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How the media affects youth | Oda Faremo Lindholm | TEDxOslo

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We now live in a world where bite-sized chunks of mathematical data have become central to how we live our daily lives. When you search online, scroll through your social feeds or receive song recommendations from Spotify, you are being guided by an algorithm that understands your consumption habits perhaps more than you do.

Each day you are influenced by an algorithm in guiding your decisions and choices.

Mathematical calculations are influencing your purchasing decisions on Amazon, your flight in an airport and even whether your supermarket has your favorite cereal in stock.

As if by magic, you may be completely unaware of when an algorithm is at work. They act seamlessly between yourself and the task at hand. And while this might sound sinister, algorithms are, by and large, there to help you.

Social media algorithms are becoming central to everything you do. Often misunderstood and occasionally inaccurate but always on and always learning.

How you and most of society consume news and information can be attributed directly to algorithms.

Whether searching on Google or scrolling through Facebook and Twitter, the news and information presented come from a mathematical equation based on two factors:

Algorithmic quality - the quality standard of the content available.

Your previous history - the actions and reactions you've taken to specific chunks of content in the past.

This means whether by design or by personal choice, social media algorithms have allowed us to create filters to see content we want and remove everything else we don't.

Coupled with recent claims that algorithms can be biased it's important that they are understood and when they are at work.

Perhaps even more so since people are more likely to follow advice when they are being told that it came from an algorithm rather than a human according to a Harvard Business School study.

This has lead to articles providing guidance on how to think for yourself when algorithms control what you read.

While this guide does not claim to lay out the exact inner-workings of the social media algorithms, it tries to include everything we know about them that is publicly available.

What's presented here is based on a combination of publicly disclosed information by the social networks, third-party research, some basic assumptions and a little common sense.

Secondly, the diagrams presented are not visual representations of the algorithms. That would be impossible. Instead, they are more Decision Problems rather than algorithmic equations.

Use them as a process and checklist you can follow to ensure your content and messaging has the best opportunity to receive maximum impact.

Now in its third iteration, this guide is updated and expanded upon each year.

Social media algorithms for information and news flow

The most influential kind of algorithm is one that controls the flow of information people receive. It helps shape their thinking and understanding of news and events. Perhaps there is no greater power than being able to control the kind of information a group of people consume.

Over the years, social media platforms have become central to how people both communicate and receive information.

Whether that's keeping in touch with long-distance family members, organizing events, networking, running a business or keeping up with the news.
Social networks have evolved from being a place where people connect to an information distribution platform.
Many people now depend on social media algorithms to be informed and to keep up-to-date on news and events.

In fact, research by the Pew Research Center found that in 2017 two thirds of American adults reported getting at least 'some of their news' from social media.

As more people have started consuming information on social platforms, many publishers have taken advantage of the viral effect they can receive by having their content spread across them.

Indeed many publishers built their entire business models based on the viral effect platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn create. The content is optimized for shareability using persuasive techniques to create an emotional response in readers.

Understanding how social media algorithms work empowers us to know when we are perhaps being manipulated by these publishers.

Content creators - brands and individuals alike - need to understand how best to work with the social media algorithms to generate the best return for their content creating efforts.

Time and again we see content go down a black hole because no consideration is given to a social media algorithm. What works on one social network may not work for another which is why it is important to understand how each algorithm works to create the content to suit it.

Not that the social networks give us the 'secret sauce' to their algorithms. Most are notoriously hush about the inner workings of these often-complex mathematical equations.

They do, however, provide tidbits of advice and information on occasion either through their official channels or by their employees on social media.

The changing tide of the social media algorithms

In the early days of social networking, the intention was to connect people online who may not have been able to do so in real life.

Family and friends on Facebook; colleagues and work acquaintances on LinkedIn and anybody and anyone on Twitter.

As they grew and as each platform explored ways to monetize they began to diversify their offerings. News distribution was a key component of this.

The social networks, and especially Facebook, began to see themselves as a conduit for news distribution. They changed their algorithms to suit this shift especially as more people began to receive their news via them.

News publications worked on growing their audiences on these platforms and increasingly made content that was both snackable and shareable.

In 2015, Facebook surpassed Google as the number one traffic source for news sites solidifying its place as a social networking behemoth.

Then something happened.

Clickbait articles, fake news, bots, trolls and political warfare began to dominate the platform. The Facebook algorithm, perhaps the most famous algorithm in the world, was at the center of it.

People started reporting higher levels of anxiety and unhappiness after visiting Facebook and Twitter. They had turned into purveyors of outrage news and instead of connecting people they had created divisive groups.

Since 2018, the tide has changed once again for the social media algorithms.

Facebook announced that it intends to start prioritizing "meaningful conversations' instead of news articles.

Twitter is killing automation on the platform meaning any bots that create fake engagement via likes, follows or retweets will be quashed.

LinkedIn is prioritizing status updates by its professional users who dare to be more personal and open about their lives.

All of which are prioritizing content native to its platform over links to third-party sites.

In 2018, search was a bigger referrer to news sites over social for the first time since 2015.

This is the beginning of a new era in social networking. One that we've seen before and one that is more about human connection as opposed to information consumption.

It's one reason why the influencer marketing industry is on the rise. Brands are looking to work with social media influencers who have developed deep connections with their audience.

The algorithmic levers have been pulled once again. For many publishers, it has meant the end of traffic flow and in some cases the end of their entire business model.

For brands looking to engage in social networks, it requires a mindset shift.
It's about building a community, not an audience. It's about making content conversational instead of attention-grabbing. It's ultimately about taking a more honest approach when engaging with people on social networks.
Why we need to understand social media algorithms

A lack of understanding of how social media algorithms work is like driving in the dark with no lights on.

It's possible and you may get to your destination but it's an unnecessary risk.

In a nutshell, you need to understand them for the following reasons:

Impact: To ensure that your content creates the greatest impact possible

ROI: To ensure the time and effort spent publishing to these platforms has the greatest return

Reputation: To become a long-term trusted source of information for the algorithms

Wider societal impact: We need to be able to 'fight fire with fire' to prevent false information spreading online

The social networks are constantly changing, refining and testing their algorithms. It's important we keep up with them.
Ready? Then let's begin and dive into the social media algorithms.

Facebook Algorithm

Facebook has perhaps the most famous (or infamous) social media algorithm in the world.

It has been at the epicentre of political controversy over the last few years, not just in the US and Europe but across the world.

It is constantly evolving as Facebook looks to provide more value to users and more eyeballs for advertising spend and it has perhaps, along with the Google search algorithm, the main reason why layoffs continue in traditional and internet media.

Formerly known as EdgeRank, it is fair to say that the Facebook algorithm has been in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons over the last few years.

It's a morbid situation: Organic reach is almost dead, the news feed is dying and clickbait and fake news are on their last legs.

Organic reach is almost dead

In 2014, Facebook page owners started noticing a decline in organic reach. While numbers vary, the average organic reach dropped from around 16% to 6.5%. A page with 10,000 fans would only reach just 650 of them.

Page owners with more than 500,000 fans saw an event steeper drop to around 2%.

The reason for this, Facebook said, was because there was simply more content being created on the platform and people should see only the most relevant to them.

Since then, Facebook has continued to tweak the algorithm further decreasing a page's organic reach further.

Around the same time, its advertising revenues on the Facebook platform have almost hit their peak meaning it will soon depend on Instagram for the majority of its revenue growth.

A Facebook page today is more for running an advertising campaign from rather than anything else.

News feed is dying, long live stories

Stories have changed the social media landscape and it's the news feed that's taking the hit.

The ephemeral pieces of content we see from our friends, family and influencers on Instagram, Snapchat and increasingly Facebook are what consumers want most.

The news feed is a relic of the past and while it's not going away anytime soon it will no longer have the same impact it has had on society again.

Facebook itself sees stories as the future and says one billion of them are shared on its platform every day but has so far not being able to monetize them as much as its other ad inventory.

Nevertheless, stories are the where the action is and never underestimate Facebook's ability to monetize.

The Facebook facilitation of fake news and clickbait headlines is ending

To 'go viral' on Facebook used to be easy. Create a piece of content that people will share and, assuming you had decent distribution methods, it was guaranteed to spread across the Facebook platform.

It's what BuzzFeed based its business model on with other publications such as Unilad following suit. Content was engineered to be 'clickable' and 'shareable' by tapping into social psychology triggers that would evoke emotions of either love, humour, fear or anger.

This strategy was of course copied in all kinds of unscrupulous ways often using content that was completely fake.

The viral element of the old Facebook algorithm played a fundamental part in the 2016 Elections and Brexit in the UK. Both of which were largely played out on Facebook and both susceptible to fake news from fake websites and even clickbait from reputable news sources.

While the Facebook platform still has a propensity to facilitate the sharing of fake news, the company is improving its ability to capture and eradicate it by recently removing 14 million pieces of terrorist content, setting up an ' Election War Room ' to safeguard elections all around the world and by requiring users who run websites and political ad campaigns to verify their identity.

Facebook user habits have also changed when it comes to sharing news. Concerned about privacy, they prefer to use messaging apps WhatsApp and Messenger (both Facebook Inc. owned) to share and discuss news with close friends and acquaintances according to one study.

The new Facebook algorithm

The accumulation of negative media coverage along with research finding that people feel less happy after visiting Facebook has prompted the company to make swift moves to eradicate the sharing of content that make people either mad, bad or sad.

Ranking signals. Source: Facebook via Matt Navarra

An announcement by Mark Zuckerberg in January 2018 outlined the company's new approach to its algorithm by prioritizing " meaningful social interactions."

In Zuckerberg's post, he outlines a new direction for Facebook with the algorithm at the centre of it.

"We're making a major change to how we build Facebook. I'm changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions."

This means the Facebook algorithm will now prioritize content that drives discussions among friends and family as opposed to clickbait and links to third-party sites.

An example of meaningful interactions given by Facebook include:

A person commenting or liking another person's photo or status update

A person reacting to a post from a publisher (or brand) that a friend has shared

Multiple people replying to each other's comments on a video they watched or an article they read in the news feed

A person sharing a link over Messenger to start a conversation with a group of friends

The move prompted concerns by businesses and organizations that depend on Facebook as a communications platform.

Most notably people in the publishing industry and indeed publishers like LittleThings and Unilad either shut down or were acquired because of the sudden dip in referral traffic from the new algorithm.

With organic reach at an all-time low and the prioritization of communication between friends and family, many organizations question if Facebook is worth the effort at all.

Given its sheer size and dominance online, Facebook is worth the effort but this algorithm change requires a new approach.

What do we know about the Facebook algorithm in 2019?

Despite what we originally thought, Facebook confirmed it doesn't share your content with initially 26 people

A post is served to a small percentage of users to measure initial engagement

The Facebook algorithm will prioritize content that stimulates a conversation between friends and family

It will prioritize links shared over Messenger

The credibility of a user (completeness of their page, history of sharing etc) is a ranking factor

Brand or publisher content that is shared by a user and generates further discussion will be prioritized

It will prioritize live video because it receives more interactions

Native video posts receive much more engagement than a link post

Engagement is based on a points system

Posts with long-form comments will receive a higher weighting

Native content takes precedence over links to other sites

Posting five times a day seems to be the optimal amount according to a Buffer study

Clickbait and asking people to 'like, comment or share' your content will receive a markdown

Sensationalist content will be marked down by the algorithm

The Facebook algorithm will downrank articles with false headlines

The Facebook algorithm ranking signals

How to work with the Facebook algorithm in 2019

Create content with the purpose of driving discussion among Facebook users

This is the new normal on Facebook and anyone looking to work with the algorithm will have to take this into consideration when developing content they want to do well on the platform.

Take an 80/20 approach to native and owned content

Facebook wants you to create content for the platform but if your goal is to drive traffic to your site you have to play nicely. Be a credible contributor to the platform using native content and post sparingly to your own site and the algorithm may help you

Use live video to drive engagement whenever possible

Facebook has specifically said they will prioritize live video because they know it generates six times more engagement than any other content. Anything that drives meaningful engagement is worth doing

The data continues to show it and Facebook continues to verify it but native quality video will continue to be prioritised in Facebook for the foreseeable future. If you

Aim to be reputable in the eyes of the algorithm (be choosy with what you share)

Don't use Facebook as a means to share every piece of content you have. If it doesn't generate engagement then your credibility score will decrease. Only share content you believe is suitable for the platform and audience you're trying to engage.

Absolutely no clickbait, engagement bait or overly promotional content

The Facebook algorithm will mark down clickbait and sensational articles, statuses that ask users to like, comment and share, and promotional updates. To be seen as credible in the eyes of the algorithm don't do any of these.

Twitter Algorithm

Twitter has had a rollercoaster ride since its inception to say the least. For years it was unprofitable and it wasn't until 2018 it turned its first annual profit.

Despite its profitability, Twitter is losing users which is partly to do with it cleaning up the platform and removing spam and bot accounts.

It's likely Twitter will remain a niche social network but the type of users it attracts is some of the most influential in the world. It's a platform favored by the media and political elites and plays a key role in driving the news agenda.

Twitter's popularity among these people is likely to do with it being real-time, it's easy and it doesn't require any technical knowledge like writing a blog or creating a podcast.

The introduction of the Algorithmic Timelines

The Twitter algorithm, or the "Algorithmic Timeline" as Twitter calls it was introduced in 2016.

Prior to this, when you logged in to Twitter your feed was in reverse-chronicle order with the latest tweets from the people you follow at the top of the page.

When you log into Twitter now it's a different story. It's no longer in chronological order and your timeline may show a tweet from 30 minutes ago at the top of your page whereas there may be more recent tweets further down.

This is the algorithm at work and is designed to provide you with the most relevant content first based on your previous use of the platform.

These are the tweets that the algorithm thinks you will find most important. When you're developing a Twitter strategy you have to take this into account.

Twitter has no backtracked a little and provide users with an option to switch between the algorithmic and chronological timelines though it's the former that comes as default.

Trolls, bots and elections

Like Facebook, Twitter has been on the receiving end of controversy in recent years.

