US Judge prevents TikTok ban, demands a defence of decisions from US

The Commerce Department of the United States issued an executive order to Apple and Google to ban WeChat and TikTok from their app stores, but now US District Judge Carl Nichols prevents the decision.

According to the judge the government ”must file a response to a request by TikTok for a preliminary injunction or delay the order by 2:30 pm EDT Friday.”

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The same issues is occurring in California, with a federal judge issuing a preliminary injunction blocking the ban of WeChat – another platform, owned by a Chinese conglomerate Tencent. According to TikTok, the restrictions “are not motivated by a genuine national security concern” but are rather being used as a bargaining chip in the upcoming general elections.

Last Saturday several sort of delay to the ban came up after “positive developments” – Walmart and Oracle reportedly will join hands in purchasing a minor stake in TikTok Global – a new subsidiary by ByteDance that is supposedly going to make TikTok a platform for influencers and brands to promote products while doing their silly dances.

Twitter will be bringing its ‘read before you retweet’ pop up to all users

Twitter has announced it will be bringing it’s “read the article before you retweet it” prompt to all users “soon.” The company began testing the prompt in June, which shows up when people go to retweet a story they haven’t clicked through to actually read.

According to twitter the idea is to “help promote informed discussion.” Headlines often don’t tell the whole story and can even be actively misleading. Encouraging people to at least read the article they’re sharing seems like a smart way to promote media literacy and stop some of the knee-jerk reactions that can make misinformation viral.

The company shared a few results from its initial test of the feature, which was limited to Twitter users on Android. It says people shown the prompt opened articles 40 percent more often and that the overall proportion of people opening articles before retweeting increased by 33 percent. The company also said that “some people” (a statistically meaningless phrase!) didn’t retweet the article after opening it up.

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It added that it is “working on bringing these prompts to everyone globally soon” and that in the future, the prompt will be smaller once it’s been shown to users once (“because we get that you get it”). The new features isn’t only feature Twitter’s been testing to improve life on its platform. Others include a feature that warns users before they send offensive replies and the option to limit who replies to tweets (which has now been rolled out globally).

We hope the experimentation is just a warm-up for the next logical step: a warning showed to all users before they tweet anything at all.

Wikipedia begins first desktop redesign after 10 years

The whole redesign will be complete by the end of 2021

Wikipedia remains a very important part of web culture for nearly twenty years, allowing users browse its millions of text-heavy, crowd-sourced encyclopedia entries from their computer, tablet, or phone. Now, the overall look of Wikipedia on desktop will be looking different for the first time in a decade to make the site more approachable for new users.

To check all the proposed new features read here this MediaWiki post and there are some animated GIFs to show you what they might look like. Sincerely, I really like how the new table of contents feature looks. I tend to curiously read Wiki pages of public figures and this could make it a lot easier to navigate around certain sections of a page without having to scroll down on my computer.

From out observation, a collapsible sidebar will be the first change to roll out; this will allow users to collapse the menu on the left side of each page, to reduce distractions, and limit irrelevant content and links on the left of your screen to make it easier to focus. The site will also integrates an easy one-click button to change to the language for a page you’re reading.

Wikipedia will also add improvements to the in-site search tool to make it easier to find other pages and will reconfigure the logo to make it smaller on each Wikipedia page.

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Wikimedia Foundation, the site’s parent company, announced in a blog post that the changes will happen “incrementally over a long period of time,” allowing users to test the new features before they officially roll out, but that it plans to redesign the entire look of the desktop version of Wikipedia by the end of 2021.

For now, we aren’t sure if the mobile version would receive the same redesign.