This week we are focused on the topic of celebrity, branding, and marketing on the internet. People such as influencers or instagram models and act. We read articles called “Essena O’Neill Quits instagram,” and  ” A Follow up to That,” and the other article called ” Why people get annoyed with celebrities on kickstart, and shouldn’t,” followed by the film called “The Social Network.” The Social Network is a movie based upon Mark Zuckerberg and the creation of facebook. Mark Zuckerberg was a computer genius that was studying at Harvard University and was in the midst of a concept that eventually turned into the global social network that is or now known as facebook. He and his friend, Andrew Garfield, went through the entire process together in creating facebook, noting that what made it special was exclusivity and status with this site and that’s what differentiated it to other sites on the internet. They were partners and Andrew put up a lot of the money to help with the site and its success. The business grew and eventually went global.. leaving his former friend Andrew behind in the process. This led to Mark becoming the youngest billionaire ever, however, this also leads to two lawsuits against him. One of them is from the people who thought Mark stole their idea of facebook, and the other lawsuit was from his former friend Andrew for essentially screwing him over. This completely changed the game of social media and the internet. 

This movie goes into Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of facebook, and the events that lead into his success and how the evolution of facebook changed how social media is today. It shifted from just posting pictures and retaining info, to now having exclusivity with friends and the status that is held in their bios. This led to instagram, twitter, and things like that.. and clearly you can see that instagram has even shifted for its purpose. Now you see ads, Instagram models, influencers, and it is also used for marketing as well. People and companies now profit from Instagram and it has become a little toxic because now it is reinforced that gaining attention is a priority for success. People get paid for how many followers and likes they receive off of instagram.. to do that you need hold a certain image. This goes into the article of “Essence O’Neill quits instagram” and ” A follow up to that.” In these two articles, it’s about a young woman who had more than 612,000 followers and held a platform of self promotion. She made an income off of this but eventually she quit social media all together because she described it as ” contrived perfection made to get attention.” She also said it was a toxic environment because they see these models and people online and think their life should be like the people on the internet. Looks, money and life is what people constantly compare their life too and quite frankly that is sad because it is not real life. People see what they want you to see. 

The next article is the after math of her deleting social media. She received death threats and horrible comments to her after deleting it and even mockery of her for stating that she thought it was toxic. She even tried to create a new website that was like instagram but there is no like button or comment button and it’ll be strictly for content. Which quit frankly I like this idea because it’ll take away from the attention seeking from other sites and it’ll be about real life.

This is an article about social media and marketing.

https://marketingland.com/library/channel/social-media-marketing

With the internet and smartphones becoming a huge part of our daily lives. You can find just about anything you want with a quick search or say what ever you like for the whole world to see. Sometimes this is not the best thing though as there is a lot of disinformation out there or just completely wrong. People have always manipulated information to get the outcome that they desire from just taking a small clip of a video that shows what you want it to show but it is not the whole truth and the same is done in some studies where they can manipulate the data to get what they want. So when looking a information you have to make sure that it is the whole truth and not being manipulated to fit the argument. To do this you have to be willing to dig a little deeper and do your own research on the topic or look for more articles on the topic and see if they all have the same information. Sometimes you can pull facts from all the articles and then ignore the information that was manipulated and then be able to put the whole story together yourself. With information at the tips of our finger and on just about every social media app you’re starting to see a lot of fake information and its just a lot easier to find and we have to be more careful what we take to be true. We then have to do our own research and make sure what we are reading is true.

We also read an article called “Longtime NBC reporter quits”. In this article ex NBC reporter William Arkin talks about why he quit. He talks about how the media has become obsessed over everything that Trump does and that all media does not really report a lot on other important information. This has become true since Trump announced he was running for president and since then you can’t watch the news without there being something on the President. From either his tweets or just something that he said there will be something reported on it no matter how small of a thing it is like him saying what he just had for lunch. Now a lot of people say any publicity is good publicity. For Trump this means he really doesn’t have to pay a lot of money for ads as the new stations pretty much do it for him for free and he is in the news every day which works in his favor. This reporter got tired of that and wants to make change and report on more things then what is Trump doing today.

