“Despite negative headlines and growing concerns about social media’s impact on youth, teens continue to use these platforms at high rates – with some describing their social media use as “almost constant,” according to a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. teens. The survey – conducted Sept. 26-Oct. 23, 2023, among 1,453 13- to […]
“Ultimately, Chayka’s recommendation for fleshing out the flatness of Algorithmic Culture is to reinvest human agency into the narrative he has crafted to eliminate it. He calls for a return to human curators, not algorithmic ones.”
“Neuroscientists and psychologists who specialize in the teenage brain put it plainly: Yes, social media is of concern because the rapidly developing adolescent brain may be uniquely vulnerable to what the platforms have to offer. But the science is not nearly as settled as some of the most dire headlines would make it seem.
“Also, talk about the intention behind having a device. Parents may be rightfully concerned about respecting their teen’s privacy, but it’s normal and expected that you ask questions about what they are doing online. Just as you want to support them with peer relationship dynamics at school, you should have periodic conversations with your kids […]
“The bill is a comprehensive attempt to protect young people on social media, prioritizing stronger age verification practices and placing a ban on children under 13 using social media altogether. But there was one provision of the bill that was particularly alarming to this group of students: a prohibition on social media companies using the […]
“When VaNessa Thompson wants to truly focus on doing homework for her doctoral classes at Oakland University near Detroit, she gets out her smartphone, props it on her desk, and starts streaming live video of herself on TikTok… One key goal, she and others using the hashtag say, is to try to put social pressure […]
“With 100 million people, Threads is quickly surging toward some of Twitter’s last public user numbers. Twitter disclosed it had 237.8 million daily users last July, four months before Mr. Musk bought the company and took it private.”
““The TikTok algorithm is designed for doomscrolling,” Volland says. “Being so overwhelmed by the volume of information makes it harder to be able to distinguish high- from low-quality content. It can make us feel more anxious, and we should be cognizant of that for young people who are spending so much time on the platform.””
“Social media sharers believe that they are knowledgeable about the content they share, even if they have not read it or have only glanced at a headline. Sharing can create this rise in confidence because by putting information online, sharers publicly commit to an expert identity. Doing so shapes their sense of self, helping them […]
“Both Facebook and Twitter were built on the same general model of leveraging hard-to-replicate, large social graphs to generate a never-ending stream of engaging content, a strategy that proved to be robust in the face of new competition and incredibly lucrative… This rejection of the social-graph model has allowed TikTok to circumvent the barriers to […]
“One of the most popular genres of videos online is to comment on other videos online. Are they comedians or media critics?”
“This paper, titled “Social Media and Mental Health,” leverages an ingenious natural experiment. When Facebook first began to spread among college campuses in the first decade of the 2000s, its introduction was staggered, often moving to only a few new schools at a time… Using a statistical technique called difference in differences, the researchers quantified changes in the […]
“Or, to put that into everyday language, shouting at people online causes those that witness the fight to think shouting at people online is more OK. But it also tends to make them feel bad for the person being shouted at. Intense outrage actually makes people sympathize for the recipient of that outrage.”
“The company doesn’t need to build exhaustive data profiles of its users as, say, Facebook does. It just watches what you watch, and how you watch it, and then feeds you whatever video has the highest calculated probability of tickling your fancy. You feel the frisson of discovery, but behind the scenes it’s just a […]
““I think that ten years ago it was seen as anti-cerebral to do this,” [the plastic surgeon] said. “But now it’s empowering to do something that gives you an edge. Which is why young people are coming in. They come in to enhance something, rather than coming in to fix something.””
“To become “We” requires a suspension of human nature’s tribal instincts in favor of a shared future. Such a belief is predicated in part on shared information… Coming together in an environment of shared information—an information commons—is a key component of moving from tribes to the larger Unum. When the algorithms of social media follow the money, […]
“Instagram’s hidden like counts test has sparked much debate in the social media industry, with some seeing it as a major win for platform health, and others questioning the impacts it will have on engagement, influencer marketing, etc.”
“Once a behaviour reserved for “weirdos” on Reddit and Tumblr, the alt account has now become a staple for internet users on essentially every platform. But anonymity can be a double-edged sword.”
Across all age categories, sharing fake news was a relatively rare category. Only 8.5 percent of users in the study shared at least one link from a fake news site… But older users skewed the findings: 11 percent of users older than 65 shared a hoax, while just 3 percent of users 18 to 29 […]
Soon-to-come literature includes digital renderings of Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis, and 1892 short story The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.”
“While only one-third of kids from families with higher incomes said they are on Facebook, Pew reported recently, a much larger share of teens from lower-income backgrounds… said that they still use the platform… A 2015 Pew Research Center survey also found that higher-income teens hang out with their close friends in person at a higher rate […]
“A recent study in JAMA pointed out a 13% increase in plastic surgery patients seeking to improve their looks for selfies between 2016 and 2017 because of this phenomenon.”
Edited and filtered photos can exacerbate body dysmorphic disorder, the relentless fixation with a perceived flaw in appearance… “The pervasiveness of these filtered images can take a toll on one’s self-esteem, make one feel inadequate for not looking a certain way in the real world, and may even act as a trigger and lead to […]
“Franklin had faith that truth would win out over falsehood, if given a fair chance to compete.”
“The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson once wrote that adolescence is a time when children can be “morbidly, often curiously, preoccupied with what they appear to be in the eyes of others.” …A corollary to Erikson’s observation might be that of David Elkind, another developmental psychologist, who in 1967 wrote about the “imaginary audience” phenomenon in adolescents […]
“So 120,000 Twitter followers are rabid Beethoven defenders, outraged someone would take away their beloved music? Unlikely. We post heretical pieces on ArtsJournal almost every day – many far more outrageous than this, and they don’t go viral or provoke such reaction. So why this?”
“It’s not only that heavy social media users are sadder. It’s not only that online life seems to heighten painful comparisons and both inflate and threaten the ego. It’s that heavy internet users are much less likely to have contact with their proximate neighbors to exchange favors and extend care. There’s something big happening to […]
The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: […]
The median American uses three of these eight social platforms… Facebook and YouTube dominate this landscape, as notable majorities of U.S. adults use each of these sites. At the same time, younger Americans (especially those ages 18 to 24) stand out for embracing a variety of platforms and using them frequently. Some 78% of 18- […]
In the wake of mass shootings that target adults, usually victims’ husbands, wives, parents, or adult children speak for them. But this is the largest high-school shooting in the social-media age—so it centers on adolescents, who can discuss and understand the tragedy as adults but who are as blameless for it as children.”
Then there’s the more basic question of how pictures and sounds alter how we think. An information system dominated by pictures and sounds prizes emotion over rationality. It’s a world where slogans and memes have more sticking power than arguments.”
“I wanted to be a sportswriter… but I was young and thought that the only way people would notice me is if I was the stereotypical guy… That slowly led me down a path to some things that I was very uncomfortable doing but didn’t even realize were happening.”
Berryman compares the response or push-back that some people have to social media to a form of “moral panic” such as that surrounding video games, comic books, and rock music.”
In social media posts, our journalists must not express partisan opinions, promote political views, endorse candidates, make offensive comments or do anything else that undercuts The Times’s journalistic reputation.”
A case in point is research commissioned by the dating site Match.com in the United States. In the fifth annual Singles in America report, researchers investigated the relationship between emoji usage and sexual conquests—the first survey of its kind to do so. The survey polled over 5,600 singles—all non-Match.com subscribers—whose socio-economic and ethnic profiles were […]