Facebook adds reactions, group chat to its 'Stories'
San Francisco, June 28 : Aiming to get more people to interact with its "Stories" in the main app, Facebook has added group chat and reactions among others to the service.
Facebook "Stories" are short user-generated photo and video collections that can be viewed up to two times and disappear after 24 hours.
"The social network announced a few new features for the service, which lets people post a string of photos and videos that automatically disappear after 24 hours," CNET reported on Thursday.
Now, if users reply to a "Story", they would be able to add other people to the reply which creates a new group thread in Facebook Messenger -- the social network's chat application.
Users would also be able to see if they got any Messenger replies to their "Story" without leaving the "Story" itself.
"Facebook is also adding the ability for people to reply with stickers and 'reactions' -- the 'like', 'love' and 'sad' buttons you usually see on the social network," the report added.
The social network giant "copied" the "Stories" feature from rival Snapchat and added it to all its apps, including popular photo-sharing platform Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook itself.
Stories on Instagram and WhatsApp are wildly popular, with 300 million and 450 million daily users, respectively that eclipse's Snapchat's 191 million users for the entire app, according to CNET.
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Congress using hijab issue to pacify minority anger, alleges Karnataka LoP R Ashoka
Bengaluru: Leader of Opposition in the Assembly R. Ashoka has accused the Congress government of using the hijab issue to placate what he described as discontent among minority voters after the Davanagere by-election.
In a post on X on Wednesday, Ashoka alleged that the state government, instead of addressing issues such as price rise, corruption, farmers’ distress and law and order, was attempting to retain its minority vote base by reviving the hijab issue.
Referring to the 2022 dress code introduced by the BJP government, which prohibited hijab in schools and colleges, Ashoka said the Karnataka High Court had upheld the policy and emphasised the importance of discipline in educational institutions.
He questioned the Congress government’s move to revisit the issue and asked whether setting aside the court-backed policy to benefit one community could be described as secularism.
Ashoka further alleged that while the government was willing to permit hijab, it continued to prohibit saffron shawls.
He accused the government of dividing students on religious lines rather than treating schools and colleges as spaces of equality.
Drawing a comparison with Mamata Banerjee’s government in West Bengal, Ashoka claimed that excessive appeasement politics had harmed the state and warned that the Congress in Karnataka could face a similar political response.
He said voters in Karnataka would teach the Congress a lesson for what he termed “vote-bank politics” and for compromising constitutional and judicial principles.
