• TikTok is making its algorithm optional for users in the European Union to comply with the Digital Services Act.
• It agrees to laws that ban targeted advertisements for 13 to 17 year olds.
  

Next week, a law policing Big Tech in the European Union comes into force, starting the clock on a process expected to force companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, TikTok, and Twitter, among others, to make their platforms more open and interoperable. The Digital Services Act addresses social media’s societal harms by requiring companies to watch over their platforms for illicit content more aggressively or risk billions of dollars in fines.

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To recall, the European Parliament and all EU member states reached a political agreement on the Digital Services Act in late 2022. The legislation had set a timeline for companies under the Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) category to crack down on hate speech, disinformation, and other harmful and illegal material on their platforms. 

 “If the platform or a search engine has more than 45 million users (10% of the population in Europe), the Commission will designate the service as a very large online platform or a very large online search engine. These services will have four months to comply with the obligations of the DSA, which includes carrying out and providing the Commission with their first annual risk assessment,” the Commission stated.

Timeline for Digital Services Act as set by the European Commission.

On April 23, 2023, the European Commission named a list of 19 tech platforms required to comply starting August 25, 2023. The list includes 17 VLOPs and 2 Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs).

• Alibaba AliExpress
• Amazon Store
• Apple AppStore
• Booking.com
• Facebook
• Google Play
• Google Maps
• Google Shopping
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Snapchat
• TikTok
• Twitter
• Wikipedia
• YouTube
• Zalando

Meanwhile, the VLOSEs listed included Bing and Google Search. What comes after the designation is that the companies are required to comply, within four months, with the complete set of new obligations under the Digital Services Act. Overall, the new law is also helping make Brussels a trailblazer in the growing global movement to clamp down on tech giants. 

In light of the requirements by the European Commission, TikTok’s owner ByteDance and other large online platforms will be required to police illegal content on their platforms, prohibit certain advertising practises, and share data with authorities. TikTok quickly ensured they were on the good side of the block. 

On August 4, the video-sharing platform released new measures and features for European users to comply with the incoming Digital Services Act.

How will TikTok abide by the EU Digital Services Act?

Before releasing its new guidelines, TikTok agreed to a voluntary “stress test” last month. The result was that EU industry chief Thierry Breton recommended “more work” was needed for the firm to be fully compliant.

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“In the coming weeks, we are introducing an additional reporting option for our European* community that will allow people to report content they believe is illegal, including advertising,” TikTok said in a blog posting.

That means making this as easy as possible, and people can choose from categories such as hate speech, harassment, and financial crimes. “We will provide a guide to help people better understand each category,” TikTok noted. As for content reported as being illegal, it will first be reviewed against the platform’s ‘Community Guidelines’ and removed globally if it violates TikTok’s policies. 

If it does not, TikTok has a new dedicated team of moderators and legal specialists to assess whether it violates the law, and “we will restrict access to the content in that country only,” TikTok added. Under the DSA, it will inform European users about a broader range of content moderation decisions. 

“For example, if we decide a video is ineligible for a recommendation because it contains unverified claims about an election that is still unfolding, we will let users know. We will also share more detail about these decisions, including whether the action was taken by automated technology, and we will explain how both content creators and those who file a report can appeal a decision,” the blog post reads.

TikTok also allows its European users to turn off personalization for their feed to meet the Digital Services Act requirements. “This means a user’s For You and LIVE feeds will instead show popular videos from both the places where they live and around the world, rather than recommending content to them based on their interests.”

When using a non-personalized search, users will see results of popular content from their region and in their preferred language. Their Following and Friends feeds will continue to show creators they follow, but in chronological order rather than based on the viewer’s profile.

One of the most significant changes made to cater to TikTok’s European demographic is how it’ll protect teens’ privacy. Firstly, TikTok said accounts for those under 16 are private by default, and their content cannot be recommended in For You feeds. European users aged 13-17 will no longer see personalized advertising based on their activities on or off TikTok. “People already have control over the ads they can see, and they can toggle personalized ads on or off in their settings,” TikTok concluded.

The post TikTok bends to comply with the EU’s Digital Services Act appeared first on TechHQ.

What’s for dinner? An AI recipe generator intended to help shoppers create meal plans, created by New Zealand supermarket chain Pak ‘n’ Save, caught customers’ attention when it suggested an Oreo vegetable stir fry.

The supermarket experiment with generative AI – which, by the way, is everywhere nowadays – used ChatGPT-3.5 to power the Savey Meal-bot that generated meal plans from customers’ leftovers.

After providing three or more ingredients, the bot would come up with a recipe. The concept isn’t unique: there are listicles aplenty toting the top ten AI recipe generators out there.

In a bid to be human, this AI recipe generator is unnaturally verbose.

After Savey Meal-bot’s odd concoction was shared on social media, customers began experimenting with the app. When a range of household items was added to the app, it really got cooking.

A recipe called “aromatic water mix” would create what the app describes as “the perfect nonalcoholic beverage to quench your thirst and refresh your senses.” It would also create chlorine gas, which the app suggested you should “serve chilled and enjoy the refreshing fragrance.”

Via Liam Hehir’s Tweet.

New Zealand political commentator Liam Hehir posted the “recipe,” which has no disclaimer re: the dangers of chlorine gas, to Twitter prompting others to experiment and share their results.

Ah, a hearty lunch. We especially love the wisecracks.

A spokesperson for the supermarket said they were disappointed to see “a small minority have tried to use the tool inappropriately and not for its intended purpose”. The spokesperson for the supermarket, clearly, has never previously released software to end users. To paraphrase an old saying, “if you give an inch, they’ll take pleasure in using the inch in ways never expected or coded for.”

In a statement, they said that the supermarket would “keep fine tuning our controls” of the bot to ensure it was safe and useful, and noted that the bot has terms and conditions stating that users should be over 18. Pak ‘n’ Save lives in a world where there are no stupid (or playful) adults.

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“You must use your own judgement before relying on or making any recipe produced by Savey Meal-bot,” it said, and a new warning notice now appends the meal planner that the recipes aren’t reviewed by a human being.

