Artifact news app features emoji reactions and flags articles as clickbait

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

Clickbait’s flag feature now allows you to mark an article as misleading via the three-dot menu in the article view or by long-pressing in the feed view. The company says it will use these reports as signals to “better prioritize useful articles over misleading articles.”

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

Picture credits: Artifact

Since the company just launched the tool, it’s watching the data to figure out how best to 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 will decide how best to use it for the benefit of users. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of noise in these signals, so we’re thinking about that,” he said.

Systrom added that Artifact is currently manually reviewing clickbait reports to prevent an article from being mistakenly deleted or edited.

The other two features are also interesting. 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.

Picture credits: Artifact

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

Picture credits: Artifact

Last month, the app launched AI-powered article summaries. This month it focused 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 they like to read, and we can create a following for those writers on Artifact,” Systrom said during a talk. a conversation with TechCrunch.