users

6Oct

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIAL MEDIA

The Outage And Scandals Test Facebook’s Users Frenemy Relationship

Elizabeth Stoycheff, Wayne State University When Facebook was down for most of the day on Oct. 4, 2021, did you miss it, were you relieved or some of both? Social scientists have compiled an expansive body of research that shows how people have come to develop a love-hate relationship with the social media giant with nearly 3 billion users. Many users have felt their relationship with the platform devolve into a messy codependence, mired by ambiguity and mistrust. For others, reliance on the platform is taken for granted, if occassionally appreciated in moments of pandemic isolation. And then there are the revelations that the company has been lying about applying its rules differently to important people, knowingly harming teen girls and having a big vaccine misinformation problem. Add...

Drug Users Fighting Back Against America’s War on Drugs

People addicted to opioids and other substances are organizing a national movement to demand a say in drug-policy reform. Like so many activists, Jess Tilley discovered grassroots organizing through personal hardship. In 1997, she was living in Northampton, Massachusetts, regularly injecting heroin. A limited access to clean needles led her to reuse dulled equipment, and she developed an abscess. Through friends, Tilley learned of a program where users could get free new syringes — no questions asked. At Tapestry Needle Exchange, she also discovered a community of people eager to improve their lives and the lives of others addicted to drugs. “We started talking about the mistreatment we received in emergency rooms,” Jess remembers. “I told them, ‘We need to advocate for ourselves. They ...

Instagram to remove ‘like’ counts for some US users

Amid humane tech movement, company is testing out functionality to make the social media platform feel less competitive. Facebook Inc.'s Instagram plans to remove the number of "likes" visible on posts for some users in the U.S. to decrease competitive pressure among people on the photo-sharing service. Instagram has been hiding like counts in some markets since April, beginning in Canada, and later expanding to Japan and Brazil. The U.S. is one of Instagram's largest markets with more than 106 million users, according to data analyst EMarketer. "What we're hoping to do is depressurize Instagram a little bit, and make it a bit less of a competition," Instagram boss Adam Mosseri told Bloomberg after announcing the new test at a conference in San Francisco spons...