Now, obviously someone who got given a recipe for “methanol bliss” – picture turpentine-flavored French toast – will have provided a set of ingredients that aren’t all food items and wouldn’t follow through on the recipe.

However, the wonder-machines that everyone is so keen to invest in and experiment with shouldn’t be taken at such face-value. The consumer-facing iteration of ChatGPT encourages users not to combine water, bleach and ammonia. Unless you use the “Grandma Exploit.”

There will always be hiccups with new technology (and probably with ant-poison and glue sandwiches, too), but the Savey Meal-bot points to a wider issue with the uptake of AI.

In the rush to adopt the new technology, proper testing isn’t carried out. Plus, generative AI is trained on such a vast amount of data that no human could read or oversee it in their lifetime. This, along with the fact that its answers are randomly generated, means it’s near impossible for programmers to anticipate problems.

This bot suggests you shouldn’t use *every* ingredient you have…

If everyone wasn’t so ready to embrace AI as an all-knowing overlord, and people weren’t so quick to accept robot orders (see: the number of drivers who followed GPS into large bodies of water) then perhaps the Savey Meal-bot would be a fun story.

Luckily, no one has been hurt. With AI being deployed in as many fields as possible though, it’s good to be reminded that it has flaws – that could be deadly. Even if only to idiots. We at Tech HQ look forward to a new category of Darwin Awards winners.

The post AI recipe generator will leave you gassy appeared first on TechHQ.

• Threads is billed as a calmer, less hectic Twitter variant.
• Owned by Meta, it grew rapidly in its early days.
• Despite losing half its members, Threads has the backing to outlast the more erratic Twitter.

In late 2022, you’d have been forgiven for thinking the paranoia was right, and that AI had taken over the world.

Five days after the initial release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, on November 22nd, the groundbreaking language model reached one million users. Not impressed? For context, Instagram took 2.5 months to reach one million downloads, and Netflix, which evolved from a pre-existing disc-based postal model, took three and a half years to reach the same landmark.

Unsurprisingly, ChatGPT became the record holder for the fastest platform growth in history (it reached 10 million users in just five weeks). But the record has since been broken by Meta Threads, which has been likened to a “non-racist Twitter.” Threads was launched on July 6th, 2023, and took only seven hours to break ChatGPT’s record. In a mere 24 hours, 30 million users had signed up to Threads. By the end of the weekend, the number had grown to a mind-boggling, almost inconceivable 100 million.

Threads explained – like Twitter, but not Twitter

Threads may have passed some of us by, however, because it still hasn’t been launched in the EU. Meta decided not to make it available in Europe due to “upcoming regulatory uncertainty,” which seems to be in relation to the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). Given the closed door to a huge global market, it’s arguable that the platform’s record-breaking growth is even more remarkable than it first appears.

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So, what exactly is Threads? It’s been described as “a new app, built by the Instagram team, for sharing text updates and joining public conversations.” Threads was designed by Meta, parent company to Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram as a kind of alternative to Twitter, but without some of the racial and political sturm and drang that has infected that app since the bird-app that’s no longer a bird-app ditched most of its content moderation team. Threads can also be described, without fear of contradiction, as a Twitter variant for people fed up with the dark whimsy of new owner Elon Musk.

Currently available as an app on iOS and Android devices, users log in to Threads via their Instagram accounts. From there, they can write posts up to 500 characters, 220 more than Twitter’s (though with the changing logo and branding, we’re sure that will soon change). Moreover, Thread posts can include links and videos up to five minutes long.

Nothing there stands out as exceptional, we know, but the platform is still very young. Many features, such as direct messaging and a “following” feed, are still being managed by developers, so it wouldn’t be out of the question to see it become available on laptops and desktops in the near future.

Threads vs Twitter

Threads has had a profound impact on the social media landscape already. For instance, Twitter has seen a decline in traffic since Threads’ launch.

Yes, another one.

Meta has also promised a more positive environment for users on Threads, with it being promoted as a “Public Square.” For those who have not yet embraced or even used Twitter, perhaps due to reports of hate speech and mass misinformation, Threads could be the community they are looking for.

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“Now I am become X, destroyer of Twitter…”

There’s no doubt that Threads has become Twitter’s biggest and newest rival, posing a significant threat to the platform. Over in Twitter land (Or should that now be The X Dimension?), life has been shaky since Elon Musk took over in October 2022. Due to some of his personal beliefs and certain changes to the platform, many users have been critical of it, with some reports predicting over 32 million users will leave the site in the next two years.

There’s no doubt that Twitter has been sailing on troubled waters in recent months and has gone from a place where intellectual chats were the pick of the day to a pool of bots and trolls. Add in the increased volume of hate speech on the platform, and it’s no wonder people are looking elsewhere for calmer waters. In fact, some found those calm seas in an earlier alternative, with the great Mastodon exodus.

But Mastodon’s de-centralized nature gave it barriers of understanding to overcome for many people, whereas Threads has the feel of an instinctive Twitter alternative.

If we tortuously over-extend the nautical metaphor, some users are happy to go “down with the ship” (White cross on a black background – in fairness, Twitter appears intent on turning itself into a pirate ship), rather than switch to using Meta products. After all, many Twitter users continue to love the platform and have a sentimental fondness for it after years of use.

Just add a skull and sail the Caribbean? The platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter.

As Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino said after the Threads launch, “we’re often imitated – but the Twitter community can never be duplicated.” So far, this has been true, but Threads has already surprised the industry by its rapid take-up figures.

Threads content moderation

With a sudden burst of users on this new platform, there have been questions over how Meta will scale its content moderation operation. Remember, Threads accounts are connected to Instagram accounts. So, while users can deactivate their profiles, their data could still be stored on Meta’s servers for… well, forever. And it’s in no sense the case that Meta has been a white knight when it comes to content moderation or data misuse.

