Syllabus, Handouts, Lectures and Blog
Welcome!
This is the course website, where I’ll occasionally be blogging and where all lectures, handouts and useful links will be posted. We’ll go through the site during class. I encourage you to bookmark this and reference whenever working on a project or studying for the midterm. My goal is to make this easier for you, not more difficult.
Today, we’re talking about Twitter and there will be assignment due next week.
Cheers,
Alex
An article published on Dec. 12 in The New York Times discusses Facebook’s role in monitoring free speech and guiding the modern conversation about censorship. With its more than 500 million users and one billion pieces of content per day, the article points out that the individuals responsible for monitoring that the terms of use are followed have some heavy decisions to make.
For example, following the suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi in October, Facebook’s content monitors traced and removed accounts of individuals posting hateful and threatening messages on a Spirit Day remembrance page. A lot of these offenders were fake profiles; “troll” profiles as they are called.
Mr. Willner and his colleagues silenced dozens of troll accounts, and the page became usable again. But trolls are repeat offenders, and it took Mr. Willner and his colleagues nearly 10 days of monitoring the page around the clock to take down over 7,000 profiles that kept surfacing to attack the Spirit Day event page.
But what the Facebook monitors have to also do is decide heavier questions of public and private figures. This includes when an 11-year-old girl was being threatened in comments. Because the girl had appeared in a music video, she was considered a public figure and her mother’s complaints were not heard.
The Times writes:
A Facebook spokesman said the company had left the page up because it did not violate its terms of service, which allow criticism of a public figure. The spokesman said that by appearing in a band’s video, the girl had become a public figure, and that the threatening comments had not been posted until a few days ago. Those comments, and the account of the user who had posted them, were removed after The New York Times inquired about them.
It is a fine line that Facebook will have to walk and I wouldn’t be surprised if this issue continues to plague the website. By virtue of the amount of its users and user-generated content, Facebook is the largest forum for publishing speech. It will be in its best interest to do as little as possible in censoring what is written on Facebook in order to avoid legal battles over the First Amendment. On the other hand, Facebook has a social responsibility to its users. Because of its prominence, Facebook needs to be willing to address issues of hate and discrimination on its own website. Internet bullying is escalating and Facebook needs to be willing to make decisions to protect its users.
Another reason to delete your Facebook account. The Israeli army is now using Facebook to find draft dodgers.
Military service is compulsory in Israel and most serves in the Israeli Defense Force, but many try to get out of it. Some get doctors to say they have medical conditions, and others use family connections to not serve. But some girls claim to be “too” religious, which is an acceptable cause for exemption.
But now the army is using Facebook to see if those girls are serious about their religious devotion. Soldiers in the human resources department of the IDF are now checking Facebook to see if the girls are attending events on the Sabbath, posting on Sabbath, eating in non-Kosher restaurants or wearing immodest clothes.
Apparently this Facebook-trolling technique is working. The HR department of the IDF has already caught several girls pretending to be religious to get out of their army service.
So for all of you planning on moving to Israel and lying about your religious status to get out of army service, YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!
So The New York Times got rid of its social media editor this week. The Poynter article explains that the NYT no longer felt like it needed a social media editor because social media should be the job of all reporters. Fair point, but then what exactly did the social media editor do?
Gawker took that up when NYT first created the position 1.5 years ago. “New York Times Hiring ‘Social Media Editor’ To …Do Something,” Gawker wrote. Jennifer Preston, who is the only person who held the job, was essentially meant to get the rest of the company using social media in the most brand-building way possible.
When The NYT created the position the company’s internal memo stated:
…the point is that an awful lot of people are finding our work not by coming to our homepage or looking at our newspaper but through alerts and recommendations from their friends and colleagues. So we ought to learn how to reach those people effectively and serve them well. At the same time, more of us are using social networks to find sources, contacts and information.
It was a good and smart move for the time, I think. It’s even more telling that the position is no longer needed. According to Twitaholic, The NYT is the 29th most popular Twitter account. (Can we really expect it to compete with Lady Gaga, Britney Spears or Justin Beiber?)
