Social Media & Big Tech news and discussions

[Time_Traveller]

Bluesky says 1 million people signed up for the platform in last 24 hours

7:37 PM PST · November 14, 2024

Bluesky said Thursday evening that over 1 million people signed up for the platform in the last 24 hours, making it one of the busiest days for the company. This also meant the social network crossed the mark of 16 million users overall.

The platform’s announcement comes hours after Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that Threads had seen more than 15 million sign-ups in November. He added that the Meta-owned platform has had 1 million sign-ups a day for the last three months.

[...]

At the time of writing, the signup surge on Bluesky in the last 24 hours also placed the app at the top of the free apps chart on the App Store in the U.S., followed by ChatGPT and Threads.

Bluesky is still much smaller overall than Threads, which has over 275 million active users, and X. However, the platform’s CEO Jay Graber posted earlier this week that Bluesky has a higher engagement than X.

“We also have a higher percentage of posters than most social sites, which follow a 90-9-1 pattern of lurkers-commenters-posters. We haven’t dipped below ~30% posters,” she said in a separate post.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/14/blues ... -24-hours/


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Stephen King leaves X, describing atmosphere as ‘too toxic’

Fri 15 Nov 2024 10.05 GMT

Stephen King has announced he is quitting X after describing the platform as “too toxic”.

In a post on X on Thursday, the author of The Shining and Shawshank Redemption wrote: “I’m leaving Twitter. Tried to stay, but the atmosphere has just become too toxic.” Referring to the rival platform launched by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, he added: “Follow me on Threads, if you like.”

This week, the Guardian said it would stop posting on X, citing concerns over toxic content on the platform. The German football club St Pauli, the actor Jamie Lee Curtis, the US TV journalist Don Lemon and Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia have also announced they will no longer post on the site.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/ ... -too-toxic

Wow, its definitely getting bigger by the day and all because of Musk and his toxic social media.

[weatheriscool]

[Powers]

[firestar464]

Cannot find OG article

[wjfox]

Bluesky user count:

https://bsky-users.theo.io/

[Time_Traveller]

Bluesky user count:

https://bsky-users.theo.io/

They may hit the 18 million within a few days.

[wjfox]

They may hit the 18 million within a few days.

Probably less than 12 hours at the current rate.

[Powers]

Would suck if X/Twitter became the new Youtube. (See Twitch)

[wjfox]

The majority of news influencers are conservative men, study finds

Nov 18, 2024

This morning, The Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan research organization, published a deep 122 page report that found that the news influencer landscape skews male and leans disproportionately conservative, creating a concerning imbalance in our online news landscape that could ultimately have profound political consequences.

The report is the result of months of research and analysis consisting of surveying over 10,000 U.S. adults about their news consumption habits and analyzing data from hundreds of news content creators across social platforms.

According to Pew's sample, men dominate the news influencer space space by a margin of roughly two to one, comprising 63% of all news content creators compared to just 30% who are women. This gender disparity is compounded by a political tilt: 27% of news influencers explicitly identify as conservative, significantly outnumbering the 21% who lean liberal—a gap that balloons on platforms like Facebook, where right-leaning influencers outnumber left-leaning ones by a staggering three-to-one ratio. 39% of news influencers explicitly identify as conservative on Facebook, compared with just 13% who identify as liberal.

In a media environment where about 4 in 10 adults under 30 regularly get news from news content creators, this imbalance isn’t just inequitable—it’s a systemic distortion of public discourse that ultimately undermines democratic values, entrenches conservative messaging, and accelerates polarization. I've written before about how desperately the left needs to build an infrastructure to amass online influence, these stats highlight just how urgent that mission is.

Over the past two decades, as I outlined in my book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, our media ecosystem has become fragmented and entirely reoriented around online influence. Content creators are directly reshaping how millions of people understand the world and they largely come from outside traditional journalism. Just 23% of news influencers studied were currently or previously ever employed by a news organization.

https://www.usermag.co/p/the-majority-o ... nfluencers

[weatheriscool]

[Powers]

Well deserved.

[Time_Traveller]

Congrats to them, at the start of next month I will be one of the newer users too.