As Threads is linked to Instagram, Meta has stated that Instagram’s community guidelines are in place on Threads, underpinned by a hope to develop a more positive environment for users. Despite these positive promises, history tells us that phishing scams and misinformation will always get through the cracks. That’s “just what happens” when a platform has millions of users – the content moderation task quickly becomes overwhelming.

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For now, it seems Instagram’s moderation infrastructure is applicable to Threads. For instance, if a user attempts to follow a profile that has shared misinformation repeatedly, the app will issue a warning. Yes, these moderation resources may work for now, but we’re sure Meta will have to work on new moderation formulae going forward, especially if Threads becomes a genuinely viable alternative to Twitter.

Data Privacy Concerns With Threads

Like many apps, Threads states that it may collect personal data from users when they download it on the Apple app store. This can include fitness and health, contacts, financial, and browsing history information. Where does this information go? Meta can share it with advertisers, so users can expect pop-up ads for fitness equipment tailored to their needs.

If you think Threads will respect your personal data privacy, think again. Further information, such as a user’s sexual orientation, race, and religion may also be collected. But, the data you share differs on iOS and Android devices, as the Google Play Store doesn’t demand as much data.

For users worried about the protection levels of their data on Threads, there are ways to safeguard profiles. One example is setting a Threads profile to Private, limiting visibility to “approved followers only.”

Users can also control who mentions them in posts, and hide certain words that they may find offensive. Like most social media platforms, users can also block or mute accounts (a handy feature most of us have used before). This can limit interactions that a user may deem bothersome or harmful.

If you start to use Threads and find it is not for you, it is possible to deactivate your profile. But, again, there’s a catch. Your data may remain stored on Meta’s servers indefinitely, as it is currently not possible to delete Threads data permanently.

Meta is yet to respond to news outlets regarding data privacy concerns specific to minors. And as with the Mastodon exodus, over half of those who initially signed up to Threads have subsequently left the app (leaving their data behind for the harvesting). So whether Threads will emerge as a genuine threat or successor to Twitter remains to be seen.

Threads vs Twitter – the cage fight we’re all involved in.

What can be said with a degree of certainty though is that of the possible rivals to Twitter’s newly X-shaped crown, Threads has the greatest likelihood of posing a threat to it, as Meta, unlike some of the other contenders, had more money than God, which translates into the patience to watch the adventures of X unfold, taking advantage whenever the platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter makes errors.

The post Threads – is it really the new Twitter? appeared first on TechHQ.

• The new logo of Twitter marks a new era for the social media platform that has been known for its blue bird and ‘tweets’ for over 17 years.
• Analysts view the changes as a way for Musk to achieve his vision that the app could offer various services to users beyond social media.

It is time to savor the final days of Twitter in its original state — the social media platform is at the brink of its most drastic transformation, and it’s more than just a brand new logo. There is no denying that Twitter has undergone drastic changes over the last eight months since Elon Musk completed his US$44 billion deal to own the platform. 

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But none have come close to what the 17-year-old social platform is enduring this week. Its iconic blue bird is spending its last hours as the app’s symbol. Started in the US on July 24 this week, the app and its website are gradually being transformed to be known as ‘X,’ and tweets will be dubbed ‘x’s.’

It all started on July 22 when Elon Musk tweeted, “Soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” The next 48 hours were followed by speculations on what the rebranding could mean and what new logo would replace the iconic blue bird. On the afternoon of July 23, Sunday, Musk tweeted an indication that “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll go live worldwide tomorrow.” 

Source: Twitter

Within the next 30 minutes, a user that goes by the name @SawyerMerritt posted a three seconds video of what would potentially be the new Twitter logo. Musk retweeted the video, indicating his preference for that particularly fan-made design. Not too long after, Musk changed his profile image to the new logo. He even posted a picture of the structure projected on Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.

The transition happened too quickly for many to grasp. By the morning of July 24, Twitter began replacing its decade-long logo with a fan-made “𝕏” logo. It was all over Twitter’s homepage, as a profile picture for its official Twitter account, and on a splash screen displayed while the website loads. However, it is worth noting that the blue bird logo hasn’t been erased from the service entirely — it still serves as the website’s favicon and remains prominent throughout the mobile apps. 

What does the new logo mean for Twitter?

Looking back, the rebrand comes after months of erratic behavior by Musk, which impacted users and pushed away advertisers, leaving Twitter in a troubled financial position and increasingly vulnerable to competition. For context, Musk had already converted Twitter’s corporate name to X Corp, a subsidiary of X Holding Corp, as revealed in an April court filing. 

Musk has used the letter X repeatedly across his companies. He co-founded x.com as an online bank in 1999, which later transformed into PayPal. He repurchased the domain from PayPal in 2017, saying it had “sentimental value.” In the US, the domain x.com now redirects to Twitter. 

X.com now points to twitter.com. Source: Twitter

“The new logo garnered mixed reactions from users and sparked confusion about what tweets would now be called, while marketing and branding experts said the rebrand risked throwing away years of Twitter’s name recognition,” Reuters stated in an article yesterday. 

Source: Elon Musk’s Twitter

Before buying Twitter, Musk had even said last October that he viewed the US$44 billion deal as “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” In fact, for as long as Twitter has been on Musk’s mind, he has envisioned an app that could offer various services to users beyond social media, such as peer-to-peer payments. The idea mirrors the widely popular WeChat app in China. 

Quoting Tom Morton, global chief strategy officer at ad agency R/GA, Reuters stated that the transformation is simply a way for Musk to make his mark on the company. “Twitter’s changing name and logo has nothing to do with user, advertiser, or market issues. It symbolizes that Twitter is Elon Musk’s personal property,” Morton told Reuters.

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Linda Yaccarino, Twitter’s CEO since June 5, also told employees in a memo on Monday that X “will go even further to transform the global town square.” And its believed that the company will work on new audio, video, messaging, payments, and banking features.

For now, the move of Musk’s renaming of Twitter as X is still fresh, and it can either turn out to be one of his biggest missteps since buying the company or a stroke of brilliance. There are arguments on both sides. But, indeed, a sharp name change and a new logo could help change perceptions about a tattered brand like Twitter. 

