Twitter is grasping for its piece of the booming podcast industry with an expansion of its Spaces audio conversation hub. The service will include algorithmic recommendations of podcasts that users might like. Spaces works best on the Twitter mobile app, so if you don’t use that, you’re pretty much out of luck.
A request was made by India’s Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information for company executives to respond to public concerns.
You may have heard that podcasts occasionally include information that is not entirely accurate. Shocking but true! Google-backed research has found the “prebunking” with cartoon videos can help users recognize common misinformation techniques such as ad hominem attacks and false dichotomies. The researchers seem pleased to find a 5% improvement in ability recognize such techniques within 24 hours of viewing the education videos. Raise your hand if you think that’s enough to matter.
YouTube is not just a video platform, of course, it’s also a powerful search engine and it has begun testing a Google AI Overviews carousel that will appear in results for selected queries. Given the threat AI Overviews is perceived to pose to click-thru traffic in Google Search results, there’s a question about whether the YouTube initiative could depress click-thrus to brand and creator videos. Right now, the feature is only visible to a sub-set of U.S. premium users.