Social Media Daily News Roundup 14.08.2019

Today’s social media news, rounded up in one place so you don’t have to go anywhere else. 

🙊 Social-media use 'disrupting teen sleep and exercise'

🙊 Instagram Opens AR Filter Creation Tools to All Users

🙊  YouTube is testing a members-only videos feature

🙊 Facebook also hired human contractors to listen to audio from its Messenger app

Social-media use 'disrupting teen sleep and exercise' - BBC 

Using social media isn't directly harming teenagers - but it can reduce the time they spend on healthy activities, such as sleeping and exercising, a study suggests.

Parents should ban phones from bedrooms after 22:00 and encourage more physical activity, the UK researchers said.

Girls were particularly vulnerable to cyber-bullying on social media, which could lead to psychological distress.

But what drove boys' distress needed more research, the study said.

In the UK, nine out of 10 teenagers use social media and there is growing concern about its impact on the mental health and the wellbeing of young people.

So far, research has thrown up contradictory evidence because of the lack of long-term data.

In this study, in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, a representative group of more than 12,000 teenagers at school in England was interviewed over three years, from the age of 13 to 16.

The research found boys and girls who checked social-media sites more than three times a day had poorer mental health and greater psychological distress.

These girls were also more likely to say they were less happy and more anxious in subsequent years - but the boys were not.

Instagram Opens AR Filter Creation Tools to All Users - Social Media Today

Instagram is once again following the lead of Snapchat by opening up its Spark AR filter creation platform to all users, while also introducing a new library of user-created visual tools.

As explained on the Facebook Developer blog:

"Starting today, anyone can create and publish their own Spark AR effects on Instagram. We’re also introducing the new Effect Gallery, which will include niche AR effects from up-and-coming artists, making it easier for people to discover unique effects from the creator community." 

To discover new effects, users will now find a new “Browse Effects” option at the end of the effects tray in the Instagram Camera, which will take you to the library of audience-originated visual tools.

YouTube is testing a members-only videos feature - Digi Day

Now that Facebook has started to sell subscriptions to publishers’ videos, publishers hope that YouTube will follow suit. And the Google-owned video platform appears poised to do so, stretching its existing subscription product in a way that it could be used to supplement media companies’ standalone subscription-based streaming video services.

Facebook also hired human contractors to listen to audio from its Messenger app - The Verge

Facebook has been hiring third-party contractors to review and transcribe audio clips of its users, according to a new report from Bloomberg. Facebook claims it stopped using human workers to review audio clips “more than a week ago,” noting that the contractors were previously hired to check whether anonymised conversations were being correctly transcribed on the Messenger app.

Since 2015, Messenger has offered a feature to transcribe voice clips to text, although it is turned off by default. Facebook claims only those who opted in to the feature had their audio clips reviewed by third-party contractors. However, according to its support page, if even one person in your chat has consented to Facebook transcribing the conversation, any audio in the thread would have been translated, regardless of who sent it.

The findings are particularly troubling given that nowhere in Facebook’s support page or terms of service does it indicate that humans would be reviewing the audio. “Voice to Text uses machine learning. The more you use this feature, the more Voice to Text can help you,” the support page reads.