The social wind of change?

The wind of change has not only been apparent in Twitter; there has been a surge of activity in the social media space over the last few weeks. Besides Twitter’s rebrand and the launch of Threads to take on Twitter’s microblogging dominance, TikTok has announced a new text feature this week that will broaden the kinds of content that creators can share with followers.

The short-form video app allows sharing text-based posts with music and stickers, similar to Instagram Stories, and we’ll be digging into the impact of the update once the new TikTok feature enters the mainstream market.

Creators have been able to make content on TikTok across a variety of formats — from LIVE videos to photos, Duets to Stitch. Text is the latest addition to options for content creation, allowing creators to share their stories, poems, recipes, and other written content on TikTok – giving creators another way to express themselves and making it even easier to create.
Source: TikTok

The post It is the end of the blue bird era for Twitter. Here comes Musk’s ‘X’ appeared first on TechHQ.

• Twitter has applied limits on the number of tweets you can read each day
• Elon Musk claims it is to prevent spam and data-scraping bots
• Web developers say an error has led to the platform ‘DDoS’-ing itself

Twitter users were thrown into a state of despair on Saturday when, after happily scrolling through the latest Love Island, Real Housewives or Ashes commentary, they were blocked from refreshing their feeds. The message ‘Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again’ popped up at the top, and soon after ‘#TwitterDown’ became a trending topic worldwide.

A state of confusion went on until Twitter boss Elon Musk explained that limits had been applied “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation” – of course, via a tweet after the event, rather than a warning ahead of time.

At that point, unverified accounts – i.e., those not paying a monthly subscription fee for Twitter Blue –  could only read 600 posts a day, while this was increased tenfold for verified accounts. This appeared to include Tweets and replies, regardless of the dwell time, but it is unclear whether ads are included too.

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It wasn’t long until the seemingly erratic Mr. Musk increased the rate limits, first to 800 read posts a day for unverified users and 8,000 for verified users, then to 1,000 and 10,000 posts respectively. He then offered the first explanation for the limits by retweeting an Elon Musk parody account which wrote: “We are all Twitter addicts and need to go outside.” Whether this made you chuckle or roll your eyes, it was clear that users had still not been given the full picture.

Twitter users are now subject to daily limits on how many posts they can read. Source: Twitter

In a tweet, Elon Musk explained that the limits had been applied “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation”. Source: Twitter/@elonmusk

Twitter self-inflicted its own DDoS attack?

Some web developers and tech enthusiasts hypothesized that users were reaching rate limits because Twitter was unintentionally utilizing user browsers to DDoS itself – or scale ‘distributed denial-of-service’ attacks. These occur when a bad actor floods a service or network with fake internet traffic, often using multiple compromised devices to do so, thus preventing regular traffic from accessing it.

As Twitter user and developer @sysop408 put: “Someone made an ill-advised change at Twitter that caused some code on the Twitter website to spiral into an unchecked request look.” They posted a video of the site’s script spiraling out of control to prove their claim.

Twitter appeared to be continuing to fire off requests for feed content, despite nothing loading. The code may have been broken when developers implemented rate limits to address data scraping, as Musk said. But some think it could be linked to an earlier request from above – to block users who have not logged in from viewing any tweets at all.

Twitter user @sysop408 posted a video of the Twitter script apparently ‘DDoS’-ing itself. Source: Twitter/@sysop408

It was also unclear whether the DDoS was triggered by intentional changes made at Twitter HQ or whether it caused the rate limits and restricted feed access itself. Either way, Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety on Twitter, wrote on rival platform Bluesky: “Futzing around with rate limits is probably the easiest way to break Twitter.”

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It was on purpose, honest!

A few hours before the rate limits were installed, Musk tweeted that “almost every company doing AI… was scraping vast amounts of data, ” seemingly accusing developers, like OpenAI, of training their chatbots on tweets. Since his appointment as CEO, and subsequent role change to executive chair and CTO, he has been making moves to pull up the drawbridges which allow third parties to make use of Twitter data.

One such move was changing the free access to the site’s API to paid in March, which happened through a series of sporadic restrictions being applied, causing chaos for small developers who relied on it. Those who could, and did, fork out up to $42,000 per month for access to the API complained that its quality had never been worse. A developer told Mashable: “Everything used to work fine before we started paying half a million per year.”

Yesterday, Twitter doubled down on its assertion that the rate limits were placed intentionally to “remove spam and bots from our platform” in an official blog post. “We temporarily limited usage so we could detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform,” it read. “Any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection.” The post also confirmed that, as well as spam tweets, the rate limits are targeting those scraping Twitter data to train AI models.

Advertisers, shmadvertisers

While these restrictions are allegedly temporary – an end date has yet to be specified –  they seem counterproductive.  Despite an ever-growing collection of subscription-only features, Twitter’s primary source of income remains its advertisements. There is little incentive for advertisers to allocate spending to the platform if the sponsored tweets are not going to be seen.

Twitter insists that the changes only “affect a small percentage of people using the platform” and that the “effects on advertising have been minimal,” but it is still a risky maneuver given that advertiser trust in Twitter has been dwindling. The company’s US advertising revenue in April was down 59 percent from a year earlier, according to the New York Times, largely thanks to the restored access to banned accounts and reduced content moderation practices.

The rate limit frustrations are the latest on a long list curated by Twitter users since Musk’s (pictured) US$44 billion takeover that was completed in October. Source: AFP

The Twitter mass exodus

Four days after the rate limits were imposed, it is still unclear how the key metrics behind them are calculated, like how Twitter knows when a Tweet has been read. There is also a separate, smaller rate limit for ‘new’ unverified accounts, but we do not know when they stop being counted as new.

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The frustrations are the latest on a long list curated by Twitter users since Musk’s US$44 billion takeover, that was completed in October. Others relate to the removal of blue ticks from accounts not subscribed to Twitter Blue, relaxed hate speech policies, and the mass layoffs of key employees. This list is non-exhaustive.

