Creator Weekly: Instagram Live, YouTube Profanity, TikTok Chat Rooms

Hello creators! This week there are updates from YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Instagram and more.

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🗓 Ten Years Ago This Week: Google+ Goes It Alone

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing highlights from 2015.

Ten years ago Google+ was demoted from being the “social layer” across Google products to just another interest-based social network. Immediately YouTube comments were disconnected from Google+ sharing (which made many folks happy).

Sadly Google+ the social network never caught on, and it was shut down in April 2019.

Get all the details.

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How is age verification in the UK working out?

Following up from last week’s deadline to start age verification for UK users who want to view 18+ content, it’s being noted how limiting this is. It’s not just blocking pornography and extreme violence. The age restrictions are also being added to war news, political content, health information and sex ed, and and other content.

Taylor Lorenz at User Mag: The UK's censorship catastrophe is just the beginning
Politico: The UK's new tech law triggers upheaval
404 Media: Spotify Is Forcing Users to Undergo Face Scanning to Access Explicit Content
PetaPixel: People Are Using a Video Game Photo Mode to Bypass the UK's Online Safety Act

YouTube Profanity Monetization Guidelines Update

Hot damn! YouTube updated its advertiser-friendly guidelines so that videos with strong profanity in the first 7 seconds can now earn full ad revenue.

The original policy was aligned with TV standards. Now that’s not needed because advertisers can choose content where ads appear based on the level of profanity

If you swear in your YouTube videos, or use profanity in thumbnails or titles, you should review the detailed advertiser-friendly guidelines for examples of what is and is not allowed.

YouTube Age Estimation

YouTube will soon use an age estimation model to determine if US users are under 18, no matter what birth date is set on the account. It uses a “variety of signals” including activity and how old the account is.

Details about the signals used are presumably not shared to try to prevent under 18s from gaming the system. But it sounds like it’s more sophisticated than just “does this account watch Roblox videos.

If YouTube’s estimate is incorrect, there is an age verification option.

Teens cannot watch 18+ content and will not see personalized ads, among other safeguards.

For YouTube Creators with a younger audience this change may mean lower revenue from non-personalized ads.

Under 18 creators will have new uploads set to private, and they cannot receive gifts from vertical live streams.

Small reprieve for goo.gl short links

Google will not be disabling actively used goo.gl short links. All goo.gl links were due to be disabled on August 25.

Links inactive as of late 2024 redirect to a “will no longer work in the near future” notice and will be disabled. Active links will continue to work.

Check your articles, blog posts or documents for goo.gl links, especially those published before 2019 (consumer users stopped being able to create new goo.gl short links in April 2018). You need to confirm that those short links will continue to work.

I’ve removed and replaced all of the goo.gl links on my site because it’s not great to have mystery meat links in the first place. People should be able to check if the link goes to a blog or YouTube or other site before clicking. It was also good to clean out links that no longer work at all.

Instagram Makes it Harder to Livestream

Instagram now requires at least 1,000 followers to live stream. Previously there was no minimum requirement

If you have fewer than 1000 subscribers and you try to livestream from the Instagram mobile app, you will get a popup that says “Your account is no longer eligible for Live. We changed requirements to use this feature. Only public accounts with 1,000 followers or more will be able to create live videos.”

This matches TikTok’s 1,000 follower requirement, but is stricter than most other platforms. YouTube requires 50 subscribers for mobile live streaming, but has no minimum sub requirement for desktop livestreams. Facebook requires 100 followers.

Meta has not made any announcement or explained the reason for the change.

TikTok Adds Comment and Chat Management Tools

TikTok added new tools for Creators to manage comments and engage their community.

Creator Care Mode: “filters all comments identified as offensive, inappropriate, or profane as well as comments from users that have previously been reported, deleted, or disliked.” It uses AI to learn what types of comments the Creator usually removes.

TikTok LIVE chat moderation: Mute live chat comments with specific words, phrases or emojis.

Creator Inbox: Organizes incoming comments, including Unread and Starred folders. Creators can add custom responses that can be shared with a single tap.

Creator Chat Room: Chat with engaged fans. Creators can create up to 20 chat rooms, and each room can have up to 300 members (age 18+). This is available to creators with at least 10,000 followers and either Subscriptions (similar to YouTube Memberships) or LIVE Fan Club.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

YouTube shared tips on identifying and protecting your account from fake brand deal scams. Be especially wary of:

Deals that appear too good to be true
.exe or .scr files (expect .pdf or .docx files)
Messages sent from public email domains (e.g., @mail.ru) or domains with misspellings of legit brand names
Encrypted or password-protected files disguised as contracts

YouTube added a Posts shelf on the channel Home tab on mobile and desktop. Channels that have at least 2 posts have this added automatically. It can be moved or turned off YouTube Studio > Channel Customization > Home Tab > Layout. Learn more.