In class this week we had a presentation on the book It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. This book talked about how teens are starting to come in contact with technology from a younger age and the effects of this. Much like the last presentation teens are more trusting and don’t really know what to share and what not to share. They also don’t really have a idea of what is right and wrong and how dangerous things that they post can be to themselves or the effect it can have on them in the future. I think you’re starting to see this more now when people get drafted in the sports world and someone goes and finds an offensive post that they made when they were in their teens. This then causes some negative press for the player or if found before they are drafted ends up hurting their draft stock. Sometimes it does not have to even be a tweet but just a video that someone has of you like what happen to Laremy Tunsil who had a video of him smoking a gas mask bong posted online right before the start of the draft which most likely caused him to drop in the draft. This come with question when is a teen ready to have social media and a smartphone where sharing things is super easy and can get you in a lot of trouble. When were you allowed to have your first smartphone and social media? Do you see this being the same for your kids in the future?

News Article:

This article talks about the affects of social media and the smartphone. I thought it was a good article to think about with the discussion this week being on teens and their social lives. It talks about how the common way to talk with a lot of people is on the phone and not in person and how this is affecting teens.

Fake news is something that I believe has been very popular in the last few years. This is not to say that we haven’t had fake news before, but that it’s become more popular lately. This is very unfortunate because it causes discrepancies between people. Personal experience, on Facebook I come across a lot of absurd articles shared by people. These articles seem to offer no substance and lack information that I wouldn’t consider credible or let alone use it in a professional setting. But, I always do have this idea that what if what I consider credible news is really fake news, and the absurd news is telling the truth. It can really go either way, and I believe as time goes on it might be harder to distinguish credible news.

Real news, Fake news, they both exist but they aren’t just appearing from thin air. People are actually writing this stuff and its journalist. Can we really fault the Journalists who sometimes are looking and reaching for stories just for clicks? I believe Journalists have a responsibility to have integrity when it comes to their writing. They are the ones who should report the facts and not what favors them. But it’s also understandable when you have to consider that their industry might be dying because people are getting news online and aren’t paying for subscriptions like “back in the day”. 

John Oliver explains the situation very well on his show. The video can also be found on youtube named “Journalism: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”. On the show he explains the situation that is happening in the news industry. Unfortunately it is a dying one and it has caused the newspaper companies to cut employees and just make cuts all around, some have even had to merge or downsize to try to maintain being profitable. This kind of stuff has caused journalists to have to resort to finding news that would attract customers and even have to make up news for clicks. In some way, if you think about it, journalists have had to sell out for the sake of keeping their industry a float. We are in an age where paper isn’t cutting it and a lot of things are online which makes me wonder, if there is genuinely anything that can happen to save the industry? I don’t believe finding a solution will be the right way to approach this but I do wonder where we would go from here. I think most of the solutions could lie in just the people being aware of what to look for when determining whether something is fake or not but I think even then, we’ve probably seen examples where this proves that people will believe anything. This upcoming election has definitely proven that people will stick by what they believe even if it seems absurd. As long as there is a reporter willing to write what people wanna hear, there will be real and fake news out for the public.

Do you believe you can spot fake news? What ever you choose to believe, do you ever wonder if you’ve been believing the wrong thing?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/10/16/donald-trump-retweets-babylon-bee-attack-joe-biden-twitter/3675923001/

The newspaper industry is suffering severely and this week we were given many accounts of how corrupt media really is. Things that should be reported are barely given any attention and things that often times do not matter are the headlines. We see this all the time in news outlets and we all would be lying if we don’t admit it. The regular things we do is always breaking news when a celebrity or someone with higher status does it. This is taking away from real ongoing issues and things actually worthy of being on the headline of the news.

There was an article that we had to look at that went into depth on how a longtime NBC reporter left the company because they were so focused on reporting on Trump they were missing things that actually deserved public attention. This individual was with NBC for 30 years so this just goes to show how corrupt the news really is. Someone is willing to leave their long time job it speaks for itself. He describe this issue as being a “Prisoner of Donald Trump.” how the NBC network is so quick to report anything in regards to Donald Trump and back him up. The analyst William Arkin wrote to the company a letter that he was leaving the company and is done with mainstream networks in all. He also explains how it was disheartening to see real important issues be ignored particularly global security problems by this major news sources. NBC, CNN, and Fox were all labeled as corrupt by Arkin an inside worker for mainstream media and I do not think anyone would walk away from 30 years of a job they have been doing for a lie.

