reseach paper
chanel01
article2.pdf
Social Media Explosion Do social networking sites threaten privacy rights?
F rom Facebook to the photo-sharing site Pinterest to
virtual adventure games, software that helps people
meet, converse, work and compete with others is
drawing billions online. The use of social media
comes with a price, however. Every photo upload or click of a
“like” button deposits users’ personal data online, much of which
is sold to help businesses target advertising. To some, such data
mining endangers long-cherished privacy rights, but social media
supporters say it is a small price to pay for the benefits of online
socializing. Meanwhile, critics of social media express concern that
many members of the digital generation may fail to develop vital
communication skills because they prefer virtual contact over face-
to-face conversations. But proponents say most people use social
media not to avoid others but to stay in touch with them.
I
N
S
I
D
E
THE ISSUES ......................83
CHRONOLOGY ..................91
BACKGROUND ..................92
CURRENT SITUATION ..........96
AT ISSUE..........................97
OUTLOOK........................99
BIBLIOGRAPHY................102
THE NEXT STEP ..............103
THISREPORT
More than 170 million Americans use social media to communicate with each other online, but critics say
the technology can endanger privacy rights and hamper the development of vital, face-to-face
interpersonal skills.
CQResearcher Published by CQ Press, an Imprint of SAGE Publications, Inc.
www.cqresearcher.com
CQ Researcher • Jan. 25, 2013 • www.cqresearcher.com Volume 23, Number 4 • Pages 81-104
RECIPIENT OF SOCIETY OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE � AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION SILVER GAVEL AWARD
90th Anniversary
1923-2013
82 CQ Researcher
THE ISSUES
83 • Do social media fostergreater community engage- ment? • Are social media making personal relationships more difficult? • Are social media eroding privacy?
BACKGROUND
92 Social LifeThe Internet quickly be- came an instrument for socializing.
93 Social MediaThe first social networking site was SixDegrees.com.
95 Social EverywhereMobile-device users are connected to social media at all times.
96 Who’s in Charge?Online ads target social media users based on their personal data.
CURRENT SITUATION
96 Profits and ControlMany social media users want to control how their data is used.
98 Limiting AccessNew laws address con- cerns that social media invade privacy.
OUTLOOK
99 Changing Expectations?Social media have fostered a “participatory culture” among young people.
SIDEBARS AND GRAPHICS
84 Sports, EntertainmentDominate Twitter The Japanese movie “Castle in the Sky” generated thousands of tweets.
85 Teens Flocking to FacebookNine in 10 U.S. teens use the popular website.
87 Social Media Becoming aWorrisome Distraction “If you take the technology away, you’ll lose people in minutes.”
88 Social Media Engage Consumers Consumer products are discussed more often than political issues on social networking sites.
89 Facebook Use SoarsAbout half the U.S. population uses Facebook at least once a month.
91 ChronologyKey events since 1996.
92 Online Anonymity StirsControversy Do real-name-only policies stop abusive behavior?
97 At Issue:Will social media’s use of facial-recognition technology destroy privacy?
FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
101 For More InformationOrganizations to contact.
102 BibliographySelected sources used.
103 The Next StepAdditional articles.
103 Citing CQ ResearcherSample bibliography formats.
SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOSION
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Social Media Explosion
THE ISSUES R
andi Zuckerberg — Facebook’s former marketing director and
sister of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg — should have known better. After she posted a family
photo for her Facebook friends, the picture popped up in the Twitter feed of someone not on Ms. Zucker- berg’s “friend” list. 1 “Not sure where you got this photo,” she tweeted angrily. “I post- ed it only to friends. You re- posting it on Twitter is way uncool.” But the error was Zucker-
berg’s. Even though she had guided Facebook’s market- ing, she hadn’t remembered one of the company’s com- plex rules for figuring out which postings are private. The person who tweeted the picture was a Facebook friend of a different Zuckerberg sister in the photo. Because that sister was named — “tagged,” in Facebook par- lance — as one of the photo’s sub- jects, the picture was visible to all her Facebook friends as well, despite sis- ter Randi’s intention to only share it privately. It’s a typical confusion of the so-
cial media era, when mushrooming numbers of photos and other person- al information are being placed on- line with no consensus about whether any of it should remain private or viewable by only a few, and, if so, how to accomplish that. The Internet has been a haven for
socializing since its earliest days, but beginning about a decade ago tech- nology developers have focused like a laser on “social media” — software
designed primarily to facilitate social interaction — as the key to drawing the public online. Today, social media include social networks such as Face- book that allow people to reach out to friends of friends; the photo-sharing site Pinterest; the collaboratively writ- ten Wikipedia encyclopedia; the “user review” sections at retail websites such as Amazon; “virtual worlds” such as “World of Warcraft” where people from around the world meet, compete, col- laborate and play adventure games to- gether, and many more. Software that helps people meet,
converse, work and play with others is king of the online universe, and its popularity keeps growing. As of July
2011, nearly 164 million Amer- icans were using social media, according to the New York City- based media-research compa- ny Nielsen, and by July 2012 the number had risen 5 per- cent, to about 172 million. 2
While research is in its earliest stages, some analysts believe that because young people, especially, have shift- ed so much social energy on- line, social media may end up having profound effects not just on privacy but on both individual human rela- tionships and how people re- late to their communities. Facebook CEO Zuckerberg
has famously said that, because of social networks, privacy is no longer a “social norm.” “People have really gotten
comfortable not only sharing more information and dif- ferent kinds, but more open- ly and with more people,” said Zuckerberg. That new social norm is “just some- thing that has evolved over time,” he said. 3
But some analysts argue that privacy protections are cru-
cial. “The No. 1 problem is that the Unit- ed States doesn’t have data-protection” requirements, says Alice Marwick, an assistant professor in communication and media studies at Fordham Uni- versity in New York City. “The No. 2 problem,” she says, “is that the mar- ket impulse goes in the opposite di- rection” from privacy protection, promising huge financial rewards to social media companies that sell users’ information for targeted marketing ef- forts and the like. Little is known about how social
media may be affecting human relation- ships. However, some analysts fear that social media are being seen as a re- placement for face-to-face conversation.
BY MARCIA CLEMMITT
G e tt y I m a g e s/ M ik e E h rm a n n
Linebacker Manti Te’o of the University of Notre Dame is at the center of an Internet hoax involving his two-year online relationship with a non-existent young woman
who Te’o said had died of cancer. The situation constitutes “a terrible statement about where we are
today and how social media is a tool in some really bad stuff,” said Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick.
Te’o says he did not know it was a hoax.
84 CQ Researcher
In a survey on favored communica- tion modes, people born between 1990 and 1999 said they prefer tex- ting above all other forms of com- munication, but in second place — tied with instant messaging and phone calls — is communicating via Face- book. Strikingly, face-to-face conver- sation is the least favored form of com- munication for the digital generation. That’s a stark reversal of the survey preferences voiced by each genera- tional cohort born between 1946 and 1989. All those groups put face-to-face conversation as their preferred con- versational mode, and none even list- ed a social media technology. 4
“Many kids say they prefer not to talk face to face,” notes Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at Califor- nia State University, Dominguez Hills. Instead, he says, they rely on written communication only, mainly via text or social media sites, especially when communicating with adults. That choice might damage young people’s com- munication skills for years to come, Rosen says. When people rely entire- ly on written messages “where you don’t have access to [nonverbal] cues, things are ripe for miscommunication,” he says. Furthermore, without enough practice observing how people com- municate through tone and gesture, it becomes difficult to accurately read face-to-face conversations that do take place, he says. Some worry that a preference for
social media over face-to-face meet- ings may make it easier and more tempting to commit identity fraud and hoaxes. For example, although exact- ly who was involved in the elaborate hoax is not yet clear, it was recently revealed that star Notre Dame line- backer Manti Te’o engaged in a two- year online relationship with a non- existent young woman who Te’o said died of cancer. He says he did not know it was a hoax. The situation constitutes “a terrible statement about where we are today and how social
SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOSION
Sports, Entertainment Dominate Twitter
The Japanese animated movie “Castle in the Sky” was the subject of more than 25,000 tweets per second during its December 2011 broadcast, the most related to any event between January 2011 and February 2012. The most heavily tweeted events during the period, as measured in tweets per second, were in sports and entertainment.
Source: Brian Anthony Hernandez, “The Top 15 Tweets-Per-Second Records,” Mashable, February 2012, mashable.com/2012/02/06/tweets-per-second-records-twitter
Events With Most Tweets Per Second, January 2011-February 2012
0 5,000 10,000 15,000 20,000 25,000 30,000
Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami (March 11, 2011)
LeBron James Tweet During NBA Finals (June 13, 2011)
Steve Jobs Dies (Oct. 6, 2011)
UEFA Champions League Soccer Final (May 28, 2011)
BET [Black Entertainment Television]
Awards (June 27, 2011)
New Year’s Day in Japan (Jan. 1, 2011)
Steve Jobs’ Resignation From Apple (Aug. 25, 2011)
Brazil Elimination From Copa America Soccer
Tournament (July 17, 2011)
End of FIFA Women’s World Cup (July 17, 2011)
Execution of convicted murderer Troy Davis
(Sept. 20, 2011)
Beyoncé at the MTV Video Music Awards (Aug. 28, 2011)
Tim Tebow’s Overtime Touch- down Pass vs. Pittsburgh
Steelers (Jan. 6, 2012)
Final Minutes of Super Bowl XLVI (Feb. 5, 2012)
Madonna’s Super Bowl Halftime
Performance (Feb. 5, 2012)
Euro 2012 Soccer Finale, Spain’s Fourth
Goal vs. Italy (July 1, 2012)
“Castle in the Sky” on TV (Dec. 9, 2011) 25,088
15,358
10,245
9,420
8,868
7,671
7,196
7,166
7,064
6,939
6,436
6,303
6,049
5,531
5,530
10,245
G e
tt y
I m
a g
e s
/J a
m ie
S q
u ir
e
Tweets per second
Jan. 25, 2013 85www.cqresearcher.com
media is a tool in some really bad stuff,” said Notre Dame athletic direc- tor Jack Swarbrick. 5
Others see little reason for worry. Most “digital natives” — the genera- tion that has grown up online — do not appear to be living their person- al lives much differently than older generations, says Kaveri Subrah- manyam, a professor of psychology at California State University, Los Ange- les. Most use social media mainly “to connect to people already in their lives” and “do the things they’d do anyway” in the physical world, she says. “So- cially, I don’t think that we need to be too concerned,” at least about the average person. The Internet’s potential to ignite a
more civically engaged populace by making policy information and political debate easily accessible has excited spec- ulation since the world first went on- line. Now, the dominance of social media — which spark intense online engage- ment by many people in social and en- tertainment matters, for example — has further fueled those hopes. Research suggests that social media
are leading to increased political ac- tivity, says Joseph Kahne, a professor of education at Mills College, in Oak- land, Calif., and chairman of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Net- work on Youth and Participatory Pol- itics. In a survey, 41 percent of young people reported engaging in what Kahne terms “participatory politics” — individual efforts to influence public policy outside the sphere of institu- tions such as political parties. 6 Their methods include tweeting support for a cause or forwarding a news article about an issue. This kind of person- al political engagement is “happening more and more” among young peo- ple of all races and ethnicities, he says. An example occurred in January
2012, when the Dallas-based Susan G. Komen Foundation, which supports breast cancer research and treatment, announced it would no longer fund
programs offered by Planned Parent- hood, Kahne notes. The announce- ment triggered a storm of furious com- mentary on Twitter, Facebook and other online sites — some from indi- viduals and some from organizations — and three days later the founda- tion reversed course. 7
Participatory politics played a big role in the incident, in which a powerful organization was prodded to change its position, at least partly because of in- fluence from everyday people, says Kahne. The influence “didn’t generally run through institutions” such as lobby- ists or lawmakers, he says. Instead, “a lot of people posted stuff on Face- book pages. It went viral.” Despite the growing prevalence of
such events, social media probably are not causing more people to become interested in politics and policy, as some Internet analysts have long hoped, Kahne says. Most people who engage in the new participatory politics would have been following politics anyway, he says. However, social media have provided new ways for people to turn
their interest into deeper involvement and influence, he says. As Internet users and technology
analysts ponder how the burgeoning world of social media may be chang- ing people’s lives, here are some of the questions being asked:
Do social media foster greater community engagement? Through social media such as Twitter
and Facebook, friends can urge friends to become involved in causes, and ad- vocacy groups can reach out to mil- lions. Social-media skeptics, however, wonder how much of this new en- gagement is useful. During riots in London in August
2011, triggered by economic unrest and a police shooting, “we have seen extraordinary acts of pro-active social engagement” carried out on social media, wrote Kate Crawford, a prin- cipal researcher at the corporate think tank Microsoft Research, in Boston, and an associate professor of media at Australia’s University of New South Wales, in Sydney. A Facebook and
Teens Flocking to Facebook
Nine in 10 Americans ages 13 to 17 use Facebook, making it the most popular social networking site. Experts say the multimedia appeal of Facebook and its ease of use are helping to drive its popu- larity among teenagers.
