getWikiTutorial
2024-10-03
# Need to install jsonlite, otherwise search_wiki won't work
# install.packages("jsonlite")
# library(jsonlite)Part 1 - Intro
What is getwiki?
an R package designed to retrieve and analyze Wikipedia articles directly within the R environment.
allows users to search for articles, extract content, and perform text-based analysis in an automated way.
Uses in Psychology Research:
Data Collection: Automates retrieval of psychological concepts, theories, or mental health topics faster than directly search in Wikipedia page.
Text Analysis: Facilitates keyword extraction, and topic modeling on public discourse.
Public Perception: Helps researchers analyze how psychological topics are represented in public spaces.
Part 2 - How to install
STEP 1: install it
# install it
install.packages("getwiki")## Installing package into '/Users/benjaminsilver/Library/R/x86_64/4.2/library'
## (as 'lib' is unspecified)##
## The downloaded binary packages are in
## /var/folders/pp/lk19kb4d6_g2vn0f30qf_zv40000gn/T//RtmpmVj3YS/downloaded_packagesSTEP 2: activate it in your R library
#activate it in R
library(getwiki)Part 3 - Four Major Functions
1. get_wiki: search the exact phrase
Search single keyword: get_wiki(“your word”)
Search multiple keywords: get_wiki(c(“word 1”, “word 2”, “word n”))
Keep html syntax of the content: get_wiki(“your word”, clean = FALSE)
# Search single keyword: get_wiki("your word")
# output: entire article content
get_wiki("social brain")## [1] "In primatology, the Machiavellian intelligence or social brain hypothesis describes the capacity of primates to manuever in complex social groups. The first introduction of this concept came from Frans de Waal's book Chimpanzee Politics (1982). In the book de Waal notes that chimpanzees performed certain social maneuvering behaviors that he thought of as being \"Machiavellian\". This hypothesis posits that large brains and distinctive cognitive abilities of primates have evolved via intense social competition in which social competitors developed increasingly sophisticated strategies as a means to achieve higher social and reproductive success.OverviewOrigin of the termThe term \"Machiavellian intelligence\" originates from the primatologist Franz de Waal, who noted that the behaviors of primates was so elaborate that it could perhaps be compared to political behavior today. Primatologists Nicholas Humphrey, Andrew Whiten and Richard Byrne were instrumental in developing this theory.They observed that primates, particularly great apes, displayed intricate social behaviors such as alliance formation, deception, and reconciliation. These behaviors seemed to require cognitive abilities beyond what was necessary for basic survival tasks like foraging or avoiding predators.Relations with other researchAs a concept, it is also conflated with, and mistaken for the Machiavellianism personality construct, which focuses on the affective-interpersonal traits of human beings, such as unemotionality and exploitativeness, while Machiavellian Intelligence deals with the social behaviors of primates and is not focused on immoral actions.Behaviors of organismsMachiavellian intelligence may be demonstrated by primate behaviors including:Mate seekingActs of reciprocity and aggressionComplex group manuevers, such as co-operation and competitionActs of misdirection by the primateCriticismsFood and nutrient factorsThe claim that large brains are linked to large social groups in primates and cetaceans, on which the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis is based, is criticized by a number of researchers for overlooking the availability of food as a common limiting factor for brain size and social group size. Among primates as well as cetaceans, there are some opportunistic species that eat most types of food and other species that are specialised in particular types of food, as well as differences in the overall availability of food between different geographical regions in which the animals live. Some critics of Machiavellian intelligence argue that species that have to keep their use of nutrients down due to food poverty or specialisation in a rare type of food lowers average brain size for species that live in smaller groups, making big brains falsely appear to be linked to large groups due to the common causes of opportunistic foraging for nutritious food and a rich supply of food. These critics also cite that the \"exceptions\" in the form of small-brained primates in very large groups typically eat abundant but nutrient-poor foods (such as geladas that eat grass), as predicted by the food-based model, and argue that the higher individual need for nutrients put on by large brains causes groups to become smaller if the species have the same degree of digestive specialisation and environmental availability of food.See alsoDunbar's numberPrimate evolutionIntelligenceReferencesFurther readingByrne, R. W., & Whiten, A. (1988). Machiavellian intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University PressCarlson, N.R., et al. (2007). Psychology: The Science of Behaviour - 4th Canadian ed.. Toronto, ON: Neil R. Carlson.Humphrey, N. K. (1976). The social function of the intellect. In P. P. G. Bateson & R. A. Hinde (eds.). Growing points in ethology. Cambridge: Cambridge University PressMaestripieri, Dario. (2007) Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press"# Search multiple keywords: get_wiki(c("word 1", "word 2", "word n"))
# output: a 2-column dataframe with titles & preview of contents
get_wiki(c("social media","emotional contagion"))## titles
## 1 Social media
## 2 Emotional contagion
## content
## 1 Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks. Common features include:Online platforms that enable users to create and share content and participate in social networking.User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through online interactions.Service-specific profiles that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.Social media helps the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.The term social in regard to media suggests platforms enable communal activity. Social media can enhance and extend human networks. Users access social media through web-based apps or custom apps on mobile devices. These interactive platforms allow individuals, communities, and organizations to share, co-create, discuss, participate in, and modify user-generated or self-curated content. Social media is used to document memories, learn, and form friendships. They may be used to promote people, companies, products, and ideas. Social media can be used to consume, publish, or share news.Popular social media platforms with over 100 million registered users include Twitter, Facebook, WeChat, ShareChat, Instagram, Pinterest, QZone, Weibo, VK, Tumblr, Baidu Tieba, Threads and LinkedIn. Depending on interpretation, other popular platforms that are sometimes referred to as social media services include YouTube, Letterboxd, QQ, Quora, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, LINE, Snapchat, Viber, Reddit, Discord, and TikTok. Wikis are examples of collaborative content creation.Social media outlets differ from old media (e.g. newspapers, TV, and radio broadcasting) in many ways, including quality, reach, frequency, usability, relevancy, and permanence. Social media outlets operate in a dialogic transmission system (many sources to many receivers) while traditional media operate under a monologic transmission model (one source to many receivers). For instance, a newspaper is delivered to many subscribers, and a radio station broadcasts the same programs to a city.Social media has been criticized for a range of negative impacts on children and teenagers, including exposure to inappropriate content, exploitation by adults, sleep problems, attention problems, feelings of exclusion, and various mental health maladies. Social media has also received criticism as worsening political polarization and undermining democracy. Major news outlets often have strong controls in place to avoid and fix false claims, but social media's unique qualities bring viral content with little to no oversight. "Algorithms that track user engagement to prioritize what is shown tend to favor content that spurs negative emotions like anger and outrage. Overall, most online misinformation originates from a small minority of “superspreaders,” but social media amplifies their reach and influence."HistoryEarly computingThe PLATO system was launched in 1960 at the University of Illinois and subsequently commercially marketed by Control Data Corporation. It offered early forms of social media features with innovations such as Notes, PLATO's message-forum application; TERM-talk, its instant-messaging feature; Talkomatic, perhaps the first online chat room; News Report, a crowdsourced online newspaper, and blog and Access Lists, enabling the owner of a note file or other application to limit access to a certain set of users, for example, only friends, classmates, or co-workers.ARPANET, which came online in 1967, had by the late 1970s enabled exchange of non-government/business ideas and communication, as evidenced by the network etiquette (or "netiquette") described in a 1982 handbook on computing at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ARPANET evolved into the Internet in the 1990s. Usenet, conceived by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, was the first open social media app, established in 1980.A precursor of the electronic bulletin board system (BBS), known as Community Memory, appeared by 1973. Mainstream BBSs arrived with the Computer Bulletin Board System in Chicago, which launched on February 16, 1978. Before long, most major US cities had more than one BBS, running on TRS-80, Apple II, Atari 8-bit computers, IBM PC, Commodore 64, Sinclair, and others. CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL were three of the largest BBS companies and were the first to migrate to the Internet in the 1990s. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, BBSes numbered in the tens of thousands in North America alone. Message forums were the signature BBS phenomenon throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee integrated HTML hypertext software with the Internet, creating the World Wide Web. This breakthrough led to an explosion of blogs, list servers, and email services. Message forums migrated to the web, and evolved into Internet forums, supported by cheaper access as well as the ability to handle far more people simultaneously.These early text-based systems expanded to include images and video in the 21st century, aided by digital cameras and camera phones.Social media platformsThe evolution of online services progressed from serving as channels for networked communication to becoming interactive platforms for networked social interaction with the advent of Web 2.0.Social media started in the mid-1990s with the invention of platforms like GeoCities, Classmates.com, and SixDegrees.com. While instant messaging and chat clients existed at the time, SixDegrees was unique as it was the first online service designed for people to connect using their actual names instead of anonymously. It boasted features like profiles, friends lists, and school affiliations, making it "the very first social networking site". The platform's name was inspired by the "six degrees of separation" concept, which suggests that every person on the planet is just six connections away from everyone else.In the early 2000s, social media platforms gained widespread popularity with the likes of Friendster and Myspace, followed by Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.Research from 2015 reported that globally, users spent 22% of their online time on social networks, likely fueled by the availability of smartphones. As of 2023 as many as 4.76 billion people used social media some 59% of the global population.DefinitionA 2015 review identified four features unique to social media services:Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.User-generated contentUser-created self profilesSocial networks formed by connections between profiles, such as followers, groups, and lists.In 2019, Merriam-Webster defined social media as "forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)."ServicesSocial media encompasses an expanding suite of services: Blogs (ex. HuffPost, Boing Boing)Business networks (ex. LinkedIn, XING)Collaborative projects (Mozilla, GitHub)Enterprise social networks (Yammer, Socialcast, Slack)Forums (Gaia Online, IGN)Microblogs (Twitter, Tumblr, Weibo)Photo sharing (Pinterest, Flickr, Photobucket)Products/services review (Amazon, Upwork)Social bookmarking (Delicious, Pinterest)Social gaming including MMORPG (Fortnite, World of Warcraft)Social network (Facebook, Instagram, Baidu Tieba, VK, QZone, ShareChat, WeChat, LINE)Video sharing (YouTube, Vimeo)Virtual worlds (Second Life, Twinity)Some services offer more than one type of service.Mobile social mediaMobile social media refers to the use of social media on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. It is distinguished by its ubiquity, since users no longer have to be at a desk in order to participate on a computer. Mobile services can further make use of the user's immediate location to offer information, connections, or services relevant to that location.According to Andreas Kaplan, mobile social media activities fall among four types:Space-timers (location and time-sensitive): Exchange of messages with relevance for a specific location at a specific point in time (posting about a traffic jam)Space-locators (only location sensitive): Posts/messages with relevance for a specific location, read later by others (e.g. a restaurant review)Quick-timers (only time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media mobile apps to increase immediacy (e.g. posting status updates)Slow-timers (neither location nor time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media applications to mobile devices (e.g. watching a video)Elements and functionViralityCertain content has the potential to spread virally, an analogy for the way viral infections spread contagiously from individual to individual. One user spreads a post across their network, which leads those users to follow suit. A post from a relatively unknown user can reach vast numbers of people within hours. Virality is not guaranteed; few posts make the transition.Viral marketing campaigns are particularly attractive to businesses because they can achieve widespread advertising coverage at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing campaigns. Nonprofit organizations and activists may also attempt to spread content virally.Social media sites provide specific functionality to help users re-share content, such as X's and Facebook's "like" option.BotsBots are automated programs that operate on the internet. They automate many communication tasks. This has led to the creation of an industry of bot providers.Chatbots and social bots are programmed to mimic human interactions such as liking, commenting, and following. Bots have also been developed to facilitate social media marketing. Bots have led the marketing industry into an analytical crisis, as bots make it difficult to differentiate between human interactions and bot interactions. Some bots violate platforms' terms of use, which can result in bans and campaigns to eliminate bots categorically. Bots may even pose as real people to avoid prohibitions.'Cyborgs'—either bot-assisted humans or human-assisted bots—are used for both legitimate and illegitimate purposes, from spreading fake news to creating marketing buzz. A common use claimed to be legitimate includes posting at a specific time. A human writes a post content and the bot posts it a specific time. In other cases, cyborgs spread fake news. Cyborgs may work as sock puppets, where one human pretends to be someone else, or operates multiple accounts, each pretending to be a person.PatentsA multitude of United States patents are related to social media, growing rapidly. As of 2020, over 5000 social media patent applications had been published in the United States. Only slightly over 100 patents had been issued.Platform convergenceAs an instance of technological convergence, various social media platforms adapted functionality beyond their original scope, increasingly overlapping with each other.Examples are the social hub site Facebook launching an integrated video platform in May 2007, and Instagram, whose original scope was low-resolution photo sharing, introducing the ability to share quarter-minute 640×640 pixel videos (late extended to a minute with increased resolution). Instagram later implemented stories (short videos self-destructing after 24 hours), a concept popularized by Snapchat, as well as IGTV, for seekable videos. Stories were then adopted by YouTube.X, whose original scope was text-based microblogging, later adopted photo sharing, then video sharing, then a media studio for business users, after YouTube's Creator Studio.The discussion platform Reddit added an integrated image hoster replacing the external image sharing platform Imgur, and then an internal video hosting service, followed by image galleries (multiple images in a single post), known from Imgur. Imgur implemented video sharing.YouTube rolled out a Community feature, for sharing text-only posts and polls.Usage statisticsAccording to Statista, it is estimated that, in 2022, around 3.96 billion people were using social media globally. This number is up from 3.6 billion in 2020.The following is a list of the most popular social networking services based on the number of active users as of January 2024 per Statista.Usage: before the pandemicA 2009 study suggested that individual differences may help explain who uses social media: extraversion and openness have a positive relationship with social media, while emotional stability has a negative sloping relationship with social media. A 2015 study reported that people with a higher social comparison orientation appear to use social media more heavily than people with low social comparison orientation.Common Sense Media reported that children under age 13 in the United States use social networking services although many social media sites require users to be 13 or older. In 2017, the firm conducted a survey of parents of children from birth to age 8 and reported that 4% of children at this age used social media sites such as Instagram, Snapchat, or (now-defunct) Musical.ly "often" or "sometimes". Their 2019 survey surveyed Americans ages 8–16 and reported that about 31% of children ages 8–12 use social media. In that survey, teens aged 16–18 were asked when they started using social media. the median age was 14, although 28% said they started to use it before reaching 13.Usage: during the pandemicUsage by minorsSocial media played a role in communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. In June 2020, a survey by Cartoon Network and the Cyberbullying Research Center surveyed Americans tweens (ages 9–12) and reported that the most popular application was YouTube (67%). (as age increased, tweens were more likely to have used social media apps and games.) Similarly, Common Sense Media's 2020 survey of Americans ages 13–18 reported that YouTube was the most popular (used by 86% of 13- to 18-year-olds). As children aged, they increasingly utilized social media services and often used YouTube to consume content. Reasons for use by adultsWhile adults were using social media before the COVID-19 pandemic, more started using it to stay socially connected and to get pandemic updates. "Social media have become popularly use to seek for medical information and have fascinated the general public to collect information regarding corona virus pandemics in various perspectives. During these days, people are forced to stay at home and the social media have connected and supported awareness and pandemic updates."Healthcare workers and systems became more aware of social media as a place people were getting health information:"During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media use has accelerated to the point of becoming a ubiquitous part of modern healthcare systems."This also led to the spread of disinformation. On December 11, 2020, the CDC put out a "Call to Action: Managing the Infodemic". Some healthcare organizations used hashtags as interventions and published articles on their Twitter data: "Promotion of the joint usage of #PedsICU and #COVID19 throughout the international pediatric critical care community in tweets relevant to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic and pediatric critical care." However others in the medical community were concerned about social media addiction, as it became an increasingly important context and therefore "source of social validation and reinforcement" and were unsure whether increased social media use was harmful.Use by organizationsGovernmentGovernments may use social media to (for example):inform their opinions to publicinteract with citizensfoster citizen participationfurther open governmentanalyze/monitor public opinion and activitieseducate the public about risks and public health.Law enforcementSocial media has been used extensively in civil and criminal investigations. It has also been used to search for missing persons. Police departments often make use of official social media accounts to engage with the public, publicize police activity, and burnish law enforcement's image; conversely, video footage of citizen-documented police brutality and other misconduct has sometimes been posted to social media.In the United States, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement identifies and track individuals via social media, and has apprehended some people via social media-based sting operations. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (also known as CPB) and the United States Department of Homeland Security use social media data as influencing factors during the visa process, and monitor individuals after they have entered the country. CPB officers have also been documented performing searches of electronics and social media behavior at the border, searching both citizens and non-citizens without first obtaining a warrant.Reputation managementAs social media gained momentum among the younger generations, governments began using it to improve their image, especially among the youth. In January 2021, Egyptian authorities were reported to be using Instagram influencers as part of its media ambassadors program. The program was designed to revamp Egypt's image and to counter the bad press Egypt had received because of the country's human rights record. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates participated in similar programs. Similarly, Dubai has extensively relied on social media and influencers to promote tourism. However, Dubai laws have kept these influencers within limits to not offend the authorities, or to criticize the city, politics or religion. The content of these foreign influencers is controlled to make sure that nothing portrays Dubai in a negative light.BusinessMany businesses use social media for marketing, branding, advertising, communication, sales promotions, informal employee-learning/organizational development, competitive analysis, recruiting, relationship management/loyalty programs, and e-Commerce. Companies use social-media monitoring tools to monitor, track, and analyze conversations to aid in their marketing, sales and other programs. Tools range from free, basic applications to subscription-based, tools. Social media offers information on industry trends. Within the finance industry, companies use social media as a tool for analyzing market sentiment. These range from marketing financial products, market trends, and as a tool to identify insider trading. To exploit these opportunities, businesses need guidelines for use on each platform.Business use of social media is complicated by the fact that the business does not fully control its social media presence. Instead, it makes its case by participating in the "conversation". Business uses social media on a customer-organizational level; and an intra-organizational level.Social media can encourage entrepreneurship and innovation, by highlighting successes, and by easing access to resources that might not otherwise be readily available/known.MarketingSocial media marketing can help promote a product or service and establish connections with customers. Social media marketing can be divided into paid media, earned media, and owned media. Using paid social media firms run advertising on a social media platform. Earned social media appears when firms do something that impresses stakeholders and they spontaneously post content about it. Owned social media is the platform markets itself by creating/promoting content to its users.Primary uses are to create brand awareness, engage customers by conversation (e.g., customers provide feedback on the firm) and providing access to customer service. Social media's peer-to-peer communication shifts power from the organization to consumers, since consumer content is widely visible and not controlled by the company.Social media personalities, often referred to as "influencers", are Internet celebrities who are sponsored by marketers to promote products and companies online. Research reports that these endorsements attract the attention of users who have not settled on which products/services to buy, especially younger consumers. The practice of harnessing influencers to market or promote a product or service to their following is commonly referred to as influencer marketing.In 2013, the United Kingdom Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) began advising celebrities to make it clear whether they had been paid to recommend a product or service by using the hashtag #spon or #ad when endorsing. The US Federal Trade Commission issued similar guidelines.Social media platforms also enable targeting specific audiences with advertising. Users of social media can share, and comment on the advertisement, turning passive consumers into active promoters and even producers. Targeting requires extra effort by advertisers to understand how to reach the right users. Companies can use humor (such as shitposting) to poke fun at competitors. Advertising can even inspire fanart which can engage new audiences. Hashtags (such as #ejuice and #eliquid) are one way to target interested users.User content can trigger peer effects, increasing consumer interest even without influencer involvement. A 2012 study focused on this communication reported that communication among peers can affect purchase intentions: direct impact through encouraging conformity, and an indirect impact by increasing product engagement. This study claimed that peer communication about a product increased product engagement.PoliticsSocial media have a range of uses in politics. Politicians use social media to spread their messages and influence voters.Dounoucos et al. reported that Twitter use by candidates was unprecedented during the US 2016 election. The public increased its reliance on social-media sites for political information. In the European Union, social media amplified political messages. Foreign-originated social-media campaigns attempt to influence political opinion in another country.ActivismSocial media was influential in the Arab Spring in 2011. However, debate persists about the extent to which social media facilitated this. Activists have used social media to report the abuse of human rights in Bahrain. They publicized the brutality of government authorities, who they claimed were detaining, torturing and threatening individuals. Conversely, Bahrain's government used social media to track and target activists. The government stripped citizenship from over 1,000 activists as punishment.Militant groups use social media as an organizing and recruiting tool. Islamic State (also known as ISIS) used social media. In 2014, #AllEyesonISIS went viral on Arabic X.PropagandaRecruitingScienceScientists use social media to share their scientific knowledge and research on platforms such as ResearchGate, LinkedIn, Facebook, X, and Academia.edu. The most common platforms are X and blogs. The use of social media reportedly has improved the interaction between scientists, reporters, and the general public. Over 495,000 opinions were shared on X related to science between September 1, 2010, and August 31, 2011. Science related blogs respond to and motivate public interest in learning, following, and discussing science. Posts can be written quickly and allow the reader to interact in real time with authors. One study in the context of climate change reported that climate scientists and scientific institutions played a minimal role in online debate, exceeded by nongovernmental organizations.AcademiaAcademicians use social media activity to assess academic publications, to measure public sentiment, identify influencer accounts, or crowdsource ideas or solutions. Social media such as Facebook, X are also combined to predict elections via sentiment analysis. Additional social media (e.g. YouTube, Google Trends) can be combined to reach a wider segment of the voting population, minimise media-specific bias, and inexpensively estimate electoral predictions which are on average half of a percentage point off the real vote share.School admissionsIn some places, students have been forced to surrender their social media passwords to school administrators. Few laws protect student's social media privacy. Organizations such as the ACLU call for more privacy protection. They urge students who are pressured to give up their account information to resist.Colleges and universities may access applicants' internet services including social media profiles as part of their admissions process. According to Kaplan, Inc, a corporation that provides higher education preparation, in 2012 27% of admissions officers used Google to learn more about an applicant, with 26% checking Facebook. Students whose social media pages include questionable material may be disqualified from admission processes."One survey in July 2017, by the American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers, reported that 11 percent of respondents said they had refused to admit an applicant based on social media content. This includes 8 percent of public institutions, where the First Amendment applies. The survey reported that 30 percent of institutions acknowledged reviewing the personal social media accounts of applicants at least some of the time."Court casesSocial media comments and images have been used in court cases including employment law, child custody/child support, and disability claims. After an Apple employee criticized his employer on Facebook, he was fired. When the former employee sued Apple for unfair dismissal, the court, after examining the employee's Facebook posts, reported in favor of Apple, stating that the posts breached Apple's policies. After a couple broke up, the man posted song lyrics "that talked about fantasies of killing the rapper's ex-wife" and made threats. A court reported him guilty. In a disability claims case, a woman who fell at work claimed that she was permanently injured; the employer used her social media posts to counter her