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Even Peloton is cracking down on QAnon
Peloton has banned QAnon hashtags for allegedly promoting hate in its fitness community.
Hitting the Books: How an attempt at digital allyship fell flat
Welcome to Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an easily digestible nugget of their stories.
The NFL's new TikTok account is all about highlights and sideline moments
The National Football League is hyping up its 100th season with a TikTok partnership. Today, the NFL is launching an official TikTok account with packaged highlights, sideline moments and behind-the-scenes footage. To get things started, it's promoting a #WeReady challenge. Today through September 5th, the NFL is asking fans to share videos about their favorite teams with the hashtag.
Google Maps supports adding hashtags to reviews
Google has introduced a new feature to Maps that will make business reviews more useful. Now, users who leave reviews for local establishments can include hashtags in their write-ups and readers can tap those hashtags to find other businesses with reviews using that same tag. Google told TechCrunch that the feature was rolled out to Android devices about a week ago, but there's no word yet on when it might arrive on iOS or the web.
Instagram may tidy up captions by hiding hashtags
Instagram appears to be testing a way to add hashtags to a post without having to include them in the caption itself. App researcher Jane Manchun Wong spotted the feature and tweeted a screenshot of an updated interface. In the image, you can see a new "Add Hashtags" section and a screen where you can search for and select hashtags to add to your post. Wong added that it appears, as of now, there is no limit to how many hashtags can be added with the new feature.
Facebook trained image recognition AI with billions of Instagram pics
Training deep learning models to recognize images, as well as objects within those images, takes quite a bit of effort. Often, each training image has to be labeled by humans and when you're using millions of images, that process becomes rather labor-intensive. Scaling up to billions of images becomes nearly impossible. So, Facebook has been working on a way to train deep learning models with limited human supervision. Instead, its researchers have turned to public images that are, in a way, already labeled -- with hashtags.
Russian Twitter bots are reportedly helping #NoRussiaNoGames push
It's both terrifying and fascinating how well Russia uses Twitter to influence the perception of world events. Operatives from the country have supported Trump and Brexit and positioned propaganda that was eventually shared by major news outlets. Now it seems that Russian propagandists are hard at work amplifying an actual hashtag campaign (#NoRussiaNoGames) against the ban of Russian athletes from the upcoming Olympic games.
Instagram is testing a lot of new features, including a repost button
The Next Web reports today that Instagram is testing a slew of new features, many of which could be quite welcome among users. Maybe the most exciting feature is a native Regram button, which would let users repost others' photos and videos without having to turn to a third-party app. Another potentially popular addition is the ability to archive your Stories and it appears you'll be able to set Instagram to do that automatically. And it looks like iOS users might soon be able to share Instagram posts and profiles to WhatsApp with just a click of a button.
Instagram experiments with letting you follow hashtags
Sometimes, you don't want to keep up with individual people on Instagram as you do a trending topic -- say, the latest in tech (we're slightly biased here) or a big protest. That currently involves laborious searches for hashtags, but it might become relatively trivial soon. Users have discovered that Instagram is testing an option to follow hashtags, not just people. While this only includes popular and recent posts (it could easily become overwhelming if you got all of them), it could easily give you a sense of what's hot and suggest new people to follow.
Quantum 'hashtags' may prove the existence of a strange particle
Hashtags could soon be useful for a lot more than fostering discussion on your favorite social network. Researchers have developed a hashtag-shaped quantum chip (shown below) that could confirm the existence of the oddball Majorana particle, which exists as both matter and antimatter at the same time. The team has learned that laying indium phosphide nanowires in the familiar '#' shape creates a closed circuit that lets the particles pass by each other and braid, rather that annihilating each other like they would on a single wire. Think of it like creating streets with intersections instead of a one-lane road -- the 'traffic' can actually get around without collisions.
Instagram apes Snapchat yet again with face filters
At this point, it's probably easier to note the features Instagram and Facebook haven't swiped from Snapchat. Those tools already include the likes of Stories, stickers and more. Today, the filter-driven photo app announced a slew of new features, one of which looks quite familiar: face filters. That's tight, the goofy headwear, animal noses, glasses and more you know and love on Snapchat are now available for your selfies on Instagram.
Twitter's Snapchat-like stickers are now available to all
After announcing its intentions late last month, Twitter has finally jumped on the sticker bandwagon. The company announced it has completed the rollout of its "visual spin on hashtags," allowing you to furnish your photos with strategically-placed emoji and other custom-made cartoons. They're searchable too, just in case you want to see other people's crazy creations.
Mapping project catalogs Instagram sunrises from around the world
Have you noticed the wealth of sunrise and sunset photos on Instagram? Michelle Chandra certainly has, and her project offers a look at the sun's activity around the world in real time. "All Our Suns" gathers snapshots upload with either the #sunrise or #sunset hashtag, using the posts to populate a set of data-driven maps. Two of the crowdsourced cartography pieces catalog every image that's uploaded during the course of a 24-hour period -- one for sunrises and one for sunsets based on a user's location. What's more, you can click on a location marker to view the photo. A third map notes times when two people are posting at the same time, with one updating the beginning and the other observing the end of a day. The whole thing is a study on how our lives literally revolve around the sun and how social networks illustrate time as a never-ending loop.
