All posts tagged: social-media platforms

Walton Goggins, Zadie Smith, and Lauryn Hill

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer and the author of our Up for Debate newsletter. Conor is dreaming about a Golden Girls reboot starring the Friends cast, reflecting on a poignant but hilarious one-man show from America’s “Roastmaster General,” and wasting time by playing chess on his phone. First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: The Culture Survey: Conor Friedersdorf An actor I would watch in anything: Once upon a time, I would have answered Paul Newman. I’ve long since seen everything he ever made. Then, after watching Deadwood, I thought that I’d watch Timothy Olyphant in anything––so I started watching his portrayal of Raylan Givens, on Justified. But after watching Walton Goggins portray Boyd Crowder …

Why You Maybe Shouldn’t Write a Memoir

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Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. Have you ever thought of writing an autobiography? Lots of noncelebrity people are doing that these days: Memoirs are more common, as we become more comfortable sharing intimate details of our personal lives with strangers. But before you start yours, consider this: What you think is riveting about your life might not seem so to others. As one publisher put it, too many submissions are “just the writer’s own story, which is ultimately boring.” And now that you’re reconsidering your memoir project, you might even think about taking it a step further, and talk less about yourself in general. We like to talk about ourselves because, quite simply, for us it feels good. But like many superficially soothing habits, it comes at a cost to our social lives and overall well-being. With a few nudges, however, this can be quite easily corrected. Roughly 30 to 40 percent of our speech is self-referential, according to a …

The Plight of the Oldest Sister

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Being an eldest daughter means frequently feeling like you’re not doing enough, like you’re struggling to maintain a veneer of control, like the entire household relies on your diligence. At least, that’s what a contingent of oldest sisters has been saying online. Across social-media platforms, they’ve described the stress of feeling accountable for their family’s happiness, the pressure to succeed, and the impression that they aren’t being cared for in the way they care for others. Some are still teens; others have grown up and left home but still feel over-involved and overextended. As one viral tweet put it, “are u happy or are u the oldest sibling and also a girl”? People have even coined a term for this: “eldest-daughter syndrome.” That “syndrome” does speak to a real social phenomenon, Yang Hu, a professor of global sociology at Lancaster University, in England, told me. In many cultures, oldest siblings as well as daughters of all ages tend to face high expectations from family members—so people playing both parts are especially likely to take on …

Social Media’s “Frictionless Experience” for Terrorists

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The incentives of social media have long been perverse. But in recent weeks, platforms have become virtually unusable for people seeking accurate information. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic: Dangerous Incentives “For following the war in real-time,” Elon Musk declared to his 150 million followers on X (formerly Twitter) the day after Israel declared war on Hamas, two accounts were worth checking out. He tagged them in his post, which racked up some 11 million views. Three hours later, he deleted the post; both accounts were known spreaders of disinformation, including the claim this spring that there was an explosion near the Pentagon. Musk, in his capacity as the owner of X, has personally sped up the deterioration of social media as a place to get credible information. Misinformation and violent rhetoric run rampant on X, …

Social Media Is No Longer a Coherent Place for News

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Social media has, once again, become the window through which the world is witnessing unspeakable violence and cruelty in an active war zone. Thousands of people, including children and the elderly, have been killed or injured in Israel and the Gaza Strip since Hamas launched its surprise attack on Saturday—you have probably seen the carnage yourself on X, TikTok, or Instagram. These scenes are no less appalling for their familiarity. But they are familiar. As my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote last year, the history of war is a history of media. The Gulf War demonstrated the power of CNN and the 24/7 cable-news format, foreshadowing the way infotainment would permeate politics and culture for the next 20 years. A series of contentious election cycles from 2008 to 2020, as well as the Arab Spring, the Syrian civil war, and the rise of the Islamic State, showed how social-media platforms democratized punditry and journalism, for better and worse. Commentators were quick to dub Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the “first TikTok war,” as the internet filled with …

Should You Delete Your Kid’s TikTok This Week?