If you’re looking for a new platform to get your news and view, check out the alternatives curated by TechHQ.

Just another day at Twitter HQ…

The post Elon Musk’s Twitter rate limit explained appeared first on TechHQ.

In May 2023, Adobe released a tutorial on how to use text-based video editing in Premier Pro, having added the feature to its flagship software. And the official arrival (previously, there were workarounds using XML imports) of this breakthrough way of editing video in leading content creation software shows how popular text-based video (and audio) editing is becoming.

The amount of time required to turn raw footage into a finished video depends on a number of factors, such as the complexity of the project and the talents of the production crew. But, as a rule of thumb, editors can expect to spend anywhere from 30-60 minutes on a project for every minute of the finished video. Or at least that used to be the case.

What is text-based video editing?

As content creators are discovering, text-based video editing – which allows users to edit a video as if they were editing a document (and it works for audio too, if you are making a podcast) – dramatically speeds up film production and splicing up clips for use on social media.

Videographers (or podcasters) can have a rough cut of their work in minutes rather than hours. And for those that are new to editing videos or spoken audio works, being able to use familiar document editing skills makes it easy to jump up the multimedia learning curve.

And how does text-based video editing work?

AI transcription speech-to-text services have been around for some time (and applied to various industrial use cases), and their success paves the way for text-based video editing. Adobe’s Premier Pro integration gives a good overview of how the process works. Firstly, AI speech-to-text algorithms transcribe the source footage. And when complete, the text appears in a transcript window.

Cleverly, because the text has been matched to the video, users can edit the video timeline by simply moving words or phrases rather than having to cut and paste clips. Typically, users find text-based video editing a much more intuitive process and can focus their efforts on the content rather than having to worry about the technicalities of splicing footage.

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Even seasoned video editors, writing on user forums, talk about how creating text-based video edits has changed their life. Some even go as far to say that being able to perform text-based video editing natively within a non-linear editing (NLE) system is one of the most significant advancements in digital editing. And the concept has been gathering pace for a while.

In fact, the idea of editing film and audio as if you were editing a text document has been around for over a decade. And tools have existed for a similar period of time – for example, prEdit has long allowed users to make subclips from transcribed media files and send the story to Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro as a cut sequence ready for further editing.

Very interesting to see everyone all of a sudden release text based video editing even though it was possible for so long already.

Funny how AI stuff was here for a while but we were all caught up in Web 3.0 whatever that was

— Matti Haapoja (@MattiHaapoja) April 17, 2023

What’s changed is the growth and capability of cloud-based speech-to-text transcription services that fully automate spoken audio processing and support a variety of languages. And the availability of a wide number of apps means that you don’t need to be a professional filmmaker, or even own a copy of Adobe Premier, Final Cut Pro, or DaVinci Resolve to benefit from text-based video (and audio) editing.

And there are a ton of ways that having auto-generated, time-matched transcriptions helps content creators. Users can very quickly search for topics rather than having to scroll through and listen to the audio. Text-based video editing makes it easy to remove any so-called disfluencies or hesitations in the dialogue, such as mentions of ‘um’ or ‘er’, vocal mistakes, and any overused filler phrases – like, you know, that kind of thing.

Solutions can be air-gapped too – for example, if you’re working on sensitive interviews, confidential recordings, or a blockbuster movie that you want to keep under wraps until its official launch date.

Synthetic voice: no need for microphone overdubs

Also, app users don’t have to give up on pro features. And there are some interesting software additions too – for example, Descript and Simon Says allow users to collaborate remotely on text-based multimedia editing.

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Descript’s podcast studio tool moves the needle further by integrating synthetic voice capabilities. Users can delete an unwanted word or phrase in the time-synchronized transcript, type new dialogue, and the text-based editor will synthesize and insert the audio content to match the existing voice track.

On the video image side of things, AI algorithms can even digitally rotate a speaker’s eyeballs (link to video demo) so that the subject can (in real life) be looking down, reading from a script, but (in video) appear to be looking at the camera. And this really only begins to touch on what’s possible.

Opinions vary, but text-based video editing can be anywhere from 5 – 12 times faster than using conventional methods. In principle, as Milk Video’s creative team points out, trimming scenes using a transcript allows users to edit video at the speed of reading. And for organizations that produce a lot of video content, training materials, podcasts, and other multimedia, that’s a big time-saving.

12 best text-based video (and audio) editing apps

1. Descript
2. Streamlabs Podcast Editor
3. Riverside
4. Trint
5. Simon Says
6. Camtasia Audiate
7. Sonix AudioText Editor
8. Kapwing
9. Milk Video
10. Imvidu
11. Pictory
12. Reduct Video

There are some great community projects too, and examples include the text-based video editing proof of concept built by Radamés Ajna and shared on Hugging Face.

When big players such as Adobe make text-based video editing a standard feature, you can be sure that the landscape has changed. And once content makers start using these tools, they won’t want to give those time-savings back.

The post Tech tools for business: best text-based video editing apps appeared first on TechHQ.

• Many looking for Twitter alternatives again.
• Read limits blamed on web scraping.
• Hive regarded as one of the better Twitter alternatives.

In its Elon Musk era, Twitter is different in almost every way from what it was before. Since the chief of Tesla and SpaceX acquired Twitter around a year ago, it has been quite a ride for the company and users alike. So much so that under the ownership of Musk, there have been one too many instances where Twitter users were seen flocking away, looking for alternatives.

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The most recent spectacle started on June 30, when Musk claimed that “several hundred organizations” were taking Twitter’s data in a process called scraping, and proclaimed that “it was affecting the real user experience.” So to curb the effects of data scraping, Musk decided that Twitter would no longer allow individuals to view tweets on the social media platform unless they logged into an account.

But that’s not all.

A day after Musk’s claim, thousands of users reported widespread problems in accessing Twitter. They received error messages stating they had “exceeded” their “rate limit,” violated Twitter’s rules, and downloaded/viewed too many tweets. The issue was soon followed by a new set of Musk restrictions.

