Instagram is doing some more shuffling, and this time it’ll affect your profile page.

The social media platform is testing new features throughout November and December, including vaguely announced changes to icons and buttons, and navigation between tabs.

SEE ALSO: Oh cool, you can see how much time you waste on Instagram now

It’s not as dramatic an update as a redesigned Explore tab, or an algorithmic feed, but it’s a small tweak. 

In a blog post, Instagram said the grid displaying your photos and videos won’t change at all, but the icons above the grid could be changing to words (grid, posts, IGTV, tagged). 

Your profile picture could move to the right corner, pushing your username, in larger font, to the top of the page. It appears your followers and following will take less precedence than before, and the number of posts you’ve made will no longer be present.

A side-by-side “Follow” and “Message” button could be tested on profile pages, with even more options for business pages, including “Start Order.”

“We’ve been working on these changes and will test them in phases and different combinations with our community over the next several weeks,” the post reads. “We’ll continue to experiment and update the experience as we learn from your feedback.”

It’s one of the more mild updates Instagram has rolled out over over the last few months, since Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger stepped down in September, and Facebook’s former News Feed chief, Adam Mosseri, has took over as VP of Product.

In October and November alone, the platform announced a new daily usage tracking dashboard called Your Activity, three new shopping features, and a new “nametag” feature which is reminiscent Snapchat’s Snap Codes.

The platform is also finally doing something to crack down on fake likes and followers, moving to remove follows, likes, and comments from shady third-party apps, and using machine learning to tackle bullying on its platform.

Sure, Instagram had a major outage on Tuesday. They weren’t the only ones.

This past summer, Samsung thought it would be a good idea to break folks’ TVs in the United Kingdom. It wasn’t real, of course – it was an attempt to show off a core feature of its 2018 lineup: Ambient Mode.

It spiked some interest in the feature, leading people to wonder – what does it actually do, exactly?

I was wondering the same thing, so I paid a visit to Samsung’s loft in NYC – a full showroom meant to resemble a real apartment, right in the Meatpacking District. The cozy loft came complete with appliances and other niceties, including QLED TVs. 

I was shown a demo of a 65-inch QLED TV with Ambient Mode. This feature is Samsung’s answer to transforming a television into an organic part of your living space instead of just sitting there taking up space. 

The company realized that you can still show something on a TV when it’s not in use, and that’s where Ambient Mode comes in. It allows the TV to blend in with the environment – in this case, a brick wall. Once that’s set, you can overlay different effects on top of it. It certainly is a neat feature and feels futuristic, but I’m not quite sure it’s a necessity. 

For one, keeping the screen on would use more energy, even if it is a minimal amount. Samsung did inform me that, on average, using Ambient Mode will only increase the electric bill by about a dollar a month, though. 

The reason this is surprisingly low is thanks to two energy-centric features. The first is a set of ambient light sensors that will adjust the screen’s brightness. If it gets dark for about 30 minutes, the TV will automatically shut down.

Secondly, the QLED TVs connect to your iPhone or Android device through Bluetooth, if you have the  SmartThings app installed. From there it will detect if you are in the room, and if you’re too far away, it will turn the screen off automatically. Granted, you do have to give the app extra permission, like background refresh, on iOS or Android.

Both of these energy settings can be customized to your liking via this application. They’re tucked away in the settings panel, though, so hopefully Samsung makes it obvious that users do have choices.

And there’s no reason to worry about any cameras spying on you with these features. In fact, this app for iOS and Android is your primary control for the TV. You can customize the theme, cast content to it, and also use traditional TV controls. 

Setting up Ambient Mode

Ambient Mode’s neat trick is accomplished through the SmartThings app. You might recall making a mobile deposit for a check. This is a similar process. You hold your smartphone up to the TV as if you’re taking a photo and line it up into the square. 

From there, the photo will be taken and then scanned. You’ll see it appear on the TV in front of you. After the first intake, you’ll hold your smartphone up again as it adjusts brightness and colors in real time. This is the finishing touch that makes the TV blend into the environment.

