Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor, discusses the weak link between social media and mental health problems and explains how previous moral panics have followed a similar pattern. He highlights that studies on social media and depression/suicide are inconsistent and that teens have some of the lowest suicide rates, with other age groups seeing…
Tag: social media
Chatter #151 – Sophie Zhang – Whistleblowing On Facebook: Fake Engagement and Election Manipulation
Sophie Zhang is a data scientist and whistleblower who formerly worked at Facebook. From 2018 to 2020, while she was investigating “fake engagement” at Facebook, she uncovered abusive political manipulation and opposition harassment networks in 25 countries. Zhang reported that most of these subversive networks use Facebook’s organization pages, configured with human names…
Profit Over Principles: Social Media Companies Are Destroying Democracy
Kyle Taylor is the author of The Little Black Book of Data and Democracy and founder of Fair Vote UK. Fair Vote UK was set up to tackle the issue of data misuse, voter manipulation and lack of transparency in elections head-on. We are committed to ensuring the institutions that protect our democratic…
Chatter #148 – On Freedom Of Speech, Julian Assange, And Building New Social Media
Express VPN 12 Months 35% off!! Taylor Hudak, MA, is an independent journalist focusing on free speech, press freedoms, whistleblowing and US foreign policy. Taylor’s work can be found on acTVism Munich YouTube channel, as well as The Last American Vagabond. We had a great conversation about freedom of speech and expression, the…
We Have To Ban Political Advertising Online
Once upon a time a brand-new piece of technology appeared on the scene. One that would allow politicians to conceivably reach into every house in the nation, one with few rules on advertising or what could legally be said (this was a time before fact checkers). It was soon decided that this technology…
Tech Censorship Is Dangerous, But Micro-targeted Adverts Are Worse
There’s been a lot of focus over the last few months on freedom of speech and censorship online. What began with Alex Jones and David Ike a number of years ago has morphed into bans for Steven Crowder, Project Veritas, Articles of Unity (a campaign to reject the two party system), Unity4J (an…
