Meta is adding several new features to WhatsApp status, which lets users post disappearing pictures and other media, reports The Verge.

Once the features roll out over the coming weeks, you’ll be able to react to people’s posts with an emoji, limit who can see your status, and post voice messages.

According to an announcement post, the status emoji reactions work similar to how they do on Instagram; when you swipe up on the post, you get the option to choose from one of eight emojis. (The options are 😍,😂,😮,😥,🙏,👏,🎉, and 💯.)

While a WhatsApp blog post calls emoji reactions the No. 1 requested feature after it launched the ability to react to messages last year, analysts feel the Private Audience Selector is the most useful addition announced today.

The feature lets you change who can see your statuses, with the option to show it to everyone, hide it from certain contacts, or only show it to specific people.

According to Meta, the options you pick will be the default for the next status you post, but you’ll be able to change it without changing the visibility of past statuses.

Other features are small quality-of-life improvements. Statuses that include links will also be more visually appealing — Meta says there’ll now be previews for the site or page that the link will take you to.

WhatsApp is also trying to make it clearer when people post status by adding a ring around their profile picture in the chat lists, group participant lists, and contact info screens.

Meta has announced plans to activate an elections operations centre for the 2023 general elections in Nigeria.

Meta, formerly known as Facebook stated that it was investing in people and technology to reduce the spread of misinformation and remove harmful content across its apps.

This it said is to help ensure a safe and secure general election in the country.

The social media giant disclosed this in a post titled, ‘How Meta is Preparing for Nigeria’s 2023 General Elections’ by its Head of Public Policy for Anglophone West Africa, Adaora Ikenze.

It stated that its work towards the elections would continue in the lead-up to, during, and after the vote.

“As Election Day approaches, we will activate a Nigeria-specific Elections Operations Centre focused on identifying potential threats across our apps and technologies in real-time, accelerating our response time.

“This initiative will bring together experts from across our company on our intelligence, data science, engineering, research, operations, public policy and legal teams,” the statement disclosed.

Meta explained that part of its strategy to combat misinformation and false news would involve removing serious kinds of misinformation from Facebook and Instagram, such as content that could contribute to imminent violence or physical harm, or intended to suppress voting.

It stated that for the Nigerian elections, it would remove photos and videos shared out of context that falsely depict ballot stuffing, acts of violence, or weapons.

It said that it was working with independent fact-checking organisations such as AFP, Africa Check, Dubawa, and Reuters.

Google has developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system known as ‘MusicLM’ that can generate music by following a text description.

In an academic paper published on January 26, Google researchers described MusicLM as “a model generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions such as ‘a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff’,” according to a report by Neowin.

“We demonstrate that MusicLM can be conditioned on both text and a melody in that it can transform whistled and hummed melodies according to the style described in a text caption,” the paper reads.

According to the research paper, MusicLM can take cues from user-generated descriptions like “enchanting jazz song with a memorable saxophone solo and a solo singer” or “Berlin 90s techno with a low bass and strong kick,” and receive corresponding results.

Google’s development of MusicLM comes after the rapid rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a natural language processing tool powered by AI.

ChatGPT was so popular that Google’s management reportedly declared a “code red,” according to a report by The New York Times.

As a result, the company is purportedly set to introduce over 20 AI-related projects this year, including an AI-powered version of Google Search.

MusicLM isn’t the first AI music generator. As TechCrunch points out, Riffusion, Dance Diffusion, Google’s own AudioLM, and OpenAI’s Jukebox have experimented on the subject.

MusicLM may not be available to the public in the near future, however, according to Google’s researchers, there are concerns about programming biases that may result in technological glitches, lack of representation, and the “potential misappropriation of creative content.”

In fact, during an experiment, Google’s researchers found that about 1% of the music that MusicLM generated was directly copied from the songs it was trained on.