Following a soft launch in April, Twitter is rolling out a new search interface to all logged-in users. “The updated interface is one of the larger updates Twitter’s search engine has seen in recent months, and it’s meant to make the search interface itself easier to use in terms of switching between tweets, accounts, photos and videos,” TechCrunch reports. “Ease-of-use is an area that Twitter has struggled with over the years.” 

For better or worse, a growing number of politicians are employing Snapchat to reach young potential voters. Among others, “Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) … has been using the service for almost a year and a half in an attempt to garner support from young people,” Fusion reports. “It’s a good bet that Snapchat stands to be the breakout app of the 2016 campaign, much in the same way other services like Twitter and YouTube have blossomed in the recent past.” 

Continuing to explore the implications of Facebook’s new “Instant Articles” service, Web watchers say it likely spells trouble for Twitter. “Not that long ago, Twitter saw itself as the obvious partner for media companies, and many publishers seemed to agree wholeheartedly,” writes Fortune. “Now we have Facebook signing deals with major publishers, in which it gives those companies a better-looking and better-performing mobile version of their content, plus it gives them all of the advertising revenue.” 

Belgium’s Privacy Commission is accusing Facebook of treating users’ personal data “with contempt” and failing to cooperate with regulators investigating its privacy controls. Among other findings, a commissioned academic report determined that Facebook was tracking people who hadn’t even signed up for its service. “Facebook said that was a bug and was being fixed,” The Wall Street Journal reports. 

Trying to extent its benevolent reach, Facebook is reportedly pressuring vendors to improve pay and benefits for workers, including wages of no less than $15 an hour. “In addition to the minimum wage, the social network is requiring contractors to give workers who do a substantial amount of work with Facebook at least 15 paid days off annually for holidays, sick leave and vacation,” The Wall Street Journal reports. 

With big implications for media companies, Facebook’s new “Instant Articles” service is generating a lot of chatter among industry analysts. Among 19 other “early impressions,” The Awl thinks publishing partners are trying a little too hard. “Everything is overworked,” it writes. “This always happens when publishers try new formats: It happened on Snapchat Discover, too, where publishers are gradually learning not to OVER-package their videos, because social media abhors conspicuous professionalism.” 

Giving social another go, Apple’s forecoming Beats-based streaming music service will reportedly have social networking integration for artists. “Taking a page out of the discontinued iTunes Ping feature from earlier this decade, the service will allow artists to have their own pages within the streaming music service that they can use to post track samples, photos, videos, and concert updates,” 9To5Mac reports, citing sources. 

LinkedIn is sharing a “significant amount” of its data set with 11 research groups, the social network said this week. “The groups were selected from a pool of hundreds as part of what LinkedIn is calling the Economic Graph Challenge,” Re/code reports. “Their teams will spend the next six months crunching the data -- which will be anonymized -- in hopes of drawing some conclusions about what it all means for the global economy and job market.” 

New research from Facebook shows that users are more likely to see stories in their New Feeds that support their political views. Yet, Social Media Collective blogger Christian Sandvig takes issue with the findings because, among other reasons, Facebook "only counted users self-reporting their ideological affiliation. We would expect that people who are given the choice of what news they want to read will select sources they tend to agree with.” 

To set itself apart from archrival Periscope, Meerkat is officially launching a developer platform. “In the nine weeks since Meerkat launched, 37 developers have built companion experiences to the livestreaming apps on its unofficial, private API,” TechCrunch reports. “Today, Meerkat is legitimizing those developers.”