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Tag: social media

  • Who you gonna believe, Hegseth or yYour lyin’ eyes? – The Bulwark

    Of course, it’s an open question how much “thinking” went into it at all. The Trump administration runs on pure id; its default media strategy is an exercise in raw narrative domination. It’s all there in the three rules Trump learned from his mentor, Roy Cohn: always attack, always deny everything, always declare victory. This isn’t just a strategy; it’s a habit of mind. After a decade of the party teaching itself to react to all stimuli like this, it’s unclear they know how to proceed in any other way.

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  • You can never truly go back – Garbage Day

    Thanks to large, under-moderated social platforms, anyone can write their own Mein Kampf now. Or, more likely, film it with their phone. Which is exactly what journalist Max Read noted last year, following Trump’s second win. He argues that the effect that Warzel observed back in 2021 has now turned normal internet users into a new “petite bourgeoisie.” “Influencers are, at bottom, small-business owners, and small-business owners love Trump,” Read writes. “He’s going to lower your taxes and limit the worker and consumer protections that hold you back (a genuine concern for medium-sized streamers and influencers!).”

    Which is how Democrats ended up sleep-walking into the election last year, assuming they were still selling a product — former Vice President Kamala Harris — to consumers, i.e., us. While Trump and the Republicans correctly understood that they were platforming an influencer — Trump — to either other, smaller influencers or parasocial audience members (who, of course, would probably love to be influencers, themselves).

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  • Appalled by X and Meta? Try these social media alternatives – Hyperallergic

    With less than half of a million active users at the moment, Pixelfed saw an unprecedented amount of new sign-ups in the week after Meta’s announcement of loosened content moderation policies. Initially reported by 404 Media, Meta users accused the social media giant of instantaneously deleting comments and posts including links to Pixelfed on its platforms as the decentralized platform gained traction. (Meta confirmed in an email to Hyperallergic that this was a mistake and most posts with Pixelfed links have been reinstated.) … The nostalgia for “Old Instagram,” the point in time when users were using the app for the fun of it by keeping friends and family updated through amateur photography prior to brand sponsorships and the over-saturation of influencers, can be channeled through Pixelfed.

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  • Being a person with deadly, incurable cancer who is nonetheless still alive – Mishell Baker: Bluesky

    Being a person with deadly, incurable cancer who is nonetheless still alive for an indefinite timeframe gives me an interesting metaphor that helps me deal with things like large-scale corruption in government or commerce. … You have opportunity after opportunity to create something lovely for yourself or others. Every moment you choose to sit and think about horrors beyond your control, every time you make the choice to look for more and more details about just HOW bad… you are turning away from those opportunities.

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  • You can’t post your way out of fascism – 404 Media

    If there’s one thing I’d hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president, it’s that spending lots of time online posting about what people in power are saying and doing is not going to accomplish anything. If anything, it’s exactly what they want. […]

    But perhaps the greatest of these sins is convincing ourselves that posting is a form of political activism, when it is at best a coping mechanism—an individualist solution to problems that can only be solved by collective action. This, says Cross, is the primary way tech platforms atomize and alienate us, creating “a solipsism that says you are the main protagonist in a sea of NPCs. Everything on social media is designed to make you think like that,” said Cross. “It’s all about you—your feed, your network, your friends.”

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  • Visualizing the daily scroll of the average social media user – Visual Capitalist

    On social media, users casually scroll through an estimated 300 feet of newsfeed daily—about the same height as the Statue of Liberty. According to the paper, around 5 billion people worldwide use social media, and the average social media user now spends about two and a half hours a day online.

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  • Who can save us from social media? At this point, perhaps just us – The Harvard Gazette

    The boldest and most creative of social media’s would-be reformers, a small group of legal scholars and other academics, joined by a handful of rebel programmers, have a more radical plan. They call it frictional design. They believe the existing technological system needs to be dismantled and rebuilt in a more humanistic form. Pursuing an approach reminiscent of the machine-breaking strategy of the 19th-century British Luddites, if without the violence, they seek, in effect, to sabotage existing social media platforms by reintroducing friction into their operations — throwing virtual sand into the virtual works.

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  • The case for kicking the stone – Los Angeles Review of Books

    The central problem, however, is that an onslaught of information—of everything, all at once—flattens all sense of proportion. When Zuckerberg said to his staff that “a squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa,” it’s not that his tone-deaf observation was untrue but that, as Carr says, he was making a category error, equating two things that cannot be compared. Yet “social media renders category errors obsolete because it renders categories obsolete. All information belongs to a single category—it’s all ‘content.’” And very often, the content that matters is decided in the currency of commerce: content is “bad” when it harms profits.

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  • Critical ignoring as a core competence for digital citizens – Sage Journals

    Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities.

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  • Social media is dead, you just haven’t noticed yet – Matt Muir

    It feels as though we have reached the end of a very specific period in human history, our brief, species-wide experiment in ‘seeing what happens if we all basically try and connect to each other like some sort of weird bipedal species of ant’. Was it a good idea? The jury is very much still out.

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  • Mark Zuckerberg turns his back on the media – WIRED

    [Trump’s discrediting of reporters] is exactly what Zuckerberg and his host Joe Rogan engaged in during a 3-hour conversation in Rogan’s Austin, Texas, podcast studio. This was Zuckerberg’s only appearance to explain his actions, another sign that he’s not kowtowing to a media establishment that he no longer feels is trustworthy or worth paying attention to. Zuckerberg and Rogan went on at length about how podcasters and influencers were more popular than mainstream reporters, because no one trusts those institutions anymore, and celebrated statistics that indicate that many people get their news from social media these days. (Though it’s still far from the dominant source.)