I don’t know if other newsrooms have or had a Social Media Editor position, but I understand what The NYT did. It does take some work to get reporters on board with realizing that their work can no longer just stop at filing copy. Modern media entities need to be where their readers are, and their readers are on Twitter and Facebook. As silly as her job sounded, Preston’s role in getting the rest of the newsroom on board with how to properly make the most of social media was a great call by The NYT.
The learning curve with social media is pretty fast. I doubt The NYT ever thought this was a permanent position they were creating, but there was a time when it was needed and they addressed it at the time.
Ok, the headline was really just catchy and gripping. I have no beef with the Maccabeats from Yeshiva University. The a capella group recently gained fame thanks to their Hanukkah parody of “Dynamite” by Taio Cruz. I wish them only the best in producing more a capella songs, which are the auditory equivalent of cotton candy, sickeningly sweet and all fluff.
What I do hate is the way they were hyped by the media. It’s a group of Jews singing about Hannukkah. Who cares?
I am Jewish. I have no problem with Jews. But I recognize that Jews represent about 1.5% of the population. Nevertheless the video (linked to above) has been written in about in, the last I saw, The New York Times and Washington Post Express, played on the radio and shown on “The Today Show.” The group even gave a live performance of the song on “The Early Show.”
YouTube sensations, unless they are really truly funny and pervade everyday society, should be left in the sphere of blogs. They should never make the jump to traditional news outlets. To quote my Tweet when I found The New York Times article, “Really @nytimes? The Maccabeats? That is news? What have you done? | http://goo.gl/rvBkZ #wtf#allthenewsthatsfittoprintmyass“
This graphic is absolutely awesome. Poynter’s David Shedden talks about it in his latest post and if you haven’t already, you should stop reading and go check it out. The rest of this post can wait until you’re done being dazzled by how many times people have thought of news ways to connect with one another.
The graphic reminds me of a conversation that I had with a professor in the journalism school. Facebook and social networking websites in general are not a new concept, he was saying. All the Internet has done is made it easier for people to do what they have been doing for years. For example, scrap booking. He made the argument that scrapbooks, like Facebook pages, are just ways that people log their lives. On Facebook, all of our friends can see it at once. With scrapbooks, people used to have to share them with one another. Sure, you had to physically get it from person A to B, but the idea is the same: connecting with other people.
Shedden writes:
I was especially glad to see the timeline include Compuserve, Usenet and BBS systems as early technological pioneers. Although they didn’t call it “social media” at the time, these types of services created the foundation for the online social networks we use today.
Those things were before my time – and probably before the time of anyone reading this blog – but that’s just the point that I like so much about this timeline. We’ve been social networking since before we called it social networking. This graphic by Skloog puts all that history in perspective in a way that is streamlined and easy to digest.
This isn’t the Mike Wise kind of fake Tweet. This is a hacked account results in fake Tweet kind of fake Tweet.
Someone hacked the Twitter of Andi Arief, the disaster management advisor to the President of Indonesia.
What did they send out? A fake tsunami warning. Coming on the heels of a tsunami that killed more than 100 people, the Tweet was no laughing matter.
Arief was quickly able to calm his followers, Tweeting that it was a hacker.
The coverage of the event on Mashable gives the impression that the fake Tweets, while having a quick impact, didn’t change anything. It brings back the semester-long and age-old discussion of the validity of Twitter as a news source and if bloopers like this matter.
I would argue that hacked Twitter accounts don’t actually damage the credibility of the particular user, or the medium as a whole. The modern user understands that the Internet is not fool-proof. While the chance of something false being published on Twitter is larger than the chance of the same thing happening on the New York Times website, users can forgive mistakes. Equally important is that providers can correct their mistakes quickly.
We’re all glad there isn’t going to be a tsunami in Indonesia, but do we trust Andi Arief any less? I’d say no.
Seventeen magazine recently released a study revealing the consequences of Facebook on modern dating. The magazine examines the huge role Facebook plays in teenage love life.
According to the study of 10,000 guys and girls between the ages of 16 to 21, Facebook helps teens to make a love connection.
