the one with all the twitter updates

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It’s been another busy week in social media land, especially for Twitter, which pumped out a ton of new stuff…

…However, some Twitter users have strong feelings about this one new feature 😆

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🔥 GEEKOUT HOT 5

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Nearly every social media platform is jumping on the social shopping bandwagon. Facebook has rolled out Instagram Shops. TikTok is experimenting with shopping via livestreams. Even Twitter is working on plans for shoppable tweets. For social media managers and marketers, it’s just one more thing to learn, understand, and possibly experiment with.

Thankfully, Hootsuite’s team of experts are hosting a FREE webinar to give you the Social Shopping 101 you need. So, if you want to get to grips with social commerce and find out how to kickstart your social shopping strategy, join the experts from Hootsuite who will tell you all you need to know. >> [Register to attend] <<

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💎 HIDDEN GEM | Poet.So - A FREE tool to capture and share Twitter posts as beautiful images 🎨 [Try it out]

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Before we jump into this week’s top talking points, here’s a few other bits & pieces worth being in the know about:

Ok then… Let’s dig in to the social media news making the biggest headlines this week 👇

P.S. My weekly Geekout debriefing on Twitter Spaces will return soon. More details soon. I promise 🙂

After way, way too long, Twitter is finally listening to its users when it comes to their safety. Bloomberg reported yesterday on new tools apparently in the works:

It’ll be great to say goodbye to the fiddly ‘soft block’ trick. No more having to block and unblock someone to remove them from your followers without them noticing (a version of the new approach showed up in Android app code recently as keen readers of this newsletter may remember).

But being able to auto-hide your tweets after 30, 60, 90, or 365 days is the real boon here. No more worrying about people digging through your ancient opinions from a decade ago to embarrass you today, and you won’t have to turn to third-party tools that completely delete the tweets either.

This is all part of a push for what Twitter calls “social privacy” and it ties in well with ‘Safety Mode’, which was announced in February and started rolling out to a test group this week. The mode auto-blocks accounts that send you harassment. If it works well, it could be a huge mental health boon.

Twitter’s design has long made it far easier to harass than it was to avoid harassment. That Twitter is finally addressing this upside-down situation shows how at least some social platforms are maturing, coming to terms with how people actually use them 2021, rather than how their creators optimistically wanted them to be used in the mid-2000s.

Beyond Twitter’s reset of how it handles users’ problems with its platform, another sign of social platforms evolving comes in the form of Facebook making what Wired described this week as a “big admission.”

Yes, following a survey of users’ opinions, Facebook is to downrank political content in the News Feed.

It’s part of a shift away from treating its algorithm, driven by what users engage with, as the best possible way of knowing what to show users.

The problem with treating engagement as the algorithm’s main guide is that if you don’t know what else you could be seeing, you’re going to engage with what you see. And then you see more of the stuff you don’t particularly like, and so you and your friends post more of that content because that’s the tone set by the algorithm. Like a crime-ravaged neighbourhood in a cycle of decline, social platforms driven by engagement can get stuck rewarding the worst content.

This has been clear to many of us for years, but Facebook is finally taking action on the problem. Let’s hope any negative effect it has on ad revenue doesn’t end up dragging the company back in the other direction.

Working with big-name creators is more than just a revenue opportunity. Popular creators have a bigger voice in the community than regular users, and they may use that to push platforms to change their behaviour.

Twitch saw that this week, as The Verge reported:

The protest had a noticeable effect on viewership on the platform.

Twitch promises that change to better protect creators is coming, but the walk-out this week shows how millennials and Gen-Z are far more comfortable using people-power to push for change than the generation before them, as we’ve seen in the push for unionisation in the US media industry, driven by staff in their 20s and 30s who want better working standards.

Another form of user protest got results this week over at Reddit, where many in the community were disappointed at CEO Steve Huffman’s decision to allow vaccine misinformation on the platform. “Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy. Reddit is a place for open and authentic discussion and debate. This includes conversations that question or disagree with popular consensus,” he wrote.

But when lives are at stake, many don’t see scaring people away from being vaccinated as a matter for debate. 135 subreddits went dark in a protest this week, stopping non-members from reading or joining their communities.

The move appeared to be enough to prompt change, with Reddit taking action against many anti-Covid-vax communities just days after it had said they were welcome.

People power: it gets results.

Work with Facebook ads? You should like this one…

Want to advertise in Geekout? 

Drop me an email: matt@mattnavarra.com

Credit: @workinsocialtheysaid

…And that’s a wrap!

Your weekly download of EVERYTHING new in social is complete ✅

Right… It’s time to go grab a drink.

The working week is over and the weekend has started!

Goodbye, geeks!

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This newsletter is edited by Martin SFP Bryant.