New Management Method: High School Science Club Wants to Run the School District
December 8, 2021
I love those confident, ever youthful, and oh-so enthusiastic high school science club members. Many of these individuals maintain their youthful insights into adulthood. In the after life, maybe these imbibers of the fountain of youth-type thinking are in charge. Milton, bless his poetic soul, learned that blind poets are best left to menial duties. Are there Augean stables in heaven? Nope, just techno-wizards.
I read “CTO to CEO: The Case for Putting the Tech Expert in Charge.” After an incident of Dorseying, Twitter has a new captain at the helm. The article is interesting because the author uses the Twitter appointment of Parag Agrawal as the start of a new management trend.
Here’s an example:
CTOs are increasingly being groomed by corporate boards as part of their CEO succession planning, according to Ash Athawale, senior managing director for Robert Half’s executive search division. Athawale told Protocol that he’s witnessed an increase in attention towards technology leaders as potential future chief executives. The reason? Tech is now central to core business functions across all industries…
Logical, no? A technology centric CEO at Twitter is just the ticket.
And what have technology capable adults with a history in their secondary schools’ science clubs wrought?
Here are a handful of examples:
- Twitter and its unique ability to provide left and right coasters with a platform to direct their thoughts at those who kick back and enjoy a filter bubble equipped with a one click response mechanism.
- Facebook and its remarkable impact on social constructs, including vulnerable people who have their self worth inflated or crushed in a mouse click
- The wonderful world of online advertising which introduced the concept of zero privacy to the world
- Amazon and its race with Walmart to reduce small businesses to delivery drop off points
There are other examples of what happens when tech-savvy folks run giant companies with money generating feedback mechanisms.
My hunch is that the ideal manager is not likely to be as well received as individuals with a slightly different profile.
Stephen E Arnold, December 8, 2021
Who Says Teachers Do Not Understand Social Media? Not TikTok
December 8, 2021
It can be difficult to keep up with what the kids are doing on video-sharing app TikTok, and much of it is just playful fun. However, here is an unnerving shift in direction—weaponized short videos being deployed against teachers and staff at schools in the UK. BBC News tells us about “TikTok School abuse: Teachers Quitting Over Pedophile Slurs.” Reporter Nicola Bryan writes:
“Some teachers are leaving the profession after being labeled pedophiles on TikTok, a union says. A craze on the social media app has seen children share videos of staff with inappropriate hashtags and comments and, sometimes, superimposing their faces onto pornography.”
See the write-up for a few examples. The situation is difficult because, while the children may be too young to fully understand the consequences of their actions, it is naturally causing staff and their families considerable angst. Neither of the schools have suspended any students—maybe because the content was posted anonymously. They are focusing instead on educating the children and, perhaps especially, their parents. But what is TikTok doing about the trend? A union representative states the company has been all talk and no action, and one school’s staff member reports it took a long time for videos to be taken down. However, another school’s head teacher says TikTok responded promptly to her school’s complaint. That is an odd inconsistency. The write-up quotes the company’s spokesperson:
“‘We are crystal clear that hateful behavior, bullying and harassment have no place on TikTok. We regret the distress caused to some teachers as a result of abusive content posted to our platform.’ She said the company had deployed additional technical measures and guidance and continued to ‘proactively detect and remove violative content and accounts’. She said the partner had partnered with the Professional Online Safety Helpline (POSH) to provide teachers with an additional way to report content and written to every school in the UK to ensure all staff had access to the resources they need.”
The Welsh government, for one, is not convinced TikTok is doing enough. Recognizing the seriousness of the issue, it demands TikTok remove this content immediately as it is reported. Will the company comply?
Cynthia Murrell December 8, 2021
A New Word Dorseying: Leaving Before the Fried Turkey Explodes
December 3, 2021
Full disclosure. We post Beyond Search tweets to Twitter. We use a script, and we use an account set up years ago. I don’t recall who on my team did this work, and I am not sure I know the password. We did this as a test for one of my lectures to a group of law enforcement and intelligence professionals to illustrate how a content stream could be implemented with zero fuss and muss. The mechanism is similar to the ones used by certain foreign entities to inject content into the Twitter users’ content pool.
Why’s this important?
Twitter is a coterie service; that is, the principal users are concentrated on the left and right coasts of the US. The service meets the needs of this group because tips, facts, and observations about technology and its world are essential to the personas of the most enthusiastic tweet generators. There are secondary and tertiary uses as well. Spectrum pretends to care when its customers point out yet another service outage. Political big sparklers generate outputs for their constituents. Vendors of diet supplements find the service helpful as well.