He took to his Twitter account to announce that the platform would temporarily limit the daily posts users read to address concerns over data scraping. At first, without stating how long the limits would last or what could prompt him to lift the restriction, Musk shared that verified accounts were temporarily limited to reading 6,000 daily posts.

He further explained that unverified and new unverified accounts would be limited to reading 600 posts a day and 300 posts a day, respectively. Two hours later, the temporary limitation was then increased to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified users, and 500 posts per day for new, unverified users.

Many Twitter users are reporting being hit with a “Rate Limit Exceeded” message while browsing or trying to tweet. Source: Twitter

Before the move, Musk was vocal about his dislike of organizations scraping Twitter for research or to train artificial intelligence programs. But limiting the number of tweets users can read was something no-one had anticipated. As with other frenetic Musk-era changes at Twitter, this one has motivated some users to try other alternatives.

Not the first search for Twitter alternatives

As TechCrunch puts it, interest in Twitter alternatives began in late October 2022, when the Tesla and SpaceX chief officially closed on his US$44 billion Twitter acquisition. “Continual chaos on the microblogging site has been the rule ever since. 

Amid controversial policy decisions and overnight changes, some subset of the Twitter audience decided to exit to other sites to get their social fix — or at least experiment with different options for a time,” the article aptly says.

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Considering many remaining Twitter users once again found themselves at the same crossroads, we decided to look into the microblogging site alternatives that have been trending since the weekend. 

Alternatives benefiting from the latest Twitter exodus

While many alternatives are available today, here are three that most likely may pose a challenge to Twitter.

Mastodon

When Musk bought Twitter nearly six months ago, many users felt it was the right time to leave the platform. Thousands of tweeters fled to Mastodon: a social media project designed from its start in 2016 to resist takeovers by billionaires.

Among all the alternatives to Twitter, Mastodon is often cited as the most likely option. Source: Shutterstock

Independently run servers – each with its moderators and users – can interact with each other’s posts, called “toots,” using an open protocol called ActivityPub.

Even other social media services can connect to ActivityPub, so no one app can monopolize the broader network that Mastodon is part of, called the “diverse.” Users must also choose a server to determine who would charge their data and what toots they see most often.

Mastodon gained roughly 500,000 users within ten days of Musk’s Twitter takeover on October 27, 2022. By the end of November 2022, there were 2.5 million users registered to the online network, an increase of around 300% within five months. 

According to Statista, as of March 2023, the decentralized social media platform had over ten million registered users. There is, however, no clear indication of the number of users Mastodon has gained following Twitter’s latest havoc.

Bluesky

Still an invite-only app in its beta, Bluesky has around 50,000 users, and according to estimates from data.ai, the app has been downloaded more than 375,000 times. Which means many people are trying to get an invite.

Also, a decentralized social network and authenticated transport (AT) protocol is the technology upon which Bluesky is built. Bluesky says its AT Protocol allows users to own their online identity and move their account from one provider to another. According to Bluesky’s blog, users have complete control over their algorithm to give them autonomy over their experience on the app.

The platform temporarily halted new signups over the weekend following Twitter’s ruckus. “We will temporarily pause Bluesky signups while our team continues to resolve the existing performance issues. We’ll keep you updated when invite codes resume functionality. We’re excited to welcome more users to our beta soon,” Bluesky said in a post.

Incidentally, Bluesky is owned by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Though Bluesky’s architecture is similar to Mastodon’s, many users have found Bluesky to be more intuitive, while Mastodon can come off as inaccessible. However, to remain competitive, Mastodon recently simplified its signup flow, making Mastodon.social the default server for new users.

Hive Social

Like Mastodon and Bluesky, Hive Social was a beneficiary following Musk’s takeover of Twitter late last year. Within one week of Twitter’s change of ownership, Business Insider reports Hive had seen its users spike to more than two million.

According to TechCrunch, Hive Social, launched in 2019, has been dubbed as a Gen Z-focused social app created by Kassandra Pop. Hive combines concepts from various social networks, including Instagram, Twitter, and even MySpace, such as letting users add music to their profiles from Spotify or Apple Music accounts.

Some have argued that out of all alternatives to Twitter, Hive is one of the best. “It is user-friendly, not politically obsessed, and has a neat way of differentiating posts and profile feeds without all the bloat and fluff that modern Twitter has come to possess,” a report reads.

The post Some Twitter alternatives that dodge Musk’s paywall appeared first on TechHQ.

• Discord to launch server subscriptions.
• Paywalls will monetize certain parts of the service.
• Discord’s brand of subverting the norm in peril.

Discord is introducing new monetization features by expanding server subscriptions, a Patreon-like subscription button that’s been available on large servers since 2022. The site is introducing tiered subscriptions and longer-term plans to effectively turn servers into storefronts.

“Effectively storefronts” Discord server subscriptions. Via: https://discord.com/blog/server-subscriptions-updates-media-channels-tier-templates-and-more

In December 2022, server subscriptions launched as a way for community leaders to make money directly on Discord “by providing exclusive experiences, available only for their paying subscribers.”

In a blog post titled “Server subscriptions just got super powered,” Derek Yang wrote that “To date, we’ve paid out millions of dollars to thousands of creators and communities, and we’re seeing more creators and communities earning on their Discord servers every day… Today we’re excited to share new tools that help you get started earning money faster.”

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Discord server subscriptions – super powered?

This week, “media channels,” designed to host subscriber-only content, was launched in beta. The suggestion is that the feature could be used for “exclusive memes and wallpapers,” or that artists could monetize their work by putting it behind a paywall. This might sound familiar – it’s how Patreon functions already.

Yang says paywalled media channels are a way to “give your subscribers lavish insider content” in addition to what the server already offers for free.

Other monetization opportunitites on offer are:

• Tier Templates: Formalized subscription tiers with prices set by Discord ($3.99, $4.99, $7.99, and $9.99)
• Downloadables: One-time purchasable digital products or subscriptions sold by server owners, which will be accessed via…
• Server Shops: “A single home for server owners to sell Server Subscriptions, Downloadables and Premium Roles.”

