Imagine an original Casio digital watch – and now imagine it as a ring. And now you can buy it! CC-licensed photo by John Booty on Flickr.

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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Suitably sized. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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TikTok CEO summoned to European Parliament over role in shock Romania election • POLITICO

Nicholas Vinocur and Pieter Haeck:

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A top EU lawmaker is demanding that TikTok’s chief executive appear before the European Parliament to answer questions about the platform’s role in Sunday’s Romanian presidential election, as researchers warn of covert activity on thousands of fake accounts leading up to the vote.

The first-round victory of the ultranationalist and pro-Russian Călin Georgescu has triggered shockwaves about the political trajectory of the EU and NATO country, with many concerns focused on how a TikTok campaign managed to propel an unknown candidate from obscurity. A second-round will be held on Dec. 8.

“We call on the CEO of TikTok to come to speak in this house and to ensure his platform conducted to no infringement under the DSA,” Valérie Hayer, head of the liberal Renew Europe group, told a press conference on Thursday, referring to the Digital Services Act, Europe’s rulebook for online content.

“Romania is a warning bell: radicalization and disinformation can happen all over Europe with harmful consequences,” added Hayer, an ally of French President Emmanuel Macron.

Hayer’s appeal comes only two days after Georgescu’s shock victory. He had no party backing and polls had failed to pick up on his popularity — though researchers are now zeroing on a major TikTok campaign he led in the days leading up to the election.

“We believed that Tiktok was misused and was led to be misused by him and an army of fake accounts that were used for his purpose,” said Bogdan Manolea, executive director of the Romanian campaign group, Association for Technology and Internet.

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Romania’s highest court has ordered a recount to rule out fraud. TikTok becomes interesting.
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Bluesky has a verification problem • Engadget

Karissa Bell:

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Bluesky is bigger than ever. But as the upstart social media service surges, the platform is facing some growing pains. Among them: The influx of new users has opened up new opportunities for scammers and impersonators hoping to capitalize on the attention — and Bluesky’s lack of a conventional verification system.

A recent analysis by Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech found that 44% of the top 100 most-followed accounts on Bluesky had at least one “doppelganger,” with most looking like “cheap knock-offs of the bigger account, down to the same bio and profile picture,” Mantzarlis wrote in his newsletter Faked Up.

Unlike many of its counterparts, which offer checkmarks and official badges to government officials, celebrities and other high profile accounts, Bluesky has a more hands-off approach to verification. Instead of proactively verifying notable accounts itself, the company encourages users to use a custom domain name as their handle in order to “self-verify.”

For example, my employer Engadget currently has the Bluesky handle engadget.bsky.social. But if we wanted to “verify” our account, we could opt to change it to Engadget.com. Some media organizations, like The New York Times, Bloomberg and The Onion have done this for their official accounts. Individuals are also able to verify by using a personal website.

But, the process is more complicated than simply changing your handle. It also requires entities to add a string of text to the DNS record associated with their domain.

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Yeah, well, screw that. We have speed-run to the point where Bluesky needs to do verification by people. Sure, it doesn’t scale, but in that case you speed-run to the point where you’re also taking money from people for some aspect of your site to pay for that.

There were about 294,000 verified Twitter accounts (back when that meant something). Apart from the blue tick – easily faked – there was one other simple tell: did the Twitter @verified account follow an account? In that case, it was the real thing.
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Australia passes world-first law banning under-16s from social media despite safety concerns • The Guardian

Helen Sullivan:

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Australia’s parliament has passed a law that will aim to do what no other government has, and many parents have tried to: stop children from using social media. The new law was drafted in response to what the Labor prime minister, Anthony Albanese, says is a “clear, causal link between the rise of social media and the harm [to] the mental health of young Australians.”

On Thursday, parliament’s upper house, the Senate, passed a bill by 34 votes to 19 banning children under 16 from social media platforms.

But academics, politicians and advocacy groups have warned that the ban – as envisioned by the government – could backfire, driving teenagers to the dark web, or making them feel more isolated. There are questions about how it will work in practice. Many worry that the process has been too rushed, and that, if users are asked to prove their age, it could lead to social media companies being handed valuable personal data. Even Elon Musk has weighed in.

The online safety amendment (social media minimum age) bill bans social media platforms from allowing users under 16 to access their services, threatening companies with fines of up to AU$50m (US$32m) if they fail to comply. However, it contains no details about how it will work, only that the companies will be expected to take reasonable steps to ensure users are aged 16 or over. The detail will come later, through the completion of a trial of age-assurance technology in mid-2025. The bill won’t come into force for another 12 months.