claims.Courts do not always admit social media evidence, in part, because screenshots can be faked or tampered with. Judges may consider emojis into account to assess statements made on social media; in one Michigan case where a person alleged that another person had defamed them in an online comment, the judge disagreed, noting that an emoji after the comment that indicated that it was a joke. In a 2014 case in Ontario against a police officer regarding alleged assault of a protester during the G20 summit, the court rejected the Crown's application to use a digital photo of the protest that was anonymously posted online, because it included no metadata verifying its provenance.Use by individualsNews sourceSocial toolSocial media are used to socialize with friends and family pursue romance and flirt, but not all social needs can be fulfilled by social media. For example, a 2003 article reported that lonely individuals are more likely to use the Internet for emotional support than others. A 2018 survey from Common Sense Media reported that 40% of American teens ages 13–17 thought that social media was "extremely" or "very" important for them to connect with their friends. The same survey reported that 33% of teens said social media was extremely or very important to conduct meaningful conversations with close friends, and 23% of teens said social media was extremely or very important to document and share their lives. A 2020 Gallup poll reported that 53% of adult social media users in the United States thought that social media was a very or moderately important way to keep in touch with people during the COVID-19 pandemic.In Alone Together Sherry Turkle considered how people confuse social media usage with authentic communication. She claimed that people act differently online and are less concerned about hurting others' feelings. Some online encounters can cause stress and anxiety, due to the difficulty purging online posts, fear of getting hacked, or of universities and employers exploring social media pages. Turkle speculated that many people prefer texting to face-to-face communication, which can contribute to loneliness. Surveys from 2019 reported evidence among teens in the United States and Mexico. Some researchers reported that exchanges that involved direct communication and reciprocal messages correlated with less loneliness.In social media "stalking" or "creeping" refers to looking at someone's "timeline, status updates, tweets, and online bios" to find information about them and their activities. A sub-category of creeping is creeping ex-partners after a breakup.Catfishing (creating a false identity) allows bad actors to exploit the lonely.Invidious comparisonSelf-presentation theory proposes that people consciously manage their self-image or identity related information in social contexts. One aspect of social media is the time invested in customizing a personal profile. Some users segment their audiences based on the image they want to present, pseudonymity and use of multiple accounts on the same platform offer that opportunity.A 2016 study reported that teenage girls manipulate their self-presentation on social media to appear beautiful as viewed by their peers. Teenage girls attempt to earn regard and acceptance (likes, comments, and shares). When this does not go well, self-confidence and self-satisfaction can decline. A 2018 survey of American teens ages 13–17 by Common Sense Media reported that 45% said likes are at least somewhat important, and 26% at least somewhat agreed that they feel bad about themselves if nobody responds to their photos. Some evidence suggests that perceived rejection may lead to emotional pain, and some may resort to online bullying. according to a 2016 study, users' reward circuits in their brains are more active when their photos are liked by more peers.A 2016 review concluded that social media can trigger a negative feedback loop of viewing and uploading photos, self-comparison, disappointment, and disordered body perception when social success is not achieved. One 2016 study reported that Pinterest is directly associated with disordered dieting behavior.People portray themselves on social media in the most appealing way. However, upon seeing one person's curated persona, other people may question why their own lives are not as exciting or fulfilling. One 2017 study reported that problematic social media use (i.e., feeling addicted to social media) was related to lower life satisfaction and self-esteem. Studies have reported that social media comparisons can have dire effects on physical and mental health. In one study, women reported that social media was the most influential source of their body image satisfaction; while men reported them as the second biggest factor. While monitoring the lives of celebrities long predates social media, the ease and immediacy of direct comparisons of pictures and stories with one's own may increase their impact.A 2021 study reported that 87% of women and 65% of men compared themselves to others on social media.Efforts to combat such negative effects focused promoting body positivity. In a related study, women aged 18–30 were reported posts that contained side-by-side images of women in the same clothes and setting, but one image was enhanced for Instagram, while the other was an unedited, "realistic" version. Women who participated in this experiment reported a decrease in body dissatisfaction.HealthAdolescentsSocial media can offer a support system for adolescent health, because it allows them to mobilize around health issues that they deem relevant. For example, in a clinical study among adolescent patients undergoing obesity treatment, participants' claimed that social media allowed them to access personalized weight-loss content as well as social support among other adolescents with obesity.While social media can provide health information, it typically has no mechanism for ensuring the quality of that information. The National Eating Disorders Association reported a high correlation between weight loss content and disorderly eating among women who have been influenced by inaccurate content. Health literacy offers skills to allow users to spot/avoid such content. Efforts by governments and public health organizations to advance health literacy reportedly achieved limited success.Social media such as pro-anorexia sites reportedly increase risk of harm by reinforcing damaging health-related behaviors through social media, especially among adolescents.PandemicDuring the coronavirus pandemic, inaccurate information from all sides spread widely via social media. Topics subject to distortion included treatments, avoiding infection, vaccination, and public policy. Simultaneously, governments and others influenced social media platforms to suppress both accurate and inaccurate information in support of public policy. Heavier social media use was reportedly associated with more acceptance of conspiracy theories, leading to worse mental health and less compliance with public health recommendations.AddictionSocial media platforms can serve as a breeding ground for addiction-related behaviors, with studies report that excessive use can lead to addiction-like symptoms. These symptoms include compulsive checking, mood modification, and withdrawal when not using social media, which can result in decreased face-to-face social interactions and contribute to the deterioration of interpersonal relationships and a sense of loneliness.CyberbullyingSleep disturbanceA 2017 study reported on a link between sleep disturbance and the use of social media. It concluded that blue light from computer/phone displays—and the frequency rather than the duration of time spent, predicted disturbed sleep, termed "obsessive 'checking'". The association between social media use and sleep disturbance has clinical ramifications for young adults. A recent study reported that people in the highest quartile for weekly social media use experienced the most sleep disturbance. The median number of minutes of social media use per day was 61. Females were more likely to experience high levels of sleep disturbance. Many teenagers suffer from sleep deprivation from long hours at night on their phones, and this left them tired and unfocused in school. A 2011 study reported that time spent on Facebook was negatively associated with GPA, but the association with sleep disturbance was not established.Emotional effectsOne studied effect of social media is 'Facebook depression', which affects adolescents who spend too much time on social media. This may lead to reclusiveness, which can increase loneliness and low self-esteem. Social media curates content to encourage users to keep scrolling. Studies report children's self-esteem is positively affected by positive comments and negatively affected by negative or lack of comments. This affected self-perception. A 2017 study of almost 6,000 adolescent students reported that those who self-reported addiction-like symptoms of social media use were more likely to report low self-esteem and high levels of depressive symptoms.A second emotional effect is social media burnout, defined as ambivalence, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization. Ambivalence is confusion about the benefits from using social media. Emotional exhaustion is stress from using social media. Depersonalization is emotional detachment from social media. The three burnout factors negatively influence the likelihood of continuing on social media.A third emotional effect is "fear of missing out" (FOMO), which is the "pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent." It is associated with increased scrutiny of friends on social media.Social media can also offer support as Twitter has done for the medical community. X facilitated academic discussion among health professionals and students, while providing a supportive community for these individuals by and allowing members to support each other through likes, comments, and posts. Access to social media offered a way to keep older adults connected, after the deaths of partners and geographical distance between friends and loved ones.Social impactsSome commentators refer to social media as 'anti-social media' when describing its social impact.DisparityPolitical polarizationMany critics point to studies showing social media algorithms elevate more partisan and inflammatory content. Because of recommendation algorithms that filter and display news content that matches users' political preferences, one potential impact is an increase in political polarization due to selective exposure. Political polarization is the divergence of political attitudes towards ideological extremes. Selective exposure occurs when an individual favors information that supports their beliefs and avoids information that conflicts with them. Jonathan Haidt compared the impact of social media to the Tower of Babel and the chaos it unleashed as a result.Aviv Ovadya argues that these algorithms incentivize the creation of divisive content in addition to promoting existing divisive content, but could be designed to reduce polarization instead. In 2017, Facebook gave its new emoji reactions five times the weight in its algorithms as its like button, which data scientists at the company in 2019 confirmed had disproportionately boosted toxicity, misinformation and low-quality news. Some popular ideas for how to combat selective exposure have had no or opposite impacts. Some advocate for media literacy as a solution. Others argue that less social media, or more local journalism could help address political polarization.StereotypingA 2018 study reported that social media increases the power of stereotypes. Stereotypes can have both negative and positive connotations. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, youth were accused of responsibility for spreading the disease. Elderly people get stereotyped as lacking knowledge of proper behavior on social media.CommunicationSocial media allows for mass cultural exchange and intercultural communication, despite different ways of communicating in various cultures.Social media has affected the way youth communicate, by introducing new forms of language. Novel acronyms save time, as illustrated by "LOL", which is the ubiquitous shortcut for "laugh out loud".The hashtag was created to simplify searching for information and to allow users to highlight topics of interest in the hope of attracting the attention of others. Hashtags can be used to advocate for a movement, mark content for future use, and allow other users to contribute to a discussion.For some young people, social media and texting have largely replaced in person communications, made worse by pandemic isolation, delaying the development of conversation and other social skills.What is socially acceptable is now heavily based on social media. The American Academy of Pediatrics reported that bullying, the making of non-inclusive friend groups, and sexual experimentation have increased cyberbullying, privacy issues, and sending sexual images or messages. Sexting and revenge porn became rampant, particularly among minors, with legal implications and resulting trauma risk. However, adolescents can learn basic social and technical skills online. Social media, can strengthen relationships just by keeping in touch, making more friends, and engaging in community activities.Regulation by government authoritiesSituation by geographical regionAustraliaIn July 2014, in response to WikiLeaks' release of a secret suppression order made by the Victorian Supreme Court, media lawyers were quoted in the Australian media to the effect that "anyone who tweets a link to the WikiLeaks report, posts it on Facebook, or shares it in any way online could also face charges".EgyptOn 27 July 2020, in Egypt, two women were sentenced to two years of imprisonment for posting TikTok videos, which the government claimed as "violating family values".ThailandIn the 2014 Thai coup d'état, the public was explicitly instructed not to 'share' or 'like' dissenting views on social media or face prison.United StatesHistorically, platforms were responsible for moderating the content that they presented. They set rules for what was allowable, decided which content to promote and which to ignore. The US enacted the Communications Decency Act in 1996. Section 230 of that act exempted internet platforms from legal liability for content authored by third parties.No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1)).In 2024, legislation was enacted in Florida requiring social media companies to verify the age of people with accounts, and to prohibit holding an account for people aged under 14, and between 14 and 16 in the absence of parental approval.European UnionThe European Union initially took a similar approach. However, in 2020, the European Commission presented two legislative proposals: The Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Both proposals were enacted in July 2022. The DSA entered into force on 17 February 2024, the DMA in March 2024. This legislation can be summarized in the following four objectives, articulated by MEPs:"What is illegal offline must also be illegal online"."Very large online platforms" must therefore, among other thingsdelete illegal content (propaganda, election interference, hate crimes and online harms such as harassment and child abuse) and better protect fundamental rightsredesign their systems to ensure a "high level of privacy, security and protection of minors", by prohibiting advertising based on personal data, designing recommender systems to minimize risks for children and demonstrating this to the European Commission via a risk assessment, andnot use sensitive personal data such as race, gender and religion to target advertising.Violators could face a complete ban in Europe or fines of up to 6% of global sales. Such content moderation requires extensive investment by platform providers. Enforcement resources may not be sufficient to ensure compliance.The DSA allows a country to require information to be deleted that is illegal only in that jurisdiction. According to Patrick Breyer from the German Pirate Party, a problem could arise from the Hungarian government requesting a video to be deleted that is critical of Victor Orban, as he foresaw the potential for such determinations to be applied EU-wide.Discussions and proposals2018 Nobel Laureate Paul Romer advocated taxing negative externalities of social media platforms. Similar to a carbon tax – negative social effects could be compensated for by a financial levy on the platforms. Assuming that the tax did not deter the actions that produced the externalities, the revenue raised could be used to address them. However, consensus has yet to emerge on how to measure or mitigate the harms, nor to craft a tax, .Another proposal is to invoke competition law. The idea is to restrict the platforms' market power by controlling mergers ex ante and tightening the law. This would be achieved through a supranational enforcement mechanism and the deterrent effect of high fines.In a 2024 opinion piece, Megan Moreno and Jenny Radesky, professors of pediatrics, wrote about the need for "nuanced" policy. They regarded access which is contingent upon parental consent as harmful. They commented that a focus on increasing age restrictions "may serve to distract from making sure platforms are following guidelines and best practices for all ages".In June 2024, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for social media platforms to contain a warning about the impact they have on the mental health of young people.Business modelsThe business model of most social media platforms is based on selling slots to advertisers. Platforms provide access to data about each user, which allows them to deliver adds that are individually relevant to them. This strongly incents platforms to arrange their content so that users view as much content as possible, increasing the number of ads that they see. Platforms such as X add paid user subscriptions in part to reduce their dependence on advertising revenues.Criticism, debate and controversyThe enormous reach and impact of social media has naturally led to a stream of criticism, debate, and controversy. Criticisms include platform capabilities, content moderation and reliability, impact on concentration, mental health, content ownership, and the meaning of interactions, and poor cross-platform interoperability, decrease in face-to-face interactions, cyberbullying, sexual predation, particularly of children, and child pornography.In 2007 Andrew Keen wrote, "Out of this anarchy, it suddenly became clear that what was governing the infinite monkeys now inputting away on the Internet was the law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated. Under these rules, the only way to intellectually prevail is by infinite filibustering."Trustworthiness and reliabilitySocial media has become a regular source of news and information. A 2021 Pew Research Center poll reported roughly 70% of users regularly get news from social media, despite the presence of fake news and misinformation. Platforms typically do not take responsibility for content accuracy, and many do not vet content at all, although in some cases, content the platform finds problematic is deleted or access to it is reduced. Content distribution algorithms otherwise typically ignore substance, responding instead to the contents' virality.In 2018, researchers reported that fake news spread almost 70% faster than truthful news on X. Social media bots on social media increase the reach of both true and false content and if wielded by bad actors misinformation can reach many more users. Some platforms attempt to discover and block bots, with limited success. Fake news seems to receive more user engagement, possibly because it is relatively novel, engaging users' curiosity and increasing spread. Fake news often propagates in the immediate aftermath of an event, before conventional media are prepared to publish.Data harvesting and data miningCritique of activismMalcolm Gladwell considers the role of social media in revolutions and protests to be overstated. He concluded that while social media makes it easier for activists to express themselves, that expression likely has no impact beyond social media. What he called "high-risk activism" involves strong relationships, coordination, commitment, high risks, and sacrifice. Gladwell claimed that social media are built around weak ties and argues that "social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires." According to him, "Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice, but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice."Disputing Gladwell's theory, a 2018 survey reported that people who are politically expressive on social media are more likely to participate in offline political activity.Content ownershipSocial media content is generated by users. However, content ownership is defined by the Terms of Service to which users agree. Platforms control access to the content, and may make it available to third parties.Although platform's terms differ, generally they all give permission to utilize users' copyrighted works at the platform's discretion.After its acquisition by Facebook in 2012, Instagram revealed it intended to use content in ads without seeking permission from or paying its users. It then reversed these changes, with then-CEO Kevin Systrom promising to update the terms of service.PrivacyPrivacy rights advocates warn users about the collection of their personal data. Information is captured without the user's knowing consent. Data may be applied to law enforcement or other governmental purposes. Information may be offered for third party use.Young people are prone to sharing personal information that can attract predators.While social media users claim to want to keep their data private, their behavior does not reflect that concern, as many users expose significant personal data on their profiles.In addition, platforms collect data on user behaviors that are not part of their personal profiles. This data is made available to third parties for purposes that include targeted advertising.A 2014 Pew Research Center survey reported that 91% of Americans "agree" or "strongly agree" that people have lost control over how personal information is collected and used. Some 80% of social media users said they were concerned about advertisers and businesses accessing the data they share on social media platforms, and 64% said the government should do more to regulate advertisers. In 2019, UK legislators criticized Facebook for not protecting certain aspects of user data.In 2019 the Pentagon issued guidance to the military, Coast Guard and other government agencies that identified "the potential risk associated with using the TikTok app and directs appropriate action for employees to take in order to safeguard their personal information." As a result, the military, Coast Guard, Transportation Security Administration, and Department of Homeland Security banned the installation and use of TikTok on government devices.In 2020 The US government attempted to ban TikTok and WeChat from the States over national security concerns. However, a federal court blocked the move. In 2024, the US Congress passed a law directing TikTok's parent company ByteDance to divest the service or see the service banned from operating in the US. The company sued, challenging the constitutionality of the ban.AddictionDebate over use by young peopleWhether to restrict the use of phones and social media among young people has been debated since smartphones became ubiquitous. A study of Americans aged 12–15, reported that teenagers who used social media over three hours/day doubled their risk of negative mental health outcomes, including depression and anxiety. Platforms have not tuned their algorithms to prevent young people from viewing inappropriate content. A 2023 study of Australian youth reported that 57% had seen disturbingly violent content, while nearly half had regular exposure to sexual images. Further, youth are prone to misuse social media for cyberbullying.As result, phones have been banned from some schools, and some schools in the US have blocked social media websites.CensorshipSocial media often features in political struggles. In some countries, Internet police or secret police monitor or control citizens' use of social media. For example, in 2013 some social media was banned in Turkey after the Taksim Gezi Park protests. Both X and YouTube were temporarily suspended in the country by a court's decision. A law granted immunity to Telecommunications Directorate (TİB) personnel. The TİB was also given the authority to block access to specific websites without a court order. Yet TİB's 2014 blocking of X was ruled by the constitutional court to violate free speech.United StatesDecentralization and open standardsWhile the dominant social media platforms are not interoperable, open source protocols such as ActivityPub have been adopted by platforms such as Mastodon, GNU social, Diaspora, and Friendica. They operate as a loose federation of mostly volunteer-operated servers, called the Fediverse. However, in 2019, Mastodon blocked Gab from connecting to it, claiming that it spread violent, right-wing extremism.In December 2019, X CEO Jack Dorsey advocated an "open and decentralized standard for social media". He joined Bluesky to bring it to reality.DeplatformingThreat to democracyA number of commentators and experts have argued that social media companies have incentives that to maximize user engagement with sensational, emotive and controversial material that discourages a healthy discourse that democracies depend on. Zack Beauchamp of Vox calls it an authoritarian medium because of how it is incentivized to stir up hate and division that benefits aspiring autocrats. The Economist describes social media as vulnerable to manipulation by autocrats. Informed dialogue, a shared sense of reality, mutual consent and participation can all suffer due to the business model of social media. Political polarization can be one byproduct. This has implications for the likelihood of political violence. Siva Vaidhyanathan argues for a range of solutions including privacy protections and enforcing anti-trust laws. Andrew Leonard describes Pol.is as one possible solution to the divisiveness of traditional discourse on social media that has damaged democracies, citing the use of its algorithm to instead prioritize finding consensus.Extremist groupsAccording to LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, the use of effective social media marketing techniques includes not only celebrities, corporations, and governments, but also extremist groups. The use of social media by ISIS and Al-Qaeda has been used to influence public opinion where it operates and gain the attention of sympathizers. Social media platforms and encrypted-messaging applications have been used to recruit members, both locally and internationally. Platforms have endured backlash for allowing this content. Extreme nationalist groups, and more prominently, US right-wing extremists have used similar online tactics. As many traditional social media platforms banned hate speech, several platforms became popular among right-wing extremists to carry out planning and communication including of events; these application became known as "Alt-tech". Platforms such as Telegram, Parler, and Gab were used during the January 6 United States Capitol attack, to coordinate attacks. Members shared tips on how to avoid law enforcement and their plans on carrying out their objectives; some users called for killing law enforcement officers and politicians.Deceased usersSocial media content, persists unless the user deletes it. After a user dies, unless the platform is notified, their content remains. Each platform has created guidelines for this situation. In most cases on social media, the platforms require a next-of-kin to prove that the user is deceased, and give them the option of closing the account or maintaining it in a 'legacy' status.See alsoReferencesFurther readingAral, Sinan (2020). The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health—and How We Must Adapt. Currency. ISBN 978-0-525-57451-4.Fuchs, Christian (2014). Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage. ISBN 978-1-4462-5731-9.External links Media related to Social media at Wikimedia Commons
## 2 Emotional contagion is a form of social contagion that involves the spontaneous spread of emotions and related behaviors. Such emotional convergence can happen from one person to another, or in a larger group. Emotions can be shared across individuals in many ways, both implicitly or explicitly. For instance, conscious reasoning, analysis, and imagination have all been found to contribute to the phenomenon. The behaviour has been found in humans, other primates, dogs, and chickens.Emotional contagion is important to personal relationships because it fosters emotional synchrony between individuals. A broader definition of the phenomenon suggested by Schoenewolf is "a process in which a person or group influences the emotions or behavior of another person or group through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotion states and behavioral attitudes." One view developed by Elaine Hatfield, et al., is that this can be done through automatic mimicry and synchronization of one's expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person. When people unconsciously mirror their companions' expressions of emotion, they come to feel reflections of those companions' emotions.In a 1993 paper, Psychologists Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson define emotional contagion as "the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person's [sic] and, consequently, to converge emotionally".: 96 Hatfield, et al., theorize emotional contagion as a two-step process: First, we imitate people (e.g., if someone smiles at you, you smile back). Second, our own emotional experiences change based on the non-verbal signals of emotion that we give off. For example, smiling makes one feel happier, and frowning makes one feel worse. Mimicry seems to be one foundation of emotional movement between people.Emotional contagion and empathy share similar characteristics, with the exception of the ability to differentiate between personal and pre-personal experiences, a process known as individuation. In The Art of Loving (1956), social psychologist Erich Fromm explores these differences, suggesting that autonomy is necessary for empathy, which is not found in emotional contagion.EtymologyJames Baldwin addressed "emotional contagion" in his 1897 work Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development, though using the term "contagion of feeling". Various 20th century scholars discussed the phenomena under the heading "social contagion". The term "emotional contagion" first appeared in Arthur S. Reber's 1985 The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology.Influencing factorsSeveral factors determine the rate and extent of emotional convergence in a group, including membership stability, mood-regulation norms, task interdependence, and social interdependence. Besides these event-structure properties, there are personal properties of the group's members, such as openness to receive and transmit feelings, demographic characteristics, and dispositional affect that influence the intensity of emotional contagion.ResearchResearch on emotional contagion has been conducted from a variety of perspectives, including organizational, social, familial, developmental, and neurological. While early research suggested that conscious reasoning, analysis, and imagination accounted for emotional contagion, some forms of more primitive emotional contagion are far more subtle, automatic, and universal.Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson's 1993 research into emotional contagion reported that people's conscious assessments of others' feelings were heavily influenced by what others said. People's own emotions, however, were more influenced by others' nonverbal clues as to what they were really feeling. Recognizing emotions and acknowledging their origin can be one way to avoid emotional contagion. Transference of emotions has been studied in a variety of situations and settings, with social and physiological causes being two of the largest areas of research.In addition to the social contexts discussed above, emotional contagion has been studied within organizations. Schrock, Leaf, and Rohr (2008) say organizations, like societies, have emotion cultures that consist of languages, rituals, and meaning systems, including rules about the feelings workers should, and should not, feel and display. They state that emotion culture is quite similar to "emotion climate", otherwise known as morale, organizational morale, and corporate morale.: 46 Furthermore, Worline, Wrzesniewski, and Rafaeli (2002): 318 mention that organizations have an overall "emotional capability", while McColl-Kennedy, and Smith (2006): 255 examine "emotional contagion" in customer interactions. These terms arguably all attempt to describe a similar phenomenon; each term differs in subtle and somewhat indistinguishable ways.ControversyA controversial experiment demonstrating emotional contagion by using the social media platform Facebook was carried out in 2014 on 689,000 users by filtering positive or negative emotional content from their news feeds. The experiment sparked uproar among people who felt the study violated personal privacy. The 2014 publication of a research paper resulting from this experiment, "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks", a collaboration between Facebook and Cornell University, is described by Tony D. Sampson, Stephen Maddison, and Darren Ellis (2018) as a "disquieting disclosure that corporate social media and Cornell academics were so readily engaged with unethical experiments of this kind." Tony D. Sampson et al. criticize the notion that "academic researchers can be insulated from ethical guidelines on the protection for human research subjects because they are working with a social media business that has 'no obligation to conform' to the principle of 'obtaining informed consent and allowing participants to opt out'." A subsequent study confirmed the presence of emotional contagion on Twitter without manipulating users' timelines.Beyond the ethical concerns, some scholars criticized the methods and reporting of the Facebook findings. John Grohol, writing for Psych Central, argued that despite its title and claims of "emotional contagion," this study did not look at emotions at all. Instead, its authors used an application (called "Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count" or LIWC 2007) that simply counted positive and negative words in order to infer users' sentiments. A shortcoming of the LIWC tool is that it does not understand negations. Hence, the tweet "I am not happy" would be scored as positive: "Since the LIWC 2007 ignores these subtle realities of informal human communication, so do the researchers." Grohol concluded that given these subtleties, the effect size of the findings are little more than a "statistical blip."Kramer et al. (2014) found a 0.07%—that's not 7 percent, that's 1/15th of one percent!!—decrease in negative words in people's status updates when the number of negative posts on their Facebook news feed decreased. Do you know how many words you'd have to read or write before you've written one less negative word due to this effect? Probably thousands.TypesEmotions can be shared and mimicked in many ways. Taken broadly, emotional contagion can be either: implicit, undertaken by the receiver through automatic or self-evaluating processes; or explicit, undertaken by the transmitter through a purposeful manipulation of emotional states, to achieve a desired result.ImplicitUnlike cognitive contagion, emotional contagion is less conscious and more automatic. It relies mainly on non-verbal communication, although emotional contagion can and does occur via telecommunication. For example, people interacting through e-mails and chats are affected by the other's emotions, without being able to perceive the non-verbal cues.One view, proposed by Hatfield and colleagues, describes emotional contagion as a primitive, automatic, and unconscious behavior that takes place through a series of steps. When a receiver is interacting with a sender, he perceives the emotional expressions of the sender. The receiver automatically mimics those emotional expressions. Through the process of afferent feedback, these new expressions are translated into feeling the emotions the sender feels, thus leading to emotional convergence.Another view, emanating from social comparison theories, sees emotional contagion as demanding more cognitive effort and being more conscious. According to this view, people engage in social comparison to see if their emotional reaction is congruent with the persons around them. The recipient uses the emotion as a type of social information to understand how he or she should be feeling. People respond differently to positive and negative stimuli; negative events tend to elicit stronger and quicker emotional, behavioral, and cognitive responses than neutral or positive events. So unpleasant emotions are more likely to lead to mood contagion than are pleasant emotions. Another variable is the energy level at which the emotion is displayed. Higher energy draws more attention to it, so the same emotional valence (pleasant or unpleasant) expressed with high energy is likely to lead to more contagion than if expressed with low energy.ExplicitAside from the automatic infection of feelings described above, there are also times when others' emotions are being manipulated by a person or a group in order to achieve something. This can be a result of intentional affective influence by a leader or team member. Suppose this person wants to convince the others of something, he may do so by sweeping them up in his enthusiasm. In such a case, his positive emotions are an act with the purpose of "contaminating" the others' feelings. A different kind of intentional mood contagion would be, for instance, giving the group a reward or treat, in order to alleviate their feelings.The discipline of organizational psychology researches aspects of emotional labor. This includes the need to manage emotions so that they are consistent with organizational or occupational display rules, regardless of whether they are discrepant with internal feelings. In regard to emotional contagion, in work settings that require a certain display of emotions, one finds oneself obligated to display, and consequently feel, these emotions. If superficial acting develops into deep acting, emotional contagion is the byproduct of intentional affective impression management.In workplaces and organizationsIntra-groupMany organizations and workplaces encourage teamwork. Studies conducted by organizational psychologists highlight the benefits of work teams. Emotions come into play and a group emotion is formed.The group's emotional state influences factors such as cohesiveness, morale, rapport, and the team's performance. For this reason, organizations need to take into account the factors that shape the emotional state of the work-teams, in order to harness the beneficial sides and avoid the detrimental sides of the group's emotion. Managers and team leaders should be cautious with their behavior, since their emotional influence is greater than that of a "regular" team member: leaders are more emotionally "contagious" than others.Employee/customerThe interaction between service employees and customers affects both customers' assessments of service quality and their relationship with the service provider. Positive affective displays in service interactions are positively associated with important customer outcomes, such as intention to return and to recommend the store to a friend. It is the interest of organizations that their customers be happy, since a happy customer is a satisfied one. Research has shown that the emotional state of the customer is directly influenced by the emotions displayed by the employee/service provider via emotional contagion. But this influence depends on authenticity of the employee's emotional display, such that if the employee is only surface-acting, the contagion is poor, in which case the beneficial effects will not occur.Neurological basisVittorio Gallese posits that mirror neurons are responsible for intentional attunement in relation to others. Gallese and colleagues at the University of Parma found a class of neurons in the premotor cortex that discharge either when macaque monkeys execute goal-related hand movements or when they watch others doing the same action. One class of these neurons fires with action execution and observation, and with sound production of the same action. Research in humans shows an activation of the premotor cortex and parietal area of the brain for action perception and execution.Gallese says humans understand emotions through a simulated shared body state. The observers' neural activation enables a direct experiential understanding. "Unmediated resonance" is a similar theory by Goldman and Sripada (2004). Empathy can be a product of the functional mechanism in our brain that creates embodied simulation. The other we see or hear becomes the "other self" in our minds. Other researchers have shown that observing someone else's emotions recruits brain regions involved in (a) experiencing similar emotions and (b) producing similar facial expressions. This combination indicates that the observer activates (a) a representation of the emotional feeling of the other individual which leads to emotional contagion and (b) a motor representation of the observed facial expression that could lead to facial mimicry. In the brain, understanding and sharing other individuals' emotions would thus be a combination of emotional contagion and facial mimicry. Importantly, more empathic individuals experience more brain activation in emotional regions while witnessing the emotions of other individuals.AmygdalaThe amygdala is one part of the brain that underlies empathy and allows for emotional attunement and creates the pathway for emotional contagion. The basal areas including the brain stem form a tight loop of biological connectedness, re-creating in one person the physiological state of the other. Psychologist Howard Friedman thinks this is why some people can move and inspire others. The use of facial expressions, voices, gestures and body movements transmit emotions to an audience from a speaker.See alsoReferencesFurther readingDecety, J.; Ickes, W., eds. (2009). The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.Showalter, Elaine. Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.Goleman, Daniel (1998). Working with Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books. ISBN 9780553104622.Martin, P. Y.; Schrock, D.; Leaf, M.; Rohr, C. V. (2008). "Rape work: Emotional dilemmas in work with victims". In Fineman, S. (ed.). The Emotional Organization: Passions and Power. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell. pp. 44–60). ISBN 9781405160308.McColl-Kennedy, J. R.; Smith, A. K. (2006). "Customer emotions in service failure and recovery encounters". In Zerbe, W. J.; Ashkanasy, N. M.; Hartel, C. E. J. (eds.). Individual and Organizational Perspectives on Emotion Management and Display. Research on Emotion in Organizations series. Vol. 2. Amsterdam: Elsevier. pp. 237–268.Worline, M. C.; Wrzesniewski, A.; Rafaeli, A. (2002). "Courage and work: Breaking routines to improve performance". In Lord, R. G.; Klimoski, R. J.; Kanfer, R. K.; Schmitt, N. (eds.). Emotions in the Workplace: Understanding the Structure and Role of Emotions in Organizational Behavior. The Organizational Frontier series. Vol. 16. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. pp. 295–330.External linksMirrored emotion from the University of Chicago Magazine.You remind me of me in the New York Times.Albert BanduraAmygdala (brain)Bobo DollAttunement, imputation, and the scope of embodied simulation, Alvin Goldman# for entire content: save to a new dataframe
getwiki <- get_wiki(c("social media","emotional contagion"))
print(getwiki$content)## [1] "Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks. Common features include:Online platforms that enable users to create and share content and participate in social networking.User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through online interactions.Service-specific profiles that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.Social media helps the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.The term social in regard to media suggests platforms enable communal activity. Social media can enhance and extend human networks. Users access social media through web-based apps or custom apps on mobile devices. These interactive platforms allow individuals, communities, and organizations to share, co-create, discuss, participate in, and modify user-generated or self-curated content. Social media is used to document memories, learn, and form friendships. They may be used to promote people, companies, products, and ideas. Social media can be used to consume, publish, or share news.Popular social media platforms with over 100 million registered users include Twitter, Facebook, WeChat, ShareChat, Instagram, Pinterest, QZone, Weibo, VK, Tumblr, Baidu Tieba, Threads and LinkedIn. Depending on interpretation, other popular platforms that are sometimes referred to as social media services include YouTube, Letterboxd, QQ, Quora, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, LINE, Snapchat, Viber, Reddit, Discord, and TikTok. Wikis are examples of collaborative content creation.Social media outlets differ from old media (e.g. newspapers, TV, and radio broadcasting) in many ways, including quality, reach, frequency, usability, relevancy, and permanence. Social media outlets operate in a dialogic transmission system (many sources to many receivers) while traditional media operate under a monologic transmission model (one source to many receivers). For instance, a newspaper is delivered to many subscribers, and a radio station broadcasts the same programs to a city.Social media has been criticized for a range of negative impacts on children and teenagers, including exposure to inappropriate content, exploitation by adults, sleep problems, attention problems, feelings of exclusion, and various mental health maladies. Social media has also received criticism as worsening political polarization and undermining democracy. Major news outlets often have strong controls in place to avoid and fix false claims, but social media's unique qualities bring viral content with little to no oversight. \"Algorithms that track user engagement to prioritize what is shown tend to favor content that spurs negative emotions like anger and outrage. Overall, most online misinformation originates from a small minority of “superspreaders,” but social media amplifies their reach and influence.\"HistoryEarly computingThe PLATO system was launched in 1960 at the University of Illinois and subsequently commercially marketed by Control Data Corporation. It offered early forms of social media features with innovations such as Notes, PLATO's message-forum application; TERM-talk, its instant-messaging feature; Talkomatic, perhaps the first online chat room; News Report, a crowdsourced online newspaper, and blog and Access Lists, enabling the owner of a note file or other application to limit access to a certain set of users, for example, only friends, classmates, or co-workers.ARPANET, which came online in 1967, had by the late 1970s enabled exchange of non-government/business ideas and communication, as evidenced by the network etiquette (or \"netiquette\") described in a 1982 handbook on computing at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ARPANET evolved into the Internet in the 1990s. Usenet, conceived by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, was the first open social media app, established in 1980.A precursor of the electronic bulletin board system (BBS), known as Community Memory, appeared by 1973. Mainstream BBSs arrived with the Computer Bulletin Board System in Chicago, which launched on February 16, 1978. Before long, most major US cities had more than one BBS, running on TRS-80, Apple II, Atari 8-bit computers, IBM PC, Commodore 64, Sinclair, and others. CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL were three of the largest BBS companies and were the first to migrate to the Internet in the 1990s. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, BBSes numbered in the tens of thousands in North America alone. Message forums were the signature BBS phenomenon throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee integrated HTML hypertext software with the Internet, creating the World Wide Web. This breakthrough led to an explosion of blogs, list servers, and email services. Message forums migrated to the web, and evolved into Internet forums, supported by cheaper access as well as the ability to handle far more people simultaneously.These early text-based systems expanded to include images and video in the 21st century, aided by digital cameras and camera phones.Social media platformsThe evolution of online services progressed from serving as channels for networked communication to becoming interactive platforms for networked social interaction with the advent of Web 2.0.Social media started in the mid-1990s with the invention of platforms like GeoCities, Classmates.com, and SixDegrees.com. While instant messaging and chat clients existed at the time, SixDegrees was unique as it was the first online service designed for people to connect using their actual names instead of anonymously. It boasted features like profiles, friends lists, and school affiliations, making it \"the very first social networking site\". The platform's name was inspired by the \"six degrees of separation\" concept, which suggests that every person on the planet is just six connections away from everyone else.In the early 2000s, social media platforms gained widespread popularity with the likes of Friendster and Myspace, followed by Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.Research from 2015 reported that globally, users spent 22% of their online time on social networks, likely fueled by the availability of smartphones. As of 2023 as many as 4.76 billion people used social media some 59% of the global population.DefinitionA 2015 review identified four features unique to social media services:Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.User-generated contentUser-created self profilesSocial networks formed by connections between profiles, such as followers, groups, and lists.In 2019, Merriam-Webster defined social media as \"forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos).\"ServicesSocial media encompasses an expanding suite of services: Blogs (ex. HuffPost, Boing Boing)Business networks (ex. LinkedIn, XING)Collaborative projects (Mozilla, GitHub)Enterprise social networks (Yammer, Socialcast, Slack)Forums (Gaia Online, IGN)Microblogs (Twitter, Tumblr, Weibo)Photo sharing (Pinterest, Flickr, Photobucket)Products/services review (Amazon, Upwork)Social bookmarking (Delicious, Pinterest)Social gaming including MMORPG (Fortnite, World of Warcraft)Social network (Facebook, Instagram, Baidu Tieba, VK, QZone, ShareChat, WeChat, LINE)Video sharing (YouTube, Vimeo)Virtual worlds (Second Life, Twinity)Some services offer more than one type of service.Mobile social mediaMobile social media refers to the use of social media on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. It is distinguished by its ubiquity, since users no longer have to be at a desk in order to participate on a computer. Mobile services can further make use of the user's immediate location to offer information, connections, or services relevant to that location.According to Andreas Kaplan, mobile social media activities fall among four types:Space-timers (location and time-sensitive): Exchange of messages with relevance for a specific location at a specific point in time (posting about a traffic jam)Space-locators (only location sensitive): Posts/messages with relevance for a specific location, read later by others (e.g. a restaurant review)Quick-timers (only time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media mobile apps to increase immediacy (e.g. posting status updates)Slow-timers (neither location nor time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media applications to mobile devices (e.g. watching a video)Elements and functionViralityCertain content has the potential to spread virally, an analogy for the way viral infections spread contagiously from individual to individual. One user spreads a post across their network, which leads those users to follow suit. A post from a relatively unknown user can reach vast numbers of people within hours. Virality is not guaranteed; few posts make the transition.Viral marketing campaigns are particularly attractive to businesses because they can achieve widespread advertising coverage at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing campaigns. Nonprofit organizations and activists may also attempt to spread content virally.Social media sites provide specific functionality to help users re-share content, such as X's and Facebook's \"like\" option.BotsBots are automated programs that operate on the internet. They automate many communication tasks. This has led to the creation of an industry of bot providers.Chatbots and social bots are programmed to mimic human interactions such as liking, commenting, and following. Bots have also been developed to facilitate social media marketing. Bots have led the marketing industry into an analytical crisis, as bots make it difficult to differentiate between human interactions and bot interactions. Some bots violate platforms' terms of use, which can result in bans and campaigns to eliminate bots categorically. Bots may even pose as real people to avoid prohibitions.'Cyborgs'—either bot-assisted humans or human-assisted bots—are used for both legitimate and illegitimate purposes, from spreading fake news to creating marketing buzz. A common use claimed to be legitimate includes posting at a specific time. A human writes a post content and the bot posts it a specific time. In other cases, cyborgs spread fake news. Cyborgs may work as sock puppets, where one human pretends to be someone else, or operates multiple accounts, each pretending to be a person.PatentsA multitude of United States patents are related to social media, growing rapidly. As of 2020, over 5000 social media patent applications had been published in the United States. Only slightly over 100 patents had been issued.Platform convergenceAs an instance of technological convergence, various social media platforms adapted functionality beyond their original scope, increasingly overlapping with each other.Examples are the social hub site Facebook launching an integrated video platform in May 2007, and Instagram, whose original scope was low-resolution photo sharing, introducing the ability to share quarter-minute 640×640 pixel videos (late extended to a minute with increased resolution). Instagram later implemented stories (short videos self-destructing after 24 hours), a concept popularized by Snapchat, as well as IGTV, for seekable videos. Stories were then adopted by YouTube.X, whose original scope was text-based microblogging, later adopted photo sharing, then video sharing, then a media studio for business users, after YouTube's Creator Studio.The discussion platform Reddit added an integrated image hoster replacing the external image sharing platform Imgur, and then an internal video hosting service, followed by image galleries (multiple images in a single post), known from Imgur. Imgur implemented video sharing.YouTube rolled out a Community feature, for sharing text-only posts and polls.Usage statisticsAccording to Statista, it is estimated that, in 2022, around 3.96 billion people were using social media globally. This number is up from 3.6 billion in 2020.The following is a list of the most popular social networking services based on the number of active users as of January 2024 per Statista.Usage: before the pandemicA 2009 study suggested that individual differences may help explain who uses social media: extraversion and openness have a positive relationship with social media, while emotional stability has a negative sloping relationship with social media. A 2015 study reported that people with a higher social comparison orientation appear to use social media more heavily than people with low social comparison orientation.Common Sense Media reported that children under age 13 in the United States use social networking services although many social media sites require users to be 13 or older. In 2017, the firm conducted a survey of parents of children from birth to age 8 and reported that 4% of children at this age used social media sites such as Instagram, Snapchat, or (now-defunct) Musical.ly \"often\" or \"sometimes\". Their 2019 survey surveyed Americans ages 8–16 and reported that about 31% of children ages 8–12 use social media. In that survey, teens aged 16–18 were asked when they started using social media. the median age was 14, although 28% said they started to use it before reaching 13.Usage: during the pandemicUsage by minorsSocial media played a role in communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. In June 2020, a survey by Cartoon Network and the Cyberbullying Research Center surveyed Americans tweens (ages 9–12) and reported that the most popular application was YouTube (67%). (as age increased, tweens were more likely to have used social media apps and games.) Similarly, Common Sense Media's 2020 survey of Americans ages 13–18 reported that YouTube was the most popular (used by 86% of 13- to 18-year-olds). As children aged, they increasingly utilized social media services and often used YouTube to consume content. Reasons for use by adultsWhile adults were using social media before the COVID-19 pandemic, more started using it to stay socially connected and to get pandemic updates. \"Social media have become popularly use to seek for medical information and have fascinated the general public to collect information regarding corona virus pandemics in various perspectives. During these days, people are forced to stay at home and the social media have connected and supported awareness and pandemic updates.\"Healthcare workers and systems became more aware of social media as a place people were getting health information:\"During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media use has accelerated to the point of becoming a ubiquitous part of modern healthcare systems.\"This also led to the spread of disinformation. On December 11, 2020, the CDC put out a \"Call to Action: Managing the Infodemic\". Some healthcare organizations used hashtags as interventions and published articles on their Twitter data: \"Promotion of the joint usage of #PedsICU and #COVID19 throughout the international pediatric critical care community in tweets relevant to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic and pediatric critical care.\" However others in the medical community were concerned about social media addiction, as it became an increasingly important context and therefore \"source of social validation and reinforcement\" and were unsure whether increased social media use was harmful.Use by organizationsGovernmentGovernments may use social media to (for example):inform their opinions to publicinteract with citizensfoster citizen participationfurther open governmentanalyze/monitor public opinion and activitieseducate the public about risks and public health.Law enforcementSocial media has been used extensively in civil and criminal investigations. It has also been used to search for missing persons. Police departments often make use of official social media accounts to engage with the public, publicize police activity, and burnish law enforcement's image; conversely, video footage of citizen-documented police brutality and other misconduct has sometimes been posted to social media.In the United States, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement identifies and track individuals via social media, and has apprehended some people via social media-based sting operations. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (also known as CPB) and the United States Department of Homeland Security use social media data as influencing factors during the visa process, and monitor individuals after they have entered the country. CPB officers have also been documented performing searches of electronics and social media behavior at the border, searching both citizens and non-citizens without first obtaining a warrant.Reputation managementAs social media gained momentum among the younger generations, governments began using it to improve their image, especially among the youth. In January 2021, Egyptian authorities were reported to be using Instagram influencers as part of its media ambassadors program. The program was designed to revamp Egypt's image and to counter the bad press Egypt had received because of the country's human rights record. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates participated in similar programs. Similarly, Dubai has extensively relied on social media and influencers to promote tourism. However, Dubai laws have kept these influencers within limits to not offend the authorities, or to criticize the city, politics or religion. The content of these foreign influencers is controlled to make sure that nothing portrays Dubai in a negative light.BusinessMany businesses use social media for marketing, branding, advertising, communication, sales promotions, informal employee-learning/organizational development, competitive analysis, recruiting, relationship management/loyalty programs, and e-Commerce. Companies use social-media monitoring tools to monitor, track, and analyze conversations to aid in their marketing, sales and other programs. Tools range from free, basic applications to subscription-based, tools. Social media offers information on industry trends. Within the finance industry, companies use social media as a tool for analyzing market sentiment. These range from marketing financial products, market trends, and as a tool to identify insider trading. To exploit these opportunities, businesses need guidelines for use on each platform.Business use of social media is complicated by the fact that the business does not fully control its social media presence. Instead, it makes its case by participating in the \"conversation\". Business uses social media on a customer-organizational level; and an intra-organizational level.Social media can encourage entrepreneurship and innovation, by highlighting successes, and by easing access to resources that might not otherwise be readily available/known.MarketingSocial media marketing can help promote a product or service and establish connections with customers. Social media marketing can be divided into paid media, earned media, and owned media. Using paid social media firms run advertising on a social media platform. Earned social media appears when firms do something that impresses stakeholders and they spontaneously post content about it. Owned social media is the platform markets itself by creating/promoting content to its users.Primary uses are to create brand awareness, engage customers by conversation (e.g., customers provide feedback on the firm) and providing access to customer service. Social media's peer-to-peer communication shifts power from the organization to consumers, since consumer content is widely visible and not controlled by the company.Social media personalities, often referred to as \"influencers\", are Internet celebrities who are sponsored by marketers to promote products and companies online. Research reports that these endorsements attract the attention of users who have not settled on which products/services to buy, especially younger consumers. The practice of harnessing influencers to market or promote a product or service to their following is commonly referred to as influencer marketing.In 2013, the United Kingdom Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) began advising celebrities to make it clear whether they had been paid to recommend a product or service by using the hashtag #spon or #ad when endorsing. The US Federal Trade Commission issued similar guidelines.Social media platforms also enable targeting specific audiences with advertising. Users of social media can share, and comment on the advertisement, turning passive consumers into active promoters and even producers. Targeting requires extra effort by advertisers to understand how to reach the right users. Companies can use humor (such as shitposting) to poke fun at competitors. Advertising can even inspire fanart which can engage new audiences. Hashtags (such as #ejuice and #eliquid) are one way to target interested users.User content can trigger peer effects, increasing consumer interest even without influencer involvement. A 2012 study focused on this communication reported that communication among peers can affect purchase intentions: direct impact through encouraging conformity, and an indirect impact by increasing product engagement. This study claimed that peer communication about a product increased product engagement.PoliticsSocial media have a range of uses in politics. Politicians use social media to spread their messages and influence voters.Dounoucos et al. reported that Twitter use by candidates was unprecedented during the US 2016 election. The public increased its reliance on social-media sites for political information. In the European Union, social media amplified political messages. Foreign-originated social-media campaigns attempt to influence political opinion in another country.ActivismSocial media was influential in the Arab Spring in 2011. However, debate persists about the extent to which social media facilitated this. Activists have used social media to report the abuse of human rights in Bahrain. They publicized the brutality of government authorities, who they claimed were detaining, torturing and threatening individuals. Conversely, Bahrain's government used social media to track and target activists. The government stripped citizenship from over 1,000 activists as punishment.Militant groups use social media as an organizing and recruiting tool. Islamic State (also known as ISIS) used social media. In 2014, #AllEyesonISIS went viral on Arabic X.PropagandaRecruitingScienceScientists use social media to share their scientific knowledge and research on platforms such as ResearchGate, LinkedIn, Facebook, X, and Academia.edu. The most common platforms are X and blogs. The use of social media reportedly has improved the interaction between scientists, reporters, and the general public. Over 495,000 opinions were shared on X related to science between September 1, 2010, and August 31, 2011. Science related blogs respond to and motivate public interest in learning, following, and discussing science. Posts can be written quickly and allow the reader to interact in real time with authors. One study in the context of climate change reported that climate scientists and scientific institutions played a minimal role in online debate, exceeded by nongovernmental organizations.AcademiaAcademicians use social media activity to assess academic publications, to measure public sentiment, identify influencer accounts, or crowdsource ideas or solutions. Social media such as Facebook, X are also combined to predict elections via sentiment analysis. Additional social media (e.g. YouTube, Google Trends) can be combined to reach a wider segment of the voting population, minimise media-specific bias, and inexpensively estimate electoral predictions which are on average half of a percentage point off the real vote share.School admissionsIn some places, students have been forced to surrender their social media passwords to school administrators. Few laws protect student's social media privacy. Organizations such as the ACLU call for more privacy protection. They urge students who are pressured to give up their account information to resist.Colleges and universities may access applicants' internet services including social media profiles as part of their admissions process. According to Kaplan, Inc, a corporation that provides higher education preparation, in 2012 27% of admissions officers used Google to learn more about an applicant, with 26% checking Facebook. Students whose social media pages include questionable material may be disqualified from admission processes.\"One survey in July 2017, by the American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers, reported that 11 percent of respondents said they had refused to admit an applicant based on social media content. This includes 8 percent of public institutions, where the First Amendment applies. The survey reported that 30 percent of institutions acknowledged reviewing the personal social media accounts of applicants at least some of the time.\"Court casesSocial media comments and images have been used in court cases including employment law, child custody/child support, and disability claims. After an Apple employee criticized his employer on Facebook, he was fired. When the former employee sued Apple for unfair dismissal, the court, after examining the employee's Facebook posts, reported in favor of Apple, stating that the posts breached Apple's policies. After a couple broke up, the man posted song lyrics \"that talked about fantasies of killing the rapper's ex-wife\" and made threats. A court reported him guilty. In a disability claims case, a woman who fell at work claimed that she was permanently injured; the employer used her social media posts to counter her claims.Courts do not always admit social media evidence, in part, because screenshots can be faked or tampered with. Judges may consider emojis into account to assess statements made on social media; in one Michigan case where a person alleged that another person had defamed them in an online comment, the judge disagreed, noting that an emoji after the comment that indicated that it was a joke. In a 2014 case in Ontario against a police officer regarding alleged assault of a protester during the G20 summit, the court rejected the Crown's application to use a digital photo of the protest that was anonymously posted online, because it included no metadata verifying its provenance.Use by individualsNews sourceSocial toolSocial media are used to socialize with friends and family pursue romance and flirt, but not all social needs can be fulfilled by social media. For example, a 2003 article reported that lonely individuals are more likely to use the Internet for emotional support than others. A 2018 survey from Common Sense Media reported that 40% of American teens ages 13–17 thought that social media was \"extremely\" or \"very\" important for them to connect with their friends. The same survey reported that 33% of teens said social media was extremely or very important to conduct meaningful conversations with close friends, and 23% of teens said social media was extremely or very important to document and share their lives. A 2020 Gallup poll reported that 53% of adult social media users in the United States thought that social media was a very or moderately important way to keep in touch with people during the COVID-19 pandemic.In Alone Together Sherry Turkle considered how people confuse social media usage with authentic communication. She claimed that people act differently online and are less concerned about hurting others' feelings. Some online encounters can cause stress and anxiety, due to the difficulty purging online posts, fear of getting hacked, or of universities and employers exploring social media pages. Turkle speculated that many people prefer texting to face-to-face communication, which can contribute to loneliness. Surveys from 2019 reported evidence among teens in the United States and Mexico. Some researchers reported that exchanges that involved direct communication and reciprocal messages correlated with less loneliness.In social media \"stalking\" or \"creeping\" refers to looking at someone's \"timeline, status updates, tweets, and online bios\" to find information about them and their activities. A sub-category of creeping is creeping ex-partners after a breakup.Catfishing (creating a false identity) allows bad actors to exploit the lonely.Invidious comparisonSelf-presentation theory proposes that people consciously manage their self-image or identity related information in social contexts. One aspect of social media is the time invested in customizing a personal profile. Some users segment their audiences based on the image they want to present, pseudonymity and use of multiple accounts on the same platform offer that opportunity.A 2016 study reported that teenage girls manipulate their self-presentation on social media to appear beautiful as viewed by their peers. Teenage girls attempt to earn regard and acceptance (likes, comments, and shares). When this does not go well, self-confidence and self-satisfaction can decline. A 2018 survey of American teens ages 13–17 by Common Sense Media reported that 45% said likes are at least somewhat important, and 26% at least somewhat agreed that they feel bad about themselves if nobody responds to their photos. Some evidence suggests that perceived rejection may lead to emotional pain, and some may resort to online bullying. according to a 2016 study, users' reward circuits in their brains are more active when their photos are liked by more peers.A 2016 review concluded that social media can trigger a negative feedback loop of viewing and uploading photos, self-comparison, disappointment, and disordered body perception when social success is not achieved. One 2016 study reported that Pinterest is directly associated with disordered dieting behavior.People portray themselves on social media in the most appealing way. However, upon seeing one person's curated persona, other people may question why their own lives are not as exciting or fulfilling. One 2017 study reported that problematic social media use (i.e., feeling addicted to social media) was related to lower life satisfaction and self-esteem. Studies have reported that social media comparisons can have dire effects on physical and mental health. In one study, women reported that social media was the most influential source of their body image satisfaction; while men reported them as the second biggest factor. While monitoring the lives of celebrities long predates social media, the ease and immediacy of direct comparisons of pictures and stories with one's own may increase their impact.A 2021 study reported that 87% of women and 65% of men compared themselves to others on social media.Efforts to combat such negative effects focused promoting body positivity. In a related study, women aged 18–30 were reported posts that contained side-by-side images of women in the same clothes and setting, but one image was enhanced for Instagram, while the other was an unedited, \"realistic\" version. Women who participated in this experiment reported a decrease in body dissatisfaction.HealthAdolescentsSocial media can offer a support system for adolescent health, because it allows them to mobilize around health issues that they deem relevant. For example, in a clinical study among adolescent patients undergoing obesity treatment, participants' claimed that social media allowed them to access personalized weight-loss content as well as social support among other adolescents with obesity.While social media can provide health information, it typically has no mechanism for ensuring the quality of that information. The National Eating Disorders Association reported a high correlation between weight loss content and disorderly eating among women who have been influenced by inaccurate content. Health literacy offers skills to allow users to spot/avoid such content. Efforts by governments and public health organizations to advance health literacy reportedly achieved limited success.Social media such as pro-anorexia sites reportedly increase risk of harm by reinforcing damaging health-related behaviors through social media, especially among adolescents.PandemicDuring the coronavirus pandemic, inaccurate information from all sides spread widely via social media. Topics subject to distortion included treatments, avoiding infection, vaccination, and public policy. Simultaneously, governments and others influenced social media platforms to suppress both accurate and inaccurate information in support of public policy. Heavier social media use was reportedly associated with more acceptance of conspiracy theories, leading to worse mental health and less compliance with public health recommendations.AddictionSocial media platforms can serve as a breeding ground for addiction-related behaviors, with studies report that excessive use can lead to addiction-like symptoms. These symptoms include compulsive checking, mood modification, and withdrawal when not using social media, which can result in decreased face-to-face social interactions and contribute to the deterioration of interpersonal relationships and a sense of loneliness.CyberbullyingSleep disturbanceA 2017 study reported on a link between sleep disturbance and the use of social media. It concluded that blue light from computer/phone displays—and the frequency rather than the duration of time spent, predicted disturbed sleep, termed \"obsessive 'checking'\". The association between social media use and sleep disturbance has clinical ramifications for young adults. A recent study reported that people in the highest quartile for weekly social media use experienced the most sleep disturbance. The median number of minutes of social media use per day was 61. Females were more likely to experience high levels of sleep disturbance. Many teenagers suffer from sleep deprivation from long hours at night on their phones, and this left them tired and unfocused in school. A 2011 study reported that time spent on Facebook was negatively associated with GPA, but the association with sleep disturbance was not established.Emotional effectsOne studied effect of social media is 'Facebook depression', which affects adolescents who spend too much time on social media. This may lead to reclusiveness, which can increase loneliness and low self-esteem. Social media curates content to encourage users to keep scrolling. Studies report children's self-esteem is positively affected by positive comments and negatively affected by negative or lack of comments. This affected self-perception. A 2017 study of almost 6,000 adolescent students reported that those who self-reported addiction-like symptoms of social media use were more likely to report low self-esteem and high levels of depressive symptoms.A second emotional effect is social media burnout, defined as ambivalence, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization. Ambivalence is confusion about the benefits from using social media. Emotional exhaustion is stress from using social media. Depersonalization is emotional detachment from social media. The three burnout factors negatively influence the likelihood of continuing on social media.A third emotional effect is \"fear of missing out\" (FOMO), which is the \"pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.\" It is associated with increased scrutiny of friends on social media.Social media can also offer support as Twitter has done for the medical community. X facilitated academic discussion among health professionals and students, while providing a supportive community for these individuals by and allowing members to support each other through likes, comments, and posts. Access to social media offered a way to keep older adults connected, after the deaths of partners and geographical distance between friends and loved ones.Social impactsSome commentators refer to social media as 'anti-social media' when describing its social impact.DisparityPolitical polarizationMany critics point to studies showing social media algorithms elevate more partisan and inflammatory content. Because of recommendation algorithms that filter and display news content that matches users' political preferences, one potential impact is an increase in political polarization due to selective exposure. Political polarization is the divergence of political attitudes towards ideological extremes. Selective exposure occurs when an individual favors information that supports their beliefs and avoids information that conflicts with them. Jonathan Haidt compared the impact of social media to the Tower of Babel and the chaos it unleashed as a result.Aviv Ovadya argues that these algorithms incentivize the creation of divisive content in addition to promoting existing divisive content, but could be designed to reduce polarization instead. In 2017, Facebook gave its new emoji reactions five times the weight in its algorithms as its like button, which data scientists at the company in 2019 confirmed had disproportionately boosted toxicity, misinformation and low-quality news. Some popular ideas for how to combat selective exposure have had no or opposite impacts. Some advocate for media literacy as a solution. Others argue that less social media, or more local journalism could help address political polarization.StereotypingA 2018 study reported that social media increases the power of stereotypes. Stereotypes can have both negative and positive connotations. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, youth were accused of responsibility for spreading the disease. Elderly people get stereotyped as lacking knowledge of proper behavior on social media.CommunicationSocial media allows for mass cultural exchange and intercultural communication, despite different ways of communicating in various cultures.Social media has affected the way youth communicate, by introducing new forms of language. Novel acronyms save time, as illustrated by \"LOL\", which is the ubiquitous shortcut for \"laugh out loud\".The hashtag was created to simplify searching for information and to allow users to highlight topics of interest in the hope of attracting the attention of others. Hashtags can be used to advocate for a movement, mark content for future use, and allow other users to contribute to a discussion.For some young people, social media and texting have largely replaced in person communications, made worse by pandemic isolation, delaying the development of conversation and other social skills.What is socially acceptable is now heavily based on social media. The American Academy of Pediatrics reported that bullying, the making of non-inclusive friend groups, and sexual experimentation have increased cyberbullying, privacy issues, and sending sexual images or messages. Sexting and revenge porn became rampant, particularly among minors, with legal implications and resulting trauma risk. However, adolescents can learn basic social and technical skills online. Social media, can strengthen relationships just by keeping in touch, making more friends, and engaging in community activities.Regulation by government authoritiesSituation by geographical regionAustraliaIn July 2014, in response to WikiLeaks' release of a secret suppression order made by the Victorian Supreme Court, media lawyers were quoted in the Australian media to the effect that \"anyone who tweets a link to the WikiLeaks report, posts it on Facebook, or shares it in any way online could also face charges\".EgyptOn 27 July 2020, in Egypt, two women were sentenced to two years of imprisonment for posting TikTok videos, which the government claimed as \"violating family values\".ThailandIn the 2014 Thai coup d'état, the public was explicitly instructed not to 'share' or 'like' dissenting views on social media or face prison.United StatesHistorically, platforms were responsible for moderating the content that they presented. They set rules for what was allowable, decided which content to promote and which to ignore. The US enacted the Communications Decency Act in 1996. Section 230 of that act exempted internet platforms from legal liability for content authored by third parties.No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.\" (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1)).In 2024, legislation was enacted in Florida requiring social media companies to verify the age of people with accounts, and to prohibit holding an account for people aged under 14, and between 14 and 16 in the absence of parental approval.European UnionThe European Union initially took a similar approach. However, in 2020, the European Commission presented two legislative proposals: The Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Both proposals were enacted in July 2022. The DSA entered into force on 17 February 2024, the DMA in March 2024. This legislation can be summarized in the following four objectives, articulated by MEPs:\"What is illegal offline must also be illegal online\".\"Very large online platforms\" must therefore, among other thingsdelete illegal content (propaganda, election interference, hate crimes and online harms such as harassment and child abuse) and better protect fundamental rightsredesign their systems to ensure a \"high level of privacy, security and protection of minors\", by prohibiting advertising based on personal data, designing recommender systems to minimize risks for children and demonstrating this to the European Commission via a risk assessment, andnot use sensitive personal data such as race, gender and religion to target advertising.Violators could face a complete ban in Europe or fines of up to 6% of global sales. Such content moderation requires extensive investment by platform providers. Enforcement resources may not be sufficient to ensure compliance.The DSA allows a country to require information to be deleted that is illegal only in that jurisdiction. According to Patrick Breyer from the German Pirate Party, a problem could arise from the Hungarian government requesting a video to be deleted that is critical of Victor Orban, as he foresaw the potential for such determinations to be applied EU-wide.Discussions and proposals2018 Nobel Laureate Paul Romer advocated taxing negative externalities of social media platforms. Similar to a carbon tax – negative social effects could be compensated for by a financial levy on the platforms. Assuming that the tax did not deter the actions that produced the externalities, the revenue raised could be used to address them. However, consensus has yet to emerge on how to measure or mitigate the harms, nor to craft a tax, .Another proposal is to invoke competition law. The idea is to restrict the platforms' market power by controlling mergers ex ante and tightening the law. This would be achieved through a supranational enforcement mechanism and the deterrent effect of high fines.In a 2024 opinion piece, Megan Moreno and Jenny Radesky, professors of pediatrics, wrote about the need for \"nuanced\" policy. They regarded access which is contingent upon parental consent as harmful. They commented that a focus on increasing age restrictions \"may serve to distract from making sure platforms are following guidelines and best practices for all ages\".In June 2024, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for social media platforms to contain a warning about the impact they have on the mental health of young people.Business modelsThe business model of most social media platforms is based on selling slots to advertisers. Platforms provide access to data about each user, which allows them to deliver adds that are individually relevant to them. This strongly incents platforms to arrange their content so that users view as much content as possible, increasing the number of ads that they see. Platforms such as X add paid user subscriptions in part to reduce their dependence on advertising revenues.Criticism, debate and controversyThe enormous reach and impact of social media has naturally led to a stream of criticism, debate, and controversy. Criticisms include platform capabilities, content moderation and reliability, impact on concentration, mental health, content ownership, and the meaning of interactions, and poor cross-platform interoperability, decrease in face-to-face interactions, cyberbullying, sexual predation, particularly of children, and child pornography.In 2007 Andrew Keen wrote, \"Out of this anarchy, it suddenly became clear that what was governing the infinite monkeys now inputting away on the Internet was the law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated. Under these rules, the only way to intellectually prevail is by infinite filibustering.\"Trustworthiness and reliabilitySocial media has become a regular source of news and information. A 2021 Pew Research Center poll reported roughly 70% of users regularly get news from social media, despite the presence of fake news and misinformation. Platforms typically do not take responsibility for content accuracy, and many do not vet content at all, although in some cases, content the platform finds problematic is deleted or access to it is reduced. Content distribution algorithms otherwise typically ignore substance, responding instead to the contents' virality.In 2018, researchers reported that fake news spread almost 70% faster than truthful news on X. Social media bots on social media increase the reach of both true and false content and if wielded by bad actors misinformation can reach many more users. Some platforms attempt to discover and block bots, with limited success. Fake news seems to receive more user engagement, possibly because it is relatively novel, engaging users' curiosity and increasing spread. Fake news often propagates in the immediate aftermath of an event, before conventional media are prepared to publish.Data harvesting and data miningCritique of activismMalcolm Gladwell considers the role of social media in revolutions and protests to be overstated. He concluded that while social media makes it easier for activists to express themselves, that expression likely has no impact beyond social media. What he called \"high-risk activism\" involves strong relationships, coordination, commitment, high risks, and sacrifice. Gladwell claimed that social media are built around weak ties and argues that \"social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.\" According to him, \"Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice, but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.\"Disputing Gladwell's theory, a 2018 survey reported that people who are politically expressive on social media are more likely to participate in offline political activity.Content ownershipSocial media content is generated by users. However, content ownership is defined by the Terms of Service to which users agree. Platforms control access to the content, and may make it available to third parties.Although platform's terms differ, generally they all give permission to utilize users' copyrighted works at the platform's discretion.After its acquisition by Facebook in 2012, Instagram revealed it intended to use content in ads without seeking permission from or paying its users. It then reversed these changes, with then-CEO Kevin Systrom promising to update the terms of service.PrivacyPrivacy rights advocates warn users about the collection of their personal data. Information is captured without the user's knowing consent. Data may be applied to law enforcement or other governmental purposes. Information may be offered for third party use.Young people are prone to sharing personal information that can attract predators.While social media users claim to want to keep their data private, their behavior does not reflect that concern, as many users expose significant personal data on their profiles.In addition, platforms collect data on user behaviors that are not part of their personal profiles. This data is made available to third parties for purposes that include targeted advertising.A 2014 Pew Research Center survey reported that 91% of Americans \"agree\" or \"strongly agree\" that people have lost control over how personal information is collected and used. Some 80% of social media users said they were concerned about advertisers and businesses accessing the data they share on social media platforms, and 64% said the government should do more to regulate advertisers. In 2019, UK legislators criticized Facebook for not protecting certain aspects of user data.In 2019 the Pentagon issued guidance to the military, Coast Guard and other government agencies that identified \"the potential risk associated with using the TikTok app and directs appropriate action for employees to take in order to safeguard their personal information.\" As a result, the military, Coast Guard, Transportation Security Administration, and Department of Homeland Security banned the installation and use of TikTok on government devices.In 2020 The US government attempted to ban TikTok and WeChat from the States over national security concerns. However, a federal court blocked the move. In 2024, the US Congress passed a law directing TikTok's parent company ByteDance to divest the service or see the service banned from operating in the US. The company sued, challenging the constitutionality of the ban.AddictionDebate over use by young peopleWhether to restrict the use of phones and social media among young people has been debated since smartphones became ubiquitous. A study of Americans aged 12–15, reported that teenagers who used social media over three hours/day doubled their risk of negative mental health outcomes, including depression and anxiety. Platforms have not tuned their algorithms to prevent young people from viewing inappropriate content. A 2023 study of Australian youth reported that 57% had seen disturbingly violent content, while nearly half had regular exposure to sexual images. Further, youth are prone to misuse social media for cyberbullying.As result, phones have been banned from some schools, and some schools in the US have blocked social media websites.CensorshipSocial media often features in political struggles. In some countries, Internet police or secret police monitor or control citizens' use of social media. For example, in 2013 some social media was banned in Turkey after the Taksim Gezi Park protests. Both X and YouTube were temporarily suspended in the country by a court's decision. A law granted immunity to Telecommunications Directorate (TİB) personnel. The TİB was also given the authority to block access to specific websites without a court order. Yet TİB's 2014 blocking of X was ruled by the constitutional court to violate free speech.United StatesDecentralization and open standardsWhile the dominant social media platforms are not interoperable, open source protocols such as ActivityPub have been adopted by platforms such as Mastodon, GNU social, Diaspora, and Friendica. They operate as a loose federation of mostly volunteer-operated servers, called the Fediverse. However, in 2019, Mastodon blocked Gab from connecting to it, claiming that it spread violent, right-wing extremism.In December 2019, X CEO Jack Dorsey advocated an \"open and decentralized standard for social media\". He joined Bluesky to bring it to reality.DeplatformingThreat to democracyA number of commentators and experts have argued that social media companies have incentives that to maximize user engagement with sensational, emotive and controversial material that discourages a healthy discourse that democracies depend on. Zack Beauchamp of Vox calls it an authoritarian medium because of how it is incentivized to stir up hate and division that benefits aspiring autocrats. The Economist describes social media as vulnerable to manipulation by autocrats. Informed dialogue, a shared sense of reality, mutual consent and participation can all suffer due to the business model of social media. Political polarization can be one byproduct. This has implications for the likelihood of political violence. Siva Vaidhyanathan argues for a range of solutions including privacy protections and enforcing anti-trust laws. Andrew Leonard describes Pol.is as one possible solution to the divisiveness of traditional discourse on social media that has damaged democracies, citing the use of its algorithm to instead prioritize finding consensus.Extremist groupsAccording to LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, the use of effective social media marketing techniques includes not only celebrities, corporations, and governments, but also extremist groups. The use of social media by ISIS and Al-Qaeda has been used to influence public opinion where it operates and gain the attention of sympathizers. Social media platforms and encrypted-messaging applications have been used to recruit members, both locally and internationally. Platforms have endured backlash for allowing this content. Extreme nationalist groups, and more prominently, US right-wing extremists have used similar online tactics. As many traditional social media platforms banned hate speech, several platforms became popular among right-wing extremists to carry out planning and communication including of events; these application became known as \"Alt-tech\". Platforms such as Telegram, Parler, and Gab were used during the January 6 United States Capitol attack, to coordinate attacks. Members shared tips on how to avoid law enforcement and their plans on carrying out their objectives; some users called for killing law enforcement officers and politicians.Deceased usersSocial media content, persists unless the user deletes it. After a user dies, unless the platform is notified, their content remains. Each platform has created guidelines for this situation. In most cases on social media, the platforms require a next-of-kin to prove that the user is deceased, and give them the option of closing the account or maintaining it in a 'legacy' status.See alsoReferencesFurther readingAral, Sinan (2020). The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health—and How We Must Adapt. Currency. ISBN 978-0-525-57451-4.Fuchs, Christian (2014). Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage. ISBN 978-1-4462-5731-9.External links Media related to Social media at Wikimedia Commons"