Via https://discord.com/blog/server-subscriptions-updates-media-channels-tier-templates-and-more

In the announcement, there’s a reminder that “not every opportunity to generate revenue needs to become a get-rich-quick” scheme. The emphasis is very much on “a little extra money to put back into making your community even better.”

Which is ironic, given Discord plans to take a 10% cut of server subscriptions which – call us pessimistic and cynical – is unlikely to go back into the community. By encouraging users to lock conversations behind paywalls, Discord is sharing tips to “convert people into paying customers.”

For PC Gamer, Morgan Park writes that the changes make him “miss the days when it felt like Discord was making Discord for [users].”

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An exercise in pandering?

Discord is at heart a chat platform for groups to discuss common interests. It provides an easy way to talk with friends online, and servers are often used in a similar way to a group chat. However, Discord is increasingly pandering to large communities with the introduction of features like live stages and forum channels.

The issue is that the transition from user to consumer is tricky, especially in terms of what it means for a moderator. They’ll be given free rein to paywall individual functions of a server, as Discord doesn’t plan to police what server owners charge.

Yang draws attention to Valorant streamer Woohoojin’s Club Banana server as a successful Discord community funded by subscriptions.

Woohoojin, who makes over $16,000 every month from Discord subscriptions, hands out free subscriptions to regular viewers and only asks viewers to give him money if “they have lots of it.”

The story isn’t new: over the last decade, tech companies have begun revoking the subsidized products that garnered enough attention to gain a monopoly before slamming user fees up and cashing out (see Netflix clampdowns on password sharing or the whole thing with Twitter Blue).

What’s different here is that Discord has built a userbase by subverting the norm. It didn’t inundate users with ads or add a feature trying to replicate the success of other platforms (Instagram Reels will never be TikTok!), but everyone’s got to make money somehow.

Some of them will now use Discord to do it.

The post Monetization comes for us all as Discord adds paywalls appeared first on TechHQ.

• More harmful UGC demands more – and more complex – content moderation.
• Digital literacy can help parents keep their children safe.
• Companies can do more, engaging a content moderation firm to police their platforms.

The internet is awash with UGC (user-generated content). In a way, that’s not a bug but a feature of the design – comments sections, blogs, vlogs, and the very nature of social media all depend on the continued creation of UGC. But where there are humans free (and relatively anonymous) to wreak havoc with everybody’s day, humans will… human. So content moderation is becoming increasingly vital in the face of a daily tidal wave of increasingly harmful UGC.

We spoke to Alex Popken, VP of Trust and Safety at WebPurify, a content moderation company that combines AI and human moderation in its mix, to find out what’s causing the wave, how it’s showing itself – and what can be done to beat it down.

THQ:

Can you give us a sense of the scale of the rise in harmful UGC?

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AP:

Sure. First of all, any content that’s created and shared by users of online platforms in the form of multimedia, via text, images, video, audio, is UGC. Often, we think about social media as synonymous with UGC, but really, it spans many online industries.

So, the comments section of a blog, restaurant reviews, Amazon reviews, online dating sites, ecommerce platforms, it’s all UGC, and our clients run the gamut. So the scale is significant. Last year alone, there were over 5 billion people online, and newer generations, having grown up with the internet, use it as a place to cultivate communities.

That means we’re seeing a lot more UGC in general.

And then, of course, as you said, humans are going to human and bad actors will exploit platforms and weaponize them to create harmful UGC.

THQ:

Can you define what harmful is, and who is actually being harmed by what? Just to head off the inevitable people who are… due any second… who’ll say “You can’t say anything these days without someone getting offended on the internet!”

More harmful UGC, more content moderation.

AP:

Yeah. Any content that has a negative impact on individuals, communities or even society as a whole is classed as harmful UGC. And as I said, there’s quite the gamut, ranging from copyright infringement through to child sexual abuse material on the obviously illegal side of the spectrum.

We also see things like hate speech and harassment UGC, and it impacts not only the people who have to see it, but the brands that are hosting the content.

If you run an online platform, and you have a lot of hate speech on there, that is obviously going to have negative implications for your brand, and ultimately, for your bottom line.

THQ:

Unless that’s what your platform’s for, or, for instance, you don’t care about hate speech, you don’t generally want to become known as “the place with all the hate speech.”

Of course, “harmful” is a moveable feast.

AP:

Exactly. That’s when companies turn to content moderation solutions to help them deal with harmful UGC.

In terms of who’s harmed, anyone can be, but in particular, vulnerable populations. Young people who might be exposed to cyberbullying or grooming. Members of marginalized communities – that’s important, because marginalized communities have found great value in online platforms, finding like-minded folks and points of connection.

But often, those communities can also be the target of abuse and harassment through harmful UGC, which is where content moderation is crucial.

But also, society more broadly is becoming more and more prone to harmful UGC like disinformation, which sows division and undermines democracy.

We’ve all made the “What did I just see and why?” face online – but women get a lot more horrifying UGC than men, generally.

That’s part of what content moderation can add to conversation (and the solution) around harmful UGC. No-one is immune to harmful UGC, so technically everyone should be able to count on content moderation to help protect themselves and the ecosystem.

THQ:

So what’s causing the rise in harmful UGC that content moderation has to deal with? As you say, the overall amount of UGC is rising, and therefore, by definition, the amount of harmful UGC is going to rise with it.

But is there something other than that behind the rise? Or is it just a factor of percentage of overall volume?

AP:

Percentage of volume, and a rise in overall volume, are going to be factors, certainly, but it’s probably more complex than that.

Bad actors want to exploit others online and they’ve become more sophisticated over time. When we’re fighting fraud, we like to say you build a 15 foot fence, and they figure out how to jump 16 feet.

THQ:

Forgive us for our devious journalistic brain – we were just thinking we’d just dig a five feet trench, but go on.

AP:

Ha. Yes. The point is that we’re seeing the evolution of bad actors who have figured out how they can exploit others online for their own personal gain.

