SOCIAL MEDIA

41 US states are suing Meta for getting teens hooked on social media. Here’s what to expect next. In the United States, 41 states have filed lawsuits against Meta for allegedly driving social media addiction in its young users (under the age of 18), amid growing concerns about the negative effects of platforms. The lawsuits allege Meta has been harvesting young users’ data, deploying features to promote compulsive use of both Facebook and Instagram, and misleading the public about the negative effects of these features. What might we expect to happen next? And are there potential consequences for Australia? Leveraging whistleblower revelations The most significant suit, filed in a federal court in California, involves 33 states. The claim is based on breaches of state consumer protection ...

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...

Will Social Media Companies Ever Make Fighting Online Abuse a Priority? Is it just me who believes we’ve lost our ability to have civil discourse? Every day, we rely on social media platforms to engage with like-minded people, promote ourselves, our work, and/or business. Unfortunately, the downside of increasing your visibility, especially when you wade into an online discussion with an unpopular opinion, is you become a lightning rod for online abuse. Online abuse can be especially relentless if you are a woman, identified as a member of a race, religion, ethnicity, or part of the LGBTQ+ community. I believe social media companies can reduce, even come close to, eliminating, online abuse. The first step: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, et al. becoming more serious and urgent a...

Can human moderators ever really rein in harmful online content? New research says yes. Social media platforms have become the “digital town squares” of our time, enabling communication and the exchange of ideas on a global scale. However, the unregulated nature of these platforms has allowed the proliferation of harmful content such as misinformation, disinformation and hate speech. Regulating the online world has proven difficult, but one promising avenue is suggested by the European Union’s Digital Services Act, passed in November 2022. This legislation mandates “trusted flaggers” to identify certain kinds of problematic content to platforms, who must then remove it within 24 hours. Will it work, given the fast pace and complex viral dynamics of social media environments? To find out,...

Social media can in fact be made better: Research shows it is possible to reward users for sharing accurate information instead of misinformation. Is social media designed to reward people for acting badly? The answer is clearly yes, given that the reward structure on social media platforms relies on popularity, as indicated by the number of responses – likes and comments – a post receives from other users. Black-box algorithms then further amplify the spread of posts that have attracted attention. Sharing widely read content, by itself, isn’t a problem. But it becomes a problem when attention-getting, controversial content is prioritized by design. Given the design of social media sites, users form habits to automatically share the most engaging information regardless of its accuracy ...