But Twitter, like other social media services, is in the spotlight. The trucks carting these high intensity beams are driven by wild eyed and often over enthusiastic elected officials and laborers in the gray and beige government cubicles.
Write ups like “Twitter Has a New CEO; What About a New Business Model?” and “Twitter Bans Sharing Private Images and Videos without Consent” provide purported insight into the machinations of the new Twitter. But the main point is that Twitter allows humans and smart software to create personas and push content to others in the tweetiverse.
Dorseying means that one individual is getting out of Dodge before the law arrives. This exit is less elegant than the proactive departure of Messrs. Brin and Page from the Google. From my vantage point, the former big dog of the Tweeter wants to be undisturbed and work in less well illuminated locations. Is Dorseying an action similar to running away from trouble? Interesting question.
Can Twitter be enhanced, fixed, or remediated?
My view is that anonymous and easily created “accounts” required some thought. The magic of censorship is likely to be less impactful than short lived special effects in the early Disney films. (Does anyone remember the cinegraphic breakthrough of “sparkles”?) The amping up of advertising is likely to lead to a destination that many have previously visited; that is, one with carefully crafted paths, exhibits, attractions, and inducements to buy, buy, buy.
Net net: Twitter, like other social media, will be difficult to control. My hunch is that the service will continue to snip through social fabrics. Because Twitter is a publicly traded company, management has to respond to the financial context in which it operates. Fancy talk, recommendations, and half hearted editorial measures may have unintended consequences. That’s what concerns me about the tweeter thing.
Dorseying was a good move.
Stephen E Arnold, December 3, 2021
The Most Potent American Export: The Social Media Violence System
November 29, 2021
The United States is not the country affected by social media. The Interpreter shares how religious minorities in Bangladesh are harmed when misinformation spreads via social media: “Minorities Under Attack In Bangladesh.” Bangladesh’s major religion is Islam with various minorities, including Buddhism and Hindu. The country is described as religiously tolerant compared to its neighbors.
Unfortunately rumors spread over Facebook that the Quran was desecrated during the Hindu Durga Puja festival. Buddhist and Hindu temples and holy sites were attacked, while seven people were killed. Bangladesh authorities arrested a man who claimed to have left a copy of the Quran at the festival. This is not the first time violence prompted by social media occurred:
“However, almost every year since 2012 religious minorities have been attacked somewhere in Bangladesh after online posts promulgating false allegations. The pattern runs like this: rumors begin within a local community that people from a minority background have defamed Islam, and such orchestrated “fake news” quickly spreads online to incite violence against minorities.”
Violence in Bangladesh stems from three factors: growing fear in the Islamic majority of atheism and blasphemy, growing supranational Muslin and Hindu identities, religious minority attacks are actually attempts to stem Hindu land.
Social media in Bangladesh is used as a propaganda tool to fuel prejudice and fear amongst its people. It is unfortunate that all religions in Bangladesh are victims of social media misinformation. Mob mentally runs rampant on social media and it is not any different from other violence that stems from newspapers, TVs, or radios. Social media just spreads it faster.
Whitney Grace, November 29, 2021
Apple Podcast Ratings: A Different Angle
November 24, 2021
I read “Apple Podcasts App Ratings Flip after the Company Starts Prompting Users.” The write up explains that Apple’s podcast application was receiving the rough equivalent of a D or D- from its users. How did Apple fix this? Some big monopolies wou8ld have just had an intern enter the desired number. This works with search results pages on some Web and enterprise search systems. Not Apple. The write up reports:
The iPhone maker told The Verge that iOS 15.1 started prompting users for ratings and reviews “just like most third-party apps.” However, many people thought they were rating the show they were listening to, not the app — and that led to a flood of scores and reviews for podcasts.
Two points:
- Users were confused
- Prompts sparked ratings.
I interpreted this information to mean that users are not too swift even thought Apple’s high priced products are supposed to appeal to the swift and sure. Second, the prompts caused an immediate user reaction at least for some of the app’s users.
My takeaway: Online services can cause behaviors. Power in the hands of the just and true or evidence of the impact of digital nudges? Do higher ratings improve the app? Probably not.
Stephen E Arnold, November 24, 2021
Ommmm, Ommmm: Pundit Zen
November 21, 2021
I read “How Twitter Got Research Right.” Okay, Twitter. Short messages. Loved by a comparatively modest coterie of Left and Right Coasters. Followers. Blue. Management hate from the rock star professor Scott (buy my book and invest in Shopify) Galloway. Okay, Casey Newton. Verge-tastic. Silicon Valley savvy. Independent journalist. Budding superstar with Oprah’s staff checking him out.