## [2] "Emotional contagion is a form of social contagion that involves the spontaneous spread of emotions and related behaviors. Such emotional convergence can happen from one person to another, or in a larger group. Emotions can be shared across individuals in many ways, both implicitly or explicitly. For instance, conscious reasoning, analysis, and imagination have all been found to contribute to the phenomenon. The behaviour has been found in humans, other primates, dogs, and chickens.Emotional contagion is important to personal relationships because it fosters emotional synchrony between individuals. A broader definition of the phenomenon suggested by Schoenewolf is \"a process in which a person or group influences the emotions or behavior of another person or group through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotion states and behavioral attitudes.\" One view developed by Elaine Hatfield, et al., is that this can be done through automatic mimicry and synchronization of one's expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person. When people unconsciously mirror their companions' expressions of emotion, they come to feel reflections of those companions' emotions.In a 1993 paper, Psychologists Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson define emotional contagion as \"the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person's [sic] and, consequently, to converge emotionally\".: 96 Hatfield, et al., theorize emotional contagion as a two-step process: First, we imitate people (e.g., if someone smiles at you, you smile back). Second, our own emotional experiences change based on the non-verbal signals of emotion that we give off. For example, smiling makes one feel happier, and frowning makes one feel worse. Mimicry seems to be one foundation of emotional movement between people.Emotional contagion and empathy share similar characteristics, with the exception of the ability to differentiate between personal and pre-personal experiences, a process known as individuation. In The Art of Loving (1956), social psychologist Erich Fromm explores these differences, suggesting that autonomy is necessary for empathy, which is not found in emotional contagion.EtymologyJames Baldwin addressed \"emotional contagion\" in his 1897 work Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development, though using the term \"contagion of feeling\". Various 20th century scholars discussed the phenomena under the heading \"social contagion\". The term \"emotional contagion\" first appeared in Arthur S. Reber's 1985 The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology.Influencing factorsSeveral factors determine the rate and extent of emotional convergence in a group, including membership stability, mood-regulation norms, task interdependence, and social interdependence. Besides these event-structure properties, there are personal properties of the group's members, such as openness to receive and transmit feelings, demographic characteristics, and dispositional affect that influence the intensity of emotional contagion.ResearchResearch on emotional contagion has been conducted from a variety of perspectives, including organizational, social, familial, developmental, and neurological. While early research suggested that conscious reasoning, analysis, and imagination accounted for emotional contagion, some forms of more primitive emotional contagion are far more subtle, automatic, and universal.Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson's 1993 research into emotional contagion reported that people's conscious assessments of others' feelings were heavily influenced by what others said. People's own emotions, however, were more influenced by others' nonverbal clues as to what they were really feeling. Recognizing emotions and acknowledging their origin can be one way to avoid emotional contagion. Transference of emotions has been studied in a variety of situations and settings, with social and physiological causes being two of the largest areas of research.In addition to the social contexts discussed above, emotional contagion has been studied within organizations. Schrock, Leaf, and Rohr (2008) say organizations, like societies, have emotion cultures that consist of languages, rituals, and meaning systems, including rules about the feelings workers should, and should not, feel and display. They state that emotion culture is quite similar to \"emotion climate\", otherwise known as morale, organizational morale, and corporate morale.: 46 Furthermore, Worline, Wrzesniewski, and Rafaeli (2002): 318 mention that organizations have an overall \"emotional capability\", while McColl-Kennedy, and Smith (2006): 255 examine \"emotional contagion\" in customer interactions. These terms arguably all attempt to describe a similar phenomenon; each term differs in subtle and somewhat indistinguishable ways.ControversyA controversial experiment demonstrating emotional contagion by using the social media platform Facebook was carried out in 2014 on 689,000 users by filtering positive or negative emotional content from their news feeds. The experiment sparked uproar among people who felt the study violated personal privacy. The 2014 publication of a research paper resulting from this experiment, \"Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks\", a collaboration between Facebook and Cornell University, is described by Tony D. Sampson, Stephen Maddison, and Darren Ellis (2018) as a \"disquieting disclosure that corporate social media and Cornell academics were so readily engaged with unethical experiments of this kind.\" Tony D. Sampson et al. criticize the notion that \"academic researchers can be insulated from ethical guidelines on the protection for human research subjects because they are working with a social media business that has 'no obligation to conform' to the principle of 'obtaining informed consent and allowing participants to opt out'.\" A subsequent study confirmed the presence of emotional contagion on Twitter without manipulating users' timelines.Beyond the ethical concerns, some scholars criticized the methods and reporting of the Facebook findings. John Grohol, writing for Psych Central, argued that despite its title and claims of \"emotional contagion,\" this study did not look at emotions at all. Instead, its authors used an application (called \"Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count\" or LIWC 2007) that simply counted positive and negative words in order to infer users' sentiments. A shortcoming of the LIWC tool is that it does not understand negations. Hence, the tweet \"I am not happy\" would be scored as positive: \"Since the LIWC 2007 ignores these subtle realities of informal human communication, so do the researchers.\" Grohol concluded that given these subtleties, the effect size of the findings are little more than a \"statistical blip.\"Kramer et al. (2014) found a 0.07%—that's not 7 percent, that's 1/15th of one percent!!—decrease in negative words in people's status updates when the number of negative posts on their Facebook news feed decreased. Do you know how many words you'd have to read or write before you've written one less negative word due to this effect? Probably thousands.TypesEmotions can be shared and mimicked in many ways. Taken broadly, emotional contagion can be either: implicit, undertaken by the receiver through automatic or self-evaluating processes; or explicit, undertaken by the transmitter through a purposeful manipulation of emotional states, to achieve a desired result.ImplicitUnlike cognitive contagion, emotional contagion is less conscious and more automatic. It relies mainly on non-verbal communication, although emotional contagion can and does occur via telecommunication. For example, people interacting through e-mails and chats are affected by the other's emotions, without being able to perceive the non-verbal cues.One view, proposed by Hatfield and colleagues, describes emotional contagion as a primitive, automatic, and unconscious behavior that takes place through a series of steps. When a receiver is interacting with a sender, he perceives the emotional expressions of the sender. The receiver automatically mimics those emotional expressions. Through the process of afferent feedback, these new expressions are translated into feeling the emotions the sender feels, thus leading to emotional convergence.Another view, emanating from social comparison theories, sees emotional contagion as demanding more cognitive effort and being more conscious. According to this view, people engage in social comparison to see if their emotional reaction is congruent with the persons around them. The recipient uses the emotion as a type of social information to understand how he or she should be feeling. People respond differently to positive and negative stimuli; negative events tend to elicit stronger and quicker emotional, behavioral, and cognitive responses than neutral or positive events. So unpleasant emotions are more likely to lead to mood contagion than are pleasant emotions. Another variable is the energy level at which the emotion is displayed. Higher energy draws more attention to it, so the same emotional valence (pleasant or unpleasant) expressed with high energy is likely to lead to more contagion than if expressed with low energy.ExplicitAside from the automatic infection of feelings described above, there are also times when others' emotions are being manipulated by a person or a group in order to achieve something. This can be a result of intentional affective influence by a leader or team member. Suppose this person wants to convince the others of something, he may do so by sweeping them up in his enthusiasm. In such a case, his positive emotions are an act with the purpose of \"contaminating\" the others' feelings. A different kind of intentional mood contagion would be, for instance, giving the group a reward or treat, in order to alleviate their feelings.The discipline of organizational psychology researches aspects of emotional labor. This includes the need to manage emotions so that they are consistent with organizational or occupational display rules, regardless of whether they are discrepant with internal feelings. In regard to emotional contagion, in work settings that require a certain display of emotions, one finds oneself obligated to display, and consequently feel, these emotions. If superficial acting develops into deep acting, emotional contagion is the byproduct of intentional affective impression management.In workplaces and organizationsIntra-groupMany organizations and workplaces encourage teamwork. Studies conducted by organizational psychologists highlight the benefits of work teams. Emotions come into play and a group emotion is formed.The group's emotional state influences factors such as cohesiveness, morale, rapport, and the team's performance. For this reason, organizations need to take into account the factors that shape the emotional state of the work-teams, in order to harness the beneficial sides and avoid the detrimental sides of the group's emotion. Managers and team leaders should be cautious with their behavior, since their emotional influence is greater than that of a \"regular\" team member: leaders are more emotionally \"contagious\" than others.Employee/customerThe interaction between service employees and customers affects both customers' assessments of service quality and their relationship with the service provider. Positive affective displays in service interactions are positively associated with important customer outcomes, such as intention to return and to recommend the store to a friend. It is the interest of organizations that their customers be happy, since a happy customer is a satisfied one. Research has shown that the emotional state of the customer is directly influenced by the emotions displayed by the employee/service provider via emotional contagion. But this influence depends on authenticity of the employee's emotional display, such that if the employee is only surface-acting, the contagion is poor, in which case the beneficial effects will not occur.Neurological basisVittorio Gallese posits that mirror neurons are responsible for intentional attunement in relation to others. Gallese and colleagues at the University of Parma found a class of neurons in the premotor cortex that discharge either when macaque monkeys execute goal-related hand movements or when they watch others doing the same action. One class of these neurons fires with action execution and observation, and with sound production of the same action. Research in humans shows an activation of the premotor cortex and parietal area of the brain for action perception and execution.Gallese says humans understand emotions through a simulated shared body state. The observers' neural activation enables a direct experiential understanding. \"Unmediated resonance\" is a similar theory by Goldman and Sripada (2004). Empathy can be a product of the functional mechanism in our brain that creates embodied simulation. The other we see or hear becomes the \"other self\" in our minds. Other researchers have shown that observing someone else's emotions recruits brain regions involved in (a) experiencing similar emotions and (b) producing similar facial expressions. This combination indicates that the observer activates (a) a representation of the emotional feeling of the other individual which leads to emotional contagion and (b) a motor representation of the observed facial expression that could lead to facial mimicry. In the brain, understanding and sharing other individuals' emotions would thus be a combination of emotional contagion and facial mimicry. Importantly, more empathic individuals experience more brain activation in emotional regions while witnessing the emotions of other individuals.AmygdalaThe amygdala is one part of the brain that underlies empathy and allows for emotional attunement and creates the pathway for emotional contagion. The basal areas including the brain stem form a tight loop of biological connectedness, re-creating in one person the physiological state of the other. Psychologist Howard Friedman thinks this is why some people can move and inspire others. The use of facial expressions, voices, gestures and body movements transmit emotions to an audience from a speaker.See alsoReferencesFurther readingDecety, J.; Ickes, W., eds. (2009). The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.Showalter, Elaine. Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.Goleman, Daniel (1998). Working with Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books. ISBN 9780553104622.Martin, P. Y.; Schrock, D.; Leaf, M.; Rohr, C. V. (2008). \"Rape work: Emotional dilemmas in work with victims\". In Fineman, S. (ed.). The Emotional Organization: Passions and Power. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell. pp. 44–60). ISBN 9781405160308.McColl-Kennedy, J. R.; Smith, A. K. (2006). \"Customer emotions in service failure and recovery encounters\". In Zerbe, W. J.; Ashkanasy, N. M.; Hartel, C. E. J. (eds.). Individual and Organizational Perspectives on Emotion Management and Display. Research on Emotion in Organizations series. Vol. 2. Amsterdam: Elsevier. pp. 237–268.Worline, M. C.; Wrzesniewski, A.; Rafaeli, A. (2002). \"Courage and work: Breaking routines to improve performance\". In Lord, R. G.; Klimoski, R. J.; Kanfer, R. K.; Schmitt, N. (eds.). Emotions in the Workplace: Understanding the Structure and Role of Emotions in Organizational Behavior. The Organizational Frontier series. Vol. 16. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. pp. 295–330.External linksMirrored emotion from the University of Chicago Magazine.You remind me of me in the New York Times.Albert BanduraAmygdala (brain)Bobo DollAttunement, imputation, and the scope of embodied simulation, Alvin Goldman"#Keep html syntax of the content: get_wiki("your word", clean = FALSE)
get_wiki("Social media", clean = FALSE)## [1] "<p class=\"mw-empty-elt\">\n</p>\n\n<p><b>Social media</b> are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks. Common features include:\n</p>\n<ul><li>Online platforms that enable users to create and share content and participate in social networking.</li>\n<li>User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through online interactions.</li>\n<li>Service-specific profiles that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.</li>\n<li>Social media helps the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.</li></ul>\n<p>The term <i>social</i> in regard to media suggests platforms enable communal activity. Social media can enhance and extend human networks. Users access social media through web-based apps or custom apps on mobile devices. These interactive platforms allow individuals, communities, and organizations to share, co-create, discuss, participate in, and modify user-generated or self-curated content. Social media is used to document memories, learn, and form friendships. They may be used to promote people, companies, products, and ideas. Social media can be used to consume, publish, or share news.\n</p><p>Popular social media platforms with over 100 million registered users include Twitter, Facebook, WeChat, ShareChat, Instagram, Pinterest, QZone, Weibo, VK, Tumblr, Baidu Tieba, Threads and LinkedIn. Depending on interpretation, other popular platforms that are sometimes referred to as social media services include YouTube, Letterboxd, QQ, Quora, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, LINE, Snapchat, Viber, Reddit, Discord, and TikTok. Wikis are examples of collaborative content creation.\n</p><p>Social media outlets differ from old media (e.g. newspapers, TV, and radio broadcasting) in many ways, including quality, reach, frequency, usability, relevancy, and permanence. Social media outlets operate in a <i>dialogic</i> transmission system (many sources to many receivers) while traditional media operate under a <i lang=\"en\">monologic</i> transmission model (one source to many receivers). For instance, a newspaper is delivered to many subscribers, and a radio station broadcasts the same programs to a city.\n</p><p>Social media has been criticized for a range of negative impacts on children and teenagers, including exposure to inappropriate content, exploitation by adults, sleep problems, attention problems, feelings of exclusion, and various mental health maladies. Social media has also received criticism as worsening political polarization and undermining democracy. Major news outlets often have strong controls in place to avoid and fix false claims, but social media's unique qualities bring viral content with little to no oversight. \"Algorithms that track user engagement to prioritize what is shown tend to favor content that spurs negative emotions like anger and outrage. Overall, most online misinformation originates from a small minority of “superspreaders,” but social media amplifies their reach and influence.\"\n</p>\n\n<h2 id=\"History\">History</h2>\n\n<h3 id=\"Early_computing\">Early computing</h3>\n<p>The PLATO system was launched in 1960 at the University of Illinois and subsequently commercially marketed by Control Data Corporation. It offered early forms of social media features with innovations such as Notes, PLATO's message-forum application; TERM-talk, its instant-messaging feature; Talkomatic, perhaps the first online chat room; News Report, a crowdsourced online newspaper, and blog and Access Lists, enabling the owner of a note file or other application to limit access to a certain set of users, for example, only friends, classmates, or co-workers.\n</p>\n\n<p>ARPANET, which came online in 1967, had by the late 1970s enabled exchange of non-government/business ideas and communication, as evidenced by the network etiquette (or \"netiquette\") described in a 1982 handbook on computing at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ARPANET evolved into the Internet in the 1990s. Usenet, conceived by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, was the first open social media app, established in 1980.\n</p>\n\n<p>A precursor of the electronic bulletin board system (BBS), known as Community Memory, appeared by 1973. Mainstream BBSs arrived with the Computer Bulletin Board System in Chicago, which launched on February 16, 1978. Before long, most major US cities had more than one BBS, running on TRS-80, Apple II, Atari 8-bit computers, IBM PC, Commodore 64, Sinclair, and others. CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL were three of the largest BBS companies and were the first to migrate to the Internet in the 1990s. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, BBSes numbered in the tens of thousands in North America alone. Message forums were the signature BBS phenomenon throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.\n</p><p>In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee integrated HTML hypertext software with the Internet, creating the World Wide Web. This breakthrough led to an explosion of blogs, list servers, and email services. Message forums migrated to the web, and evolved into Internet forums, supported by cheaper access as well as the ability to handle far more people simultaneously.\n</p><p>These early text-based systems expanded to include images and video in the 21st century, aided by digital cameras and camera phones.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Social_media_platforms\">Social media platforms</h3>\n\n<p>The evolution of online services progressed from serving as channels for networked communication to becoming interactive platforms for networked social interaction with the advent of Web 2.0.\n</p><p>Social media started in the mid-1990s with the invention of platforms like GeoCities, Classmates.com, and SixDegrees.com. While instant messaging and chat clients existed at the time, SixDegrees was unique as it was the first online service designed for people to connect using their actual names instead of anonymously. It boasted features like profiles, friends lists, and school affiliations, making it \"the very first social networking site\". The platform's name was inspired by the \"six degrees of separation\" concept, which suggests that every person on the planet is just six connections away from everyone else.\n</p><p>In the early 2000s, social media platforms gained widespread popularity with the likes of Friendster and Myspace, followed by Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.\n</p><p>Research from 2015 reported that globally, users spent 22% of their online time on social networks, likely fueled by the availability of smartphones. As of 2023 as many as 4.76 billion people used social media some 59% of the global population.\n</p>\n<h2 id=\"Definition\">Definition</h2>\n<p>A 2015 review identified four features unique to social media services:\n</p>\n<ul><li>Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.</li>\n<li>User-generated content</li>\n<li>User-created self profiles</li>\n<li>Social networks formed by connections between profiles, such as followers, groups, and lists.</li></ul>\n<p>In 2019, Merriam-Webster defined social media as \"forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos).\"\n</p>\n<h2 id=\"Services\">Services</h2>\n<p>Social media encompasses an expanding suite of services: \n</p>\n<ul><li>Blogs (ex. HuffPost, Boing Boing)</li>\n<li>Business networks (ex. LinkedIn, XING)</li>\n<li>Collaborative projects (Mozilla, GitHub)</li>\n<li>Enterprise social networks (Yammer, Socialcast, Slack)</li>\n<li>Forums (Gaia Online, IGN)</li>\n<li>Microblogs (Twitter, Tumblr, Weibo)</li>\n<li>Photo sharing (Pinterest, Flickr, Photobucket)</li>\n<li>Products/services review (Amazon, Upwork)</li>\n<li>Social bookmarking (Delicious, Pinterest)</li>\n<li>Social gaming including MMORPG (Fortnite, World of Warcraft)</li>\n<li>Social network (Facebook, Instagram, Baidu Tieba, VK, QZone, ShareChat, WeChat, LINE)</li>\n<li>Video sharing (YouTube, Vimeo)</li>\n<li>Virtual worlds (Second Life, Twinity)</li></ul>\n<p>Some services offer more than one type of service.\n</p>\n<h2 id=\"Mobile_social_media\">Mobile social media</h2>\n<p>Mobile social media refers to the use of social media on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. It is distinguished by its ubiquity, since users no longer have to be at a desk in order to participate on a computer. Mobile services can further make use of the user's immediate location to offer information, connections, or services relevant to that location.\n</p><p>According to Andreas Kaplan, mobile social media activities fall among four types:\n</p>\n<ul><li>Space-timers (location and time-sensitive): Exchange of messages with relevance for a specific location at a specific point in time (posting about a traffic jam)</li>\n<li>Space-locators (only location sensitive): Posts/messages with relevance for a specific location, read later by others (e.g. a restaurant review)</li>\n<li>Quick-timers (only time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media mobile apps to increase immediacy (e.g. posting status updates)</li>\n<li>Slow-timers (neither location nor time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media applications to mobile devices (e.g. watching a video)</li></ul>\n<h2 id=\"Elements_and_function\">Elements and function</h2>\n<h3 id=\"Virality\">Virality</h3>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<p>Certain content has the potential to spread <i>virally</i>, an analogy for the way viral infections spread contagiously from individual to individual. One user spreads a post across their network, which leads those users to follow suit. A post from a relatively unknown user can reach vast numbers of people within hours. Virality is not guaranteed; few posts make the transition.\n</p><p>Viral marketing campaigns are particularly attractive to businesses because they can achieve widespread advertising coverage at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing campaigns. Nonprofit organizations and activists may also attempt to spread content virally.\n</p><p>Social media sites provide specific functionality to help users re-share content, such as X's and Facebook's \"like\" option.\n</p>\n<h4 id=\"Bots\">Bots</h4>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<p>Bots are automated programs that operate on the internet. They automate many communication tasks. This has led to the creation of an industry of bot providers.\n</p><p>Chatbots and social bots are programmed to mimic human interactions such as liking, commenting, and following. Bots have also been developed to facilitate social media marketing. Bots have led the marketing industry into an analytical crisis, as bots make it difficult to differentiate between human interactions and bot interactions. Some bots violate platforms' terms of use, which can result in bans and campaigns to eliminate bots categorically. Bots may even pose as real people to avoid prohibitions.