Another article we had to look at spoke about how the age of newspapers are gone and it is now an era of corruption. The first sentence of the article is “We take newspapers for granted.” and I do feel this statement is true. I am not going to sit here and say I read the newspaper and am such a big fan of them because I am not. I learn all of my news off of my phone and the only time I might see something new is in a magazine in the store. The newspaper does report more things that we are missing and I can admit I am blind to other news because my primary source of news is my phone. Newspapers are now shrinking in pages and this just start to the what I see as the extinction of newspapers. This could be beneficial to companies making this gift to online, but not for us. Mainstream networks will just give us corrupt news and not real issues. So with newspapers slowly fading we should fear our source of real issues will too.

There was one more thing that out of the many things we had among us that struck me and it was a video with John Oliver talking about this corruption. He goes in on how the major source for all these websites and other news outlets online are newspapers and with newspapers going out of business what is in store for the future of news. Journalism is losing its importance and real journalist like Arkin and Oliver are trying to open our eyes to what we are heading into. They definitely opened mine and I saw a comment on the video that was very true and it was “Our world needs Clark Kent a lot more than Superman.” Do you agree with the statement? And whatever you choose what is the reasoning?

WEEKLY NEWS: https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/ex-cowboys-receiver-dez-bryant-to-join-ravens-practice-squad-following-early-season-workout-per-report/

The weekly news article I chose is about an ex star receiver Dez Bryant getting his well deserved second chance in the NFL with a big Super Bowl favorite the Baltimore Ravens.

The news brings us our information and informs us about whats going on in the world, but how much of that in formation is the truth? We all believe for the most part that when we are watching the news the information we are receiving is the truth, so we’d have no reason not to believe these news stations. Who’s to say they don’t withhold information from us or only give us half of the truth. Many people believe that most news stations are only fixated on there profits and ratings, giving up in formation the public should know about for instead less meaningful news stories. A man named William Arkin who just quit as a NBC/MSNBC reporter has noticed this problem through out the years and decided he would no longer be a reporter for those news stations. We had to read an article about him this week for class and Arkiin is a actually a very established journalist who worked on war and military reports. He was best known for three part Washington post series, which was about how sprawling, unaccountable, and omnipotent the national security state has become in the post-9/11 era. Arkin quitting shows the problems with our news stations today and the depressing this is that it doesn’t look like this is going to change anytime soon.

A show clip we had to watch this week called the “News Room” goes over this idea of the of how media withholds the truth from the public. This show is about this fictional news team that does not withhold facts and information, but instead pushes for more news stations to be like them in the sense of giving the people the information they deserve to hear. They also base there episodes on real events that were happening currently, definitely a show to watch. We were also required to watch this video about John Oliver who goes over how the newspaper is struggling and how the new challenges journalists face are affecting the reporting being done on stories. He goes over the requirements of what journalists have to do nowadays, like having to constantly write, edit, shoot videos, and tweet. That has resulted in mistakes being made when stories are sent out to the public. So yes News Stations do withhold information sometimes, but its not always the journalist fault, but instead the people who run the station.

My take from all of this is that I believe most journalist wanna do the right thing and give the people a story thats worth listening to and not lie or give unworthy new stories. We deserve to be told the truth by people we trust to give us information and to let us know whats going on in the world. If we can’t trust the news then who are we going to trust to tell us what we want to know? There will forever be an ongoing battle between whether or not news is reliable or falsely given.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/23/politics/voter-reax-to-final-debate/index.html

This article is about President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden faced off in a more cordial debate, discussing a range of issues from the coronavirus pandemic to health care and the economy.

The ninth week of Social Media & Society has introduced us to political motives, fake news and The Newsroom. This weeks also included a book presentation by group three on It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, written by Nada Boyd. Their presentation discussed how teens and young adults use and apply different platforms on social media. The read provides a sensible perspective based on her conversations from teens who actually use these applications, and not from theories. The book overall seemed very informative on teenager’s experiences with social media and Boyd weighed in on an important topic in society today. Group three was pleased with their read and recommended it for anyone searching from an intriguing thesis.