After this, you can choose from several screen overlays like a mountain range, a visual forecast, and even news updates. Samsung will regularly introduce new content for Ambient Mode through free software updates.

Is it believable?

I will admit I was skeptical of the feature going in, but seeing Ambient Mode in person really conveys what Samsung is trying for. No, a blank black TV screen doesn’t bother me, but this mode enhances it in a way that adds style and purpose.

From a technological standpoint, it’s impressive that it can do the intake of the environment in real time and looks incredible. This is all due to Samsung’s QLED technology, which allows for vibrant colors, better brightness, and dark blacks. 

The process itself is speedy, and you get a lot of customization over the appearance and the settings behind it. If you’re an energy-conscious person, you can turn it off or set a timer. And if you don’t want the TV to be in communication with the Samsung app on your phone, you can turn that off as well. 

Ambient Mode certainly lets you get more out of your TV, but time will tell if this interesting augment becomes a standard feature in the future. 

My partner’s arms are longer than mine, so, on election day this year, I made him take the #IVoted selfie. 

Now, I’m not one for selfies, usually. But I decided to share my act of civic participation on social media earlier this month for two reasons. First, because I was genuinely jazzed to vote. It was my first time doing so in person! It was exciting! And second, I’d just learned that posting photos with sticker proof of your buy-in to the democratic system is actually an impactful way to encourage others to vote. 

SEE ALSO: Youth voter turnout spiked during the midterms. Now what?

Apparently, I wasn’t alone in my enthusiasm. 

On Tuesday, Snapchat shared that 1.4 million users visited their Get to the Polls platform, a voting information portal powered by the tech-focused nonprofit organization Democracy Works. Snapchat also registered over 400,000 new voters in the weeks leading up to the election — and over half of those voters were aged 18-24, also known as the coveted but fickle youth vote. Twitter, Instagram, and Facbook ran similar initiatives, though they have yet to release participation numbers.

The midterms also appear to have been a landmark year for voter turnout. With 49.3 percent of the population eligible to vote casting their ballots this year, the 2018 midterms had the highest non-presidential election turnout since 1914. In particular, Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, (CIRCLE) projects that youth in particular increased their midterm turnout by 10 percent — up to 31 percent of eligible voters aged 18-29, from 21 percent in 2014.

With voting stories, stickers, and resources peppering social media platforms, and youth voters heading to the polls in record numbers, it’s tempting to draw a conclusion about the role social media may have played in getting to the polls. And while social media is a fact of all parts of life – including politics — and is now an indispensable resource for reaching voters, tracing the line from social media to the voting booth may be trickier than it seems. 

Though voter rolls won’t be released until next spring, with Snapchat’s report, voter turnout, and industry analysis, a picture is beginning to emerge of the role that social media played in fueling civic engagement. 

It may be too soon to definitively know whether social media contributed to the turnout spike; in particular, it’s difficult to ascribe definitive causation, specifically to social media, for voter turnout. However, CIRCLE’s preliminary findings in their research on social media and youth voting in the 2018 midterms indicate that social media helped reach, inform, and energize young voters. 

“Our analysis clearly shows that social media platforms reached a very large segment of young people, many of whom were potential first-time voters, and that youth benefited from hearing about the election on their social media feeds,” CIRCLE explained in a blog post. “It is likely that intentional efforts by social media companies to promote non-partisan voter engagement in 2018 likely had a positive effect on youth voter turnout, especially for those youth who lacked election information and outreach from other sources.”

Snapchat partnered with Democracy Works to reach potential voters in a couple ways. It prominently linked to the organization’s TurboVote platform to register voters and allow them to sign up for future election information. Snapchat also drove users to the Get to the Polls portal on Election Day, to learn about their polling place, how to cast a ballot, the hours, and other logistical information – which CIRCLE says can be a barrier to voting if people feel they don’t understand how it works.

Around 3.5 million people used Get to the Polls, twice as many as last year. Democracy Works’ TurboVote program director, Mike Ward, added that Snapchat was one of the biggest drivers to the portal, netting 1.4 million visits, 40 percent of the total.