New media, new forms of UGC, new demands on content moderation.

So for example, fraudsters can create really lucrative businesses, where they are phishing for credit card information and growing their own personal bank account. So harmful UGC has become a lucrative business for bad actors.

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Also, people have realized that the level of anonymity online emboldens people to be maybe their worst selves. So there’s a reckoning with that anonymity in the rise of harmful UGC, and the corresponding need for more content moderation.

And then there’s the rise in new media types. When we first started content moderation of UGC 17 years ago, we were really just text moderators, which is pretty binary, right? It was a case of either the text contained harmful content or didn’t.

THQ:

So it was a fast, easily recognizable thing. That’s clearly harmful, that’s silly but not harmful, that’s a description of a fluffy bunny, next!

Content moderation is not always about the horrifying stuff – sometimes, people just need a time-out.

AP:

Exactly. But then we saw the rise of images, and then video, which adds a three-dimensional element. And now we’ve got audio, we’ve got even the metaverse and so the sheer complexity and the various forms of media, also have contributed to the rise of harmful UGC – which makes content moderation a much more complex business.

And then of course there are algorithms. So, content goes viral, and often, that’s caused by amplification, by the machines that are powering these platforms. That certainly increases the reach of harmful UGC – and makes it harder and more complicated in terms of content moderation. If it’s viral, it’s everywhere.

New harmful UGC content moderation solutions for civilians.

THQ:

So between human bad actors and algorithmic amplification of the harmful UGC, how do we begin to ensure content moderation still works, in a system it would be all too easy to categorize as out of control?

What can companies actually do to minimize their exposure to harmful UGC? What can people do? What can parents do, even?

AP:

There’s a concept known as digital literacy. It means empowering individuals to responsibly engage with digital technologies in a way that allows them to be informed about the risks, and protect themselves.

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So, for instance, if you’re on a platform, and you don’t know how to make your profile private, or how to report problematic content, or even what it means to be exposed to harmful UGC and to need to take advantage of content moderation, it can educate you for your digital life.

Block the creepy stuff – once you know it’s the creepy stuff.

Similarly, part of digital literacy is learning how to compartmentalize your experience online, so the problematic UGC that you encounter doesn’t traumatize you too much, and you can engage whatever content moderation is in place on the platform.

So digital literacy and education are important first steps when it comes to combating the rise of harmful UGC. That’s especially important for children, who don’t have a fully-developed prefrontal cortex, and who are grappling with right and wrong.

It behooves parents to have an open dialogue, to set boundaries around their usage of technology, and to communicate with them about what it means to see creepy, suspicious content and when to raise their hand and say “This feels weird.” There are oftentimes parental controls in place to give parents that leverage. But you have to know they’re there, and you have to know how to use them as part of a broader conversation about content and content moderation.

In Part 2 of this article, we’ll delve deeper into companies, platforms, and the battle for content moderation in a world of increasing amounts of harmful UGC.

The post Content moderation and the rise of harmful UGC appeared first on TechHQ.

• Reddit API changes cause backlash.
• At least 3,500 subreddits are down.
• The protest will last at least 24 hours.

Communities on Reddit have “gone dark” today in protest of the site’s decision to monetize access to its data. More than 3,000 subreddits have joined the protest, and will go “private” today, preventing anyone outside the community seeing their posts.

The action protests forthcoming changes to the site’s API, which lets other companies use reddit data in their own products and services.

The changes will introduce charges for “premium access,” effectively destroying third-party Reddit apps like Apollo, which would have to charge about $5/user every month just to pay the fees to Reddit, according to Apollo’s developer Christian Selig.

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According to Reddit, the changes come as a result of the clash between the social network and AI companies that have used huge amounts of data from Reddit to train their systems.

“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, told the New York Times in April. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

However, popular opinion is that the goal is to shut down third-party sites like Apollo. Reddit’s mobile app only launched in 2016, after third-party services had dominated the market for mobile use of the site. Realistically, this source of competition is as much a motivator as anything.

In a post to the website on Friday, Reddit chief executive Steve Huffman said it “needs to be a self-sustaining business” and addressed the blackout.

“We respect when you and your communities take action to highlight the things you need, including, at times, going private,” he said.

“We are all responsible for ensuring Reddit provides an open, accessible place for people to find community and belonging.”

Steve Huffman commented on the Reddit API protest. Source: Zach Gibson / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP

However, Reddit is reliant on community moderation. The shutdown of 3,500 subreddits (and counting!) will significantly harm the site’s traffic. Mods might spend hours a day ensuring the posts in their subreddit fit guidelines, unpaid, but aren’t charged hosting fees for the communities that are set up.

The protest is planned to last for two days, although some are saying that it could continue indefinitely – or until Reddit backtracks.

Why is the Reddit API protest effective?

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, there was talk of a mass exodus from the platform in retaliation against his acquisition (we covered it here). Beyond that, every time a site changes its interface, the timeline fills with indignant users threatening to delete their accounts or move to a competitor.

Users hate change. However, “this anger never actually matters.” It’s fundamentally too difficult to coordinate a mass migration to an alternative site. This can be figured in relation to a 90-9-1 rule that applies to social media users.

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Protest depends on finding communities and making an impact. That’s difficult when your community is disengaged.

Unless a boycott can break through to those more disengaged and passive users somehow, it’s doomed to fail. And it’s nearly impossible to reach them precisely because they’re disengaged.

The API changes at Reddit don’t particularly impact the disengaged 90%. Because the site is so dependent on its engaged users, it’s those users that make change felt. Of the most active Reddit users, a vast majority use third-party Reddit apps in some way or another.

90% of Reddit users don’t care about the API protest.

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So, the mods that dislike the changes are blacking out the site. Traffic will drop and frustrated passive users will have to look elsewhere for answers to their most niche enquiries. When the strike ends in 24 hours, the ball will be in Reddit’s court.

Some users don’t see how the blackout will impact the site owners.

The post Reddit protests cause blackouts onsite appeared first on TechHQ.