\n</p><p>'Cyborgs'—either bot-assisted humans or human-assisted bots—are used for both legitimate and illegitimate purposes, from spreading fake news to creating marketing buzz. A common use claimed to be legitimate includes posting at a specific time. A human writes a post content and the bot posts it a specific time. In other cases, cyborgs spread fake news. Cyborgs may work as sock puppets, where one human pretends to be someone else, or operates multiple accounts, each pretending to be a person.\n</p>\n<h4 id=\"Patents\">Patents</h4>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<p>A multitude of United States patents are related to social media, growing rapidly. As of 2020, over 5000 social media patent applications had been published in the United States. Only slightly over 100 patents had been issued.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Platform_convergence\">Platform convergence</h3>\n<p><span id=\"Scope_expansion_and_feature_merge\"></span>\n</p><p>As an instance of technological convergence, various social media platforms adapted functionality beyond their original scope, increasingly overlapping with each other.\n</p><p>Examples are the social hub site Facebook launching an integrated video platform in May 2007, and Instagram, whose original scope was low-resolution photo sharing, introducing the ability to share quarter-minute 640×640 pixel videos (late extended to a minute with increased resolution). Instagram later implemented stories (short videos self-destructing after 24 hours), a concept popularized by Snapchat, as well as <i>IGTV</i>, for seekable videos. Stories were then adopted by YouTube.\n</p><p>X, whose original scope was text-based microblogging, later adopted photo sharing, then video sharing, then a media studio for business users, after YouTube's Creator Studio.\n</p><p>The discussion platform Reddit added an integrated image hoster replacing the external image sharing platform Imgur, and then an internal video hosting service, followed by image galleries (multiple images in a single post), known from Imgur. Imgur implemented video sharing.\n</p><p>YouTube rolled out a Community feature, for sharing text-only posts and polls.\n</p>\n<h2 id=\"Usage_statistics\">Usage statistics</h2>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<p>According to Statista, it is estimated that, in 2022, around 3.96 billion people were using social media globally. This number is up from 3.6 billion in 2020.\n</p><p>The following is a list of the most popular social networking services based on the number of active users as of January 2024 per Statista.\n</p>\n\n<h3 id=\"Usage:_before_the_pandemic\">Usage: before the pandemic</h3>\n<p>A 2009 study suggested that individual differences may help explain who uses social media: extraversion and openness have a positive relationship with social media, while emotional stability has a negative sloping relationship with social media. A 2015 study reported that people with a higher social comparison orientation appear to use social media more heavily than people with low social comparison orientation.\n</p><p>Common Sense Media reported that children under age 13 in the United States use social networking services although many social media sites require users to be 13 or older. In 2017, the firm conducted a survey of parents of children from birth to age 8 and reported that 4% of children at this age used social media sites such as Instagram, Snapchat, or (now-defunct) Musical.ly \"often\" or \"sometimes\". Their 2019 survey surveyed Americans ages 8–16 and reported that about 31% of children ages 8–12 use social media. In that survey, teens aged 16–18 were asked when they started using social media. the median age was 14, although 28% said they started to use it before reaching 13.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Usage:_during_the_pandemic\">Usage: during the pandemic</h3>\n<h4 id=\"Usage_by_minors\">Usage by minors</h4>\n<p>Social media played a role in communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. In June 2020, a survey by Cartoon Network and the Cyberbullying Research Center surveyed Americans tweens (ages 9–12) and reported that the most popular application was YouTube (67%). (as age increased, tweens were more likely to have used social media apps and games.) Similarly, Common Sense Media's 2020 survey of Americans ages 13–18 reported that YouTube was the most popular (used by 86% of 13- to 18-year-olds). As children aged, they increasingly utilized social media services and often used YouTube to consume content. \n</p>\n\n\n<h4 id=\"Reasons_for_use_by_adults\">Reasons for use by adults</h4><p>\nWhile adults were using social media before the COVID-19 pandemic, more started using it to stay socially connected and to get pandemic updates. </p><blockquote><p>\"Social media have become popularly use to seek for medical information and have fascinated the general public to collect information regarding corona virus pandemics in various perspectives. During these days, people are forced to stay at home and the social media have connected and supported awareness and pandemic updates.\"</p></blockquote><p>Healthcare workers and systems became more aware of social media as a place people were getting health information:</p><blockquote><p>\"During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media use has accelerated to the point of becoming a ubiquitous part of modern healthcare systems.\"</p></blockquote><p>This also led to the spread of disinformation. On December 11, 2020, the CDC put out a \"Call to Action: Managing the Infodemic\". Some healthcare organizations used hashtags as interventions and published articles on their Twitter data: </p><blockquote><p>\"Promotion of the joint usage of #PedsICU and #COVID19 throughout the international pediatric critical care community in tweets relevant to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic and pediatric critical care.\" </p></blockquote><p>However others in the medical community were concerned about social media addiction, as it became an increasingly important context and therefore \"source of social validation and reinforcement\" and were unsure whether increased social media use was harmful.\n</p><h2 id=\"Use_by_organizations\">Use by organizations</h2>\n<h3 id=\"Government\">Government</h3>\n<p>Governments may use social media to (for example):\n</p>\n<ul><li>inform their opinions to public</li>\n<li>interact with citizens</li>\n<li>foster citizen participation</li>\n<li>further open government</li>\n<li>analyze/monitor public opinion and activities</li>\n<li>educate the public about risks and public health.</li></ul>\n<h4 id=\"Law_enforcement\">Law enforcement</h4>\n<p>Social media has been used extensively in civil and criminal investigations. It has also been used to search for missing persons. Police departments often make use of official social media accounts to engage with the public, publicize police activity, and burnish law enforcement's image; conversely, video footage of citizen-documented police brutality and other misconduct has sometimes been posted to social media.\n</p><p>In the United States, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement identifies and track individuals via social media, and has apprehended some people via social media-based sting operations. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (also known as CPB) and the United States Department of Homeland Security use social media data as influencing factors during the visa process, and monitor individuals after they have entered the country. CPB officers have also been documented performing searches of electronics and social media behavior at the border, searching both citizens and non-citizens without first obtaining a warrant.\n</p>\n<h4 id=\"Reputation_management\">Reputation management</h4>\n<p>As social media gained momentum among the younger generations, governments began using it to improve their image, especially among the youth. In January 2021, Egyptian authorities were reported to be using Instagram influencers as part of its media ambassadors program. The program was designed to revamp Egypt's image and to counter the bad press Egypt had received because of the country's human rights record. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates participated in similar programs. Similarly, Dubai has extensively relied on social media and influencers to promote tourism. However, Dubai laws have kept these influencers within limits to not offend the authorities, or to criticize the city, politics or religion. The content of these foreign influencers is controlled to make sure that nothing portrays Dubai in a negative light.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Business\">Business</h3>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<p>Many businesses use social media for marketing, branding, advertising, communication, sales promotions, informal employee-learning/organizational development, competitive analysis, recruiting, relationship management/loyalty programs, and e-Commerce. Companies use social-media monitoring tools to monitor, track, and analyze conversations to aid in their marketing, sales and other programs. Tools range from free, basic applications to subscription-based, tools. Social media offers information on industry trends. Within the finance industry, companies use social media as a tool for analyzing market sentiment. These range from marketing financial products, market trends, and as a tool to identify insider trading. To exploit these opportunities, businesses need guidelines for use on each platform.\n</p><p>Business use of social media is complicated by the fact that the business does not fully control its social media presence. Instead, it makes its case by participating in the \"conversation\". Business uses social media on a customer-organizational level; and an intra-organizational level.\n</p><p>Social media can encourage entrepreneurship and innovation, by highlighting successes, and by easing access to resources that might not otherwise be readily available/known.\n</p>\n<h4 id=\"Marketing\">Marketing</h4>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<p>Social media marketing can help promote a product or service and establish connections with customers. Social media marketing can be divided into paid media, earned media, and owned media. Using paid social media firms run advertising on a social media platform. Earned social media appears when firms do something that impresses stakeholders and they spontaneously post content about it. Owned social media is the platform markets itself by creating/promoting content to its users.\n</p><p>Primary uses are to create brand awareness, engage customers by conversation (e.g., customers provide feedback on the firm) and providing access to customer service. Social media's peer-to-peer communication shifts power from the organization to consumers, since consumer content is widely visible and not controlled by the company.\n</p><p>Social media personalities, often referred to as \"influencers\", are Internet celebrities who are sponsored by marketers to promote products and companies online. Research reports that these endorsements attract the attention of users who have not settled on which products/services to buy, especially younger consumers. The practice of harnessing influencers to market or promote a product or service to their following is commonly referred to as influencer marketing.\n</p><p>In 2013, the United Kingdom Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) began advising celebrities to make it clear whether they had been paid to recommend a product or service by using the hashtag #spon or #ad when endorsing. The US Federal Trade Commission issued similar guidelines.\n</p><p>Social media platforms also enable targeting specific audiences with advertising. Users of social media can share, and comment on the advertisement, turning passive consumers into active promoters and even producers. Targeting requires extra effort by advertisers to understand how to reach the right users. Companies can use humor (such as shitposting) to poke fun at competitors. Advertising can even inspire fanart which can engage new audiences. Hashtags (such as #ejuice and #eliquid) are one way to target interested users.\n</p><p>User content can trigger peer effects, increasing consumer interest even without influencer involvement. A 2012 study focused on this communication reported that communication among peers can affect purchase intentions: direct impact through encouraging conformity, and an indirect impact by increasing product engagement. This study claimed that peer communication about a product increased product engagement.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Politics\">Politics<span id=\"Political_effects\"></span><span id=\"Social_media_in_politics\"></span><span id=\"Use_in_politics\"></span></h3>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<p>Social media have a range of uses in politics. Politicians use social media to spread their messages and influence voters.\n</p><p>Dounoucos et al. reported that Twitter use by candidates was unprecedented during the US 2016 election. The public increased its reliance on social-media sites for political information. In the European Union, social media amplified political messages. Foreign-originated social-media campaigns attempt to influence political opinion in another country.\n</p>\n<h4 id=\"Activism\">Activism</h4>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<p>Social media was influential in the Arab Spring in 2011. However, debate persists about the extent to which social media facilitated this. Activists have used social media to report the abuse of human rights in Bahrain. They publicized the brutality of government authorities, who they claimed were detaining, torturing and threatening individuals. Conversely, Bahrain's government used social media to track and target activists. The government stripped citizenship from over 1,000 activists as punishment.\n</p><p>Militant groups use social media as an organizing and recruiting tool. Islamic State (also known as ISIS) used social media. In 2014, #AllEyesonISIS went viral on Arabic X.\n</p>\n<h4 id=\"Propaganda\">Propaganda</h4>\n\n<h3 id=\"Recruiting\">Recruiting</h3>\n\n<h3 id=\"Science\">Science</h3>\n<p>Scientists use social media to share their scientific knowledge and research on platforms such as ResearchGate, LinkedIn, Facebook, X, and Academia.edu. The most common platforms are X and blogs. The use of social media reportedly has improved the interaction between scientists, reporters, and the general public. Over 495,000 opinions were shared on X related to science between September 1, 2010, and August 31, 2011. Science related blogs respond to and motivate public interest in learning, following, and discussing science. Posts can be written quickly and allow the reader to interact in real time with authors. One study in the context of climate change reported that climate scientists and scientific institutions played a minimal role in online debate, exceeded by nongovernmental organizations.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Academia\">Academia</h3>\n<p>Academicians use social media activity to assess academic publications, to measure public sentiment, identify influencer accounts, or crowdsource ideas or solutions. Social media such as Facebook, X are also combined to predict elections via sentiment analysis. Additional social media (e.g. YouTube, Google Trends) can be combined to reach a wider segment of the voting population, minimise media-specific bias, and inexpensively estimate electoral predictions which are on average half of a percentage point off the real vote share.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"School_admissions\">School admissions</h3>\n<p>In some places, students have been forced to surrender their social media passwords to school administrators. Few laws protect student's social media privacy. Organizations such as the ACLU call for more privacy protection. They urge students who are pressured to give up their account information to resist.\n</p><p>\nColleges and universities may access applicants' internet services including social media profiles as part of their admissions process. According to Kaplan, Inc, a corporation that provides higher education preparation, in 2012 27% of admissions officers used Google to learn more about an applicant, with 26% checking Facebook. Students whose social media pages include questionable material may be disqualified from admission processes.</p><blockquote><p>\"One survey in July 2017, by the American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers, reported that 11 percent of respondents said they had refused to admit an applicant based on social media content. This includes 8 percent of public institutions, where the First Amendment applies. The survey reported that 30 percent of institutions acknowledged reviewing the personal social media accounts of applicants at least some of the time.\"</p></blockquote>\n<h3 id=\"Court_cases\">Court cases</h3>\n<p>Social media comments and images have been used in court cases including employment law, child custody/child support, and disability claims. After an Apple employee criticized his employer on Facebook, he was fired. When the former employee sued Apple for unfair dismissal, the court, after examining the employee's Facebook posts, reported in favor of Apple, stating that the posts breached Apple's policies. After a couple broke up, the man posted song lyrics \"that talked about fantasies of killing the rapper's ex-wife\" and made threats. A court reported him guilty. In a disability claims case, a woman who fell at work claimed that she was permanently injured; the employer used her social media posts to counter her claims.\n</p><p>Courts do not always admit social media evidence, in part, because screenshots can be faked or tampered with. Judges may consider emojis into account to assess statements made on social media; in one Michigan case where a person alleged that another person had defamed them in an online comment, the judge disagreed, noting that an emoji after the comment that indicated that it was a joke. In a 2014 case in Ontario against a police officer regarding alleged assault of a protester during the G20 summit, the court rejected the Crown's application to use a digital photo of the protest that was anonymously posted online, because it included no metadata verifying its provenance.\n</p>\n<h2 id=\"Use_by_individuals\">Use by individuals</h2>\n<h3 id=\"News_source\">News source</h3>\n\n<h3 id=\"Social_tool\">Social tool</h3>\n<p>Social media are used to socialize with friends and family pursue romance and flirt, but not all social needs can be fulfilled by social media. For example, a 2003 article reported that lonely individuals are more likely to use the Internet for emotional support than others. A 2018 survey from Common Sense Media reported that 40% of American teens ages 13–17 thought that social media was \"extremely\" or \"very\" important for them to connect with their friends. The same survey reported that 33% of teens said social media was extremely or very important to conduct meaningful conversations with close friends, and 23% of teens said social media was extremely or very important to document and share their lives. A 2020 Gallup poll reported that 53% of adult social media users in the United States thought that social media was a very or moderately important way to keep in touch with people during the COVID-19 pandemic.\n</p><p>In <i>Alone Together</i> Sherry Turkle considered how people confuse social media usage with authentic communication. She claimed that people act differently online and are less concerned about hurting others' feelings. Some online encounters can cause stress and anxiety, due to the difficulty purging online posts, fear of getting hacked, or of universities and employers exploring social media pages. Turkle speculated that many people prefer texting to face-to-face communication, which can contribute to loneliness. Surveys from 2019 reported evidence among teens in the United States and Mexico. Some researchers reported that exchanges that involved direct communication and reciprocal messages correlated with less loneliness.\n</p><p>In social media \"stalking\" or \"creeping\" refers to looking at someone's \"timeline, status updates, tweets, and online bios\" to find information about them and their activities. A sub-category of creeping is creeping ex-partners after a breakup.\n</p><p>Catfishing (creating a false identity) allows bad actors to exploit the lonely.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Invidious_comparison\">Invidious comparison</h3>\n<p>Self-presentation theory proposes that people consciously manage their self-image or identity related information in social contexts. One aspect of social media is the time invested in customizing a personal profile. Some users segment their audiences based on the image they want to present, pseudonymity and use of multiple accounts on the same platform offer that opportunity.\n</p><p>A 2016 study reported that teenage girls manipulate their self-presentation on social media to appear beautiful as viewed by their peers. Teenage girls attempt to earn regard and acceptance (likes, comments, and shares). When this does not go well, self-confidence and self-satisfaction can decline. A 2018 survey of American teens ages 13–17 by Common Sense Media reported that 45% said likes are at least somewhat important, and 26% at least somewhat agreed that they feel bad about themselves if nobody responds to their photos. Some evidence suggests that perceived rejection may lead to emotional pain, and some may resort to online bullying. according to a 2016 study, users' reward circuits in their brains are more active when their photos are liked by more peers.\n</p><p>A 2016 review concluded that social media can trigger a negative feedback loop of viewing and uploading photos, self-comparison, disappointment, and disordered body perception when social success is not achieved. One 2016 study reported that Pinterest is directly associated with disordered dieting behavior.\n</p><p>People portray themselves on social media in the most appealing way. However, upon seeing one person's curated persona, other people may question why their own lives are not as exciting or fulfilling. One 2017 study reported that problematic social media use (i.e., feeling addicted to social media) was related to lower life satisfaction and self-esteem. Studies have reported that social media comparisons can have dire effects on physical and mental health. In one study, women reported that social media was the most influential source of their body image satisfaction; while men reported them as the second biggest factor. While monitoring the lives of celebrities long predates social media, the ease and immediacy of direct comparisons of pictures and stories with one's own may increase their impact.\n</p><p>A 2021 study reported that 87% of women and 65% of men compared themselves to others on social media.\n</p><p>Efforts to combat such negative effects focused promoting body positivity. In a related study, women aged 18–30 were reported posts that contained side-by-side images of women in the same clothes and setting, but one image was enhanced for Instagram, while the other was an unedited, \"realistic\" version. Women who participated in this experiment reported a decrease in body dissatisfaction.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Health\">Health</h3>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<h4 id=\"Adolescents\">Adolescents</h4>\n<p>Social media can offer a support system for adolescent health, because it allows them to mobilize around health issues that they deem relevant. For example, in a clinical study among adolescent patients undergoing obesity treatment, participants' claimed that social media allowed them to access personalized weight-loss content as well as social support among other adolescents with obesity.\n</p><p>While social media can provide health information, it typically has no mechanism for ensuring the quality of that information. The National Eating Disorders Association reported a high correlation between weight loss content and disorderly eating among women who have been influenced by inaccurate content. Health literacy offers skills to allow users to spot/avoid such content. Efforts by governments and public health organizations to advance health literacy reportedly achieved limited success.\n</p><p>Social media such as pro-anorexia sites reportedly increase risk of harm by reinforcing damaging health-related behaviors through social media, especially among adolescents.\n</p>\n<h4 id=\"Pandemic\">Pandemic</h4>\n<p>During the coronavirus pandemic, inaccurate information from all sides spread widely via social media. Topics subject to distortion included treatments, avoiding infection, vaccination, and public policy. Simultaneously, governments and others influenced social media platforms to suppress both accurate and inaccurate information in support of public policy. Heavier social media use was reportedly associated with more acceptance of conspiracy theories, leading to worse mental health and less compliance with public health recommendations.\n</p>\n<h4 id=\"Addiction\">Addiction</h4>\n<p>Social media platforms can serve as a breeding ground for addiction-related behaviors, with studies report that excessive use can lead to addiction-like symptoms. These symptoms include compulsive checking, mood modification, and withdrawal when not using social media, which can result in decreased face-to-face social interactions and contribute to the deterioration of interpersonal relationships and a sense of loneliness.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Cyberbullying\">Cyberbullying</h3>\n\n<h3 id=\"Sleep_disturbance\">Sleep disturbance</h3>\n<p>A 2017 study reported on a link between sleep disturbance and the use of social media. It concluded that blue light from computer/phone displays—and the frequency rather than the duration of time spent, predicted disturbed sleep, termed \"obsessive 'checking<span>'</span>\". The association between social media use and sleep disturbance has clinical ramifications for young adults. A recent study reported that people in the highest quartile for weekly social media use experienced the most sleep disturbance. The median number of minutes of social media use per day was 61. Females were more likely to experience high levels of sleep disturbance. Many teenagers suffer from sleep deprivation from long hours at night on their phones, and this left them tired and unfocused in school. A 2011 study reported that time spent on Facebook was negatively associated with GPA, but the association with sleep disturbance was not established.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Emotional_effects\">Emotional effects</h3>\n<p>One studied effect of social media is 'Facebook depression', which affects adolescents who spend too much time on social media. This may lead to reclusiveness, which can increase loneliness and low self-esteem. Social media curates content to encourage users to keep scrolling. Studies report children's self-esteem is positively affected by positive comments and negatively affected by negative or lack of comments. This affected self-perception. A 2017 study of almost 6,000 adolescent students reported that those who self-reported addiction-like symptoms of social media use were more likely to report low self-esteem and high levels of depressive symptoms.\n</p><p>A second emotional effect is social media burnout, defined as ambivalence, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization. Ambivalence is confusion about the benefits from using social media. Emotional exhaustion is stress from using social media. Depersonalization is emotional detachment from social media. The three burnout factors negatively influence the likelihood of continuing on social media.\n</p><p>A third emotional effect is \"fear of missing out\" (FOMO), which is the \"pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.\" It is associated with increased scrutiny of friends on social media.\n</p><p>Social media can also offer support as Twitter has done for the medical community. X facilitated academic discussion among health professionals and students, while providing a supportive community for these individuals by and allowing members to support each other through likes, comments, and posts. Access to social media offered a way to keep older adults connected, after the deaths of partners and geographical distance between friends and loved ones.\n</p>\n\n<h2 id=\"Social_impacts\">Social impacts<span id=\"Social_impacts_of_social_media\"></span></h2>\n<p>Some commentators refer to social media as 'anti-social media' when describing its social impact.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Disparity\">Disparity</h3>\n\n<h3 id=\"Political_polarization\">Political polarization</h3>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\"><p>Many critics point to studies showing social media algorithms elevate more partisan and inflammatory content. Because of recommendation algorithms that filter and display news content that matches users' political preferences, one potential impact is an increase in political polarization due to selective exposure. Political polarization is the divergence of political attitudes towards ideological extremes. Selective exposure occurs when an individual favors information that supports their beliefs and avoids information that conflicts with them. Jonathan Haidt compared the impact of social media to the Tower of Babel and the chaos it unleashed as a result.\n</p><p>Aviv Ovadya argues that these algorithms incentivize the creation of divisive content in addition to promoting existing divisive content, but could be designed to reduce polarization instead. In 2017, Facebook gave its new emoji reactions five times the weight in its algorithms as its like button, which data scientists at the company in 2019 confirmed had disproportionately boosted toxicity, misinformation and low-quality news. Some popular ideas for how to combat selective exposure have had no or opposite impacts. Some advocate for media literacy as a solution. Others argue that less social media, or more local journalism could help address political polarization.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Stereotyping\">Stereotyping</h3>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<p>A 2018 study reported that social media increases the power of stereotypes. Stereotypes can have both negative and positive connotations. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, youth were accused of responsibility for spreading the disease. Elderly people get stereotyped as lacking knowledge of proper behavior on social media.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Communication\">Communication</h3>\n<p>Social media allows for mass cultural exchange and intercultural communication, despite different ways of communicating in various cultures.