Winning Week for Twitter, Despite Elon’s Questionable Antics
Twitter’s recent security breach, as covered in last week’s instalment of Talk Social, has concluded with the company winning its court order to unmask the leaker of its source code.
As a result of the court order, the internet service known as GitHub, where the original leak was posted, will be forced to release information about the original poster. Theoretically, Twitter should be able to catch its culprit much easier now, therefore limiting the potential of any future security breaches.
Despite the court win, it hasn’t been all plain sailing for Twitter this week. Contentious billionaire Elon Musk has been repeatedly questioned over his platform ownership after users recently realised that the standard Twitter logo has now been replaced by an image of the popular internet meme, Doge. Elon is currently facing a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit over his support for Dogecoin, which may explain why the Doge icon has recently replaced the Twitter logo.
Instagram Testing New Discovery Element Providing Another Way to Enhance Engagement
Instagram has been trialling a discovery feature that would allow you to view a collaborative feed of content from accounts that you and your friend follow together, known as the ‘discover content together’ option.
By offering this option, users would get more guidance on topics they both enjoy, which could lead to exciting new interactions, and may reveal interests they never even knew they shared. Further engagement opportunities in the app would be generated by sharing future posts from those profiles and interests.
As people share fewer updates to Instagram’s main feed, the platform is now trying to position itself as a more distinctive app than TikTok, for example, by emphasising how users can interact more with friends.
Find out more here
LinkedIn Adds Suggested Posts in an Attempt to Boost Engagement
A new feature of LinkedIn is the addition of algorithmically ranked posts from across its network, allowing users to view content in-stream more efficiently. With this new feature, LinkedIn users will now be able to see new ‘Suggested Posts’ that are based on their preferences.
A spokesperson for Linkedin claimed that “with suggested posts, we’ll do the heavy lifting to find out what’s trending amongst professionals in your field and surface great conversations on topics that might be very relevant to you.”
The all-new ‘suggested posts’ will appear with a ‘suggested’ label in a user’s feed, as LinkedIn’s algorithm seeks to highlight content that may be of interest to that particular user based on their engagement activity. The new algorithm is said to be similar to the one used by TikTok where the emphasis is on the content itself, not the people that you choose to follow and so it seems Linkedin is attempting to replicate this and distribute it to a different audience.
Find out more here.
New report shows 5.2 Billion ads removed by Google in 2022
Google has recently published its 2022 ads safety report, outlining the plethora of ads and websites that Google took action against over the last year. They claim that the company was able to block or remove more than 5.2billion ads, restrict more than 4.3billion ads and suspend more than 6.7million advertiser accounts.
Among the key reasons for blocking those billions of ads were trademark violations, legal requirements and misrepresentation within the promotions. The top reason why ads were banned in 2022 was ‘Abusing the Ad Network’, which essentially relates to spammers and scammers who were attempting to use the system to con Google users – this total came to almost 1.36billion.
Alongside this, Google took action against a range of websites taking part in its AdSense program, which enables publishers to display Google ads on their websites. It is no surprise that the leading reason why certain websites were banned was down to the content present on the website itself, with 1.15billion websites being restricted for posting inappropriate content.
Find out more here.