After launching on Amazon Fire TV in December, Instagram for TV is expanding to Google TV devices in the US starting Tuesday, as Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced in a post on Threads. The feature lets users view reels on their TV, arranged into “channels” for different topics and themes.
[Threads]
It’s harder to clean up a mess you’re still actively making.
Charles Porch, who helped land Instagram’s biggest partnerships — including the launch of Beyoncé’s self-titled album on the social network — will now serve as OpenAI’s first VP of global creative partnerships.
“I’m going to be the person that’s talking to creative communities around the world to figure out how we build the best products to serve them,” Porch tells Vanity Fair.
Meta has bet big on AI everything, but also has Instagram boss Adam Mosseri out there warning creators about its impact. One commenter (and occasional Verge contributor!) sums up its position nicely:
David Imel:
Meta: “We’re going to shove our AI models into everything we make so you use them as much as possible”
Meta: “AI is making it hard to tell what’s real. This is going to be a challenge for us and for you! Be careful and vigilant and try not to die”
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Following Australia’s social media ban for children under 16 taking effect last month, Meta says it has now removed almost 550,000 Instagram, Facebook, and Threads accounts that it believes were run by kids under that age threshold. Despite its compliance, Meta is still voicing opposition to the law.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri says, “People stopped sharing personal moments to feed years ago,” in a New Year’s Eve post about the future of the platform as generative AI produces more realistic-looking content.
A report from The Washington Post reveals Meta’s recent push to attract more teens to Instagram, which reportedly involved setting up a “living museum” inside its offices “to help employees internalize the lifestyles of their teenage targets:”
In at least one case it featured photos of top teen hangout places — a fast-food restaurant and a mall — and instructions on how to take wacky, teen-style selfies, according to photos of the exhibit.
[The Washington Post]
During Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said TikTok is “very much applying lessons they’ve learned in China to the rest of the world:”
Super apps, which are very popular in China, are not popular in the same way outside of China, and I think they’re turning into a Chinese super app — and that may or may not work outside of China.
US-based car reviewers are going gaga over Chinese EVs. Their audiences wonder why they can’t buy them.
The platform is testing a way for users to indicate what topics they want to see in content, beginning with Reels. Instagram said previously that this was in the works. The topics appear to be extremely specific — things like Bad Bunny, “Japanese artisan menswear,” “vintage Patek,” and so on. In other words: help Instagram improve its algorithm.
Meta’s AI translation feature initially worked with English and Spanish.
Plain old pictures are out; content is in.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri discovered this week that his “I’m not listening to you through your phone” T-shirt was raising a lot of questions already answered by his shirt. But real heads know that Instagram doesn’t need to listen to you, because it already knows everything anyway.
Nixel:
Yeah, we don’t listen to you… just endlessly track you across the internet building up so much data that it seems exactly like we do
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The change should make it easier to not have your own comments get buried.