Still, it’s too early to know whether visiting Get to the Polls meant that people actually turned out to vote. But Ward believes that higher voter turnout and higher use of the platform are not meaningless numbers.

“Get to the Polls got more traffic in a midterm than it did in the presidential, which is exceptional,” Ward said. “We can’t track whether this percentage of users actually turned out to the polls, but the results of the election is a strong indication that this has been successful.”

CIRCLE’s findings back this up as well. Of surveyed voters, 28 percent said they heard about the 2018 elections through social media campaigns.

Along with research from groups like CIRCLE, Democracy Works and Snapchat may be able to track use of the portal with election turnout when the government releases voter rolls in the spring. 

However, Chris Doten, who is the chief innovation officer of nonprofit democratic advocacy organization National Democratic Institute’s (NDI), said matching use of a social media platforms to voting behavior might not be so simple.

“The science on this stuff is hard to get right,” Doten said. “When you’re trying to do analyses of get out the vote tactics, it’s really hard to tease out a determination of what matters.”

Social media is clearly playing a role, but it’s part of a much larger and more difficult to quantify ecosystem of voter engagement.

Rock the Vote’s director of policy and civic tech, Jen Tolentino, believes social media campaigns have been instrumental in reaching and energizing voters. In Rock the Vote’s own work, mobilizing influencers on social media to inspire their followers to vote has been especially important. And she sees providing the sort of logistical information that Snapchat did as an effective way to help people get to the polls. 

“It’s a really impactful way for users to get information without having to seek it out,” Tolentino said. “Surfacing it to them, telling them within their newsfeed, that they have an election and it’s something to be celebrated, I think it is incredibly impactful.”

However, she only sees social media campaigns as one side of the story. Social media may have helped enable participation in the midterms, but a now impassioned and energized youth demographic, reinvigorated ultimately by issues they care about — not social media prodding — was the first necessity for turnout.

“It’s really not enough to just tell people, you have an election, go vote,” Tolentino said. “The ones that did are much more motivated by the issues that they’re seeing, and making the connection between what they care about as a generation to how they can have an impact on their countries and communities is what’s making the difference.”

“When enthusiasm is very high, there are a lot of ways in,” Dotan added. “But would that person have found their way in otherwise? Many access points is great. But that’s not to say they get ‘credit’ for every single person who voted.”

Social media companies who undertake get out the vote campaigns are not necessarily seeking “credit.”  At this point, people concerned with elections are still trying to understand how to best reach and motivate potential voters, and social media campaigns are assisting with that. 

But in some ways, registration and logistical information is the least these companies can do. Social media is becoming a pipeline for voting and civic engagement and that may be a boon for registration, but it also comes with its own pitfalls. 

“There is a risk of young people who are turning to social media as primary sources of civic knowledge being exposed to political misinformation and disinformation, which many of these platforms are still struggling to combat,” CIRCLE noted. 

Dotan added that get out the vote campaigns stand in somewhat ironic contrast to the damage that social media platforms have done to democracy.

“There’s a strong argument that social platforms have done a lot in the widespread dissemination of disinformation that has poisoned democracy in various ways,” Dotan said. “So it’s good if they put up an ‘I Voted’ frame. But what else are they doing?”

Many of these platforms, notably Facebook, have been taking strides to root out the democracy-eroding problems of their own creation — though many of the changes only came after harsh public and political backlash. The registration and voting drives, along with the I Voted stickers, selfies, and the many ways that voting became a part of life online in 2018, are a proactive compliment to that work.

“In addition to all the metrics, there’s a real impact that can be made by changing the culture around voting,” Ward said. “Snapchat is making voting more fun. And when voting is more fun, more people do it. We can’t measure how they’re making it more fun, but they are.”

Social-media based Get Out the Vote campaigns won’t turn our democracy around themselves. But they can ease the runway, particularly for young voters, as they head to the polls, perhaps for the first time, and hopefully, not for the last.