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What a complete and utter mess. (The topic of my Substack, linked at the top.)
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CRW001-1 • CASIO

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Creating a ring-sized, full-metal version of the Casio watch’s complex form is no easy feat. To make this possible, we needed to use a special method of metal processing to inject a mixture of fine metal powders and resin into a mold. Using metal injection molding (MIM), the case, case back, and ring are molded in one piece, with even the dimpled design on the band faithfully reproduced. A special glass adhesive technique ensures a tight seal for a watch built to be water-resistant while still allowing the battery to be replaced.

With an inner diameter of 20 mm and a circumference of 62.8 mm, the ring fits a size 22 finger (US 10.5, EU U) and includes two size-adjusting spacers, in size 19 (19-mm inner diameter) and 16 (18-mm inner diameter).

We downsized the standard watch module by a factor of 10 and combined it with a small button battery to create a 3-button digital watch that fits on your finger. Even at this small size, the watch features a 7-segment LCD that displays not only the time down to the second, but also the date, dual time, and stopwatch functionality.

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Yes, you read that correctly: it’s a Casio digital watch, shrunk down to the size of a ring. A conversation piece for sure, such as: “what the hell time is it? This thing’s too small to read.”
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Exclusive: new hijacking scam targets Elsevier, Springer Nature, and other major publishers • Retraction Watch

Ellie Kincaid and others:

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Typically, cloned versions of journals’ websites are of low quality and don’t resemble the recognizable and professional designs of Springer Nature and Elsevier. As described in previous posts, fraudulent publishers would usually copy the ISSN, title and other metadata of niche and university journals in order to avoid identification, and possibly index their unauthorized content in bibliographic databases such as Scopus or Web of Science. 

We’ve cataloged over 300 such cloned journals in the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, a small number of which involve major publishers like Springer Nature, Elsevier and Wiley. For example, earlier this year the Journal of Academic Ethics and Machine Intelligence Research, both published by Springer Nature, were cloned.

But earlier this month, William Black, founder and CEO of PSIref, an online platform aggregating scholarly publication data which offers advertising opportunities for publishers, sent me evidence of a new, more sophisticated scam.

The company “Springer Global Publication” – which is not affiliated with Springer Nature – has published dozens of papers cloning the websites of journals officially published by Elsevier, Springer, the American Medical Association and more.  The company had advertised a variety of services on its website, including finding a writer for research papers, editing manuscripts, developing research proposals, analyzing data and managing the peer review process. This collection of services is a classic attribute of a paper mill. 

Springer Global Publication did not respond to our request for comment, but after we contacted them, they removed descriptions of their services from their website, as well as links to papers published in cloned journals.

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It says nothing good about the current state of the online scientific journal publishing business that there is such a thing as the “Hijacked Journal Checker”.
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Meta’s Threads is developing its own take on Bluesky’s ‘Starter Packs’ • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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Hoping to quell some of the momentum behind social network Bluesky, a competitor to X and Meta’s Threads, Meta is developing a feature that takes inspiration from one of Bluesky’s more popular additions: the concept of “Starter Packs,” or hand-curated lists of suggested users that help newcomers find people to follow. Meta’s version of these Starter Packs will also suggest profiles that are “handpicked by people on Threads,” according to screenshots of the feature, which is still in development.

Unlike Threads, which is built off the back of Instagram’s existing social graph, Bluesky needed a way to quickly and easily connect new users to others in its community whose posts they may find interesting. Instead of importing users’ address books, the startup introduced the concept of “Starter Packs,” which are curated lists of recommended users that anyone in the community can make.

These lists can center around topics of interest, geographies, industries, fan groups, languages, or anything else.

The feature has become so popular there are now websites that organize everyone’s Bluesky Starter Packs into a searchable database. Starter Packs can also often be found shared by others in the Bluesky feed and are available as a tab on users’ profiles.

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Hilarious how Bluesky is now the product manager for Threads. First, Threads manager Adam Mosseri had to say that there would be a pure “Following” default for those who wanted it, rather than the algorithmic timeline; and now this. Change of logo next?
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Yes, that viral LinkedIn post you read was probably AI-generated • WIRED

Kate Knibbs:

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Over 54% of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are likely AI-generated, according to a new analysis shared exclusively with WIRED by the AI detection startup Originality AI. It’s just that the corporate-speak style of AI writing on the platform can be tricky to distinguish from genuine human-penned Thought Leader Blogging.

