Week 8 The Promise and Reality of New Media

Question 1

Social Media

Answer 1

• Facebook and Co are new gatekeepers- and thus competitors
• They control infrastructure and thus shape content directly and indirectly
• Yet they refuse to be seen as media companies and solely “tech companies”
• Claim to make the world more open and connected- but how?

Question 2

Facebook Papers (Washington Post)

“A trove of internal Facebook documents reveals that the social media giant has privately and meticulously tracked ___________ exacerbated by its platforms, ignored warnings from its employees about the risks of their design decisions and exposed vulnerable communities around the world to a cocktail of dangerous content.”

Answer 2

real-world harms

Question 3

Facebook Files (WSJ)

Answer 3

• Facebook says all its rules apply to all. Company documents reveal a secret elite that’s exempt
• Facebook knows Instagram is toxic to teen girls
• Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place. It got angrier
• Facebook employees flag drug cartels and human traffickers. The company’s response is weak
• How Facebook hobbled Mark Zuckerberg’s bid to get America vaccinated
• Facebook says AI will clean up the platform. Engineers have doubts
• Facebook increasingly suppresses political movements it deems dangerous
• Facebook services are used to spread religious hatred in India
• Facebook’s internal chat boards show politics often at the center of decision making
• Company survey suggests that Facebook is bad for about 360 million users

Question 4

Key takeaways

Answer 4

• Zuckerberg’s public claims often conflict with internal research
• Facebook dropped its guard before the Jan 26 insurrection
• Facebook fails to effectively police content in much of the world
• Facebook chooses maximum engagement over user safety
• Facebook took years to implement a simple fix for anger and misinformation

Question 5

Who is Francis Haugen?

Answer 5

• 37 year old computer science and Harvard Business school graduate
• Had successful career as Silicon Valley entrepreneur and employee
• Cofounder of popular dating app Hinge and worked at some of the best known companies in tech, including Google and Pinterest
• Accessed documents from the company’s internal social network and took pictures of them
• Felt like her work to identify and rectify the social network’s problems wasn’t going anywhere. Rather than quit, she decided to gather documents and release them publicly
• Revealed herself this month as the Facebook Whistleblower who shared documents (that show the company repeatedly made decisions to incentivize growth and profits over its users’ wellbeing) with Wall Street Journal, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Congress

Question 6

The Mechanics of Meaningful Sharing

Answer 6

• Like: 1 point
• Love: 5
• Angry: 5
• Comment from family or friend: 30
• Comment from acquaintance: 15

Question 7

The change in algorithm (weight decision?) had unhealthy side effects on important slices of public content, such as politics and news.

What were the effects?

Answer 7

• Engagement on positive and policy posts has been severely reduced, leaving parties increasingly reliant on inflammatory posts and direct attacks on competitors

Question 8

What hashtag were Black people on twitter using leading to hilarous, bizarre, and profane posts?

Answer 8

wordsthatleadtotrouble

Hashtags categorize messages to make it easier to search for posts on a specific topic

Question 9

Andre Brock

“Black Twitter is an online gathering (not quite community) of Twitter users who identify as Black and employ Twitter features to do what 3 things?

While there are a number of non-Black and people of color Twitter users who have been “invited to the cookout,” so to speak, participating in Black Twitter requires a deep knowledge of Black culture, commonplaces, and digital practices.”

Answer 9

• Perform Black discourses
• Share Black cultural commonplaces
• Build social affinities

Question 10

Black Twitter Functions

Answer 10

• As an artifact
• As a practice
• As a set of beliefs

Question 11

Black Twitter as an artifact

Answer 11

• Hardware and protocols necessary to use Black Twitter
• Twitter interface

Question 12

Black Twitter as a practice

Answer 12

• Technical and digital literacy conventions
• Discourse conventions
• Black discourse conventions

Question 13

Black Twitter as a set of beliefs

Answer 13

• In group vs out of group beliefs about race and technology

Question 14

Technical affordances

Answer 14

• Similar to text message interfaces
• Mobile and desktop
• Trending topics
• Minimalism and malleability

Question 15

Black Twitter as Counterpublic

Black Twitter as a “digital/virtual space where Blackness frames
the ___________, occasionally breaking free of internal discourses to confront or simply inform wider publics about their concerns

Answer 15

politics of the everyday

Question 16

“For Du Bois, personal (not individual) Black identity is the intersection between Black communal solidarity and a white
supremacist ideology. His formulation acknowledges the hegemony of whiteness without privileging it over the agency and
spiritual energy found within the Black community.

