Social media updates and new features to know this week

Last week, we reported on a change to Meta’s terms & conditions that would have given the social giant the power to scrape content from any website connected to a Meta account — including news sites.

After outcry, Meta has removed the offending language from its terms of service.

In a statement provided to The Verge, Meta spokespeople said:

“We’ve heard you and want to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves. It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers. As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.”

Let’s see what else is new in the world of social media.

YouTube

Proving once again that short video is king, YouTube is offering creators in certain regions a bonus payout for highly engaged Shorts. This is an invite only program with no application process. Qualified creators will be notified via email and a notification in YouTube Studio. If they accept, there are two tiers to the payment. One is based on upload activity, while the other is based on engaged views.

YouTube is also taking steps to protect channels which have been hacked or compromised. If the platform detects unusual login activity, they will disable a variety of functions, including uploading videos, starting live streams and more. This is designed to keep bad actors from hijacking an account and quickly uploading unwanted content.

YouTube says that if an account is paused, creators will see a banner in YouTube Studio explaining what happened and when account access may be restored.

Meta

Advertisers on Meta platforms are now able to choose specific demographic audiences for each ad creative. Meta gives examples like advertising women’s sweaters only to women or retirement planning services only to people over the age of 50.

The Edits app now offers a paid tier, called Edits Plus. It’s still in limited testing, and the only listed benefit is 200 GB of cloud storage for the app. Pricing information has not yet been released.

Reddit

Reddit continues to build its ads business in a big way. It’s offering a suite of new tools and options for advertisers, including:

• Campaign planner: Build media plans directly within Reddit, including head-to-head comparisons of different plans. Engagement insights and conversation summaries, powered by AI, help advertisers better understand their customers and what they’re talking about in each subreddit.
• Campaign optimization score: Gives each campaign a score, 0-100, and offers suggestions on boosting the score for a more effective ad.
• Campaign budget optimization: Allows advertisers to set budgets and bids for each campaign, which then are shifted based on ad performance.

Allison Carter is editorial director of PR Daily and Ragan.com. Follow her on LinkedIn.