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This week, a teenager might open up their TikTok feed and immediately be served a video about a hairbrush that promises to gently detangle the roughest of tangles. Or a clip about Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift’s rumored romance. Or the app could show them a scene from the Israeli Supernova music festival, where on Saturday a young woman named Noa Argamani was put on the back of a motorcycle as her boyfriend was held by captors. Footage from Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel, and the retaliatory strikes it has prompted, is appearing in social-media feeds across the world. Videos about the conflict have drawn billions of views on TikTok alone, according to The Washington Post, and queries related to it have appeared in the app’s trending searches. Hamas reportedly posted the murder of one grandmother to her own Facebook page. Hamas reportedly captured about 150 hostages, and has threatened to execute them. Some schools in Israel and the United States have asked that parents preemptively delete social-media apps from their children’s devices in order …

The Very Simple Lesson Every Social Network Learns

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During a bizarre interview last week at Vox Media’s Code conference, X CEO Linda Yaccarino was eager to talk about numbers. She said that the platform, formerly known as Twitter, now has 540 million monthly users, along with 225 million daily users, and that “key” user-engagement metrics were “trending very, very positively.” Yaccarino’s appearance was painted as a fiasco for several reasons. She seemed unprepared, rattled by a surprise interview between Kara Swisher and Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, who was driven from his home after Elon Musk put a target on his back. But what about these numbers? If they are real, then they indicate a platform in decline, which isn’t much of a surprise. Celebrities and high-profile figures have fled; hate speech has risen; Musk’s tweets have become erratic and hostile; he’s threatened brands, briefly banned users for promoting links to other social platforms, and is engaged in a battle with the Anti-Defamation League. No one would expect the numbers to be good. The focus on the user metrics …

The Supreme Court Cases That Could Redefine the Internet

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In the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, both Facebook and Twitter decided to suspend lame-duck President Donald Trump from their platforms. He had encouraged violence, the sites reasoned; the megaphone was taken away, albeit temporarily. To many Americans horrified by the attack, the decisions were a relief. But for some conservatives, it marked an escalation in a different kind of assault: It was, to them, a clear sign of Big Tech’s anti-conservative bias. That same year, Florida and Texas passed bills to restrict social-media platforms’ ability to take down certain kinds of content. (Each is described in this congressional briefing.) In particular, they intend to make political “deplatforming” illegal, a move that would have ostensibly prevented the removal of Trump from Facebook and Twitter. The constitutionality of these laws has since been challenged in lawsuits—the tech platforms maintain that they have a First Amendment right to moderate content posted by their users. As the separate cases wound their way through the court system, federal judges (all of whom were nominated …

Elon Musk’s Latest Target Hits Back

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Over the past few days, hundreds of thousands of posts on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, have lambasted a Jewish organization that many people are only vaguely aware of: the Anti-Defamation League. The #BanTheADL campaign, started by overt white nationalists and later boosted by Elon Musk himself, accuses the Jewish civil-rights group of seeking to censor the site’s users, intimidate its advertisers, and generally abrogate American freedoms in service of a sinister liberal agenda. I’m pretty familiar with the ADL. Like many reporters and subject-matter experts on anti-Semitism, I’ve spoken at some of the organization’s events. I haven’t always agreed with its approach, whether on social-media moderation or Israel. But though the ADL doesn’t get everything right, it has a better batting average than most organizations in this difficult space. In any case, as I wrote earlier this week, none of what is happening to the group today has much to do with the specific policies it advocates, whatever their merits. Rather, the ADL is being scapegoated on Twitter for the platform’s own …

The Seven Social-Media Commandments – The Atlantic

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Like any other technology, whether nuclear power or the printing press, social media is only as good as the people who use it—and over the past decade, we haven’t exactly used it well. What began as a promising prospect for connecting communities and amplifying new voices has gradually evolved into an engine for sowing upset, distrust, and conspiracy. As the next generation of social-media sites emerges, one question is: Can we do better? I think so. Rather than holding out for unlikely top-down solutions from Washington or Silicon Valley, users can solve our problems from the bottom up. As individuals, we can’t necessarily make better social-media platforms, but we can make better choices on them. So whether you’re joining a new site like Threads or trying to get more out of an old haunt like Facebook, here are some tips for how to use social media without it using you. Have a block party. In real life, if someone crashed a gathering of strangers and started disrupting conversations while shouting abuse, they’d quickly be bounced …