Source: “The Digital Divide,” McAfee, June 2012, www.mcafee.com/ us/about/news/2012/q2/20120625-01.aspx
89.5%
Most Popular Websites Visited by U.S. Teens Ages 13-17, May 2012
0
20
40
60
80
100%
Four- square or other location-
based services
MyspacePinterest4chanTumblrGoogle+TwitterFacebook
48.7% 41.5%
33% 23% 20% 18%
12.2%
86 CQ Researcher
Twitter campaign under the hashtag #riotcleanup “rallied people to clean up the streets,” wrote Crawford. On Twitter and Tumblr — a social net- work and blog website that makes it easy for users to follow other users’ blogs — citizen journalists writing from the field “made substantive contribu- tions to media coverage,” she said. 8
Social media make supporting and organizing causes easier than in the past and are especially effective in get- ting people already interested in pol- itics to take a more active role, says Daniel Kreiss, an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. For example, thanks to social media, “I can give a small do- nation much easier — instantaneous- ly” in fact, he says. Debating public issues can now be done from home, for free, via social media channels such as Twitter, Tumblr blogs, and newspaper and blog comment sec- tions. In the past, self-publishing a pamphlet cost at least a bit of cash, and figuring out how to get it to po- tentially interested people was ex- tremely difficult, Kreiss notes. President Obama’s 2008 and 2012
campaign operations used Facebook ef- fectively to encourage supporters to con- tact particular Facebook “friends” who analysts determined were promising tar- gets for a vote-Obama pitch, Kreiss says. “A strong activist community is one
that is unified and [has] a sense of ca- maraderie,” wrote Charles Harris, a po- litical science major and 2011 graduate of Western Kentucky University Honors College, in Bowling Green, who orga- nized his local university chapter of a national peace and sustainability group. Facebook is an ideal place to bring ac- tivists together because the frequent in- teraction people experience on social media can increase “comfort levels in interaction during regular meetings” in real life, he said. 9
Some observers argue, however, that the role of big-name social media such
as Twitter has been overblown when it comes to organizing protests. Western commentators have claimed
that Iranians used Twitter to organize protests after a contested June 2009 election. But, in fact, Twitter was used only minimally, according to Golnaz Esfandiari, an Iranian-born blogger and a senior correspondent for the U.S.-funded agency Radio Free Europe, which broadcasts to Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East. Most of the Twitter feeds Westerners quot- ed as evidence of Twitter’s role were in English, and “no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordi- nate protests in Iran would be writ- ing in any language other than Farsi,” Esfandiari said. Twitter may actually have had a destructive influence on the protests because it eased the spread of unsubstantiated rumors, she said. 10
In social media’s early days, Inter- net theorists “had this amazing opti- mism that as the cost of [becoming engaged and engaging others] falls, then everyone was going to be en- gaged in public issues,” says Kreiss. “But it turns out that there’s always a ceiling, in money, in skills, in time.” It’s now clear that while many who were already interested in public is- sues are more deeply engaged be- cause of social media, the greatly broad- ened participation once predicted is highly unlikely to happen, he says. With ever-increasing amounts of in-
formation about individuals available from social networks such as Face- book, political campaigns can target their messages to only the very small slice of the electorate prone to be per- suadable, and that could be danger- ous to democracy, wrote Kreiss and Philip N. Howard, an associate pro- fessor of communication at the Uni- versity of Washington in Seattle. “Scholars have long feared a ‘democ- ratic deficit’ ” when campaigns com- municate only with the handful of vot- ers they believe will respond to specific pitches so that successful can-
didates, in effect, end up representing only those people, they wrote. 11
Social media communications and relationships are too short and shal- low to spur deep commitment, argues best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell, a journalist who writes about social- science research. Effective activists for high-stakes
causes such as the 1960s civil rights marches almost invariably have a high degree of personal connection to the movement, with many real-life friends — the kind “who talk late into the night with one another” — also in- volved, he wrote. “The kind of ac- tivism associated with social media isn’t like this at all,” Gladwell argues. Twit- ter “is a way of following . . . people you may never have met,” while Face- book is “for keeping up with the peo- ple you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with.” Such acquain- tances are useful for passing along new information about causes one might consider supporting, but they aren’t personally compelling enough to inspire the hard work of true ac- tivism, he argues. 12
Are social media making person- al relationships more difficult? With many people communicating
with friends more online than off these days, debate is growing about whether that trend is healthy for human rela- tionships. “It’s a tough area to study because
it’s all so new,” says California State’s Rosen. “There are no answers yet.” Some trends are emerging, however,
Rosen and other researchers say. Teens are showing “a decrease in
risk taking” from previous generations when it comes to expressing them- selves and interacting with other peo- ple, says Katie E. Davis, an assistant professor at the University of Wash- ington Information School in Seattle. “It’s hard to know how much of this comes from technology,” but many teenagers today hold back on intimacy
SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOSION
Jan. 25, 2013 87www.cqresearcher.com
by forgoing face-to-face conversations whenever possible in favor of writing on a Facebook wall or texting — modes of communication that encourage much briefer and less open-ended dialogue than do more traditional approaches such as face-to-face talk or even email, she says. “It feels much safer to broach un-
comfortable subjects when you don’t
have to look someone in the eye,” says Davis. “It takes a lot of the messi- ness out of relationships, but it means that you don’t make yourself vulner- able,” Davis says. That can be a prob- lem because vulnerability is a key to strong relationships, she says. Many teens also seem constrained
when it comes to expressing differ- ent aspects of themselves freely, Davis
says. Traditionally, “adolescence is a time of experimentation,” when peo- ple try on many roles and are con- cerned with self-expression, she points out. But, she adds, in a Facebook- dominated world many say “that how they present themselves online is very public, something that friends” and even parents and college admissions officers might scrutinize and judge,
T he allure of socializing online has created a nation of mobile-device obsessives, many of whom can go bare- ly 10 minutes without checking their smartphones for
Twitter or Facebook messages. But the long-term consequences of this behavior are difficult to determine. Some believe that whatever the psychological and relationship-
related changes that may stem from this new form of interaction, social media obsession may already be altering how people think and learn. Single-minded focus on a person, object or concept seems
to be the first casualty, making the age of online socializing also the age of multitasking, says Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills. When electronic devices were first becoming ubiquitous,
some hoped they would teach a new generation how to multi- task better than previous generations did. But research indicates that people who grew up with electronic devices “really can’t multitask” either, says Rosen. As a result, the typical technology- obsessed person now gives “continuous partial attention” to just about everything and full attention to almost nothing. “You never do anything in depth,” he says. “You’re constantly interrupted, and you’re self-interrupting,”
too, he says. The very nature of the brain seems to decree that, for many activities, people simply can’t do two or more tasks at once. In addition, while the brain can switch rapidly from task to task, doing so takes more time to do the tasks. In addition, he says, “You simply don’t do as thorough a job,” and some tasks simply aren’t amenable to being done in a shallow way. The repeated switching of attention also “adds to one’s stress.” Some analysts say evidence may already be showing that
technology-driven multitasking takes a toll on one’s ability to per- form the most complex mental tasks. “I’m not sure I’m able to write in the same concentrated way” as before the saturation of digital media began, says Kaveri Subrahmanyam, a professor of psychology at California State University, Los Angeles. “And I’m teaching 20-year-olds who seem to have less memory than I do.” The sleep disruptions that accompany social technology may
help account for cognitive changes, Subrahmanyam suggests. The
“digital native” generation — teens and young 20-somethings who have grown up with these technologies —“sleep with the cell phone and get up in the middle of the night to respond to texts,” she says. While the long-term effects of such behavior are un- known, research has shown that “frequent sleep interruptions make it harder for the brain to consolidate the day’s learning and memories,” she says. Because technologically aided social connection is not going
away, society must figure out how to adapt to these changes, says Rosen. He recommends “tech breaks” — for classrooms and even family dinners — to help people tolerate the anxi- ety many feel when unable to check their online social worlds. Banning cell phones from the classroom or dinner table
doesn’t work, he says. “If you take the technology away, you’ll lose people in three to five minutes. They’ll start to zone out” because of the anxiety of knowing they can’t check their phones, he says. Anxious people aren’t able to pay attention, he says. If, instead, people can check their phones every five min-
utes, for example, that anxiety is defused, and the intervals be- tween phone-checking time can be increased gradually, he says. Mental focus matters, and social media may pose a partic-
ular threat to it, says Rosen. His research team conducted detailed observations of 263
middle school, high school and university students while they studied at home for 15 minutes. Not surprisingly, most were surrounded by technology and remained at one task just three to five minutes before losing focus. One finding from the re- search “stunned” Rosen, though: “If the students checked Face- book just once during the 15-minute study period, they had a lower grade-point average.” Thanks to always-available social media, Rosen argues, many young people spend their days constantly simmering in anxiety about whether they’ve heard from online friends, and “anxiety inhibits learning.” 1
— Marcia Clemmitt
1 Larry Rosen, “Driven to Distraction: Our Wired Generation,” Pioneer Press [St. Paul, Minn.], Nov. 12, 2012, www.twincities.com/opinion/ci_21982260/larry- rosen-driven-distraction-our-wired-generation.