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  • The Tyranny of Now – The New Atlantis

    Information in digital form is weightless, its immateriality perfectly suited to instantaneous long-distance communication. It makes newsprint seem like concrete. The infrastructure built for its transmission, from massive data centers to fiber-optic cables to cell towers and Wi-Fi routers, is designed to deliver vast quantities of information as “dynamically” as possible, to use a term favored by network engineers and programmers. The object is always to increase the throughput of data. When the flow of information reaches the consumer, it’s translated into another flow: a stream of images formed of illuminated pixels, shifting patterns of light. The screen interface, particularly in its now-dominant touch-sensitive form, beckons us to dismiss the old and summon the new — to click, swipe, and scroll; to update and refresh. If the printed book was a technology of inscription, the screen is a technology of erasure.

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  • TikTok is partially back online in the US, but it’s not back in the App Store yet – The Verge

    US users were shut out of TikTok last night ahead of the federal ban coming into effect, with the app displaying a message that its services were “temporarily unavailable.” Service started to be restored on Sunday around 12PM ET in TikTok’s mobile app and on the web. The app now displays a message saying “Welcome back!” and crediting Trump with restoring service. “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!” the message reads.

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  • Bluesky launches a custom feed for vertical videos – TechCrunch

    With TikTok’s future in the U.S. uncertain, it feels like major social media platforms are working overtime to ship features to attract the millions of people who may want to switch: Bluesky said on Sunday that it is launching a custom feed for vertical videos in its app. … Other social networks are taking advantage of this situation as well. Elon Musk-owned X also launched a dedicated feed for vertical videos in the U.S, and Meta announced a new video editing app called Edits to rival CapCut.

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  • Why has LinkedIn become so weird? – The Guardian

    Much has been written about how tech is changing how we see ourselves and each other. Instagram pushing unattainable beauty standards and lifestyles, Facebook fake news chipping away at people’s belief in institutions, an X format that reduces a complex thought to 280 characters (no wonder nuance is impossible!), turning all of us into outrage addicts. Dating apps have commodified and gamified those most human phenomena: love and desire. Yet somehow LinkedIn has been left out of the spotlight. But here’s my contention: I think it is doing something to us, shifting how we see our accomplishments, what we assign value to and what we don’t. And perhaps most chilling of all, it promotes the idea that we are all just brands, and we must always – always – be selling. Apparently, LinkedIn is now being used as a full social network, a place where people talk about their marriages, make friends and maybe even date. What does that tell us about our lives outside work? Do we even still have lives outside work at all?

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  • Turns out the zombie apocalypse isn’t as fun as they said it would be – Rebecca Solnit on our dangerously disconnected world – The Guardian

    The pandemic emptied out the streets, but this is another kind of emptiness – it often seems as though fewer people are out and about, but also the people still present are a lot less present. Had this happened overnight it would be a sci-fi horror movie scenario – people seeming numbed, dazed, their attention captured and manipulated by the contents of tiny devices controlled by powerful corporations, a billion Manchurian candidates in a wifi-equipped Metropolis. A Night of the Living Dead to You. But it’s happened so incrementally it’s become normal for us all to be in that limbo, that bardo.

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  • Blue bots, done quick!

    Create your own Bluesky bot! This site will help you make a bot for Bluesky using Tracery, a tool for writing generative grammars created by Kate Compton. It is completely free and relatively easy to use.

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  • Social media given ‘last chance’ to tackle illegal posts – BBC News

    Online platforms must begin assessing whether their services expose users to illegal material by 16 March 2025 or face financial punishments as the Online Safety Act (OSA) begins taking effect. … Platforms have three months to carry out risk assessments identifying potential harms on their services or they could be fined up to 10% of their global turnover.

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  • Mark Zuckerberg says Threads has more than 100 million daily active users – The Verge

    In recent weeks, Meta has been very vocal about Threads’ growth after a lot of people flocked to Bluesky. While Bluesky tracker says that that platform currently has a little over 25 million total users, Zuckerberg shared Monday that Threads has more than 300 million monthly active users. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but it’s clear that Threads is still much larger than Bluesky.

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  • Bluesky has an impersonator problem – MIT Technology Review

    Bluesky’s decentralized nature makes kicking out impersonators a trickier problem to solve. Competitors such as X and Threads rely on centralized teams within the company who moderate unwanted content and behavior, such as impersonation. But Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol, a decentralized, open-source technology, which allows users more control over what kind of content they see and enables them to build communities around particular content.

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  • Convert BSky starter pack to a list

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  • Starter packs – Bluesky Directory

    Recommended custom feeds and users to help communities find each other.

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  • ‘You get desensitised to it’: how social media fuels fear of violence – The Guardian

    “Now everyone has seen him running away and his pride is going to make him want to retaliate,” he said. “It will get passed around in group chats and everyone knows that he ran away, so next time he leaves the house he wants to prove himself. That’s what happens. Sometimes the retaliation is filmed.” … “People glamourise them types of things and the smallest thing can be escalated on social media,” he said. “A fight can happen between two people and they can squash it [reach a truce], but because the video’s out there on social media and it looks from a different perspective like one is losing, pride is going to be hurt so you might go out there and get some sort of revenge and let people know, you’re not going to mess with me.”

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