It has been accused of providing anonymous trolls and extremist groups a platform to spout vitriol and hate. And allowing Russian accounts and bots to meddle in the 2016 US presidential elections.

In January last year, Twitter said it had removed 50,000 Russian-related accounts that used the platform to post automated material relating to 2016 elections.

This has prompted a new change to the Twitter algorithm announced in February last year.

From now on, automation (or bot usage) on the Twitter platform won't be allowed.

Twitter has sent a clear warning sign to services that facilitate the usage of these bots with the following statement:

"The use of any form of automation (including scheduling) to post identical or substantially similar content, or to perform actions such as Likes or Retweets across many accounts that have authorized your app (whether or not you created or directly control those accounts) is not permitted."

Working with the Algorithmic Timeline in 280 characters

The intention of the Twitter algorithm is to make the timeline more relevant so users can catch important tweets that they would otherwise miss from people they engage with the most.

At the same time, Twitter still considers itself as a live news site as well as a social platform. It reinforces this by asking "What's happening?" when you log in to your account.

It won't show you tweets that are days old because, by Twitter's standards, they're too old. The intention of Twitter is to help people find out 'what's happening right now' as opposed to Facebook or LinkedIn which is more about 'what's going on this week.'

So while the algorithm will show you older tweets first, time is still an important factor. And if you want your tweets to get as much reach and engagement as possible, you have to work with the algorithm.

In September 2017, Twitter made one of its boldest changes yet by going from the 140 character limit to 280.

There was outrage from users who believed this move would spell the demise of the platform.

In hindsight, Twitter had a good plan based on analyzing engagement data on languages that could fit more context into a tweet. They found that tweets in Japanese - where the characters allow you to say more - received much more engagement than tweets in English.

With that said, in October 2018 it was reported that the average tweet length is still only 35 characters.

Now you can avoid the Twitter algorithm altogether

In another bold move by Twitter, in September 2018 it announced that users will be able to switch to the chronological timeline so they can see the latest post at the top of their feed.

In a tweet by Twitter support, the company said, "Our goal with the timeline is to balance showing you the most recent Tweets with the best Tweets you're likely to care about, but we don't always get this balance right."

What do we know about the Twitter algorithm?

Timing is heavily weighted in the Twitter algorithm

Profile credibility is favoured in the algorithm

Using the 280 character limit increase engagement rates

Native content is likely to take precedence over links to other sites though links still can get shared

Tweets from people you engage with the most will show first

A tweet is served to a small percentage of users to measure initial engagement

Likes, replies and retweets are likely to have a weighting score

Time spent reading someone's tweets or visiting their profile will impact the content you see even if you don't engage with it

The more you engage with people and the more they engage back makes the algorithm show any further tweets in their timeline (if they are following you)

The Twitter algorithm ranking signals

How to work with the Twitter algorithm in 2019

Timing: Tweet when your followers are online

Use a third-party service like Tweroid or ManagerFlitter to tell you what time of the day your followers are usually online. This is the best time to post to ensure that your tweets get as much visibility as possible among your followers. The more visibility a tweet has, the greater chance of engagement it will receive.

Develop a follower-base around a specific topic or subject area to be more relevant and drive more engagement

Some people buy followers to look more influential than they are. Or they use a bot to follow and unfollow lots of accounts to inflate their follower numbers.

The problem here is when they tweet and receive little to no engagement. Why? Because the majority of their followers are either spam accounts or irrelevant.

Twitter has now thankfully put a stop to this manipulation of numbers but the lesson in it for us all:

To create engaging tweets you must have a relevant and responsive audience. Don't add any kind of account in the hope they'll add you back. Instead, be highly specific with the accounts you follow and over time those types of accounts will follow you back.

Create tweets based on what your followers like

Your Twitter Analytics provides you with a wealth of data not just about your tweets but about the demographics of your followers. It will tell you their subject interests and break them down by percentage.

Once you understand your follower interests you can create tweets for them. The more relevant they are the more likely they will engage.

Use the 280 character limit to provide further information and context

Twitter has stated that tweets that use more characters get more engagement. Why? Because you can add more information and more context. You can also be more creative. Do this and the Twitter algorithm will reward you for it.

Ensure your profile is up-to-date and you have all the relevant information (name, bio, location, links, photo etc) filled out.

The algorithm favours accounts that it deems credible so do not be spammy, post broken links or use automation software.

If you're tweeting every day and providing value to your followers, the algorithm will reward you for it. If your tweets from the past week received engagement the algorithm will prioritize you further. It's about showing up every day and adding value to a relevant audience.

When you retweet and @reply other people and they respond, the algorithm will place any further tweets of yours in their timeline (provided they are following you).

Engaging with other Twitter accounts ensures that the algorithm sees you as a contributor to the community. Don't just tweet out and expect people to engage with you - go out and engage with others.

LinkedIn Algorithm

While the LinkedIn algorithm hasn't been on the end of as much controversy as Facebook or Twitter, it has certainly had a few hiccups along the way.

In September 2016, LinkedIn was accused of showing a preference to men over women when looking for candidates using its search feature.

A few months before that, LinkedIn users had fun and games with people who have names that are double entendres. Bart Simpson played no part in any of this.

LinkedIn has perhaps been one of the most open social networks about how its algorithm works.

In March 2017, it's data team published a blog post titled, Strategies for Keeping the LinkedIn Feed Relevant which included an algorithm diagram of how it combats spam.

What is telling from the March 2017 post is that LinkedIn uses human intervention as well as its algorithm to determine content quality.

If a post begins to receive a lot of engagement "real people at LinkedIn" will analyse it and decide whether it's good enough to be seen by a wider audience on the platform.

Insider tip: keep your LinkedIn network relevant to the types of content you share on the platform. It will have a greater chance of spreading if most of your contacts are in the same industry as you and value the same kind of content.

In March 2018, the same team published another blog post titled, A Look Behind the AI that Powers LinkedIn's Feed which provides insights as to what the LinkedIn algorithm values.

The engineering team say that when a user logs into the platform, the LinkedIn algorithm sorts through tens of thousands of posts and ranks the most important ones at the top of the feed.

From this they use thousands of signals to determine a user's preferences which they use to personalize the feed for specific member.

From these signals the LinkedIn algorithm buckets them into three broad categories:

Identity: Who are you? Where do you work? What are your skills? Who are you connected with?

Content: How many times was the update viewed? How many times was it "liked"? What is the update about? How old is it? What language is it written in? What companies, people, or topics are mentioned in the update?

Behavior: What have you liked and shared in the past? Who do you interact with most frequently? Where do you spend the most time in your news feed?

"By inputting these signals into our algorithms, we are able to generate personalized news feeds for every member and ensure they are having the conversations they need to become more productive and successful.

The Knowledge Graph and proposed Interest Graph will change the LinkedIn algorithm

In 2016, LinkedIn published a post detailing its 'Knowledge Graph'' which is based on users' jobs, titles, skills, companies, geographical locations, schools, etc.

According to LinkedIn, "these entities and the relationships among them form the ontology of the professional world and are used by LinkedIn to enhance its recommender systems, search, monetization and consumer products, and business and consumer analytics."

Last year, the company announced the proposed 'Interest Graph' that represents relationships between members and a taxonomy of topics.

"This graph allows us to measure member-to-topic affinity (e.g. how interested are you about scuba diving?), topic-to-topic relatedness (e.g. snorkling is related to scuba diving), as well as which of your connections share your interests."

This means that with the Knowledge Graph and Interest Graph, the LinkedIn algorithm will be able to match people not only by their jobs but also what they enjoy in their personal lives too.

This will be a very powerful algorithm and perhaps more than what the Facebook algorithm can achieve.

The viral effect is with your 2nd-degree connections

The LinkedIn algorithm gives your content virility by showing it to the connections of those who engage with it. If someone engages with your post either by commenting on it or liking it, the algorithm will show that comment or like to their 1st-degree connections (your 1st or 2nd).

So, let's say someone comments on your post, the LinkedIn algorithm will show it to five of their connections. This is how your content is amplified outside of your 1st-degree network to your 2nd and 3rd-degree connections.

Use 'Broetry' to generate a viral effect with LinkedIn statuses

If you use LinkedIn regularly, you may have seen status updates what BuzzFeed calls 'Broetry.'

These are "go-to post format for marketers, social media mavens, and growth evangelists."

They are one sentence paragraphs designed with a narrative, emotional hooks and social triggers.

The best-known creator of 'broems' is growth hacker, Josh Fechter, who has created some serious viral posts on LinkedIn using this method wracking up 200 million views in the process.

While broems are not to everybody's taste, there's no denying this style of posts is LinkedIn algorithm friendly.

As we know, however, algorithms never stay the same and already users of the broem are acknowledging that they don't receive the same traction as they once did.

What do we know about the LinkedIn algorithm?

Native content takes precedence over links to other sites

Content will be shown to the most relevant people in your network by matching skills, industry and who you're connected with

Content will be shown to people who have engaged with you on LinkedIn in the past and who you interact with the most frequently

Likes, comments and shares are likely to have different weightings

The key to going viral is to get the algorithm to show your content to your 2nd and 3rd-degree network

A post is served to a small percentage of users to measure initial engagement

One sentence paragraphs of personal narratives still do well as a viral mechanism

Content with high engagement will be analysed by LinkedIn staff and potentially opened up to a wider audience (though human analysis can be subjective)

The LinkedIn algorithm ranking signals

How to work with the LinkedIn algorithm in 2019

Create a relevant network of LinkedIn connections

If your LinkedIn network is full of people from a myriad of industries and sectors then your content won't resonate with all of them. Instead, keep your connections relevant to the industry you're in so your content has more chance of appealing and being shared by them to your 2nd and 3rd-degree networks.

Be a valuable member of your network by liking, commenting and sharing your contacts' content. Doing this the LinkedIn algorithm

Use the status box over blog post to stand a better chance of going viral

Users report that statuses receive more visibility than actual blog posts. This is surprising given LinkedIn's focus on publishing content and the greater effort it takes to write a blog post. While this might change in time, this is the way the LinkedIn algorithm prioritizes written content for now.

While LinkedIn hasn't specifically said the algorithm will prioritize native imagery or video, given its focus on the latter and how other social networks have prioritized it, we can assume that if it currently doesn't, it will.

Mix up your content style broetry with regular writing styles and paragraph structures

While broetry isn't dead yet, it's not as viral as it once was. Take a leaf out of Josh Fechter's book and mix up your writing styles. Use broetry alongside regular writing styles and paragraph structures.

Take an 80/20 approach to native and owned content

Most brands and people prefer to use the social networks to drive traffic to an owned channel like a website or a blog. These days it's increasingly harder to do so as the algorithms prioritize native content over external links. The LinkedIn algorithm, however, will still drive a lot of traffic to your owned channel provided you don't abuse it.

Instagram Algorithm

While not as famous (or infamous) as the Facebook algorithm, Instagram's is certainly the coolest social media algorithm and perhaps the most important for the future as Instagram increasingly becomes a force in changing consumer culture.

Instagram is without a doubt the hottest social media platform and will likely be for some time. It has changed entire industries like the fashion industry where trendy publications like Vogue no longer dictate what's in and what isn't.

It's now the main platform for people to become influencers as Instagram has made the creative process that much easier than any other social platform.

Instagram influencer marketing is booming with the data showing a continuous upward trend.

Instagram is home to influencers from all walks of life from fashion, fitness, travel, gaming, pets and even CGI influencers.

Using Instagram tools and apps anyone can become 'insta famous' if they're talented enough and put in the work.

Like its big brother site, Instagram has also had its share of negative media coverage recently although nowhere near the extent that Facebook has.

Influencer fraud

For starters, there are a lot of people trying to game the Instagram algorithm to look more influential than they actually are.

It's not uncommon for people to use bots and services that automatically follow and then unfollow other accounts and comment and like on their content.

Rather than create real followership and engagement, it's a manipulation of the system which Instagram seems to do nothing about.

Worse than this is the people who buy fake followers and engagement to bolster their numbers are rife on the platform too. It requires very little ($5-10) to buy a few thousand followers from a third party site and about the same price to get 'people' to like and comment on your content.

Until this is cleaned up, many fake influencers will dupe brands and agencies into working with and spending money on them. Over the long term they will be found out as the ROI doesn't match their perceived influence.

The move from timeline to Instagram algorithm

Instagram announced its own social media algorithm in mid-2016 as a way to provide users with the type of content they will engage with the most.

Prior to the Instagram algorithm being launched, the feed worked in chronological order meaning you'd see the latest post at the top. Back then a post had a half-life of 72 minutes whereas now it can receive engagement days after it's published.

Regardless of whether the people you engage with the most publish something the day before, you'll see it at the top of your timeline when you next login.

Engagement is a key ranking factor for the Instagram algorithm. The more likes, comments, comment likes, post saves, DM replies and sent via DMs a post receives, the more weighting is placed on it by the algorithm.

What do we know about the Instagram algorithm in 2019?

When first published, a post is shown to a select group of followers to gauge engagement

The three most important factors are: 1. Interest (the more the Instagram algorithm thinks you'll like a post the more likely you'll see it), 2. Timelines (it prioritizes recent posts) and 3. Relationship (if you like and comment a lot it will assume you're friends and family)

Posting regularly will help you feature higher in users' timelines and it won't downrank people who post a lot

It doesn't favor users who use Stories, Live or other special features

Posts shared via DM will be ranked by the algorithm

Comments are weighted more than likes alone

Optimising a post using the 30 hashtag limit will make it more discoverable though you shouldn't use the same hashtags for each post

The genres of content you interact with most will be shown higher

Hashtags still work in the algorithm but mainly for the Explore page

An established and engaged community will improve each post's credibility

Actively engaging with other people's content (via likes and comments) helps drive people and further engagement to your profile

The longer users spend on the post the more algorithmic credibility it has

The Instagram algorithm ranking signals

How to work with the Instagram algorithm in 2019

If you post irregularly the algorithm will treat you as a bit player and won't prioritize your posts among your followers. And why should it? Those who post regularly and contribute the most will be rewarded for it.