Social Media Becoming a Worrisome Distraction “If you take the technology away, you’ll lose people in minutes.”
88 CQ Researcher
she says. Then, because the online and offline social worlds are increas- ingly intertwined, many teens end up presenting themselves in both arenas
as what Davis terms “packaged, pol- ished selves” who conform to what- ever image they believe fits best in their social circle, without allowing
eccentric pictures or negative emo- tions or unusual interests to show. “Everything’s happy on Facebook” even if it’s not, she says. As the online world migrates to mo-
bile devices through which social media are readily available 24 hours a day, new concerns arise. A 2011 study found that smart-
phone users are developing “checking habits” — recurring 30-second glances at social media such as Facebook — as often as every 10 minutes. 13
“Just the fact that we’re constantly pulling our phones out” is evidence “that we’re becoming anxious,” says Rosen. “An obsession is something that builds up an anxiety so that we have to do something about it to relieve it” — in this case, check for contact from one’s social group, he says. (See side- bar, p. 87.) Camp directors interviewed by the
University of Washington’s Davis see this anxiety growing rampant among “helicopter parents,” Davis says. To avoid being out of touch with their away-at-camp children, some parents now equip their youngster with two cell phones so that when the camp director asks for one to be handed over, the child still has a hidden one. “Parents expect to see pictures of their children on a camp’s website” daily, something unheard of just a few years ago, Davis says. “Digital natives” are “always con-
nected, never alone,” says Subrah- manyam, at California State University, Los Angeles. This fact may translate into overblown
fears of being alone, according to some analysts. “We have a generation of young adults who, due to no fault of their own, have grown dependent on continuous technological connec- tion,” wrote Vivian Diller, a psycholo- gist in New York City. With so little experience dealing with “frustration or loneliness,” Diller wonders how a cell phone-dependent generation will deal with such feelings. 14
SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOSION
Social Media Engage Consumers
Social media users are more likely to turn to social networking sites to talk about consumer products (bottom graph) than to engage in discussions about political or social issues (top). Consumers are especially interested in learning about others’ experience with products and in researching information on goods and services.
Sources: “Social Media and Political Engagement: Summary of Findings,” Pew Internet & American Life Project, October 2012, pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/ Political-engagement/Summary-of-Findings.aspx; “State of the Media: The Social Media Report 2012,” Nielsen, 2012, p. 20, blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/social/2012
Percent of social media users who . . .
0% 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
Share money incentives
Express concerns and complaints about brands and services
Compliment brands
Learn more about brands,
products and services
Hear others’ experiences with
consumer products
Repost content on political
or social issues
Post own political or social commentary
Encourage people to vote
“Like” or promote material on political
or social issues
Political and Social
Issues
Consumer Issues
38%
35%
34%
33%
70%
65%
53%
50%
47%
Percentage of social media users
Jan. 25, 2013 89www.cqresearcher.com
The more one’s Facebook friends include people from different spheres — such as extended family, school friends and work colleagues — the greater one’s social stress, according to researchers at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh. “Facebook used to be like a great party for all your friends where you can dance, drink and flirt,” said Ben Marder, a fellow at the uni- versity’s business school. “Now with your mum, dad and boss there, the party becomes an anxious event full of potential social landmines.” 15
But many researchers also note that qualms and difficulties always accom- pany new technology and that some evidence indicates that much social media use is benign. In young people’s quick embrace
of social media, it’s clear that they con- stitute “a primal way to satisfy the eter- nal need for social connection,” says Subrahmanyam. Social media tools clearly help
some people, says Rosen. For exam- ple, studies show that for people with mild or major depression, “having many friends on Facebook helps” improve moods, in the same way that talking on the phone does. In addition, “we’ve actually found
that practicing being empathetic on- line” — such as by commenting pos- itively on someone’s online postings — “can help you learn to be empa- thetic in the real world,” says Rosen. “Now we’re looking at whether kids can learn other social skills online,” such as taking turns and “expressing what you say in nicer terms,” and then translate those skills into offline situ- ations where they’re needed.
Are social media eroding privacy? As people navigate the Internet, so-
cial media and data-analysis compa- nies gather information about every- thing from what magazine articles they read to what times of day they log on to websites and whose birthday parties they attend. Statistical analysts
aggregate that information into pro- files that businesses use to target ads and political campaigns milk for in- sight into whether voters are per- suadable. To some, this aspect of social media
spells the end of the very notion of privacy — the idea that all people have the right and should have the ability to determine for themselves who can see their personal informa- tion. But others say allowing such “data mining” for commercial and other purposes is a reasonable price to pay for the services social media provide. Internet users are likely unaware of
how aggressive companies are about using personal information, wrote soft- ware developer Dave Winer, who says the current climate “scares” him.
“I have always assumed everything I post to Facebook is public,” but com- panies now use information that we leave behind simply by visiting web- sites, without ever clicking a “Like” but- ton or posting a comment, Winer wrote. “What clued me in was an ar- ticle on [the technology blog] Read- WriteWeb that says that just reading an article on their site may create an an- nouncement on Facebook” that will go out to all of one’s Facebook followers — a group that includes not just one’s Facebook “friends” but people, includ- ing strangers, who have signed up to get access to public posts. “People joke that privacy is over, but I don’t think they imagined that the disclosures would be so proactive.” 16
As the archives of personal data grow, interest increases in examining them for many purposes. In the past, college admissions of-
ficers viewed only information pro- vided by applicants or available from public sources, such as schools or gov- ernment agencies. A recent survey of medical school and residency admis- sions officers, however, found that while only 9 percent said they routinely used material from social networks to make admissions decisions, 53 percent said evidence of unprofessional behavior found on such sites could jeopardize a candidate’s spot. 17
The Obama campaign had access to more than 500 points of data for every member of the public, including data from surveys, commercial and fi- nancial transactions, magazine sub- scriptions and so on, says Kreiss of the University of North Carolina. “None of it is very meaningful” on its own, he says. However, because analysts have data for literally hundreds of millions of people, they can use statistical pat- terns to construct a profile of the per- son most likely to be swayed to vote for a candidate, he says. Kreiss believes campaigns should
be required to reveal basic informa- tion about how they use personal data.
Facebook Use Soars
About half the U.S. population, or 152 million Americans, are expected to log in to Facebook at least once a month this year, up from 84 million in 2009.
* forecast
Source: “Number of Facebook Users in the United States From 2009 to 2013 (in Millions),” Statista, 2013, www. statista.com/statistics/183089/forecast- of-the-number-of-facebook-users-in- the-us/
Number of Americans Who Use Facebook at Least Once
a Month, 2009 and 2013
(in millions)
84.3
0
50
100
150
200
2013*2009
152.1
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SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOSION
“We don’t know if the data is secure or how campaigns target certain peo- ple” to receive particular individual- ized ads, he says. For example, today campaigns send
certain ads to people who access the Internet over a smartphone, different ads to people who use a computer or tablet and very negative ads only to care- fully chosen voters. Since the Supreme Court has ruled that it is constitutional to require transparency of political advertis- ers, “there should be a disclosure on every individually targeted ad that ex- plains: ‘Why am I seeing this ad?’ ” he argues. 18
Nevertheless, Kreiss doesn’t think the data give campaigns a creepy superpower to manipulate voters. “An ad that’s specifically targeted to me still won’t make me turn into a Republican. Ads work on the margin,” convincing only a very narrow subset of people who are ripe for changing their minds, he says. The difficulty of drawing truly ac-
curate conclusions about people from even the largest amounts of data may be the biggest problem, said Alessan- dro Acquisiti, an associate professor of information technology and public pol- icy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College. Companies sell data-mining and pro-
file-assembly services to employers looking for guidance on which job candidates to hire and advertisers seek- ing to woo customers who might be particularly influential among their peers. Today, some organizations even use facial-recognition software to link
people in photos to their Facebook profiles to ferret out more details about them. But analogous experiments car- ried out by his research team demon- strate that such operations should be regarded with mistrust because it’s far too easy to jump to a sure-feeling — but dead wrong — conclusion about someone based on information they reveal online, Acquisiti said. “We tend
to make strong extrapolations about weak data,” he said. 19
Other analysts argue that privacy violations are not a problem, even in some of the most massive databases. Businesses that use social media
information to target advertising col- lect the data and target the ads using numerical customer codes rather than real names, according to companies involved in such work. Contrary to privacy-advocates’ fears, therefore, the data collection actually preserves social media users’ anonymity and thus their privacy, company repre- sentatives say. 20
An oft-expressed worry is that the “digital-native” generation may forgo traditional concerns about pri- vacy in favor of broadcasting their doings to a social media audience. In fact, however, many young peo- ple “are actually being very strate- gic” and increasingly savvy about social media use, says Fordham Uni- versity’s Marwick.
For example, “we see people using sites like Twitter” — where pseu- donyms are allowed — “to post more playful- ly” than they would on Facebook, knowing that what they post there is “not going to come back to their Facebook iden- tities,” Marwick says. Teens also are shift-
ing to pseudonym- permitted sites to share the kind of private rev- elations that most peo- ple have always re- stricted to a small circle, according to the blog of mobileYouth, a consulting firm that an- alyzes marketing for mobile devices. 21
Recent surveys re- veal that more teens now seek out social
media sites where they can restrict their postings to friends only. At the same time, many are adding to their social media repertoire Twitter accounts blocked to public viewing. A Twitter account visible to friends only is “the equivalent of having that secret diary you would allow only your closest friends to read. This is where teens post more emotional content — how they feel after a breakup, their latest crush,” said the mobileYouth analyst. One survey found that between 2009
and 2011 teen Twitter users doubled from 8 percent to 16 percent, mainly
Continued on p. 92
Competitors in the final round of the LG U.S. National Texting Championship face off in New York’s Times Square on Aug. 8, 2012.
Austin Wierschke, a 17-year-old from Rhinelander, Wis., left, won for the second year in a row, pocketing $50,000. In 39 seconds he accurately typed a 149-character message with capitalization,
punctuation and several symbols.
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Chronology 1990sAs more people go online, companies develop technologies to help them so- cialize.