What concept does this quote illustrate?

Answer 16

Double consciousness

Question 17

“Signifyin” as Black Discoursive Identity

Answer 17

• Signifyin a “rhetorical practice unengaged in information giving. Signifyin turns on the play and chain of signifiers” (Gates 1983)
• Call and response
• “it is the articulation of a shared worldview, where recognition
  of the forms plus participation in the wordplay signals membership in the Black community”
• Not just “bland information transfer” but “communal commentary on political and personal realities”
• Public performance of Black identity

Question 18

March 2012: ByteDance is founded in China by entrepreneur Zhang Yimin. Its first hit product is ________, a personalized news aggregator for Chinese users

Answer 18

ByteDance; Toutiao

Question 19

July 2014: Startup ________, later known for an eponymous app used to post short lipsyncing music videos, is founded in China by entrepreneur Alex Zhu

Answer 19

Musical.ly

Question 20

July 2015:Musical.ly hits #1 in the Apple App Store, following a design change that what?

Answer 20

made the company’s logo visible when users shared their videos

Question 21

2016: ByteDance launches _____, a video sharing app for Chinese users. Its popularity inspires the company to spin off a version for foreign audiences called ______

Answer 21

Douyin; Tiktok

Question 22

November 2017: ByteDance acquires Musical.ly for $1 billion. Nine months later, __________

Answer 22

ByteDance merges it with TikTok

Powered by an algorithm that encourages binge-watching, users begin to share a wide variety of video on the app, including dance moves, kitchen food preparation and various “challenges” to perform, record and post acts that range from serious to satirical.

Question 23

February 2019: Rapper Lil Nas X releases the country-trap song “Old Town Road” on TikTok, where it goes viral and pushes the song to a record 17 weeks in the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The phenomenon ____________________________

Answer 23

kicks off a wave of TikTok videos from musical artists who suddenly see TikTok as a critical way to reach fans

Question 24

TikTok settles federal charges of __________ and agrees to pay a $5.7 million fine.

Answer 24

violating U.S. child-privacy laws

Question 25

September 2019: The Washington Post reports that while images of _______________ are common on most social media sites, they are strangely absent on TikTok. The same story notes that TikTok posts with the #trump2020 tag received more than 70 million views

The company insists that TikTok content moderation, conducted in the U.S., is not responsible and says the app is a place for entertainment, not politics.

The Guardian reports on internal documents that reportedly detail how TikTok instructs its moderators to delete or limit the reach of videos touching on ________________

Answer 25

Hong Kong democracy protests and police crackdowns

topics sensitive to China such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and subsequent massacre, Tibetan independence or the sanctioned religious group Falun Gong.

Question 26

October 2019: U.S. politicians begin to raise alarms about TikTok’s influence, calling for ______________ of its Musical.ly acquisition and a national security probe into TikTok and other Chinese-owned apps.

Answer 26

a federal investigation

That investigation begins in November, according to news reports. December 2019: The Pentagon recommends that all U.S. military personnel delete TikTok from all phones, personal and government-issued. Some services ban the app on military owned phones. In January, the Pentagon bans the app from all military phones. TikTok becomes the second-most downloaded app in the world, according to data from analytics firm SensorTower.

Question 27

May 2020: Privacy groups file a complaint alleging TikTok is still violating U.S. child-protection laws and flouting a 2019 settlement agreement. The company “takes the issue of safely seriously” and continues to improve safeguards, it says.