\n</p><p>Social media has affected the way youth communicate, by introducing new forms of language. Novel acronyms save time, as illustrated by \"LOL\", which is the ubiquitous shortcut for \"laugh out loud\".\n</p><p>The hashtag was created to simplify searching for information and to allow users to highlight topics of interest in the hope of attracting the attention of others. Hashtags can be used to advocate for a movement, mark content for future use, and allow other users to contribute to a discussion.\n</p><p>For some young people, social media and texting have largely replaced in person communications, made worse by pandemic isolation, delaying the development of conversation and other social skills.\n</p><p>What is socially acceptable is now heavily based on social media. The American Academy of Pediatrics reported that bullying, the making of non-inclusive friend groups, and sexual experimentation have increased cyberbullying, privacy issues, and sending sexual images or messages. Sexting and revenge porn became rampant, particularly among minors, with legal implications and resulting trauma risk. However, adolescents can learn basic social and technical skills online. Social media, can strengthen relationships just by keeping in touch, making more friends, and engaging in community activities.\n</p>\n<h2 id=\"Regulation_by_government_authorities\">Regulation by government authorities</h2>\n<h3 id=\"Situation_by_geographical_region\">Situation by geographical region</h3>\n\n<h4 id=\"Australia\">Australia</h4>\n<p>In July 2014, in response to WikiLeaks' release of a secret suppression order made by the Victorian Supreme Court, media lawyers were quoted in the Australian media to the effect that \"anyone who tweets a link to the WikiLeaks report, posts it on Facebook, or shares it in any way online could also face charges\".\n</p>\n<h4 id=\"Egypt\">Egypt</h4>\n<p>On 27 July 2020, in Egypt, two women were sentenced to two years of imprisonment for posting TikTok videos, which the government claimed as \"violating family values\".\n</p>\n<h4 id=\"Thailand\">Thailand</h4>\n<p>In the 2014 Thai coup d'état, the public was explicitly instructed not to 'share' or 'like' dissenting views on social media or face prison.\n</p>\n<h4 id=\"United_States\">United States</h4>\n<p>Historically, platforms were responsible for moderating the content that they presented. They set rules for what was allowable, decided which content to promote and which to ignore. The US enacted the Communications Decency Act in 1996. Section 230 of that act exempted internet platforms from legal liability for content authored by third parties.\n</p>\n<blockquote class=\"templatequote\"><p>No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.\" (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1)).</p></blockquote><p>In 2024, legislation was enacted in Florida requiring social media companies to verify the age of people with accounts, and to prohibit holding an account for people aged under 14, and between 14 and 16 in the absence of parental approval.\n</p><h4 id=\"European_Union\">European Union</h4>\n<p>The European Union initially took a similar approach. However, in 2020, the European Commission presented two legislative proposals: The Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Both proposals were enacted in July 2022. The DSA entered into force on 17 February 2024, the DMA in March 2024. This legislation can be summarized in the following four objectives, articulated by MEPs:\n</p>\n<ul><li>\"What is illegal offline must also be illegal online\".</li>\n<li>\"Very large online platforms\" must therefore, among other things\n<ul><li>delete illegal content (propaganda, election interference, hate crimes and online harms such as harassment and child abuse) and better protect fundamental rights</li>\n<li>redesign their systems to ensure a \"high level of privacy, security and protection of minors\", by prohibiting advertising based on personal data, designing recommender systems to minimize risks for children and demonstrating this to the European Commission via a risk assessment, and</li>\n<li>not use sensitive personal data such as race, gender and religion to target advertising.</li></ul></li></ul>\n<p>Violators could face a complete ban in Europe or fines of up to 6% of global sales. Such content moderation requires extensive investment by platform providers. Enforcement resources may not be sufficient to ensure compliance.\n</p><p>The DSA allows a country to require information to be deleted that is illegal only in that jurisdiction. According to Patrick Breyer from the German Pirate Party, a problem could arise from the Hungarian government requesting a video to be deleted that is critical of Victor Orban, as he foresaw the potential for such determinations to be applied EU-wide.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Discussions_and_proposals\">Discussions and proposals</h3>\n<p>2018 Nobel Laureate Paul Romer advocated taxing negative externalities of social media platforms. Similar to a carbon tax – negative social effects could be compensated for by a financial levy on the platforms. Assuming that the tax did not deter the actions that produced the externalities, the revenue raised could be used to address them. However, consensus has yet to emerge on how to measure or mitigate the harms, nor to craft a tax, .\n</p><p>Another proposal is to invoke competition law. The idea is to restrict the platforms' market power by controlling mergers <i>ex ante</i> and tightening the law. This would be achieved through a supranational enforcement mechanism and the deterrent effect of high fines.\n</p><p>In a 2024 opinion piece, Megan Moreno and Jenny Radesky, professors of pediatrics, wrote about the need for \"nuanced\" policy. They regarded access which is contingent upon parental consent as harmful. They commented that a focus on increasing age restrictions \"may serve to distract from making sure platforms are following guidelines and best practices for all ages\".\n</p><p>In June 2024, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for social media platforms to contain a warning about the impact they have on the mental health of young people.\n</p>\n<h2 id=\"Business_models\">Business models</h2>\n<p>The business model of most social media platforms is based on selling slots to advertisers. Platforms provide access to data about each user, which allows them to deliver adds that are individually relevant to them. This strongly incents platforms to arrange their content so that users view as much content as possible, increasing the number of ads that they see. Platforms such as X add paid user subscriptions in part to reduce their dependence on advertising revenues.\n</p>\n<h2 id=\"Criticism,_debate_and_controversy\"><span id=\"Criticism.2C_debate_and_controversy\"></span>Criticism, debate and controversy<span id=\"Criticisms\"></span></h2>\n<p>The enormous reach and impact of social media has naturally led to a stream of criticism, debate, and controversy. Criticisms include platform capabilities, content moderation and reliability, impact on concentration, mental health, content ownership, and the meaning of interactions, and poor cross-platform interoperability, decrease in face-to-face interactions, cyberbullying, sexual predation, particularly of children, and child pornography.\n</p><p>In 2007 Andrew Keen wrote, \"Out of this anarchy, it suddenly became clear that what was governing the infinite monkeys now inputting away on the Internet was the law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated. Under these rules, the only way to intellectually prevail is by infinite filibustering.\"\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Trustworthiness_and_reliability\">Trustworthiness and reliability</h3>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<p>Social media has become a regular source of news and information. A 2021 Pew Research Center poll reported roughly 70% of users regularly get news from social media, despite the presence of fake news and misinformation. Platforms typically do not take responsibility for content accuracy, and many do not vet content at all, although in some cases, content the platform finds problematic is deleted or access to it is reduced. Content distribution algorithms otherwise typically ignore substance, responding instead to the contents' virality.\n</p><p>In 2018, researchers reported that fake news spread almost 70% faster than truthful news on X. Social media bots on social media increase the reach of both true and false content and if wielded by bad actors misinformation can reach many more users. Some platforms attempt to discover and block bots, with limited success. Fake news seems to receive more user engagement, possibly because it is relatively novel, engaging users' curiosity and increasing spread. Fake news often propagates in the immediate aftermath of an event, before conventional media are prepared to publish.\n</p>\n<h4 id=\"Data_harvesting_and_data_mining\">Data harvesting and data mining</h4>\n\n<h3 id=\"Critique_of_activism\">Critique of activism</h3>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<p>Malcolm Gladwell considers the role of social media in revolutions and protests to be overstated. He concluded that while social media makes it easier for activists to express themselves, that expression likely has no impact beyond social media. What he called \"high-risk activism\" involves strong relationships, coordination, commitment, high risks, and sacrifice. Gladwell claimed that social media are built around weak ties and argues that \"social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.\" According to him, \"Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice, but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.\"\n</p><p>Disputing Gladwell's theory, a 2018 survey reported that people who are politically expressive on social media are more likely to participate in offline political activity.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Content_ownership\">Content ownership</h3>\n<p>Social media content is generated by users. However, content ownership is defined by the Terms of Service to which users agree. Platforms control access to the content, and may make it available to third parties.\n</p>\n\n<p>Although platform's terms differ, generally they all give permission to utilize users' copyrighted works at the platform's discretion.\n</p><p>After its acquisition by Facebook in 2012, Instagram revealed it intended to use content in ads without seeking permission from or paying its users. It then reversed these changes, with then-CEO Kevin Systrom promising to update the terms of service.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Privacy\">Privacy</h3>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<p>Privacy rights advocates warn users about the collection of their personal data. Information is captured without the user's knowing consent. Data may be applied to law enforcement or other governmental purposes. Information may be offered for third party use.\n</p><p>Young people are prone to sharing personal information that can attract predators.\n</p><p>While social media users claim to want to keep their data private, their behavior does not reflect that concern, as many users expose significant personal data on their profiles.\n</p><p>In addition, platforms collect data on user behaviors that are not part of their personal profiles. This data is made available to third parties for purposes that include targeted advertising.\n</p><p>A 2014 Pew Research Center survey reported that 91% of Americans \"agree\" or \"strongly agree\" that people have lost control over how personal information is collected and used. Some 80% of social media users said they were concerned about advertisers and businesses accessing the data they share on social media platforms, and 64% said the government should do more to regulate advertisers. In 2019, UK legislators criticized Facebook for not protecting certain aspects of user data.\n</p><p>In 2019 the Pentagon issued guidance to the military, Coast Guard and other government agencies that identified \"the potential risk associated with using the TikTok app and directs appropriate action for employees to take in order to safeguard their personal information.\" As a result, the military, Coast Guard, Transportation Security Administration, and Department of Homeland Security banned the installation and use of TikTok on government devices.\n</p><p>In 2020 The US government attempted to ban TikTok and WeChat from the States over national security concerns. However, a federal court blocked the move. In 2024, the US Congress passed a law directing TikTok's parent company ByteDance to divest the service or see the service banned from operating in the US. The company sued, challenging the constitutionality of the ban.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Addiction_2\">Addiction</h3>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n\n<h3 id=\"Debate_over_use_by_young_people\">Debate over use by young people</h3>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<p>Whether to restrict the use of phones and social media among young people has been debated since smartphones became ubiquitous. A study of Americans aged 12–15, reported that teenagers who used social media over three hours/day doubled their risk of negative mental health outcomes, including depression and anxiety. Platforms have not tuned their algorithms to prevent young people from viewing inappropriate content. A 2023 study of Australian youth reported that 57% had seen disturbingly violent content, while nearly half had regular exposure to sexual images. Further, youth are prone to misuse social media for cyberbullying.\n</p><p>As result, phones have been banned from some schools, and some schools in the US have blocked social media websites.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Censorship\">Censorship<span id=\"Censorship_incidents\"></span></h3>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<p>Social media often features in political struggles. In some countries, Internet police or secret police monitor or control citizens' use of social media. For example, in 2013 some social media was banned in Turkey after the Taksim Gezi Park protests. Both X and YouTube were temporarily suspended in the country by a court's decision. A law granted immunity to Telecommunications Directorate (TİB) personnel. The TİB was also given the authority to block access to specific websites without a court order. Yet TİB's 2014 blocking of X was ruled by the constitutional court to violate free speech.\n</p>\n<h4 id=\"United_States_2\">United States</h4>\n\n<h3 id=\"Decentralization_and_open_standards\">Decentralization and open standards</h3>\n<p>While the dominant social media platforms are not interoperable, open source protocols such as ActivityPub have been adopted by platforms such as Mastodon, GNU social, Diaspora, and Friendica. They operate as a loose federation of mostly volunteer-operated servers, called the Fediverse. However, in 2019, Mastodon blocked Gab from connecting to it, claiming that it spread violent, right-wing extremism.\n</p><p>In December 2019, X CEO Jack Dorsey advocated an \"open and decentralized standard for social media\". He joined Bluesky to bring it to reality.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Deplatforming\">Deplatforming</h3>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n\n<h3 id=\"Threat_to_democracy\">Threat to democracy</h3>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<p>A number of commentators and experts have argued that social media companies have incentives that to maximize user engagement with sensational, emotive and controversial material that discourages a healthy discourse that democracies depend on. Zack Beauchamp of Vox calls it an authoritarian medium because of how it is incentivized to stir up hate and division that benefits aspiring autocrats. The <i>Economist</i> describes social media as vulnerable to manipulation by autocrats. Informed dialogue, a shared sense of reality, mutual consent and participation can all suffer due to the business model of social media. Political polarization can be one byproduct. This has implications for the likelihood of political violence. Siva Vaidhyanathan argues for a range of solutions including privacy protections and enforcing anti-trust laws. Andrew Leonard describes Pol.is as one possible solution to the divisiveness of traditional discourse on social media that has damaged democracies, citing the use of its algorithm to instead prioritize finding consensus.\n</p>\n<h3 id=\"Extremist_groups\">Extremist groups</h3>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<p>According to <i>LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media</i>, the use of effective social media marketing techniques includes not only celebrities, corporations, and governments, but also extremist groups. The use of social media by ISIS and Al-Qaeda has been used to influence public opinion where it operates and gain the attention of sympathizers. Social media platforms and encrypted-messaging applications have been used to recruit members, both locally and internationally. Platforms have endured backlash for allowing this content. Extreme nationalist groups, and more prominently, US right-wing extremists have used similar online tactics. As many traditional social media platforms banned hate speech, several platforms became popular among right-wing extremists to carry out planning and communication including of events; these application became known as \"Alt-tech\". Platforms such as Telegram, Parler, and Gab were used during the January 6 United States Capitol attack, to coordinate attacks. Members shared tips on how to avoid law enforcement and their plans on carrying out their objectives; some users called for killing law enforcement officers and politicians.\n</p>\n<h2 id=\"Deceased_users\">Deceased users</h2>\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1236090951\">\n<p>Social media content, persists unless the user deletes it. After a user dies, unless the platform is notified, their content remains. Each platform has created guidelines for this situation. In most cases on social media, the platforms require a next-of-kin to prove that the user is deceased, and give them the option of closing the account or maintaining it in a 'legacy' status.\n</p>\n\n<h2 id=\"See_also\">See also</h2>\n\n<h2 id=\"References\">References</h2>\n\n<h2 id=\"Further_reading\">Further reading</h2>\n<ul><li><link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1238218222\"><cite id=\"CITEREFAral2020\" class=\"citation book cs1\">Aral, Sinan (2020). <i>The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health—and How We Must Adapt</i>. Currency. ISBN <bdi>978-0-525-57451-4</bdi>.</cite><span title=\"ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=book&rft.btitle=The+Hype+Machine%3A+How+Social+Media+Disrupts+Our+Elections%2C+Our+Economy%2C+and+Our+Health%E2%80%94and+How+We+Must+Adapt&rft.pub=Currency&rft.date=2020&rft.isbn=978-0-525-57451-4&rft.aulast=Aral&rft.aufirst=Sinan&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3ASocial+media\"></span></li>\n<li><link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1238218222\"><cite id=\"CITEREFFuchs2014\" class=\"citation book cs1\">Fuchs, Christian (2014). <i>Social Media: A Critical Introduction</i>. London: Sage. ISBN <bdi>978-1-4462-5731-9</bdi>.</cite><span title=\"ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=book&rft.btitle=Social+Media%3A+A+Critical+Introduction&rft.place=London&rft.pub=Sage&rft.date=2014&rft.isbn=978-1-4462-5731-9&rft.aulast=Fuchs&rft.aufirst=Christian&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3ASocial+media\"></span></li></ul>\n<h2 id=\"External_links\">External links</h2>\n\n<link rel=\"mw-deduplicated-inline-style\" href=\"mw-data:TemplateStyles:r1235681985\">\n<ul><li><span typeof=\"mw:File\"></span> Media related to Social media at Wikimedia Commons</li></ul>"2. search_wiki: search anything that contains the keyword
Output: Give top 20 trendy resultsin a 2-column dataframe. title and preview of the contents
If want full content of article: save to a df varable and use get_wiki(yourdataframe$content)
# will return the top 20 results from Wikipedia
search_wiki("Social media")## titles
## 1 Anonymous social media
## 2 Filter (social media)
## 3 List of social networking services
## 4 Problematic social media use
## 5 Social media
## 6 Social media analytics
## 7 Social media and identity
## 8 Social media and suicide
## 9 Social media and television
## 10 Social media as a news source
## 11 Social media in education
## 12 Social media marketing
## 13 Social media measurement
## 14 Social media mining
## 15 Social media optimization
## 16 Social media use by Barack Obama
## 17 Social media use by the Islamic State
## 18 Social media use in politics
## 19 Timeline of social media
## 20 Tweet (social media)
## content
## 1 Anonymous social media is a subcategory of social media wherein the main social function is to share and interact around content and information anonymously on mobile and web-based platforms. Another key aspect of anonymous social media is that content or information posted is not connected with particular online identities or profiles.
## 2 Filters are digital image effects often used on social media. They initially simulated the effects of camera filters, and they have since developed with facial recognition technology and computer-generated augmented reality. Social media filters—especially beauty filters—are often used to alter the appearance of selfies taken on smartphones or other similar devices. While filters are commonly associated with beauty enhancement and feature alterations, there is a wide range of filters that have different functions. From adjusting photo tones to using face animations and interactive elements, users have access to a range of tools. These filters allow users to enhance photos and allow room for creative expression and fun interactions with digital content.
## 3 A social networking service is an online platform that people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections.This is a list of notable active social network services, excluding online dating services, that have Wikipedia articles. For defunct social networking websites, see List of defunct social networking services.
## 4 Experts from many different fields have conducted research and held debates about how using social media affects mental health. Research suggests that mental health issues arising from social media use affect women more than men and vary according to the particular social media platform used, although it does affect every age and gender demographic in different ways. Psychological or behavioural dependence on social media platforms can result in significant negative functions in individuals' daily lives. Studies show there are several negative effects that social media can have on individuals' mental health and overall well-being. While researchers have attempted to examine why and how social media is problematic, they still struggle to develop evidence-based recommendations on how they would go about offering potential solutions to this issue. Because social media is constantly evolving, researchers also struggle with whether the disorder of problematic social media use would be considered a separate clinical entity or a manifestation of underlying psychiatric disorders. These disorders can be diagnosed when an individual engages in online content/conversations rather than pursuing other interests.
## 5 Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks. Common features include:Online platforms that enable users to create and share content and participate in social networking.User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through online interactions.Service-specific profiles that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.Social media helps the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.The term social in regard to media suggests platforms enable communal activity. Social media can enhance and extend human networks. Users access social media through web-based apps or custom apps on mobile devices. These interactive platforms allow individuals, communities, and organizations to share, co-create, discuss, participate in, and modify user-generated or self-curated content. Social media is used to document memories, learn, and form friendships. They may be used to promote people, companies, products, and ideas. Social media can be used to consume, publish, or share news.Popular social media platforms with over 100 million registered users include Twitter, Facebook, WeChat, ShareChat, Instagram, Pinterest, QZone, Weibo, VK, Tumblr, Baidu Tieba, Threads and LinkedIn. Depending on interpretation, other popular platforms that are sometimes referred to as social media services include YouTube, Letterboxd, QQ, Quora, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, LINE, Snapchat, Viber, Reddit, Discord, and TikTok. Wikis are examples of collaborative content creation.Social media outlets differ from old media (e.g. newspapers, TV, and radio broadcasting) in many ways, including quality, reach, frequency, usability, relevancy, and permanence. Social media outlets operate in a dialogic transmission system (many sources to many receivers) while traditional media operate under a monologic transmission model (one source to many receivers). For instance, a newspaper is delivered to many subscribers, and a radio station broadcasts the same programs to a city.Social media has been criticized for a range of negative impacts on children and teenagers, including exposure to inappropriate content, exploitation by adults, sleep problems, attention problems, feelings of exclusion, and various mental health maladies. Social media has also received criticism as worsening political polarization and undermining democracy. Major news outlets often have strong controls in place to avoid and fix false claims, but social media's unique qualities bring viral content with little to no oversight. "Algorithms that track user engagement to prioritize what is shown tend to favor content that spurs negative emotions like anger and outrage. Overall, most online misinformation originates from a small minority of “superspreaders,” but social media amplifies their reach and influence."
## 6 Social media analytics or social media monitoring is the process of gathering and analyzing data from social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter. A part of social media analytics is called social media monitoring or social listening. It is commonly used by marketers to track online conversations about products and companies. One author defined it as "the art and science of extracting valuable hidden insights from vast amounts of semi-structured and unstructured social media data to enable informed and insightful decision-making."
## 7 Social media can have both positive and negative impacts on a user's identity. Psychology and Communication scholars study the relationship between social media and identity in order to understand individual behavior, psychological impact, and social patterns. Communication within political or social groups online can result in practice application of those identities or adoption of them as a whole. Young people, defined as emerging adults in or entering college, especially shape their identities through social media.
## 8 Researchers study social media and suicide to find if a correlation exists between the two. Some research has shown that there may be a correlation.
## 9 Social media and television have a number of connections and interrelationships that have led to the phenomenon of Social Television, which is an emerging communication digital technology that centers around real-time interactivity involving digital media displayed on television. The main idea behind Social Television is to make television consumption a more active content experience for audiences. In the 2010s, social media platforms and websites allowed for television shows to be accessed online on a range of desktop and mobile computer devices, smartphones and smart TVs that are still evolving today in the 2020s. Alongside this, online users can use social media websites to share digital video clips or excerpts from TV shows with fellow fans or even share an entire show online. Many social media websites enable users to post online comments on the programs—both negative and positive—in a variety of ways. Viewers can actively participate while watching a TV program by posting comments online, and have their interactions viewed and responded to in real time by other viewers. Technologies such as smartphones, tablets, and laptop computers allow viewers to watch downloaded digital files of TV shows or "stream" digital files of TV shows on a range of devices, both in the home and while on the go. In the 2020s, many television producers and broadcasters encourage active social media participation by viewers by posting "hashtags" on the TV screen during shows. These hashtags enable viewers to post online comments about the show, which may either be read by other social media users, or even, in some cases, displayed on the screen during the show.In contrast to pre-Internet TV viewing, which typically took place in a family room of a private home, in the 2020s, digital and Internet technologies enable viewers to watch shows anytime, anywhere, regardless of the over-the-air television air times. For example, when a TV show is made available on a streaming service, viewers can watch the show on any day and at any time, and even on multiple screens at once Viewers with Internet-enabled mobile devices can even stream or download and watch a TV show while using different means of transportation. Television stations and programs have taken advantage of this new accessibility by incorporating aspects of social media into their programming, such as indicating social media websites where viewers and fans can post comments or participate in online activities. TV show producers are also using viewer comments from social media to improve their content or modify their marketing campaigns. TV show producers are also releasing video clips from live TV, including promotional trailers and excerpts from shows on popular social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat in order to generate additional advertising revenue and increase Internet users' awareness of and interest in their show. In some cases, social media marketing may be more effective at reaching a target market and less expensive than using "traditional" marketing approaches for TV shows, such as TV commercials. At the same time, TV shows using social media may face certain risks, as Internet users can post negative comments about the show online. In comparison with traditional marketing platforms, over which advertisers generally have a high level of control (e.g., a TV commercial), with social media, regular viewers can post critical comments directly under a TV show's online advertisement on a social media website.