1996 AOL introduces the Buddy List, which alerts users when friends are online.
1997 The early social networking site Sixdegrees.com is among the first to link users to friends of their friends.
•
2000sAs the populari- ty of social networking grows, technology to facilitate user- generated content and social interaction spreads to most websites.
2001 Online social network Meetup is launched to help link people wanting to meet offline. . . . Wikipedia, a collaboratively written and edited encyclopedia, is founded.
2003 MySpace is founded. . . . Vermont Gov. Howard Dean becomes a leading contender for the Democ- ratic presidential nomination with a successful social media-based campaign. . . . Business networking site LinkedIn debuts. . . . Online virtual world “Second Life” debuts.
2004 Thefacebook.com debuts for Har- vard undergraduates only. . . . Launch of photo-sharing site Flickr.
2005 Blog-hosting website Xanga adds social networking features. . . . So-
cial news and entertainment site Reddit is founded; content is fea- tured on the site based on mem- ber voting. . . . Video-sharing site YouTube is founded.
2006 Facebook opens to anyone age 13 or older. . . . Social network and “microblogging” site Twitter opens.
2007 Facebook introduces Beacon, which updates Facebook members’ friends about members’ recent pur- chases, but ends the program after users protest. . . . Social discussion service Disqus is founded; mem- bers use the same login details at any website that uses Disqus; member profiles include informa- tion about websites a member uses. . . . Microblogging website Tumblr founded to facilitate shar- ing of videos, graphics, music and links. . . . Good Reads is founded to share book recommendations and reading lists.
2008 Twitter users post 100 million tweets every three months.
2009 Location-based social networking site Foursquare is founded for use on mobile devices; users can search for friends or types of places in their geographical loca- tion and leave location-linked commentary for other users.
2010 Privacy advocates dub May 31 “Quit Facebook Day,” but fewer than 40,000 people quit. . . . Number of Facebook users passes 500 million. . . . Germany bans employers from checking Face- book pages of potential hires. . . . Library of Congress agrees to archive all Twitter traffic.
2012 Studies find people have become savvier about protecting privacy on social media. . . . Facebook sells stock shares to the public for the first time; the $38 per-share offer- ing price is widely considered too high because it’s unclear that sell- ing customer data can raise as much revenue as some expect; the stock quickly loses about half its value. . . . Breast-cancer charity Susan G. Komen Foundation cuts funding to Planned Parenthood but reverses course after criticism explodes on social media. . . . Documentary film “Kony 2012” by advocacy group Invisible Chil- dren attracts more than 95 million YouTube views and millions of “shares” on social media websites as Internet users protest atrocities by the African cult leader Joseph Kony; critics note that the film contains inaccuracies. . . . Euro- pean Union (EU) forces Facebook to turn off facial recognition soft- ware for users in EU countries. . . . Senate panel holds hearing on facial- recognition technology. . . . Senate Judiciary Committee approves bill requiring permission for mobile- device applications to share location- based data and another measure requiring the government to obtain warrants before obtaining most e- mail communications.
2013 Library of Congress has archived 170 billion tweets but struggles with how to make them search- able. . . . Six states now prohibit employers or postsecondary schools — or both — from demanding access to individuals’ social media information. . . . Facebook introduces new Graph Search feature allowing users to search name-tagged photos and users’ online profiles, including “likes.”
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splitting their online time between Face- book and Twitter, according to the mobileYouth blog. 22
Some governments are limiting how far companies can go in collecting per- sonal information, although the trend hasn’t spread to the United States, says Marwick. The European Union recently required social media sites to turn off their facial-recognition technology. “It’s ridiculous that video store rental is protected and online information” — much of it far more revealing —“is not,” she says.
BACKGROUND Social Life
O ver the centuries, people havequickly turned new technologies of all kinds into new and improved ways to meet one of humanity’s strongest needs — to socialize. Horse-drawn car- riages and automobiles, designed as simple transportation, quickly became dating venues for young lovers. The
telephone, intended as a business aid, almost immediately became a favorite means of social chitchat. 23
In the late 1960s, when the In- ternet was established, its quick adop- tion for friendly social interaction surprised its developers. By 1973, e- mail — much of it purely social in nature — made up 75 percent of traffic on ARPANET, the world’s first computer network, designed by the Department of Defense to allow re- searchers to exchange data and ac- cess remote computing capability. Early “newsgroups,” used by Internet
SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOSION
Continued from p. 90
A n old joke runs, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” And until several years into the 21st century, that was largely true, since many — if not
most — people who participated in online discussion forums did so under pseudonyms. That changed, however, when Facebook and other social media sites such as Google Plus and YouTube began requiring users to post under their real names. 1
Supporters of real-name-only policies say they prevent abu- sive behavior online because they force people to take full re- sponsibility for what they post. Proponents of allowing pseu- donyms, however, say their use frees many people to engage in honest online conversation about delicate topics such as pol- itics, sex or health problems without exposing them to offline suspicion or harassment. “Anonymity on the Internet has to go away,” said Randi
Zuckerberg, former Facebook marketing director and sister of the company’s co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. “People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. People hide behind anonymity, and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.” 2
Requiring the use of real names in Internet postings would create a more civil online atmosphere, wrote London-based In- ternet analyst James Cook. “Associate someone’s real name to abusive content that they’ve posted online, and suddenly they aren’t so keen on standing by it,” said Cook. A requirement for real-name posting “is often accompanied by a rise in qual- ity, and a friendlier community,” he said. “Would you scam someone on eBay if they knew your real name? Would you tell someone to go kill themselves via Twitter if everyone who followed that person knew who you were? The odds are that, no, you would not.” 3
But skeptics of the virtue of a real-names-only Web say such arguments ignore salient points. For one thing, posting under a longtime pseudonym, as many veteran Internet posters have done for decades, is different from posting anonymously, says Alice Marwick, an assistant professor in communication and media studies at Fordham University in New York City. Many pseudonymous posters have built up a reputation under their pseudonyms, she says, and preserving that reputation creates many of the same benefits claimed for real-name posting, with- out opening people to possible harassment because they hold unpopular views. “The civility argument doesn’t tell the whole story,” said
Eva Galperin, international freedom of expression coordinator at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advo- cates for online privacy. For instance, “uncivil discourse [is] alive and well in venues with real-name policies (such as Face- book),” she said. 4
Furthermore, “offline, people say things appropriate to the group they are in,” and the use of online pseudonyms allows people to decide with whom they may openly share which ideas, just as people do in real life, said Bernie Hogan, a re- search fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute in the United Kingdom. Without that, he said, the freedom to share certain thoughts with only some people vanishes. 5
Many who prefer pseudonymous postings want to preserve the Internet as a venue for honest discussion of difficult top- ics as much as they want to make it more civil. Among those who may need the protection of pseudonyms to engage in honest discussion are teachers, those whose relatives don’t share their views or circumstances, those who live in intolerant com- munities, spouses of government workers who must keep their political views to themselves and marginalized people, such as
Online Anonymity Stirs Controversy Do real-name-only policies stop abusive behavior or shut down difficult debates?
Jan. 25, 2013 93www.cqresearcher.com
researchers to transmit messages, soon included groups sharing their enthu- siasms for subjects such as science fiction and wines. By the 1990s, technology devel-
opers had caught on to the appeal of online socializing and saw it — rather than the lure of interesting con- tent — as key to attracting the pub- lic online. “Community is the Velcro that
keeps people [at America Online (AOL)],” said Ted Leonsis, a former top AOL executive. AOL was one of the first tech companies to provide pub-
lic access to the Internet from home computers. 24
Among the social features AOL in- troduced early in its existence were chat rooms that allow users to ex- change messages live and “buddy lists” that alert members when their friends are online so they can exchange in- stant messages. 25
Social Media
T he first social networking site (SNS)similar to those that are popular
today — New York-based SixDegrees.com — was launched in 1997. 26 It inte- grated several existing software fea- tures into a package that closely re- sembles the later SNS giants, MySpace and Facebook. Social network sites are unique not
because they “allow individuals to meet strangers” with common interests, wrote Nicole Ellison, an associate professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Michigan’s School of In- formation, and Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. Online chat rooms and newsgroups always
homosexuals, wrote Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at the corporate think tank Microsoft Research. “Not everyone is safer by giving out their real name.” 6
“People also don’t seem to under- stand the history of Facebook’s ‘real names’ culture,” noted Boyd. “When early adopters (elite college students) embraced Facebook, it was a trust- ed community,” confined to certain universities. Then “as the site grew larger, people had to grapple with new crowds being present and dis- comfort emerged. . . . But the norms were set.” 7
Other analysts say the opportu- nity to take on another character — such as by choosing a so-called avatar to represent oneself on a game site or some other kind of virtual world — can be a valuable learning experience for young peo- ple. For safety’s sake, many virtual environments created for children and teens bar users from revealing their true names, ages or the cities in which they live, says Deborah Fields, an assis- tant professor of instructional technology and learning sci- ences at Utah State University in Logan. The role playing that takes place in virtual environments — under pseudonyms — is valuable, and “research is suggesting that that’s especially
true for girls” who, in real life, “are often constrained” in their roles. “It’s easier to take on a role with people who don’t know you because people who know you put you in a box.”
— Marcia Clemmitt
1 For background, see Gregory Ferenstein, “Sur- prisingly Good Evidence that Real Name Poli- cies Fail to Improve Comments,” Techcrunch, July 29, 2012, http://techcrunch.com/2012/ 07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence-that-real-name- policies-fail-to-improve-comments, and Ramona Emerson, “Google+ ‘Real Names’ Policy Gets Re- vised,” The Huffington Post, Jan. 24, 2012, www. huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/23/google-plus-real- names-policy_n_1224970.html. 2 Quoted in Eva Galperin, “Randi Zuckerberg Runs in the Wrong Direction on Pseudonymity Online,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, Aug. 2, 2011, www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/randi-zuckerberg- runs-wrong-direction-pseudonymity. 3 James Cook, “Let’s Have an Internet-wide Real- name Policy,” The Kernel, Jan. 10, 2013, www.ker nelmag.com/comment/column/3951/lets-have-an- internet-wide-real-name-policy. 4 Galperin, op. cit. 5 Bernie Hogan, “Real-Name Sites Are Neces- sarily Inadequate for Free Speech,” Social Media
Collective blog, Aug. 8, 2011, http://socialmediacollective.org/2011/08/08/real- name-sites-are-necessarily-inadequate-for-free-speech. 6 Danah Boyd, “Real Name Policies Are an Abuse of Power,” Social Media Collective blog, Aug. 4, 2011, www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/08/ 04/real-names.html. 7 Ibid.
Former Facebook marketing director Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Facebook co- founder Mark Zuckerberg, says people
“behave a lot better” when they use their real names online.
