Meta

According to WABetaInfo, under a new optional subscription plan called WhatsApp Premium, users will be able to use additional features such as the ability to create a custom business link and link up to 10 devices to their accounts in the future. About the last feature, it would also be helpful for large businesses to manage certain chats from a specific device for this reason, WhatsApp is developing the ability to assign chats to linked devices, the report said.

According to The Verge, the new division is Meta's "first serious foray into building paid features across its main social apps". The group 'New Monetisation Experiences' will be headed by Pratiti Raychoudhury, former Meta's head of research, the report said late on Wednesday.

While the platform is testing the ability to mark multiple posts in Explore as 'Not Interested,' it will also soon start testing the ability to tell Instagram you don't want to see suggested posts with certain words, phrases or emojis in the caption or hashtags. "We're testing the ability to mark multiple posts in Explore as Not Interested. We'll immediately hide those posts and refrain from showing you similar content in the future," said the company.

Reels, the audio from the clip just disappeared. "It means if you want to export the footage from Reels to use in another app (like TikTok), you have to actually post the Reel first in order to save the sound," The Verge had reported this week. Instagram said it was a bug and that has been fixed. Meanwhile, when creators now make a video on YouTube Shorts, they will not be able to download the video and cross-post it to other apps without a "YouTube watermark".

On the microblogging site Twitter, the photo-sharing platform's head Adam Mosseri announced the new Reels updates. "We are launching a few new Reels features to make it fun and easy for people to find + share more entertaining content -- 'Add Yours' Sticker, IG-to-FB Crossposting, FB Reels Insights," Mosseri captioned the video posted on Twitter. With the tap of a button, the new update allows users to cross-post Reels from Instagram to Facebook. Mosseri also mentioned that the Add Yours sticker that became popular in Stories is now coming to Reels on Instagram and Facebook.

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also retweeted the pictures with a cryptic caption "Meta," that a user named, Arix (@Arix_Ki) posted on the microblogging platform. "This baby Jesus sculpture at LA Museum of Art looks like Mark Zuckerberg," the user tweeted with pictures of Mother Mary and baby Jesus from the Los Angeles Museum of Art.

Chinese short-form video platform TikTok has rocketed in popularity and is now a top social media platform for teens among Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat. Some 67 per cent of teens say they ever use TikTok, with 16 per cent of all teens saying they use it almost constantly. Google-owned YouTube tops the 2022 teen online landscape among the platforms, as it is used by 95 per cent of teens. TikTok is next on the list of platforms that were asked about in this survey (67 per cent), followed by Instagram and Snapchat, which are both used by about six in 10 teens.

"We're also starting a test of automatic end-to-end encrypted chat threads on Messenger and expanding other features," said the company. "As with end-to-end encrypted chats, secure storage means that we won't have access to your messages, unless you choose to report them to us," said Sara Su, Product Management Director, Messenger Trust.

A report by the Tech Transparency Project revealed that more than 80 white supremacist groups have a presence on Facebook, including some that Facebook itself has labelled as "dangerous organisations". "What's more, when our test user searched for the names of white supremacist groups on Facebook, the search results were often monetised with ads -- meaning Facebook is profiting off them," the non-profit organisation said in a statement late on Wednesday. The study found that ads appeared on 40 per cent of the queries for the white supremacist groups.

Quest 1 owners will no longer be able to launch or play the game starting October 31, its developer BigBox VR has announced. "We are building 'BIG POP1' experiences that will push the boundaries of multiplayer VR. In order to focus our efforts on next-gen features and tech, we're ending Quest 1 support on October 31, 2022," Meta said in an update.