Engage with the types of content you post on

Engaging with content and users that are relevant to your own Instagram profile will help drive people to your own account. The more you engage with these accounts the more the algorithm will show your content their timelines.

One of the three key criteria for the Instagram algorithm is timeliness. Learn when your best time to publish is and post then.

Use hashtags with the intention to be found via the Explore page

If you can get to the top of the Explore page via hashtag usage it can generate hundreds, if not thousands, of likes and followers.

YouTube Algorithm

The YouTube algorithm is perhaps one of the hardest social media algorithms to crack these days given the popularity of the platform.

With 1.5bn global users and statistically the second largest search engine in the world, YouTube is a platform to be reckoned with.

The YouTube algorithm has been developed to serve those that contribute the most to the site. This is reflected in some of its ranking factors which are based on posting consistency and the number of subscribers a user has.

Unless you're famous, superbly talented in some way or have a completely different angle to creating videos than anyone else, building a substantial audience on YouTube from scratch requires a lot of work.

Why? Because the quality of content is exceptionally high and every topic imaginable has been covered already. On top of this, it requires posting of around 2/3 times a week to gain algorithmic traction.

This is why YouTube SEO is a growing industry and many 'traditional' SEO experts like Brian Dean are beginning to focus on and hone their skills on the YouTube platform.

The recommendation algorithm and child safety

Over the last couple of years, YouTube's recommendation algorithm has come under fire because of questionable comments on videos of children and also its search autofill relating to paedophila.

This led to a number of major brands suspending advertising on YouTube until the issues were fixed. At the time of writing, a similar issue has occurred once more with the YouTube algorithm at the center of it.

Huge billion dollar companies like Google/Alphabet and Facebook are not in full control of the use of their own social media algorithms. Worrying? Slightly.

Influencer backlash from YouTube algorithm tests

In May 2018, many YouTube influencers were angry at the platform for carrying out algorithm tests that gave viewers recommendations of videos of channels they weren't subscribed to over the ones they were already subscribers of.

YouTube said it only ran tests on a small percentage of users but nevertheless some YouTube stars were annoyed and publicly spoke out against the move.

Something to bear in mind is that users - even the most influential of users - don't have full control over their channel or content on any social media site and never will. It's rented land.

What do we know about the YouTube algorithm in 2019?

Total watch time and audience retention are important ranking factors

Upload frequency is an important factor and those who upload consistently are rewarded

A recently uploaded video is served to a small percentage of users to measure initial engagement

The more subscribers you have, the more priority the YouTube algorithm places on your videos

The more views your videos have, the more priority the YouTube algorithm places on them

The more views a channel has, the more priority the YouTube algorithm places on it

Video likes/dislikes and comments are important ranking signals

The title, description and keyword tags are important ranking factors

Videos that are 7-16 mins are the optimal length

The YouTube algorithm is AI. It learns, understands and expands

The YouTube algorithm ranking signals

How to work with the YouTube algorithm in 2019

Channels that are sporadic in their video content uploads will be marked down by the algorithm. The best approach is to publish videos consistently and preferably at the same time and/or day each week.

Not only will this help you from an algorithmic perspective but your subscribers will be more receptive to new videos when they know they are due out.

The more subscribers your channel has the more credible you are in the eyes of the algorithm. This is a catch 22 situation for anyone starting from scratch and looking to grow a YouTube channel making it all-the-more difficult for newbies.

Make your video enjoyable to your target audience

Of course you should be doing this anyway but the more likes your video receives the more the YouTube algorithm rewards it. Make videos that your target market will enjoy and don't be controversial to encourage 'thumbs down' responses.

Hook your viewers in on the first few minutes of your video

The longer people watch your videos, the more interesting the YouTube algorithm will assume it to be. The aim is to hook the viewer in as soon as possible and many YouTubers use specific tactics to do so.

Make your videos around 7-16 mins in length

Matt Gielen found that videos which are 7 - 16 minutes in length receive the best retention, most engagement and best viewer-to-subscription rate.

Decoding the social media algorithms requires a collective effort

Social networks continually A/B test and change their algorithms to accommodate new features, revenue streams and provide more value to users.

While we'll never completely understand the inner workings of each social media algorithm, we can take cues from company announcements and adjust our approach accordingly.

We can decode the social media algorithms piece-by-piece through our own experiences and by sharing learnings with one another.

Using crumbs of information, basic assumptions, some common sense, continuous testing and the sharing of data, these mystical bite-sized chunks of mathematical equations can be cracked.

Much like the SEO industry was born out of a collective desire to crack the search engine algorithms, we too can work together to make sense of their powerful social media counterparts that are shaping society and culture.

This means continually testing content to discover what works, what doesn't and, in either case, why.

It requires speed and agility when it comes to social media communications. It requires a collective sharing of knowledge and experience.

And perhaps it requires a collective sharing of clout to pressure the social networking companies to provide more information on the inner workings of these mysterious algorithms that are having a greater influence on how we all live.

This is my starter for ten.

If you have anything extra to add, feel free to let me know.

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Decoding the social media algorithms in 2020. The ultimate guide

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We now live in a world where bite-sized chunks of mathematical data have become central to how we live our daily lives. When you search online, scroll through your social feeds or receive song recommendations from Spotify, you are being guided by an algorithm that understands your consumption habits perhaps more than you do.

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By: Anita Daryanani, UCSD Dietetic Intern
Photo by: Arielle Chen | Daily Trojan

"Diet culture" refers to a set of beliefs that values thinness, appearance, and shape above health & well-being 1,2,3. Additionally, the concept places importance on restricting calories, normalizes negative self-talk, and labels certain foods as "good" and "bad". Individuals subjected to "diet culture" messages have been conditioned to believe that not only does thinness and dieting equate to health, but that the pursuit of health makes one person morally superior to another 1,2,3.

Also, the idea of "fat talk" has also become prevalent in society. "Fat talk" refers to negative comments about one's weight and food choices.

Some examples of fat talk include:

My/Your thighs are huge

That milkshake has way too many calories!

I/You should not be eating this

I/You look fat in this dress

I/You need to go for a run after Thanksgiving dinner

I/You was/were so bad earlier; I/you had a hamburger and fries!

"Diet culture" and "fat talk" have become so normalized in modern society that disordered eating behaviors may happen without any concern 1,2,3. Common warning signs of eating disorders (such as skipping meals, restricting calories, excessively exercising, and eliminating certain food groups) should be concerning, but are instead looked upon as normal now. Thus, the vast presence of "diet culture" and "fat talk" may contribute to harmful behaviors that are left unacknowledged; these may then persist into a diagnosable eating disorder 1,2,3,4,5,6.
How is Social Media Involved?
The media has a tremendous impact on body-image 1,2,3,4,5,6. Social media platforms are accused of distorting reality, in that the models portrayed are either naturally thin and thus unrepresentative of normality, or unnaturally thin due to forced dieting, malnutrition, and/or digital editing 2,3. Edited images have been reported to encourage men and women to compare themselves to heavily enhanced and often physically unachievable appearance ideals, which can have a serious negative impact on their wellbeing ⁶. Exposure to these images in the media has been associated with increased body dissatisfaction, lowered self-esteem, and body image-related anxiety ⁶. Also, not surprisingly, the media are often blamed for the increasing incidence of eating disorders because images of idealized/slim physiques motivate society to attempt to achieve slimness themselves. It can be assumed that viewers are under the impression that thinner is better, and that skinny equals attractive 1,2,3,4,5,6.

From research...

According to a social media usage survey conducted in 2019, 90% of American 18 - 29-year-olds indicated that they use any form of social media daily. Because social media is so universal and influential in today's society, posts can be impactful.⁵

Notably, a study reported that over 50% of the 2000 adults who were surveyed had previously edited their social media images in some way. Additionally, 70% of women, and over 50% of men aged 18-35 years reported editing their images regularly. This demonstrates a large amount of dissatisfaction in one's true, original, and natural self to the point where altering the image seems ideal.6

The Bottom Line:
"Diet culture" is prevalent in modern society and edited/unrealistic social media posts help to spread this harmful content 1,2,3,4,5.

Here are some steps to eliminate "diet culture":

Avoid "fat-talk"

Do not edit photos. Embrace your natural self!

Recognize that thinness does not equal health

Understand that models are not representative of an average human's body⁵

Unfollow toxic accounts and instead follow accounts with diverse body types

These actions can create a happier & healthier society.

If you're struggling with body image check out these resources:

And if you'd like to improve your relationship with food, schedule an appointment with Erin Kukura, MS, RD (UCSD Recreation Dietitian).
References:

1. Harrison K. Media, Body Image, and Eating Disorders. The Routledge International Handbook of Children, Adolescents and Media. doi:10.4324/9780203366981.ch27

2. Hogan MJ, Strasburger VC. Body image, eating disorders, and the media. Adolescent medicine: state of the art reviews. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19227390/. Published 2008. Accessed October 20, 2020.

3. Wiseman C, Sunday S, Becker A. Impact of the media on adolescent body image. Child and adolescent psychiatric clinics of North America. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15936668/. Published 2005. Accessed October 20, 2020.

4. A, Calado M. Westernization: The Role of Mass Media on Body Image and Eating Disorders. Relevant topics in Eating Disorders. 2012. doi:10.5772/31307

5. Demographics of Social Media Users and Adoption in the United States. Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/. Published June 5, 2020. Accessed October 20, 2020.

6. Guest E. Photo editing: enhancing social media images to reflect appearance ideals. Journal of Aesthetic Nursing. 2016;5(9):444-446. doi:10.12968/joan.2016.5.9.444

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By: Anita Daryanani, UCSD Dietetic Intern Photo by: Arielle Chen | Daily Trojan "Diet culture" refers to a set of beliefs that values thinness, appearance, and shape above health & well-being 1,2,3. Additionally, the concept places importance on restricting calories, normalizes negative self-talk, and labels certain foods as "good" and "bad".

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Social Media’s Impact on Body Dysmorphia

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Social Media’s Impact on Body Dysmorphia

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Social Media's Impact on Body Dysmorphia | NBCLX

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“Influencer” Marketing and Children’s Food Intake

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“Influencer” Marketing and Children’s Food Intake

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Abstract

OBJECTIVES: To examine the impact of social media influencer marketing of foods (healthy and unhealthy) on children's food intake.

METHODS: In a between-subjects design, 176 children (9-11 years, mean 10.5 ± 0.7 years) were randomly assigned to view mock Instagram profiles of 2 popular YouTube video bloggers (influencers). Profiles featured images of the influencers with unhealthy snacks (participants: n = 58), healthy snacks ( n = 59), or nonfood products ( n = 59). Subsequently, participants' ad libitum intake of unhealthy snacks, healthy snacks, and overall intake (combined intake of healthy and unhealthy snacks) were measured.

RESULTS: Children who viewed influencers with unhealthy snacks had significantly increased overall intake (448.3 kilocalories [kcals]; P = .001), and significantly increased intake of unhealthy snacks specifically (388.8 kcals; P = .001), compared with children who viewed influencers with nonfood products (357.1 and 292.2 kcals, respectively). Viewing influencers with healthy snacks did not significantly affect intake.

CONCLUSIONS: Popular social media influencer promotion of food affects children's food intake. Influencer marketing of unhealthy foods increased children's immediate food intake, whereas the equivalent marketing of healthy foods had no effect. Increasing the promotion of healthy foods on social media may not be an effective strategy to encourage healthy dietary behaviors in children. More research is needed to understand the impact of digital food marketing and inform appropriate policy action.

What's Known on This Subject:

Studies have revealed that broadcast food advertising strongly influences children's eating behavior. The Internet is now well established as a food-marketing platform, and young people spend considerable time on social media, including engaging with the activity of influencers.

What This Study Adds:

Acute experimental exposure to influencers promoting unhealthy foods on social media increases children's immediate intake of unhealthy foods, but the same influencers promoting healthy foods does not have a beneficial effect on children's choices or intake of those foods.

Childhood obesity is a global health concern. Obesogenic food environments, in which high-saturated fat, high-salt, and/or high-sugar (HFSS) foods are increasingly available and extensively marketed, are a predominant food-system driver of population weight gain. ⁻ The World Health Organization has called on governments to implement policies that promote the intake of healthy foods and reduce the intake of unhealthy foods by children and adolescents.

The detrimental effects of traditional broadcast marketing, ⁻ and HFSS product placement, ⁻ on children's eating behavior are well established. The Internet is now a major platform for food marketing, and recent studies suggest that digital marketing may have similar effects to that of television. ⁻ Research has also demonstrated a "beyond-brand" effect of digital food marketing whereby irrespective of the healthfulness of a cue, children's subsequent overall food intake increases.,

Children's digital media (online content) consumption is growing rapidly., When online, many children use social networking sites ⁻; for example, 50% of 8- to 11-year-olds in the United Kingdom report using Instagram, and >80% of 5- to 15-year-olds use YouTube. In social media, marketing is typically embedded into engaging and entertaining media content, which actively encourages children to share these experiences with peers., Social media have also bred a new form of celebrity: online influencers with huge fanbases and whose opinions can affect those of their subscribers. Brands seek promotional relationships with influencers because of their reach and the trust that followers have in them. Influencers often engage in food-marketing activity on social media by featuring brands and products in their content, and it is not yet clear if this affects eating behaviors in the young people exposed. Recent psychological models suggest that reactivity to food cues is moderated by message factors, including the level of integration of food cues. Because of the embedded nature of food cues in influencer media content, children's awareness of the marketing may be low and the effects potentially more powerful than for television, on which even young children can discern what is marketing and what is content.

In addition, social learning theory purports that children's liking of a character increases the probability of imitating the character's action. Therefore, exposure to an admired media character, such as an influencer, holding a food product may encourage these behaviors in children. Exposure to traditional celebrity endorsement of HFSS foods in television commercials has been shown to increase children's preference for and intake of these products,, with less robust findings seen for healthy foods. ⁻ Children report viewing influencers to be more trustworthy than traditional celebrities, possibly because of increased feelings of familiarity. To date, the impact of influencer marketing of food on children's eating behavior has not been researched.