G e tt y I m a g e s/ M ig u e l V il la g ra n
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facilitated such interactions, they noted. Instead, social networking sites “enable users to articulate and make visible” to themselves and others their real-world webs of social connections, including friends of friends, thus linking an on- line social world with a real-life social world, Ellison and Boyd wrote. 27
Unlike previous online technologies, SNSs alerted people to the “friends of their friends” and allowed users to browse SNSs’ membership lists, thus allowing them to reach out socially by the nat- ural-feeling method of contacting peo- ple with whom they have mutual ac- quaintances, wrote Boyd and Ellison. Others can use the information, too,
however, setting up concerns about whether this innovative socializing tool exposes SNS members to too much snooping. Among other risks, govern- ments can use the “friends of friends” information to find and watch the so- cial circles of people they suspect of dangerous activity. 28
Since the first SNSs came on the scene, the online world has includ- ed ever more elements of “social media” — loosely defined as tech- nologies that center the online ex- perience on: • user-created content, both indi-
vidual and collaborative; (such as the user-written Wikipedia), • conversation and other interac-
tion among social-media users, such as “liking” fellow users’ postings; • participation in online communi-
ties with shared interests, and • in some cases, publication of in-
dividuals’ social circles online. The technologies that enable such
activities are known as Web 2.0, a term first used in 2004 to distinguish the new — social — online world from the Web 1.0 paradigm, in which software tools were primarily designed to facilitate publishing content on the World Wide Web, according to Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein, pro- fessors of marketing at the Paris campus of ESCP Europe, a business school. 29
SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOSION
Social Media’s Wide Reach
Pope Benedict XVI sends his first Twitter message during his weekly general audience at the Vatican on Dec. 12, 2012 (top). The pope’s tweet, sent from a digital tablet using the handle @pontifex, blessed his hundreds of thousands of new Internet followers. An anti-government demonstrator (bottom) promotes Facebook use during protests at Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, on Feb. 3, 2011. Initial protests against the government were organized using social media.
G e tt y I m a g e s/ Jo h n M o o re
A F P /G e tt y I m a g e s/ V in ce n zo P in to
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The World Wide Web is the mas- sive Internet-based technology, invented around 1990 by British technology de- veloper Tim Berners-Lee, which allows browsers such as Internet Explorer to use so-called hyperlinks to discover and access the millions of documents and other resources that exist on the Internet’s connected computers. In the Web 1.0 days, the aim be-
hind most online technology was to make it easier and cheaper for indi- viduals and organizations to publish their work online in a way that would be easy for others to discover as they “clicked” website links. As it became clear that socializing is a more com- pelling human desire than creation, however, Web 2.0 shifted from help- ing people publish their own blogs to helping them converse, collaborate, compete, meet, socialize and comment on others’ online postings, Kaplan and Haenlein wrote. With Web 2.0, online “content and applications are no longer created and published by individuals, but instead are continuously modified by all users in a participatory and col- laborative fashion.” That occurs, for example, when multiple blog partic- ipants create a massive commentary on a single individual post or when YouTube posters create a massive archive of, say, a musician’s live and electronic performances. 30
In Web 2.0, the universe of online “user-generated content” exploded. No longer did a person have to commit to a time-consuming personal blog — which no one might ever see — to be an online content creator. Using social media tools, even time-strapped people and those who aren’t interest- ed in writing their thoughts have easy routes to posting content that others are likely to see and respond to. Spurred by the lure of getting responses from others, Internet users have embraced social media. 31
Social media technologies also in- clude reader-review sections at online retailer Amazon and other commercial
sites; increasingly expansive readers’- comment sections on blogs and at newspaper websites; YouTube, where cell phone and other videos are shared by people and businesses; the photo- sharing site Pinterest where people post and categorize favorite images re- lating to interests such as fashion; and blog websites such as Tumblr, where some bloggers mainly post screen cap- tures and brief animated snippets from favorite TV shows. In fact, not all social media even
require users to create content to par- ticipate and collaborate, notes Christo- pher Peterson, a research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- nology Center for Civic Media. Websites such as Digg and Reddit,
for example, engage members in “curat- ing” online content, or filtering the staggering amount of content that ap- pears online daily, elevating the best to a position so others will be likely to see it. Users vote posted content up or down, and, based on an algo- rithm that weights individual users’ rat- ings, content that’s judged most posi- tively rises to prominence, says Peterson. As a result, large numbers of ordinary Internet users daily sift through mas- sive amounts of material and “decide what’s good or bad — rather than having editors decide to what our at- tention should be directed,” he says. “We trust the people and the algo- rithm to surface useful information from a flood of material.” Other social media offer opportu-
nities to interact through role-playing in “virtual worlds.” In multiplayer online role-playing
games such as “World of Warcraft,” players choose characters — called avatars — to represent themselves and enter a virtual game world to pursue adventures such as fighting monsters or seeking treasure. In the process, they interact with other players’ char- acters, competing, collaborating and forming friendships, rivalries and ro- mances. Players find the social games
so compelling that they spend an av- erage 22.7 hours a week in play. 32
Other virtual social worlds such as “Second Life” don’t have game-style rules but allow people to choose ani- mated avatars and “live” in an online video environment as those people. Players socialize and form relation- ships with other “residents” as they explore the world, create and partici- pate in groups of many kinds as well as create businesses and “sell” one another virtual goods and services such as virtual pets, clothing, jewelry, works of art and parcels of “Second Life” real estate.
Social Everywhere
T he use of mobile devices such assmartphones and tablets for ac- cessing the Internet also has helped fuel social media’s dominance. Tweets and Facebook status up-
dates encapsulate a moment’s thought or emotion, making them perfect for devices that are always in one’s pock- et, argues Kaplan, the Paris marketing professor. 33
As the world has gone mobile, so- cial media have become “an even more integrated part of social life” be- cause mobile-device users are actual- ly connected to social media at all times, even when surrounded by live companions, as in a restaurant with friends or family, says Fordham’s Mar- wick. That gives people’s social media circles increased influence because “you’re getting feedback” from them constantly, she observes. Some social media have been de-
veloped to take advantage of the fact that mobile devices reveal their users’ exact locations 24 hours a day, wrote Kaplan. At the locally based directory services collectively known as Yelp, users can search for local businesses and post reviews of businesses that are then “tagged” to a location and accessible to other users who visit the
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SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOSION
spot. Yelp users also gain reputations in the Yelp community as useful or less useful reviewers, based on voting by other users. 34
Who’s in Charge?
S ocial media facilitate easy com-munication with friends as well as publication of one’s ideas to a po- tentially wide audience. As of August 2012, nearly 70 percent of U.S. adult Internet users employed social net- working sites, for example, including 75 percent of women and 92 percent of people ages 18 to 29. 35 And it’s all free. Free, however, always comes at a
price. The bottom line with anything consumers get “free” is this, wrote a commenter pen-named “blue_beetle” on the MetaFilter blog: “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” 36
When it comes to social media, the presumed value of the customer-as- product lies in the massive amounts of personal information social media users leave online, which businesses hope to use to target ads and mar- keting. That includes information peo- ple post about themselves, information gleaned from analyzing an individual’s social media connections and patterns of online activity and information that mobile technology sends out constantly about its users’ geographic location and online activities. Debates over how that information is collected, stored and used and who has the right to grant access to it and control its uses have raged throughout the social media age. “Even more so than television au-
dience members, Facebook users function as workers who look . . . at advertisements but are also, cru- cially, suppliers of personal informa- tion and producers of content — par- ticularly on a platform like Facebook,” wrote Tamara Shepherd, a postdoc-
toral fellow in information-technology management at Toronto’s Ryerson University. Unlike with traditional media, the customer information so- cial media produces is so detailed that advertisers not only can deter- mine which products people are likely to buy but can use clues about their economic status to show them different prices for the same goods, Shepherd wrote. 37
“The privacy concerns surrounding social media are the most important things to pay attention to,” says Ford- ham’s Marwick. “We want to connect and share with those we care about, and we want to participate in public life, but we don’t want our informa- tion to be public,” she says.
CURRENT SITUATION Profits and Control
S ocial media companies continuelooking for ways to turn the pub- lic’s love of their products into profit, but the process is tough. Meanwhile, struggles continue between marketers hungry for personal data and individ- uals who want to control how their information is shared. During the recent holiday shop-
ping season, while store and online sales rose, the number of purchases made after a social media user clicked through to a store from a site such as Facebook or YouTube dropped 26 percent from the previ- ous year. Furthermore, old-fashioned email advertising resulted in $39.40 in sales for each dollar spent in 2012, compared to only $12.90 worth of sales per dollar spent on social media- based promotions. 38
Social media businesses keep looking for ways to cash in on user-generated content. But users are managing to beat back some initiatives. In Decem- ber, the photo-sharing site Instagram, owned by Facebook, sparked ire when it announced that it not only claimed full ownership of photos and all other information users leave on the site but would accept cash from companies and other organizations “to display your username, likeness, photos and/or actions you take” in ad- vertising and promotional material “without any compensation to you.” For example, Instagram users might find their vacation photos and com- ments used in advertising for a hotel or resort without getting paid for the content. 39
After commenters on Instagram and other social media sites reacted angrily, the company quickly changed course, however. “Instagram has no intention of selling your photos, and we never did. We don’t own your photos, you do,” co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom backtracked on the company blog. 40
Still, extending companies’ control over user data is a common social media business strategy. In December, Facebook unveiled a revamped sys- tem that makes privacy-control tools more easily findable on the site and shows users more details about where and to whom their information is visible — both consumer-friendly moves. However, in the same pack- age, Facebook ended users’ rights to mark their profiles off-limits to Face- book’s search function. The ability to hide one’s profile
from search is being “retired” because only a “single-digit percentage” of Face- book users do so, explained the company’s director of product, Sam Lessin. However, because Facebook now has over a billion users, that “single-digit percentage” could mean “tens of millions” of people, remarked
Continued on p. 98
no
Jan. 25, 2013 97www.cqresearcher.com
At Issue: Will social media’s use of facial recognition destroy privacy?yes
yes ALESSANDRO ACQUISTI ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, HEINZ COLLEGE, CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
FROM TESTIMONY BEFORE SENATE JUDICIARY SUBCOMMITTEE ON PRIVACY, TECHNOLOGY AND THE LAW, JULY 18, 2012
f ace recognition could make our lives easier or moresecure; conversely, it could limit our freedom, endangerour security and chill free speech by creating a state of constant and ubiquitous surveillance.