You can filter your YouTube playlists by description and visibility on the Content > Playlists tab in YouTube Studio. It also now shows views, which matches the stats shown on the mobile playlist page and playlist analytics tab. Learn more.

A small update for YouTube Communities: Channel owners can now ❤ community posts by fans. Learn more.

YouTube is experimenting with a new collaboration feature. There aren’t details about how it works, but YouTube says the content is recommended to all the collaborators' audiences. It looks like Mr. Beast is collabing with other creators for his #TeamWater fundraiser.

TikTok is very much a music discovery platform. They have an Add to Music App (Add Song) button on videos that lets you save the song to a playlist on your favorite music streaming service. They just added YouTube Music to the options.

TikTok is also testing Content Check Lite, which lets creators check whether a video would be eligible for recommendation in the For You feed before it’s uploaded. That way the content can be adjusted before posting.

TikTok is rolling out Footnotes in the US. These are community-added notes to add context to videos. Like Meta, X, YouTube and other platforms with user-added notes, they use a bridging-based system to only display notes where people with different points of view agree it’s helpful. I’m really skeptical of that, as it almost guarantees that notes on highly divisive topics won’t appear.

TikTok Pro is rolling out in Europe, starting with Germany, Portugal and Spain. Pro doesn’t mean professional. This “is a new app that allows people to experience and engage with joyful and entertaining content”. It includes the new Sunshine Programme that allows NGOs and charities to engage with new audiences.

Twitch is rolling out access to monetization features to all US streamers, including Bits, paid Subs, channel emotes and more. Payouts are only available to Affiliates and Partners, but everyone can spend their earnings on the platform.

Twitch improved detection of viewbots, inauthentic viewership and other fake engagement. Creators may see a drop in channel viewcount. Twitch CEO Dan Clancy notes that some bots are bought by streamers, while others are being used to harass. Twitch is trying to eliminate both types.

The Edits video editing app has 150 new fonts, lets you save a draft on Instagram, preview clips when recording from your camera and has new audio tools, including extending a track duration for editing, and automatically cutting silences, and importing audio from files.

Adobe Firefly AI video generator has new features:

Improved motion fidelity
Use existing video for composition reference
Style presets
Keyframe cropping
Generate sound effects - record your own voice as reference for energy and timing, layer sound effects.
Text-to-avatar turns scripts to avatar-led video

Bluesky says video uploads are now higher resolution. They haven’t shared what that resolution is.

Social Media

Substack the newsletter-turned-social media platform sent out a push notification last week recommending a Nazi newsletter. This wasn’t just far right politics. The newsletter’s icon is literally a swastika and its content is just what you would expect. Substack apologized, and said they would fix the system that sent it, but they aren’t at all sorry for hosting the content or taking a cut of the subscription fees for that newsletter.

LinkedIn quietly updated their hateful and derogatory content policy to remove protections for transgender users, and updated their harassment policy to remove “race or gender identity” as examples of inherent traits for which negative comments are considered harassment. When asked for comment, LinkedIn just noted that they regularly update their policies.

Instagram shared an infographic on what types of content reach different types of people. Use Reels and Carousels to reach new audiences, share Photos, Carousels and Stories to engage your followers, and use Lives and Broadcast Channels to “nurture your most loyal fans.”

Molly White suggests Curate your own newspaper with RSS. Choose what news organizations and blogs you read without algorithmic feeds.

Lindsey Gamble reports: VSCO Launches New Global Camera App 'Capture' and Acquires The Freelance Photographer to Support Professional Creators

More AI Updates and Tips

Google’s NotebookLM can now generate Video Overviews as announced at Google I/O in May. The idea is similar to its podcast-like Audio Overviews. It creates a narrated slideshow, with images, quotes and numbers from your documents, plus AI-generated visuals. This is rolling out to all users in English.

Google AI Mode in Search is getting new features: ask questions about images and PDFs on desktop, Canvas lets you organize information over multiple sessions, and Search Live with Google Lens and Project Astra’s video input.

Adobe added new AI-powered beta features to Photoshop

Harmonize blends elements into cohesive composites
Generative Upscale enhances resolution up to 8 megapixels
Projects organization tool
Improved Remove tool
GenAI Model Picker

Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta to bring “personal superintelligence” to everyone. What is “superintelligence”? He doesn’t define it, but is sure it will “help humanity accelerate our pace of progress.” It also doesn’t exist, and it’s not clear when it will exist. But that’s what Meta is doing now.

You can now sign up for xAI’s Grok for early access to its new text-to-video AI tool

Peggy K's Creator News

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