Our aim in this study was to examine the impact of social media marketing of snack foods, via influencers' Instagram profiles, on children's ad libitum snack intake. It was hypothesized that (1) children exposed to the social media marketing of snack foods (healthy or unhealthy) would consume more snacks compared with children exposed to marketing for a nonfood item, (2) children exposed to the social media marketing of unhealthy snacks would consume more unhealthy snacks compared with children exposed to marketing for a nonfood item, and (3) children exposed to the social media marketing of healthy snacks would consume more healthy snacks compared with children exposed to marketing for a nonfood item.

Methods

Participants

A convenience sample of 178 participants aged 9 to 11 years were recruited via schools in the United Kingdom. Participants were offered no incentive for taking part. This age group is active on social media despite platform terms and conditions setting age of participation at 13 years. The required sample size ( n = 150) was calculated on the basis of a similar study with a medium effect size of celebrity endorsement on children's food intake. The current study was approved by the University of Liverpool Institute of Psychology, Health and Society Research Ethics Committee, and data were collected between January 2017 and July 2017. Parents and children were informed of the study via school distribution of study information sheets, which required parents to return opt-in consent forms and children to assent before participation. Parents provided information on their children's demographics, food allergies, and media use on the consent form. Children with food allergies were excluded from participation. The number of children with food allergies and the number of eligible parents who did not provide consent were not recorded because of researcher time constraints.

Study Design

In a between-subjects design, participants were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 influencer-marketing conditions: healthy food marketing, unhealthy food marketing, and nonfood marketing (control). Within each condition, the mock Instagram profiles of 2 popular influencers (1 man, 1 woman) were viewed on a laptop computer. Counterbalancing of participants to condition, and influencer order (man first or woman first), was conducted by using randomizer.org. Although a "food-cues only" condition would begin to disentangle whether effects on food intake are attributable to the endorsement of the food cue or just the food cue itself, this is not representative of how foods are marketed by social media influencers; therefore, this condition was not included in the study.

Materials and Measures

Mock Instagram Profiles

Two social media influencers were selected: a 26-year-old female YouTube video blogger (vlogger) and a 23-year-old male YouTube vlogger (names are not provided for reasons of copyright). Both feature in the top 10 most popular vloggers with children in the United Kingdom with ∼12.1 million and 4.1 million subscribers on YouTube, respectively, at the time of testing and an equivalent number of followers on Instagram. Research suggests consumers respond differently to male and female celebrity endorsers, and so children were exposed to mock Instagram profiles for both influencers ( Supplemental Fig 2). Profiles consisted of the Instagram banner and 6 images (3 test and 3 filler) of the influencer holding a product. In test images, the products were snacks (unhealthy [eg, chocolate cookies] or healthy [eg, banana]) or branded nonfood items (control [eg, sneakers]). Snacks were used because they are frequently marketed to children and are a major source of calories. In filler images, the products were unbranded nonfood items. All images were obtained and edited (to create the healthy-condition stimuli) from influencers' YouTube channels (Corel PaintShop Pro 9).

BMI

BMI was calculated as weight (kg) divided by height (m). Weight was measured to the nearest 0.1 kg with a calibrated weighing scale (Seca 770); height was measured to the nearest 0.5 cm by using a stadiometer (Leicester Portable Height Measure). Internationally recognized criteria for children were used to categorize children as being of healthy weight, being overweight, or being obese on the basis of age- and sex-specific BMI cutoff scores. BMI z scores adjusted for age and sex were calculated by using World Health Organization AnthroPlus software (who.int/growthref/tools/en).

Hunger

Subjective measures of hunger were obtained by using 100 mm visual analog scales (VASs). This measure followed the format of the question, "How hungry do you feel right now?" with the anchor points "not at all hungry" and "very hungry" to the left and right of the line, respectively. VASs are widely used, reliable, and valid rating scales for measuring children's subjective experiences related to food intake.

Caloric Intake

To measure caloric intake, children were invited to eat ad libitum from a small selection of snack foods. The foods offered were unhealthy snacks (jelly candy [343 kilocalories (kcals) per 100 g] and chocolate buttons [510 kcals per 100 g]) and healthy snacks (carrot batons [42 kcals per 100 g] and seedless white grapes [66 kcals per 100 g]). Previous studies have successfully used similar foods to assess intake after exposure to advertisements., Each food was preweighted to 100 g with the exception of the chocolate buttons, which were served as sold (70 g) to ensure that the quantities of all snacks appeared to be similar when served. Snacks were presented without any branding information on white paper plates and were weighed postintake to the nearest 0.1 g (Model BP8100; Sartorius, Epsom, United Kingdom), with data later being converted into kcals on the basis of the manufacturer's nutritional information.

Social Media Questionnaire

A questionnaire designed for this study asked children 18 closed-ended questions about Internet use and activities performed on social media. Questions were adapted from the European Union Kids Online Survey 2010. To control for potential effects on kcal food intake, children were asked to report liking of the mock Instagram profiles with a yes-or-no response and previous familiarity with the influencers by indicating the number of social media sites they had previously viewed them on.

Procedure

Participants were tested in a quiet room in their school, seated at a desk with a laptop computer and questionnaire. Children firstly completed the hunger rating VAS and then viewed each influencer's Instagram profile on the laptop screen for 1 minute. Children were told to pay close attention to the profiles because they would later be asked about them in the questionnaire. Participants were then served 4 snacks (none of the foods served were visible on any of the test or filler images) and told they had 10 minutes to eat as much or as little as they liked. After 10 minutes, any remaining snacks were removed and weighed, and participants completed the questionnaire. Participants were debriefed, and height and weight measurements were recorded in private. Children were accompanied back to classrooms and were asked to refrain from discussing the experiment with classmates.

Statistical Analysis

Randomization checks were conducted for hunger, BMI, age, sex, ethnicity, liking of Instagram profiles, and previous exposure to the influencers by using a Welch 1-way analysis of variance. The conditions did not differ on the variables measured (all P > .05; Table 1).

To examine which factors should be used as covariates, Pearson's correlations were calculated. As shown in Table 2, hunger, previous influencer exposure, and liking of Instagram profiles were related to kcal intake and included as covariates in the analyses. Multivariate analysis of covariance measured the effect of the marketing-exposure condition (unhealthy snacks, healthy snacks, or nonfood control) on kcal intake. Post hoc tests examined the differences between conditions with Bonferroni adjustments for multiple comparisons. All analyses were conducted by using SPSS software (version 24 for Windows; IBM SPSS Statistics, IBM Corporation), and significance was assessed by using a 2-tailed test at P < .05. Effect sizes were calculated by using partial η squared, with 0.01 indicating a small effect, 0.09 indicating a medium effect, and 0.25 indicating a large effect.

Results

The final sample consisted of 176 participants (105 girls) aged 9 to 11 years (mean = 10.5 ± 0.7 years). Two children were excluded from the analysis because they had not finished the session ( n = 1) and had been observed to have concealed test foods ( n = 1). Of the participants, 71% had a healthy weight, whereas 29% were of an unhealthy weight (18.2% with overweight; 10.8% with obesity). The percentage of children who had overweight or obesity was slightly lower than the national average (34.3% of 10-11-year-olds in England had overweight or obesity at the most recent assessment). No differences were found in the BMI category distribution between sexes.

The results of the multivariate analysis of covariance are shown in Table 3 and Supplemental Table 4. There was a significant effect of marketing-exposure condition on total kcal intake ( P = .001). Children in the unhealthy Instagram condition consumed 26% more kcals overall (mean = 448.3 ± 140.82 kcals) compared with those in the control condition (mean = 357.1 ± 146.5 kcals; P = .001) and 15% more than those in the healthy Instagram condition (mean = 388.96 ± 145.53 kcals; P = .05). There was no statistically significant difference in overall kcals consumed between the healthy Instagram condition and the control condition ( P = .55). Together, these post hoc results provided partial support for hypothesis 1. See Fig 1 for results of the post hoc tests.

The effect of marketing-exposure condition on kcal intake from unhealthy food was also significant ( P = .001). Children in the unhealthy Instagram condition consumed 32% more kcals from unhealthy snacks (mean = 384.83 ± 141.21 kcals) compared with children in the control condition (mean = 292.24 ± 146.85 kcals; P = .001) and 20% more than those in the healthy Instagram condition (mean = 319.51 ± 143.77 kcals; P = .03). There was no statistically significant difference in kcals consumed from unhealthy snacks between the healthy Instagram condition and the control condition ( P = .76). These results supported hypothesis 2. However, there was no significant effect of Instagram condition on kcal intake from healthy snacks ( P = .49), and so hypothesis 3 was not supported.

Discussion

This study quantifies the impact of influencer food marketing on children's food intake. The results demonstrated that children exposed to marketing of unhealthy snacks increased their immediate overall kcal intake compared with children exposed to healthy food or nonfood marketing. Relative to the control condition, children exposed to marketing of unhealthy snacks also consumed more kcals from unhealthy snacks specifically relative to the other 2 groups. However, children exposed to marketing of healthy snacks did not differ in their overall kcal intake or their kcal intake from healthy snacks specifically, compared with those in the control condition.

Celebrity endorsement of healthy foods has previously been shown to encourage children to eat more of these foods,, although this effect, when found, is typically less robust than for HFSS foods. Studies have also revealed that playing a fruit advergame increases children's intake of fruit, but again, this effect is smaller than seen for HFSS foods. Therefore, it was reasonable to predict that exposure to social media food marketing for healthier items would produce similar effects in the current study. The results did not support these findings. A possible explanation for this, and for the smaller effects found in previous studies, is that the hedonic value (ie, tastiness) of HFSS foods is much stronger than for healthier foods. In addition, HFSS foods are often designed to appeal more to children because of colorful packaging and brand logos. These explanations are supported by recent eye-tracking data, which demonstrate that HFSS food cues embedded in media content capture children's visual attention more than healthy cues., It is therefore likely that substantially more exposure than what typically occurs in short-term experimental studies is needed to drive children's intake of healthier items.

Food cues within an advergame, irrespective of whether they are HFSS foods or fruit, have been shown to lead children to increase kcal intake in general., Therefore, it was predicted that exposure to influencer food marketing that featured a food cue would produce similar effects in the current study. This effect was found for unhealthy cues but not healthy cues. As previously discussed, children may have attended more to the unhealthy cues. Alternatively, only fruits were offered as healthy snacks in the advergame study, whereas a fruit and a vegetable were offered in the current study. Children have been found to prefer fruits to vegetables because of their sweet taste and so may have consumed more kcals overall in the advergame study because of a greater preference for the test foods.

In the current study, as predicted, children exposed to unhealthy food marketing consumed more unhealthy foods compared with children in the other conditions. These findings are consistent with previous studies assessing the impact of digital marketing on intake of HFSS foods, and those demonstrating the effect of celebrity endorsement on intake of HFSS foods., The medium effect size found in the current study is consistent with that of a meta-analysis of the effect of broadcast and digital food advertising on children's intake. Cohort studies indicate that an energy gap of 69 to 77 kcals per day is all that is required for a child to become overweight. In the current study, children in the unhealthy-food-marketing condition consumed 91 kcals more compared with those in the control condition. This is larger than the proposed energy gap and is the effect after acute exposure to social media influencer marketing only. Children's additional kcal intake in response to acute food-marketing exposure is not compensated for at later eating occasions, and so marketing-driven overconsumption would, in time, lead to weight gain.

This study had some limitations. First, all children were exposed to the same 2 influencers, and individual differences that may have moderated endorser effects, such as perceived similarity, familiarity, and likeability, could not be considered. Just more than 40% of the sample had no previous exposure of the 2 influencers used in the current study but were included in the analysis. Including these children may have underestimated the impact of influencer food marketing. However, children are likely to spend much longer on social media sites than occurred here and, as a result, be exposed to greater volumes of influencer food marketing. In addition, Instagram encourages engagement with advertising by prompting users to "like" and share images. This engagement allows direct communication between influencers and followers, heightening feelings of familiarity and likeability and enabling influencer marketing to reach not only followers but also followers' wider social networks. For this reason, it would be interesting to explore effects of influencer marketing on those who do not follow the influencers' online activity but may be recipients of their content via peers. Second, although children were asked to refrain from discussing the study with their classmates, we cannot be sure that this "contamination" did not occur. Thirdly, the study was cross-sectional, so conclusions about causality cannot be drawn from these data, and future studies should be designed to explore this and the potential for longer-term effects. It would also be interesting to compare the potential influence of peers versus media influencers on children's behavior.

The findings of the current study may be used to inform the debates ongoing in many countries surrounding food-marketing policies for digital media. In 2017, the United Kingdom's Committee of Advertising Practice introduced a new self-regulatory code for nonbroadcast media that required advertisements for HFSS products to not be shown where >25% of the audience is <16 years old. In a recent ruling, the Advertising Standards Authority, the United Kingdom's independent advertising regulator, responded to complainants who viewed that 2 YouTube vloggers (those featured in the current study) were popular with children and had featured in HFSS marketing on Instagram. Both influencers have been nominated for the award for UK favorite vlogger at the 2015 Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards, demonstrating their popularity with children. The Advertising Standards Authority noted that <25% of both influencers' Instagram followers were registered as <18 years old; therefore, the advertisement was deemed to not target children. At the time of writing, collectively, these influencers have just more than 15 million Instagram followers. Using Instagram's user demographics data, 3.75 million young people (13-17 years old) may have been exposed to this influencer HFSS food marketing. In addition, Instagram's data do not include children <13 years old who use fake dates of birth; thus, this figure is likely to be a conservative estimate. The data presented here should inform regulations of online food marketing to enable children to participate in the digital world without their dietary health being adversely affected.

Conclusions

This study demonstrates that influencer marketing of unhealthy foods increased children's immediate food intake of these foods, whereas influencer promotion of healthy foods had no such effect. These findings are consistent with the literature on the impact of celebrity endorsement, which shows that the effects of HFSS food promotion are more robust than for healthy foods. Childhood obesity remains a major health concern across the globe, and digital marketing offers food companies myriad new ways to reach children, many of which are difficult to monitor and the effects challenging to quantify. Children have a right to participate in digital media and a right to protection of health. Food-marketing restrictions should be applied to new forms of digital marketing, particularly social media, on which vulnerable young people spend a lot of their online time.

