Influencer Factories

Influencer Wang Xizi live streaming from a clothing store, courtesy of Raffaele Huang for the Wall Street Journal In China, Indonesia, South Korea, and many other East Asian countries, a new e-commerce phenomenon is growing: influencer factories. Influencer factories, influencer farms, or influencer incubators are a new e-commerce model where hundreds of influencers film content …

Google’s Gemini Adds Fuel To Raging Fire Of AI Culture Wars

With artificial intelligence quickly becoming the hottest commodity in the technology industry, many prominent companies are working on creating, coding, and publishing their own AI services. The most recent entity to throw their hat into the ring was Google when they released their ‘Gemini’ model into the world. One of the main capabilities the model …

Supreme Court Grapples With New Social Media Moderation Laws

For roughly four hours on the afternoon of Monday, February 26, Supreme Court justices discussed the validity of the recently-passed laws in Texas and Florida aimed to restrict the power social media companies have over controlling the content on their platforms. Solicitors general from both states argued that removing posts from online feeds is a …

Will TikTok’s Parental Controls Actually Be Effective?

From Unsplash About a week ago on March 1st, 2023, popular social media app TikTok unveiled a new set of parental controls dubbed Family Pairing. It allows mothers and fathers to manage how their children are able to interact with the app, including setting screen time limits, seeing how many times they've opened the app, …

You Can Trust This Article Is Real, Right?

A few days ago on February 27th, 2023 a Tweet posted by The Post Millennial went live. It was a video that used artificial intelligence technology to manufacture a video that depicts Joe Biden sets the Selective Service act in motion and calls for a national draft. The Tweet can be found here: https://twitter.com/tpostmillennial/status/1630228964479229954 The …

Desensitization to Devastating News in Social Media

Is Social Media The Cause of desensitization, or are WE? In the 21st century, the negative influence of social media is everywhere, all the time. Open any social media app and after a few clicks between Instagram posts, or a couple minutes spent scrolling down the TikTok explore page you have been exposed to the …

How to Spot a Troll

There are liars all over the internet, and sometimes it can be difficult to parse through everything you see online and determine what is fact and what is fiction. People participate in an act the internet has dubbed "trolling", where they purposefully spread misinformation for the sake of their amusement. Browsers of the web might …

Digital Natives Still Susceptible to Misinformation

It's no question that social media is very popular amongst teens and young adults. Teens and young adults are being crowned the title as "digital natives" in today's day and age. A digital native is described as "people who have grown up under the ubiquitous influence of the internet and other modern information technologies.” Social …

Desensitization via Media Exposure: A Societal Problem

Image source: Rawhide Youth Services Within our modern cultural and digital landscapes, it is no secret that there is an overwhelming glut of entertainment media. For example, in terms of television and film, one needs only to look at the 50+ different streaming services available in North America for a frame of reference, or even …

Should The Criteria For Civic Engagement Change?

Photo by Max DeRoin on Pexels.com Civic engagement is crucial to democracy and the prosperity of our nation. The Criteria for what it means to be civically engaged has remained the same for quite some time. In the age of the internet we live in today, we have access to so many more opportunities to …