Social Media

Gaggle has published a Cyberbullying eBook to help administrators, educators, parents, and students understand and react to digital harassment. The new eBook offers a fresh and up-to-date analysis of cyberbullying, with additions on remote learning and updated resources. Available for free, the comprehensive eBook details the importance of full awareness and involvement from administrators, teachers, and parents in order to protect students online. The eBook includes guidance for dealing with all aspects of cyberbullying, from prevention to identification to discipline. The guide also offers an updated list of cyberbullying resources and websites, so students, parents, teachers, and administrators can do further research and learn new ways to handle incidents of cyberbullying in the future.

While TikTok has seemingly avoided a ban in the US (for now), the app remains under scrutiny, due to concerns about its impact on young users and international data security considerations given its Chinese ownership. On the first point, TikTok is set to once again be examined over the ways in which it tracks and uses data from underage users as part of newly launched legal proceedings in the UK. The case is the latest of many that have brought against the app over the same concern.

The New York Times recently ran an article about a 15 year old girl in Nashville, TN who three years ago sent a three second video using a racist term to a friend as a celebration of getting her driver’s license. The girl is white. The person who received the message forwarded it on to another student, who sent it to another, and eventually it made its way to a male student at the same school. This student, who is multiracial, took the message to school administrators who said they could take no action because the message was sent from off school grounds. Angry at the inaction of administrators and the climate at the high school where this racial epithet was thrown around regularly, the young man saved the video and after the Black Lives Matter demonstrations last spring, put it up on social media- right after the female student had been admitted to the University of Tennessee and their prestigious cheerleading program. The young woman was shamed online and the university, under pressure, rescinded her admissions offer. She is now taking college courses online and the young man is off to college in California. They never spoke to each other directly about the incident.

While the right or wrong of this incident can be argued, what remains is that what one puts up on social media lasts forever and always has the possibility to resurface. Many teens are also finding out that when these incidents occur (no matter how isolated), they can be captured, even from apps such as Snapchat where messages are supposed to be fleeting. Second chances also seem to be in short supply for some. It is a bit of an extreme tale, but a cautionary one you may want to tell your children about.

YouTube's first ever "Culture & Trends Report" reveals that 58% of users are willing to watch content created by people of any age, and Baby Boomers are increasingly searching YouTube for information, with their consumption of beauty tutorials increasing by 50%. The report also points to the rise of "cowatching" for live, virtual events and states, "Whether the motivation was community connection, finding resources to stay resilient or exploring new ways to be seen and heard, audiences and creators showed us that adversity drives innovation."

The Federal Trade Commission has given nine top social media and Internet firms 45 days to provide details about "[how they] collect, use, and present personal information, their advertising and user engagement practices, and how their practices affect children and teens." No penalties apply if companies fail to answer. So far it seems many of the social media companies are pointing fingers at each other’s practices, claiming they are worse  than their own, but if you are interested in consumer privacy it is a story you will want to watch unfold.

If you want to discuss with your kids how misinformation is creeping into our lives, you might want to use the upcoming Georgia runoff elections as a case study of how things are getting out of hand on social media. The full force of 2020’s most effective fake news tactics is hitting the state: fears of widespread voter fraud, allegations of violence, and claims about candidates’ socialism. But despite its much-touted efforts to add warning or fact-checking labels to election disinformation, Facebook is failing to do exactly that on more than half of the questionable posts related to the Georgia races, according to a new analysis by Avaaz, a nonprofit that tracks online disinformation. The group found that Facebook failed to add fact-checking labels to at least 60% of a cross-section of Georgia-related election misinformation that reached thousands of voters. An analysis of more than 200 posts promoting a dozen false claims about the Georgia elections in both English and Spanish showed how the posts followed a now well-worn playbook of amplifying disinformation that has proven effective in recent months. This includes falsehoods about widespread voter fraud, fake rumors about acts of violence targeting African-American voters, and allegations that Democratic Senate candidate Raphael Warnock had “celebrated” Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Years ago there was some talk about creating a font to be used for making sarcastic remarks so that the person on the other end would know the tone was meant to be sarcastic. It never came to pass but now tone indicators are making the rounds in social media posts. Put simply, tone indicators are written shorthand for the poster’s intent and emotion. For example, one might use “/j,” short for “joking” to indicate the disparaging comment you just made about your best friend was just a friendly nudge and not the ‘nastygram’ that it might be taken as.

It will be interesting to see if this trend catches on. The tone indicators are showing up on Twitter and in the comments sections of The New York Times. And if your children start using them, you will certainly need to know what they are. Here is a sample list:

/j = joking
/s = sarcasm
/srs = serious
/nsrs = not serious
/r = romantic
/lh = lighthearted
/f = fake
/th = threat
/li = literally
/nm = not mad or upset
/t = teasing
 

Lauren Gehr, an English teacher at a South Carolina high school, says that kids' use of social media is affecting their academic work -- including using "social media speak" in classwork. In an article written for teachers but with useful hints for parents, Gehr shares tech tools like NoRedInk and FlipGrid to help kids drop certain habits from their work, such as abbreviating words, using slang, and writing too quickly.

Americans are divided on both whether offensive content online is taken seriously enough, and on which is more important online: free speech or feeling safe. Republicans and Democrats have grown further apart when it comes to these issues since 2017. Overall, 55% of Americans say many people take offensive content they see online too seriously, while a smaller share (42%) say offensive content online is too often excused as not a big deal, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted in early September 2020. In addition, about half of Americans (53%) say it’s more important for people to be able to feel welcome and safe online, compared with 45% who believe it’s more important for people to be able to speak their minds freely online, according to an earlier Center survey fielded in July 2020.

Since Snapchat is a staple in tween and teen’s social media repertoire, parents may be interested in some insights from Snapchat’s second annual "Friendship Report." 47% of respondents say their friendships are closer during the pandemic. 60% of Snapchat users say the platform helps them to strengthen friendships, 44% use video to maintain friendships and the report notes, "The findings showed how 'social' is being inserted back into social media."