which employs AI to counteract the problem— a somewhat ironic approach given the situation.
Meta claims that “Using GPT-4 for evaluation, Shepherd reaches an average win rate of 53-87% compared to competitive alternatives. In human evaluation, Shepherd strictly outperforms other models and on average closely ties with ChatGPT.”
There could be some big advances in AI usage by social media platforms as a result of this. Despite the fact that such systems cannot detect nuance or meaning as accurately as humans, it is predicted that users’ posts could soon be subject to a much greater level of automated moderation with advancements of AI such as ‘Shepard’.
Find out more here.
Facebook ‘Group’ admins at risk of replacement
This week, Facebook has notified a number of group admins that they need to be more active in moderating their groups, otherwise another member will be appointed as the admin. Users are reporting a warning which says that admins need to be more attentive or the platform will find someone to replace them within a week.
The warning has not gone down well with users of the feature, who are now worried that a week away from the platform could see them stripped of all authority and put amongst the other members of the group.
Facebook claims that their selection process for new admins of a page is formed by a range of signals. Signals include the user’s current level of participation and whether they are an admin of any other Facebook groups, which will both help to determine whether they are a good fit for that specific page.
Find out more here.