Mashable: “”It’s not an uncommon occurrence these days for a friend to tell you they read some article, about something, somewhere, only to have seen a TikTok about it the night before. TikTok insists that it’s “first and foremost an entertainment platform,” but people aren’t necessarily using it that way. It’s increasingly becoming an alternative… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Social Media
TikTokers, Tokers and Terminations
American Bar Association (ABA): “The exploding use of social media can sometimes put employers and employees at odds. Employers must decide how to respond when employees express political and social opinions in the workplace, in conversation or through apparel. Other outside-of-work activities, including lawful drug use, increasingly have employment implications as well. While private employers… Continue Reading
The Role of Alternative Social Media in the News and Information Environment
“In recent years, several new options have emerged in the social media universe, many of which explicitly present themselves as alternatives to more established social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – especially by opposing free speech restrictions they say are rife at those sites. These newer sites have created a small but… Continue Reading
The Most Visited Website in Every Country (That Isn’t A Search Engine)
Hostinger -“The World Wide Web has connected people and cultures from nearly every part of the globe. It’s given us instant access to news and media from every country and the tools to translate content from one language to another. But while it has introduced new forms and ideas on a global scale, the web… Continue Reading
A new Supreme Court case could fundamentally change the internet
Vox: “Gonzalez v. Google, an extraordinarily high-stakes tech policy case that the Supreme Court announced it will hear on Monday, emerged from a horrible act of mass murder. Nohemi Gonzalez was a 23-year-old American studying in Paris, who was killed after individuals affiliated with the terrorist group ISIS opened fire on a café where she… Continue Reading
Political spam is out of control. Now Gmail is about to make it worse.
Washington Post: “Brace for a potential midterm meltdown in your inbox. Emails from certain federal candidates, parties and political action committees will soon be allowed to bypass the spam filters on Gmail and go straight into your inbox. To banish them, you’ll need to click a new unsubscribe button on each and every sender. (I’ll… Continue Reading
The ever-expanding job of preserving the web’s backpages
FT.com [paywall]: The Internet Archive’s mission is to ‘provide universal access to all knowledge’. Within the partitions of a lovely former church in San Francisco’s Richmond district, racks of laptop servers hum and blink with exercise. They comprise the web. Well, a really great amount of it. The Internet Archive, a non-profit, has been gathering… Continue Reading
A new history of YouTube argues that the video-streaming service created the template for the online attention economy
The New Yorker – “…According to the company, the site has more than two billion monthly “logged-in” users. In a given twenty-four-hour period, more than a billion hours of video are streamed, and every minute around five hundred hours of video are uploaded. The torrent of content added to the site has helped establish new… Continue Reading
The High Cost of Living Your Life Online
Wired: “To be online is to be constantly exposed. While it may seem normal, it’s a level of exposure we’ve never dealt with before as human beings. We’re posting on Twitter, and people we’ve never met are responding with their thoughts and criticisms. People are looking at your latest Instagram selfie. They’re literally swiping on… Continue Reading
How TikTok Tracks You Across the Web, Even If You Don’t Use the App
Consumer Reports: “Almost every website you visit collects information about what you’re doing and sends it off into the tech industry’s data analyzing machinery, where it is used for online advertising. For years, Google and Facebook (now known as Meta) have dominated that advertising business, and conducted a lot of the data gathering. But lately,… Continue Reading
How to scrub your phone number and address from Google search
Washington Post: “From a simple Google search, strangers can dig up your phone number, physical address or other personal information. You might not want that floating around the internet — or its presence could be putting you in danger. Now, Google says it’s making it easier to request that information be removed from search results.… Continue Reading
Deep state phobia: Narrative convergence in coronavirus conspiracism on Instagram
Tuters, M., & Willaert, T. (2022). Deep state phobia: Narrative convergence in coronavirus conspiracism on Instagram. Convergence, 28(4), 1214–1238. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221118751 “Recent scholarship has established that conspiracist narratives proliferated in mainstream online discourse during the coronavirus pandemic. This proliferation has been provocatively characterized as a ‘conspiracy singularity’ in which previously divergent conspiracy narratives converged into a… Continue Reading
