Snapchat

An interesting look at how Snap has diverted from other platforms in its handling of former President Trump:

Unlike other major tech platforms, Snap has not lifted the ban on Mr. Trump’s personal account, which has drawn angry pushback from his campaign. Despite not allowing Mr. Trump to post personally, the company has said it would sell his campaign political advertisements, which must all go through an internal fact-check.

Here at Snap’s annual Partner Summit in Santa Monica, he’s asking for suggestions from the audience as he generates AR effects with AI while wearing a pair. (You can read my full impressions of the hardware here.) Bring back more live tech demos like this, please!

I’m here at Snap’s annual conference in Santa Monica where the company just announced its biggest redesign to Snapchat in years. You can read more about that below. They keynote is still going and I hear there’s some other big news coming, so stay tuned for more.

Casey Newton shines a light on the increasingly common social media scam that primarily targets teen boys in his most recent Platformer newsletter:

But when a terrifying scam comes along that has led to at least 20 confirmed deaths in the past two years, a whole stack of investigations can’t seem to get a conversation going. [...] Perhaps the surgeon general, instead of his new ham-fisted campaign against every risk that social media presents, could warn parents about this one.

A deep dive by Rolling Stone tracked the deaths of children who died after taking fake drugs they bought on the app. Parents and law enforcement officials blame, in part, the disappearing messages feature that made Snapchat popular in the first place.

A small, sparkly ghost logo will “soon” feature on saved or exported images created with Snapchat’s generative AI tools.

More information — including some fairly obvious yet rigorous generative AI dos and don’ts — can be found on Snap’s support page.

Facebook's “In App Panel” program ran from 2016 to 2019 using Onavo’s technology as a man-in-the-middle attack to decrypt secured Snapchat traffic. Court documents unsealed as part of an ongoing class-action antitrust lawsuit show how the program came together.

A June 2016 email included in the documents from Mark Zuckerberg says:

Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them. . . .

Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.

The ad-free tier is an experimental feature for Snapchat Plus. It’s not clear when the test launched (Android Police spotted that it was available in Norway as of early September), but we noticed it today when user Jonah Manzano posted on Threads about its availability in Australia. It’s being trialed there at a price of $15.99, over double the standard $5.99 monthly cost of Snapchat Plus.