TikTok hires former Disney executive Kevin Mayer as its chief executive officer in an apparent attempt to __________. Mayer resigns three months later.

Answer 27

improve its U.S. relations

Question 28

July 2020: ________ bans TikTok and dozens of other Chinese apps in response to a border clash with China.

President Donald Trump says he is considering banning TikTok as retaliation for ______________

Answer 28

India

China’s alleged mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic

Question 29

August 2020: Trump issues a sweeping but vague executive order banning American companies from any “transaction” with ByteDance and its subsidiaries, including TikTok. Several days later, he issues a second order demanding that ByteDance divest itself of TikTok’s U.S. operations within 90 days. Microsoft confirms it is exploring acquisition of TikTok. The deal never materializes; neither does a similar overture from Oracle and Walmart. TikTok, meanwhile, sues the Trump administration for _______________

Answer 29

alleged violation of due process in its executive orders

Question 30

November 2020: Joe Biden is elected president.

What is his stance on Tiktok and the effect?

Answer 30

He doesn’t offer new policy on TikTok and won’t take office until January, but Trump’s plans to force a sale of TikTok start to unravel anyway. The Trump administration extends the deadlines it had imposed on ByteDance and TikTok and eventually lets them slide altogether.

February 2021: Newly sworn-in President Joe Biden postpones the legal cases involving Trump’s plan to ban TikTok, effectively bringing them to a halt.

Question 31

September 2021: TikTok announces it has ___________ monthly active users.

Answer 31

more than a billion

Question 32

December 2021: A _________ report finds TikTok algorithms can flood teens with a torrent of harmful material such as videos recommending extreme dieting, a form of eating disorder.

Answer 32

Wall Street Journal

Question 33

In February 2022, what does Tiktok do or not do in response to the harmful videos?

Answer 33

TikTok announces new rules to deter the spread of harmful material such as viral hoaxes and promotion of eating disorders.

Question 34

April 2022: “The ______________,” a project created by two fans of the Netflix show as a TikTok project, wins the Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album.

TikTok becomes the most downloaded app in the world, beating out
Instagram, according to SensorTower data.

Answer 34

Unofficial Bridgerton Musical

Question 35

June 2022: _______ reports that China-based ByteDance employees
have repeatedly accessed the nonpublic information of TikTok users, based on leaked recordings from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings. TikTok responds with a vague comment touting its commitment to security that doesn’t directly address the
report. TikTok also announces it has migrated its user data to U.S. servers managed by the U.S. tech firm Oracle. But that doesn’t prevent fresh alarm among U.S. officials about he risk of Chinese authorities accessing U.S. user data.

Answer 35

Buzzfeed

Question 36

February 2022: ____________ raises national security concerns about TikTok, warning that Chinese officials could manipulate the app’s recommendation algorithm for influence operations. ByteDance also said it fired four employees who accessed data on journalists from Buzzfeed News and The Financial Times while attempting to track down leaks of confidential materials about the company.

Answer 36

FBI Director Chris Wrap

Question 37

February 2023: Legislators grill TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew at a six-hour congressional hearing where Chew, a native of Singapore, attempts to ____________

Answer 37

push back on assertions that TikTok and ByteDance are tools of the Chinese government

Question 38

Tiktok Timeline 2024:

-TikTok said it was restricting a tool some researchers use to analyze popular videos on the platform.

What other notable event happened for Tiktok this year/

Answer 38

Buy/sell bill

• A bill to ban TikTok or force its sale to a U.S. company gathers steam in Congress. TikTok brings dozens of its creators to Washington to tell lawmakers to back off, while emphasizing changes the company has made to protect user data. TikTok also annoys
  legislators by sending notifications to users urging them to “speak up now” or risk seeing TikTok banned; users then flood congressional offices with calls.
• The House of Representatives passes the TikTok ban-or-sell bill.
• The Senate follows suit, sending the bill to President Biden, who signs it.
• TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance sue the U.S. federal government to challenge a law that would force the sale of ByteDance’s stake or face a ban, saying that the law is unconstitutional.