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AI video editing based on text prompts is coming to Instagram next year, with the company’s head showing off the ability to do things like change your clothing and video background, as well as some funkier stuff like adding animated characters.

The company had earlier shown a demo video (below) of completely AI-generated video, stating that it was just a research project, but it seems the first practical application of the tech is arriving sooner than expected …

As we approach the end of the year, Instagram is rolling out a new year-in-review feature. This year, you’ll be able to create a collage for your Instagram Story showing off your favorite moments of the year.

Deep fakes are arguably the most dangerous aspect of AI. It’s now relatively trivial to create fake photos, audio, and even video. See below for deep fakes of Morgan Freeman and Tom Cruise, for example.

But while social media has so far been used as a mechanism for distributing deep fakes, Instagram head Adam Mosseri thinks it can actually play a key role in debunking them …

Meta is currently experiencing a major outage across all its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Messenger, and WhatsApp. As noted by Downdetector.com, there has been a sharp increase in reported outages from users of these various services. Here’s what we know so far.

Update 5 p.m. Eastern: Over four hours into the outage, Meta has restored service for some users but many continue to experience issues and there has been no new update yet.

Meta is introducing a new way for creators to test content performance before sharing with followers. The new Instagram feature called trial reels allows creators to share videos with non-followers as a way to gauge reactions. This will allow creators to push the most engaging videos to their actively following audience.

A law enforcement agency has said that both Instagram and TikTok are increasingly being used to recruit money mules, who are either knowingly or unknowingly helping criminal gangs to launder money.

Those caught face prison sentences of up to 14 years, and are also likely to be banned from holding or opening a bank account …

Note: This report contains links to reports about teenage suicides

Australia has followed France in imposing a social media ban for kids, and other countries are expected to follow. The French government is now pushing for an EU-wide ban.

Social media platforms are of course pushing back as they face losing a demographic seen as key to their future, and questions are being raised about how the ban will be enforced …

Update: Australia has now voted to ban social media use by children under the age of 16. In a 9to5Mac reader poll on the issue, the vast majority of you thought the US should do the same – see the end of the piece.

The impact of social media use by kids is perhaps one of the hottest topics in tech. There’s significant evidence that social media apps like Instagram can be harmful to the mental health of children, while others argue that it can also enable social connection.

Apple’s Find My Friends (which is now integrated into the Find My app) lets you share your location in real time with other people. Soon, Instagram users will have access to a similar feature to share their location with friends and family right from the social network.

One of the biggest problems with social media is that our feeds are full of things the algorithms think we want to see, rather than what we actually want to see.

If your Instagram recommendations seem increasingly removed from your interests, Meta is now offering you the chance to start again from scratch …

Instagram and Spotify on Thursday announced an update to both apps that will bring new integration to make their users’ lives a bit easier. Instagram users will now have a quick and easy way to add songs they like to their Spotify library with just a few taps.

Instagram is introducing new measures to protect teens from sextortion, by making it harder for criminals to blackmail them.

Separately, it appears to be working on a new Social Library feature intended to make it easier to find posts you’ve shared, liked, or been sent in chat …

Meta has been fined €91M ($101M) after it was discovered that to 600 million Facebook and Instagram passwords had been stored in plain text.

Some of those passwords had been unprotected since 2012, and were searchable by more than 20,000 Meta employees …

Meta has admitted to scraping all public Facebook and Instagram posts made since 2007 in order to train its generative AI model, adding to the privacy contrast with Apple Intelligence.

While the admission was made during a public enquiry in Australia, the company’s statement applies globally …

Instagram Stories, one of the most popular parts of the Instagram app today, is getting a big new feature: comments. Here are all the details you should know, including how they’re designed to help eliminate trolls.

Streaming apps like Apple Music and Spotify already provide some kind of integration with Instagram that lets users easily share the song they’re listening to in a post or Story. However, Meta and Spotify have been working on an MSN-like feature that will let Instagram users show in real time the music they’re listening to.

Meta on Tuesday announced a major update coming to Instagram and its other apps. However, rather than adding a new feature, the company is removing one. That’s because Meta has confirmed that it will be shutting down its Spark platform, which lets anyone create AR filters that can be used on the camera within apps like Instagram and Facebook.

Back in May, Meta started testing the ability to cross-post from Instagram to Threads, and the company is now rolling this out to everyone.

The feature also lets you cross-post from Facebook, continuing Meta’s integration of its three different social media platforms …

Ever wished you could share more memories on Instagram at once? Thanks to a new change rolling out today, you can: Instagram is upping the max number of photos and videos that can go in a post.