Creator Weekly: Meta's Moderation, YouTube Shorts, Medium Partner Program

Wildfires are my nightmare. They are fast moving, destructive, and near unstoppable when the winds are strong. My heart goes out to folks in Los Angeles County affected by the current fires (which are still mostly uncontained as I write this). 

It’s sickening that there are selfish people flying drones into the fire areas, for likes or “content”. One of the big water-dropping Super Scooper planes was seriously damaged by a drone and aircraft have been unable to work in some areas due to unauthorized drone activity. I hope they are penalized.

This week the big news is Meta’s new moderation policies. There are also updates for YouTube, Medium, WordPress, X and more. 

Top news and updates this week

• Meta shifts moderation policy, allows more hateful content, and shifts from 3rd party fact checks to community notes.

• The YouTube Shorts editor now lets you create or upload Shorts up to 3 minutes long (with limitations).

• YouTube is testing a tool to automatically create highlight Shorts.

• YouTube Music is testing a new Monthly Audience metric, to replace Subscribers. 

• Medium is cracking down on accounts in their Partner Program participating in “non-genuine engagement”.

• Automattic will be investing less in the WordPress Project, and will make WordPress.com closer to the core experience. 

• OpenAI seems to have stopped working on their Media Manager tool.

• Getty and Shutterstock plan to merge, dominating the stock image market.

• X is rolling out parody labels and plans to update its algorithm so people see less negativity.

• Google Drive supports differential uploads. 

• Google Meet will soon limit automatically translated captions to Workspace users with a Gemini subscription.

• 10 Years Ago This Week: “virtual reality is a reality” (scroll to the end to read about CES in 2015).

To Do & Try

Two quick tips this week: Use Sill to keep up with popular links in your Bluesky feeds and use the Watch Duty app for accurate timely wildfire updates in the western half of the US.

The Public Domain Review has launched the Public Domain Image Archive. This has more than 10,000 out-of-copyright public domain images that are free to use. It’s great to browse! For example if you start with the technology tag, you can find a 14th century bathysphere, 19th century velocipedes, and space colony art from the 1970s.

Meta to allow more “Free Expression”

On Tuesday Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that they would be making big changes to moderation on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, in the name of “free expression”. 

I’ve written up a detailed overview, with a selection of responses, but these are the changes:

• Updates to the Hateful Conduct (formerly Hate Speech) policy, that allows more insulting and hateful content, especially around homosexuality, transgender rights, and immigration. Under the new hate speech rules, some slurs and hateful comments are now explicitly allowed.

• Focusing their automated policy filters on “illegal and high severity” violations, and relying on user reports for less severe violations.

• In the US, shifting from “biased” third party fact checking to X-like Community Notes.

• Moving the Trust & Safety enforcement team from California to Texas, because Californians are perceived as biased.

• Recommending political content from accounts you don’t follow.

• Working with the Trump administration to push back against foreign governments.

Official Announcement: More Speech and Fewer Mistakes. 

It’s not clear yet what this will look like in practice, but it feels like an invitation to people who post misinformation and hateful content to post more. 

Zuckerberg pays lip service to wanting to “keep the communities friendly and positive”, but I don’t see how that will work with more hate speech, more political content, and less moderation.

Also this week, Meta unexpectedly removed the transgender and non-binary Messenger themes, and the posts announcing their addition are no longer online.

And Meta shut down its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs, which does not seem to be coincidental.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

You can now create Shorts up to 3 minutes long in the YouTube app’s Shorts editor. When you create a Short, tap the default length (15s) at top right to switch to 3 minutes. Note that remixes and collabs are still limited to one minute, and the available music is only one minute tracks.

YouTube is testing a new tool to automatically create a Short highlight clip from long form videos. If you are in this test (English only) you will see the “Create a video highlight”  tool in the YouTube video editor.

If you are using the Google Vids video editor, they have a quick tutorial for editing audio timing and transitions.