Consider, for instance, Facebook. Many of its users choose photos of themselves as their “primary profile” image. Facebook has aggressively pursued a “real identity” policy, under which members are expected to join the network under their real names, under penalty of account cancellation. Using tagging features and login security questions, the social network has successfully nudged users to associate their and their friends’ names to uploaded photos. These photos are also publicly available: Primary profile photos must be shared with strangers under Facebook’s own Privacy Policy. Online social networks such as Facebook are accumulating
the largest known databases of facial images. Often, those im- ages are tagged or attached to fully identified profiles. Further- more, many social network users post and tag multiple photos of themselves and their friends, allowing biometric models of their faces, and those of other people as well, to become more accurate. Furthermore, such a vast and centralized biometrics database can be at risk of third-party hacking. An analysis of recent history in the market for personal data
also suggests that firms may engage in more invasive appli- cations of face recognition over time. If recent history is a guide, the current, almost coy applications of face recognition may be “bridgeheads” designed by firms to habituate end-users into progressively more powerful and intrusive services. Consider the frequency with which, in the past few years,
a popular social network such as Facebook has engaged in practices that either unilaterally modified settings associated with user privacy or reflected a “two steps forwards, one step backward” strategy, in which new services were enacted, then taken back due to users’ reaction, and then enacted again, after some time had passed. In the absence of policy interventions, therefore, the pat-
terns we are observing (increasing gathering and usage of in- dividuals’ facial biometrics data) are unlikely to abate. The risk exists that some firms may attempt to nudge indi-
viduals into accepting more capturing and usage of facial data — creating a perception of fait accompli which, in turn, will influence individuals’ expectations of privacy and anonymity.no
ROBERT SHERMAN MANAGER, PRIVACY & PUBLIC POLICY, FACEBOOK
FROM TESTIMONY BEFORE SENATE JUDICIARY SUBCOMMITTEE ON PRIVACY, TECHNOLOGY AND THE LAW, JULY 18, 2012
i n the early days of Facebook, we learned how importantphoto sharing was to our users. One component of ourphoto management and sharing features is photo tagging — the 21st century’s version of handwriting captions on the backs of photographs — and it allows users to instantaneously link photos from birthdays, vacations and other important events with the people who participated. To help our users more efficiently tag their friends in photos,
we built “tag suggestions,” which uses facial recognition tech- nology to suggest people they already know and whom they might want to tag. “Tag suggestions” works by determining what several photos
in which a person has been tagged have in common and storing a summary of the data derived from this comparison. When a person uploads a new photo, we compare that photo to the summary information in the templates of the people on Face- book with whom the person communicates frequently. This al- lows us to make suggestions about whom the user should tag in the photo, which the user can then accept or reject. “Tag suggestions” has been enthusiastically embraced by
millions of people because it is convenient, and the uploader is in control of [his or her] photos. We launched the feature with several important privacy
protections. “Tag suggestions” only uses data people have voluntarily pro-
vided to Facebook — photos and the tags people have applied to them. We do not collect any new information beyond the photos themselves in order for “tag suggestions” to work. Facebook’s technology does not enable people to identify
others with whom they have no relationship. Perhaps most importantly, Facebook enables people to pre-
vent the use of their image for facial recognition altogether. Through an easy-to-use privacy setting, people can choose whether they will use our facial recognition technology to suggest that their friends tag them in photos. When you turn off “tag suggestions,” Facebook won’t suggest that friends tag you when photos look like you. Our software cannot be used to compare a photo of an
unknown person against our database of user templates. Our technology is designed to search only a limited group of tem- plates — namely, an individual user’s friends — and law en- forcement agencies accordingly cannot use our technology to reliably identify an unknown person.
98 CQ Researcher
Nick Bilton, a technology blogger for The New York Times. 41
This month, Facebook introduced the first version — fledgling and in- complete — of a search tool that ul- timately will allow users to search for much more than just names. Using Graph Search, users can dig into Face- book’s photo archives as well as the many prefer- ences that people in their social networks have expressed on- line to find, for ex- ample, “photos of friends before 1990” or which Facebook connections are fans of a particular columnist. 42
In response, some analysts pre- dict a mass rejec- tion of photo tag- ging and “liking” as people realize that things they casual- ly responded to five years ago are suddenly searchable by anyone in their Facebook network. 43
Limiting Access
S immering questions about whethersocial media facilitate serious in- vasions of privacy are leading to new legislative proposals. Last September in Europe, Facebook
turned off its facial-recognition software, which links names to photographed faces based on other photos that users have already “tagged” with a name. Facebook said it would delete all fa- cial-recognition data it had stored for European customers. The Irish Data Protection Commissioner, who over- sees data-protection issues for the
European Union, and privacy officials in some other EU countries demanded the change on the grounds that the software did not comply with privacy laws in some EU countries. 44
Privacy experts worldwide have voiced concerns about whether the technology might allow rampant gov-
ernment surveillance of innocent peo- ple as well as potentially invasive or embarrassing commercial-marketing efforts based on the content of pho- tos people consider private. 45 (See “At Issue,” p. 97.) In November 2012, in a measure
that applies mainly to email, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill requiring the government to get probable-cause warrants to re- quest most stored online communi- cations from companies. And in December the panel approved re- quiring user consent before an app on a mobile device reports infor- mation about its geographic loca- tion. Committee leaders are ex- pected to urge further action on the bills this year. 46
On Jan. 1, laws took effect in Illi- nois and California barring employers from asking workers and job seekers for their social media account-access information. California also has a new law barring universities and colleges from seeking applicants’ or students’ social media passwords.
On Dec. 28, Michi- gan’s Republican gov- ernor, Rick Snyder, signed legislation bar- ring employers and postsecondary educa- tional institutions from requesting social media access information, ef- fective immediately. In early December, New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie signed legislation barring uni- versities and colleges from seeking applicants’ or students’ passwords. And in November the New Jersey Senate passed a similar ban on employers, which awaits action by the state As- sembly. Earlier in 2012, Delaware banned post-
secondary educational institutions and Maryland barred employers from seek- ing social media access information. 47
Federal legislation blocking em- ployers and colleges from seeking so- cial media access information was in- troduced in the U.S. House last April, but it expired after no committee acted on it during the 112th Congress. 48
“Our social media accounts offer views into our personal lives and ex- pose information that would be inap- propriate to discuss during a job in- terview due to the inherent risk of creating biases,” said Democratic Cali- fornia state Assembly member Nora Campos, author of her state’s bill. 49
But some analysts blame an un- founded “media frenzy” for the legislative interest. In March 2012, The Associated
SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOSION
Continued from p. 96
Seattle resident Damon Brown is all smiles after Facebook helped give him a new lease on life. Brown, here with his wife and two sons, found a
kidney donor after telling of his need on the social media site. His friends and family forwarded the request to everyone they knew, and a
woman his wife had known for years offered to make the donation.
A P P h o to /E la in e T h o m p so n
Jan. 25, 2013 99www.cqresearcher.com
Press reported on some isolated inci- dents in which employers had either requested or required social media log-in information from workers or job applicants. Yet, wrote bloggers for San Francisco-based Littler Mendelson, a law firm specializing in employment issues, no media article has cited “a single study proving that private em- ployers routinely” do so. 50
Meanwhile, significant cultural changes — including in how people engage with political issues — are oc- curring because of the intertwining of media and social networking, says Kahne of Mills College. “We think we see potentially a very important shift — especially for young people” in the way people pass along and learn about the news, he says. In a survey by his research group,
roughly as many young people said they got news through their Facebook and Twitter relationships with friends and family as said they got it from news- papers, he says. This suggests that a fair- ly large percentage of young people — the 10 to 15 percent who report that they regularly forward news — are “me- diating or influencing what their family and friends learn” about the world,” Kahne says. “I would argue that’s a significant difference” from the past, with the news- forwarders playing a very active role in shaping the political conversation in their networks, he says.
OUTLOOK Changing Expectations?
J ust under a decade into the flow-ering of social media, early pre- dictions that they would empower peo- ple in hitherto unimagined ways and earn billions for social media compa- nies are giving way to more realistic views, analysts say.
Theorists once predicted that, with ever larger numbers of people post- ing and responding to observations at venues such as Twitter and website comment sections, citizen reporting and analysis might rival if not replace tra- ditional journalism for exposing and opposing official malfeasance, says Kreiss of the University of North Caroli- na. But that task turns out to be too demanding for unpaid amateurs, no matter how numerous, Kreiss says. “It’s great to imagine that an army
of people on Twitter is going to call the government to account,” but “pro- fessional journalists are paid to sort through databases” and track down elusive sources — actions that social- media users, posting for free in their spare time, simply can’t do. “Produc- ing high-quality journalism requires re- sources to counter power, which itself has huge resources,” he says. Mid-2000s expectations for the
earnings potential of social media companies were also overblown, says Fordham’s Marwick. The concept of a “successful” so-
cial media website is beginning to change, she says. For one thing, sites where users post under pseudonyms — rather than real names, as Face- book requires — increasingly get mil- lions of hits by providing social cen- ters where people with shared interests, such as parenting, can con- verse while maintaining privacy, a combination many people find “very freeing,” she says. Because these companies don’t require people to use their real names or reveal their offline social connections, they’ll never collect the masses of individual data that Facebook intends to rely on for ultra-high profits. Still, Marwick says, “I think a lot of
the small companies will be fine be- cause they’re not expecting to have billion-dollar IPOs” — initial public of- ferings of their shares on Wall Street. “It’s very sexy and exciting to have these young entrepreneurs” such as Face-
book CEO Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who earned billions in the dot-com boom of the 1990s, “but in reality there’s no reason that tech com- panies should make people millions and millions of dollars. We’re moving toward a much more moderate model based on reality,” she says. Having social media as today’s pre-
dominant communications mode is lead- ing to a significant cultural change — the rise of “participatory culture,” which is already baked into the entertainment arena and spilling over into politics, says Kahne of Mills College. Although the change may hardly be noticeable, par- ticipatory activities such as public vot- ing to determine the outcome of TV shows, tweeting back and forth with a TV show’s writing staff while an episode airs or providing commentary and debate with other fans on a real- time blog during a football game or reality-TV program are now common- place activities. During the recent pres- idential campaign both President Obama and GOP candidate Mitt Romney sent special tweets to their followers before debates, bringing people into a closer relationship to the campaigns than in the past, Kahne says. All this may make the moment ripe
for helping young people forge new connections to political life, Kahne says. The teen and 20-something generation can more easily learn the tools of civic engagement than in the past, because institutions such as advocacy groups and government offices use social media, too, he says. Studies show that young people al-
ready are enthusiastically engaged in participatory culture, and now they can become more politically involved just by “doing [what] they are already doing” on social media for other in- terests, such as music and sports, “draw- ing on skills they’ve already devel- oped,” Kahne says. “These things are much more friendly” to the digital generations than writing letters to the editor, he says.
