Artifact news app introduces emoji reactions and flagging articles as clickbait

Instagram founders’ news app Arifact launched a new set of features Monday, allowing users to report clickbait articles, react with emojis and share articles as images.

The clickbait flag feature now lets you mark an article as misleading through the three-dot menu in the article view or through a long press in the feed view. The company says that it will use these reports as signals to “better prioritize helpful articles over misleading ones.”

Until now, the app allowed users to report an article with reasons such as “spam,” “paywall,” “broken image or link,” “I just don’t like it”, “too many ads,” and “false or misleading information.” It’s not clear how the company plans to separate some of these signals from clickbait.

As the company has just launched the tool, it is observing data to understand how to best use it, Kevin Systrom told TechCrunch.

“Currently we are in data collection mode. We launched the reporting tool today and in the coming weeks, we’ll decide how best to use it to benefit users. As you might imagine, there’s a fair amount of noise in these signals so we’re being thoughtful about it,” he said.

Systrom added that Artifact is manually reviewing clickbait reports at the moment to avoid any article from being mistakenly removed or modified.

The other two features are also nice-to-haves. Users can now use one of six emojis like “thumbs up,” “heart,” “laughing face” “angry face,” “amused face” and “sad face” in response to an article.

The app has also improved sharing of articles by allowing people to share a story directly as an image with different card options that include the source name and summary. Users can directly share the article on Instagram stories or save it as an image. Plus, they can select text from an article to share that part as a picture card.

Last month, the app launched AI-powered summaries for articles. This month, it turned its focus on writers by allowing them to claim their profiles and readers to follow them.

“Maybe what we could do is create this marketplace where we match consumers with the writers of the things that they love reading, and we can build a following for these writers on Artifact,” Systrom said in a conversation with TechCrunch.

Artifact news app introduces emoji reactions and flagging articles as clickbait by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch