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https://vimeo.com/722991284

video created in the TECE/Transatlantic Exchange of Civic Educators,
in the thematic working group on information literacy, misinformation, fake news,
Washington D.C., May 10, 2022

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Language: English Mature content filter: None

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App TopShot - to dive into the world of cinematic design tools

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App TopShot - to dive into the world of cinematic design tools

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https://www.filmundschule.nrw.de/de/digital/topshot/

In five interactive applications, the film education initiative FILM+SCHULE NRW invites teachers and students* to dive into the world of cinematic design tools.

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Das übersichtliche Programm zeigt, wie etwa Look, Musik und Filmschnitt die Wirkung von Filmen beeinflussen. Anwender*innen können dabei interaktiv in Filmclips eingreifen. Die App soll auf diese Weise filmische Gestaltungsmittel erfahrbar machen. Ein Klick auf den Infobutton erläutert dann kurz und…

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created in the TECE/Transatlantic Exchange of Civic Educators,
in the thematic working group on information literacy, misinformation, fake news, May 2022
https://tece-usde.org/

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Some sources for stock photos and videos 

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Some sources for stock photos and videos 

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https://gesellschaftsbilder.de/
https://genderphotos.vice.com/
https://unsplash.com/

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Warum sollte ich Gesellschaftsbilder.de nutzen?

Gesellschaftsbilder.de ist eine Fotodatenbank für Redaktionen, Medienmacherinnen und Blogger und alle Interessierte, die für ihre Arbeit Bilder fernab von Klischees suchen. Die Fotodatenbank soll ein Angebot sein, um die Vielfalt der Gesellschaft abzubilden.
Auf dieser Seite kannst du Bilder für die redaktionelle Arbeit suchen und kostenfrei verwenden. Für weitere Verwendungszwecke können die Bilder auf Anfrage lizensiert werden oder wir vermitteln dir den Kontakt zu den Fotograf*innen oder Organisationen.
Die Datenbank ist nicht vollständig und wir sind immer auf der Suche nach weiteren Bildern, die unser Angebot zu einer vielfältigeren Gesellschaftsabbildung erweitern. Bei Interesse an einer Zusammenarbeit, einfach kontaktieren!

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Die Fotodatenbank mit neuen Perspektiven!

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The Glass Room, MissInformation Edition, 

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The Glass Room, MissInformation Edition, 

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available in english, german, other languages
https://www.theglassroom.org/en/misinformation/exhibition/

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Media consumption and news habits among youth (12 - 19 years) in Germany 2020

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Media consumption and news habits among youth (12 - 19 years) in Germany 2020

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JIM-Studie-2020_Web_final.pdf (mpfs.de)

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Seit 1998 wird mit der JIM-Studie im jährlichen Turnus eine Basisstudie zum Medienumgang der Zwölf- bis 19-Jährigen durchgeführt. Neben einer aktuellen Standortbestimmung sollen die Daten zur Erarbeitung von Strategien und Ansatzpunkten für neue Konzepte in den Bereichen Bildung, Kultur und Arbeit dienen.

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Folgende Ergebnisse wurden am Mittwoch, dem 28.04.2021, auf dem Hamburger Mediendialog präsentiert und anschließend veröffentlicht: Digitale Medienumgebungen haben die Art und Weise, wie sich die Gesellschaft informiert, erheblich verändert. Doch während sie einerseits immer mehr Möglichkeiten bieten, gesellschaftliche Diskurse zu beleben, ist andererseits eine Verarmung der gesellschaftlichen Kommunikation zu beobachten, etwa Tendenzen, Nachrichteninhalte zu meiden, die Verbreitung von Falschmeldungen oder geringe Zahlbereitschaft für journalistische Angebote.

Weil eine funktionierende Demokratie auf gut informierte Bürger*innen und eine freie individuelle Meinungsbildung angewiesen ist, ist diese Situation problematisch. Aus diesem Grund haben die dpa und die Hamburger Behörde für Kultur und Medien ein Projekt initiiert, das gemeinsam mit Partnern aus Medien, Wissenschaft, öffentlichen Institutionen und Zivilgesellschaft die Nachrichtenkompetenz insbesondere der Bevölkerung unter 30 Jahren erforschen und fördern will.

Ziele sind dabei,

fundiertes Wissen über die Nachrichtennutzung, die Informiertheit und die nachrichtenbezogene Kompetenz der Bevölkerung zu gewinnen,

einen breiten, Politik, Medienunternehmen, Bildungsinstitutionen und Zivilgesellschaft umfassenden Dialog über Möglichkeiten der Förderung von Nachrichtenkompetenz und Nachrichteninteresse zu schaffen und

eine breite Palette an Maßnahmen zur Förderung von Nachrichtenkompetenz zu entwickeln.

Um fundiertes Wissen bereitzustellen, führt das Leibniz-Institut für Medienforschung zunächst eine Studie mit qualitativ und quantitativ ausgerichteten Bestandteilen durch. Im Vordergrund steht dabei das Zusammenspiel zwischen Nachrichteninteresse, Nachrichtennutzung, Informiertheit und Meinungsbildung.
Die Leitfragen der Untersuchung lauten:

Welchen Unterschied macht es, wo und wie sich Menschen informieren?

Wie steht es um die Nachrichtenkompetenz in der digitalen Medienumgebung?

Auf Basis der Ergebnisse der Studie "Use the News - Nachrichtenutzung und Nachrichtenkompetenz im digitalen Zeitalter" wollen die Beteiligten dann in einem eigens gegründeten Medienlabor neue Nachrichtenformate entwickeln und testen.

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Use the News - Nachrichtennutzung und Nachrichtenkompetenz im digitalen Zeitalter

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Folgende Ergebnisse wurden am Mittwoch, dem 28.04.2021, auf dem Hamburger Mediendialog präsentiert und anschließend veröffentlicht: Digitale Medienumgebungen haben die Art und Weise, wie sich die Gesellschaft informiert, erheblich verändert. Doch während sie einerseits immer mehr Möglichkeiten bieten, gesellschaftliche Diskurse zu beleben, ist andererseits eine Verarmung der gesellschaftlichen Kommunikation zu beobachten, etwa Tendenzen, Nachrichteninhalte zu meiden, die Verbreitung von Falschmeldungen oder geringe Zahlbereitschaft für journalistische Angebote.

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Social media preferences vary by race and ethnicity

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Social media preferences vary by race and ethnicity

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Latinos, blacks and whites use social media networks about equally, but there are some differences in their preferences for specific social media sites. For example, Instagram is more popular among Latinos while Pinterest is more popular among whites, according to a late 2014 Pew Research Center survey.

Today, about eight-in-ten Latino, black and white adults who are online use at least one of five social media sites - Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter. Among these, Facebook stands out as the most widely used platform, regardless of race or ethnicity: About seven-in-ten adult internet users (71%) say they use the site.

But there are differences by race and ethnicity in the use of other social media sites, in particular Instagram. The photo-sharing site is more popular among Hispanic and black internet users than among white internet users. About one-third (34%) of online Hispanics use Instagram, as do 38% of blacks. By comparison, only 21% of whites use the network.

Instagram's popularity among younger adults is notable. For example, roughly half (53%) of online adults ages 18 to 29 use the service, compared with 25% of those ages 30 to 49, 11% of those ages 50 to 64 and 6% of those 65 and older. This is worth noting when looking at social media use by race and ethnicity since Latinos are significantly younger than other groups. More than a decade separates the median age of Latinos (27) and whites (42), while the median age for blacks is 33.

By contrast, the social media site Pinterest is more popular among white internet users than among other groups. About one-third (32%) of whites use Pinterest, compared with 21% of Hispanics and just 12% of blacks. LinkedIn differs in that about equal shares of whites (29%) and blacks (28%) use the site, compared with 18% of Hispanics. Meanwhile, Twitter has a more equal distribution. About one-in-four Hispanics and blacks use the site, along with 21% of whites.

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Social media preferences vary by race and ethnicity

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Latinos, blacks and whites use social media networks about equally, but there are some differences in their preferences for specific social media sites. For example, Instagram is more popular among Latinos while Pinterest is more popular among whites, according to a late 2014 Pew Research Center survey.

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Social Media Usage Statistics for 2021 Reveal Surprising Shifts

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Social Media Usage Statistics for 2021 Reveal Surprising Shifts

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Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy

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2021 social media usage statistics and research from my friends at Edison Research and Triton Digital, contained in the newest version of their annual The Infinite Dial report, found surprising shifts in how Americans use social networks.

I strongly encourage you to download the entire free report, as there is a lot of more interesting information than what I've analyzed for you here.

A note on methodology: this is not some quick poll that a marketer put together. Edison is one of the most respected research organizations in America. This a random sample survey of 1,507 people, with participants balanced to match USA gender, age, and race distribution. In short, this is data you can trust.

Let's dive into these social media usage statistics and discuss what the research really means.

Social media usage increased slightly in 2021.

TikTok fueled social media usage growth among young people.

Facebook's popularity continues to decline among young and middle-aged people.

Twitter regained influence.

Social Media Usage Increased in U.S., Driven by Pandemic

Approximately 233 million Americans use social media in 2021. This is a slight increase over 2020. Overall, however, social media usage is only slightly higher in 2021 than 5 years ago. Thus, it can reasonably be deduced that the overall pool of social media participants in the United States is unlikely to grow in the near term.

The Rise of TikTok

Typically, when new social networks pop up, they are first adopted by youth, and then the composition of users becomes more reflective of America as a whole when older people start to log on to the "new thing."

Before 2020, a lack of new social networks suggested that social media usage wasn't growing even among young people.

Even now, among Americans 12-34 years old, Facebook usage declined from 79% of that group in 2017 to 57% today. Snapchat usage decreased from a previously stable 62% to 55%. Twitter is down from 36% to 34% and increased from last year at 29%. Both Pinterest and Linkedin are the same as they were in 2017 at 36% and 23% respectively, after recovering from a slight percentage drop in the last year or two.

A still steadily growing social network among young Americans is Instagram, up from 66% to 70% in the past two years.

The most shocking is the rise of TikTok. This social media platform first became popular in 2020 with about 25% usage and only continued to soar in 2021 up to 44% usage. This initial draw to TikTok could be due to a platform resemblance to the once-popular social media app Vine.

Facebook Usage Is Only Growing Among Those 55 and Older

While Facebook is the most popular social network, the only demographic that saw an increase in users was the 55 and older age group. Every other age group saw a decline.

Twitter Regains Influence

In 2018, Twitter hit the lowest usage percentages across the board but since then, it has regained usage percentages. The popularity is equivalent or above the usages in 2016.

Snapchat Loses Users in Coveted 12-34 Age Group

Similar to Facebook, Snapchat saw a significant decrease in users in the 12-34 age group. With young people spending more time at home during the pandemic, entertaining content on TikTok drew in more users than the more communication-focused Snapchat.
Don't forget to download the entire Infinite Dial 2021 report. There are more interesting findings on digital media today and how patterns are changing.

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Social Media Usage Statistics for 2021 Reveal Surprising Shifts

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2021 social media usage statistics and research from my friends at Edison Research and Triton Digital, contained in the newest version of their annual The Infinite Dial report, found surprising shifts in how Americans use social networks. I strongly encourage you to download the entire free report, as there is a lot of more interesting information than what I've analyzed for you here.

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U.S. social reach by ethnicity 2019 | Statista

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U.S. social reach by ethnicity 2019 | Statista

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This statistic shows the share of adults in the United States who were using social networks as of February 2019, sorted by ethnicity. During that period of time, 70 percent of Hispanic adults used social networking sites.

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U.S. social reach by ethnicity 2019 | Statista

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This statistic shows the share of adults in the United States who were using social networks as of February 2019, sorted by ethnicity. During that period of time, 70 percent of Hispanic adults used social networking sites.

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English-speaking Asian Americans stand out for their technology use

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English-speaking Asian Americans stand out for their technology use

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Discussions of the "digital divide" often touch on race and ethnicity - and the narrative is often that whites lead in technology adoption while other racial or ethnic groups struggle to keep up. But a new analysis of four Pew Research Center surveys conducted in 2015 finds that this isn't true for one group: English-speaking Asian Americans adopt a number of common technologies at rates that exceed the rest of the population, including whites.

It's important to note that the figures reported here are based on surveys conducted only in English (and Spanish for non-English-speaking Hispanics); they do not include non-English-speaking Asian Americans. Our 2012 survey found that among all Asian Americans, 63.5% say they speak English "very well," including about half of immigrant Asians.

Here are three key findings relating to English-speaking Asian Americans and technology use:

1 95% of English-speaking Asian Americans use the internet. English-speaking Asian Americans have long led other racial and ethnic groups when it comes to internet adoption, and that trend continues to hold true: This analysis shows that 95% of English-speaking Asian Americans reported using the internet in 2015, compared with 87% of whites, 81% of blacks and 82% of Hispanics.

2 84% of English-speaking Asian Americans have broadband service at home. The level of adoption of home broadband by English-speaking Asian Americans is nearly 20 percentage points higher than that of the overall population (67%) and is also higher than those of whites (72%), blacks (54%) and Hispanics (50%). Overall, home broadband use in the U.S. has plateaued in recent years after rising steadily since 2000.

3 91% of English-speaking Asian Americans own a smartphone. Smartphone ownership among English-speaking Asian Americans has increased by 20 points in three years, from 71% in 2012 to 91% last year. By comparison, 66% of whites, 62% of blacks, and 65% of Hispanics are currently smartphone owners. Cellphone ownership overall is near ubiquitous among English-speaking Asian Americans: 98% own some type of cellphone (whether a smartphone or a less advanced cellphone), compared with 90% of whites, 92% of blacks and 93% of Hispanics.

One reason English-speaking Asian Americans are adopting these technologies at higher rates may be their high levels of educational attainment and household income relative to the rest of the population. Both factors are tightly linked with technology adoption rates.

In addition, as noted above, the figures reported here are based on surveys conducted in English only among samples of Asian Americans. While Pew Research Center has not conducted surveys of Asian Americans and their technology use in languages other than English, surveys of Hispanics indicate that English-language proficiency is highly correlated with the use and adoption of various technologies.
Methodology
The analysis in this blog post is based on four Pew Research Center surveys conducted March 17-April 12, 2015; May 28-31, 2015; June 10-July 12, 2015; and Oct. 13-Nov. 15, 2015. The May survey was not included in the analysis of English-speaking Asian Americans with broadband at home. The table below shows the number of surveys and interviews conducted for each subgroup of Asian Americans respectively, as well as the margin of error for each sample.

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English-speaking Asian Americans stand out for their technology use

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Discussions of the "digital divide" often touch on race and ethnicity - and the narrative is usually that whites lead in technology adoption while other racial or ethnic groups struggle to keep up. But that's not the case for English-speaking Asian Americans.

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Social media continue to be important political outlets for Black Americans

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Social media continue to be important political outlets for Black Americans

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Social media platforms have served as venues for political engagement and social activism for many years, especially for Black Americans. This was evident again in 2020, when the killing of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, by a White Minneapolis police officer resulted in widespread protests that demonstrated the reach and power of these platforms.

Across Pew Research Center surveys, Black social media users have been particularly likely to say that these sites are personally important to them for getting involved with issues they care about or finding like-minded people. They are also likely to express positive views about the impact of these platforms for holding powerful people accountable for their actions and giving a voice to underrepresented groups. The online community known as Black Twitter has long been using these platforms to collectively organize, offer support and increase visibility online for Black people and issues that matter to them.

The impact of social media made itself felt after instances like the killing of Eric Garner at the hands of New York City police in 2014 and the death of Freddie Gray after he sustained spinal injuries in the back of a Baltimore police van in 2015. Researchers from the Center for Media & Social Impact (CMSI) have found that supporters of the activism movement used Twitter, specifically, to share breaking news, circulate images and engage with news stories about corresponding protests.

Analysis by the Center of publicly available tweets, from both 2016 and 2018, supports the idea that although race-related hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter are consistent on platforms like Twitter, spikes in the use of these hashtags often correspond with current events.

Black social media users are especially likely to use these sites for some forms of political activism

Though engaging in political behaviors and types of activism on these sites is not limited to any one group, Black social media users are often more likely than their counterparts from some other racial and ethnic backgrounds to engage in different types of political activities on social media and to believe these activities are more effective. Across four types of political activities asked about in a June 2020 survey, Black American social media users are among those most likely to use these platforms for activities related to causes and issues.

The types of online activism engaged in by Black social media users varies by age, with younger Black users being more likely to do these things than older Black users. But overall, 48% of Black social media users said they posted a picture to show their support for a cause on social media in the month prior to the survey fielded June 16-22, 2020, while a similar share said the same about encouraging others to take action on issues that are important to them or looking for information about rallies or protests happening in their area. One-third of Black users reported using a hashtag related to a political or social issue on social media in the previous month.

Across some of these activities, Black Americans who use social media were more likely to have engaged in these activism-related behaviors on these sites in the past month when compared with those from other racial or ethnic backgrounds. For instance, Black users (45%) were more likely to encourage others to take action on issues that were important to them when compared with White (30%) and Hispanic users (33%). The same was generally true across different groups when it came to posting a photo to show support for a cause.

In other cases, Black and Hispanic social media users both stood out from White users in using social media to look for information about rallies or protests happening in their area. Black and Hispanic users (45% and 46% respectively) used the platforms for this purpose, compared with 29% of White social media users.

At the same time, the use of social media for these political activities varies by age among Black Americans. About eight-in-ten Black users age 18 to 49 (79%) say they had done at least one of these activities in the month prior to the survey, compared with six-in-ten of those who are 50 and older (59%).

Across each individual activity asked about in June, younger Black social media users were more likely than older ones to say they had done these. For instance, 44% of Black social media users ages 18 to 49 said they used a hashtag related to a political or social issue on these platforms in the previous month, compared with 13% of those 50 and older. There are similar gaps between younger and older Black social media users across the other three activities - encouraging others to take action on issues that are important to them (52% vs. 31%), posting a picture to show their support for a cause (55% vs. 36%) and looking for information about rallies or protests happening near them (51% vs. 34%).

Many Black social media users find these platforms personally important and effective for political activism and express positive sentiments toward the sites

Substantial shares of Black social media users consider these sites at least somewhat personally important to them for purposes of finding others who share their views, getting involved with issues that are important to them and expressing their political opinions - and these figures have remained relatively consistent since the Center first asked these questions in a 2018 survey.

Their views also closely align with those of Hispanic users. For example, about half or more of Black and Hispanic adults who use social media say that these platforms are very or somewhat important to them for finding others who share their views and getting involved with political or social issues that are important to them, compared with about four-in-ten White users, according to June 2020 data. Similarly, about half of Black and Hispanic users say these sites are personally important to them when it comes to giving them a venue to express their political opinions, compared with smaller shares of White users (34%) who say the same.

Age is also a factor, with Black social media users age 18 to 49 being more likely to say social media are at least somewhat important to them for getting involved with issues that are important to them, compared with those 50 and older (65% vs. 51%).

Along with being among those most likely to engage in these online political activities and finding them personally important, majorities of Black Americans who use social media also say these sites are an effective tool for social and political advocacy, according to data from a July 2020 survey.

In most cases, Black, Hispanic and Asian American users stand out from White users in how effective they think social media are at achieving some social and political aims. About seven-in-ten Black, Hispanic and Asian users say social media are at least somewhat effective for changing people's minds about political or social issues, compared with half of White users who say the same. These views generally hold true when influencing policy decisions and getting elected officials to pay attention to issues are considered. As to whether social media are seen as very or somewhat effective for creating sustained social movements, Black and Hispanic users (82% for both) are more likely to say this than White Americans (76%) who use these sites. Some 77% of Asian Americans who use social media say these sites are at least somewhat effective for this aim.

But online activism is only part of the story, as evidenced by the thousands of protesters who gathered offline in cities across the country this summer to protest anti-Black racism and to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Scholarly research has shown that online and offline activism are often integrated and are positively correlated. This research also suggests that in some cases participation in online activism can encourage offline protest by serving as a way to ease people into offline action and help them form their identity. Additionally, the author suggests that online and offline activities can be complementary over the course of a movement.

Research from the Center in 2016 also supports this analysis. That is, social media users who are highly politically engaged are more likely to do things online like follow candidates for office or other political figures or respond when someone posts something about politics that they disagree with when compared with users who have lower levels of political engagement.

In addition to considering these platforms effective tools for social and political advocacy, majorities of Black social media users also agree with positive statements about social media on traits such as the sites' ability to highlight important issues and give a voice to underrepresented groups.

Across these positive statements, Black, Hispanic and Asian users often have more similar views than White users. Around three-quarters of Black, Hispanic and Asian users say the statement "social media help give a voice to underrepresented groups" describes social media very or somewhat well, compared with a smaller share of White users (58%) who agree, according to July 2020 data.

Black, Hispanic and Asian users are less likely than White Americans to say "social media make people think they are making a difference when they really aren't" describes these sites at least somewhat well - though majorities across all groups say this. Black and Hispanic Americans also stand out in being less likely to say that social media distract people from issues that are truly important when compared with slightly larger shares of White users who agree. Black social media users are also less likely than Asian American users to say these sites distract people from truly important issues.

What do the tweets tell us?

Though online conversations about racial injustice and race relations seem to peak along with race-related events in national news, a Center study from 2016 found that race-related posts on Twitter are always happening and span a variety of subjects, including social activism, pop culture and personal experiences.

Survey work by the Center in 2016 also found that Black social media users are more likely to see race-related content on these platforms. Black social media users were more likely than White users to say that most of what they see on these sites is about race or race relations (24% vs. 6%). Hispanic users fall in between these two groups, with 14% saying that most of what they see on these sites is related to race.

Still, current events do often bring these conversations to the forefront of public consciousness. From the period of July 2013 through May 2018, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was used nearly 30 million times - often increasing along with responses to real-world events - according to 2018 Center analysis of public tweets.

In May of this year, an analysis of tweets by the Center found that days after the killing of Floyd by police, nearly 8.8 million tweets contained the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. After that initial peak, the number of tweets containing the hashtag remained above 2 million uses per day through June 7.

Though the Center analysis of tweets does not include demographic information about who is tweeting, a study by the Knight Foundation on the relationship between Black Twitter (and other sub-communities on social media) and the media supports some of these findings by suggesting that participants in these online communities often use Twitter to circulate and raise awareness of issues before media organizations or journalists take interest. And even before Twitter and other well-known social media sites were established, Black-centric blogs were known for pressuring media organizations to cover topics that were otherwise going unnoticed.

Work from other researchers, like those from CMSI, suggests that social media benefit marginalized populations - by both leveling the playing field and allowing people from these groups to pursue social change. The report also suggests that today's youth are particularly drawn toward "digitally-enabled and cause-based" activism.

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Social media continue to be important political outlets for Black Americans

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Social media platforms have served as venues for political engagement and social activism for many years, especially for Black Americans.

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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A majority of Americans say they use YouTube and Facebook, while use of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok is especially common among adults under 30.

Despite a string of controversies and the public's relatively negative sentiments about aspects of social media, roughly seven-in-ten Americans say they ever use any kind of social media site - a share that has remained relatively stable over the past five years, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults.

Beyond the general question of overall social media use, the survey also covers use of individual sites and apps. YouTube and Facebook continue to dominate the online landscape, with 81% and 69%, respectively, reporting ever using these sites. And YouTube and Reddit were the only two platforms measured that saw statistically significant growth since 2019, when the Center last polled on this topic via a phone survey.

When it comes to the other platforms in the survey, 40% of adults say they ever use Instagram and about three-in-ten report using Pinterest or LinkedIn. One-quarter say they use Snapchat, and similar shares report being users of Twitter or WhatsApp. TikTok - an app for sharing short videos - is used by 21% of Americans, while 13% say they use the neighborhood-focused platform Nextdoor.

Even as other platforms do not nearly match the overall reach of YouTube or Facebook, there are certain sites or apps, most notably Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, that have an especially strong following among young adults. In fact, a majority of 18- to 29-year-olds say they use Instagram (71%) or Snapchat (65%), while roughly half say the same for TikTok.

These findings come from a nationally representative survey of 1,502 U.S. adults conducted via telephone Jan. 25-Feb.8, 2021.

With the exception of YouTube and Reddit, most platforms show little growth since 2019

YouTube is the most commonly used online platform asked about in this survey, and there's evidence that its reach is growing. Fully 81% of Americans say they ever use the video-sharing site, up from 73% in 2019. Reddit was the only other platform polled about that experienced statistically significant growth during this time period - increasing from 11% in 2019 to 18% today.

Facebook's growth has leveled off over the last five years, but it remains one of the most widely used social media sites among adults in the United States: 69% of adults today say they ever use the site, equaling the share who said this two years prior.

Similarly, the respective shares of Americans who report using Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Twitter and WhatsApp are statistically unchanged since 2019. This represents a broader trend that extends beyond the past two years in which the rapid adoption of most of these sites and apps seen in the last decade has slowed. (This was the first year the Center asked about TikTok via a phone poll and the first time it has surveyed about Nextdoor.)

Adults under 30 stand out for their use of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok

When asked about their social media use more broadly - rather than their use of specific platforms - 72% of Americans say they ever use social media sites.

In a pattern consistent with past Center studies on social media use, there are some stark age differences. Some 84% of adults ages 18 to 29 say they ever use any social media sites, which is similar to the share of those ages 30 to 49 who say this (81%). By comparison, a somewhat smaller share of those ages 50 to 64 (73%) say they use social media sites, while fewer than half of those 65 and older (45%) report doing this.

These age differences generally extend to use of specific platforms, with younger Americans being more likely than their older counterparts to use these sites - though the gaps between younger and older Americans vary across platforms.

Majorities of 18- to 29-year-olds say they use Instagram or Snapchat and about half say they use TikTok, with those on the younger end of this cohort - ages 18 to 24 - being especially likely to report using Instagram (76%), Snapchat (75%) or TikTok (55%). These shares stand in stark contrast to those in older age groups. For instance, while 65% of adults ages 18 to 29 say they use Snapchat, just 2% of those 65 and older report using the app - a difference of 63 percentage points.

Additionally, a vast majority of adults under the age of 65 say they use YouTube. Fully 95% of those 18 to 29 say they use the platform, along with 91% of those 30 to 49 and 83% of adults 50 to 64. However, this share drops substantially - to 49% - among those 65 and older.

By comparison, age gaps between the youngest and oldest Americans are narrower for Facebook. Fully 70% of those ages 18 to 29 say they use the platform, and those shares are statistically the same for those ages 30 to 49 (77%) or ages 50 to 64 (73%). Half of those 65 and older say they use the site - making Facebook and YouTube the two most used platforms among this older population.

Other sites and apps stand out for their demographic differences:

Instagram: About half of Hispanic (52%) and Black Americans (49%) say they use the platform, compared with smaller shares of White Americans (35%) who say the same.

WhatsApp: Hispanic Americans (46%) are far more likely to say they use WhatsApp than Black (23%) or White Americans (16%). Hispanics also stood out for their WhatsApp use in the Center's previous surveys on this topic.

LinkedIn: Those with higher levels of education are again more likely than those with lower levels of educational attainment to report being LinkedIn users. Roughly half of adults who have a bachelor's or advanced degree (51%) say they use LinkedIn, compared with smaller shares of those with some college experience (28%) and those with a high school diploma or less (10%).

Pinterest: Women continue to be far more likely than men to say they use Pinterest when compared with male counterparts, by a difference of 30 points (46% vs. 16%).

Nextdoor: There are large differences in use of this platform by community type. Adults living in urban (17%) or suburban (14%) areas are more likely to say they use Nextdoor. Just 2% of rural Americans report using the site.

A majority of Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram users say they visit these platforms on a daily basis

While there has been much written about Americans' changing relationship with Facebook, its users remain quite active on the platform. Seven-in-ten Facebook users say they use the site daily, including 49% who say they use the site several times a day. (These figures are statistically unchanged from those reported in the Center's 2019 survey about social media use.)

Smaller shares - though still a majority - of Snapchat or Instagram users report visiting these respective platforms daily (59% for both). And being active on these sites is especially common for younger users. For instance, 71% of Snapchat users ages 18 to 29 say they use the app daily, including six-in-ten who say they do this multiple times a day. The pattern is similar for Instagram: 73% of 18- to 29-year-old Instagram users say they visit the site every day, with roughly half (53%) reporting they do so several times per day.

YouTube is used daily by 54% if its users, with 36% saying they visit the site several times a day. By comparison, Twitter is used less frequently, with fewer than half of its users (46%) saying they visit the site daily.

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A majority of Americans say they use YouTube and Facebook, while use of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok is especially common among adults under 30.

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Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen testifies before Senate Commerce Committee

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Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen testifies before Senate Commerce Committee

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Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen testifies before Senate Commerce Committee

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Activism on social media varies by race and ethnicity, age, political party

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Activism on social media varies by race and ethnicity, age, political party

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From global protests against racial injustice to the 2020 election, some Americans who use social media are taking to these platforms to mobilize others and show their support for causes or issues. But experiences and attitudes related to political activities on social media vary by race and ethnicity, age, and party, according to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted June 16-22, 2020.

People can be politically active on social media in many ways. This survey asked Americans about four different types of activities that they may have engaged in on these platforms. Overall, about one-third of social media users (36%) say they have used sites like Facebook, Twitter and others in the past month to post a picture to show their support for a cause, look up information about rallies or protests happening in their area (35%) or encourage others to take action on issues they regard as important (32%). A smaller share (18%) reports using a hashtag related to a political or social issue on social media during this time.

Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand how Americans are using social media to engage in civic behaviors and online activism. For this analysis, we surveyed 4,708 U.S. adults from June 16 to June 22, 2020. Everyone who took part is a member of Pew Research Center's American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP's methodology.

Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.

Hispanic and Black social media users (46% and 45%, respectively) are more likely than white users (29%) to say they have looked up information about protests and rallies in their area on social media in the past month.

But in certain activities, Black users stand out: 48% of Black social media users say they have posted a picture on social media to show their support for a cause in the past month, compared with 37% of Hispanic users and 33% of white users. Black adults who use social media (45%) are also more likely than their Hispanic (33%) or white (30%) counterparts to say that in the past month they've taken to social media to encourage others to take action on issues that are important to them.

Black users are also more than twice as likely as white users to say they have used a hashtag related to a political or social issue on these platforms in the past month (33% vs. 15%), while Hispanic users fall in between these two groups (22%).

Social media engagement for causes or issues also varies by age. Just over half of social media users ages 18 to 29 (54%) say they have used these sites in the past month to look for information about rallies or protests happening in their area, compared with 36% of those ages 30 to 49, 26% of those 50 to 64 and 20% of those 65 and older. Social media users under the age of 30 are also more likely than those 30 and older to say they have used a hashtag related to a political or social issue and encouraged others to take action on issues that they see as important, while there are smaller age gaps when it comes to posting a picture to show support for a cause.

Racial differences are also present within younger groups, with younger Black social media users being particularly likely to post hashtags or encourage others to be politically engaged. For example, 55% of Black social media users ages 18 to 49 say they posted a picture to show support for a cause in the past month, compared with fewer than four-in-ten Hispanic (37%) or white users (36%) in the same age range. Among adults under the age of 50, Black users (44%) are about twice as likely as their white (22%) or Hispanic (23%) counterparts to say they have used a hashtag in the past month related to a political or social issue.

Partisanship is also a factor. About four-in-ten or more Democrats and those who lean Democratic say that in the past month they have posted a picture to show support for a cause, used social media to look for information about rallies or protests happening near them, or encouraged others to take action on an issue that is important to them. This compares with only about three-in-ten or fewer Republicans and Republican leaners who say they have done this. Democrats are also more than twice as likely as Republicans to say they have used a hashtag related to a political or social issue in the past month (25% vs. 10%).

Although the survey did not specifically ask respondents the kind of topics they were posting or looking up, these findings come at a time when a majority of Americans are having conversations about race and racial inequality, according to a separate Center survey conducted in June 2020, following the killing of George Floyd in police custody at the end of May.

A separate Pew Research Center analysis of tweets found an unprecedented use of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag on Twitter. The hashtag had been used roughly 47.8 million times between May 26 and June 7. And a 2018 Center report found that people take to social media to discuss a variety of political and social issues, ranging from #MeToo to #MAGA to #LoveWins.

Racial and ethnic differences on importance of these platforms for finding like-minded people, getting involved with issues

Social media users were also asked in three distinct ways how important these sites were to them personally as a venue for their political activities. Black and Hispanic users were found to be particularly likely to value social media for these activities.

Overall, 45% of users say that social media is very or somewhat important to them personally when it comes to finding other people who share their views about important issues, while similar shares say the same for getting involved with political or social issues (44%) or giving them a venue to express their political opinions (40%).

Black and Hispanic social media users see more personal benefits than white users when it comes to these types of civically minded activities.

Black and Hispanic social media users (60% and 57%, respectively) are more likely than white users (39%) to say that social media is very or somewhat important to them personally for finding other people who share their views about important issues. There are similar racial gaps when asked about these sites' personal importance for getting involved with issues they care about or giving them a venue to express their political opinions.

Users who are Democrats are also more likely than Republicans to say these sites are important to them personally for engaging in certain types of civic activities. Some 55% of Democrats say that social media is very or somewhat important to them for getting involved with political or social issues that are important to them, compared with 32% of Republicans who say the same (including those who lean to each party). Similar partisan gaps are evident when the issue is the importance of social media in finding others who share users' views (54% vs. 36%) and in giving users a venue to express their political opinions (47% vs. 33%).

Younger social media users also are more likely than older users to say social media is important to them in these ways. About six-in-ten (58%) of those ages 18 to 29 say that social media is very or somewhat important for them when getting involved with political and social issues that are important to them. Among older adults, 43% of those 30 to 49 say this, while a smaller share (36%) of those 50 or older say this.

A majority of social media users ages 18 to 29 (59%) say social media is at least somewhat important to them for finding others who share their views on important issues, compared with smaller shares of those 30 to 49 (45%). Users 50 and older (37%) are the least likely to say social media is personally important to them in these ways.

Overall, the levels of personal importance that social media users place on these platforms for political engagement are fairly consistent with the last time the Center asked these questions, in a 2018 survey. For example, 43% of social media users said then that these sites were somewhat or very important to them personally for finding others who share their views about important topics, about on par with the 45% of social media users today who say the same. There is also little or no difference in the level of importance that users place on getting involved with social and political issues that are important to them and using social media as a venue to share their political opinions.

There have been shifts in how much some users - particularly younger ones - view social media platforms as important for certain forms of online activism

The share of 18- to 29-year-old social media users who say that these platforms are at least somewhat important to them for finding other people who share their views about important topics has risen from 47% in 2018 to 59% today. There have also been double-digit increases among younger users when it comes to getting involved with political or social issues and having a venue to express their opinions. By comparison, there has been little to no change on these questions for social media users ages 30 or older.

Democrats are more likely to describe these platforms as important to them personally than in the past. Some 44% of Democrats said in 2018 they found social media to be at least somewhat important to them personally for getting involved with political or social issues, compared with 55% today. There have also been increases among Democrats when it comes to the importance of finding others on social media who share their views and giving them a place to express political opinion. However, there has been little or no change on these questions for Republican social media users.

And while there have been some changes on these questions by age or political affiliations, these shares for Black, white or Hispanic users are statistically unchanged since 2018.
Correction (July 24, 2020): An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that, among Hispanic social media users, there had been an increase since 2018 in the shares who say social media is very or somewhat important to them for finding others who share their views and that it is important to them for getting involved in social or political issues they care about. The differences were not statistically significant. Note: Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.

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Activism on social media varies by race and ethnicity, age, political party

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32% of U.S. social media users say they have used these sites in the past month to encourage others to take action on issues.

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Like whistleblower Frances Haugen, these Facebook employees warned about the company's problems for years. No one listened.

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Like whistleblower Frances Haugen, these Facebook employees warned about the company's problems for years. No one listened.

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Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen speaks during a Senate subcommittee hearing on Oct. 5. (Alex Brandon/AP)

Around the same time Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen was downloading tens of thousands of revealing company documents, another researcher from her division quit amid a mix of burnout and frustration. He too had lost hope that he could make change at Facebook.

2021 Election: Complete coverage and analysis

That employee, Brian Waismeyer, who like Haugen was a member of the company's integrity unit, broadcast his displeasure in a farewell post on the company's internal message board - a familiar venue for expressing the mounting dissent within a company whose own employees have become a formidable force for criticism. He said the social network made it "uniquely difficult" for people with jobs like his - reformers within a growth-focused social media service - "to the point that it impedes progress and burns out those who grapple with it."

The overall picture portrayed in these scathing farewell missives, many of which have been obtained by The Washington Post, echo accounts from dozens of current and former employees interviewed in recent days and over the past several years: Facebook is obsessed with growth, unwilling to undertake systemic reforms in the face of documented harms and ready to accommodate the politically powerful, especially President Donald Trump in the years before he was banned from the platform after the Jan. 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol.

The rising volume of such complaints has brought Facebook to a perilous moment in which it's being pilloried on a bipartisan basis in Washington and scrutinized by regulators across the world. A company that has endured a relentless string of controversies over its 17-year history while becoming ever-bigger, ever-richer now faces a broadening consensus that the time for self-regulation is long past; only forceful governmental action - in the United States and elsewhere - can curb the company's penchant for allowing content that undermines democracy and harms individuals.

Some saw Haugen's testimony - and the troves of documents she has shared with reporters and lawmakers - as steps toward that goal.

"I'm glad that these documents prove what many have been saying: Facebook's leadership prioritizes growth and political power over the public good - and anyone who tries to change that continuously hits a wall," said Yael Eisenstat, a former Facebook executive who has visited Congress and met with lawmakers to discuss how she battled senior leadership over an unwillingness to fact-check misinformation in political ads.

Zuckerberg defends allowing politicians to make false claims in ads

The former employees interviewed by The Post described their own painful journeys, from initial optimism that they could play a role in fixing the service to frustration at what they saw inside the company, and ultimately, to resignation that Facebook was unable to transform itself from within. In a handful of cases, they spoke out publicly, in Congress, or spirited away sensitive documents - sometimes the criticism made them persona non grata in the tech industry.

But most frequently they used the company's internal message board, called Workplace, to sound alarms to the company's 60,000 employees, in missives that were generally not available to the public. They spoke of the demoralization that arose after believing that they were on the front lines of protecting people from hate and online harm, only to see years' worth of internal projects cast aside by management. At least 10 members of the integrity division where Haugen worked now work in a similar division at Twitter.

"Selecting anecdotes from departing employees doesn't tell the story of how change happens at Facebook. Our integrity team is full of incredible professionals who make our platform better," Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne said. "Projects go through rigorous reviews and debates exactly so that we can be confident in any potential change and its impact on people. In fact, we did end up implementing variations of many of the ideas raised in this story - and we're grateful to everyone who has worked on these complex issues."

Some internal critics have mixed feelings about Haugen. While they welcome reforms that could come from airing so much dirty laundry, those still in the trenches feel it could become harder to execute change from within, according to three of the people. Some also felt that Haugen exaggerated her understanding of issues on which she did not work directly and research that she did not conduct; Haugen on several occasions during her testimony told senators that she could not respond to questions because she did not have direct knowledge.

Concerns that conditions could become more difficult for would-be reformers were bolstered by the reaction to Haugen's testimony of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who in the past routinely apologized for the company's missteps but has taken a more defiant stance this time. In a blog posted Tuesday night, he said that when corporate research is mischaracterized to the public it dissuades companies from examining their problems. "If we attack organizations making an effort to study their impact on the world, we're effectively sending the message that it's safer not to look at all, in case you find something that is held against you," he wrote, noting that the company was still committed to its research.

Though few of these former Facebook employees have spoken as publicly and potently as Haugen has, many have sat just offstage for months, sometimes years, roiling over what they saw while working at Facebook. Many contacted by The Post declined to speak or to speak only on the condition of anonymity to protect their current jobs or out of respect for former co-workers. When reached for comment, Waismeyer confirmed that he had written the note and that the description of his experience was accurate, but said he would decline to comment further "out of respect for the many wonderful people still fighting the good integrity fight" at Facebook.

When Waismeyer resigned in March, he had been one of the longest serving researchers in the company's integrity division, which came to encompass several subunits such as civic integrity and community integrity. During his more than three years in the integrity division, he had spent more than a year working on a project to help victims of revenge porn report such posts to the company, according to his final post and another person familiar with the situation. The project was abruptly dropped during an internal reorganization and was never executed, upsetting the entire team.

In his farewell post, Waismeyer wrote that people who work in integrity face particular burdens in their jobs. The value of their work is always weighed against potential PR and legal risks, as well as whether it would hurt the bottom line or diminish the amount of time people spend on the platform, he said. In addition, the work can be emotionally damaging because of the repeated exposure to harmful content or contact, via interviews or surveys, with people who have been harmed or who have harmed others on social media.

Another former employee - who like Waismeyer had worked in integrity - described discovering serious problems in Facebook's private groups, which operate beyond the public eye and have harbored hateful and other problematic content. This former employee hoped to help Facebook remedy such problems but repeatedly ran into barriers within.

"They were just zero percent interested in stuff that I brought them," this former employee said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "It was raised all the way up ... and was consistently stopped."

In November 2020, another integrity researcher, Lindsay Blackwell, wrote a long resignation letter on the company's chat system. Blackwell's project, called WoW, or the Worst of the Worst, was an effort to refine the company's hate speech detection algorithms after internal research found that users want Facebook to police some very harmful forms of hateful speech, such as attacks on Muslims or LGBTQ people, more rigorously than others, according to a person familiar with the project, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters. After the team spent more than a year engineering a solution to reorient the algorithms, managers and senior leaders dramatically redefined the project, arguing that prioritizing the safety of marginalized groups would be too political, the person said. Blackwell declined to comment.

Others described particular frustration at what they characterized as a pronounced rightward tilt of Facebook's policy office as Trump emerged as the Republican nominee for president in 2016 and, even more so, after he won the White House. Several former employees have described how a group of leading Republicans at the company's Washington office, led by former George W. Bush administration official Joel Kaplan, Facebook's vice president for global public policy, consistently resisted efforts to more aggressively combat misinformation, hate speech and incitement of violence for fear of alienating Trump and his supporters.The Post previously reported that Kaplan objected to some efforts to police false news reports on the grounds that they would "disproportionately affect conservatives."

Zuckerberg once wanted to sanction Trump. Then Facebook wrote rules that accommodated him.

Another former data scientist said executives resisted researchers' calls to identify the Proud Boys as a hate organization for at least four months before the company actually did so, out of concern that the Proud Boys had backing in the Republican Party.

"The Republicans on the public policy team, they made every single decision to avoid upsetting Trump," one former employee said. "They would just think of ways to make him happy so he wouldn't unload on them."

Facebook has contended with waves of public resignationsover company decisions in recent years. They followed the company's decision not to take down a racially divisive post by Trump, in May 2020, that appeared to endorse violence against people protesting the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was murdered in the custody of Minneapolis police. Still more people resigned after learning of the company's role in promoting groups and content that led to the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6.

But for people who work in divisions specifically designed to mitigate societal harms, particularly a subunit called civic integrity, where Haugen worked, people have left because they felt their work was undervalued or stymied.

Another person who worked in integrity said a team had discovered that it could make a significant dent in the amount of harmful speech on the platform if the algorithms meant to detect that speech were allowed to overcorrect - essentially, remove content that was suspected to be hate speech without being 100 percent sure of it. But executives canceled the effort, leaving the team demoralized. They made the call that they did not want to risk censoring people unfairly, even if doing so could significantly reduce hate speech and harm overall, the person said.

Several other people familiar with the work of the integrity unit said that teams were reorganized numerous times during a single year, and, ultimately, parts of it were disbanded, causing widespread frustration and leaving projects incomplete.

"We didn't join Facebook because we were big fans of the company," said one of the people. "We joined because - rather than shouting about how something sucks you think you can make it better. But over time, you realize that the leadership is either indifferent or ignorant. Sometimes they don't prioritize the work. Other times they don't understand the logistical complexity, so they under-resource it until it goes into the void."

correction

An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that former Facebook executive Yael Eisenstat testified before Congress about her negative experiences with the company. Eisenstat has spoken publicly against Facebook, met with lawmakers, and attended a congressional hearing with another tech industry whistleblower, but did not testify herself. This version has been updated.

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Like whistleblower Frances Haugen, these Facebook employees warned about the company's problems for years. No one listened.

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Around the same time Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen was downloading tens of thousands of revealing company documents, another researcher from her division quit amid a mix of burnout and frustration. He too had lost hope that he could make change at Facebook.

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A New, More Rigorous Study Confirms: The More You Use Facebook, the Worse You Feel

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A New, More Rigorous Study Confirms: The More You Use Facebook, the Worse You Feel

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A New, More Rigorous Study Confirms: The More You Use Facebook, the Worse You Feel

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Online social interactions are no substitute for the real thing.

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Facebook changed its name to Meta. But does that mean you should trust it?

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Facebook changed its name to Meta. But does that mean you should trust it?

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Facebook changed its name to Meta. But does that mean you should trust it?

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Months after TikTok apologized to Black creators, many say little has changed

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Months after TikTok apologized to Black creators, many say little has changed

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Months after TikTok apologized to Black creators, many say little has changed

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“Whether it’s Latino or Asian or whatever you are, I feel like it’s way harder to go up on TikTok if you are not white,” TikTok creator Noah Webster said.

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The case against Mark Zuckerberg: Insiders say Facebook's CEO chose growth over safety

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The case against Mark Zuckerberg: Insiders say Facebook's CEO chose growth over safety

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Zuckerberg's rolein the Vietnam decision, which has not been previously reported, exemplifies his relentless determination to ensure Facebook's dominance,sometimes at the expense of his stated values, according to interviews with more than a dozen former employees. That ethos has come under fire in a series of whistleblower complaints filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen.

While it's unclear whether the SEC will take the case or pursue action against the CEO personally, the allegations made by the whistleblower represent arguably the most profound challenge to Zuckerberg's leadership of the most powerful social media company on Earth.Experts said the SEC - which has the power to seek depositions, fine him and even remove him as chairman - is likely to dig more deeply into what he knew and when. Though his direct perspective is rarely reflected in the documents, the people who worked with him say his fingerprints are everywhere in them.

In particular, Zuckerberg made countless decisions and remarks that demonstrated a hard-line devotion to free speech. Even in Vietnam, the company says that the choice to censor is justified "to ensure our services remain available for millions of people who rely on them every day," according to a statement provided to The Post.

The documents - disclosures made to the SEC and provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen's legal counsel - were obtained and reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post.

In her congressional testimony, Haugen repeatedly accused Zuckerberg of choosing growth over the public good, an allegation echoed in interviews with the former employees.

"The specter of Zuckerberg looms in everything the company does," said Brian Boland, a former vice president of partnerships and marketing who left in 2020 after coming to believe that the platform was polarizing society. "It is entirely driven by him."

A Facebook spokeswoman, Dani Lever, denied that decisions made by Zuckerberg "cause harm," saying the claim was based on "selected documents that are mischaracterized and devoid of any context."

"We have no commercial or moral incentive to do anything other than give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible," she said. "Like every platform, we are constantly making difficult decisions between free expressions and harmful speech, security and other issues, and we don't make these decisions inside a vacuum - we rely on the input of our teams, as well as external subject matter experts to navigate them. But drawing these societal lines is always better left to elected leaders which is why we've spent many years advocating for Congress to pass updated Internet regulations."

Facebook has previously fought efforts to hold Zuckerberg personally accountable. In 2019, as the company was facing a record-breaking $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations related to Cambridge Analytica,a political consultancy that abused profile data from tens of millions of Facebook users, Facebook negotiated to protect Zuckerberg from direct liability. Internal Facebook briefing materials revealed the tech giant was willing to abandon settlement talks and duke it out in court if the agency insisted on pursuing the CEO.

Zuckerberg "has to be the driver of these decisions," said Sean McKessy, the first chief of the SEC's whistleblower office, now representing whistleblowers in private practice at Phillips & Cohen. "This is not a typical public company with checks and balances. This is not a democracy, it's an authoritarian state. ... And although the SEC doesn't have the strongest track record of holding individuals accountable, I certainly could see this case as being a poster child for doing so."

Zuckerberg, who is 37, founded Facebook 17 years ago in his college dorm room, envisioning a new way for classmates to connect with one another. Today, Facebook has become a conglomerate encompassing WhatsApp, Instagram and a hardware business. Zuckerberg is chairman of the board and controls 58 percent of the company's voting shares, rendering his power virtually unchecked internally at the company and by the board.

An ownership structure that gives a single leader a lock on the board's decision-making is "unprecedented at a company of this scale," said Marc Goldstein, head of U.S. research for the proxy adviser Institutional Shareholder Services. "Facebook at this point is by far the largest company to have all this power concentrated in one person's hands."

Zuckerberg has long been obsessed with metrics, growth and neutralizing competitive threats, according to numerous people who have worked with him. The company's use of "growth-hacking" tactics, such as tagging people in photos and buying lists of email addresses, was key to achieving its remarkable size - 3.51 billion monthly users, nearly half the planet. In Facebook's early years, Zuckerberg set annual targets for the number of users the company wanted to gain. In 2014, he ordered teams at Facebook to grow "time spent," or each user's minutes spent on the service, by 10 percent a year, according to the documents and interviews.

Politically, he has developed hard-line positions on free speech, announcing that he would allow politicians to lie in ads and at one time defending the rights of Holocaust denialists. He has publicly stated that he made the final call in the company's most sensitive content decisions to date, including allowing President Donald Trump's violence-inciting post during the George Floyd protests to stay up, despite objections from thousands of employees.

And his capacity for micromanagement is vast: He personally chose the colors and layout of the company's "I got vaccinated" frames for user profile pictures, according to two of the people.

Ahead of the 2020 U.S. election, Facebook built a "voting information center" that promoted factual information about how to register to vote or sign up to be a poll worker. Teams at WhatsApp wanted to create a version of it in Spanish, pushing the information proactively through a chat bot or embedded link to millions of marginalized voters who communicate regularly through WhatsApp. But Zuckerberg raised objections to the idea, saying it was not "politically neutral," or could make the company appear partisan, according to a person familiar with the project who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, as well as documents reviewed by The Post.

Ultimately, the company implemented a whittled-down version: a partnership with outside groups that allowed WhatsApp users to text a chat bot if they saw potential misinformation or to text a bot built by the organization Vote.org to get voting info.

"WhatsApp did not propose pushing information to all users, which is not how WhatsApp works," said spokeswoman Christina LoNigro.

After Zuckerberg agreed to increase censorship of anti-government posts, Facebook's transparency report shows that more than 2,200 posts by Vietnamese users were blocked between July and December 2020, compared with 834 in the previous six months. Pro-democracy and environmental groups, meanwhile, have become a target of government-led mass reporting campaigns, the documents and interviews show, landing people in jail for even mildly critical posts.

"Mark doesn't think we could go broad," said Anna Stepanov, the director giving the readout from the Zuckerberg meeting, about the CEO's response to the proposal to change the algorithm. "We wouldn't launch if there was a material trade-off with MSI."

Zuckerberg was a bit more open to a proposal to allow algorithms to be slightly less precise in what the software deemed to be hate speech, nudity and other banned categories - enabling it to delete a broader array of "probable violating content" and potentially reducing such harmful material by as much as 17 percent. But he only supported it as a "break the glass" measure, to be used in emergency situations such as the Jan. 6 insurrection, the documents said. Account demotions - which would have preemptively limited accounts that algorithms predicted were most likely to promote misinformation or hate - were off the table.

Facebook's Lever says "probable violating" proposals were not break the glass measures and the company did implement them across categories such as graphic violence, nudity and porn, and hostile speech. Later, it also implemented the algorithm change fully for political and health categories that are in place today.

The document that finally reached Zuckerberg was carefully tailored to address objections that researchers anticipated he would raise. For each of the nine suggestions that made their way up the chain, the data scientists added one row to list how the proposals would affect three areas he was known to care about: free speech, how Facebook is viewed publicly and how the algorithm change might affect MSI.

One former employee involved in that proposal process said those who worked on it were deflated by Zuckerberg's response. The researchers had gone back and forth with leadership for months on it, changing it many times to address concerns about clamping down on free speech.

Zuckerberg, said a former executive, "is extremely inquisitive about anything that impacts how content gets ranked in the feed - because that's the secret sauce, that's the way this whole thing keeps spinning and working and making profits."

"People felt, it was Mark's thing, so he needs it to be successful. It needs to work," the person added.

In 2019, those in the company's civic integrity division, a roughly 200-person team that focused on how to mitigate harms caused by the platform, began to hear that Zuckerberg himself was becoming very worried about "false positives" - or legitimate speech being taken down by mistake. They were soon asked to justify their work by providing estimates of how many "false positives" any integrity-related project was producing, according to one of the people.

"Our very existence is fundamentally opposed to the goals of the company, the goals of Mark Zuckerberg," said another person who quit. "And it made it so we had to justify our existence when other teams didn't."

"Founder-CEOs have superpowers that allow them to do courageous things. Mark has done that time and again," Samidh Chakrabarti, the former head of the company's civic integrity unit, who quit recently, tweeted this month. "But the trust deficit is real and the FB family may now better prosper under distributed leadership."

The former employees said it was also not surprising that the document trove contains so few references to Zuckerberg's thoughts. He has become more isolated in recent years, in the face of mounting scandals and leaks (Facebook disputes his isolation). He primarily communicates decisions through a small inner circle, known as the Small Team, and a slightly bigger group of company leaders known as M-Team, or Mark's team. Information that gets to him is also tightly controlled, as well as information about him.

Even criticizing Zuckerberg personally can come with costs. An engineer who spoke with The Post, and whose story was reflected in the documents, says he was fired in 2020 after penning an open letter to Zuckerberg on the company's chat system, accusing the CEO of responsibility for protecting conservatives whose accounts had been escalated for misinformation.

One document, a 2020 proposal that indicates it was sent to Zuckerberg for review - over whether to hide like counts on Instagram and Facebook - strongly suggests that Zuckerberg was directly aware of some of the research into harmful effects of the service. It included internal research from 2018 that found that 37 percent of teenagers said one reason that they stopped posting content was because wanting to get enough like counts caused them "stress or anxiety."

Though Biden later backed off his comment, some former executives saw Facebook's attack on the White House as unnecessary self-sabotage, an example of the company exercising poor judgment in an effort to please Zuckerberg.

But complaints about the brash action were met with a familiar response, three people said: It was meant to please the "audience of one."

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The case against Mark Zuckerberg: Insiders say Facebook's CEO chose growth over safety

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Zuckerberg's rolein the Vietnam decision, which has not been previously reported, exemplifies his relentless determination to ensure Facebook's dominance,sometimes at the expense of his stated values, according to interviews with more than a dozen former employees. That ethos has come under fire in a series of whistleblower complaints filed with the U.S.

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It's not just Facebook and Twitter. TikTok is 'hatescape' for racism and white supremacy, study says

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It's not just Facebook and Twitter. TikTok is 'hatescape' for racism and white supremacy, study says

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Of the 1,030 TikTok videos researchers analyzed, nearly a third amplified white supremacy.

Tiktok videos spewed hate about Asians, LGBTQ, migrants and refugees, women, Muslims and Jews.

Researchers warned exposure to extremism is dangerous because of TikTok's reach with kids and teens.

Extremists use TikTok features like video effects, video grid layout and music to promote hate.

Despite pledges to crack down on hatred, TikTok is still trafficking in short-form videos that promote white supremacy and anti-Black racism, according to a new study from the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

The counterextremism think tank says its study is the largest to examine hate on TikTok and raises new questions about how effectively the platform polices it.

Of the 1,030 videos researchers analyzed over three months in 2020, 312 - nearly a third - amplified white supremacy. The clips included support for genocide conspiracy theories that claim white people's existence is under threat and music from white power bands.

Three of the 10 most popular videos, viewed a combined 3.5 million times, were clips originally produced by Paul Miller, an extremist known as "Gypsy Crusader" who spreads racist and antisemitic rhetoric on social media.

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Miller, who was arrested earlier this year on charges of being a felon in possession of a firearm, can be seen in another video telling a Black person they're "as Black as the ace of spades." It was viewed 354,500 times before it was taken down.

"By and large, the majority of content in our sample did not achieve such views like this, but there was still a significant cluster that did and this raises questions over how TikTok's algorithms promote explicitly hateful content to users on the platform," strategic dialogue institute analyst Ciaran O'Connor told USA TODAY.

Though white supremacist videos were by far the largest category of content the study uncovered, the institute found an alarming number of videos spewing offensive content about Asians, LGBTQ people, migrants and refugees, women, Muslims and Jews.

Black people were also frequent targets of hate. Some videos mocked or celebrated the death of George Floyd, who was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020.

Others used racist terminology such as "jogger exterminator," a reference to the killing of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, who was chased and shot by white men last year while running in a neighborhood south of south of Savannah, Georgia. "Jogger" is an anti-Black slur used by far-right groups to refer to Black people.

Another video covered Black Lives Matters' closed fist symbol with a white hand in a Sieg Heil, the Nazi victory salute.

"Not only are communities, minorities or groups of people like African Americans being targeted, those who target them are also being praised, shared and glorified on the platform," O'Connor said.

Are kids, teens exposed to extremism on TikTok?

That, he says, can be dangerous, particularly with TikTok's wide reach among young people.

O'Connor says he regularly spotted watermarked links to white supremacist Telegram channels. In the comments, users would ask or advise others how to find extremist manifestos or additional materials.

"To think that young people are not only viewing such content that is hateful of communities and supportive of extremists, but also actively creating this content, too, is especially concerning," he said.

TikTok says it does not permit threats and incitement to violence, dangerous individuals or organizations, attacks or slurs based on protected characteristics, and hateful ideologies, and it says it removes any content that violates its rules, including video, audio, livestream, images, comments and text.

"TikTok categorically prohibits violent extremism and hateful behavior, and our dedicated team will remove any such content as it violates our policies and undermines the creative and joyful experience people expect on our platform," the company said in a statement. "We greatly value our collaboration with ISD and others whose critical research on industry-wide challenges helps strengthen how we enforce our policies to keep our platform safe and welcoming."

It said last year that it has "zero tolerance" for organized hate groups and those associated with them.

TikTok learned from Facebook but still has 'long way to go'

This isn't the first time TikTok has taken heat for racist and white supremacist content, though it has largely avoided the intense scrutiny that has stalked Facebook, Twitter and Google's YouTube which are under fire around the globe for amplifying hate speech.

Researchers say TikTok has learned from the troubles of more established social media companies and put in place comprehensive policies. But, said O'Connor, there is a "considerable enforcement gap."

"TikTok has shown signs that they've grown up," O'Connor said. "Their policies are quite robust. But this research shows they still have a way to go."

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue says TikTok removes hateful and extremist content but not consistently. Some 191 videos, 18.5% of all the videos ISD analyzed, were removed or were no longer available on TikTok by the end of the data collection period, but the rest stayed up.

"Policies are only as good as their application, and that application is currently lacking in accuracy, consistency and transparency, particularly around content that espouses support for white supremacy," O'Connor said.

TikTok said it removed "all remaining violative content."

Extremists hide activity using TikTok features

What's more, extremists use the platform's features - profiles, hashtags, share functions, video effects and music - to push their ideologies and cloak their activities.

Of the videos ISD analyzed, 279 contained music and 172 used video effects. A third of the videos referenced hate or extremism in the username, profile image or biography.

Extremists also latch on to certain hashtags to gain more views and engagement and regularly try to make it onto other users' "For You," the main video feed.

"The platform is being used exactly as TikTok designed it - video effects, music, hashtags are being used to tag, promote and group together content - but in this case, this activity is being used to promote hatred and extremism," O'Connor said.

To evade detection, TikTok creators turn their accounts private, restrict comments to followers only, or use alternative hashtag spellings. They also use the video grid layout to send hidden messages. One creator posted six videos, each containing a letter that spells out a racial slur.

If they are ejected from TikTok for violating its policies, they return to the platform with almost identical usernames, the institute found.

How much terrorist, antisemitic content is on TikTok? No one knows

How widespread is extremism on TikTok? It's impossible for researchers to determine because they don't have access to enough data. But, O'Connor said, "the promotion of hatred and support for extremism appears to be widespread."

Of the videos analyzed by the researchers, 246 videos - nearly a quarter - expressed support for extremists or terrorists, including glorification of Adolf Hitler and propaganda from the Islamic State group.

Researchers also uncovered terrorism footage of the 2019 Christchurch mosque attack in New Zealand as well as 30 videos that supported the attacker and three videos that featured video games recreating the tragic events.

The most-viewed video, seen 2 million times, promoted anti-Asian hatred linked to COVID-19. Two videos among the 10 most-viewed mocked victims and denied the Bosnian genocide and the Holocaust.

Hate against Black people was found in 139 videos. A dozen featured a white supremacist dressed in blackface or dressed as a police officer reenacting Floyd's murder. Two used visuals of Floyd with a voiceover denying the Holocaust. The Ku Klux Klan was also glorified, including one video that shows figures in white robes carrying a burning cross.

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It's not just Facebook and Twitter. TikTok is 'hatescape' for racism and white supremacy, study says

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Of the 1,030 TikTok videos researchers analyzed, nearly a third amplified white supremacy. Tiktok videos spewed hate about Asians, LGBTQ, migrants and refugees, women, Muslims and Jews. Researchers warned exposure to extremism is dangerous because of TikTok's reach with kids and teens. Extremists use TikTok features like video effects, video grid layout and music to promote hate.

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Leaked files show Facebook is in crisis mode over losing young people

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Leaked files show Facebook is in crisis mode over losing young people

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Earlier this year, a researcher at Facebook shared some alarming statistics with colleagues.

Teenage users of the Facebook app in the US had declined by 13 percent since 2019 and were projected to drop 45 percent over the next two years, driving an overall decline in daily users in the company's most lucrative ad market. Young adults between the ages of 20 and 30 were expected to decline by 4 percent during the same timeframe. Making matters worse, the younger a user was, the less on average they regularly engaged with the app. The message was clear: Facebook was losing traction with younger generations fast.

The "aging up issue is real," the researcher wrote in an internal memo. They predicted that, if "increasingly fewer teens are choosing Facebook as they grow older," the company would face a more "severe" decline in young users than it already projected.

The "aging up issue is real"

The findings, echoed by other internal documents and my conversations with current and former employees, show that Facebook sees its aging user base as an existential threat to the long-term health of its business and that it's trying desperately to correct the problem with little indication that its strategy will work. If it doesn't correct course, the 17-year-old social network could, for the first time, lose out on an entire generation. And while Instagram remains incredibly popular with teens, Facebook's own data shows that they are starting to engage with the app less.

The internal documents are part of disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by legal counsel for Frances Haugen, an ex-Facebook employee turned prominent whistleblower. A consortium of news organizations, including The Verge, has obtained the redacted versions received by Congress. Some documents served as the basis for earlier reporting in The Wall Street Journal.

Facebook's struggle to attract users under the age of 30 has been ongoing for years, dating back to as early as 2012. But according to the documents, the problem has grown more severe recently. And the stakes are high. While it famously started as a networking site for college students, employees have predicted that the aging up of the app's audience - now nearly 2 billion daily users - has the potential to further alienate young people, cutting off future generations and putting a ceiling on future growth.

The problem explains why the company has taken such a keen interest in courting young people and even pre-teens to its main app and Instagram, spinning up dedicated youth teams to cater to them. In 2017, it debuted a standalone Messenger app for kids, and its plans for a version of Instagram for kids were recently shelved after lawmakers decried the initiative.

At the same time, a rising crop of younger social networks has continued growing in popularity with young people - a phenomenon Facebook has closely tracked with its own research. In an internal presentation earlier this year, employees estimated that teens spend 2-3x more time on TikTok than on Instagram and that Snapchat is the preferred method of communicating with best friends for young people.

"Our products are still widely used by teens, but we face tough competition from the likes of Snapchat and TikTok," Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesperson, said in response to questions about the documents cited in this story. "All social media companies want teens to use their services. We are no different."

In March of this year, a team of data scientists at Facebook presented the company's chief product officer, Chris Cox, with "heath scorecards" for Facebook and Instagram's usage among teens and young adults. Instagram was still strong with young people but losing engagement in key markets, including the US, Australia, and Japan. And the age of Facebook's user base was increasing rapidly.

"A wide range of negative associations with Facebook"

"Most young adults perceive Facebook as a place for people in their 40s and 50s," according to the presentation. "Young adults perceive content as boring, misleading, and negative. They often have to get past irrelevant content to get to what matters." It added that they "have a wide range of negative associations with Facebook including privacy concerns, impact to their wellbeing, along with low awareness of relevant services."

The March presentation to Cox showed that, in the US, "teen acquisition is low and regressing further." Account registrations for users under 18 were down 26 percent from the previous year in the app's five top countries. For teens already on Facebook, the company was continuing to "see lower or worsening levels of engagement compared to older cohorts." Messages sent by teens were down 16 percent from the previous year, while messages sent by users aged 20-30 were flat.

A "particularly concerning trend," according to one slide, was that time spent in the Facebook app by young people in the US had declined from the period before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic last year, when usage of Facebook's services momentarily spiked across the board. Another slide described "addressing the existing engagement gap" between younger and older users, saying that people older than 30 in the US were spending, on average, 24 more minutes per day on Facebook than younger users.

"Average age will continue to increase, potentially disengaging younger users even more"

Facebook internally measures its user base against population estimates from the United Nations for specific countries. If the social network has the same amount of monthly users in an age bracket as what the estimates say for that region, it's fully saturated. The presentation to Cox explained that the average Facebook user age "has been increasing disproportionately to the average population age over time. If this continues, [the Facebook app's] average age will continue to increase, potentially disengaging younger users even more."

Instagram was doing better with young people, with full saturation in the US, France, the UK, Japan, and Australia. But there was still cause for concern. Posting by teens had dropped 13 percent from 2020 and "remains the most concerning trend," the researchers noted, adding that the increased use of TikTok by teens meant that "we are likely losing our total share of time."

To address the growing crisis, employees at Facebook and Instagram have, for the past year, been planning a slew of products tailored for teens and young adults, according to the internal documents. But they recognize that it's going to be an uphill battle on both platforms.

"A brand tax we need to get ahead of"

Young adults "feel Facebook shouldn't be the place for rants and charged opinions, even though it seems prevalent on the platform," according to a November 2020 strategy document about targeting young adults. "External forces such as negative media coverage further tarnish this perception," it continued, equating to "a brand tax we need to get ahead of."

In order to address the "significant risk" of young adults engaging less and less with Facebook over time, employees last November identified two "beached" areas of focus, allowing "us to establish credibility and gain trust for extension into future areas" like mental health products. They laid out a multi-year plan to "enable young adults to connect with mentors for professional guidance" and "engage in meaningful conversations around causes to take action locally with others."

Planned features included asking young people to update their friend networks to make them more relevant since their connections "are often dormant and they struggle to realize any value" from them after collecting hundreds of friends over the years. They began work to tweak the News Feed algorithm specifically for young adults, with the goal of testing the change as early as the second half of this year, in order to show them "unconnected" content from accounts they didn't choose to follow.

The employees also discussed letting young people set different profile identities that were specific to certain Facebook groups. Other products included a more visual version of the News Feed tentatively called Spotlight and "mood feeds" to increase "visitation and engagement."

The documents show that, as part of its youth push, Facebook has been working on an unreleased version of Facebook Groups called Groups+, slated in the November document to begin testing as soon as this year, that is intended to let people join groups for specific personalities and "close-knit communities" as a way to "increase cultural relevance." A whole pillar of products targeting people between the ages of 20 and 30 is focused on competing with LinkedIn, allowing people to host resumes and browse for jobs or career advice in a specialized feed.

Joe Osborne, the Facebook spokesperson, said, "We continuously explore new products and experiences for people, but these efforts either evolved or never left the exploration phase."

Seven percent of teens report experiencing bullying on Instagram

For Instagram, much of the product work targeting young people has recently focused on reducing the negative experiences of social comparison and bullying that they report. A presentation from earlier this year said that 7 percent of teens report experiencing bullying on Instagram and that 40 percent of all bullying happened in private messages. Other internal research documents, some of which were earlier reported on by The Wall Street Journal, show that teens have told the company they experience negative social comparison and even depression from using Instagram.

Sixty-one percent of new teen accounts on Instagram choose to make their profiles private on initial setup, the presentation said, adding that Instagram employees wanted to make "nudging" product tweaks to encourage more young users to set their accounts to private. The documents show that secondary, private "finsta" accounts have also been exploding in popularity, especially among Instagram's youngest users - behavior that employees want to encourage as a way to retain young people.

"Teens seek a way to connect with their friends, but don't want to share with all their followers," the company's researchers wrote in one recent document. "They want to easily share with just the people that they trust so that they feel seen, accepted, and validated."

Attracting young people and keeping them engaged remains top of mind inside Instagram. Adam Mosseri, the head of the app, in May told employees that Instagram's goal is to be "a place where young people define themselves and the future," according to The New York Times.

Losing young people wasn't always the existential threat for the blue Facebook app that it is now, according to Michael Sayman, a 25-year-old former product manager for youth products who joined the company in 2014 when he was just 17. With the rise of selfie cameras in phones, social apps became more visual while Facebook stayed mostly focused on text posts.

Copying Stories from Snapchat - which reduced the pressure people feel to share everyday snippets of their lives by making them disappear - has helped keep younger users on Instagram, as has encouraging the use of multiple accounts. But Facebook's use by young people has stayed on a consistent decline. By the time Sayman left in 2017, "the company had understood very clearly the importance," he told me. "It's an entire generation."

Nowadays, teens are increasingly flocking to more immersive, social game platforms like Fortnite or Sayman's current employer, Roblox. These 3D worlds with custom avatars appeal to young people who are looking to be online without the pressure of people judging their appearance or surroundings. And while a lot of traditional social media can feel like a performance, these virtual game worlds are fun. Incidentally, Facebook is planning to rebrand its corporate name to focus on the metaverse, which could partly be an effort to try to appeal to young people again.

For now, Facebook isn't even sure if its plans to win back young people are enough. As the March presentation to Cox bluntly said: "We believe it's too early to assess the effectiveness of our current suite of big bets for teens on Instagram and young adults on Facebook, and whether they are sufficient given the current competitive landscape."

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Leaked files show Facebook is in crisis mode over losing young people

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Earlier this year, a researcher at Facebook shared some alarming statistics with colleagues. Teenage users of the Facebook app in the US had declined by 13 percent since 2019 and were projected to drop 45 percent over the next two years, driving an overall decline in daily users in the company's most lucrative ad market.

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This story is part of a group of stories called

In June, the UK tabloid the Mirror published a story about a TikTok video that discussed "the four biggest dating app red flags," according to a creator named @sydneyplus, who said she worked at a dating site. Said red flags include standing in front of a fancy car (likely not their own), describing oneself as an "entrepreneur," or being weirdly obsessed with their mom. The article is a typical hastily written web post capitalizing on trending content in order to drive pageviews, and was later picked up by the New York Post. The only problem was that @sydneyplus doesn't work at a dating site, because @sydneyplus doesn't really exist.

"Sydney," a broke, blonde 20-something who lives on her sister's couch and works in customer service at a dating site, is the invention of a team of writers, one actress, and a technology/entertainment/media company called FourFront. Co-founded by a former screenwriter named Ilan Benjamin, the company has so far launched 22 "stories," or character arcs, eight of them ongoing since the spring. Sydney's "story," for example, was that she found out that her sister's fiancé was cheating, while Ollie, a trans man, discovers that his father also transitioned.

"We're basically creating an MCU-style universe of characters on TikTok," says Benjamin. "Some succeed, some fail - it's the TV pilot season model where we only invest in those that get traction and audiences love." The company says it's raised $1.5 million in seed funding so far.

Last week, Sydney, Ollie, and the rest of the characters - Tia, who discovers her boyfriend is African royalty; Carmen, a self-described sugar baby and bimbo; Chris, a father and Army veteran; and "Billy Hundos," a "finance fuckboy," among others - convened IRL in Los Angeles, ostensibly to participate in a contest to win a billion dollars. This also acted as FourFront's "big reveal," in which the characters hosted a live Zoom event and showed that they all exist within a single universe. In total, the characters have a combined 1.9 million followers and 281 million views.

Fictional influencers are not unique to the TikTok era. In June 2006, a soft-spoken 16-year-old named Bree began uploading video confessionals to YouTube under the username Lonelygirl15. Bree, however, was actually the invention of screenwriters Miles Beckett and Mesh Flinders, along with their lawyer-producer friend Greg Goodfried. (Interestingly, Goodfried is now the president of D'Amelio Family Enterprises, the company representing TikTokers Charli and Dixie D'Amelio.) Within months, millions of people tuned in, many turning to message boards to speculate about what was going on behind the scenes, and by September, sleuths had found trademark applications and pictures of the actress Jessica Rose, who played Bree. Some fans said they were "heartbroken" by the discovery, but the videos went on to air for another two years. Asked whether something like Lonelygirl15 could exist today, Flinders told the Guardian, "On YouTube now we wouldn't get away with this for 30 seconds. People would know she's fake immediately."

But perhaps that's less true for TikTok. While FourFront is adamant that most of its audience is aware that what they're watching is the work of actors and writers, that's nearly impossible to know for certain. "With everything that happened with QAnon and how alternate reality games have been weaponized, it's important that we made our universe light and playful - no cult content, no dark content, and every one of our characters is openly fictional," Benjamin says. Yet nearly all of the comments appear to engage with the characters just like they would with real TikTokers, giving advice and sharing reactions or their own experiences. Though FourFront has started using the hashtag #fictional on its videos and the word "fictional" in the characters' bios, to expect that users who come across one of their videos on their For You page to put the clues together is asking quite a lot, considering most TikTokers use unrelated hashtags in their posts to gain more traction and choose intentionally weird bios to set themselves apart.

As a commercial rather than purely artistic venture, FourFront told Fast Company that its long-term revenue plan is to license their AI character voices to other companies, and to make money with some kind of subscription model or by selling tickets to live events starring their characters. "Why can't I hang out with Harry Potter?" he said. "That's the question this whole company began with: Why can't we allow people to get closer to their favorite characters?"

The company also encourages its most invested followers to text their favorite characters on a separate messaging app and "unlock secrets," using the AI language GPT-3 to respond. With an earlier character Paige, whose story concept was "all my friends blocked me!," Benjamin says that when they told audiences at the beginning of the messaging session that it was a fictional story, 89 percent wanted to continue, and 42 percent "shared really intimate emotional data with the character." (Benjamin says they do not plan to sell that data, but instead use it to improve their own storytelling.)

Those characters, by the way, are conceptualized and written by Benjamin and a team of writers, mostly recent grads from USC's screenwriting program. Ollie's bio describes him as "made with love by (rainbow flag emoji) actors and creators," while Chris's says "made by veteran actors and creators." Actors, who film and direct themselves and then send footage to an editor, also contribute to the storylines. Cameisha Cotton, who plays Tia, says the idea was pitched to her agent in February as a web series, and that she'd done augmented reality projects beforehand. "They're incredibly collaborative," she says. "It's the coolest SAG project I've ever been able to be a part of."

FourFront is part of a larger wave of tech startups devoted to, as aspiring Zuckerbergs like to say, building the metaverse, which can loosely be defined as "the internet" but is more specifically the interconnected, augmented reality virtual space that real people share. It's an undoubtedly intriguing concept for people with a stake in the future of technology and entertainment, which is to say, the entirety of culture. It's also a bit of an ethical minefield: Isn't the internet already full of enough real-seeming content that is a) not real and b) ultimately an effort to make money? Are the characters exploiting the sympathies of well-meaning or media illiterate audiences? Maybe!

On the other hand, there's something sort of darkly refreshing about an influencer "openly" being created by a room of professional writers whose job is to create the most likable and interesting social media users possible. Influencers already have to walk the delicate line between aspirational and inauthentic, to attract new followers without alienating existing fans, to use their voice for change while remaining "brand-safe." The job has always been a performance; it's just that now that performance can be convincingly replicated by a team of writers and a willing actor.

"We're telling stories that are a little bit larger than life, and I think a lot of influencers on TikTok do the same thing," Benjamin says. It's true - determining whether viral TikTok videos are "real" or created in earnest rather than ironically is the platform's favorite sport. Tons of TikTokers play a character, to dramatic or comedic or aesthetic effect, but far fewer actually create a detailed narrative arc. If people really want to know whether someone like Sydney, Tia, or "Billy Hundos" is real, it's not immensely difficult to figure out. But they fooled at least two newspapers, and if one of their videos came across my For You page, they probably would have fooled me, too. It almost feels like benevolent trolling, a nicer version of, say, a tweet designed to provoke outrage but really only ends up driving engagement to that person's page. You sort of feel foolish taking the bait, but the internet is full of bizarre characters. How is anyone supposed to tell the difference?
This column was first published in The Goods newsletter. Sign up here so you don't miss the next one, plus get newsletter exclusives.

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What's the deal with fictional influencers?

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This story is part of a group of stories called In June, the UK tabloid the Mirror published a story about a TikTok video that discussed "the four biggest dating app red flags," according to a creator named @sydneyplus, who said she worked at a dating site.

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A fun product has the same downsides as booze. Instagram’s own internal research makes the case better than any critic.

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Why it feels like everything is going haywire

Suppose that the biblical story of Creation were true: God created the universe in six days, including all the laws of physics and all the physical constants that apply throughout the universe. Now imagine that one day, in the early 21st century, God became bored and, just for fun, doubled the gravitational constant. What would it be like to live through such a change? We'd all be pulled toward the floor; many buildings would collapse; birds would fall from the sky; the Earth would move closer to the sun, reestablishing orbit in a far hotter zone.

Let's rerun this thought experiment in the social and political world, rather than the physical one. The U.S. Constitution was an exercise in intelligent design. The Founding Fathers knew that most previous democracies had been unstable and short-lived. But they were excellent psychologists, and they strove to create institutions and procedures that would work with human nature to resist the forces that had torn apart so many other attempts at self-governance.

For example, in " Federalist No. 10," James Madison wrote about his fear of the power of "faction," by which he meant strong partisanship or group interest that "inflamed [men] with mutual animosity" and made them forget about the common good. He thought that the vastness of the United States might offer some protection from the ravages of factionalism, because it would be hard for anyone to spread outrage over such a large distance. Madison presumed that factious or divisive leaders "may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States." The Constitution included mechanisms to slow things down, let passions cool, and encourage reflection and deliberation.

Madison's design has proved durable. But what would happen to American democracy if, one day in the early 21st century, a technology appeared that-over the course of a decade-changed several fundamental parameters of social and political life? What if this technology greatly increased the amount of "mutual animosity" and the speed at which outrage spread? Might we witness the political equivalent of buildings collapsing, birds falling from the sky, and the Earth moving closer to the sun?

America may be going through such a time right now.

What Social Media Changed

Facebook's early mission was "to make the world more open and connected"-and in the first days of social media, many people assumed that a huge global increase in connectivity would be good for democracy. As social media has aged, however, optimism has faded and the list of known or suspected harms has grown: Online political discussions (often among anonymous strangers) are experienced as angrier and less civil than those in real life; networks of partisans co-create worldviews that can become more and more extreme; disinformation campaigns flourish; violent ideologies lure recruits.

The problem may not be connectivity itself but rather the way social media turns so much communication into a public performance. We often think of communication as a two-way street. Intimacy builds as partners take turns, laugh at each other's jokes, and make reciprocal disclosures. What happens, though, when grandstands are erected along both sides of that street and then filled with friends, acquaintances, rivals, and strangers, all passing judgment and offering commentary?

The social psychologist Mark Leary coined the term sociometer to describe the inner mental gauge that tells us, moment by moment, how we're doing in the eyes of others. We don't really need self-esteem, Leary argued; rather, the evolutionary imperative is to get others to see us as desirable partners for various kinds of relationships. Social media, with its displays of likes, friends, followers, and retweets, has pulled our sociometers out of our private thoughts and posted them for all to see.
Human beings evolved to gossip, preen, manipulate, and ostracize. We are easily lured into this new gladiatorial circus.
If you constantly express anger in your private conversations, your friends will likely find you tiresome, but when there's an audience, the payoffs are different-outrage can boost your status. A 2017 study by William J. Brady and other researchers at NYU measured the reach of half a million tweets and found that each moral or emotional word used in a tweet increased its virality by 20 percent, on average. Another 2017 study, by the Pew Research Center, showed that posts exhibiting "indignant disagreement" received nearly twice as much engagement -including likes and shares-as other types of content on Facebook.

The philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke have proposed the useful phrase moral grandstanding to describe what happens when people use moral talk to enhance their prestige in a public forum. Like a succession of orators speaking to a skeptical audience, each person strives to outdo previous speakers, leading to some common patterns. Grandstanders tend to "trump up moral charges, pile on in cases of public shaming, announce that anyone who disagrees with them is obviously wrong, or exaggerate emotional displays." Nuance and truth are casualties in this competition to gain the approval of the audience. Grandstanders scrutinize every word spoken by their opponents-and sometimes even their friends-for the potential to evoke public outrage. Context collapses. The speaker's intent is ignored.

Human beings evolved to gossip, preen, manipulate, and ostracize. We are easily lured into this new gladiatorial circus, even when we know that it can make us cruel and shallow. As the Yale psychologist Molly Crockett has argued, the normal forces that might stop us from joining an outrage mob-such as time to reflect and cool off, or feelings of empathy for a person being humiliated-are attenuated when we can't see the person's face, and when we are asked, many times a day, to take a side by publicly "liking" the condemnation.
From October 2018: America is living James Madison's nightmare
In other words, social media turns many of our most politically engaged citizens into Madison's nightmare: arsonists who compete to create the most inflammatory posts and images, which they can distribute across the country in an instant while their public sociometer displays how far their creations have traveled.

Upgrading the Outrage Machine

At its inception, social media felt very different than it does today. Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook all appeared between 2002 and 2004, offering tools that helped users connect with friends. The sites encouraged people to post highly curated versions of their lives, but they offered no way to spark contagious outrage. This changed with a series of small steps, designed to improve user experience, that collectively altered the way news and anger spread through American society. In order to fix social media-and reduce its harm to democracy-we must try to understand this evolution.

When Twitter arrived in 2006, its primary innovation was the timeline: a constant stream of 140-character updates that users could view on their phone. The timeline was a new way of consuming information-an unending stream of content that, to many, felt like drinking from a fire hose.

Later that year, Facebook launched its own version, called the News Feed. In 2009, it added the "Like" button, for the first time creating a public metric for the popularity of content. Then it added another transformative innovation: an algorithm that determined which posts a user would see, based on predicted "engagement"-the likelihood of an individual interacting with a given post, figuring in the user's previous likes. This innovation tamed the fire hose, turning it into a curated stream.

The News Feed's algorithmic ordering of content flattened the hierarchy of credibility. Any post by any producer could stick to the top of our feeds as long as it generated engagement. "Fake news" would later flourish in this environment, as a personal blog post was given the same look and feel as a story from The New York Times.

Twitter also made a key change in 2009, adding the "Retweet" button. Until then, users had to copy and paste older tweets into their status updates, a small obstacle that required a few seconds of thought and attention. The Retweet button essentially enabled the frictionless spread of content. A single click could pass someone else's tweet on to all of your followers-and let you share in the credit for contagious content. In 2012, Facebook offered its own version of the retweet, the "Share" button, to its fastest-growing audience: smartphone users.

Chris Wetherell was one of the engineers who created the Retweet button for Twitter. He admitted to BuzzFeed earlier this year that he now regrets it. As Wetherell watched the first Twitter mobs use his new tool, he thought to himself: "We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon."

The coup de grâce came in 2012 and 2013, when Upworthy and other sites began to capitalize on this new feature set, pioneering the art of testing headlines across dozens of variations to find the version that generated the highest click-through rate. This was the beginning of "You won't believe ..." articles and their ilk, paired with images tested and selected to make us click impulsively. These articles were not usually intended to cause outrage (the founders of Upworthy were more interested in uplift). But the strategy's success ensured the spread of headline testing, and with it emotional story-packaging, through new and old media alike; outrageous, morally freighted headlines proliferated in the following years. In Esquire, Luke O'Neil reflected on the changes wrought on mainstream media and declared 2013 to be "The Year We Broke the Internet." The next year, Russia's Internet Research Agency began mobilizing its network of fake accounts, across every major social-media platform-exploiting the new outrage machine in order to inflame partisan divisions and advance Russian goals.

The internet, of course, does not bear sole responsibility for the pitch of political anger today. The media have been fomenting division since Madison's time, and political scientists have traced a portion of today's outrage culture to the rise of cable television and talk radio in the 1980s and '90s. A multiplicity of forces are pushing America toward greater polarization. But social media in the years since 2013 has become a powerful accelerant for anyone who wants to start a fire.

The Decline of Wisdom

Even if social media could be cured of its outrage-enhancing effects, it would still raise problems for the stability of democracy. One such problem is the degree to which the ideas and conflicts of the present moment dominate and displace older ideas and the lessons of the past. As children grow up in America, rivers of information flow continually into their eyes and ears-a mix of ideas, narratives, songs, images, and more. Suppose we could capture and quantify three streams in particular: information that is new (created within the past month), middle-aged (created 10 to 50 years ago, by the generations that include the child's parents and grandparents), and old (created more than 100 years ago).
Citizens are now more connected to one another, on platforms that have been designed to make outrage contagious.
Whatever the balance of these categories was in the 18th century, the balance in the 20th century surely shifted toward the new as radios and television sets became common in American homes. And that shift almost certainly became still more pronounced, and quickly so, in the 21st century. When the majority of Americans began using social media regularly, around 2012, they hyper-connected themselves to one another in a way that massively increased their consumption of new information-entertainment such as cat videos and celebrity gossip, yes, but also daily or hourly political outrages and hot takes on current events-while reducing the share of older information. What might the effect of that shift be?

In 1790, the Anglo-Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke wrote, "We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages." Thanks to social media, we are embarking on a global experiment that will test whether Burke's fear is valid. Social media pushes people of all ages toward a focus on the scandal, joke, or conflict of the day, but the effect may be particularly profound for younger generations, who have had less opportunity to acquire older ideas and information before plugging themselves into the social-media stream.

Our cultural ancestors were probably no wiser than us, on average, but the ideas we inherit from them have undergone a filtration process. We mostly learn of ideas that a succession of generations thought were worth passing on. That doesn't mean these ideas are always right, but it does mean that they are more likely to be valuable, in the long run, than most content generated within the past month. Even though they have unprecedented access to all that has ever been written and digitized, members of Gen Z (those born after 1995 or so) may find themselves less familiar with the accumulated wisdom of humanity than any recent generation, and therefore more prone to embrace ideas that bring social prestige within their immediate network yet are ultimately misguided.

For example, a few right-wing social-media platforms have enabled the most reviled ideology of the 20th century to draw in young men hungry for a sense of meaning and belonging and willing to give Nazism a second chance. Left-leaning young adults, in contrast, seem to be embracing socialism and even, in some cases, communism with an enthusiasm that at times seems detached from the history of the 20th century. And polling suggests that young people across the political spectrum are losing faith in democracy.

Is There Any Way Back?

Social media has changed the lives of millions of Americans with a suddenness and force that few expected. The question is whether those changes might invalidate assumptions made by Madison and the other Founders as they designed a system of self-governance. Compared with Americans in the 18th century-and even the late 20th century-citizens are now more connected to one another, in ways that increase public performance and foster moral grandstanding, on platforms that have been designed to make outrage contagious, all while focusing people's minds on immediate conflicts and untested ideas, untethered from traditions, knowledge, and values that previously exerted a stabilizing effect. This, we believe, is why many Americans-and citizens of many other countries, too-experience democracy as a place where everything is going haywire.

It doesn't have to be this way. Social media is not intrinsically bad, and has the power to do good-as when it brings to light previously hidden harms and gives voice to previously powerless communities. Every new communication technology brings a range of constructive and destructive effects, and over time, ways are found to improve the balance. Many researchers, legislators, charitable foundations, and tech-industry insiders are now working together in search of such improvements. We suggest three types of reform that might help:
There was a time in American public life when atonement was seen as a form of strength-a way not only to own up to one's missteps but also to control the narrative. That time is over, Megan Garber writes.
(1) Reduce the frequency and intensity of public performance. If social media creates incentives for moral grandstanding rather than authentic communication, then we should look for ways to reduce those incentives. One such approach already being evaluated by some platforms is "demetrication," the process of obscuring like and share counts so that individual pieces of content can be evaluated on their own merit, and so that social-media users are not subject to continual, public popularity contests.

(2) Reduce the reach of unverified accounts. Bad actors-trolls, foreign agents, and domestic provocateurs-benefit the most from the current system, where anyone can create hundreds of fake accounts and use them to manipulate millions of people. Social media would immediately become far less toxic, and democracies less hackable, if the major platforms required basic identity verification before anyone could open an account-or at least an account type that allowed the owner to reach large audiences. (Posting itself could remain anonymous, and registration would need to be done in a way that protected the information of users who live in countries where the government might punish dissent. For example, verification could be done in collaboration with an independent nonprofit organization.)

(3) Reduce the contagiousness of low-quality information. Social media has become more toxic as friction has been removed. Adding some friction back in has been shown to improve the quality of content. For example, just after a user submits a comment, AI can identify text that's similar to comments previously flagged as toxic and ask, "Are you sure you want to post this?" This extra step has been shown to help Instagram users rethink hurtful messages. The quality of information that is spread by recommendation algorithms could likewise be improved by giving groups of experts the ability to audit the algorithms for harms and biases.

Many Americans may think that the chaos of our time has been caused by the current occupant of the White House, and that things will return to normal whenever he leaves. But if our analysis is correct, this will not happen. Too many fundamental parameters of social life have changed. The effects of these changes were apparent by 2014, and these changes themselves facilitated the election of Donald Trump.

If we want our democracy to succeed-indeed, if we want the idea of democracy to regain respect in an age when dissatisfaction with democracies is rising-we'll need to understand the many ways in which today's social-media platforms create conditions that may be hostile to democracy's success. And then we'll have to take decisive action to improve social media.
This article appears in the December 2019 print edition with the headline "Why It Feels Like Everything Is Going Haywire."

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violent ideologies lure recruits.the problem

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Why it feels like everything is going haywire Suppose that the biblical story of Creation were true: God created the universe in six days, including all the laws of physics and all the physical constants that apply throughout the universe.

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Skip to Content

"This is not normal. This is not healthy."

Update: After this story published, Facebook took down two of the five troll-farm pages we identified.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook's most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms. These pages were part of a larger network that collectively reached nearly half of all Americans, according to an internal company report, and achieved that reach not through user choice but primarily as a result of Facebook's own platform design and engagement-hungry algorithm.

The report, written in October 2019 and obtained by MIT Technology Review from a former Facebook employee not involved in researching it, found that after the 2016 election, Facebook failed to prioritize fundamental changes to how its platform promotes and distributes information. The company instead pursued a whack-a-mole strategy that involved monitoring and quashing the activity of bad actors when they engaged in political discourse, and adding some guardrails that prevented "the worst of the worst."

But this approach did little to stem the underlying problem, the report noted. Troll farms-professionalized groups that work in a coordinated fashion to post provocative content, often propaganda, to social networks-were still building massive audiences by running networks of Facebook pages. Their content was reaching 140 million US users per month-75% of whom had never followed any of the pages. They were seeing the content because Facebook's content-recommendation system had pushed it into their news feeds.

"Instead of users choosing to receive content from these actors, it is our platform that is choosing to give [these troll farms] an enormous reach," wrote the report's author, Jeff Allen, a former senior-level data scientist at Facebook.

Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesperson, said in a statement that the company "had already been investigating these topics" at the time of Allen's report, adding: "Since that time, we have stood up teams, developed new policies, and collaborated with industry peers to address these networks. We've taken aggressive enforcement actions against these kinds of foreign and domestic inauthentic groups and have shared the results publicly on a quarterly basis."

In the process of fact-checking this story shortly before publication, MIT Technology Review found that five of the troll-farm pages mentioned in the report remained active.

This is the largest troll-farm page targeting African-Americans in October 2019. It still remains active on Facebook.

The report found that troll farms were reaching the same demographic groups singled out by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) during the 2016 election, which had targeted Christians, Black Americans, and Native Americans. A 2018 BuzzFeed News investigation found that at least one member of the Russian IRA, indicted for alleged interference in the 2016 US election, had also visited Macedonia around the emergence of its first troll farms, though it didn't find concrete evidence of a connection. (Facebook said its investigations hadn't turned up a connection between the IRA and Macedonian troll farms either.)

"This is not normal. This is not healthy," Allen wrote. "We have empowered inauthentic actors to accumulate huge followings for largely unknown purposes ... The fact that actors with possible ties to the IRA have access to huge audience numbers in the same demographic groups targeted by the IRA poses an enormous risk to the US 2020 election."

As long as troll farms found success in using these tactics, any other bad actor could too, he continued: "If the Troll Farms are reaching 30M US users with content targeted to African Americans, we should not at all be surprised if we discover the IRA also currently has large audiences there."

Allen wrote the report as the fourth and final installment of a year-and-a-half-long effort to understand troll farms. He left the company that same month, in part because of frustration that leadership had "effectively ignored" his research, according to the former Facebook employee who supplied the report. Allen declined to comment.

The report reveals the alarming state of affairs in which Facebook leadership left the platform for years, despite repeated public promises to aggressively tackle foreign-based election interference. MIT Technology Review is making the full report available, with employee names redacted, because it is in the public interest.

Its revelations include:

As of October 2019, around 15,000 Facebook pages with a majority US audience were being run out of Kosovo and Macedonia, known bad actors during the 2016 election.

Collectively, those troll-farm pages-which the report treats as a single page for comparison purposes-reached 140 million US users monthly and 360 million global users weekly. Walmart's page reached the second-largest US audience at 100 million.

The troll farm pages also combined to form:
the largest Christian American page on Facebook, 20 times larger than the next largest-reaching 75 million US users monthly, 95% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

the largest African-American page on Facebook, three times larger than the next largest-reaching 30 million US users monthly, 85% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

the second-largest Native American page on Facebook, reaching 400,000 users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

the fifth-largest women's page on Facebook, reaching 60 million US users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

Troll farms primarily affect the US but also target the UK, Australia, India, and Central and South American countries.

Facebook has conducted multiple studies confirming that content more likely to receive user engagement (likes, comments, and shares) is more likely of a type known to be bad. Still, the company has continued to rank content in user's newsfeeds according to what will receive the highest engagement.

Facebook forbids pages from posting content merely copied and pasted from other parts of the platform but does not enforce the policy against known bad actors. This makes it easy for foreign actors who do not speak the local language to post entirely copied content and still reach a massive audience. At one point, as many as 40% of page views on US pages went to those featuring primarily unoriginal content or material of limited originality.

Troll farms previously made their way into Facebook's Instant Articles and Ad Breaks partnership programs, which are designed to help news organizations and other publishers monetize their articles and videos. At one point, thanks to a lack of basic quality checks, as many as 60% of Instant Article reads were going to content that had been plagiarized from elsewhere. This made it easy for troll farms to mix in unnoticed, and even receive payments from Facebook.

How Facebook enables troll farms and grows their audiences

The report looks specifically at troll farms based in Kosovo and Macedonia, which are run by people who don't necessarily understand American politics. Yet because of the way Facebook's newsfeed reward systems are designed, they can still have a significant impact on political discourse.

In the report, Allen identifies three reasons why these pages are able to gain such large audiences. First, Facebook doesn't penalize pages for posting completely unoriginal content. If something has previously gone viral, it will likely go viral again when posted a second time. This makes it really easy for anyone to build a massive following among Black Americans, for example. Bad actors can simply copy viral content from Black Americans' pages, or even Reddit and Twitter, and paste it onto their own page-or sometimes dozens of pages.

Second, Facebook pushes engaging content on pages to people who don't follow them. When users' friends comment on or reshare posts on one of these pages, those users will see it in their newsfeeds too. The more a page's content is commented on or shared, the more it travels beyond its followers. This means troll farms, whose strategy centers on reposting the most engaging content, have an outsize ability to reach new audiences.

Third, Facebook's ranking system pushes more engaging content higher up in users' newsfeeds. For the most part, the people who run troll farms have financial rather than political motives; they post whatever receives the most engagement, with little regard to the actual content. But because misinformation, clickbait, and politically divisive content is more likely to receive high engagement (as Facebook's own internal analyses acknowledge), troll farms gravitate to posting more of it over time, the report says.

As a result, in October 2019, all 15 of the top pages targeting Christian Americans, 10 of the top 15 Facebook pages targeting Black Americans, and four of the top 12 Facebook pages targeting Native Americans were being run by troll farms.

"Our platform has given the largest voice in the Christian American community to a handful of bad actors, who, based on their media production practices, have never been to church," Allen wrote. "Our platform has given the largest voice in the African American community to a handful of bad actors, who, based on their media production practices, have never had an interaction with an African American."

"It will always strike me as profoundly weird ... and genuinely horrifying," he wrote. "It seems quite clear that until that situation can be fixed, we will always be feeling serious headwinds in trying to accomplish our mission."

The report also suggested a possible solution. "This is far from the first time humanity has fought bad actors in our media ecosystems," he wrote, pointing to Google's use of what's known as a graph-based authority measure-which assesses the quality of a web page according to how often it cites and is cited by other quality web pages-to demote bad actors in its search rankings.

"We have our own implementation of a graph-based authority measure," he continued. If the platform gave more consideration to this existing metric in ranking pages, it could help flip the disturbing trend in which pages reach the widest audiences.

When Facebook's rankings prioritize engagement, troll-farm pages beat out authentic pages, Allen wrote. But "90% of Troll Farm Pages have exactly 0 Graph Authority ... [Authentic pages] clearly win."

Systemic issues

A search of all the troll-farm pages listed in the report reveals that five are still active nearly two years later:

A page called "My Baby Daddy Ain't Shit," which was the largest Facebook page targeting African-Americans in October 2019.

A page called "Savage Hood," targeting African-Americans.

A page called "Hood Videos," targeting African-Americans.

A page called "Purpose of Life," targeting Christians.

A page called "Eagle Spirit," targeting Native Americans.

A troll-farm page targeting Christian Americans.

Facebook's recent controversial "Widely Viewed Content" report suggests that some of the core vulnerabilities the troll farms exploited also remain. Fifteen of the 19 most viewed posts listed in the report were plagiarized from other posts that had previously gone viral on Facebook or another platform, according to an analysis from Casey Newton at The Verge.

Samantha Bradshaw, a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University who studies the intersection of disinformation, social media, and democracy, says the report "speaks to a lot of the deeper systemic problems with the platform and their algorithm in the way that they promote certain kinds of content to certain users, all just based on this underlying value of growth." If those are not fixed, they will continue to create distorted, economic incentives for bad actors, she adds: "That's the problem."

Read the full report here:

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Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows

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Skip to Content "This is not normal. This is not healthy." Update: After this story published, Facebook took down two of the five troll-farm pages we identified.

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Troll farms: not the stuff of fairy tales

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Troll farms: not the stuff of fairy tales

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Troll farms: not the stuff of fairy tales

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When you think of the term troll farm, what comes to mind? Maybe a scene in a sci-fi book or a game to download onto your phone. But don't be fooled: the dangerous consequences of troll farms are real and serious.

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The Future of Free Speech, Trolls, Anonymity and Fake News Online

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The Future of Free Speech, Trolls, Anonymity and Fake News Online

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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The internet supports a global ecosystem of social interaction. Modern life revolves around the network, with its status updates, news feeds, comment chains, political advocacy, omnipresent reviews, rankings and ratings. For its first few decades, this connected world was idealized as an unfettered civic forum: a space where disparate views, ideas and conversations could constructively converge. Its creators were inspired by the optimism underlying Stuart Brand's WELL in 1985, Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web and Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow's 1996 "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace." They expected the internet to create a level playing field for information sharing and communal activity among individuals, businesses, other organizations and government actors.

Since the early 2000s, the wider diffusion of the network, the dawn of Web 2.0 and social media's increasingly influential impacts, and the maturation of strategic uses of online platforms to influence the public for economic and political gain have altered discourse. In recent years, prominent internet analysts and the public at large have expressed increasing concerns that the content, tone and intent of online interactions have undergone an evolution that threatens its future and theirs. Events and discussions unfolding over the past year highlight the struggles ahead. Among them:

Respected internet pundit John Naughton asked in The Guardian, "Has the internet become a failed state?" and mostly answered in the affirmative.

The U.S. Senate heard testimony on the increasingly effective use of social media for the advancement of extremist causes, and there was growing attention to how social media are becoming weaponized by terrorists, creating newly effective kinds of propaganda.

Scholars provided evidence showing that social bots were implemented in acts aimed at disrupting the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And news organizations documented how foreign trolls bombarded U.S. social media with fake news. A December 2016 Pew Research Center study found that about two-in-three U.S. adults (64%) say fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events.

A May 2016 Pew Research Center report showed that 62% of Americans get their news from social media. Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times argued that the "internet is loosening our grip on the truth." And his colleague Thomas B. Edsall curated a lengthy list of scholarly articles after the election that painted a picture of how the internet was jeopardizing democracy.

2016 was the first year that an internet meme made its way into the Anti-Defamation League's database of hate symbols.

Time magazine devoted a 2016 cover story to explaining "why we're losing the internet to the culture of hate."

Celebrity social media mobbing intensified. One example: "Ghostbusters" actor and Saturday Night Live cast member Leslie Jones was publicly harassed on Twitter and had her personal website hacked.

An industry report revealed how former Facebook workers suppressed conservative news content.

Multiple news stories indicated that state actors and governments increased their efforts to monitor users of instant messaging and social media

The Center on the Future of War started the Weaponized Narrative Initiative.

Many experts documented the ways in which "fake news" and online harassment might be more than social media "byproducts" because they help to drive revenue.

#Pizzagate, a case study, revealed how disparate sets of rumors can combine to shape public discourse and, at times, potentially lead to dangerous behavior.

Scientific American carried a nine-author analysis of the influencing of discourse by artificial intelligence (AI) tools, noting, "We are being remotely controlled ever more successfully in this manner. ... The trend goes from programming computers to programming people ... a sort of digital scepter that allows one to govern the masses efficiently without having to involve citizens in democratic processes."

Google (with its Perspective API), Twitter and Facebook are experimenting with new ways to filter out or label negative or misleading discourse.

Researchers are exploring why people troll.

And a drumbeat of stories out of Europe covered how governments are attempting to curb fake news and hate speech but struggling to reconcile their concerns with sweeping free speech rules that apply in America.

To illuminate current attitudes about the potential impacts of online social interaction over the next decade, Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center conducted a large-scale canvassing of technology experts, scholars, corporate practitioners and government leaders. Some 1,537 responded to this effort between July 1 and Aug. 12, 2016 (prior to the late-2016 revelations about potential manipulation of public opinion via hacking of social media). They were asked:
In the next decade, will public discourse online become more or less shaped by bad actors, harassment, trolls, and an overall tone of griping, distrust, and disgust?
In response to this question, 42% of respondents indicated that they expect "no major change" in online social climate in the coming decade and 39% said they expect the online future will be "more shaped" by negative activities. Those who said they expect the internet to be "less shaped" by harassment, trolling and distrust were in the minority. Some 19% said this. Respondents were asked to elaborate on how they anticipate online interaction progressing over the next decade. (See "About this canvassing of experts" for further details about the limits of this sample.)

Participants were also asked to explain their answers in a written elaboration and asked to consider the following prompts: 1) How do you expect social media and digital commentary will evolve in the coming decade? 2) Do you think we will see a widespread demand for technological systems or solutions that encourage more inclusive online interactions? 3) What do you think will happen to free speech? And 4) What might be the consequences for anonymity and privacy?

While respondents expressed a range of opinions from deep concern to disappointment to resignation to optimism, most agreed that people - at their best and their worst - are empowered by networked communication technologies. Some said the flame wars and strategic manipulation of the zeitgeist might just be getting started if technological and human solutions are not put in place to bolster diverse civil discourse.

A number of respondents predicted online reputation systems and much better security and moderation solutions will become near ubiquitous in the future, making it increasingly difficult for "bad actors" to act out disruptively. Some expressed concerns that such systems - especially those that remove the ability to participate anonymously online - will result in an altered power dynamic between government/state-level actors, the elites and "regular" citizens.

Anonymity, a key affordance of the early internet, is an element that many in this canvassing attributed to enabling bad behavior and facilitating "uncivil discourse" in shared online spaces. The purging of user anonymity is seen as possibly leading to a more inclusive online environment and also setting the stage for governments and dominant institutions to even more freely employ surveillance tools to monitor citizens, suppress free speech and shape social debate.

Most experts predicted that the builders of open social spaces on global communications networks will find it difficult to support positive change in "cleaning up" the real-time exchange of information and sharing of diverse ideologies over the next decade, as millions more people around the world become connected for the first time and among the billions already online are many who compete in an arms race of sorts to hack and subvert corrective systems.

Those who believe the problems of trolling and other toxic behaviors can be solved say the cure might also be quite damaging. "One of the biggest challenges will be finding an appropriate balance between protecting anonymity and enforcing consequences for the abusive behavior that has been allowed to characterize online discussions for far too long," explained expert respondent Bailey Poland, author of "Haters: Harassment, Abuse, and Violence Online."

The majority in this canvassing were sympathetic to those abused or misled in the current online environment while expressing concerns that the most likely solutions will allow governments and big businesses to employ surveillance systems that monitor citizens, suppress free speech and shape discourse via algorithms, allowing those who write the algorithms to sculpt civil debate.

Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst at Altimeter Group, walked through a future scenario of tit-for-tat, action-reaction that ends in what she calls a "Potemkin internet." She wrote: "In the next several years we will see an increase in the type and volume of bad behavior online, mostly because there will be a corresponding increase in digital activity. ... Cyberattacks, doxing, and trolling will continue, while social platforms, security experts, ethicists, and others will wrangle over the best ways to balance security and privacy, freedom of speech, and user protections. A great deal of this will happen in public view. The more worrisome possibility is that privacy and safety advocates, in an effort to create a more safe and equal internet, will push bad actors into more-hidden channels such as Tor. Of course, this is already happening, just out of sight of most of us. The worst outcome is that we end up with a kind of Potemkin internet in which everything looks reasonably bright and sunny, which hides a more troubling and less transparent reality."

One other point of context for this non-representative sample of a particular population: While the question we posed was not necessarily aimed at getting people's views about the role of political material in online social spaces, it inevitably drew commentary along those lines because this survey was fielded in the midst of a bitter, intense election in the United States where one of the candidates, in particular, was a provocative user of Twitter.

Most participants in this canvassing wrote detailed elaborations explaining their positions. Their well-considered comments provide insights about hopeful and concerning trends. They were allowed to respond anonymously, and many chose to do so.

These findings do not represent all points of view possible, but they do reveal a wide range of striking observations. Respondents collectively articulated four "key themes" that are introduced and briefly explained below and then expanded upon in more-detailed sections.

The following section presents a brief overview of the most evident themes extracted from the written responses, including a small selection of representative quotes supporting each point. Some responses are lightly edited for style or due to length.

Theme 1: Things will stay bad because to troll is human; anonymity abets anti-social behavior; inequities drive at least some of the inflammatory dialogue; and the growing scale and complexity of internet discourse makes this difficult to defeat

While some respondents saw issues with uncivil behavior online on somewhat of a plateau at the time of this canvassing in the summer of 2016 and a few expect solutions will cut hate speech, misinformation and manipulation, the vast majority shared at least some concerns that things could get worse, thus two of the four overarching themes of this report start with the phrase, "Things will stay bad."

A number of expert respondents observed that negative online discourse is just the latest example of the many ways humans have exercised social vitriol for millennia. Jerry Michalski, founder at REX, wrote, "I would very much love to believe that discourse will improve over the next decade, but I fear the forces making it worse haven't played out at all yet. After all, it took us almost 70 years to mandate seatbelts. And we're not uniformly wise about how to conduct dependable online conversations, never mind debates on difficult subjects. In that long arc of history that bends toward justice, particularly given our accelerated times, I do think we figure this out. But not within the decade."

Vint Cerf, Internet Hall of Fame member, Google vice president and co-inventor of the Internet Protocol, summarized some of the harmful effects of disruptive discourse:

"The internet is threatened with fragmentation," he wrote. "... People feel free to make unsupported claims, assertions, and accusations in online media. ... As things now stand, people are attracted to forums that align with their thinking, leading to an echo effect. This self-reinforcement has some of the elements of mob (flash-crowd) behavior. Bad behavior is somehow condoned because 'everyone' is doing it. ... It is hard to see where this phenomenon may be heading. ... Social media bring every bad event to our attention, making us feel as if they all happened in our back yards - leading to an overall sense of unease. The combination of bias-reinforcing enclaves and global access to bad actions seems like a toxic mix. It is not clear whether there is a way to counter-balance their socially harmful effects."

Subtheme: Trolls have been with us since the dawn of time; there will always be some incivility

An anonymous respondent commented, "The tone of discourse online is dictated by fundamental human psychology and will not easily be changed." This statement reflects the attitude of expert internet technologists, researchers and pundits, most of whom agree that it is the people using the network, not the network, that is the root of the problem.

Paul Jones, clinical professor and director of ibiblio.org at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, commented, "The id unbound from the monitoring and control by the superego is both the originator of communication and the nemesis of understanding and civility."

John Cato, a senior software engineer, wrote, "Trolling for arguments has been an internet tradition since Usenet. Some services may be able to mitigate the problem slightly by forcing people to use their real identities, but wherever you have anonymity you will have people who are there just to make other people angry."

And an anonymous software engineer explained why the usual level of human incivility has been magnified by the internet, noting, "The individual's voice has a much higher perceived value than it has in the past. As a result, there are more people who will complain online in an attempt to get attention, sympathy, or retribution."

Subtheme: Trolling and other destructive behaviors often result because people do not recognize or don't care about the consequences flowing from their online actions

Michael Kleeman, formerly with the Boston Consulting Group, Arthur D. Little and Sprint, now senior fellow at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California, San Diego, explained: "Historically, communities of practice and conversation had other, often physical, linkages that created norms of behavior. And actors would normally be identified, not anonymous. Increased anonymity coupled with an increase in less-than-informed input, with no responsibility by the actors, has tended and will continue to create less open and honest conversations and more one-sided and negative activities."

An expert respondent who chose not to be identified commented, "People are snarky and awful online in large part because they can be anonymous." And another such respondent wrote, "Trolls now know that their methods are effective and carry only minimal chance of social stigma and essentially no other punishment. If Gamergate can harass and dox any woman with an opinion and experience no punishment as a result, how can things get better?"

Anonymously, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) commented, "We see a dark current of people who equate free speech with the right to say anything, even hate speech, even speech that does not sync with respected research findings. They find in unmediated technology a place where their opinions can have a multiplier effect, where they become the elites."

Subtheme: Inequities drive at least some of the inflammatory dialogue

Some leading participants in this canvassing said the tone of discourse will worsen in the next decade due to inequities and prejudice, noting wealth disparity, the hollowing out of the middle class, and homophily (the tendency of people to bond with those similar to themselves and thus also at times to shun those seen as "the other").

Cory Doctorow, writer, computer science activist-in-residence at MIT Media Lab and co-owner of Boing Boing, offered a bleak assessment, writing, " Thomas Piketty, etc., have correctly predicted that we are in an era of greater social instability created by greater wealth disparity which can only be solved through either the wealthy collectively opting for a redistributive solution (which feels unlikely) or everyone else compelling redistribution (which feels messy, unstable, and potentially violent). The internet is the natural battleground for whatever breaking point we reach to play out, and it's also a useful surveillance, control, and propaganda tool for monied people hoping to forestall a redistributive future. The Chinese internet playbook - the 50c army, masses of astroturfers, libel campaigns against 'enemies of the state,' paranoid war-on-terror rhetoric - has become the playbook of all states, to some extent (see, e.g., the HB Gary leak that revealed U.S. Air Force was putting out procurement tenders for 'persona management' software that allowed their operatives to control up to 20 distinct online identities, each). That will create even more inflammatory dialogue, flamewars, polarized debates, etc."

And an anonymous professor at MIT remarked, "Traditional elites have lost their credibility because they have become associated with income inequality and social injustice. ... This dynamic has to shift before online life can play a livelier part in the life of the polity. I believe that it will, but slowly."

Axel Bruns, a professor at the Queensland University of Technology's Digital Media Research Centre, said, "Unfortunately, I see the present prevalence of trolling as an expression of a broader societal trend across many developed nations, towards belligerent factionalism in public debate, with particular attacks directed at women as well as ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities."

Subtheme: The ever-expanding scale of internet discourse and its accelerating complexity make it difficult to deal with problematic content and contributors

As billions more people are connected online and technologies such as AI chatbots, the Internet of Things, and virtual and augmented reality continue to mature, complexity is always on the rise. Some respondents said well-intentioned attempts to raise the level of discourse are less likely to succeed in a rapidly changing and widening information environment.

Matt Hamblen, senior editor at Computerworld, commented, "[By 2026] social media and other forms of discourse will include all kinds of actors who had no voice in the past; these include terrorists, critics of all kinds of products and art forms, amateur political pundits, and more."

An anonymous respondent wrote, "Bad actors will have means to do more, and more significant bad actors will be automated as bots are funded in extra-statial ways to do more damage - because people are profiting from this."

Jessica Vitak, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, commented, "Social media's affordances, including increased visibility and persistence of content, amplify the volume of negative commentary. As more people get internet access - and especially smartphones, which allow people to connect 24/7 - there will be increased opportunities for bad behavior."

Bryan Alexander, president of Bryan Alexander Consulting, added, "The number of venues will rise with the expansion of the Internet of Things and when consumer-production tools become available for virtual and mixed reality."

Theme 2: Things will stay bad because tangible and intangible economic and political incentives support trolling. Participation = power and profits

Many respondents said power dynamics push trolling along. The business model of social media platforms is driven by advertising revenues generated by engaged platform users. The more raucous and incendiary the material, at times, the more income a site generates. The more contentious a political conflict is, the more likely it is to be an attention getter. Online forums lend themselves to ever-more hostile arguments.

Subtheme: 'Hate, anxiety, and anger drive participation,' which equals profits and power, so online social platforms and mainstream media support and even promote uncivil acts

Frank Pasquale, professor of law at the University of Maryland and author of "Black Box Society," commented, "The major internet platforms are driven by a profit motive. Very often, hate, anxiety and anger drive participation with the platform. Whatever behavior increases ad revenue will not only be permitted, but encouraged, excepting of course some egregious cases."

Kate Crawford, a well-known internet researcher studying how people engage with networked technologies, observed, "Distrust and trolling is happening at the highest levels of political debate, and the lowest. The Overton Window has been widened considerably by the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, and not in a good way. We have heard presidential candidates speak of banning Muslims from entering the country, asking foreign powers to hack former White House officials, retweeting neo-Nazis. Trolling is a mainstream form of political discourse."

Andrew Nachison, founder at We Media, said, "It's a brawl, a forum for rage and outrage. It's also dominated social media platforms on the one hand and content producers on the other that collude and optimize for quantity over quality. Facebook adjusts its algorithm to provide a kind of quality - relevance for individuals. But that's really a ruse to optimize for quantity. The more we come back, the more money they make off of ads and data about us. So the shouting match goes on. I don't know that prevalence of harassment and 'bad actors' will change - it's already bad - but if the overall tone is lousy, if the culture tilts negative, if political leaders popularize hate, then there's good reason to think all of that will dominate the digital debate as well."

Subtheme: Technology companies have little incentive to rein in uncivil discourse, and traditional news organizations - which used to shape discussions - have shrunk in importance

Several of the expert respondents said because algorithmic solutions tend "to reward that which keeps us agitated," it is especially damaging that the pre-internet news organizations that once employed fairly objective and well-trained (if not well-paid) armies of arbiters as democratic shapers of the defining climate of social and political discourse have fallen out of favor, replaced by creators of clickbait headlines read and shared by short-attention-span social sharers.

David Clark, a senior research scientist at MIT and Internet Hall of Famer commented that he worries over the loss of character in the internet community. "It is possible, with attention to the details of design that lead to good social behavior, to produce applications that better regulate negative behavior," he wrote. "However, it is not clear what actor has the motivation to design and introduce such tools. The application space on the internet today is shaped by large commercial actors, and their goals are profit-seeking, not the creation of a better commons. I do not see tools for public discourse being good 'money makers,' so we are coming to a fork in the road - either a new class of actor emerges with a different set of motivations, one that is prepared to build and sustain a new generation of tools, or I fear the overall character of discourse will decline."

An anonymous principal security consultant wrote, "As long as success - and in the current climate, profit as a common proxy for success - is determined by metrics that can be easily improved by throwing users under the bus, places that run public areas online will continue to do just that."

Steven Waldman, founder and CEO of LifePosts, said, "It certainly sounds noble to say the internet has democratized public opinion. But it's now clear: It has given voice to those who had been voiceless because they were oppressed minorities to those who were voiceless because they are crackpots. ... It may not necessarily be 'bad actors' - i.e., racists, misogynists, etc. - who win the day, but I do fear it will be the more strident. I suspect there will be ventures geared toward counter-programming against this, since many people are uncomfortable with it. But venture-backed tech companies have a huge bias toward algorithmic solutions that have tended to reward that which keeps us agitated. Very few media companies now have staff dedicated to guiding conversations online."

John Anderson, director of journalism and media studies at Brooklyn College, wrote, "The continuing diminution of what Cass Sunstein once called 'general-interest intermediaries' such as newspapers, network television, etc. means we have reached a point in our society where wildly different versions of 'reality' can be chosen and customized by people to fit their existing ideological and other biases. In such an environment there is little hope for collaborative dialogue and consensus."

David Durant, a business analyst at U.K. Government Digital Service, argued, "It is in the interest of the paid-for media and most political groups to continue to encourage 'echo-chamber' thinking and to consider pragmatism and compromise as things to be discouraged. While this trend continues, the ability for serious civilized conversations about many topics will remain very hard to achieve."

Subtheme: Terrorists and other political actors are benefiting from the weaponization of online narratives by implementing human- and bot-based misinformation and persuasion tactics

The weaponization of social media and "capture" of online belief systems, also known as "narratives," emerged from obscurity in 2016 due to the perceived impact of social media uses by terror organizations and political factions. Accusations of Russian influence via social media on the U.S. presidential election brought to public view the ways in which strategists of all stripes are endeavoring to influence people through the sharing of often false or misleading stories, photos and videos. "Fake news" moved to the forefront of ongoing discussions about the displacement of traditional media by social platforms. Earlier, in the summer of 2016, participants in this canvassing submitted concerns about misinformation in online discourse creating distorted views.

Anonymously, a futurist, writer, and author at Wired, explained, "New levels of 'cyberspace sovereignty' and heavy-duty state and non-state actors are involved; there's money, power, and geopolitical stability at stake now, it's not a mere matter of personal grumpiness from trolls."

Karen Blackmore, a lecturer in IT at the University of Newcastle, wrote, "Misinformation and anti-social networking are degrading our ability to debate and engage in online discourse. When opinions based on misinformation are given the same weight as those of experts and propelled to create online activity, we tread a dangerous path. Online social behaviour, without community-imposed guidelines, is subject to many potentially negative forces. In particular, social online communities such as Facebook also function as marketing tools, where sensationalism is widely employed and community members who view this dialogue as their news source gain a very distorted view of current events and community views on issues. This is exacerbated with social network and search engine algorithms effectively sorting what people see to reinforce worldviews."

Laurent Sch ü pbach, a neuropsychologist at University Hospital in Zurich, focused his entire response about negative tone online on burgeoning acts of economic and political manipulation, writing, "The reason it will probably get worse is that companies and governments are starting to realise that they can influence people's opinions that way. And these entities sure know how to circumvent any protection in place. Russian troll armies are a good example of something that will become more and more common in the future."

David Wuertele, a software engineer at Tesla Motors, commented, "Unfortunately, most people are easily manipulated by fear. ... Negative activities on the internet will exploit those fears, and disproportionate responses will also attempt to exploit those fears. Soon, everyone will have to take off their shoes and endure a cavity search before boarding the internet."

Theme 3: Things will get better because technical and human solutions will arise as the online world splinters into segmented, controlled social zones with the help of artificial intelligence (AI)

Most respondents said it is likely that the coming decade will see a widespread move to more-secure services, applications, and platforms and more robust user-identification policies. Some said people born into the social media age will adapt. Some predict that more online systems will require clear identification of participants. This means that the online social forums could splinter into various formats, some of which are highly protected and monitored and others which could retain the free-for-all character of today's platforms.

Subtheme: AI sentiment analysis and other tools will detect inappropriate behavior and many trolls will be caught in the filter; human oversight by moderators might catch others

Some experts in this canvassing say progress is already being made on some fronts toward better technological and human solutions.

Galen Hunt, a research manager at Microsoft Research NExT, replied, "As language-processing technology develops, technology will help us identify and remove bad actors, harassment, and trolls from accredited public discourse."

Stowe Boyd, chief researcher at Gigaom, observed, "I anticipate that AIs will be developed that will rapidly decrease the impact of trolls. Free speech will remain possible, although AI filtering will make a major dent on how views are expressed, and hate speech will be blocked."

Marina Gorbis, executive director at the Institute for the Future, added, "I expect we will develop more social bots and algorithmic filters that would weed out the some of the trolls and hateful speech. I expect we will create bots that would promote beneficial connections and potentially insert context-specific data/facts/stories that would benefit more positive discourse. Of course, any filters and algorithms will create issues around what is being filtered out and what values are embedded in algorithms."

Jean Russell of Thrivable Futures wrote, "First, conversations can have better containers that filter for real people who consistently act with decency. Second, software is getting better and more nuanced in sentiment analysis, making it easier for software to augment our filtering out of trolls. Third, we are at peak identity crisis and a new wave of people want to cross the gap in dialogue to connect with others before the consequences of being tribal get worse (Brexit, Trump, etc.)."

David Karger, a professor of computer science at MIT, said, "My own research group is exploring several novel directions in digital commentary. In the not too distant future all this work will yield results. Trolling, doxxing, echo chambers, click-bait, and other problems can be solved. We will be able to ascribe sources and track provenance in order to increase the accuracy and trustworthiness of information online. We will create tools that increase people's awareness of opinions differing from their own and support conversations with and learning from people who hold those opinions. ... The future Web will give people much better ways to control the information that they receive, which will ultimately make problems like trolling manageable (trolls will be able to say what they want, but few will be listening)."

Subtheme: There will be partitioning, exclusion and division of online outlets, social platforms and open spaces

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google and other platform providers already "shape" and thus limit what the public views via the implementation of algorithms. As people have become disenchanted with uncivil discourse "open" platforms they stop using them or close their accounts, sometimes moving to smaller online communities of people with similar needs or ideologies. Some experts expect that these trends will continue and even more partitions, divisions and exclusions may emerge as measures are taken to clean things up. For instance, it is expected that the capabilities of AI-based bots dispatched to assist with information sorting, security, and regulation of the tone and content of discourse will continue to be refined.

Lindsay Kenzig, a senior design researcher, said, "Technology will mediate who and what we see online more and more, so that we are drawn more toward communities with similar interests than those who are dissimilar. There will still be some places where you can find those with whom to argue, but they will be more concentrated into only a few locations than they are now."

Valerie Bock, of VCB Consulting, commented, "Spaces where people must post under their real names and where they interact with people with whom they have multiple bonds regularly have a higher quality of discourse. ... In response to this reality, we'll see some consolidation as it becomes easier to shape commercial interactive spaces to the desired audience. There will be free-for-all spaces and more-tightly-moderated walled gardens, depending on the sponsor's strategic goals. There will also be private spaces maintained by individuals and groups for specific purposes."

Lisa Heinz, a doctoral student at Ohio University, commented, "Humanity's reaction to negative forces will likely contribute more to the ever-narrowing filter bubble, which will continue to create an online environment that lacks inclusivity by its exclusion of opposing viewpoints. An increased demand for systemic internet-based AI will create bots that will begin to interact - as proxies for the humans that train them - with humans online in real-time and with what would be recognized as conversational language, not the word-parroting bot behavior we see on Twitter now. ... When this happens, we will see bots become part of the filter bubble phenomenon as a sort of mental bodyguard that prevents an intrusion of people and conversations to which individuals want no part. The unfortunate aspect of this iteration of the filter bubble means that while free speech itself will not be affected, people will project their voices into the chasm, but few will hear them."

Bob Frankston, internet pioneer and software innovator, wrote, "I see negative activities having an effect but the effect will likely be from communities that shield themselves from the larger world. We're still working out how to form and scale communities."

The expert comments in response to this canvassing were recorded in the summer of 2016; by early 2017, after many events (Brexit, the U.S. election, others mentioned earlier in this report) surfaced concerns about civil discourse, misinformation and impacts on democracy, an acceleration of activity tied to solutions emerged. Facebook, Twitter and Google announced some new efforts toward technological approaches; many conversations about creating new methods of support for public affairs journalism began to be undertaken; and consumer bubble-busting tools including "Outside Your Bubble" and "Escape Your Bubble" were introduced.

Subtheme: Trolls and other actors will fight back, innovating around any barriers they face

Some participants in this canvassing said they expect the already-existing continuous arms race dynamic will expand, as some people create and apply new measures to ride herd over online discourse while others constantly endeavor to thwart them.

Cathy Davidson, founding director of the Futures Initiative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said, "We're in a spy vs. spy internet world where the faster that hackers and trolls attack, the faster companies (Mozilla, thank you!) plus for-profits come up with ways to protect against them and then the hackers develop new strategies against those protections, and so it goes. I don't see that ending. ... I would not be surprised at more publicity in the future, as a form of cyber-terror. That's different from trolls, more geo-politically orchestrated to force a national or multinational response. That is terrifying if we do not have sound, smart, calm leadership."

Sam Anderson, coordinator of instructional design at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said, "It will be an arms race between companies and communities that begin to realize (as some online games companies like Riot have) that toxic online communities will lower their long-term viability and potential for growth. This will war with incentives for short-term gains that can arise out of bursts of angry or sectarian activity (Twitter's character limit inhibits nuance, which increases reaction and response)."

Theme 4: Oversight and community moderation come with a cost. Some solutions could further change the nature of the internet because surveillance will rise; the state may regulate debate; and these changes will polarize people and limit access to information and free speech

A share of respondents said greater regulation of speech and technological solutions to curb harassment and trolling will result in more surveillance, censorship and cloistered communities. They worry this will change people's sharing behaviors online, limit exposure to diverse ideas and challenge freedom.

Subtheme: Surveillance will become even more prevalent

While several respondents indicated that there is no longer a chance of anonymity online, many say privacy and choice are still options, and they should be protected.

Longtime internet civil libertarian Richard Stallman, Internet Hall of Fame member and president of the Free Software Foundation, spoke to this fear. He predicted, "Surveillance and censorship will become more systematic, even in supposedly free countries such as the U.S. Terrorism and harassment by trolls will be presented as the excuses, but the effect will be dangerous for democracy."

Rebecca MacKinnon, director of Ranking Digital Rights at New America, wrote, "I'm very concerned about the future of free speech given current trends. The demands for governments and companies to censor and monitor internet users are coming from an increasingly diverse set of actors with very legitimate concerns about safety and security, as well as concerns about whether civil discourse is becoming so poisoned as to make rational governance based on actual facts impossible. I'm increasingly inclined to think that the solutions, if they ever come about, will be human/social/political/cultural and not technical."

James Kalin of Virtually Green wrote, "Surveillance capitalism is increasingly grabbing and mining data on everything that anyone says, does, or buys online. The growing use of machine learning processing of the data will drive ever more subtle and pervasive manipulation of our purchasing, politics, cultural attributes, and general behavior. On top of this, the data is being stolen routinely by bad actors who will also be using machine learning processing to steal or destroy things we value as individuals: our identities, privacy, money, reputations, property, elections, you name it. I see a backlash brewing, with people abandoning public forums and social network sites in favor of intensely private 'black' forums and networks."

Subtheme: Dealing with hostile behavior and addressing violence and hate speech will become the responsibility of the state instead of the platform or service providers

A number of respondents said they expect governments or other authorities will begin implementing regulation or other reforms to address these issues, most indicating that the competitive instincts of platform providers do not work in favor of the implementation of appropriate remedies without some incentive.

Michael Rogers, author and futurist at Practical Futurist, predicted governments will assume control over identifying internet users. He observed, "I expect there will be a move toward firm identities - even legal identities issued by nations - for most users of the Web. There will as a result be public discussion forums in which it is impossible to be anonymous. There would still be anonymity available, just as there is in the real world today. But there would be online activities in which anonymity was not permitted. Clearly this could have negative free-speech impacts in totalitarian countries but, again, there would still be alternatives for anonymity."

Paula Hooper Mayhew, a professor of humanities at Fairleigh Dickinson University, commented, "My fear is that because of the virtually unlimited opportunities for negative use of social media globally we will experience a rising worldwide demand for restrictive regulation. This response may work against support of free speech in the U.S."

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), wrote, "The regulation of online communications is a natural response to the identification of real problems, the maturing of the industry, and the increasing expertise of government regulators."

Subtheme: Polarization will occur due to the compartmentalization of ideologies

John Markoff, senior writer at The New York Times, commented, "There is growing evidence that that the Net is a polarizing force in the world. I don't believe to completely understand the dynamic, but my surmise is that it is actually building more walls than it is tearing down."

Marcus Foth, a professor at Queensland University of Technology, said, "Public discourse online will become less shaped by bad actors ... because the majority of interactions will take place inside walled gardens. ... Social media platforms hosted by corporations such as Facebook and Twitter use algorithms to filter, select, and curate content. With less anonymity and less diversity, the two biggest problems of the Web 1.0 era have been solved from a commercial perspective: fewer trolls who can hide behind anonymity. Yet, what are we losing in the process? Algorithmic culture creates filter bubbles, which risk an opinion polarisation inside echo chambers."

Emily Shaw, a U.S. civic technologies researcher for mySociety, predicted, "Since social networks ... are the most likely future direction for public discourse, a million (self)-walled gardens are more likely to be the outcome than is an increase in hostility, because that's what's more commercially profitable."

Subtheme: Increased monitoring, regulation and enforcement will shape content to such an extent that the public will not gain access to important information and possibly lose free speech

Experts predict increased oversight and surveillance, left unchecked, could lead to dominant institutions and actors using their power to suppress alternative news sources, censor ideas, track individuals, and selectively block network access. This, in turn, could mean publics might never know what they are missing out on, since information will be filtered, removed, or concealed.

Thorlaug Agustsdottir of Iceland's Pirate Party, said, "Monitoring is and will be a massive problem, with increased government control and abuse. The fairness and freedom of the internet's early days are gone. Now it's run by big data, Big Brother, and big profits. Anonymity is a myth, it only exists for end-users who lack lookup resources."

Joe McNamee, executive director at European Digital Rights, said, "In the context of a political environment where deregulation has reached the status of ideology, it is easy for governments to demand that social media companies do 'more' to regulate everything that happens online. We see this with the European Union's 'code of conduct' with social media companies. This privatisation of regulation of free speech (in a context of huge, disproportionate, asymmetrical power due to the data stored and the financial reserves of such companies) raises existential questions for the functioning of healthy democracies."

Randy Bush, Internet Hall of Fame member and research fellow at Internet Initiative Japan, wrote, "Between troll attacks, chilling effects of government surveillance and censorship, etc., the internet is becoming narrower every day."

Dan York, senior content strategist at the Internet Society, wrote, "Unfortunately, we are in for a period where the negative activities may outshine the positive activities until new social norms can develop that push back against the negativity. It is far too easy right now for anyone to launch a large-scale public negative attack on someone through social media and other channels - and often to do so anonymously (or hiding behind bogus names). This then can be picked up by others and spread. The 'mob mentality' can be easily fed, and there is little fact-checking or source-checking these days before people spread information and links through social media. I think this will cause some governments to want to step in to protect citizens and thereby potentially endanger both free speech and privacy."

Responses from other key experts regarding the future of online social climate

This section features responses by several more of the many top analysts who participated in this canvassing. Following this wide-ranging set of comments on the topic will be a much-more expansive set of quotations directly tied to the set of four themes.

'We'll see more bad before good because the governing culture is weak and will remain so'

Baratunde Thurston, a director's fellow at MIT Media Lab, Fast Company columnist, and former digital director of The Onion, replied, "To quote everyone ever, things will get worse before they get better. We've built a system in which access and connectivity are easy, the cost of publishing is near zero, and accountability and consequences for bad action are difficult to impose or toothless when they do. Plus consider that more people are getting online everyday with no norm-setting for their behavior and the systems that prevail now reward attention grabbing and extended time online. They reward emotional investment whether positive or negative. They reward conflict. So we'll see more bad before more good because the governing culture is weak and will remain so while the financial models backing these platforms remain largely ad-based and rapid/scaled user growth-centric."

'We should reach 'peak troll' before long but there are concerns for free speech'

Brad Templeton, one of the early luminaries of Usenet and longtime Electronic Frontier Foundation board member, currently chair for computing at Singularity University, commented, "Now that everybody knows about this problem I expect active technological efforts to reduce the efforts of the trolls, and we should reach 'peak troll' before long. There are concerns for free speech. My hope is that pseudonymous reputation systems might protect privacy while doing this."

'People will find it tougher to avoid accountability'

Esther Dyson, founder of EDventure Holdings and technology entrepreneur, writer, and influencer, wrote: "Things will get somewhat better because people will find it tougher to avoid accountability. Reputations will follow you more than they do now. ... There will also be clever services like CivilComments.com (disclosure: I'm an investor) that foster crowdsourced moderation rather than censorship of comments. That approach, whether by CivilComments or future competitors, will help. (So would sender-pays, recipient-charges email, a business I would *like* to invest in!) Nonetheless, anonymity is an important right - and freedom of speech with impunity (except for actual harm, yada yada) - is similarly important. Anonymity should be discouraged in general, but it is necessary in regimes or cultures or simply situations where the truth is avoided and truth-speakers are punished."

Chatbots can help, but we need to make sure they don't encode hate

Amy Webb, futurist and CEO at the Future Today Institute, said, "Right now, many technology-focused companies are working on 'conversational computing,' and the goal is to create a seamless interface between humans and machines. If you have [a] young child, she can be expected to talk to - rather than type on - machines for the rest of her life. In the coming decade, you will have more and more conversations with operating systems, and especially with chatbots, which are programmed to listen to, learn from and react to us. You will encounter bots first throughout social media, and during the next decade, they will become pervasive digital assistants helping you on many of the systems you use. Currently, there is no case law governing the free speech of a chatbot. During the 2016 election cycle, there were numerous examples of bots being used for political purposes. For example, there were thousands of bots created to mimic Latino/Latina voters supporting Donald Trump. If someone tweeted a disparaging remark about Trump and Latinos, bots that looked and sounded like members of the Latino community would target that person with tweets supporting Trump. Right now, many of the chatbots we interact with on social media and various websites aren't so smart. But with improvements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, that will change. Without a dramatic change in how training databases are built and how our bots are programmed, we will realize a decade from now that we inadvertently encoded structural racism, homophobia, sexism and xenophobia into the bots helping to power our everyday lives. When chatbots start running amok - targeting individuals with hate speech - how will we define 'speech'? At the moment, our legal system isn't planning for a future in which we must consider the free speech infringements of bots."

A trend toward decentralization and distributed problem solving will improve things

Doc Searls, journalist, speaker, and director of Project VRM at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, wrote: "Harassment, trolling ... these things thrive with distance, which favors the reptile brains in us all, making bad acting more possible and common. ... Let's face it, objectifying, vilifying, fearing, and fighting The Other has always been a problem for our species. ... The internet we share today was only born on 30 April 1995, when the last backbone that forbade commercial activity stood down. Since then we have barely begun to understand, much less civilize, this new place without space. ... I believe we are at the far end of this swing toward centralization on the Net. As individuals and distributed solutions to problems (e.g., blockchain [a digital ledger in which transactions are recorded chronologically and publicly]) gain more power and usage, we will see many more distributed solutions to fundamental social and business issues, such as how we treat each other."

There are designs and tech advances 'that would help tremendously'

Judith Donath of Harvard University's Berkman Center, author of "The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online," wrote, "With the current practices and interfaces, yes, trolls and bots will dominate online public discourse. But that need not be the case: there are designs and technological advances that would help tremendously. We need systems that support pseudonymity: locally persistent identities. Persistence provides accountability: people are responsible for their words. Locality protects privacy: people can participate in discussions without concern that their government, employer, insurance company, marketers, etc., are listening in (so if they are, they cannot connect the pseudonymous discourse to the actual person). We should have digital portraits that succinctly depict a (possibly pseudonymous) person's history of interactions and reputation within a community. We need to be able to quickly see who is new, who is well-regarded, what role a person has played in past discussions. A few places do so now (e.g., StackExchange) but their basic charts are far from the goal: intuitive and expressive portrayals. 'Bad actors' and trolls (and spammers, harassers, etc.) have no place in most discussions - the tools we need for them are filters; we need to develop better algorithms for detecting destructive actions as defined by the local community. Beyond that, the more socially complex question is how to facilitate constructive discussions among people who disagree. Here, we need to rethink the structure of online discourse. The role of discussion host/moderator is poorly supported by current tech - and many discussions would proceed much better in a model other than the current linear free for all. Our face-to-face interactions have amazing subtlety - we can encourage or dissuade with slight changes in gaze, facial expression, etc. We need to create tools for conversation hosts (think of your role when you post something on your own Facebook page that sparks controversy) that help them to gracefully steer conversations."

'Reward systems favor outrage mongering and attention seeking almost exclusively'

Seth Finkelstein, writer and pioneering computer programmer, believes the worst is yet to come: "One of the less-examined aspects of the 2016 U.S. presidential election is that Donald Trump is demonstrating to other politicians how to effectively exploit such an environment. He wasn't the first to do it, by far. But he's showing how very high-profile, powerful people can adapt and apply such strategies to social media. Basically, we're moving out of the 'early adopter' phase of online polarization, into making it mainstream. The phrasing of this question conflates two different issues. It uses a framework akin to 'Will our kingdom be more or less threatened by brigands, theft, monsters, and an overall atmosphere of discontent, strife, and misery?' The first part leads one to think of malicious motives and thus to attribute the problems of the second part along the lines of outside agitators afflicting peaceful townsfolk. Of course deliberate troublemakers exist. Yet many of the worst excesses come from people who believe in their own minds that they are not bad actors at all, but are fighting a good fight for all which is right and true (indeed, in many cases, both sides of a conflict can believe this, and where you stand depends on where you sit). When reward systems favor outrage mongering and attention seeking almost exclusively, nothing is going to be solved by inveighing against supposed moral degenerates."

Some bad behavior is 'pent-up' speech from those who have been voiceless

Jeff Jarvis, a professor at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, wrote, "I am an optimist with faith in humanity. We will see whether my optimism is misplaced. I believe we are seeing the release of a pressure valve (or perhaps an explosion) of pent-up speech: the 'masses' who for so long could not be heard can now speak, revealing their own interests, needs, and frustrations - their own identities distinct from the false media concept of the mass. Yes, it's starting out ugly. But I hope that we will develop norms around civilized discourse. Oh, yes, there will always be ... trolls. What we need is an expectation that it is destructive to civil discourse to encourage them. Yes, it might have seemed fun to watch the show of angry fights. It might seem fun to media to watch institutions like the Republican Party implode. But it soon becomes evident that this is no fun. A desire and demand for civil, intelligent, useful discourse will return; no society or market can live on misinformation and emotion alone. Or that is my hope. How long will this take? It could be years. It could be a generation. It could be, God help us, never."

Was the idea of 'reasoned discourse' ever reasonable?

Mike Roberts, Internet Hall of Fame member and first president and CEO of ICANN, observed, "Most attempts at reasoned discourse on topics interesting to me have been disrupted by trolls in last decade or so. Many individuals faced with this harassment simply withdraw. ... There is a somewhat broader question of whether expectations of 'reasoned' discourse were ever realistic. History of this, going back to Plato, is one of self-selection into congenial groups. The internet, among other things, has energized a variety of anti-social behaviors by people who get satisfaction from the attendant publicity. My wife's reaction is 'why are you surprised?' in regard to seeing behavior online that already exists offline."

Our disembodied online identity compels us to 'ramp up the emotional content'

Barry Chudakov, founder and principal at Sertain Research and StreamFuzion Corp., wrote,

"In the next decade a number of factors in public discourse online will continue to converge and vigorously affect each other:

1) Nowness is the ultimate arbiter: The value of our discourse (everything we see or hear) will be weighted by how immediate or instantly seen and communicated the information is. Real-time search, geolocation, just-in-time updates, Twitter, etc., are making of now, the present moment, an all-subsuming reality that tends to bypass anything that isn't hyper-current.

2) Faceless selfism rocks: With photos and video, we can present ourselves dimensionally, but due to the lack of 'facework' in the online sim, our faces are absent or frozen in a framed portrait found elsewhere, and so there is no face-to-face, no dynamic interactivity, no responsive reading to our commentary, except in a follow-up comment. Still, we will get better at using public discourse as self-promotion.

"3) Anonymity changes us: Identity-shielding leads to a different set of 'manners' or mannerisms that stem from our sense (not accurate, of course) that online we are anonymous.

4) Context AWOL: Our present '

">filter failure,' to borrow Clay Shirky's phrase, is almost complete lack of context, reality check, or perspective. In the next decade we will start building better contextual frameworks for information.

5) Volume formula: The volume of content, from all quarters - anyone with a keypad, a device - makes it difficult to manage responses, or even to filter for relevance but tends to favor emotional button-pushing in order to be noticed.

"6) Ersatz us: Online identities will be more made-up, more fictional, but also more malleable than typical 'facework' or other human interactions. We can pretend, for a while, to be an ersatz version of ourselves.

7) Any retort in a (tweet) storm: Again, given the lack of 'facework' or immediate facial response that defined human response for millennia, we will ramp up the emotional content of messaging to ensure some kind of response, frequently rewarding the brash and outrageous over the slow and thoughtful."

David Weinberger, senior researcher at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, said, "Conversations are always shaped by norms and what the environment enables. For example, seating 100 dinner guests at one long table will shape the conversations differently than putting them at ten tables of ten, or 25 tables of four. The acoustics of the room will shape the conversations. Assigning seats or not will shape the conversations. Even serving wine instead of beer may shape the conversations. The same considerations are even more important on the Net because its global nature means that we have fewer shared norms, and its digital nature means that we have far more room to play with ways of bringing people together. We're getting much better at nudging conversations into useful interchanges. I believe we will continue to get better at it."

Patrick Tucker, author of "The Naked Future " and technology editor at Defense One, said, "Today's negative online user environment is supported and furthered by two trends that are unlikely to last into the next decade: anonymity in posting and validation from self-identified subgroups. Increasingly, marketers need to better identify and authentication APIs (authentication through Facebook for example) are challenging online anonymity. The passing of anonymity will also shift the cost benefit analysis of writing or posting something to appeal to only a self-identified bully group rather than a broad spectrum of people."

Alice Marwick, a fellow at Data & Society, commented, "Currently, online discourse is becoming more polarized and thus more extreme, mirroring the overall separation of people with differing viewpoints in the larger U.S. population. Simultaneously, several of the major social media players have been unwilling or slow to take action to curb organized harassment. Finally, the marketplace of online attention encourages so-called 'clickbait' articles and sensationalized news items that often contain misinformation or disinformation, or simply lack rigorous fact-checking. Without structural changes in both how social media sites respond to conflict and the economic incentives for spreading inaccurate or sensational information, extremism and therefore conflict will continue. More importantly, the geographical and psychological segmentation of the U.S. population into 'red' and 'blue' neighborhoods, communities, and states is unlikely to change. It is the latter that gives rise to overall political polarization, which is reflected in the incivility of online discourse."

Jamais Cascio, distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future, replied, "I don't expect a significant shift in the tone of online discourse over the next decade. Trolling, harassment, etc., will remain commonplace but not be the overwhelming majority of discourse. We'll see repeated efforts to clamp down on bad online behavior through both tools and norms; some of these efforts will be (or seem) successful, even as new variations of digital malfeasance arise."

Anil Dash, technologist, wrote, "I expect the negative influences on social media to get worse, and the positive factors to get better. Networks will try to respond to prevent the worst abuses, but new sites and apps will pop up that repeat the same mistakes."

David Brin, author of "The Transparent Society" and a leader of at the University of California, San Diego's Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, said, "Some company will get rich by offering registered pseudonyms, so that individuals may wander the Web 'anonymously' and yet vouched for and accountable for bad behavior. When this happens, almost all legitimate sites will ban the unvouched anonymous."

Fred Baker, fellow at Cisco, commented, "Communications in any medium (the internet being but one example) reflects the people communicating. If those people use profane language, are misogynistic, judge people on irrelevant factors such as race, gender, creed, or other such factors in other parts of their lives, they will do so in any medium of communication, including the internet. If that is increasing in prevalence in one medium, I expect that it is or will in any and every medium over time. The issue isn't the internet; it is the process of breakdown in the social fabric. ... If we worry about the youth of our age 'going to the dogs,' are we so different from our ancestors? In "Book III of Odes," circa 20 B.C., Horace wrote: 'Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires. We, their sons, are more worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.' I think the human race is not doomed, not today any more than in Horace's day. But we have the opportunity to choose to lead them to more noble pursuits and more noble discussion of them."

Mike Liebhold, senior researcher and distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future, wrote, "After Snowden's revelations, and in context accelerating cybercrimes and cyberwars, it's clear that every layer of the technology stack and every node in our networked world is potentially vulnerable. Meanwhile both magnitude and frequency of exploits are accelerating. As a result users will continue to modify their behaviors and internet usage and designers of internet services, systems, and technologies will have to expend growing time and expense on personal and collective security."

Jillian York, director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, noted, "The struggle we're facing is a societal issue we have to address at all levels, and that the structure of social media platforms can exacerbate. Social media companies will need to address this, beyond community policing and algorithmic shaping of our newsfeeds. There are many ways to do this while avoiding censorship; for instance, better-individualized blocking tools and upvote/downvote measures can add nuance to discussions. I worry that if we don't address the root causes of our current public discourse, politicians and companies will engage in an increasing amount of censorship."

An anonymous professor at City University of New York, wrote, "I see the space of public discourse as managed in new, more-sophisticated ways, and also in more brutal ones. Thus we have social media management in Mexico courtesy of Peñabots, hacking by groups that are quasi-governmental or serving nationalist interests (one thinks of Eastern Europe). Alexander Kluge once said, 'The public sphere is the site where struggles are decided by other means than war.' We are seeing an expanded participation in the public sphere, and that will continue. It doesn't necessarily mean an expansion of democracy, per se. In fact, a lot of these conflicts are cross-border. In general the discussions will stay ahead of official politics in the sense that there will be increasing options for participation. In a way this suggests new kinds of regionalisms, intriguing at a time when the European Union is taking a hit and trade pacts are undergoing re-examination. This type of participation also means opening up new arenas, e.g., Facebook has been accused of left bias in its algorithm. That means we are acknowledging the role of what are essentially sophisticated mathematical equations as having social effects."

Bernardo A. Huberman, senior fellow and director of the Mechanisms and Design Lab at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said, "Privacy as we tend to think of nowadays is going to be further eroded, if only because of the ease with which one can collect data and identify people. Free speech, if construed as the freedom to say whatever one thinks, will continue to exist and even flourish, but the flip side will be a number of derogatory and ugly comments that will become more pervasive as time goes on."

Stephen Downes, researcher at National Research Council of Canada, noted, "It's important to understand that our perception of public discourse is shaped by two major sources: first, our own experience of online public discourse, and second, media reports (sometimes also online) concerning the nature of public discourse. From both sources we have evidence that there is a lot of influence from bad actors, harassment, trolls, and an overall tone of griping, distrust, and disgust, as suggested in the question. But a great deal of public online discourse consists of what we and others don't see."

Marcel Bullinga, trendwatcher and keynote speaker @futurecheck, wrote, "Online we express hate and disgust we would never express offline, face-to-face. It seems that social control is lacking online. We do not confront our neighbours/children/friends with antisocial behaviour. The problem is not [only] anonymous bullying: many bullies have faces and are shameless, and they have communities that encourage bullying. And government subsidies stimulate them - the most frightening aspect of all. We will see the rise of the social robots, technological tools that can help us act as polite, decent social beings (like the REthink app). But more than that we need to go back to teaching and experiencing morals in business and education: back to behaving socially."

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Lee Rainie, Janna Anderson and Jonathan Albright

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The Future of Free Speech, Trolls, Anonymity and Fake News Online

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Many experts fear uncivil and manipulative behaviors on the internet will persist - and may get worse.

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How to Create Engaging Social Media Videos: A Step-by-Step Guide

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How to Create Engaging Social Media Videos: A Step-by-Step Guide

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When was the last time you watched a video on social media?

Videos are becoming increasingly popular on social media, especially on mobile. Over the past year, the time people spent watching Facebook Live every day has increased by four times and Instagram videos by 80 percent3

.

To create engaging social media videos, Facebook recommends creating videos as short as 15 seconds2

. Sounds easier? But where do you start?

In this guide, you'll learn step-by-step how to create short social media videos - anything from a few seconds to a few minutes. We've also included many tools and examples to help you get started.

Creating videos can be more challenging than writing a blog post or designing an image. But it isn't as difficult as you might have imagined. Here's how you can create effective short social media videos easily:

1. Ideate

The first step is to brainstorm ideas for your videos. Here are three quick ways to generate a ton of ideas:

Look at your top blog posts

If you write a blog, like us, you'll likely have a treasure trove of content ideas on your blog. The blog posts that resonate with your audience is probably great content for your videos. This strategy has helped us create well-liked videos such as this and this.

You can use your Google Analytics to find your top posts. Go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. You should see something like this:

In the upper-right corner, increase the date range to a month. A quarter or a year is fine, too.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and change the number of rows shown to 100.

Voilà! Now you have your top 100 blog posts for the past month (quarter or year) - and tons of content ideas for your video.

Study the most shared content

Sometimes, your top blog posts are also your most shared. But sometimes, they aren't. Using a tool like Buzzsumo, you can find your most shared content. You can also find the most shared content for any topic!

To find your most shared blog posts, enter your blog URL on Buzzsumo.

You'll get a list of your most shared blog posts, ordered in terms of the number of shares.

You could also sort the results by the various social media platforms. For example, if you plan to create a Facebook video, you can sort the list by Facebook engagements. Now, you'll have a list of blog posts that generated the most shares, likes, and comments on Facebook.

Check out popular videos from similar brands

Finally, you can also look around on social media to see what topics are popular at the moment. With Facebook's Pages to Watch, you can easily check out the top posts from your favorite or similar Facebook Pages.

To access Pages to Watch, go to your Facebook Page > Insights. You'll find the section at the bottom of the Overview tab.

When you click on any of the Pages, you'll see its top posts for the week. The posts should give you some video content ideas. It'll be great to keep an eye out for video posts specifically.

For Twitter, Social Bearing is a great tool for finding any Twitter account's top tweets. For Instagram, you could try using 2. Plan
Once you have brainstormed your content ideas and picked one to work on, you can start planning for it. The two ways I like to plan for a video is to either write a script or create a storyboard. Both encourage me to think through the entire flow and important aspects of the video. A storyboard also helps me visualize how a shot would look like, which will be handy for the next step - recording.

If you are not familiar with storyboarding, here's a quick guide to get you started.

To help you with your planning, here are some tips from Facebook for creating effective videos:

Capture attention early: Videos auto-play on most social media platforms. By capturing attention with the first few seconds of your video, you have a higher chance of stopping a viewer while she scrolls through her feed. Facebook recommends starting with your most captivating elements, incorporating your brand message and identity early, and using engaging post copy.

Keep your message simple: Facebook encourages you to ask yourself, "What is the most important message I need to deliver in this video?"

Design for sound off: Facebook found that people watch mobile videos everywhere - home, at work, during their commute, etc. Oftentimes, they wouldn't want the sound (and perhaps that's why mobile videos are designed to play without sound). According to Digiday, 85 percent of Facebook videos are played without sound. Add captions or text to tell your story visually.

Experiment with size: More than 50 percent of videos are played on mobile now. And square and vertical videos take up more screen space than landscape videos when the phone is held vertically. In our own experiments, we found that square videos outperformed landscape videos on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in terms of average engagement and views.

If you're looking for information about video specs of all the major social media platforms such as the maximum length and default audio state, we hope we've gotten you covered with this blog post.

3. Record

Now, the fun part - recording!

Thanks to the advancement of technology (yay to smartphones!), you can create engaging, high-quality videos with just a few simple tools and tricks. Here are some of our suggestions:

Use your smartphone

You don't need expensive video equipment to get started. One of the most powerful video tools is right in your pocket - your smartphone. Most smartphones today can record videos of high visual and audio quality.

There are also many video-editing mobile apps available, which you'll learn about later in this post.

Stabilize your phone with a tripod

A stable video helps it look more professional. You can easily get affordable tripods from Amazon. For example, a mini tripod for phones costs about $11 while a 50-inch lightweight tripod costs $13.

Speak into a microphone

It's best to find a quiet location to record your video. To improve the sound quality further, you can get a lavalier microphone for just $20. Just plug it into your phone and hit record.

Find good lighting

Natural light is one of the best light sources for your videos. If you can't get that, lamps work great, too. When recording your video, be sure to face the light source so that the light spreads evenly across your face.

If you prefer a more advanced light setup, you'll love this " Lighting on the Fly " guide by Wistia.

Find or create your video background

Finally, find a nice background for your video. A simple colored background is a great option as it encourages viewers to focus on you and prevents them from being distracted by things going on in the background.

If you can't find a suitable background, you could create one yourself. You could buy a large foam board from Amazon or a stationery store and place it behind you. Or you could build your own lightbox if you are filming a small physical product.

4. Edit

Great work on recording your video clips! Now, let's put them together.

Here are a few of our favorite video-editing tools:

Animoto

For creating video slideshows, we love to use Animoto. It allows us to easily combine video clips, stock videos, photos, and text together to create short engaging videos. Music can also be added to the video in just a few clicks.

If you're looking for more music choices, Brian Peters found 13 fantastic places for background music.

Other tools like Animoto: Adobe Spark Video, Promo, and Wave

Quik

If you like to edit on-the-go, Facebook recommends Quik by GoPro ( Android, iOS). You can just pick your videos and photos, and Quik will automatically find highlights, add effects, and sync transitions with the music. You can then customize the video to your liking.

Other tools like Quik: Videoshop ( Android, iOS), Stop Motion Studio ( Android, iOS), Vidlab ( iOS)

Legend

With Legend ( Android, iOS), you can turn simple text into impressive animations. These animations can be a great addition to your videos as a transition between two video clips.

Other tools like Legend: Crello, Adobe Spark Post ( iOS)

Note: You'll want to be mindful of the copyrights and royalties of the videos, images, and music you use for your videos. Here's a quick rundown of a few rules and licenses.

Finally, you're ready to share your video!

While there are many ways to share your videos on your social media profiles, we hope the best way for you is to use Buffer's Tailored Posts.

With Tailored Posts, you can easily schedule or post different videos to each of your social media profiles. All at once, from a single place. And videos will be uploaded directly to the social media platforms.

To use Tailored Posts, click on the Buffer browser extension on any website. (Tailored Posts is coming to the desktop and mobile dashboards soon!)

Then, select the social profiles you want to share the video with, update the copy, and upload the video.

Then, hit "Add to Queue". Your video will be added to your respective social profile queues and shared at the selected times.

7 video ideas and examples to help you get started

I know creating videos can feel a little intimidating at first. I had many questions myself. What should I include in the video? How long should it be? What type of music should I use?

I hope from these ideas and examples of short social media videos, you'll find some inspiration and the answers to your questions.

How-to, tips, or tutorial

HubSpot created a short video on how to convince your boss to let you work from home, with stock footages and text.

Customer testimonial

GoPro interviewed three customers to promote its drone, GoPro Karma, and to introduce its new features.

Events

Wistia did a recap video of their time at Inbound 2017.

Behind-the-scenes

Patagonia shared a quick behind-the-scenes look at their factory.

Product launch

Ben & Jerry's created a simple looping video to promote a new flavor of ice cream.

List

We made a short video slideshow sharing five tips that increased our Facebook video views and engagement.

User-generated content

Starbucks compiled photos of its iconic holiday cups from its customers into a simple video slideshow.

For more ideas, check out Facebook's Creative Hub, where they have listed close to 100 Facebook videos for your inspiration.

With videos being the third most-wanted content type in the future (after social media posts and news), it'll be great to get started now6

. Here's a simple framework you can use (and adapt):

If you have already been creating videos, I would love to learn from you. Do you have any tips for creating engaging social media videos? How does your video creation process look like?

-

Get started for free now

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How to Create Engaging Social Media Videos: A Step-by-Step Guide

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When was the last time you watched a video on social media? Videos are becoming increasingly popular on social media, especially on mobile. Over the past year, the time people spent watching Facebook Live every day has increased by four times and Instagram videos by 80 percent3 .

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A Brief Education On Educational Video Content

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A Brief Education On Educational Video Content

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This is largely due to the steady growth in popularity of video content online, and the proliferation of affordable, easy to use, high definition video camera recording equipment, making it easier and more lucrative than ever to create video content, whether you're a large media company or a small mom and pop business owner.

How did we get to the point where we are now, where educational video content dominates the internet, with more videos seeking to inform us on more topics than we could ever hope to finish watching in ten lifetimes, let alone one?

Today, we're going to review the history of educational video content, as well as the types of educational videos and industries that businesses can benefit most from using. Let's dive in.

The rise of the educational video.

At the same time that content marketing as a whole has changed the digital marketing landscape, the video format has specifically transformed the educational content landscape, primarily in the types of content that gets created most often. To understand this shift, let's take it back... waaaay back, to the dawn of the internet...

In the beginning, the internet was originally created as a way to share information over a series of computers under a single network. In many ways, the concept of sharing information is almost identical to that of learning in general - you are exchanging ideas and concepts with the intent of knowing something you didn't know before.

In that way, education and educating oneself was always one of the most important tenets of why we use the internet, and as the internet became more widely used, the search engine Google began to dominate the internet as the number one most visited website. It was becoming apparent that people most wanted to use the internet to learn all kinds of things they didn't know before.

Then came YouTube, beginning in early 2005, and the need to learn began to seep over into the online video world as well. YouTube wasn't just for funny viral videos, but quickly became a good resource for learning things, whether it was videotaped lectures being uploaded by teachers or videos recorded to help teach a young cousin math . Even videos on simple things, like how to change a flat tire, became a vital part of the YouTube video ecosystem. With attention spans shortening, people become more likely to watch how to videos than read how to articles, finding how to videos more informative and easier to comprehend anyway.

It should be no surprise then, that Google eventually bought YouTube, and YouTube is now the second most popular search engine in the world. Billions of people around the globe use YouTube to look up and learn all kinds of things, and this thirst for information has dominated some of the site's most popular videos and creators.

Popular YouTubers like young-adult author and science channels like Veritasium likely initiated the trend by spreading educational-adjacent content across the internet, with viral "Did you know?" and "8 Crazy Facts From History" style educational videos that doubled as entertainment.

At the same time, remote SaaS sales reps created hundreds of product demo videos to share with clients all over the world. Add that to the digitizing of company training videos, the rise of video webinars, and the transferring of written case study and testimonials into video content, and you start to get a picture of how educational video content has become so popular and widespread today in 2019.

Why use educational video content today?

The best summary I've ever read of the value of educational content came from from the creator of Hubspot Academy, Mark Kilens, on how he got the idea and subsequently created the Hubspot Academy.

In essence, it all began because he was a Hubspot customer first, fell in love with the company's mission and service, and realized after joining the company that something needed to be created to better educate customers to help them better utilize Hubspot to success like he did back when he was a customer.

Mark says, " Not enough companies today offer education that makes their product or service more valuable to their customers. Education is a massive opportunity that almost any company can use to generate more leads, retain more customers, and help more people."

Starting as blogs and webinars, Mark eventually turned Hubspot Academy into a massive resource of educational video training courses that educates thousands of certificate-recipients every month, with the help of dozens of new videos they produce every month. Mark and his team realized early on that video was one of the best tools available to educate an audience, and their team is no stranger to use video to promote their own success with case studies, like this impressive example:

Mark's journey from impressed customer to Hubspot Academy founder is impressive, and is a great example of how a company can capitalize and optimize their successes by using educational video content to help increase positive customer results.

If you have a product or service that helps a customer solve an important issue in their life or business, then doing whatever you can to help them achieve that positive resolution will benefit you in the long run by increasing overall customer satisfaction and increase repeat business from lifelong loyal customers.

What industries benefit the most from educational videos?

All industries and companies can benefit from educating their audiences, which primarily consist of potential customers. By educating your audience, you establish yourself as an expert in your field, as a trusted source of value, and as a potential resource for them in the future should they need your services.

Plus, educational content is great for nurturing prospects into becoming customers, and every company in every industry can benefit from adding value to their marketing funnels to convert leads at higher volumes.

Getting more specific, however, there are some industries in particular that can benefit from educational content more so than others.

Marketing agencies benefit greatly from educating their clients and audiences with case study videos and video webinars on subjects impacting their industry, as establishing themselves as experts is vital to win business.

Non-profit companies benefit greatly from educating audiences with PSA videos and industry videos educating viewers on the problems their organization was created to combat. Without educating on the issues, it's hard to get people to hand over their hard earned money, even if it's for a good cause.

Tech companies need educational video content like virtual product demos (for SaaS companies especially) and explainer videos to break down complicated technologies into terms a layman can understand. If you're looking to win over big time enterprise accounts, this is even more true.

What type of educational videos should you create?

Everything and anything that helps a customer better understand your product or service while also nurturing them with valuable information that establishes you as a trustworthy source of information is going to benefit your company and increase the number of leads you convert into sales.

Breaking it down by the stage of the buyer's journey your customer is in, here are a few of the top videos you should create depending on what goal you are trying to achieve and what result you are trying to optimize.

Awareness Stage

Attract more customers and build better brand awareness and brand recall by:

Creating how to videos featuring your product or service to solve an issue to increase SEO and soft sell audiences looking for answers on how to solve their problems on Youtube in a (mostly) brand agnostic way.

Consideration Stage

Engage with viewers interested in learning more about your product or service by:

Creating day in the life videos to educate viewers on your company or team, while simultaneously establishing yourself as authentic and trustworthy by being open.

Creating and providing explainer videos on your website and landing pages to provide additional value and information about your core product or service.

Decision Stage

Nurture and encourage prospects to make an affirmative purchasing decision by:

Hosting and sharing webinars to educate viewers on adjacent topics that affect them or your industry and provide value to leads for free.

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A Brief Education On Educational Video Content - Lemonlight

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This is largely due to the steady growth in popularity of video content online, and the proliferation of affordable, easy to use, high definition video camera recording equipment, making it easier and more lucrative than ever to create video content, whether you're a large media company or a small mom and pop business owner.

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How to Create Engaging Social Media Videos: A Step-by-Step Guide

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How to Create Engaging Social Media Videos: A Step-by-Step Guide

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When was the last time you watched a video on social media?

Videos are becoming increasingly popular on social media, especially on mobile. Over the past year, the time people spent watching Facebook Live every day has increased by four times and Instagram videos by 80 percent3

.

To create engaging social media videos, Facebook recommends creating videos as short as 15 seconds2

. Sounds easier? But where do you start?

In this guide, you'll learn step-by-step how to create short social media videos - anything from a few seconds to a few minutes. We've also included many tools and examples to help you get started.

Creating videos can be more challenging than writing a blog post or designing an image. But it isn't as difficult as you might have imagined. Here's how you can create effective short social media videos easily:

1. Ideate

The first step is to brainstorm ideas for your videos. Here are three quick ways to generate a ton of ideas:

Look at your top blog posts

If you write a blog, like us, you'll likely have a treasure trove of content ideas on your blog. The blog posts that resonate with your audience is probably great content for your videos. This strategy has helped us create well-liked videos such as this and this.

You can use your Google Analytics to find your top posts. Go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. You should see something like this:

In the upper-right corner, increase the date range to a month. A quarter or a year is fine, too.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and change the number of rows shown to 100.

Voilà! Now you have your top 100 blog posts for the past month (quarter or year) - and tons of content ideas for your video.

Study the most shared content

Sometimes, your top blog posts are also your most shared. But sometimes, they aren't. Using a tool like Buzzsumo, you can find your most shared content. You can also find the most shared content for any topic!

To find your most shared blog posts, enter your blog URL on Buzzsumo.

You'll get a list of your most shared blog posts, ordered in terms of the number of shares.

You could also sort the results by the various social media platforms. For example, if you plan to create a Facebook video, you can sort the list by Facebook engagements. Now, you'll have a list of blog posts that generated the most shares, likes, and comments on Facebook.

Check out popular videos from similar brands

Finally, you can also look around on social media to see what topics are popular at the moment. With Facebook's Pages to Watch, you can easily check out the top posts from your favorite or similar Facebook Pages.

To access Pages to Watch, go to your Facebook Page > Insights. You'll find the section at the bottom of the Overview tab.

When you click on any of the Pages, you'll see its top posts for the week. The posts should give you some video content ideas. It'll be great to keep an eye out for video posts specifically.

For Twitter, Social Bearing is a great tool for finding any Twitter account's top tweets. For Instagram, you could try using 2. Plan
Once you have brainstormed your content ideas and picked one to work on, you can start planning for it. The two ways I like to plan for a video is to either write a script or create a storyboard. Both encourage me to think through the entire flow and important aspects of the video. A storyboard also helps me visualize how a shot would look like, which will be handy for the next step - recording.

If you are not familiar with storyboarding, here's a quick guide to get you started.

To help you with your planning, here are some tips from Facebook for creating effective videos:

Capture attention early: Videos auto-play on most social media platforms. By capturing attention with the first few seconds of your video, you have a higher chance of stopping a viewer while she scrolls through her feed. Facebook recommends starting with your most captivating elements, incorporating your brand message and identity early, and using engaging post copy.

Keep your message simple: Facebook encourages you to ask yourself, "What is the most important message I need to deliver in this video?"

Design for sound off: Facebook found that people watch mobile videos everywhere - home, at work, during their commute, etc. Oftentimes, they wouldn't want the sound (and perhaps that's why mobile videos are designed to play without sound). According to Digiday, 85 percent of Facebook videos are played without sound. Add captions or text to tell your story visually.

Experiment with size: More than 50 percent of videos are played on mobile now. And square and vertical videos take up more screen space than landscape videos when the phone is held vertically. In our own experiments, we found that square videos outperformed landscape videos on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in terms of average engagement and views.

If you're looking for information about video specs of all the major social media platforms such as the maximum length and default audio state, we hope we've gotten you covered with this blog post.

3. Record

Now, the fun part - recording!

Thanks to the advancement of technology (yay to smartphones!), you can create engaging, high-quality videos with just a few simple tools and tricks. Here are some of our suggestions:

Use your smartphone

You don't need expensive video equipment to get started. One of the most powerful video tools is right in your pocket - your smartphone. Most smartphones today can record videos of high visual and audio quality.

There are also many video-editing mobile apps available, which you'll learn about later in this post.

Stabilize your phone with a tripod

A stable video helps it look more professional. You can easily get affordable tripods from Amazon. For example, a mini tripod for phones costs about $11 while a 50-inch lightweight tripod costs $13.

Speak into a microphone

It's best to find a quiet location to record your video. To improve the sound quality further, you can get a lavalier microphone for just $20. Just plug it into your phone and hit record.

Find good lighting

Natural light is one of the best light sources for your videos. If you can't get that, lamps work great, too. When recording your video, be sure to face the light source so that the light spreads evenly across your face.

If you prefer a more advanced light setup, you'll love this " Lighting on the Fly " guide by Wistia.

Find or create your video background

Finally, find a nice background for your video. A simple colored background is a great option as it encourages viewers to focus on you and prevents them from being distracted by things going on in the background.

If you can't find a suitable background, you could create one yourself. You could buy a large foam board from Amazon or a stationery store and place it behind you. Or you could build your own lightbox if you are filming a small physical product.

4. Edit

Great work on recording your video clips! Now, let's put them together.

Here are a few of our favorite video-editing tools:

Animoto

For creating video slideshows, we love to use Animoto. It allows us to easily combine video clips, stock videos, photos, and text together to create short engaging videos. Music can also be added to the video in just a few clicks.

If you're looking for more music choices, Brian Peters found 13 fantastic places for background music.

Other tools like Animoto: Adobe Spark Video, Promo, and Wave

Quik

If you like to edit on-the-go, Facebook recommends Quik by GoPro ( Android, iOS). You can just pick your videos and photos, and Quik will automatically find highlights, add effects, and sync transitions with the music. You can then customize the video to your liking.

Other tools like Quik: Videoshop ( Android, iOS), Stop Motion Studio ( Android, iOS), Vidlab ( iOS)

Legend

With Legend ( Android, iOS), you can turn simple text into impressive animations. These animations can be a great addition to your videos as a transition between two video clips.

Other tools like Legend: Crello, Adobe Spark Post ( iOS)

Note: You'll want to be mindful of the copyrights and royalties of the videos, images, and music you use for your videos. Here's a quick rundown of a few rules and licenses.

Finally, you're ready to share your video!

While there are many ways to share your videos on your social media profiles, we hope the best way for you is to use Buffer's Tailored Posts.

With Tailored Posts, you can easily schedule or post different videos to each of your social media profiles. All at once, from a single place. And videos will be uploaded directly to the social media platforms.

To use Tailored Posts, click on the Buffer browser extension on any website. (Tailored Posts is coming to the desktop and mobile dashboards soon!)

Then, select the social profiles you want to share the video with, update the copy, and upload the video.

Then, hit "Add to Queue". Your video will be added to your respective social profile queues and shared at the selected times.

7 video ideas and examples to help you get started

I know creating videos can feel a little intimidating at first. I had many questions myself. What should I include in the video? How long should it be? What type of music should I use?

I hope from these ideas and examples of short social media videos, you'll find some inspiration and the answers to your questions.

How-to, tips, or tutorial

HubSpot created a short video on how to convince your boss to let you work from home, with stock footages and text.

Customer testimonial

GoPro interviewed three customers to promote its drone, GoPro Karma, and to introduce its new features.

Events

Wistia did a recap video of their time at Inbound 2017.

Behind-the-scenes

Patagonia shared a quick behind-the-scenes look at their factory.

Product launch

Ben & Jerry's created a simple looping video to promote a new flavor of ice cream.

List

We made a short video slideshow sharing five tips that increased our Facebook video views and engagement.

User-generated content

Starbucks compiled photos of its iconic holiday cups from its customers into a simple video slideshow.

For more ideas, check out Facebook's Creative Hub, where they have listed close to 100 Facebook videos for your inspiration.

With videos being the third most-wanted content type in the future (after social media posts and news), it'll be great to get started now6

. Here's a simple framework you can use (and adapt):

If you have already been creating videos, I would love to learn from you. Do you have any tips for creating engaging social media videos? How does your video creation process look like?

-

Get started for free now

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How to Create Engaging Social Media Videos: A Step-by-Step Guide

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When was the last time you watched a video on social media? Videos are becoming increasingly popular on social media, especially on mobile. Over the past year, the time people spent watching Facebook Live every day has increased by four times and Instagram videos by 80 percent3 .

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11 Tips For Creating Amazing Social Media Videos

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11 Tips For Creating Amazing Social Media Videos

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11 Tips For Creating Amazing Social Media Videos - Eclincher

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Capture your audience’s attention, improve engagement, and increase conversions with video. Click here for 11 tips for better social media videos.

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11 Tips for Creating Amazing Social Media Videos

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Guardian Australia (@guardianaustralia) Official TikTok | Watch Guardian Australia's Newest TikTok Videos

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Guardian Australia (@guardianaustralia) on TikTok | 8.1M Likes. 207K Fans. Fearless, independent news, Aus style! Live news👉theguardian.com/au Bio links👇

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The #usa failed in their 20yr attempt to control #Afghanistan but what come next for the #Afghani people?📸Reuters/AP/REX  #🇦🇫 #Kabul #usarmy

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@guardianaustralia
The #usa failed in their 20yr attempt to control #Afghanistan but what come next for the #Afghani people?📸Reuters/AP/REX #🇦🇫 #Kabul #usarmy
♬ original sound - Guardian Australia

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Doctors and scientists use TikTok to spread Coronavirus message

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Doctors and scientists use TikTok to spread Coronavirus message

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Doctors and scientists use TikTok to spread Coronavirus message | 5 News

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The Viral TikTok That Explains Vaccine Science 

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The Viral TikTok That Explains Vaccine Science 

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I've spent 30 years trying to make complicated science understandable. Explaining how vaccines work can be especially tricky. Explaining the new technology used in COVID-19 vaccines can be trickier still.

So my heart filled with joy and delight when I saw Vick Krishna's TikTok explaining how the vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna work. So simple. So straightforward. So well done.

And fun to watch. It's a horror film parody including a monster with spiky fork hands, people disappearing into thin air, a concerned scientist - the works. But the video is absolutely rated G.

If you can find a better way to explain why putting messenger RNA into a cell so it will make an antigen that will prompt the generation of neutralizing antibodies that will protect someone from COVID-19, I'd love to see it.

The best part: Krishna works at NPR as a development and operations engineer based in New York City.

NPR editor Suzette Lohmeyer caught up with the 32-year-old tech expert by day, videographer by night, to ask him a few questions about his video, which took just two days to film and edit but has garnered more than 6 million views on TikTok alone according to Fast Company.
What motivated you to make this TikTok?
I knew there was a lot of fear and misinformation about the vaccine, so I wanted to show in an entertaining way that this vaccine is not what they thought and ease their minds.
How did you come up with the idea of "fork hands" to represent the coronavirus spike protein?
So I was doing a lot of research on the vaccine, and the key component to it was the spike protein. There was a fork on my table where I was writing the skit, and that clicked for me. Fork = coronavirus spike protein.
Has making explainer videos been something you've been into for a while, or did you just start with this one?
I've been making TikToks since the start of the pandemic as a creative outlet. And I've attempted to explain a lot of current events, like India's farmers protest, in an easy way, along with just comedic skits.
How do you make the TikToks? And are you a solo act?
I just shoot these skits with my iPhone and edit on my PC by myself. I did have to ask my girlfriend to push the record button while I had "fork hands."
Any more COVID-19 ideas you're working on?
I am working on a video about why two doses are needed for the mRNA vaccine. I'm also trying to make a skit in support of #StopAAPIHate.
What are your future career plans? Something with film? Video?
My love is acting, and I'm a big dreamer. So hopefully I'll land in TV/film one day.

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The Viral TikTok That Explains Vaccine Science - And Makes You Laugh

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I've spent 30 years trying to make complicated science understandable. Explaining how vaccines work can be especially tricky. Explaining the new technology used in COVID-19 vaccines can be trickier still. So my heart filled with joy and delight when I saw Vick Krishna's TikTok explaining how the vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna work.

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Supporting our community through COVID-19

Amidst global concerns around the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, we want to share some of the steps we're taking to help the TikTok community stay safe and informed. TikTok is committed to providing our community with access to public health information and resources. At the same time, we want to do our part to support families, frontline workers, and others deeply impacted by the pandemic.

Supporting communities in need

We're all operating in uncertain times, and it's more important now than ever to come together to help those in need.

TikTok Health Heroes Relief Fund: Health care workers are the heroes of this global battle, and we're passionate about supporting their efforts through the provision of $150 million in funds toward medical staffing, supplies, and hardship relief. This includes $15 million to the CDC Foundation to support surge staffing at high-need hospitals across the US and $10 million to the World Health Organization's (WHO) COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund which provides essential supplies to frontline health care workers and support treatment and vaccine research. We've also donated $10 million to 10 academic institutions that serve underrepresented students with programs focused on public health and professions in the medical and healthcare fields.

TikTok Community Relief Fund: To provide critical relief to communities impacted by the health and economic damage caused by this crisis, we've allotted $40 million to local organizations that serve groups representative of TikTok's diverse communities, including musicians, artists, nurses, educators, and families that have come together on the platform. Some of the many organizations we've donated to include MusiCares to provide assistance to music professionals whose livelihoods have been severely impacted; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, to support immunization programs in Africa; the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundational to aid service workers as their industry faces uncertainty; the National Parent Teacher Association (PTA) to help fund distance learning, meals, and mental health support to over 150 PTAs across the US; and After-School All-Stars (ASAS) to help provide food for families impacted by the loss of access to free or reduced-cost school meals in 60 US cities.

TikTok Creative Learning Fund: TikTok has committed $50 million in grants to educators, professional experts, and nonprofits whose real-world skills and expertise can help spread educational information and useful course material in an accessible, distance learning format.

Helping SMBs restart and rebuild: To help SMBs weather this crisis, we're providing $100 million in ad credits to help companies get back on their feet.

Partnering for greater impact

We're at our strongest when we work together, which is why we've partnered with a number of local and global organizations who are using TikTok to share trusted information with the community. Beyond the library of information available to the community in our COVID-19 hub, the WHO is serving as a valuable resource to our community by using their TikTok account to create videos highlighting key tips and facts: Find them @who A sampling of other organizations using their accounts to provide tips and promote safe and healthy behavior include:

... and many more. Local health authorities interested in sharing trusted information can contact us here.

Through our partnership with Team Halo, scientists from all over the world continue to post video updates on TikTok to show the world the progress being made on the vaccine. This team of public health experts answer all kinds of questions from our community, from what steps go into developing a vaccine to how they test them for safety - helping people stay in the know. Additionally, TikTok is donating prominent in-feed ad space to trusted organizations and local health authorities to help our community stay safe, informed, and connected. To date, TikTok has donated nearly $5 million in ad credits to trusted organizations and local health authorities in the US.

Resources for our community

TikTok works with public health experts to make authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines available directly in our app. In our COVID-19 information hub, our community can find answers to common questions about the virus and vaccines from the World Heath Organization (WHO) and the CDC as well as tips on staying safe.

While this resource isn't the reason people come to TikTok, we want to make sure it's readily available among the creative content they're enjoying. The informational hub can be accessed from the Discover page, search, and banners on videos related to COVID-19 and vaccines. In the second half of 2020, this hub was viewed over 2 billion times globally. We believe that one of the best ways to counter misinformation is through engaging, informative content, and we continue to partner with public health experts to create content that resonates with our community -- here are some examples:

TikTok supported the Safe Hands Challenge, a campaign launched by the WHO to promote hand washing. The hashtag has 5.4 billion views with participants like Jimmy Fallon, Gloria Gaynor, and Mariah Carey.

We launched #HappyAtHome, a series of fun and educational live programs with a goal of sharing in a bit of levity, providing our community some comfort, and embracing the responsibility we all have to do the right thing by staying inside and stopping the spread of coronavirus.

Procter & Gamble partnered with TikTok and public health officials to launch the #DistanceDance challenge, which encourages people to stay at home and practice physical distancing to help slow the spread of coronavirus and encourage their friends to do the same - in a fun and creative way.

We also hosted a series of live streams led by the World Health Organization where experts from WHO shared information on protective measures and took live questions from our community.

TikTok has a mission to inspire creativity and bring joy - and the need for joy and positivity has rarely felt more needed than during this time. This is a difficult time for the world as a whole, but it's also possible for our shared sense of concern to be a commonality that brings us closer. We appreciate that those in our community are being kind to themselves and to each other.

Combatting medical misinformation

TikTok's Community Guidelines prohibit content that's false or misleading, including misinformation related to COVID-19, vaccines, and anti-vaccine disinformation more broadly. We also do not allow paid advertising that advocates against vaccinations, though PSAs or calls to action related to COVID-19 vaccines are accepted on a case-by-case basis if they're in the interest of public health and safety. TikTok works with experts across the industry, civil society, public health, our Content Advisory Council to develop our policies and enforcement strategies and stay ahead of evolving content. TikTok takes a proactive, holistic approach to countering misinformation.

We have specially trained teams working to identify and remove false or misleading content as well as accounts that spread misinformation. Our community members can also report misinformation to us from our app.

Our fact-checking partners help us assess the accuracy of content and include Politifact, Lead Stories, Science Feedback, and the AFP. If fact-checking is inconclusive, we will limit the distribution of content into anyone's For You feed to reduce the potential for misinformation to spread.

We work with industry-leading threat detection platforms to identify networks and suspicious activity.

We take multiple approaches to make anti-vaccine and COVID-19 misinformation harder to find. In addition to removing content, we redirect searches associated with vaccine or COVID-19 disinformation to our Community Guidelines and do not autocomplete anti-vaccine hashtags in search.

For people on TikTok who choose to explore hashtags related to coronavirus, we surface an in-app notice that provides direct access to WHO's website and local public health agencies while also reminding them to report content that violates our Community Guidelines.

Protecting our global team

As a global company, we prioritize the safety of our employees and the world around us. With this in mind, we've introduced a work from home policy for our global teams and suspended cross-border business trips. We continue to evaluate the current environment, and in conjunction with guidance from trusted health authorities, we will adjust our measures as needed.

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Amidst global concerns around the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, we want to share some of the steps we're taking to help the TikTok community stay safe and informed. TikTok is committed to providing our community with access to public health information and resources.

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Camera Shots and Camera angles
LO 3: Demonstrate how all factors construct the mise en scène and contribute to the narrative.
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https://hoaxmap.org/
https://www.geschichtscheck.de/ (Open history e.V.)

https://www.mimikama.at https://www.hoaxsearch.com/

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Creative appropriation of political information on TikTok. A multi-method investigation of the hashtag #ww3

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Creative appropriation of political information on TikTok. A multi-method investigation of the hashtag #ww3

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https://www.medienpaed.com/article/view/1080/957

Prof. Dr. Judith Ackermann, Leyla Dewitz ,University o applied Science

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Anzeige von Kreative Bearbeitung politischer Information auf TikTok | MedienPädagogik: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Medienbildung

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MedienPädagogik ist ein Open-Access-Journal und richtet sich an Fachpersonen aus Wissenschaft und Praxis, die sich mit Fragen der Vermittlung zwischen Menschen und Medien in pädagogischen Kontexten beschäftigen (Medienpädagogik). Die Zeitschrift bietet ein Forum, um Fragen der medienpädagogischen Theoriebildung zu verhandeln und sich über den Stand des Fachdiskurses zu orientieren.

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Mach den digitalen Nachrichtentest!Wie gut bist du im Umgang mit Nachrichten im Internet?

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Mach den digitalen Nachrichtentest!Wie gut bist du im Umgang mit Nachrichten im Internet?

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https://mabb.de/news-test.html

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News Test - Medienanstalt Berlin-Brandenburg

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Tragen Sie sich hier mit Ihrer E-Mail-Adresse ein, um regelmäßig den mabb-Newsletter zu erhalten.

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arte TV feature: Social media propaganda machine

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arte TV feature: Social media propaganda machine

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https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/098157-000-A/propagandamaschine-social-media/

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Mozilla Foundation Report: "Leere Versprechungen: TikTok und die Bundestagswahl "TikTok scheitert beim Eindämmen von Fehlinformationen - Empty promises: TikTok and the Bundestag election, TikTok fails to curb misinformation

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Mozilla Foundation Report: "Leere Versprechungen: TikTok und die Bundestagswahl "TikTok scheitert beim Eindämmen von Fehlinformationen - Empty promises: TikTok and the Bundestag election, TikTok fails to curb misinformation

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http://dicipass.eu/

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DICIPASS4YOUTH - Exploring digital citizenship

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Many intellectual information laws are violated in this new digital age, i.e. copyright infringement and trademark abuse. The digital world is so enormous that it is difficult to police. Therefore, we digital citizens must be vigilant in reporting illegal behavior, if we see it, and we personally should only engage in behavior that is above reproach.

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AllSides' balanced news coverage, media bias ratings, civil dialogue opportunities, and technology platform are available for everyone and can be integrated by schools, nonprofits, media companies, and more.

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AllSides Headline Roundups™ bring you top news stories from the left, center and right of the political spectrum - side-by-side so you can see the full picture.

We rotate the order of headlines to avoid biasing our coverage in favor of the left, which otherwise would always be listed first.

Learn how AllSides provides balanced news

MSNBC (Left bias) announced it's canceling opinion commentator Mehdi Hasan's Sunday night show on Thursday, drawing opinions from journalists and media outlets. For Context: Hasan is known...

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AllSides | Balanced news via media bias ratings for an unbiased news perspective

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We use media bias ratings to provide balanced news, perspectives and issues across the political spectrum. Unbiased news coverage doesn't exist - there is no such thing as unbiased news or t

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The COR curriculum provides free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.

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Free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.

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... from different cities from different projects/providers

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lecture series: Making sense of the digital society

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lecture series: Making sense of the digital society

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https://www.hiig.de/en/making-sense-of-the-digital-society/

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Rasmus Kleis Nielsen: The power of platforms and how publishers adapt – HIIG

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Today, more people follow the news via platform companies like Facebook and Google than via any news organisation in human history, and smaller platforms like Twitter serve news to more people than all but the biggest publishers.

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Rasmus Kleis Nielsen: The power of platforms and how publishers adapt

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tool: open source collaborative plattform for projects

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tool: open source collaborative plattform for projects

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Die Nutzung von wechange.de ist für alle kostenlos, denn wir verstehen unsere Plattform als Gemeingut. Dennoch entstehen bei der Entwicklung und Betreuung der Plattform Kosten in Form von Personal, Servermieten etc., die natürlich fair sein sollen. Deshalb haben wir ein solidarisches Preismodell geschaffen: ihr zahlt für die Nutzung von wechange.de das, was es euch wert ist. Mit jedem Euro, den ihr zahlt, helft ihr mit, wechange.de immer besser zu machen. Wenn ihr nur wenig oder gar nichts beitragen könnt, tragen euch andere mit.

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WECHANGE - deine Plattform für den Wandel

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WECHANGE will den sozio-ökologischen Wandel mit seiner digitalen Plattform für Zusammenarbeit und Vernetzung voranzubringen. Mehr erfahren➤

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a partner project of Wisenschaft im Dialog,  (excursion yesterday/12.11.21)

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a partner project of Wisenschaft im Dialog,  (excursion yesterday/12.11.21)

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www.getbadnews.de
https://www.wissenschaft-im-dialog.de/projekte/bad-news/

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Digitale Agenda für Europas Wirtschaft - demokratisch * nachhaltig * gerecht

Europa stellt heute die Weichen für die Wirtschaft von morgen. Die digitale Agenda der EU spielt hierbei eine zentrale Rolle. Um im Wettbewerb der Systeme zu bestehen, vor allem aber um seinen Werten und Zielen gerecht zu werden, muss Europa ein eigenes, innovatives Wirtschaftsmodell für das digitale Zeitalter etablieren.

Wie sieht ein Wirtschaftsmodell aus, in dem der Einsatz von Big Data oder Künstlicher Intelligenz im Einklang mit Demokratie und sozialer Gerechtigkeit steht? Wie trägt die digitale Ökonomie zum Erreichen der europäischen Klimaziele bei? Und wie souverän ist Europa auf seinem Weg in die digitale Zukunft?

Beim Kongress Digitaler Kapitalismus Kongress denken wir Zukunft zusammen. Sei mit dabei!

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Digitale Agenda für Europas Wirtschaft - demokratisch * nachhaltig * gerecht Europa stellt heute die Weichen für die Wirtschaft von morgen. Die digitale Agenda der EU spielt hierbei eine zentrale Rolle. Um im Wettbewerb der Systeme zu bestehen, vor allem aber um seinen Werten und Zielen gerecht zu werden, muss Europa ein eigenes, innovatives Wirtschaftsmodell für das digitale Zeitalter etablieren.

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Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.

A few days ago, a handful of similar stories or anecdotes about technology came to my attention. While they came from different sectors and were of varying degrees of seriousness, they shared a common characteristic. In each case, there was either an expressed bewilderment or admission of obliviousness about the possibility that a given technology would be put to destructive or nefarious purposes. Naturally, I tweeted about it ... like one does.

I subsequently clarified that I was not subtweeting anyone in particular just everything in general. Of course, naiveté, hubris, and recklessness don't quite cover all the possibilities-nor are they mutually exclusive.

In response, someone noted that "people find it hard to 'think like an *-hole', in
@mathbabedotorg's phrase, because most aren't." That handle belongs to Cathy O'Neil, best known for her 2016 book, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality And Threatens Democracy.

There's something to this, of course, and, as I mentioned in my reply, I truly do appreciate the generosity of this sentiment. I suggested that the witness of history is helpful on this score, correcting and informing our own limited perspectives. But I was also reminded of a set of questions that I had put together back in 2016 in a moment of similar frustration.

The occasion then was the following observation from Om Malik:

"I can safely say that we in tech don't understand the emotional aspect of our work, just as we don't understand the moral imperative of what we do. It is not that all players are bad; it is just not part of the thinking process the way, say, 'minimum viable product' or 'growth hacking' are."

Malik went on to write that "it is time to add an emotional and moral dimension to products," by which he seems to have meant that tech companies should use data responsibly and make their terms of service more transparent. In my response at the time, I took the opportunity to suggest that we needn't add an emotional and moral dimension to tech, it was already there. The only question was as to its nature. As Langdon Winner had famously inquired "Do artifacts have politics?" and answered in the affirmative, I likewise argued that artifacts have ethics. I then went on to produce a set of 41 questions that I drafted with a view to helping us draw out the moral or ethical implications of our tools. The post proved popular at the time and I received a few notes from developers and programmers who had found the questions useful enough to print out post in their workspaces.

This was all before the subsequent boom in "tech ethics," and, frankly, while my concerns obviously overlap to some degree with the most vocal and popular representatives of that movement, I've generally come at the matter from a different place and have expressed my own reservations with the shape more recent tech ethics advocacy has taken. Nonetheless, I have defended the need to think about the moral dimensions of technology against the notion that all that matters are the underlying dynamics of political economy (e.g., here and here).

I won't cover that ground again, but I did think it might be worthwhile to repost the questions I drafted then. It's been more than six years since I first posted them, and, while some you reading this have been following along since then, most of you picked up on my work in just the last couple of years. And, recalling where we began, trying to think like a malevolent actor might yield some useful insights, but I'd say that we probably need a better way to prompt our thinking about technology's moral dimensions. Besides, worst case malevolent uses are not the only kinds of morally significant aspects of our technology worth our consideration, as I hope some of these questions will make clear.

This is not, of course, an exhaustive set of questions, nor do I claim any unique profundity for them. I do hope, however, that they are useful, wherever we happen to find ourselves in relation to technological artifacts and systems. At one point, I had considered doing something a bit more with these, possibly expanding on each briefly to explain the underlying logic and providing some concrete illustrative examples or cases. Who knows, may be that would be a good occasional series for the newsletter. Feel free to let me know what you think about that.

Anyway, without further ado, here they are:

1. What sort of person will the use of this technology make of me?

2. What habits will the use of this technology instill?

3. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of time?

4. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of place?

5. How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to other people?

6. How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to the world around me?

7. What practices will the use of this technology cultivate?

8. What practices will the use of this technology displace?

9. What will the use of this technology encourage me to notice?

10. What will the use of this technology encourage me to ignore?

11. What was required of other human beings so that I might be able to use this technology?

12. What was required of other creatures so that I might be able to use this technology?

13. What was required of the earth so that I might be able to use this technology?

14. Does the use of this technology bring me joy? [N.B. This was years before I even heard of Marie Kondo!]

15. Does the use of this technology arouse anxiety?

16. How does this technology empower me? At whose expense?

17. What feelings does the use of this technology generate in me toward others?

18. Can I imagine living without this technology? Why, or why not?

19. How does this technology encourage me to allocate my time?

20. Could the resources used to acquire and use this technology be better deployed?

21. Does this technology automate or outsource labor or responsibilities that are morally essential?

22. What desires does the use of this technology generate?

23. What desires does the use of this technology dissipate?

24. What possibilities for action does this technology present? Is it good that these actions are now possible?

25. What possibilities for action does this technology foreclose? Is it good that these actions are no longer possible?

26. How does the use of this technology shape my vision of a good life?

27. What limits does the use of this technology impose upon me?

28. What limits does my use of this technology impose upon others?

29. What does my use of this technology require of others who would (or must) interact with me?

30. What assumptions about the world does the use of this technology tacitly encourage?

31. What knowledge has the use of this technology disclosed to me about myself?

32. What knowledge has the use of this technology disclosed to me about others? Is it good to have this knowledge?

33. What are the potential harms to myself, others, or the world that might result from my use of this technology?

34. Upon what systems, technical or human, does my use of this technology depend? Are these systems just?

35. Does my use of this technology encourage me to view others as a means to an end?

36. Does using this technology require me to think more or less?

37. What would the world be like if everyone used this technology exactly as I use it?

38. What risks will my use of this technology entail for others? Have they consented?

39. Can the consequences of my use of this technology be undone? Can I live with those consequences?

40. Does my use of this technology make it easier to live as if I had no responsibilities toward my neighbor?

41. Can I be held responsible for the actions which this technology empowers? Would I feel better if I couldn't?

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Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. A few days ago, a handful of similar stories or anecdotes about technology came to my attention. While they came from different sectors and were of varying degrees of seriousness, they shared a common characteristic.

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Itʼs Complicated. People and Their Democracy in Germany, France, Britain, Poland and the United States.

What expectations do people have of democracy? What are their demands or concerns? Politicians and civil society frequently ask these questions as they seek starting points to effectively strengthen democracy and involve people who have not felt addressed so far.

In order to gain a better understanding people's different attitudes, expectations, and experiences with regards to democracy, we conducted a cross-national and application oriented study in partnership with the Robert Bosch Foundation in 2021. With the help of the expertise of our international More in Common team and network, we were able to examine people's relationship to democracy in five countries at once. Together, we looked at the challenges facing each democratic country.

With the support of YouGov and KANTAR, More in Common polled more than 10,000 people in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Poland and the United States in early 2021 and heard from thousands of people during interviews and focus groups.

Particular attention was paid focus to those groups within the population that are neither active defenders nor opponents of democracy, but have an ambivalent relationship with democracy.

Insights into core findings of the new study
The study provides five core findings on the basis of which recommendations can be made:

In none of the five countries do the majority desire alternatives to democracy.

At the same time, people have different ideas about what constitutes democracy and what it must fulfil.

Democracy 'in itself' is not enough for many people. They link their satisfaction with democracy to the results of political action.

In all five countries, there are democracy-ambivalent groups that do not have a solid relationship to democracy and that needs to be better addressed.

A crisis of trust and discourse characterizes all five countries, albeit to varying degrees. This exists between citizens and the political system, as well as among citizens themselves.

Contents

Conclusion: Country-Specific Findings and Recurring Motifs

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Harvard Youth Poll finds young Americans are worried about democracy and even fearful of civil war

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Harvard Youth Poll finds young Americans are worried about democracy and even fearful of civil war

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Harvard Youth Poll finds young Americans are worried about democracy and even fearful of civil war

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Young Americans share concerns about democracy, the Biden administration, the repercussions of the pandemic, and climate change in the latest IOP survey.

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reuters digital news report - comparative media usedas resources - globally  / year

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reuters digital news report - comparative media usedas resources - globally  / year

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This year's report reveals new insights about digital news consumption based on a YouGov survey of over 92,000 online news consumers in 46 markets including India, Indonesia, Thailand, Nigeria, Colombia and Peru for the first time.
Digital News Report 2021

This report looks at the progress on pay models and the popularity of curated editorial products like podcasts and newsletters.
Digital News Report 2020

This report find that the of social media for news has started to fall in a number of key markets after years of continuous growth.
Digital News Report 2019

This report find that the of social media for news has started to fall in a number of key markets after years of continuous growth.
Digital News Report 2018

This report casts new light on prevailing narratives about trust, fake news, failing business models and the power of platforms.
Digital News Report 2017

This year's data shows a unprecedented levels of disruption to business models and growing consumer rejection of online advertising.
Digital News Report 2016

This year's data shows a quickening of the pace towards social and mobile news along with a rise in online video consumption
Digital News Report 2015

The use of smartphones and tablets has jumped significantly in the past year, with fewer people using their computers for news
Digital News Report 2014

Those paying for online news doubles in many countries - albeit from a low base
Digital News Report 2013

UK shows the most interest in celebrity news, least interest in political news
Digital News Report 2012

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This year's report reveals new insights about digital news consumption based on a YouGov survey of over 75,000 online news consumers in 38 countries including South Africa for the first time. The report focuses on the progress on new paid online business models, trust and misinformation, the impact of populism, the shift to private messaging apps, and the rise of podcasts.