SOCIAL MEDIA

5 dental TikTok trends you probably shouldn’t try at home. TikTok is full of videos that demonstrate DIY hacks, from up-cycling tricks to cooking tips. Meanwhile, a growing number of TikTok videos offer tips to help you save money and time at the dentist. But do they deliver? Here are five popular dental TikTok trends and why you might treat them with caution. 1. Home-made whitening solutions Many TikTok videos provide tips to whiten teeth. These include tutorials on making your own whitening toothpaste using ingredients such as hydrogen peroxide, a common household bleaching agent, and baking soda (sodium bicarbonate). In this video, the influencer says: And then you’re going to pour in your hydrogen peroxide. There’s really no measurement to this. But hydrogen peroxide...

Signs of our times: why emoji can be even more powerful than words. Each year, Oxford Dictionaries – one of the world’s leading arbiters on the English language – selects a word that has risen to prominence over the past 12 months as its “Word of the Year”. The word is carefully chosen, based on a close analysis of how often it is used and what it reveals about the times we live in. Past examples include such classics as “vape”, “selfie” and “omnishambles”. But the 2015 word of the year is not a word at all. It’s an emoji – the “face with tears of joy” emoji, to be precise. Formerly regarded with disdain as the textual equivalent of an adolescent grunt, it appears that emoji has now gone mainstream. Even if it’s not a fully-fledged language, then it is – at the very least – something that ...

Overwhelmed by group chat messages? You’re not alone. For many of us, group chats are part of the texture of our social lives. These groups, formed on apps like Messenger or Whatsapp, can be as large as a hundred people or as small as three. We use them for organising one-off tasks or events, managing recurring coordination between groups like sports clubs or work teams, and keeping in touch with family and friends. In the best cases, group chats can provide important spaces for building and maintaining relationships. They can be places of joy, solidarity and refuge. But they can also be burdensome, and create feelings of anxiety and worry. I researched group chat dynamics and these are the three biggest issues I encountered. 1. You’re overwhelmed by the volume of messages The volu...

Why Elon Musk is obsessed with casting X as the most ‘authentic’ social media platform. With X, formerly known as Twitter, hitting the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk’s US$44 billion takeover of the social media platform, it can feel disorienting to try to make sense of all that’s gone down. Blue check-mark verifications got hawked. Internal company documents about content moderation policies got laundered. A puzzling rebrand to “X” got hatched. And a literal cage match with Meta head Mark Zuckerberg was on again and, ultimately, off again. It appears unclear what, precisely, Musk’s ambitions are for the platform. But when a threatening competitor, Threads, emerged in summer 2023, he may have offered a brief window of insight. A clone of X, Threads rolled up 100 million users in less tha...