Footnotes

Accepted January 18, 2019.

Address correspondence to Anna E. Coates, MPhil, Institute of Psychology, Health, and Society, University of Liverpool, Eleanor Rathbone Building, Bedford St South, Liverpool L69 7ZA, United Kingdom. E-mail: annacoa{at}liverpool.ac.uk

FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE: Drs Christiansen, Halford, and Hardman receive research funding from the American Beverage Association; and Ms Coates and Dr Boyland have indicated they have no financial relationships relevant to this article to disclose.

FUNDING: Conducted as part of Ms Coates's work, which is funded by the University of Liverpool. No external funding.

POTENTIAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The authors have indicated they have no potential conflicts of interest to disclose.

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Social Media Influencer Marketing and Children's Food Intake: A Randomized Trial

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OBJECTIVES: To examine the impact of social media influencer marketing of foods (healthy and unhealthy) on children's food intake. METHODS: In a between-subjects design, 176 children (9-11 years, mean 10.5 ± 0.7 years) were randomly assigned to view mock Instagram profiles of 2 popular YouTube video bloggers (influencers).

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This Is How Social Media Is Made To Be Addicting

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INSTRUCTIONS

OBJECTIVES

Livingstone and Smith, 2014
Children and adolescents are growing up in a digital world. The rapid expansion of the development, accessibility, and use of cellular phones and the Internet is changing human existence. Adolescents are absorbed in the use of technology; however, this behavior is also becoming characteristic of younger children as well (

Annual research review: Harms experienced by child users of online and mobile technologies: The nature, prevalence and management of sexual and aggressive risks in the digital age.

Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and Allied Disciplines. 2014; 55 : 635-654
Reid Chassiakos et al., 2016
). Consider that in 1970, the average American child began to watch television regularly at age 4, yet today, children begin interacting with digital media at the age of 4 months (

Council on Communications and Media
Children and adolescents and digital media.
Wright and Donnerstein, 2014
). Although technology can enhance communication, recreation, and education, its use can also present risks to children and adolescents. One such risk is exposure to pornography. It is difficult to dispute the fact that the Internet has revolutionized the pornography industry and has substantially expanded child and adolescent access to pornography. The Internet allows instant access to a wide variety of pornography that can be viewed anywhere, even from the privacy of a child's room, with little to no parental knowledge (

Sex online: Pornography, sexual solicitation, and sexting.

Adolescent Medicine: State of the Art Reviews. 2014; 25 : 574-589

DEFINITION

Pornography can be broadly defined as professionally produced or consumer-generated pictures or videos intended to sexually arouse the consumer (). Traditional pornography relies on traditional media venues such as television, movies, and magazines. Internet pornography viewing is the online viewing or downloading of pictures and videos where genitals are exposed, and/or people are having sex with the intention of stimulating a sexual reaction in the viewer (). A variety of sexual activities are depicted in both genres of pornography, including but not limited to masturbation, oral sex, and vaginal and anal intercourse, all with a focus on the genitals.

The Internet has transformed pornography consumption. Online pornography differs from traditional pornography in several ways. The Internet has changed the fundamental relationship between the individual and pornography, allowing access to an endless supply of free and diverse material (). Online pornography is accessible from virtually anywhere with an Internet connection and is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The Internet allows for the global dissemination of pornography via the Triple-A Engine: accessibility, affordability, and anonymity (). Traditional pornography requires acquiring a magazine or film from a store or a friend or viewing a television program, all of which carry a perception of increased risk of parental detection. Online pornography exposure is much more difficult for parents to monitor than traditional media exposure (). The child or teen often perceives viewing online pornography as private and anonymous, which emboldens them to search for material that they would not search for via traditional media.

Child and adolescent pornography exposure can be either intentional or unintentional. Examples of unintentional exposure include the opening of unsolicited messages or receiving spam emails (), mistyping Web site addresses, searching for terms that have a nonsexual as well as sexual meaning (), or accidentally viewing pop-up images and advertisements (). Intentional pornography exposure is deliberate and purposeful, often involving an active online search for the material. It is unclear to what extent unintentional online pornography viewing contributes to intentional pornography viewing.

References

1. Report of the ATSA task force on children with sexual behavior problems.

: 199-218

2. Exposure and use of mobile media devices by young children.

: 1044-1050

3. The Internet and aggression: Motivation, disinhibitory and opportunity aspects.

The social net: Human behavior in cyberspace. Oxford University Press, New York, NY 2005: 163-191

4. Children, adolescents, and the media: Health effects.

Pediatric Clinics of North America. 2012; 59 (): 533-587

Gail Hornor, Pediatric Nurse Practitioner, Center for Family Safety and Healing, Nationwide Children's Hospital, Columbus, OH.

Article Info

Footnotes

Conflicts of interest: None to report.

Identification

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pedhc.2019.10.001

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EPIDEMIOLOGY

It is important to understand the trajectory of adolescent pornography use. describe three trajectories of pornography use for boys: nonuse or infrequent use, strongly increased use, occasional use, and decreasing use. Pornography use for girls followed three trajectories: stable nonuse or infrequent use, strongly increasing use, and stable occasional use. Although prevalence rates vary among studies, national and international studies reveal that online pornography use is common among boys and not uncommon among girls ().

PREDICTORS OF CHILD AND ADOLESCENT PORNOGRAPHY USE

Certain factors are important predictors of child and adolescent pornography use ( Box 1). Demographic factors associated with increased pornography exposure include male gender and lower socioeconomic status (). Bisexual or gay adolescent males tend to use Internet pornography more often than straight males (). Family factors can also increase risk for pornography exposure. Living in a single-parent home, lower level of caregiver surveillance, and weak emotional bonds with caregivers can lead to increased pornography exposure ().

Exposure to psychosocial trauma is also predictive of pornography viewing. Youth who have experienced physical or sexual abuse or who have had a recent negative life experience, such as parental divorce, are more likely to view pornography. Adolescents who experience traditional and/or cyberbullying are also more likely to use Internet pornography (

). Opportunity for pornography viewing also predicts actual viewing. Youth with Internet access on their phones or a computer in their bedroom are more likely to view pornography. In addition, pornography use is more prevalent among youth who are less religiously involved and who perceive less potential for condemnation upon discovery of their pornography viewing. In summary describe the typical adolescent pornography user as male, at a higher stage of puberty, and a sensation-seeker with weak or troubled family relations.

Some factors appear to be protective against child and adolescent use of pornography. Religiousness, religious internalization and involvement, serve as a protective factor against child and adolescent pornography viewing (). Religiousness protects against pornography viewing for several reasons. Religiousness contributes to a more conservative attitude toward viewing pornography, increased self-regulation, and social control against the use of pornography. Other factors protective against child and adolescent use of pornography include higher parent education, higher socioeconomic status, greater attachment to school, and healthier family relationships (; ).

CONSEQUENCES

See Box 2 for possible consequences of child and adolescent pornography viewing. The primary concern related to pornography viewing in young children under the age of 12 years is the development of problem sexualized behaviors (PSB). PSB involves sexual knowledge beyond what would be expected for the child's age and developmental levels, such as children engaging in sophisticated sexual acts such as intercourse or oral sex ().

states that these PSB in children less than 12 years of age are the result of several factors, including pornography viewing. PSB in young children has also been linked to trauma and violence, insufficient supervision, and impulse control problems (

). found children less than 12 years of age who disclosed engaging in pornography viewing were at significantly higher odds of engaging in PSB when compared with their non-pornography exposed peers. Social learning theory provides a framework for understanding this phenomenon. Exposure to pornography at a young age not only introduces children to sexual behaviors but also reinforces the behaviors. Reinforcement occurs because of viewing depictions of rewards (pleasure) when engaging in sexual behaviors (). Any link between PSB and adolescent sexually abusive behaviors is unclear, and the risk is considered to be low if the child receives proper mental health treatment (

). However, children engaging in PSB and adolescents engaging in sexually abusive behaviors share common risk factors, including a history of child maltreatment () and early exposure to pornography ().

examined midadolescent use of pornography and its relationship to adolescent sexual activity. Over 1,000 Croatian adolescents participated in a 3-wave study and were surveyed regarding their use of pornography and their sexual activity 3 times at 1-year intervals. Participants were 16 years of age at baseline. The proportion of sexually active participants increased from 23% at baseline to 38.1% at wave 3 among male adolescents and from a baseline of 19.7% to 38.1% at wave 3 for adolescent females. Adolescent males who reported moderate to high pornography use and female adolescents who reported regular pornography use demonstrated a higher rate of sexual initiation. Viewing sensation-seeking pornography was also associated with sexual initiation in adolescent males.

examined the link between pornography use and sexually aggressive behaviors in adolescents. More than 3,000 children between the ages of 10 and 15 years were surveyed regarding their intentional pornography use, perpetration of sexual aggression (in-person sexual assault, technology-based sexual harassment, and solicitation), and sexual aggression victimization. Nearly one fourth (23%) of youth reported intentional exposure to pornography in the past, and 5% reported perpetrating sexually aggressive behavior. Less than 5% of teens reported exposure to sexually violent pornography. Youth who reported intentional exposure to pornography were 6.5 times more likely to report perpetration of sexually aggressive behaviors when compared with youth not reporting intentional pornography use. Youth reporting exposure to sexually violent pornography were 24 times more likely to perpetrate sexually aggressive behaviors in comparison with their non-pornography viewing peers. This increased likelihood of engaging in sexually aggressive behaviors was not gender-specific; both boys and girls viewing pornography, especially sexually violent pornography, were much more likely to engage in sexually aggressive behaviors.

Studies of Internet pornography use by adults have solidified the knowledge that some individuals report a loss of control regarding their pornography use, accompanied by increasing pornography use and negative consequences in multiple areas of life such as academic, job functioning, and personal relationships (). The actual prevalence of Internet pornography disorder (IPD) in the adult population is impossible to estimate because there is no agreement on the diagnostic criteria (). It is important to note that IPD becomes a problem for only a small but significant number of individuals (). There is a current argument among experts, on how to best classify addictive viewing of Internet pornography as a form of sex addiction () or a specific type of Internet addiction (). Regardless of the classification, certain individuals appear to be at an increased risk of developing problematic pornography viewing. Individuals with underlying comorbidities such as depression or anxiety disorders (; ), impulsivity (

), compulsivity (), self-regulation deficits (), and high levels of narcissism () are particularly vulnerable to develop problems with their pornography use. It is important to note that the majority of individuals who seek treatment for IPD are Caucasian (), believe their pornography use is a moral transgression (), and report pornography exposure early in adolescence as well as participating in risky sexual behavior in adolescence (). in a longitudinal study of 648 adolescents at 16 years of age and then at 18 years of age found Internet pornography viewing to be a significant risk factor of the development of Internet addiction-the use of the Internet in a manner that is continuous and compulsive, resulting in negative consequences to everyday life. Evidence suggests that excessive and compulsive pornography use has effects on the brain similar to those seen in substance addictions, including a decline in working memory performance (), neuroplasticity changes that reinforce use (), and reduction in grey matter volume (). Magnetic resonance scans in adults have shown the brain activity of individuals who are self-perceived pornography addicts are comparable to those with substance dependence ().

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

The use of technology by children, especially mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers, has dramatically increased in recent years.

, in a study involving 0 to 4-year-olds recruited from a low-income clinic, stated that nearly all (96.6%) of the children had used a mobile device, 75% owned their device, andmost 2-year-olds used a mobile device regularly. It is a reality that the majority of pediatric nurse practitioners (PNPs) are providing care to children of all ages who are familiar with and often very sophisticated in regards to Internet technology.

Internet pornography is readily available to American children and adolescents. Studies have revealed that viewing pornography can result in a variety of negative consequences for both children and adolescents. It is crucial that PNPs feel comfortable and knowledgeable in addressing the issue of pornography viewing with caregivers and children. studied parental reaction to their young children (less than 12 years of age) viewing pornography. Many parents in this sample of 279 reported feeling paralyzed, unsure of how to respond to their child, and fearful of the potential impact on their child. The majority of the children (76%) viewed pornography online, 13% in print, and 10% on television. Nearly one fourth (24%) of parents reported that they felt their child's pornography viewing was intentional. None of the parents reported that they found out about their child's pornography viewing because they asked the child about the viewing. Parents also stated that they would be in favor of their child's healthcare provider giving them guidance or pamphlets or directing them to other educational resources to assist them in better knowing how to talk to their children about pornography ().

PNPs must be poised to address the needs of parents and their children related to Internet pornography use. The first step in this process involves assessing child and adolescent use of online technology. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that pediatric health care providers ask adolescents and older children 2 technology-related questions at all well-child visits (

): how much time do you spend on the Internet and online social media each day?; and do you have access to the Internet in your bedroom? The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that adolescents limit media use to less than 2 hours a day ().

PNPs must stress how important it is that parents talk with their children about what they are viewing online and whom they are talking to online andencourage their children to be open and honest regarding their online activities. It is also important that parents develop an Internet safety plan to reduce the likelihood of exposure to sexual material on the home computer and mobile devices. Preventive software including filtering, blocking, and monitoring software should be installed (). Discuss with parents the importance of explaining to their child that they, as their parents, want to protect them from viewing content that is for adults only. Especially for young children, limit alone and unsupervised Internet use. Encourage Internet use in only public areas of the home. Caution parents that being too restrictive with older children and adolescents may lead them to be less open and honest regarding online behavior. Parents must also be cognizant of what they themselves are viewing online and protect their children from accessing any pornography or other adult content they may be viewing.

Although an Internet safety plan is essential, total prevention of access to online pornography is virtually impossible. Providing anticipatory guidance regarding child and adolescents exposure to pornography is crucial. Encourage parents to talk with their children and adolescents in an age-appropriate manner about pornographic content and encourage children and adolescents to come to the parent if they ever see anything online that is confusing or disturbing to them. This will help protect them if they accidentally come across such content. Reinforce the need for parents to have age-appropriate discussions with children and adolescents about sex, sexuality, and intimacy. Building this open relationship between parent and child will make it easier for the child to come to the parent with sexual questions or curiosities. See Box 3 for online resources available for parents to assist them with discussing pornography with their children and protecting them from pornography viewing.