100 CQ Researcher
Notes 1 “Oops. Mark Zuckerberg’s Sister Has a Private Facebook Photo Go Public,” Tech blog, Forbes, Dec. 26, 2012, www.forbes.com/sites/kashmir hill/2012/12/26/oops-mark-zuckerbergs-sister- has-a-private-facebook-photo-go-public; and Tom McCarthy, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Sister Learns Life Lesson After Facebook Photo Flap,” US News blog, The Guardian [UK], Dec. 27, 2012, www.guardian.co.uk/technology/us-news- blog/2012/dec/27/facebook-founder-sister- zuckerberg-photo. 2 “State of the Media: The Social Media Re- port 2012,” Nielsen, http://blog.nielsen.com/ nielsenwire/social/2012. 3 Quoted in Bobbie Johnson, “Privacy No Longer a Social Norm, Says Facebook Founder,” The Guardian, Jan. 10, 2010, www.guardian. co.uk/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-privacy. 4 Larry Rosen, “Poke Me: How Social Net- works Can Both Help and Harm Our Kids,” address, American Psychological Association 119th Annual Convention, Aug. 4-7, 2011, www. fenichel.com/pokeme.shtml. 5 Quoted in Steve Eder, “Te’o Maintains Inno- cence in Hoax,” The New York Times, Jan. 19, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/sports/ncaa football/notre-dame-athletic-director-jack-swar brick-stands-by-manti-teo.html?hpw. 6 Cathy J. Cohen and Joseph Kahne, “Partici- patory Politics: New Media and Youth Politi- cal Action,” MacArthur Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics, June 2012, http://ypp.dmlcentral.net/sites/all/files/publi cations/YPP_Survey_Report_FULL.pdf. 7 David Rothschild, “The Twitter Users Who Drove the Furor Over Komen and Planned Parenthood,” Yahoo! News/The Signal, Feb. 4, 2012, http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/signal/ twitter-users-drove-furor-over-komen-planned- parenthood-160326208.html#krwrGyT.
8 Kate Crawford, “Riots, Social Media and the Value of ‘First Responders,’ ” Social Media Collective Research blog, Aug. 12, 2011, http:// socialmediacollective.org/2011/08/12/riots- social-media-and-the-value-of-%E2%80%98first- responders%E2%80%99. 9 Charles Harris, “Social Media for Social Good: A Guide to New Media for College Activists,” Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects, Paper 320, Western Kentucky Univer- sity, May 5, 2011, http://digitalcommons.wku. edu/stu_hon_theses/320. 10 Golnaz Esfandiari, “The Twitter Devolution,” Foreign Policy, June 7, 2010, www.foreignpolicy. com/articles/2010/06/07/the_twitter_revolution_ that_wasnt. 11 Daniel Kreiss and Philip N. Howard, “New Challenges to Political Privacy: Lessons from the First U.S. Presidential Race in the Web 2.0 Era,” International Journal of Communication, 2010, pp. 1032-1050, http://ijoc.org/ojs/index. php/ijoc/article/view/870/473. 12 Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change,” The New Yorker, Oct. 4, 2010, pp. 42-49, www.gladwell. com/pdf/twitter.pdf. 13 Antti Oulasvirta, Tye Rattenbury, Lingyi Ma and Eeva Raita, “Habits Make Smartphone Use More Pervasive,” Journal of Personal and Ubiq- uitous Computing, June 16, 2011, www.hiit.fi/ u/oulasvir/scipubs/Oulasvirta_2011_PUC_Habits MakeSmartphoneUseMorePervasive.pdf. 14 Vivian Diller, “The Need for Connection in the Age of Anxiety,” The Huffington Post, Nov. 8, 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/vivian- diller-phd/technology-anxiety_b_2083475.html? utm_hp_ref=college&ir=College. 15 “More Facebook Friends Means More Stress, Says Report,” press release, University of Edin- burgh/EurekAlert, Nov. 26, 2012, www.eurek alert.org/pub_releases/2012-11/uoe-mff11261 2.php. 16 Dave Winer, “Facebook Is Scaring Me,” Scripting blog, Sept. 24, 2011, http://scripting.
com/stories/2011/09/24/facebookIsScaringMe. html. 17 Carl I. Schulman, et al., “Influence of So- cial Networking Websites on Medical School and Residency Selection Process,” Postgrad- uate Medicine Journal, Nov. 8, 2012, www. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23139411. 18 The case is Citizens United v. Federal Elec- tion Commission, 588 U.S. 310 (2010), www. supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf. 19 Quoted in Erica Naone, “When Social Media Mining Gets It Wrong,” MIT Technology Review, Aug. 9, 2011, www.technologyreview.com/news/ 424965/when-social-media-mining-gets-it-wrong. 20 Natasha Singer, “Your Online Attention, Bought in an Instant,” The New York Times, Nov. 17, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/ technology/your-online-attention-bought-in-an- instant-by-advertisers.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1& ref=natashasinger&adxnnlx=1355878018-Dcm Dj3dpu5kPXSMf8kp0GQ. 21 “Facebook vs. Twitter vs. Instagram: What Do Teens Prefer?” mobileYouth Idea Factory blog, Nov. 14, 2012, www.mobileyouthidea factory.com/facebook-vs-twitter-vs-instagram- what-do-teen. 22 Ibid. 23 For background, see Marcia Clemmitt, “Cy- bersocializing,” CQ Researcher, June 28, 2006, pp. 625-648, and “Social Networking,” CQ Re- searcher, Sept. 17, 2010, pp. 749-772. 24 Quoted in “Internet Communities,” Business Week Archives, May 5, 1997, www.business week.com/1997/18/b35251.htm. 25 Ibid. 26 For background, see Danah M. Boyd and Nicole B. Ellison, “Social Network Sites: De- finition, History, and Scholarship,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communications, October 2007, article 11, http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/ issue1/boyd.ellison.html. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein, “Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media,” Business Hori- zons, 2010, pp. 59-68, www.michaelhaenlein. eu/Publications/Kaplan,%20Andreas%20-% 20Users%20of%20the%20world,%20unite.pdf. 30 Ibid. 31 For background, see Kenneth Jost and Melissa J. Hipolit, “Blog Explosion,” CQ Re- searcher, June 9, 2006 (updated Sept. 14, 2010), pp. 505-528. 32 For background, see Nicholas Yee, “The Psychology of Massively Multi-User Online Role-Playing Games: Motivations, Emotional
SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOSION
About the Author Staff writer Marcia Clemmitt is a veteran social-policy re- porter who previously served as editor in chief of Medi- cine & Health and staff writer for The Scientist. She has also been a high school math and physics teacher. She holds a liberal arts and sciences degree from St. John’s College, Annapolis, and a master’s degree in English from George- town University. Her recent reports include “Computer Hack- ing” and “Internet Regulation.”
Jan. 25, 2013 101www.cqresearcher.com
Investment, Relationships and Problematic Usage,” in Ralph Schroeder and Ann-Sofie Axelsson, eds., Avatars at Work and Play: Collaboration and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environ- ments (2006), pp. 187-207, http://vhil.stanford. edu/pubs/2006/yee-psychology-mmorpg.pdf. Also see Sarah Glazer, “Video Games,” CQ Researcher, Nov. 10, 2006, pp. 937-960; updat- ed, Sept. 23, 2011. 33 Andreas M. Kaplan, “If You Love Something, Let It Go Mobile: Mobile Marketing and Mobile Social Media 4 x 4,” Business Horizons, 2012, pp. 129-139, http://smad341automotive.files. wordpress.com/2012/09/going-mobile.pdf. 34 Ibid. 35 “Who Uses Social Networking Sites,” Pew Internet: Social Networking, Nov. 13, 2012, http://pewinternet.org/Commentary/2012/March/ Pew-Internet-Social-Networking-full-detail.aspx. 36 “User-Driven Discontent,” MetaFilter, Aug. 26, 2010, www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven- discontent#3256046. 37 Tamara Shepherd, “Desperation and Data- logix: Facebook Six Months After Its IPO,” Cul- ture Digitally blog, Nov. 12, 2012, http://culture digitally.org/2012/11/desperation-and-datalogix. 38 Sapna Maheshwari and Matt Townsend, “Email Still Whips Social Media as Marketing Tool,” Bloomberg News, The Columbus Dispatch, Dec. 24, 2012, www.dispatch.com/content/ stories/business/2012/12/24/email-still-whips- social-media-as-marketing-tool.html. 39 Quoted in “User Revolt Causes Instagram to Keep Old Rules About Picture Rights,” Agence France-Presse, Herald Sun [Melbourne, Australia], Dec. 21, 2012, www.heraldsun.com. au/technology/user-revolt-causes-instagram-to- keep-old-rules-about-picture-rights/story-fn5 izo02-1226541837778. 40 Quoted in ibid. 41 Nick Bilton, “Facebook Changes Privacy Settings, Again,” Bits blog, The New York Times, Dec. 12, 2012, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2012/12/12/facebook-changes-privacy-settings- again; for background, see Carl Franzen, “Face- book Updates Privacy Controls: Better and Simpler, Or More Invasive?” Idea Lab, Talking Points Memo, Dec 12, 2012, http://idealab.talking pointsmemo.com/2012/12/facebook-changes- privacy-controls-better-and-simpler-or-more- invasiv. 42 Barbara Ortutay, “‘Graph Search’ Reviewed,” The Associated Press/ABQ Journal [Albuquerque], Jan. 16, 2013,www.abqjournal.com/main/2013/ 01/16/abqnewsseeker/updated-facebook-search- tool-a-review.html. 43 Ibid.
44 Somini Sengupta and Kevin O’Brien, “Face- book Can ID Faces, but Using Them Grows Tricky,” The New York Times, Sept. 21, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/technology/face book-backs-down-on-face-recognition-in-eu rope.html?_r=0; Loek Essers, “Facebook to Delete All European Facial Recognition Data,” ComputerWorld/IDG News Service, Sept. 21, 2012, www.computerworld.com/s/article/9231 566/Facebook_to_delete_all_European_facial_ recognition_data?taxonomyId=70; “Facebook Ireland Ltd: Report of Re-audit, Data Protec- tion Commissioner,” Sept. 21, 2012, http://data protection.ie/documents/press/Facebook_Ire land_Audit_Review_Report_21_Sept_2012.pdf. 45 Ibid. (New York TImes.) 46 “Senate Judiciary Committee Approves Lo- cation Privacy Bill,” Electronic Privacy Infor- mation Center, http://epic.org/2012/12/senate- judiciary-committee-app.html, and “Senate Committee Updates ECPA, Modifies Video Pri- vacy Law,” Electronic Privacy Information Cen- ter, http://epic.org/2012/11/senate-committee- updates-ecpa.html.