YouTube Premium subscribers can now save their video queue as a playlist in the YouTube mobile app.

YouTube Music is testing a new Monthly Audience metric, in place of Subscribers, for artists. This includes users who viewed or listened to videos, Shorts, and collaborations with the artist’s music, fan content, and non-music content.

Delta Airlines and YouTube have partnered to bring ad-free YouTube videos and music to Skymiles members.

Free open-source media player VLC demo’d automatic captions and translation (LinkedIn post) using open source AI models at CES.

TikTok brought to the US Supreme Court an appeal of the law that requires they be sold or banned. There could be a decision as soon as Monday. Observers think their appeal will not be successful.

Video sharing social media site Triller has set up savemytiktoks.com for easy migration of content from TikTok.

Charlotte Colombo at PassionFruit shares takeaways for creators from the TikTok What’s Next Report of 2025.  

TikTok has been promoting its photo-sharing app Lemon8 in the US, despite the looming ban, which covers all ByteDance products (CapCut also).

At CES Logitech G’s Streamlabs and NVIDIA announced a collaboration on an AI-powered live streaming assistant. They say the AI agent can serve as a co-host and commentator, adjust scenes and help set up and monitor streams.

Live streaming industry reporter Zach Bussey shared his live streaming predictions for 2025, including live shopping and a Brand Connect equivalent on Twitch, new features for live streamers on YouTube, and more.

Lindsey Gamble has 8 predictions for the creator economy in 2025, including more video on LinkedIn, creator content on major streaming services, and more creators turning to affiliate marketing.

Kevin Parry, who makes short “magic” special effects videos, shared his process for making longer “how I made it” videos by “being an expert, not an entertainer”. It’s a good read, free subscription required.

Web Publishers and Search

Medium is cracking down on some accounts in their Partner Program participating in non-genuine engagement, like “engagement circles, clap-for-clap rings, writers leaving hundreds of no-value responses in the hopes they’ll help boost their earnings”. Earnings are still based on how long Medium members spend reading your content, engagement (claps, highlights and responses), any Boost bonus, and adjustments for the read-through-rate, but Medium is “tweaking” the way earnings are calculated to “better reward genuine behavior and discourage gaming.” 

Automattic says that they will be spending less sponsoring the WordPress Project, claiming they are having to reduce their spending due to the legal action from WP Engine. They will be focusing more on their for-profit products, including “making WordPress.com much closer to a core WordPress experience, instead of having a different interface.” No word on whether Matt Mullenweg will be stepping back and allowing more community involvement in the direction of WordPress (so I’m guessing not). 

Matt Mullenweg also made a snarky post at WordPress(dot)org about Joost de Valk (developer of Yoast SEO plugin) and Karim Marucchi (who runs Crowd Favorite) supposedly creating a WordPress fork. And, of course, he deactivated their and several other WordPress community members’ .org accounts. Discussion on Reddit.

The free WordPress Studio Sync development environment for Mac and Windows is now integrated with WordPress.com (that’s the paid WordPress hosting from Automattic, not the free open-source WordPress). 

Photos and Image Design

In May 2024, OpenAI said they were working on a Media Manager tool for photographers and other creators to identify their copyrighted content and exclude it from being used for AI training. But despite their claim that it would be available “by 2025”, PetaPixel reports that it doesn’t appear OpenAI is even working on it. 

Getty (owner of iStock) and Shutterstock plan to merge, a move that will probably not be great for photographers. It’s estimated that together the two companies own 75% of the stock image market, and a merger would give photographers fewer options. Jaron Schneider at PetaPixel also speculates that this move is driven in part by Getty’s desire for more photos to train their “commercially safe” generative AI tool.

Social Media

Did you know that the Bluesky trending topics are custom feeds? That means you can open a topic and pin it to your home screen. That’s really useful for breaking news events like the LA fires. 

Sill, the service that compiles the most popular links in your Bluesky and Mastodon networks, has added a publicly available Trending page with the most popular links on Sill (which are the most popular links followed by people with Sill accounts). They also note that once Sill is out of beta, some features will be behind a paywall.