Screening children and adolescents for pornography viewing should be a routine aspect of pediatric health care. For children younger than 12 years of age, the anogenital exam, which should be a part of all well-child exams, offers an appropriate opportunity to ask a few screening questions. Anogenital exams should include education about the concept of private parts and what the child should do if private parts are touched, and asking if anything like that has ever happened to them (). Also ask if they have ever seen pictures, movies, or videos of people without their clothes on. If the answer is yes, explore. Ask where they viewed the images, what the people without their clothes on were doing, whether anyone show them the images, and whether they viewed the images once or more than one time. Children less than 12 years of age repeatedly seeking pornography viewing require referral to a mental health provider for further exploration of the behavior. For adolescents 12 years of age and older, a discussion of sexual activity should include an assessment of possible pornography viewing; if affirmative to viewing, try to determine frequency of viewing. It is important to discuss healthy sexual intimacy with pornography viewing adolescents and stress that what they are viewing in pornography does not depict typical real-life intimate relationships. Adolescents disclosing problematic pornography viewing (excessive, disrupting school, social, or family life) will also need intervention with a mental health specialist versed in addressing the concern. Familiarity with local mental health resources will assist the PNP with making the most appropriate mental health referral.

Children under the age of 12 years engaging in PSB will need to be assessed for exposure to pornography and possible sexual abuse. A referral to child protective services is indicated to ensure the safety of the child. The child will need a forensic interview by an appropriately trained individual and a medical exam by an individual skilled in sexual abuse examinations. Knowledge of local resources is crucial. Depending on the chronicity and severity of the PSB, these children may also benefit from specialized mental health services, which include elements of trauma-informed care while also providing body education and safety.

Online pornography is readily available to American children and adolescents. Pornography viewing can result in a variety of adverse health consequences. PNPs should urge schools to provide comprehensive sex education programs that include principles of healthy intimate relationships as well as basic principles of Internet literacy (

). PNPs should also encourage and participate in research into the effect of sexual contact in online media on children and adolescents. By participating in governmental advocacy, PNPs can lobby for the implementation of stricter Internet regulation to better control child and adolescent access to online pornography. Finally, PNPs can make immediate differences in the lives of children and adolescents by incorporating practice behaviors to better assess for pornography exposure and provide appropriate intervention as needed. Pornography viewing is indeed a pediatric health care problem, and PNPs must feel comfortable and confident in addressing the problem.

Appendix B. Supplementary materials

). This continuing educational article will explore child and adolescent Internet pornography exposure in terms of definition, epidemiology, predictors, consequences, and implications for practice.

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Child and Adolescent Pornography Exposure

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Children and adolescents are growing up in a digital world. The rapid expansion of the development, accessibility, and use of cellular phones and the Internet is changing human existence. Adolescents are absorbed in the use of technology; however, this behavior is also becoming characteristic of younger children as well (Livingstone & Smith, 2014).

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Moderation, I can tell you firsthand, is one of the most important and challenging aspects of social media. With the COVID-19 pandemic, social networks have been under greater pressure than ever to police their platforms to prevent the spread of misinformation.

As a result, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the other social-media giants have cranked up their censorship into overdrive, but they are ignoring the structural problems that allow misinformation to be boosted on their platforms in the first place.

These companies are increasingly dictating what their users should and should not see and believe. They are kicking out good users and taking down countless harmless posts, pages and groups simply for asking questions about COVID-19 or presenting opinions that differ with those from the company's executives and authorities. This widespread censorship of ideas would make George Orwell dizzy and runs counter to the whole purpose of social networking.

On May 11, Twitter announced it would add labels to tweets with false or disputed information about COVID-19, and Facebook already started adding similar labels. This is a Band-Aid that does not solve the fundamental issue and can actually create even more problems.

According to MIT research, when people see that some posts on social media have warning labels, they're far more likely to assume, incorrectly, that all the posts without these warning labels have been verified by fact-checkers. This misperception is exacerbated by the fact that only a fraction of posts with false or unverified information are checked and marked as such.

The basic problem is the micro-targeting business/revenue model of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and all current mainstream social networks. These companies allow marketers and purveyors of misinformation to pay to boost content to targeted audiences most susceptible to believing it.

Pizzagate is a well-known example of this, and two weeks ago, after Facebook had vowed to prevent misinformation, it allowed marketers to target ads to 78 million users interested in "pseudoscience." Putting warning labels on certain posts with unverified information is a superficial solution that fails to address this structural flaw.

In contrast, my company, MeWe, has no targeting, no newsfeed manipulation and no way for advertisers, marketers or political operatives to boost anything to users. This prevents any information or opinion - true or false - from being broadly promoted. Users need to deliberately seek out information for themselves and cannot be targeted by others who wish to reach and manipulate their thoughts.

This is not to say that social-media companies should relinquish moderation altogether and institute an "anything goes" policy. If a user, group, page or post is breaking the law or inciting violence, threats, hate, bullying, harassment, etc., companies have a duty to investigate and remove that user or content in order to keep their other users safe.

This is how MeWe operates. If users or groups want to have conversations following these basic rules of conduct and share different viewpoints about politics, religion, sexuality, medical treatments, diets, exercise regimens, supplements, lifestyles, etc., it is not the role of social-media companies to censor such discussions.

"Rightness" about a position, whether it is related to politics, medicine, health, fitness, science or anything else, has often been reversed or changed over time. In our current period of COVID-19, what information is "true" is changing at an unprecedented pace. In January, the World Health Organization falsely tweeted that COVID-19 could not spread from person to person; in March, it recommended against wearing a mask if you are not sick.

In April, President Trump falsely suggested during a White House briefing that COVID-19 might be treated by injecting disinfectant into the body. Should social networks censor the WHO or the president? Of course not.

Censorship is often counterproductive and amplifies what was meant to be muzzled. It's human nature to want to see what's forbidden, which is why books sometimes become more popular after they're banned. When it comes to conspiracy theories, this is even more true. Banning content proves to the conspiracy-minded that it must be valuable because the authorities don't want them to see it.

Social media was intended to be a place where good people of all stripes are free to express themselves and share opinions authentically. The widespread censorship we're currently witnessing runs contrary to this purpose.
Mark Weinstein is CEO of the social-network company MeWe.

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Why social media censorship is worse than useless

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Moderation, I can tell you firsthand, is one of the most important and challenging aspects of social media. With the COVID-19 pandemic, social networks have been under greater pressure than ever to police their platforms to prevent the spread of misinformation.

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Michael Oghia was on a Zoom videoconference with about 20 climate activists last week when someone hijacked the presenter's screen to show a video of explicit pornography involving an infant.

"It took me a moment to process it," said Oghia, advocacy and engagement manager at the Global Forum for Media Developments. "At first I thought it was porn, but as soon as it clicked, I shut my computer. What the hell did I just see?"

Oghia's call had been "zoombombed" with images of child sexual abuse. He's unsure whether it was a video or a livestream. It left him feeling traumatized and unable to sleep. "It goes without saying that the real victim is the baby, but I can completely understand why social media content moderators develop PTSD," he said.

Oghia's experience is an extreme example of what people who track and try to stop child abuse and the dissemination of child pornography say is a flood of child sexual exploitation material that has risen during the coronavirus pandemic.

And with tech companies' moderation efforts also constrained by the pandemic, distributors of child sexual exploitation material are growing bolder, using major platforms to try to draw audiences. Some platforms are warning users that when they report questionable or illegal content, the company may not be able to quickly respond.
Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak
Distributors of child sexual abuse images are trading links to material in plain sight on platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram using coded language to evade the companies' detection tools, according to child safety experts and law enforcement. At the same time, reports of child sexual exploitation activity to cybertip hotlines are up by an average of 30 percent globally, according to InHope, a network of 47 national cybertip lines.

Reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the organization that receives cybertips in the United States, including from all of the Silicon Valley technology platforms, have more than doubled, from 983,734 reports in March 2019 to 2,027,520 reports this March. A significant chunk of the new reports are made up of a small number of videos that went viral, according to John Shehan, vice president of the center's exploited children division.

Zoom said that it was looking into what happened on Oghia's call and that any child abuse on its platform is "devastating and appalling" and prohibited by its policies. The company said that it uses a mix of tools, including automated ones, to proactively identify accounts that could be sharing child sexual exploitation material and that it notifies law enforcement when appropriate. Zoom also now defaults to password protection for all meetings. Oghia's meeting did not require a password.

The incident came at a time when popular social media, video and messaging platforms have been flooded with child sexual exploitation material, experts told NBC News. The COVID-19 pandemic means people are spending more time online at home, leading to greater demand for this type of content.

"Activity is peaking on the platforms where it takes place, very similar to how it peaks around holiday time when people are off work," said Brian Herrick, assistant chief of the FBI's Violent Crimes Against Children and Human Trafficking Section.

He confirmed that "a lot of activity" took place in coded conversations on mainstream social media platforms but noted that the "most egregious child sexual abuse material" was shared on the dark web.

It's too early to see a spike in case openings, Herrick said, as they typically lag behind the online activity.

All the technology companies NBC News contacted for this article - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp, Telegram, TamTam and Mega - said that they have zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation and that finding, removing and reporting such content to law enforcement remains a top priority.

Moderation falls short

Most technology companies use automated tools to detect images and videos that have already been categorized by law enforcement as child sexual exploitation material, but they struggle to identify new, previously unknown material and rely heavily on user reports.

Distributors and consumers of the material have developed elaborate, cross-platform strategies to dodge detection. They frequently use the most popular platforms to find a community of child sexual predators to whom they can advertise the material using coded language. They then drive interested consumers to more private channels where they can access the material, often using encrypted messaging apps or poorly policed file-sharing services.
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Concerned parents notified NBC News of accounts on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and in the comments of YouTube videos where users were sharing and asking for links to child abuse images and videos. Many of the links were to groups on private messaging apps, including Telegram and WhatsApp, as well as to file-sharing sites such as Mega. Sometimes they used generic terms with the initials "C.P.," a common abbreviation for "child pornography," and code like "caldo de pollo," which means "chicken soup" in Spanish. Others referred to the names of children who appear in sets of child abuse imagery already known to law enforcement. NBC News did not click on the links to verify that they contained what they advertised.

Technology companies are already under immense pressure to reduce the spread of misinformation related to COVID-19 on their platforms with fewer workers available to review content because many contractors have been sent home and cannot access the company's systems remotely because of security measures. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have created warnings that they might be slower than usual to respond to reports when users flag accounts or posts for review.

YouTube said in a blog post that it is relying more heavily on technology to do the work usually done by human reviewers. All companies said they continued to prioritize child sexual exploitation material in their content review processes.

The issue is compounded by several factors during the pandemic, according to experts from law enforcement and child safety groups. People are generally spending far more time at home and online, giving them more time to look for and distribute content of all sorts, including child sexual exploitation material.

Because of school closures, more children are also at home, which leaves them more vulnerable to sexual exploitation by family members or those online, the FBI warned last month. However, there are also more people online to find and report material, which may add to the workload of tech companies' content reviewers and those at the national cybertip lines.

'There's nobody watching'

Parents of underage Instagram influencers said there has been a palpable shift in the number of predators trying to make contact.

"The past several weeks have been a s---show," said Katie Spinner, a Los Angeles-based teacher who monitors the Instagram account of her 16-year-old daughter, Lily, a model and influencer.

Even before the pandemic emerged, Spinner would field direct messages from older men who would make lewd requests or send photos of their genitals. However, over the last few weeks, they've been emboldened.

"I've seen seven erect penises this week in profile pictures. People have realized there are no controls right now. There's nobody watching," she said, saying Instagram has been less responsive to her reports during quarantine.

Concerned parents of children on Instagram pointed NBC News to a network of accounts showing legal pictures of young children in provocative poses and descriptions linking out to private messaging groups or other channels. One account depicted prepubescent boys in underwear or swimwear, some of whom were sleeping, with a lewd caption on every picture inviting the reader to sexually abuse the children.

"These types of images are inappropriate, but they don't meet the threshold for child sexual abuse material," said Sarah Smith, a technical researcher at the U.K.'s cybertip line, the Internet Watch Foundation. "We typically see this type of content on gateway sites that may also contain illegal content."

NBC News reported the account through Instagram's in-app reporting feature, along with several others. The Instagram app responded with a message stating that the company couldn't "prioritize all reports right now" as it had fewer people available to review reports because of the pandemic. "So we're only able to review content with the most potential for harm," the message said, suggesting muting or blocking the account in the interim.

Instagram said that some of the content review work had shifted from contractors to full-time employees but that those employees were highly trained on the platform's content policies. The company's capacity to review child sexual exploitation material remained unchanged, it said.

On Twitter, hashtags that child protection groups and online activists have been reporting for months and flagged to NBC News, such as #MegaLinks, continue to be used to advertise or ask for "C.P." links or groups on Telegram, WhatsApp and other platforms, including Mega and the messaging app TamTam. Some users shared links publicly or offered to share links to people who sent them direct messages. NBC News did not click on the links or interact with any of the users.

Mega Chairman Stephen Hall said the company has "zero tolerance" for child sexual abuse material and that when it receives a report, it immediately disables links to files shared on its platform, closes the user's account down and shares account details with authorities in New Zealand, where Mega is headquartered.

In the first three months of 2020, Telegram has taken down 26 percent more groups and channels for child abuse than it did over the same period in 2019 - 18,815 compared to 14,950, according to data it releases online each day. April is on course to be its largest month ever for takedowns of those kinds of channels.

A pandemic push

To meet the increased demand for new material, more children are being sexually abused on camera, experts say.

"Child sex offenders are not satisfied viewing the same old materials over and over again. They want to see new photos and videos of children being sexually abused with escalating violence," said John Tanagho, a field office director for the International Justice Mission, a nonprofit that helps rescue children in the Philippines from being sexually abused on demand by Westerners via livestreams.