## 10 Social media as a news source is the use of online social media platforms rather than moreover traditional media platforms to obtain news. Just as television turned a nation of people who listened to media content into watchers of media content in the 1950s to the 1980s, the emergence of social media has created a nation of media content creators. Almost half of Americans use social media as a news source, according to the Pew Research Center.As a participatory platform that allows for user-generated content and sharing content within one's own virtual network, using social media as a news source allows users to engage with news in a variety of ways, including:Consume newsDiscover newsShare or repost newsPost their own photos, videos, or reports of news (i.e., engage in citizen or participatory journalism)Comment on newsUsing social media as a news source has become an increasingly more popular way for old and young adults alike to obtain information. There are ways that social media positively affects the world of news and journalism but it is important to acknowledge that there are also ways in which social media has a negative effect on the news that people consume such as false news, biased news, and disturbing content.A 2019 Pew Research Center poll reported that Americans are wary about the ways that social media sites share news and certain content. This wariness of accuracy grew as awareness that social media sites could be exploited by bad actors who concoct false narratives and fake news.
## 11 Social media in education is the use of social media to enhance education. Social media is "a group of Internet-based applications...that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content". It is also known as the read/write web. As time went on and technology evolved, social media has been an integral part of people's lives, including students, scholars, and teachers in the form of social media. However, social media is controversial because in addition to providing new means of connection, critics claim that it damages self-esteem, shortens attention spans, and increases mental health issues.A 2016 dissertation presented surveys that focused on the impact of social media. It reported that 54.6% of students believed that social media affected their studies positively (38% agree, 16.6% strongly agree). About 40% disagreed, and 4.7% of students strongly disagreed. 53% of female students reported that social media negatively impacted their studies. Among male students, 40% agreed that social media had a negative impact on studies, while 59% disagreed.
## 12 Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. Although the terms e-marketing and digital marketing are still dominant in academia, social media marketing is becoming more popular for both practitioners and researchers.Most social media platforms such as: Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and X, among others, have built-in data analytics tools, enabling companies to track the progress, success, and engagement of social media marketing campaigns. Companies address a range of stakeholders through social media marketing, including current and potential customers, current and potential employees, journalists, bloggers, and the general public.On a strategic level, social media marketing includes the management of a marketing campaign, governance, setting the scope (e.g. more active or passive use) and the establishment of a firm's desired social media "culture" and "tone".When using social media marketing, firms can allow customers and Internet users to post user-generated content (e.g., online comments, product reviews, etc.), also known as "earned media", rather than use marketer-prepared advertising copy.
## 13 Social media measurement, also called social media controlling, is the management practice of evaluating successful social media communications of brands, companies, or other organizations. Key performance indicators may be measured by extracting information from social media channels, such as blogs, wikis, micro-blogs such as Twitter, social networking sites, or video/photo sharing websites, forums from time to time. It is also used by companies to gauge current trends in the industry. The process first gathers data from different websites and then performs analysis based on different metrics like time spent on the page, click through rate, content share, comments, text analytics to identify positive or negative emotions about the brand. Some other social media metrics include share of voice, owned mentions, and earned mentions. The social media measurement process starts with defining a goal that needs to be achieved and defining the expected outcome of the process. The expected outcome varies per the goal and is usually measured by a variety of metrics. This is followed by defining possible social strategies to be used to achieve the goal. Then the next step is designing strategies to be used and setting up configuration tools that ease the process of collecting the data. In the next step, strategies and tools are deployed in real-time. This step involves conducting Quality Assurance tests of the methods deployed to collect the data. And in the final step, data collected from the system is analyzed and if the need arises, it is refined on the run time to enhance the methodologies used. The last step ensures that the result obtained is more aligned with the goal defined in the first step.
## 14 Social media mining is the process of obtaining data from user-generated content on social media in order to extract actionable patterns, form conclusions about users, and act upon the information. Mining supports targeting advertising to users or academic research. The term is an analogy to the process of mining for minerals. Mining companies sift through raw ore to find the valuable minerals; likewise, social media mining sifts through social media data in order to discern patterns and trends about matters such as social media usage, online behaviour, content sharing, connections between individuals, buying behaviour. These patterns and trends are of interest to companies, governments and not-for-profit organizations, as such organizations can use the analyses for tasks such as design strategies, introduce programs, products, processes or services.Social media mining uses concepts from computer science, data mining, machine learning, and statistics. Mining is based on social network analysis, network science, sociology, ethnography, optimization and mathematics. It attempts to formally represent, measure and model patterns from social media data. In the 2010s, major corporations, governments and not-for-profit organizations began mining to learn about customers, clients and others.Platforms such as Google, Facebook (partnered with Datalogix and BlueKai) conduct mining to target users with advertising. Scientists and machine learning researchers extract insights and design product features.Users may not understand how platforms use their data. Users tend to click through Terms of Use agreements without reading them, leading to ethical questions about whether platforms adequately protect users' privacy.During the 2016 United States presidential election, Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign, to analyze the data of an estimated 87 million Facebook users to profile voters, creating controversy when this was revealed.
## 15 Social media optimization (SMO) is the use of a number of outlets and communities to generate publicity to increase the awareness of a product, service brand or event. Types of social media involved include RSS feeds, social news, bookmarking sites, and social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, video sharing websites, and blogging sites. SMO is similar to search engine optimization (SEO) in that the goal is to generate web traffic and increase awareness for a website. SMO's focal point is on gaining organic links to social media content. In contrast, SEO's core is about reaching the top of the search engine hierarchy. In general, social media optimization refers to optimizing a website and its content to encourage more users to use and share links to the website across social media and networking sites. SMO is used to strategically create online content ranging from well-written text to eye-catching digital photos or video clips that encourages and entices people to engage with a website. Users share this content, via its weblink, with social media contacts and friends. Common examples of social media engagement are "liking and commenting on posts, retweeting, embedding, sharing, and promoting content". Social media optimization is also an effective way of implementing online reputation management (ORM), meaning that if someone posts bad reviews of a business, an SMO strategy can ensure that the negative feedback is not the first link to come up in a list of search engine results.In the 2010s, with social media sites overtaking TV as a source for news for young people, news organizations have become increasingly reliant on social media platforms for generating web traffic. Publishers such as The Economist employ large social media teams to optimize their online posts and maximize traffic, while other major publishers now use advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology to generate higher volumes of web traffic.
## 16 Barack Obama won the 2008 United States presidential election on November 4, 2008. During his campaign, he became the first presidential candidate of a major party to utilize social networking sites (such as podcasting, Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube) to expand and engage his audience of supporters and donors.Obama's adoption of social media for political campaigning has been compared to Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy's adoption of the radio and television media for communication with the American public. For this reason, Obama has been dubbed by some as "the first social media president."In his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama had more friends on Facebook and Myspace and more followers on Twitter than his opponent John McCain.
## 17 The Islamic State is a militant group and a former unrecognised proto-state. The group sophisticatedly utilizes social media as a tool for spreading its message and for international recruitment. The Islamic State is widely known for its posting of disturbing content, such as beheading videos, on the internet. This propaganda is disseminated through websites and many social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, and YouTube. By utilizing social media, the organization has garnered a strong following and successfully recruited tens of thousands of followers from around the world. In response to its successful use of social media, many websites and social media platforms have banned accounts and removed content promoting the Islamic State from their platforms.
## 18 Social media use in politics refers to the use of online social media platforms in political processes and activities. Political processes and activities include all activities that pertain to the governance of a country or area. This includes political organization, global politics, political corruption, political parties, and political values. The media's primary duty is to present us with information and alert us when events occur. This information may affect what we think and the actions we take. The media can also place pressure on the government to act by signaling a need for intervention or showing that citizens want change The internet has created channels of communication that play a key role in circulating news, and social media has the power to change not just the message, but also the dynamics of political corruption, values, and the dynamics of conflict in politics. Through the use of social media in election processes, global conflict, and extreme politics, diplomacy around the world has become less private and more susceptible to public perception. Overtime, social media has become a larger way of how we are informed by the news of what is going on in the world. These new stations can ever biased about their political opinions. This also includes Twitter and Facebook of holding the potential to alter civic engagement, this holds a large effect and influences individuals toward a particular way of thinking. Social media also affects elections and campaigns. This is due to the interactive and communal nature of social media can be especially powerful for elections and campaigns. Voters often use these platforms to discuss their position and share their support. An example of this is "I voted" image can remind others to submit their ballots or create peer pressure to encourage voting
## 19 This page is a timeline of social media. Major launches, milestones, and other major events are included.
## 20 A tweet is a short status update on the social networking site Twitter, officially known as X, which can include images, videos, GIFs, straw polls, hashtags, mentions, and hyperlinks. Around 80% of all tweets are made by 10% of users, averaging 138 tweets per month, with the median user making only two tweets per month.The service has experimented with changing how tweets work over the years to attract more users and to keep them on the site. The character limit was originally 140 characters when the service started, had media attachments no longer count in the mid-2010s, and doubled altogether in 2017.Following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, and rebranding of the site as "X", the "tweet" button was changed to "post", and "retweet" changed to "repost".# FOR ENTIRE CONTENT- use get_wiki()
# STEP 1 - save to a new dataframe
sm <- search_wiki("Social media")
# STEP 2 - use the titles we got from seearch wiki()as keywords
sm_articles <- get_wiki(sm$titles)
# step 3 - retrieve sm_articles$content
sm_articles$content[1] #read content of first airticle## [1] "Anonymous social media is a subcategory of social media wherein the main social function is to share and interact around content and information anonymously on mobile and web-based platforms. Another key aspect of anonymous social media is that content or information posted is not connected with particular online identities or profiles.BackgroundAppearing very early on the web as mostly anonymous-confession websites, this genre of social media has evolved into various types and formats of anonymous self-expression. One of the earliest anonymous social media forums was 2channel, which was first introduced online on May 30, 1999, as a Japanese text board forum.With the way digital content is consumed and created continuously changing, the trending shift from web to mobile applications is also affecting anonymous social media. This can be seen as anonymous blogging, or various other format based content platforms such as nameless question and answer online platforms like Ask.fm introduced mobile versions of their services. The number of new networks joining the anonymous social sharing scene continues to grow rapidly.Degrees of anonymityAcross different forms of anonymous social media there are varying degrees of anonymity. Some applications, such as Librex, require users to sign up for an account, even though their profile is not linked to their posts. While these applications remain anonymous, some of these sites can sync up with the user's contact list or location to develop a context within the social community and help personalize the user's experience, such as Yik Yak or Secret. Other sites, such as 4chan and 2channel, allow for a purer form of anonymity as users are not required to create an account, and posts default to the username of \"Anonymous\". While users can still be traced through their IP address, there are anonymizing services like I2P or various proxy server services that encrypt a user's identity online by running it through different routers. Secret users must provide a phone number or email when signing up for the service, and their information is encrypted into their posts. Stylometry poses a risk to the anonymity or pseudonymity of social media users, who may be identifiable by writing style; in turn, they may use adversarial stylometry to resist such identification.ControversyApps such as Formspring, Ask, Sarahah, Whisper, and Secret have elicited discussion around the rising popularity of anonymity apps, including debate and anticipation about this social sharing class. As more and more platforms join the league of anonymous social media, there is growing concern about the ethics and morals of anonymous social networking as cases of cyber-bullying, and personal defamation occurs. Formspring, also known as spring.me, and Ask.fm have both been associated with teen suicides as a result of cyberbullying on the sites. Formspring has been associated with at least three teen suicides and Ask.fm with at least five. For instance, the app Secret got shut down due to its escalated use of cyberbullying. The app Yik Yak has also helped to contribute to more cyberbullying situations and, in turn, was blocked on some school networks. Their privacy policy meant that users could not be identified without a subpoena, search warrant, or court order. Another app called After School also sparked controversy for its app design that lets students post any anonymous content. Due to these multiple controversies, the app has been removed from both Apple and Google app stores. As the number of people using these platforms multiplies, unintended uses of the apps have increased, urging popular networks to enact in-app warnings and prohibit the use for middle and high school students. 70% of teens admit to making an effort to conceal their online behavior from their parents. Even Snapchat has some relation to the health of children after using social media. This an app that is meant to be quick and simple but in many ways it can be overwhelming. A person can post something, and it be gone in seconds. Oftentimes, the post that was made was inappropriate and harmful to another person. It's a never-ending cycle. Some of these apps have also been criticized for causing chaos in American schools, such as lockdowns and evacuations. In order to limit the havoc caused, anonymous apps are currently removing all abusive and harmful posts. Apps such as Yik Yak, Secret, and Whisper are removing these posts by outsourcing the job of content supervision to oversea surveillance companies. These companies hire a team of individuals to inspect and remove any harmful or abusive posts. Furthermore, algorithms are also used to detect and remove any abusive posts the individuals may have missed. Another method used by the anonymous app named Cloaq to reduce the number of harmful and abusive posts is to limit the number of users that can register during a certain period. Under this system, all contents are still available to the public, but only registered users can post. Other websites such as YouTube have gone on to create new policies regarding anonymity. YouTube now does not allow anonymous comments on videos. Users must have a Google account to like, dislike, comment or reply to comments on videos. Once a sign-in user \"likes\" a video, it will be added to that user's 'Liked video playlist'. YouTube changed their \"Liked video playlist\" policy in December 2019, allowing a signed-in user to keep their \"Liked video playlist\" private.Historically, these controversies and the rise of cyberbullying have been blamed on the anonymous aspect of many social media platforms, but about half of US adult online harassment cases do not involve anonymity, and researchers have found that if targeted harassment exists offline it will also be found online, because online harassment is a reflection of existing prejudices.As platforms for anonymous discussionAnonymous social media can be used for political discussion in countries where political opinions opposed to the government are normally suppressed, and allow persons of different genders to communicate freely in cultures where such communication is not generally accepted. In the United States, the 2016 presidential election led to an increase in the use of anonymous social media websites to express political stances. Moreover, anonymous social media can also provide authentic connection to complete anonymous communication. There have been cases where these anonymous platforms have saved individuals from life-threatening situation or spread news about a social cause. Additionally, anonymous social websites also allow internet users to communicate while also safeguarding personal information from criminal actors and corporations that sell users' data.A study in 2017 on the content posted to 4chan's /pol/ board found that the majority of the content was unique, including 70% of the 1 million images included in the studied data set.Revenue generated by anonymous social mediaAnonymous appsGenerating revenue from anonymous apps has been a discussion for investors. Since little information is collected about the users, it is difficult for anonymous apps to advertise to users. However some apps, such as Whisper, have found a method to overcome this obstacle. They have developed a \"keyword-based\" approach, where advertisements are shown to users depending on certain words they type. The app Yik Yak has been able to capitalize on the features they provide. Anonymous apps such a Chrends take the approach of using anonymity to provide freedom of speech. Telephony app Burner has regularly been a top grossing utilities app in the iOS and Android app stores using its phone number generation technology. Despite the success of some anonymous apps, there are also apps, such as Secret, which have yet to find a way to generate revenue. The idea of an anonymous app has also caused mixed opinions within investors. Some investors have invested a large sum of money because they see the potential revenue generated within these apps. Other investors have stayed away from investing these apps because they feel these apps bring more harm than good.Anonymous sitesThere are several sources to generate revenue for anonymous social media sites. One source of revenue is by implementing programs such as a premium membership or a gift-exchanging program. Another source of revenue is by merchandising goods and specific usernames to users. In addition, sites such as FMyLife, have implemented a policy where the anonymous site will receive 50% of profit from apps that makes money off it.In terms of advertisements, some anonymous sites have had troubles implementing or attracting them. There are several reasons for this problem. Anonymous sites, such as 4chan, have received few advertisement offers due to some of the contents it generates. Other anonymous sites, such as Reddit, have been cautious in implementing them in order to maintain their user base. Despite the lack of advertisements on certain anonymous sites, there are still anonymous sites, such as SocialNumber, that support the idea.See alsoAnonymous postDark web § Social mediaOnline disinhibition effectReferencesBibliographyGröndahl, Tommi; Asokan, N. (2020). \"Text Analysis in Adversarial Settings: Does Deception Leave a Stylistic Trace?\". ACM Computing Surveys. 52 (3): 1–36. arXiv:1902.08939. doi:10.1145/3310331. S2CID 67856540."3. random_wiki: give a random article to explore
# returns a random wikipedia article
random_wiki()## Keo, Arkansas
## "Keo is a town in southwest Lonoke County, Arkansas, United States. The population was 256 at the 2010 census. It is part of the Little Rock–North Little Rock–Conway Metropolitan Statistical Area.HistoryKeo had its start as a shipping station when the railroad was extended to that point.GeographyKeo is located in southwestern Lonoke County. U.S. Route 165 passes through the town, leading northwest 19 miles (31 km) to North Little Rock and southeast 4 miles (6 km) to England. Arkansas Highway 15 leads north from Keo 16 miles (26 km) to Furlow and southeast with US 165 to England. Arkansas Highway 232 leads west from the center of Keo.According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 4.9 square miles (12.7 km2), of which 0.04 square miles (0.1 km2), or 0.70%, are water.DemographicsAs of the census of 2000, there were 235 people, 96 households, and 69 families residing in the town. The population density was 123.9 inhabitants per square mile (47.8/km2). There were 108 housing units at an average density of 56.9 per square mile (22.0/km2). The racial makeup of the town was 19.87% White, 80.33% Black or African American, 0.43% from other races. 1.70% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.There were 96 households, out of which 28.1% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 59.4% were married couples living together, 7.3% had a female householder with no husband present, and 28.1% were non-families. 27.1% of all households were made up of individuals, and 10.4% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.45 and the average family size was 2.97.In the town, the population was spread out, with 23.8% under the age of 18, 6.0% from 18 to 24, 26.8% from 25 to 44, 24.7% from 45 to 64, and 18.7% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 40 years. For every 100 females, there were 102.6 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 103.4 males.The median income for a household in the town was $40,250, and the median income for a family was $43,333. Males had a median income of $24,028 versus $26,000 for females. The per capita income for the town was $21,159. About 10.3% of families and 18.3% of the population were below the poverty line, including 38.3% of those under the age of eighteen and 7.0% of those 65 or over.Commerce and industryKeo is known as one of Arkansas' largest pecan producers with a rich history in farming of cotton and rice. As in much of the surrounding region, agriculture is the driving economic force in the area around Keo, primarily in the cultivation of cotton, rice, soybean, and fish farms.ClimateThe climate in this area is characterized by hot, humid summers and generally mild to cool winters. According to the Köppen Climate Classification system, Keo has a humid subtropical climate, abbreviated \"Cfa\" on climate maps.EducationKeo is in the England School District, which includes England High School.ReferencesExternal linksOfficial website"4. trend_wiki: show the most recent 60 days views of a phrase
# returns a dataframe of the view numbers of the wikipedia articles for the past sixty days
trend_wiki("911")## title date views
## 1 911 2024-08-22 151
## 2 911 2024-08-23 146
## 3 911 2024-08-24 146
## 4 911 2024-08-25 139
## 5 911 2024-08-26 196
## 6 911 2024-08-27 159
## 7 911 2024-08-28 154
## 8 911 2024-08-29 168
## 9 911 2024-08-30 124
## 10 911 2024-08-31 137
## 11 911 2024-09-01 163
## 12 911 2024-09-02 189
## 13 911 2024-09-03 181
## 14 911 2024-09-04 135
## 15 911 2024-09-05 206
## 16 911 2024-09-06 193
## 17 911 2024-09-07 143
## 18 911 2024-09-08 168
## 19 911 2024-09-09 246
## 20 911 2024-09-10 342
## 21 911 2024-09-11 1433
## 22 911 2024-09-12 754
## 23 911 2024-09-13 457
## 24 911 2024-09-14 268
## 25 911 2024-09-15 231
## 26 911 2024-09-16 269
## 27 911 2024-09-17 252
## 28 911 2024-09-18 246
## 29 911 2024-09-19 232
## 30 911 2024-09-20 205
## 31 911 2024-09-21 163
## 32 911 2024-09-22 175
## 33 911 2024-09-23 245
## 34 911 2024-09-24 227
## 35 911 2024-09-25 220
## 36 911 2024-09-26 224
## 37 911 2024-09-27 307
## 38 911 2024-09-28 195
## 39 911 2024-09-29 189
## 40 911 2024-09-30 229
## 41 911 2024-10-01 214
## 42 911 2024-10-02 205
## 43 911 2024-10-03 191
## 44 911 2024-10-04 227
## 45 911 2024-10-05 225
## 46 911 2024-10-06 179
## 47 911 2024-10-07 224
## 48 911 2024-10-08 202
## 49 911 2024-10-09 204
## 50 911 2024-10-10 174
## 51 911 2024-10-11 219
## 52 911 2024-10-12 186
## 53 911 2024-10-13 167
## 54 911 2024-10-14 198
## 55 911 2024-10-15 205
## 56 911 2024-10-16 200
## 57 911 2024-10-17 242
## 58 911 2024-10-18 230
## 59 911 2024-10-19 191
## 60 911 2024-10-20 191# STEP 1 - install and activate GGPLOT2 package
#install.packages("ggplot2")
library(ggplot2)# STEP 2 - save trend results to a dataframe
nine11 <- trend_wiki("911")
#STEP 3 - Use dataframe nine11 to plot the line graph
ggplot(nine11, aes(x = date, y = views)) +
geom_line(color = "blue") + # Line graph
geom_point(color = "red", size = 1.5) + # Mark each data point
geom_vline(xintercept = as.Date("2024-09-11"), linetype = "dashed", color = "red") + # Highlight September 11th
annotate("text", x = as.Date("2024-09-11"), y = max(nine11$views), label = "9/11", vjust = -1, color = "red") +
labs(title = "Wikipedia Views for '911' Over 60 Days",
x = "Date",
y = "Views") +
theme_minimal()
FUN EXAMPLE: use trend_wiki to test “view flow”
# Save the trend results of three events into three separate data frames
nine11 <- trend_wiki("911") # result for "911" into data frame nine11
m11 <- trend_wiki("11-M") # result for "M-11" (2004 Madrid bombing) into data frame m11
july7 <- trend_wiki("7/7") # result for "7/7" (2005 London bombing) into data frame july7# Add an event column to each dataframe
nine11$event <- "NYC 9/11"
m11$event <- "MADRID-11"
july7$event <- "LONDON 7/7"
# Combine all three dataframes into one
combined_df <- rbind(nine11, m11, july7)
# Plot the combined dataframe using ggplot
ggplot(combined_df, aes(x = date, y = views, color = event)) +
geom_line(size = 1) + # Line graph for each event
geom_point(size = 1.5) + # Mark each data point
geom_vline(xintercept = as.Date("2024-09-11"), linetype = "dashed", color = "red") + # Highlight September 11th
annotate("text", x = as.Date("2024-09-11"), y = max(combined_df$views), label = "9/11", vjust = -1, color = "red") +
labs(title = "Wikipedia Views for '9/11', 'M-11', and '7/7' Over 60 Days",
x = "Date",
y = "Views") +
theme_minimal()## Warning: Using `size` aesthetic for lines was deprecated in ggplot2 3.4.0.
## ℹ Please use `linewidth` instead.
## This warning is displayed once every 8 hours.
## Call `lifecycle::last_lifecycle_warnings()` to see where this warning was
## generated.