X is rolling out profile labels for parody accounts.

X plans to update its algorithm to promote more “informational/entertaining” content, especially video, but not links. Owner Elon Musk says “"Too much negativity is being pushed that technically grows user time, but not unregretted user time." (But does that mean Musk will change what he posts? I suspect not.)

Instagram shared tips on how businesses (and anyone) can expand the reach of their posts. I don’t think there are any surprises here: 

• Ditch the 3rd party watermark on Reels

• Don’t repost content already on Instagram

• Reels that are no longer than 90 seconds.

• Don’t post content that violates recommendation guidelines (for example violence, self-harm, eating disorders, trivializing death or depression, sexually suggestive, regulated products (like tobacco)).

• Don’t post engagement bait.

Communication and Collaboration

Features are available to free accounts unless otherwise noted.

Starting on January 22, auto-translated live captions in Google Meet will require a paid Gemini add-on, on top of a Google Workspace account. Live translated captions in Meet were first generally available to Google Workspace users in January 2022. Since then Google has significantly expanded the number of languages it supports. But this seems not great to put a feature users have been using for 3 years behind an additional paywall.

Google Drive now supports differential uploads, so that when you are uploading a new version of a large file, it only uploads the part of the file that changed.

Google Gemini is now integrated into the Google Drive PDF overlay file previewer. It can create overviews and summaries, make study guides, write emails and other tasks. This is available to Google Workspace with a Gemini subscription and Google One AI Premium.

More AI Updates and Tips

There is a new experiment in Google Search Labs that creates a podcast-style “Daily Listen” audio show with personalized content from the Discover feed. Try it (US only). Via 9to5Google.

Adobe published a new method (TransPixar) for generating text-to-video with background transparency (like a cutout). See the link for a demo. (via John Nack)

Apple posted a statement about their “Longstanding privacy commitment with Siri”, even when using the new “Apple Intelligence” AI. This seems to be in response to rumors about privacy issues.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says their $200 per month ChatGPT Pro plan is losing money. Generative AI tools are expensive to run, and it’s not clear how this is sustainable. Companies like Google and Meta may be able to afford such losses, but maybe not for long.

Ars Technica reports Photobucket opted inactive users into privacy nightmare, lawsuit says, with “plans to sell users' photos—including biometric identifiers like face and iris scans—to companies training generative AI models”.

More Reading

This past week was the CES tech trade show. The Verge has coverage: CES 2025: all the news, gadgets, and surprises. An aromatic laptop? Prototype cars? Heated gaming chairs? Washing machine that makes phone calls?  It’s all there.

iFixit shared the worst (least repairable, least secure, least sustainable) items at CES.

Chia Amisola @ Figma: Making Space for a Handmade Web. 

Renee Diresta @ Noema: The Great Social Media Decentralization 

Richard MacManus: What the Internet Was Like in 2011 

Ten Years Ago This Week

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

The huge Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was held in Las Vegas January 6-9, 2015. Just like this week’s CES, there were new TVs, computers, gadgets and appliances. 

One of the big announcements was the launch of Sling TV, which offers cable TV channels you could watch with just an internet connection. Sling TV is still available in the US, but now has competitors like YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV.

CNET also declared “virtual reality is a reality”, with a new version of the Oculus Rift headset (the first after being acquired by Facebook) and Samsung showing its recently launched Gear VR. Both would announce consumer versions later in 2015. 

It looks like Samsung has not released a new headset since 2017.

But while the Oculus Rift has since been discontinued, it was the first in a long line of VR headsets from what is now called Meta Reality Labs, which are the entry to Meta’s “metaverse”. 

VR would be an ongoing theme in 2015. And nearly 10 years later, Google and Samsung announced Android XR, a new operating system (with AI!) for headsets. I’m expecting to see more news of that in the coming year.

Thanks for reading! 🌼