New material is sometimes created on demand in exchange for payment. The material is often recorded and subsequently distributed as videos or still images.

The livestreams are "the engine" that creates child sexual abuse material, Tanagho said. Although it's difficult to measure because the platforms lack the tools to screen livestreams, he said, there are "very strong indicators of a spike" in livestreamed child sexual abuse. Cybertips of child sexual exploitation in the Philippines, including the distribution and consumption of material, tripled in the first three months of 2020, corresponding with the global lockdown.

"With COVID-19 it's a perfect storm. Traffickers are on lockdown in the Philippines. Victims are not at school," Tanagho said, adding that in more than 60 percent of cases the local trafficker is a family member or a close family friend.

He called for technology companies, including social media sites, messaging apps and livestreaming services, to make more of an effort to detect when children are being abused via livestreams on their platforms. "That's where the abuse is being facilitated. What they can see, law enforcement can't see," he said, saying tech companies could combine AI tools with human content reviewers to help ensure that victims are rescued sooner.

"It really comes down to a choice," he added. "If they choose to prioritize child protection, they will detect the exploitation as it's happening, and that means children will be rescued days or weeks or months after the abuse, as opposed to years."

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Child sexual abuse images and online exploitation surge during pandemic

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Michael Oghia was on a Zoom videoconference with about 20 climate activists last week when someone hijacked the presenter's screen to show a video of explicit pornography involving an infant. "It took me a moment to process it," said Oghia, advocacy and engagement manager at the Global Forum for Media Developments.

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Tik Tok and the Sexualization of Children

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Tik Tok and the Sexualization of Children

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TikTok is one of the most popular - and most interesting - social media apps on the planet, but it has yet to enter the lexicon of mostaverage Americans. The gist is this: Users film videos of themselves lip-syncing or acting out comedy sketches, up to 15 seconds long, and can choose from a database of songs, effects, or sound bites. Collaboration is a major incentive - you can do a "duet" with someone by replying to their video, which creates a split-screen diptych, thus feeding into an endless chain of reactions. Users can also upload their own sounds, so it's possible to lip-sync to someone else's original video.

All of this makes TikTok extremely fun to use, and helps explain why it's grown so massively: In September 2018, it surpassed Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat in monthly installs in the App Store, and was downloaded more than a billion times in 2018. It's smaller than Facebook ( 2.27 billion global monthly active users, including Instagram and WhatsApp, which it owns), but it's far ahead ofTwitter ( 336 million) and Snapchat ( 186 million). And as of February 2019, 27 million of those active users were in the US.

This has translated to enormous success for its parent company, ByteDance, which surpassed Uber as the world's most valuable startup. At a valuation of more than $75 billion, it's the first Chinese internet company with a "significant, genuinely engaged following around the world," according to The Verge. On December 7, the tech site the Information reported that ByteDance was in talks to raise an additional $1.4 billion for investments in artificial intelligence and media content. TikTok itself has gotten so big that Facebook even quietly launched a competitor called Lasso in November.

TikTok, on the surface, doesn't look so different from the litany of other video-centric social media apps that came before it, like Snapchat, Vine, or Dubsmash. It shares similar pitfalls (privacy, online creeps) and similar assets (like Vine, TikTok has created its own language of comedy), but thanks to its algorithm that makes binge-watching irresistible, as well as a sophisticated array of sound and visual effects, TikTok offers far more possibilities for creators.

For an app with such a simple mission - singing! dancing! to music! - being good at TikTok requires a surprising amount of practice. Many of its most popular videos are quite laborious to produce ( here's a tutorial that will show you how to take advantage of some of the app's most useful features), but it's also what's made huge stars of its most skilled users: 16-year-old German twins Lisa and Lena (32 million fans), 18-year-old Baby Ariel (29 million fans), 16-year-old Loren Gray (29 million fans), and 16-year-old Jacob Sartorius (19 million fans), all of whom have released their own (non-lip-synced) singles since building huge followings on TikTok's predecessor, Musical.ly.

What all this means is thatTikTok isn't just the latest app you need to pretend to have heard of to impress Gen Z - it's one of the most important companies on the planet, and it's at the forefront of the possible future of social media.

Where did TikTok come from?

Along with an aggressive YouTube ad campaign, TikTok also appears to have spent money to get more celebrities on the app: Cardi B and Offset ( RIP, love) hosted a sponsored holiday "wrap battle," in which Awkwafina also participated, while Foodgod's (née Jonathan Cheban) first video was also sponsored.

But TikTok is still primarily an app for normies. The act of scrolling through TikTok will transport you into the worlds of regular American teenagers whose videos have thousands of likes and hundreds of supportive comments. Multiple popular TikTok users I spoke to pointed to the astronomical views, comments, and likes that posts can garner - which easily eclipse those of Instagram, Snapchat, or Vine in its heyday - as one of the reasons they loved it, as well as the relative rarity of bullying and trolls that swarm other sites.

Though TikTok's video view count is only available to the original poster, when videos end up on the "For You" page (that's the home feed that showcases TikTok's best content), they'll receive anywhere from 50,000 to more than 1 million likes.

TikTok is perfectly designed for our love of bizarre humor

This, however, is not exactly the reputation that TikTok enjoys on the rest of the internet. My own entrée into TikTok culture came through compilations of the most cringe-inducing content on the app, which are among the first results you'll get when you type "TikTok" into YouTube. To a generation of cynical internet users, TikTok videos are purely targets of ridicule.

Because when lots and lots of normal people use an app that's essentially simulating karaoke - already an activity with a high possibility for humiliation - and then broadcast those videos to a potential audience of millions, not all of the results are going to be as pretty as a filtered, curated Instagram photo. The level of earnestness that many TikTok videos convey often crosses the line into cringeworthiness, particularly when it comes to very young teenagers exploring subcultures like furry fandom, infantilism, or certain kinds of cosplay.

But what has happened increasingly is that TikTok's sometimes corny quirks and normie aesthetic are making the app a gold mine of edgy, subversive, and surreal comedy, much like Vine was. When TikTok first launched in the US last fall, for instance, my feed was filled with things like finger dancing, people trying to lip-sync to a scene from Ice Age, andthe "Why do good girls like bad guys?" meme, in which men attempt to transform themselves into "bad boys" while lip-syncing to a 2011 pop-punk song.

Now, however, I'm much more likely to see a satirical rendition of Charli XCX's "Boys" in which the song replaces all references to boys with "God" and "Jesus," captioned with "So my mom found my TikTok." Or someone acting out a subplot of Dance Moms set to "Sexy Bitch" by Akon. Or a makeup transformation into Jasmine Masters of the iconic "and I oop" video. It's a weird, delightful place that's unsettlingly easy to spend hours scrolling through.

YouTube creators, meanwhile, have milked viewers' interest in watching TikToks by making reaction videos with titles like " TikTok Must Be Stopped" and " TikTok Gamer Girls Should Be Illegal," or any one of YouTube's most-subscribed user PewDiePie's five TikTok screeds (always the contrarian, he now seems to have decided that actually, TikTok is good).

Of course, like on Vine and Twitter, unoriginal comedy and joke-stealing also thrives on TikTok: There are plenty of examples of people lip-syncing to scenes from film or TV, someone else's standup (or someone else's TikTok sketch), or worse, a viral tweet.

One example from fall 2018 of the sort of just-add-water comedic memes common on the app is set to the song "Little Bit" by 15-year-old white rapper MattyBRaps, in which a boy acts out the lyric, "Hey girl, you like me a little bit?" and his female counterpart responds, "No, I don't even like you a little bit." This is the extent of the joke.

Didi Rio, a 15-year-old in Southern California, is among the users who only post original comedy rather than parroting other people's content. He's been on the app for just a month, yet he's already amassed 30,000 fans with his high-energy, often meta video skits. "I think I would call my comedy style 'boom, you didn't see that coming,'" he tells Vox.

He says that while he's encountered bullies on the site, he doesn't let them get to him. "There isn't a second anywhere in our world without them," he says. "Luckily, love and kindness triumphs that, so it's no big deal to me."

The darker side of TikTok: creepy adults, illegal data collection, and sexist teens

Bullying, however, is likely not the biggest threat to TikTok. Though it only allows users who are 13 or older, like most apps, it's not exactly a foolproof restriction. And also like most apps aimed at young people, TikTok is home to its fair share of creeps.

The South China Morning Post found that hundreds of Hong Kong children as young as 9 years old unwittingly exposed their full names, phone numbers, and schools by including the information in public videos. (On TikTok, videos can only be either private to one's self or public to anyone on the app.) They also noted that many of these accounts received creepy messages from adults asking young girls to "be their girlfriend" or requesting their cellphone numbers.

This isn't a new problem; in 2017 an ABC news segment told the story of an Indiana 7-year-old who was asked to send shirtless photos of herself by a stranger on Musical.ly. Around the same time, a 25-year-old Fresno, California, man was charged with sexual exploitation of children under 12 through Musical.ly and other apps.

In response to a Vice story on TikTok's vast underbelly of accounts that try to solicit nudes from children, a TikTok spokesperson said that it has "a number of measures in place today to protect against misuse," including a moderation team and the fact that photos and videos can't be sent via direct message. The problem, though, is that many of these accounts are in all likelihood adults posing as fellow teenagers, making kids much more likely to hand over their phone numbers.

There's another problem with TikTok's lax enforcement of age restrictions: In February 2019, the Federal Trade Commission slapped the company with a record fine of $5.7 million for illegally collecting the data of children under 13, a violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998.

As one YouTube video points out in great detail, one of TikTok's largest factions is very young girls mimicking thirst trap culture by posting provocative videos of themselves in risqué clothes. Besides potentially being discovered by pedophiles, this can make the experience of scrolling through TikTok as an adult deeply uncomfortable.

And although it certainly isn't illegal to do so, the TikTok compilator who runs the YouTube channel Randy Ronda told me that among the worst parts of TikTok is "the older men dueting underage girls." For context, it'd be similar to an older man, say, commenting on the Facebook or Instagram of a teen girl he didn't know. Also uncomfortable: the hordes of white teenagers putting on questionable affectations while lip-syncing to black artists.

One of TikTok's most popular memes is also predicated largely on sexism. Gamer culture has never exactly welcomed women into its ranks, but when a clip from a song about the game Overwatch went viral on TikTok this fall, the "I'm already Tracer" meme - in which the female vocalist sassily declares that she's chosen all the most powerful characters in the game, like Tracer, Widowmaker, and Winston - was quickly turned into a means of bullying girls.

As internet culture reporter Julia Alexander notes, the song " No Mercy" by the Living Tombstone, from which the "I'm already Tracer" clip originated, was a catchy, clever skewering of the idea that female gamers are automatically assumed to play as supporting characters (in this case, that's Mercy). But when users uploaded videos of themselves lip-syncing to the song in which they, for instance, used the wrong controller or held it a certain way, others uploaded split-screen duets of the song in attempts to out the original poster as a " fake gamer girl," a sexist character trope that's among the most loathed on the internet.

TikTok is a hugely lucrative Wild West - for now

Even though TikTok is an enormous network of inside jokes, reactions, reactions to reactions, and meta memeification, it's still wildly underdeveloped. That's because brands - omnipresent on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter - have yet to truly sink their teeth in.

For users, that's part of the appeal, andwhat makes the experience of using TikTok feel so authentic. That's already beginning to change, but for creators, these are boom times.

Drea Knows Best, a comedy creator with more than 1.8 million fans, says the biggest distinction TikTok has from other social media apps is its highly loyal and hugely active audience. Though she was already popular on Muscial.ly and Vine before they were shut down, "the engagement on TikTok is unreal," she tells me.

Though she says she currently makes the majority of her income on TikTok through partnerships with brands like Netflix, she knows there are even more opportunities on the platform for both creators and the companies they work with. "The demographic is growing; it's no longer like how it was on Musical.ly, where it's all kids. All the creators on the app have very loyal fans. If they say, 'Hey, guys, I'm partnering with Burger King, everyone go to Burger King and buy a burger,' they will go to Burger King and buy a burger because they trust the influencers on TikTok and they're loyal to them. It's just phenomenal."

TikTok had its highest-earning month to date in October, thanks to growing its in-app purchases by about 275 percent, according to the app business insights blog Sensor Towers, translating to more than $3.5 million worldwide. In-app purchases on TikTok are limited to "coins," which people can use to send virtual gifts worth actual money to their favorite TikTok personalities during live broadcasts, which acts as another revenue source for creators like Drea.

Drea currently works with the digital talent agency Collab while also pitching herself directly to brands. She's found success on the app in other ways, too: She's currently enrolled in an entrepreneurial program at USC after winning a free semester there through Musical.ly.

Didi, a 15-year-old creator, could be next. "I see working in entertainment in the future as something I would totally enjoy big-time," he says, "but I haven't been approached by any entertainment professionals through TikTok yet. Talent pros, if you're reading, I'm a great boy, hit me up."

The best thing TikTok currentlyhas going for it is its goofiness: Sure, the most popular TikTok celebrities can eventually shill products or launch actual music careers, but the vast majority are there to make silly lip-sync videos, fool around with visual effects, and participate in whatever challenge happens to be going viral at the moment. If social media is ever going to feel less like a chore, then TikTok is leading the way.

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TikTok is one of the most popular - and most interesting - social media apps on the planet, but it has yet to enter the lexicon of mostaverage Americans. The gist is this: Users film videos of themselves lip-syncing or acting out comedy sketches, up to 15 seconds long, and can choose from a database of songs, effects, or sound bites.

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Video-sharing app TikTok says it is "sorry" that some children and other young people have felt pressured into sending money to their favourite influencers on the app.

TikTok lets fans send their favourite videomakers "digital gifts", which can cost up to £48.99.

A BBC investigation found influencers promising to share their phone numbers with fans in exchange for the gifts.

TikTok said it would strengthen its policies and guidelines but did not explain exactly how.

Claire (not her real name) told BBC News she regretted spending £100 to obtain her favourite TikTok star's phone number - and he had never answered his phone.

Claire, 12, who lives in the north-west of England, sent TikTok star Sebastian Moy a £48.99 "drama queen" gift to show her appreciation for his videos.