[caltrek]

The Impact of Misinformation on Spanish-language Social Media Platforms
November 19, 2024

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) US Latinos who rely on social media in Spanish for their news are more vulnerable to political misinformation than those who use English-language social media, according to a study. Misinformation swirls on social media in every language, but social media companies struggle to combat disinformation circulating in Spanish on major social media platforms. In a study done in partnership with Jonathan Nagler of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics as part of the group’s Bilingual Election Monitor project, Marisa Abrajano and colleagues surveyed over 1,000 English-dominant, bilingual, and Spanish-dominant Latino users of Facebook and Instagram in the US, offering a monetary incentive for participation. Each participant was asked whether they believed seven false political narratives, including the claim that Venezuela was intentionally sending criminals to the US, the claim that most Planned Parenthood clinics have closed down across the country in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, and the claim that the COVID-19 vaccine can make breast milk dangerous to infants. Latinos who use Spanish-language social media for news were 11 percentage points more likely to believe in false political narratives than those who use English-language social media for news. According to the authors, the study offers evidence that misinformation circulating on social media in Spanish leads to factually inaccurate political beliefs, which could have important consequences for democracy.

Read more of the Eurekalert article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1064996

For a presentation of study results as published in PNAS Nexus https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/arti ... /7900260

This could be an important factor explaining why Latinos are now voting for Republican candidates like Trump in greater percentages than in previous times.

[caltrek]

Researchers Indicate Social Media Users Probably Won’t Read Beyond This Headline
November 20, 2024

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Congratulations. Reading this far into the story is a feat not many will accomplish, especially if shared on Facebook, according to a team led by Penn State researchers. In an analysis of more than 35 million public posts containing links that were shared extensively on the social media platform between 2017 and 2020, the researchers found that around 75% of the shares were made without the posters clicking the link first. Of these, political content from both ends of the spectrum was shared without clicking more often than politically neutral content.

The findings, which the researchers said suggest that social media users tend to merely read headlines and blurbs rather than fully engage with core content, appeared today (Nov. 19) in Nature Human Behavior. While the data were limited to Facebook, the researchers said the findings could likely map to other social media platforms and help explain why misinformation can spread so quickly online.

“It was a big surprise to find out that more than 75% of the time, the links shared on Facebook were shared without the user clicking through first,” said corresponding author S. Shyam Sundar, Evan Pugh University Professor and the James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects at Penn State. “I had assumed that if someone shared something, they read and thought about it, that they’re supporting or even championing the content. You might expect that maybe a few people would occasionally share content without thinking it through, but for most shares to be like this? That was a surprising, very scary finding.”

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1065586

[Powers]

And how many open the news sources in this forum?

[Time_Traveller]

And how many open the news sources in this forum?

I open most of the news sources on this forum, even though I will be going back to Social media soon, I will still be continuing to do it on topics I enjoy and read.

[Powers]

And how many open the news sources in this forum?

I open most of the news sources on this forum, even though I will be going back to Social media soon, I will still be continuing to do it on topics I enjoy and read.

I honestly only do it on Phys and MedicalXpress.

There's also https://techxplore.com/ apparently too.

[Time_Traveller]

I am planning to go onto these 4 decentralised social medias from the 1st December and wanted to share these videos on them on what they are about and how to use them. The Hive video is at least 2 years old.

[caltrek]

Appeals Court Upholds TikTok Ban
by Eric Smalley
Updated December 6, 2024

Introduction:

(The Conversation) A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Dec. 6, 2024, upheld a law requiring TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell the video app by Jan. 19, 2025, or face a nationwide ban on the app. The court rebuffed TikTok’s claim that the law violates its First Amendment rights.

The appeals court ruling is the latest development in a lengthy saga over the fate of an app that is widely popular, especially among young Americans, but that many politicians in Washington say is a security risk.

The ruling is unlikely to be the end of the story. TikTok is expected to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, though the court could refuse to hear the appeal. President-elect Donald Trump has reversed his earlier support for banning the app under its current ownership and stated during his 2024 presidential campaign that he would “save” the app, though he has not said how he would attempt to do so.

But why is TikTok controversial? Are the claims of it being a national security risk valid? And what will the case mean for free speech? The Conversation’s contributors have been on hand to answer these questions.

Read more here: https://theconversation.com/appeals-co ... es-239160

[weatheriscool]