The study concludes that:
“Within one week of meeting a new person, 79 percent of people click ‘friend,’ and after adding a new friend; 60 percent of people stalk their crush’s profile once a day (40 percent check-in on their would-be soul mate several times a day). Moreover, contrary to beliefs that social networking is eroding interpersonal communication, 72 percent of those surveyed said that talking to someone online brings you closer to them IRL.”
Other studies have examined the role of Facebook in break-ups. Samuel Axon from Mashable wrote a feature concluding that Facebook has changed dating for the worse. Twenty-one percent of respondents in a study admitted they would break up with someone by changing their statuses on Facebook.
Seventeen’s study also examined this element. The study reported that 10 percent of people have been dumped over Facebook. After a break up, 27 percent of people change their Facebook connection to their ex (hiding them on the News Feed, unfriending or blocking them). However, 73 percent keep their exes on their friends list.
The study also revealed that girls are more likely to use Facebook as a dating tool than guys. Forty-three percent of girls said they would decide not to date someone based on a Facebook profile compared to 33 percent of guys. Guys are also more willing to keep their relationship statuses private, 17 percent don’t share their status compared with 12 percent of girls. For girls, a status change represents something more. Fifty percent of girls “get a kick out of the status change,” while 24 percent of guys find it unnecessary.
Without a doubt, Facebook has changed the dating scene for teenagers. Facebook allows its users to pick from the following list regarding their relationship status: “single,” “in a relationship,” “engaged,” “married,” “it’s complicated,” “in an open relationship,” “widowed,” “separated” or “divorced.” You can also publicly announce if you are looking for a relationship, dating, networking or friendship on your page. Facebook puts everyone’s business out in cyberspace. Maybe it’s good because it makes it harder to cheat. Maybe it’s bad because it encourages over analyzing and jealously. And, when you’re dumped, it’s now public news.
Regardless, Facebook has changed the ways in which relationships begin and end. It has become a central part of the modern-day love story.
Has Facebook changed your love life? For the better or worse?
Until last year Facebook knew my name, email, birth date, religion, political views and gender. Facebook also knew that I was single, loved A Clockwork Orange, listened to Tom Waits and read a lot of Tom Wolfe books.
Facebook could use that information in whatever way they wanted or sell it to whomever they wanted without my permission. Ad agencies, statisticians, government agencies, they all could have access to my personal preferences and they interests of any Facebook user if they had the right money. And while I am sure that these groups would not use said information for clandestine activities, no one could really do much to stop it. I mean, hey, we all agreed to the terms and conditions.
This fact freaked out Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomiskiy. So the four created Diaspora, an open-source alternative to Facebook. This site offers the same social networking capabilities of Facebook but the user has to provide the server space. They have to pay for the space but in return the user owns and controls their information.
The site has not really picked up steam and reached critical mass yet, but as there are more and more security breaches and people realize they do not own their information, this user-controlled social-networking site might just catch on.
You stumble back from a night out at Cornerstone or Bentley’s (RIP Turtle) and your intoxicated brain tells you it’s a great time to see what’s going on in the wonderful world of Facebook at 3 a.m. You get to the log-in screen and manage to type in your e-mail address and password, but this time it’s not so easy for you to get to your news feed. That’s because you’ve installed the new social media sobriety test.
Has anyone else ever heard of the math questions designed to thwart drunk e-mails? Well now Webroot has developed a sobriety test to prevent you from facebooking or tweeting while intoxicated. When the user logs into their account, they are required to pass one of five sobriety tests, one of which includes the task of keeping your cursor inside a moving circle. If you fail, the sobriety test will post for you, indicating you failed the test and are too intoxicated to post on the website.
It’s simple to set up. You just go to the website and customize which websites you would like to block and the times you would like to block them. Then later when you try to access the site, the fun begins.
I personally think this is hilarious. I wonder how many people actually will use it and how successful it will be in preventing drunk posts. The only thing I don’t understand is why they would share that you’re too intoxicated to post when the point of the sobriety test is to prevent sharing with the social media world that you are drunk and making a fool of yourself.
This was a great idea by Webroot especially since employers are increasingly keeping an eye on employees’ Facebook and Twitter accounts. Your boss doesn’t need to know you had one too many beers at Cstone.
