SOCIAL MEDIA

Why some governments fear even teens on TikTok. In Egypt, teenager Menna Abdel Aziz used social media to ask for protection after a sexual assault. She was arrested on a variety of charges, including misusing social media and corrupting family values. Two young women, Haneen Hossam, with 915,000 TikTok followers, and Mawada Eladhm, with 3.1 million TikTok followers) were also arrested for their social influencing videos. Renad Imad, another social media influencer, was arrested after allegations of posting indecent content and prostitution. In late June, belly dancer Sama El-Masry was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for posts to the TikTok video sharing platform and other social media. These and several other arrests follow on the heels of earlier cases, including singer Sherine ...

‘Pantry porn’ on TikTok and Instagram makes obsessively organized kitchens a new status symbol. Neatly aligned glass spice jars tagged with printed white labels. Wicker baskets filled with packages of pasta, crackers and snacks. Rows of flavored seltzer water stacked in double-decker plastic bins. In today’s consumer culture, “a place for everything and everything in its place” isn’t just a mantra; it’s big business. Nowhere is this more evident than the kitchen pantry. Most people can relate to finding half-empty cereal boxes squirreled away in the cupboard or letting produce sit just a bit too long in a refrigerator drawer. But for a subset of social media denizens, such sacrileges would never grace their feeds. As someone who studies digital consumer culture, I’ve noticed an uptick ...

Should you pay for Meta’s and Twitter’s verified identity subscriptions? A social media researcher explains how the choice you face affects everyone else. Social media services have generally been free of charge for users, but now, with ad revenues slowing down, social media companies are looking for new revenue streams beyond targeted ads. Now, Twitter is charging for its blue check verification, and Meta and Twitter both charge for identity protection. Users benefit from “free” services such as social media platforms. According to one study, in the U.S., Facebook users say they would have to be paid in the range of $40 to $50 to leave the social networking service for one month. If you value Facebook highly enough that you’d need to get paid to take a break, why not pay for these new se...

When someone says social media, you probably don’t immediately think of LinkedIn. But there’s no denying that the business networking site has gone the distance: it is now 20 years since it was founded in Silicon Valley. It was the brainchild of Reid Hoffman, a US entrepreneur who worked on an early social media platform for Apple before launching one of his own in 1997. SocialNet was a dating and professional connections site, but folded two years later after failing to find a big enough userbase in those early days of the web. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. Marco Verch, CC BY-SA Hoffman went on to become a senior manager at PayPal, and made a substantial amount of money when it was bought by eBay in 2002. This helped him to co-found LinkedIn on December 28 2002 with a team of former Soc...