And when he had asked for another one in exchange for his personal phone number, she said she was swept up in the moment.

The US-based video-maker has 3.8 million fans on TikTok and has not broken any of the app's rules.

He has not responded to the BBC's requests for comment.

Taking a cut

TikTok is the fastest-growing social media app, with about 500 million regular users, although the company doesn't disclose its userbase. It's estimated to have been downloaded more than a billion times on app stores.

The app lets people post 15-second videos. It is known for clips of teenagers lip-syncing and dancing to the latest trending music.

The company says it is most popular with 16- to 24-year-olds but there is evidence that many users are under 13, which is against the app's rules.

The firm has already been fined $5.7m (£4.5m) by a US regulator after being accused of collecting under-13s' personal details without their parents' consent. And on Tuesday, the UK's Information Commissioner revealed she had also launched an inquiry into whether the app was doing enough to safeguard its youngest users.

"We do have an active investigation into TikTok right now, so you can watch that space," said Elizabeth Denham.

Videomakers with more than 1,000 followers are allowed to broadcast live on the platform. It is during these live streams that fans can send digital gifts to show their appreciation.

Gifts appear as on-screen animations and cost between 5p and £48.99. The app's biggest stars can earn thousands of pounds in one live stream.

TikTok declined to say how much of that money it kept - but several influencers told the BBC they took home 50% of all gift revenue earned.

Promised rewards

Over 10 weeks, the BBC monitored dozens of live streams in which the app's stars asked fans for gifts.

In exchange, they promised shoutouts on their live streams, said they would follow back fans on social media or offered to make "duets", which allow users to collaborate with TikTok stars in a split-screen video.

One creator promised to talk to a fan on Instagram "for a week" and was given three gifts worth a total of £147.

Some creators routinely offered personal messaging details and phone numbers in exchange for gifts.

The BBC also found a group who scoured the app for people giving gifts and then contacted them directly asking for money in exchange for "likes" and "follows".

Exploited

Stephanie Barbour, from Toronto, found her 11-year-old daughter had run up a bill for $400 (£240).

"I was shocked when I found out what the money was spent on," she said.

"I said to my daughter, 'So you don't actually get anything for it?' and she said, 'No.'

"Adults should know better. And even other teenagers should know better - that you do not ask children for money."

Another TikTok fan, Kelly, told the BBC she had spent £500-£600 of her own money on digital gifts. She no longer sends them because she feels she was exploited.

"I understand people need to make money these days off social media but I just think it's force-fed down young people's throats that they need to pay money to get attention or feel appreciated," Kelly said.

Rhys, 20 said he had spent more than £1,000 without realising it.

"Gifting on TikTok is a little bit like gambling," he said "It gets addictive. I really didn't see anything wrong with it at the time but now I don't think it's worth it.

"I have nothing to show for it. It was my personal choice but I do think there should be some sort of age restriction or timeout function."

The BBC contacted several of the TikTok stars seen using such techniques but most of them did not reply.

Feeling guilty

The Neffati brothers have amassed 2.5 million followers in just six months on the platform.

The 25-year-old Polish twins who live in Blackburn, Lancashire, are famous for their dancing and comedy sketches.

They offer to follow back fans in exchange for a "drama queen" gift, worth £49 and promise to write fans' names on their heads if they send multiple gifts.

They told the BBC that they had only started offering perks in exchange for gifts because they had been receiving them regularly.

They said they were simply following the lead of other creators on the platform and that most of the fans that sent gifts were about 30 years old.

But they said they did feel guilty when they received gifts from young fans.

"We don't like it when our gifters are young, so basically we ask them if their parents know about it," they said.

"But we can't stop them. We can't stop it. We are going live not only for the money but we are going on the live to get more audience."

Rhia, from south Wales, and has 2.5 million fans thanks to her creative video-editing skills.

She said her average fan was about 10 to 14 years old and they were always happy with the perks she offered in exchange for gifts.

But she also feels uncomfortable when she receives several gifts from very young followers.

And she would like to see stricter age limits on gifting.

"It would give us peace of mind as creators," she told the BBC.

"It would make you feel more ethical because taking money from children is not a good way to earn a living really."

Deceptive

Livestream gifting originated in China - where TikTok's owner Bytedance is based. The practice is far more popular there. Professional "cam girls" earn huge amounts from their audiences.

In the West, tipping has become more common especially on gaming platforms such as Twitch.

However, the rapid rise of TikTok is testing the business model like never before.

TikTok declined to answer specific questions but told the BBC it was investigating digital gifting.

In a statement, it said: "We do not tolerate behaviours that are deceptive in nature and we are sorry to hear some of the users' experiences.

"We recognise there is always room for improvements in terms of making guidelines and information more accessible, clear and easy-to-understand for all users.

"We value your feedback and will further strengthen our policies and product features."

The company gave no details on what policies or community guidelines it would change.

Alessandro Bogliari, from the Influencer Marketing Factory, said there was wider pressure on TikTok to make changes.

"These sorts of stories are not good for a social network that is becoming popular with brands and marketers," he said.

"The app has major potential but there is clearly work to do to improve things.

"I think more parental-control features would be a good idea and some sort of cap on the amount users can gift per day or per livestream.

"They could also make the guidelines more clear and ban the use of certain terms that 'hard sell' to users."

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TikTok's young fans 'exploited' for digital gifts

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Video-sharing app TikTok says it is "sorry" that some children and other young people have felt pressured into sending money to their favourite influencers on the app. TikTok lets fans send their favourite videomakers "digital gifts", which can cost up to £48.99.

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How TikTok Fuels the Sexualisation of Young Girls and Exploitation of Teens

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How TikTok Fuels the Sexualisation of Young Girls and Exploitation of Teens

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This posed a problem for the tobacco industry. Here you had 50% of the population not smoking their cigarettes for no other reason than it was unfashionable or seen as impolite. This wouldn't do. As George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, said at the time, "It's a gold mine right in our front yard." The industry tried multiple times to market cigarettes to women but nothing ever seemed to work. The cultural prejudice against it was simply too ingrained, too deep.

Then, in 1928, the American Tobacco Company hired Edward Bernays, a young hotshot marketer with wild ideas and even wilder marketing campaigns.

Bernays' marketing tactics at the time were unlike anybody else's in the industry. Back in the early 20th century, marketing was seen simply as a means of communicating the tangible, real benefits of a product in the simplest and most concise form possible. It was believed at the time that people bought based on facts and information. If someone wanted to buy cheese, then you must communicate to them the facts of why your cheese was superior ("Freshest french goat milk, cured 12 days, shipped refrigerated!"). People were seen as rational actors making rational purchasing decisions for themselves.

But Bernays was more unconventional. Bernays didn't believe that people made rational decisions most of the time. In fact, he believed that people were fundamentally irrational and so you had to appeal to them on an emotional and unconscious level.

Whereas the tobacco industry had been focused on convincing individual women to buy and smoke cigarettes, Bernays saw it as an emotional and cultural issue. If Bernays wanted women to smoke, then he had to shift that balance and turn smoking into a positive emotional experience for women by reshaping the cultural perceptions of smoking.

To accomplish this, Bernays hired a group of women and got them into the Easter Sunday Parade in New York City. Today, big holiday parades are cheesy things you let drone on the television while you fall asleep on the couch. But back in those days, parades were big social events, kind of like the Super Bowl or something.

Bernays planned it so that these women in the parade, at the appropriate moment, would all stop and light up cigarettes at the same time. Then, Bernays hired photographers to take flattering photos of the women which he then passed out to all of the major national newspapers. Bernays then told the reporters that these ladies were not just lighting cigarettes, but they were lighting "torches of freedom," demonstrating their ability to assert their own independence and be their own woman.

It was all fake, of course. But Bernays staged it as a political protest because he knew this would trigger the appropriate emotions in women all across the country. Feminists had just won women the right to vote a decade earlier. Women were now working outside the home and becoming more integral to the country's economic life. They were asserting themselves by cutting their hair short and wearing racier clothes. Women at the time saw themselves as the first generation that could behave independently of a man. And many of them felt very strongly about this. If Bernays could just hitch his "smoking = freedom" message onto the women's liberation movement, well, tobacco sales would double and he'd be a rich man.

And it worked. Women started smoking and got to enjoy lung cancer just as much as their husbands did.

Meanwhile, Bernays went on to pull off these kinds of cultural coups regularly throughout the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. He completely revolutionized the marketing industry and invented the field of public relations in the process. Paying celebrities to use your product? That was Bernays' idea. Creating fake news articles that are actually subtle advertisements for a product? Also his idea. Staging controversial public events as a means to draw attention and notoriety for one of his clients? His idea as well. Pretty much every form of marketing or publicity we're all subjected to today began with Bernays.

But here's something else surprising about Bernays: he was Sigmund Freud's nephew.

Freud's theories were some of the first to argue that most human decision making was primarily unconscious and irrational. Freud was the one who realized that people's insecurities drove them to excess and overcompensation. Freud was also the one who understood that people are, at heart, animals and are easily manipulated, especially in groups.

Bernays just applied these ideas to selling products and he got rich in the process.

Through Freud, Bernays understood something nobody else in business ever understood before him: that if you can tap into people's insecurities - if you can needle at their deepest feelings of inadequacy - then they will buy just about any damn thing you tell them to.

This form of marketing became the blueprint of all future advertising. Trucks are marketed to men as ways to assert strength and reliability. Makeup is marketed to women as a way to be more loved and garner more attention. Beer is marketed as a way to have fun and be the center of attention at the party. I mean, my god, Burger King used to market hamburgers with, "Have it your way" - that doesn't even make sense.

After all, how else does a women's magazine that shows 150 pages of airbrushed pictures of women in the 0.01th percentile of the population in terms of beauty make money other than turning around and selling beauty products next to those exact same airbrushed women? Or beer commercials that show raucous parties with friends, girls, titties, sports cars, Vegas, friends, more girls, more titties, more beer, girls, girls, girls, parties, dancing, cars, friends, girls! - Drink Budweiser.

This is all Marketing 101 today. When I first studied marketing when I started my first business, I was told to find people's "pain points" and then subtly make them feel worse. Then turn around and tell them my product will make them feel better. In my case, I was selling dating advice, so the idea was to tell people that they will be lonely forever, that no one will ever like them or love them, that something must be wrong with them - oh! And here, buy my book!

I didn't do that, of course. It made me feel icky. And it took me years to really understand why.

In our culture today, marketing often is the message. The vast majority of information that we're exposed to is some form of marketing. And so if the marketing is always trying to make you feel like shit to get you to buy something, then we're essentially existing in a culture designed to make us feel like shit and we'll always want to overcompensate in some way.

One thing I've noticed over the years is that of the thousands of people who have emailed me for advice in one form or another, a large percentage of them didn't actually seem to have any identifiable problem. Rather, they clung to bizarre and unrealistic standards for themselves. Like the college kid who goes to college expecting to go to insano pool parties with bikini-clad women on a daily basis and is then disappointed when he feels socially awkward because he has to go to class and study hard subjects and make new friends and constantly be unsure of himself because he's never lived on his own before. The latter experience is totally normal, yet he somehow shipped himself off to university with expectations of Animal House every weekend.

This sort of thing is happening all over. I know for me, my conception of romance and a relationship when I was young was some cross between a random episode of Friends and a Hugh Grant movie. Needless to say, I spent many years feeling frustrated and as though something must be inherently wrong with me.

Bernays was aware of all of this, by the way. But Bernays' political views were like a diet version of fascism - he believed that it was both inevitable and in everybody's best interests that the weak be exploited by the strong through media and propaganda. He called it "the invisible government" and generally thought the masses were stupid and deserving of whatever smart people convinced them to do.

Our society has evolved to an interesting point in history. Capitalism, in theory, works by allotting resources to fulfill everyone's needs and demands in the most efficient way possible.

But perhaps capitalism is only the most efficient means of fulfilling a population's physical needs - needs for food, shelter, clothing, etc. Because in a capitalist system, it also becomes economical to feed into everyone's insecurities, their vices and vulnerabilities, to promote their worst fears and constantly remind them of their shortcomings and failures. It becomes profitable to set new and unrealistic standards, to generate a culture of comparison and inferiority. Because people who constantly feel inferior make the best customers.

After all, people only buy something if they believe it will solve a problem. Therefore, if you want to sell more stuff than there are problems, you have to encourage people to believe there are problems where there are none.

This isn't an attack on capitalism. It's not even an attack on marketing. I don't think there's some big overarching conspiracy to keep the "sheeple" in line. I think the system simply creates certain incentives that shape media, and then the media go on to shape a callous and superficial culture based on trying to always live up to something.

Overall our system has done pretty damn well, and still does for the most part. I like to think of it as the "least worst" solution to organizing human civilization. Unbridled capitalism simply brings with it certain cultural baggage that we must learn to be aware of and adapt to. Oftentimes, the marketing in our economy pushes insecurity onto us that is not helpful and that intentionally triggers inadequacies or addictions within ourselves to make more profit.

Some may argue that this sort of stuff should be regulated and controlled by government. Maybe that can help a little bit. But it doesn't strike me as a good long-term solution.

The only real long-term solution is for people to develop enough self-awareness to understand when mass media is prodding at their weaknesses and vulnerabilities and to make conscious decisions in the face of those fears. The success of our free markets has burdened us with the responsibility of exercising our freedom to choose. And that responsibility is far heavier than we often realize.
This is an excerpt from my new book, Everthing is F*cked: A Book about Hope. (Cover image: "A Night in NYC" by Yuya Sekiguchi is licensed under CC BY 2.0)

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In the 1920s, women didn't smoke. Or if they did, they were severely judged for it. It was taboo. Like graduating from college or getting elected to Congress, people believed women should leave the smoking to men. Honey, you might hurt yourself. Or burn your beautiful hair.

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Watch The Social Dilemma | Netflix Official Site

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This documentary-drama hybrid explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations. Watch trailers & learn more.

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Media and Eating Disorders in Fiji: Interview with Anne E. Becker, M.D

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Social Media - Anything goes podcast with emma chamberlain