It is late October and the race to the Presidency is a national dilemma. The first Presidential debate was dominated by shouting and outlandish statements by both parties. The two men frequently interrupted and talk over each other. It reached a certain point where Democratic representative Joe Biden said, “Will you shut up man?”. Neither side was clearly able to address the moderators questions and give clarity viewers and voters. The second and final Presidential debate was held last night at 9:00 PM EDT. The two candidates, compared to the first debate, were much more controlled and restrained in the last debate. The candidates allowed each other to speak and used respectful tones. Even when they went on the attack, they did so in a calm, deliberate manner. As the debate progressed President Trump proclaimed a vaccine that he said would be ready “in weeks”. He offered personal testimony to the power of the new drugs to treat the disease and boasted the he was now immune. Biden used this opportunity and went on the Attack. He pointed out that Trump had repeatedly promised the disease would disappear on its own. He also said that America had lost 220,000 people and could possibly lose another 200,000 by the end of the year. President Trump also gloated about his criminal justice reform and funding for historically black colleges. He questioned why the former Vice-President did not accomplish more when he served under the Barack Obama administration. Trump said, “Why didn’t you get it done? You had eight years to get it done”.

Imbedded in media and in the news today, false information or disinformation is a serious issue. Companies and corporations today seem more concerned about their next check rather than informing their citizens. People in general are not being served the same media they were decades ago. These sources are not invested in the role the media is supposed to play in a free democratic society, which is to do genuine investigative reporting. I believe the only way we can return to true, factual information is not to become more authoritarian, but we can to revive our true sense of democracy.

This is not my first encounter with the series The Newsroom. Doctor Schlegel first introduced The Newsroom to me in Mass Media in American Life in 2019. This entire TV series is charming and electric. It tackles how news agency are drifting from hard news stories and saved by Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) and his team. I have only watched a few episodes but I trying to find time to watch each season through on HBO!

Published by: Samuel Erickson

Weekly News Article: The BBC News takes a deeper look at the statements made in the final 2020 Presidential debate. Are their allegations true or false ?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/election-us-2020-54645608

When I read this week’s topic, I felt that there is something very serious is going to be revealed on me. And when I started to read the articles, I got answers for my curiosities. This week’s topic “Politics, Subversion of Democracy, News (Fake) and Digital Activism” is based on many of the articles, news and reports on how social media platforms are being used by the politicians in order to get their motives fulfilled.

Starting from the article: “Longtime NBC Reporters Quits”, in this article one of the reporter William Arkin stated the mainstream social media as “Prisoners of Donald Trump”. He further stated that his 30 years of career in NBC were the “Trump free” days and now everything is happening as per the requirement of the President. The media has now become puppet in the hands of the politicians.

In one of the memo, he writes, quote, “I find it disheartening that we do not report the failures of the generals and national security leaders. I find it shocking that we essentially condone continued American bumbling in the Middle East and now Africa through our ho-hum reporting.”

In the next article: “The Next Big Focus in the Russia Investigation: Social Media”, it has been stated that for the last nine months, Twitter and Facebook have tried to dodge the intense public scrutiny involved with the investigation into Russian interference in last year’s presidential election. The Congressional investigation are digging in on Russia’s use of Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies to try to influence the 2016 campaign. From both of these articles, what I got to understand that everyone in this world including the politicians are using the social media in order to get their campaigns successful. The social media platforms are considered the most wide spread platforms and are being used by every person of every age.

The CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg gave this statement: “We support Congress in deciding how to best use this information to inform the public, and we expect the government to publish its findings when their investigation is complete”.

My question here to you all is:

What do you think about this campaign?

What are your opinions on the statement of NBC reporter and on the statement of Mark Zuckerberg?

The next article: “Can Facebook Fix Its Own Worst Bug? Has enlighten the fact that Mark Zuckerberg now acknowledges the dangerous side of the social revolution he helped started. But is one of the most powerful tool for connection in human history capable of adapting to the world it created.

And the last article named “The Traffic Factories” the report’s premise is that it is impossible to settle these debates until we understand how people and organizations are producing and using the data and how these information gathered by the internet companies are then used by them either in positive or in negative form.

All of this discussion is based on the fact that Internet has made such changings and is being used in various ways that now it is impossible to stop its diversity. The politicians are getting their missions successful by using the media as per their purposes.