Twitter revamps trends to explain why a topic is popular
Peeking at what's trending on Twitter ensures you don't miss anything, but sometimes a hashtag's meaning isn't obvious. For those strange-looking acronyms, subjects and unfamiliar names, the 140-character social network tweaked the way its Android and iOS apps handle trends. On the top chart, there are descriptions for each item that not only decodes a hashtag, but explains why the subject is a hot topic. The company nixed the Discover and Activity tabs too, and all the details on what's popular now reside in Search. Unfortunately, the new workflow is only available on mobile in the US for now, but it'll arrive in more locales, and on the desktop, "in the future." Revamped trends follows the recent change to quote retweets so that they don't eat up that valuable character allotment -- both of which make Twitter's own software more attractive.
The Queue: Lumber mill, UI, and Blizzard
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky (@adamholisky) will be your host today. Queued up, ready to go. Valen asked: Easy Q4tQ: do higher tiers of Lumber Mill generate more GR per WO? I assume not, but just wanna make sure.
Amazon lets you fill out your wish list with the help of a hashtag
Look beyond the lightspeed rush of news and one-liners and you'll see a Twitter that's slowly morphing into a place where you can buy stuff. Amazon seems to be coming to grips with that peculiar truth, which is why it cooked up another way to use the social service to discover and covet the gewgaws people tweet about. Assuming you've already hooked up your Twitter account (for #AmazonCart shopping), try responding to tweets including Amazon product links with #AmazonWishList - they'll instantly be added to (what else?) your wish list for easy buying down the road. It's useful enough what with the holiday shopping season nearly upon us, but let's face it: this just gives Amazon more reason to fill your feed with products you may or may not actually need. We just wish we could fill our Amazon carts directly with a tweet, and we'd be shocked if the folks in Seattle haven't started thinking about it already.
Twitter helps you keep track of NFL action with curated timelines
While you're sitting on the sofa watching your NFL team of choice take the field, you're likely peeking at a mobile device for updates, too. If that's the case, Twitter is looking to lend a hand this season with curated timelines for action around the league and game-specific options. In the #NFL timeline, you can see what the folks you follow are saying with "relevant tweets" from teams, players, coaches, media and celebrities peppered in to keep you in the know. For the game-focused feed (#SeahawksvsPackers or #SEAvsGB for example), everything is distilled down to what you need to watch that particular matchup. If that sounds a bit familiar it's because the social network did the same thing during the World Cup, and now it's looking to keep American football fans well-informed. For now, the timelines are only available on iOS and the web, so Android users will have to sit tight for the time being.
Ukraine rallies the Twitter troops as Russia invades
Strange as it may seem, wars aren't just fought with bullets and bombs anymore. Tweets and shares can at times be equally potent, and that's probably why Ukraine mounted a social offensive yesterday after Russian troops began engaging with domestic forces in the border town of Novoazovsk. The country's Foreign Ministry implored Twitter users retweet its message and to use the hashtags #RussiaInvadedUkraine and #UkraineUnderAttack to spread the word of Russia's incursion. It looks like the plan's working, too. #RussiaInvadedUkraine is the more popular of the two hashtags, and according to Topsy, it's been deployed in over 400,000 tweets over the past 24 hours.
New Twitter feature labels #hashtags you may not recognize
My feed is currently littered with hashtags I've never seen before. Iberia (the Spanish airline) tweeted with #ttot (Travel Talk on Twitter), Al Gore used #CRinBrazil (Climate Reality in Brazil) and Verizon posted something with #MobileBKsweeps (no clue). Things can get even more confusing during evening hours on the East Coast, when tags like #TWD (The Walking Dead), #AHSFX (American Horror Story) and #HIMYM (How I Met Your Mother) might appear. A quick trip to Google typically clears things up, but most of the time it's simply not worth the hassle. According to #WSJ, Twitter's now testing a tool that would help bring some clarity to those cryptic tags, in an attempt to make the service more user-friendly. The Wall Street Journal noticed expanded hashtags in Twitter's iOS app, and while reps declined to comment, it appears that the new feature is beginning to roll out. #itsabouttime.
Facebook rolls out hashtag support for mobile web and related searches
Clickable hashtags are a major new Facebook feature, and now the social network is bringing them to the next level by rolling out related searches and mobile availability. We're talking about its mobile site and (unfortunately) not its iOS and Android apps, making the former a better choice for browsing public status updates on the go. The introduction of related searches also makes it easier to discover new conversations, as searching for a particular hashtag brings up similar ones. Facebook analyzes which terms are often posted together, so looking for #equality also brings up posts tagged with #lgbt or #pride. These updates will soon show up on your accounts if they haven't yet, and unless you despise hashtags, they're icing on the cake.