47 “Employer Access to Social Media Usernames and Passwords,” National Conference ofState Leg- islatures, www.ncsl.org/issues-research/telecom/ employer-access-to-social-media-passwords.aspx. 48 Sean Gallagher, “Bill Banning Employer Facebook Snooping Introduced in Congress,” Ars Technica, April 28, 2012, http://arstechnica. com/tech-policy/2012/04/bill-banning-employer- facebook-snooping-introduced-in-congress; and H.R. 5050 (112th), “Social Networking Online Protection Act,” GovTrack, www.gov track.us/congress/bills/112/hr5050. 49 Quoted in Leslie Katz, “Progress for Calif. Bill to Stop Employers’ Social-media Snooping,” CNET News, May 10, 2012, http://news.cnet. com/8301-1023_3-57432298-93/progress-for- calif-bill-to-stop-employers-social-media-snooping. 50 Philip Gordon and Lauren Woon, “Re- thinking and Rejecting Social Media ‘Pass- word Protection’ Legislation,” Privacy blog, July 10, 2012, http://privacyblog.littler.com/2012/ 07/articles/state-privacy-legislation/rethinking- and-rejecting-social-media-password-protection- legislation.
FOR MORE INFORMATION Culture Digitally blog, http://culturedigitally.org. National Science Foundation- funded blog where scholars and researchers discuss information technologies, including social media.
Electronic Frontier Foundation, 454 Shotwell St., San Francisco CA 94110-1914; 415-436-9333; https://www.eff.org. Nonprofit advocacy, information and legal-support group involved with technology-related privacy and civil rights issues.
Electronic Privacy Information Center, 1718 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Suite 200, Washington, DC 20009; 202-483-1140; www.epic.org. Nonprofit research center that studies privacy and civil liberties issues related to technology.
Facebook blog, http://blog.facebook.com. Announces and discusses Facebook policy changes.
MacArthur Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics, http://ypp. dmlcentral.net. Foundation-funded academic research project that studies cultural participation in the online era and its effects on young people’s political engage- ment.
Mashable, http://mashable.com. Online magazine that covers social media news.
Pew Internet and American Life Project, 1615 L St., N.W., Suite 700, Washington, DC 20036; 202-419-4500; http://pewinternet.org. Nonprofit foundation that studies social media use and trends.
Social Media Collective blog, http://socialmediacollective.org. A blog where re- searchers at the corporation-funded think tank Microsoft Research New England discuss social media issues.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
102 CQ Researcher
Selected Sources
Bibliography Books
Aboujaoude, Elias, Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of E-Personality, W.W. Norton & Company, 2011. A Stanford University psychiatrist recounts his experiences treating people who have created social media personas that are much more adventurous, risk-taking, confident, sexy and charismatic than their real-life personalities. Those personas often cause problems in the relationships — both online and offline — of their creators.
Castells, Manuel, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Polity, 2012. A professor of communication technology and society at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, explains the role of Internet technology in recent social movements such as the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States and the Arab Spring revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East.
Keen, Andrew, Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us, St. Martin’s Press, 2012. An Internet business executive argues that privacy and human intimacy are endangered as the networked world continually increases the amount of information people in- advertently share about themselves and social media replace in-person conversation.
Articles
Angwin, Julia, “The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets,” The Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2010, http://online. wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870394090457539507 3512989404.html. This article, the first of a series, reports on the burgeoning tracking technology that social media and other websites are using to collect data on computer users as they make their way around the Web. On average, each of the country’s 50 most visited websites installed 64 pieces of tracking software on the computers of each visitor; a few of the sites, such as the nonprofit Wikipedia, did not install any, however.
Gillespie, Tarleton, “Is Twitter Us or Them? #Twitterfail and Living Somewhere Between Public Commitment and Private Investment,”Culture Digitally blog, July 31, 2012, http://culturedigitally.org/2012/07/is_twitter_us_or_them. A Cornell University assistant professor of communication de- scribes the ethical, political and business issues involved in having private companies such as Twitter and Facebook func- tion as major public communication channels. Are the com- panies obligated to support free speech or cooperate with gov- ernment surveillance? How far can they go in serving advertisers’ interests before they harm the public interest?
Rosen, Larry, “The Power of Like: We Like Being Liked . . . on Facebook,” Rewired blog, Psychology Today, July 15, 2012, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rewired-the- psychology-technology/201207/the-power. Is clicking “like” or “share” on a social media site enough to show online friends that we care about them or are such gestures too small to provide meaningful positive feedback?
Singer, Natasha, “Your Online Attention, Bought in an Instant,”The New York Times, Nov. 17, 2012, p. A1, www. nytimes.com/2012/11/18/technology/your-online-attention- bought-in-an-instant-by-advertisers.html?pagewanted=all &_r=0. Marketers increasingly know exactly how people spend their time online and use that information to target them with very specific advertising, including offering different prices to different people. Privacy advocates worry about such scenarios as future marketers targeting shopaholics with low sales resistance with ads tailored to entice them.
Reports and Studies
“Participatory Politics: New Media and Youth Political Action,” The MacArthur Network on Youth and Partici- patory Politics, 2012, www.michaelhaenlein.eu/Publica tions/Kaplan,%20Andreas%20-%20Users%20of%20the %20world,%20unite.pdf. A foundation-funded study by academic researchers finds that more than 40 percent of people ages 15 to 25 engage in political acts such as voicing support for or criticism of interest groups on social media websites or forwarding po- litical news to family and friends. Forty-three percent of white, 41 percent of black, 38 percent of Latino and 36 per- cent of Asian-American youths say they participate in such activities.
“Photos and Videos as Social Currency Online,” Pew In- ternet and American Life Project, September 2012, http:// pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Online-Pictures.aspx. Social websites specializing in visual media — such as Insta- gram, Tumblr and Pinterest — are becoming a much more prominent part of the online experience.
Boyd, Danah, and Alice Marwick, “Social Privacy in Net- worked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies,” discussion paper for Privacy Law Scholars Conference, June 2, 2011, www.danah.org/papers/2011/SocialPrivacy PLSC-Draft.pdf. Basing their arguments on interviews with young people, analysts from the corporate think tank Microsoft Research contend that, contrary to myth, young social media users do care about privacy and try to shape their online behavior to protect it in matters of greatest concern to them.
Jan. 25, 2013 103www.cqresearcher.com
Community Engagement
Falcone, Amanda, “Social Media Now a Must Have in the Political Campaign Toolbox,” Hartford (Conn.) Courant, Sept. 24, 2012, p. A1, articles.courant.com/2012-09-24/news/ hc-social-media-0922-20120921_1_social-media-campaign- tweets-pinterest. U.S. Senate GOP candidate Linda McMahon used social media to better connect with Connecticut voters.
Timpane, John, “Today’s E-Protesters Live-Stream to the Barricades,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 23, 2011, p. A2, articles.philly.com/2011-10-23/news/30313369_1_ facebook-posts-facebook-page-social-media. Philadelphia’s “Occupy” protesters have used social media to rally the community behind their cause.
Ward, William, “Tweet by Tweet, Change Comes to the Olympic Games,” Newsday (N.Y.), Aug. 5, 2012, p. A36, www.newsday.com/opinion/oped/ward-tweet-by-tweet- change-comes-to-the-olympic-games-1.3880551. Twitter helped make the Summer Olympics an interactive media experience for viewers and fans.
Facial Recognition Technology
Bilton, Nick, “Behind the Google Goggles, Virtual Reality,” The New York Times, Feb. 22, 2012, p. B1, www.nytimes. com/2012/02/23/technology/google-glasses-will-be-pow ered-by-android.html. Google plans to sell eyeglasses that act as mobile computer monitors.
Freishtat, Sarah, “Just a Face in a Crowd? Scans Pick Up ID, Personal Data,”The Washington Times, July 26, 2012, p. A1, www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jul/26/just- a-face-in-a-crowd-scans-pick-up-id-personal-d/?page=all. Facial recognition technology is opening up possibilities in business, advertising and law enforcement, but privacy ques- tions persist.
Wiser, Mike, “Program Pushes Facial Recognition for Iowa Sex Offenders,”The Gazette (Iowa), Dec. 17, 2012, p. A1, thegazette.com/2012/12/17/program-pushes-facial- recognition-for-iowa-sex-offenders/. The Iowa Department of Public Safety wants sheriffs to use facial recognition software to digitize and analyze the faces of sex offenders.
Personal Relationships
Spenceley, Arlene, “Facebook Is Going Public; Not Me,” Tampa Bay (Fla.)Times, Feb. 12, 2012, p. P1, www.tampa bay.com/news/perspective/facebook-is-going-public-not- me/1214560.
Quitting Facebook can often teach people the things that are most necessary in life, says a columnist who quit using the site.
Timberg, Craig, “A World Away From Facebook,” The Washington Post, Aug. 5, 2012, p. G1, articles.washing tonpost.com/2012-08-03/business/35491933_1_facebook- board-member-katherine-losse-facebook-home-page. Excessive reliance on Facebook often forces people to lose out on more intimate relationships, says a former employee of the company.
Privacy
Acohido, Byron, “Social Networks Raise Workplace IT Worries,” USA Today, Feb. 29, 2012, p. B1, usatoday30. usatoday.com/MONEY/usaedition/2012-02-29-Cyber-In truders_CV_U.htm. Many employers are restricting employees’ usage of social media sites amid a rise in database breaches.
Kleinberg, Scott, “Online Privacy Settings Apply Offline Too,”Chicago Tribune, April 12, 2012, articles.chicagotrib une.com/2012-04-12/news/ct-tribu-social-media-employment- 20120412_1_social-media-erin-egan-privacy-expectations. Employers are undermining the privacy of Facebook users when they ask potential employees for their passwords.
Sengupta, Somini, and Evelyn Rusli, “Personal Data’s Value? Facebook Is Set to Find Out,”The New York Times, Jan. 31, 2012, p. B1, www.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/tech nology/riding-personal-data-facebook-is-going-public.html? pagewanted=all&_r=0. Facebook’s ultimate value as a company will be determined by how it can capitalize on its storage of personal data.
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Upcoming Reports Unrest in the Arab World, 2/1/13 Cyber Security, 2/8/13 Hazing, 2/15/13
In-depth Reports on Issues in the News
?Are you writing a paper?Need backup for a debate?Want to become an expert on an issue? For more than 80 years, students have turned to CQ Researcher for in-depth reporting on issues in the news. Reports on a full range of political and social issues are now available. Following is a selection of recent reports:
Civil Liberties Solitary Confinement, 9/12 Re-examining the Constitution, 9/12 Voter Rights, 5/12 Remembering 9/11, 9/11 Government Secrecy, 2/11
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Environment/Society Peace Corps Challenges, 1/13 Future of Homeownership, 12/12 Indecency on Television, 11/12 Managing Wildfires, 11/12 Understanding Mormonism, 10/12 Genetically Modified Food, 8/12
Health/Safety Sugar Controversies, 11/12 New Health Care Law, 9/12 Farm Policy, 8/12 Treating ADHD, 8/12 Alcohol Abuse, 6/12
Politics/Economy 3D Printing, 12/12 Social Media and Politics, 10/12 Euro Crisis, 10/12 Privatizing the Military, 7/12 U.S.-Europe Relations, 3/12