I have chosen this week’s news post on the same topic that is being discussed in order to get all of you understand that how much the politics and the politicians are ruling the internet these days.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/19/55-of-u-s-social-media-users-say-they-are-worn-out-by-political-posts-and-discussions/

This week we had to watch a video on bots. More specifically political bots. This video talks about how bots can put a finger on the political scale in our country. In the first couple minutes it talks about hoe bots played a factor in the EU election and promoted upcoming candidates in Indias election too. It also stated that the Isis terrorist group makes several bot accounts to spread all sorts of propaganda around the world. So basically the groups that use the bot accounts are making it seem like normal people are just expressing there freedom of speech, while in reality these groups are using these accounts to push towards there overall goal in the end game. The videos states that the first time that bots stuck there nose in US presidential elections was in 2012, where Mitt Romney got caught buying bots when his followers drastically went up by a good amount. You can also but thousands of bots for just a low amount of money. In the Trump and Clinton election there were bots used in that as well. After the first debate, over 1/3 of the tweets sent out by both campaigns were bot activity. On twitter they claimed that over 8% of all accounts are non human activity accounts. Considering how many people are on twitter that use it, that’s a very very big number of users that don’t have any human activity that could in fact be a bot.

As a result of all the bot activity on twitter, analysts made a website called Bot or Not which analyzes the twitter accounts based on the frequency of the tweets, types of networks and friends they are connected to, and also the type of message the tweet that’s being sent out conveys.

I think that other countries trying to intervene with our countries business is awful and there should definitely be consequences to it. I was watching the debate last night and this was actually one of the topics disgust. Vice President Joe Biden said that if he is elected, he will punish whoever is doing this.That is of course if he can figure that out because it can be extremely challenging to find such crimes and where they are happening. As far as the bot or not website that was created, I fully support it. Like I said before I don’t think its right for other people in other countries to be participating in our business. The website will ultimately crack down on the bots from the other countries and delete the accounts I’m guessing so I support it and think it was a very good and well needed tool to stop this.The fact that presidents from our campaigns in recent yeas are doing this I think is disgusting. I do believe there should be some type of penalty for doing it too. Its like buying votes in a way, spreading the propaganda all over the internet. The elections should be ethical with little to no interference and I think our country is an will continue to work on his issue.

Check out this article on the debate https://theweek.com/articles/945421/why-joe-biden-won-final-debate

This week in class we had a presentation from group 3 about the book It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, written by Danah Boyd. After we discussed and focused on fake news, politics, and digital activism. I learned more after class by watching the video clip of John Oliver talking about journalism and then looked at the article ”Long time NBC reporter quits…”.

The group’s presentation on the book talked about how teens and adults use different social media platforms, the book also shows her actual conversations with teens about social media and not just drawing conclusions based on other people’s theories. At the end the group’s questions really had to make me think about my answer and even left me speechless and not knowing what I would do or say. After their presentation and recommending this book I may look into reading it when I am less busy with school and athletics.

In John Oliver’s talk about journalism he goes on about how the news and media take information that is on newspapers and they find a way to put them in their own stories. These platforms don’t even do a lot of their own research or reports, instead they use others including the newspapers to get the stories they want out of them, but since the newspaper industry is on the fall, there will be no one for the news and media to gather their information. Oliver ended up giving an example of this video where there were two “reporters”, portrayed by actors looking at the daily newspaper and after seeing a story about puppies and another one about a corrupt politician, they decide to go with the puppies story because they believe it is what the people want to see and will bring in more viewers. That is the problem with media these days and that reporters only care about what will bring in the most viewers and how to make the most amount of money possible. I do believe this to be true in current day situation, although I do think it has started to change because people want to be focused on black lives matter, Covid-19, and the election. These are currently some of the most important events in our lives so we do need to be educated on these topics.

After, I read the article about the NBC reporter quitting and I learned that he ended up quitting because of the journalism that was taking place at NBC. Instead of reporting he said it was more like commentary to what was happening in the world, although he does see how this can be a tough spot for NBC as they are supposed to be non biased in their reportings. This has caused the news to be less in depth and not digging deeper into the story they are reporting. For me I believe all news should be unbiased and promoted that way, because I get to see both sides of the story as well as make up my own mind and not the reporter telling me what is right or wrong. I do know that it can be be hard to be unbiased about everything but news rooms have to do their best otherwise we don’t know if e can trust them.

News Article: The very real consequences of fake news stories and why your brain can’t ignore them

This article shows how fake news stories on the media affects us and the others that are being falsely accused.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/real-consequences-fake-news-stories-brain-cant-ignore