Originality scanned a sample of 8,795 public LinkedIn posts over 100 words long that were published from January 2018 to October 2024. For the first few years, the use of AI writing tools on LinkedIn was negligible. A major increase then occurred at the beginning of 2023. “The uptick happened when ChatGPT came out,” says Originality CEO Jon Gillham. At that point, Originality found the number of likely AI-generated posts had spiked 189%; it has since leveled off.

LinkedIn says it doesn’t track how many posts on the site are written or edited with AI tools. “But we do have robust defenses in place to proactively identify low-quality, and exact or near-exact duplicate content. When we detect such content, we take action to ensure it is not broadly promoted,” says Adam Walkiewicz, LinkedIn’s head of “feed relevance.” “We see AI as a tool that can help with review of a draft or to beat the blank page problem, but the original thoughts and ideas that our members share are what matter.”

LinkedIn is for finding a new job and keeping in touch with former coworkers, which means it’s a relatively staid social media platform. But in recent years, it’s developed its own network of influencers and is surprisingly popular with Gen Z, including teenagers.

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What a fabulous race: will AI slop take over Facebook or LinkedIn first? Let’s watch!
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Musk admits X throttles links as “news influencers” take over • The Washington Post

Will Oremus:

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X owner Elon Musk seemed on Monday to confirm what sharp-eyed users have suspected for months: that putting a link in your post on his social network is a good way to ensure it won’t go viral.

Musk was replying to a post by the influential Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham, who opined on Sunday that “the deprioritization of tweets with links in them is Twitter’s biggest flaw.” X’s main draw, Graham said, is “to find out what’s going on, and you can’t do that without links.”

Musk’s response implied Graham was right that X’s algorithm downgrades link posts.

“Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply,” Musk said, mentioning a strategy that some savvy X users were already employing. “This just stops lazy linking.”

It’s another sign that the humble hyperlink – the connective tissue of the open web – has fallen on hard times. Earlier this century, when first Google and then social networks conquered the attention economy, they left the legacy media and other online publishers a consolation prize: the chance to siphon readers back to their websites via links. The local news outlet might no longer be its readers’ daily portal to the wider world, but at least its grabbiest stories still stood a chance of topping their search results or Facebook feeds. That meant eyeballs and therefore revenue.

Those were the days. Facebook began de-emphasizing posts from publishers around 2017 in favor of posts from friends, family and groups, along with images, memes and videos uploaded directly to Facebook. YouTube, Instagram and TikTok gave rise to new classes of influencers and creators who connected with audiences and made money directly on their platforms — often discussing news they read elsewhere without directing viewers to the source. The term of art for such posts betrays the platforms’ bias: “native content.”

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Global foldable smartphone shipments decline in Q3 2024 despite Samsung’s launch of new models • Counterpoint Research

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Global foldable smartphone shipments saw a 1% YoY decline in Q3 2024 after six consecutive quarters of YoY growth, according to the latest Counterpoint Research Global Foldable Smartphone Market Tracker. This was also the first-ever Q3 decline in the segment’s history, mainly due to Samsung’s relatively underwhelming performance with its new Galaxy Z6 series.

Samsung regained its position as the global market leader with a 56% share, driven by the Z6 series launch. However, the brand’s unit shipments fell 21% YoY. Among its new models, the book-type Galaxy Z Fold 6 delivered a modest performance, while the clamshell Galaxy Z Flip 6 struggled to match its predecessor’s sales. The decline in global market share was partly due to growing foldable demand and contribution from China, where Samsung has a comparatively small presence with only 8% foldables share in Q3 2024 compared to being the undisputed leader globally (ex-China) with 82% share.

Having said that, as the foldables supply chain matures, Samsung is increasingly facing strong competition from in North America from Moto with its full range of sub-$1000 Razr flip foldables, and in Western Europe from Honor with its attractive and thin Magic V series book-type foldables.

…Jene Park, senior analyst at Counterpoint, said, “The global foldable market appears to have entered a transitionary phase where it is facing challenges as it progresses from a niche segment to the mainstream. User satisfaction is particularly high with book-type foldable devices, but the prohibitively high prices remain the biggest obstacle to mass adoption.

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No word on actual numbers, but as they’re only about 20m annually, or about 1% of the total market, this remains the nichiest of niche topics.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified