Telegram joins the big league; new Twitter features; fake news a big hit on Facebook
Social media headlines of the week - August 30-September 5, 2021
A quick wrap of the big social media announcements, events and news in the week that just went past. New edition every Monday.
Instagram to ask users their date of birth
Instagram says it will start prompting its users to enter their date of birth. According to Instagram, this is being done to better manage and protect younger users from unwanted exposure on the platform.
Telegram joins the billion plus club
According to data from Sensor Tower, instant messaging app Telegram has been downloaded over a billion times. With this milestone, Telegram joins the list of a few apps that have achieved such popularity which include: WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Spotify and Netflix. India is the biggest market for Telegram.
To mark its 8th anniversary, Telegram added a host of new features including unlimited live streams, flexible forwarding and Trending Stickers.
LinkedIn Stories come to an end
Soon after Twitter shut down its Fleets feature, LinkedIn announced that is shuttering its Stories to explore different video formats more suited for its audience.
Twitter introduces Safety Mode, Super Follows
Twitter announced a new features last week, including Safety Mode that will let users limit unwelcome interactions. Something that is quite frequent on the platform. Twitter also announced Super Follows, "a new way for people to earn monthly revenue by sharing subscriber-only content with their followers on Twitter."
The company is also exploring the ability of archive old tweets, removing individual accounts as followers, removing yourself from a conversation and hiding old likes.
Fake news got six times more engagement than real news on Facebook
A study around the 2020 US Presidential election found that articles from known misinformation spreaders on Facebook received six times as many likes, shares, and interactions as legitimate news articles.