The write up explains “got right” as a fine expression of business savvy. The write up offered this observation:
Twitter hosted an open competition to find bias in its photo-cropping algorithms.
I think I failed a college class because I was unable to find a suitable definition for the concept “mea culpa.” I think the instructor was unhappy with my one word research paper which pivoted on the acronym PR. I was supposed to write down something like a person or entity says something that is one’s fault. (See, I am writing in a gender neutral way.” Ommmmm. Ommmmm.
In the shadow of this “real news” Silicon Valley essay, I think the proper term is apologia. As I recall from another course in which I wallowed in academic desperation, an apologia means “speaking in defense.” I wonder if I ever finished reading Plato’s Apology.
Somewhere in my lousy college education I learned about the dialectic or motive force of an action that creates a thought or reaction. The subsequent events go off the rails, and the actors do the explaining away thing.
What’s up in the Twitter mea culpa / apologia event is that social media have been quite significant in several ways: Amplification of certain information and providing a free, unfettered mechanism to whip up frenzy. (Some examples come to mind, but I shall refrain from writing their names because stop word lists….
To sum up: Quite a rhetorical tour de force, and I don’t buy into the Twitter is trying to do good despite the got right assurance. Ommmmm. Ommmmm. That’s the sound of regulators calming themselves before actually regulating.
Stephen E Arnold, November 22, 2021
Giants of Social Media, Out of Touch, Are We?
November 17, 2021
Just a short item. I read “How to Hit the Top on Each Social Media Platform.” I ignored the how to part. I don’t want to hit the “top” on any social media platform. Not for this 77 year old, nope.
In the write up was a very suggestive item of information. Of course, I believe everything I read on the Internet. The statement which caught my attention was:
According to an Axios analysis of the top 50 most-followed accounts on each platform, TikTok is especially unique in minting its own stars who don’t blow up on other platforms.
- The top five most-followed accounts on TikTok — Charli D’Amelio, Khaby Lame, Addison Rae, Bella Poarch and Zach King — do not rank in the top 50 of any other social media network.
- Collectively, those five stars have 480 million followers on TikTok, but less than half of that amount of followers across Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook combined.
- Top TikTok personalities have been able to land massive Hollywood deals across film, TV and podcasts, without building audiences on other platforms.
If these data are accurate, it follows that “peak” US social media has come and is now officially going. The data, if on the money, suggest:
- Those with access to TikTok data have a valuable trove of signals. These can be used for many things; for example, which individual is most likely to have a predisposition to resist authority.
- A split between old school social media and new school social media is similar to the technical and intellectual bifurcation between those with traditional college educations and those who prefer short video content. Does this presage a new approach to thinking and decision making which outsiders may struggle to understand.
- The social damage sparked by old school social media platforms may be accelerated by the “velocity” and algorithmic steering of the TikTok type environment.
Now who owns TikTok? What outfits have access to these real time data? What managers have direct access to the stars identified as bright sparks in the TikTok universe? Time for some academics, real journalists, and researchers not accepting China centric funding to do some objective analysis.
Stephen E Arnold, November 17, 2021
Teens Protest Online: Social Media Feels the Chill
November 17, 2021
Facebook has created problems from the moment Zuckerberg released the social media platform. Facebook has contributed to human trafficking, child pornography, teen suicides, and widespread misinformation related to vaccines and politics. Facebook has also seen its users age with fewer young people interested in using the platform. Teen Vogue details how teens planned to protest Facebook’s bad acts in, “Facebook Log Out Campaign Aims To Hold Social Media Companies Accountable For Protecting Users.”
On November 10, the Kairos Fellowship encouraged Instagram and Facebook users to log out of their accounts. The movement called the Facebook (and Instagram) Log Out. The purpose is to remove users from the social media platforms’ profit streams. In other words, hurt the companies in the wallet in an attempt to gain their attentions. The protestors want effective content moderation, algorithm transparency, and direct accountability to the people on the platform:
“But here’s the thing: Social media users are not powerless. In Facebook’s case, 98% of their revenue comes from advertising, much of which is hyper-targeted towards each and every user. So when I say Facebook is nothing without users and user data, I literally mean it. We make or break platforms like Instagram and Facebook, and, together, we can begin the process of reimagining what these spaces could look like and how they can run. It’s because I see the importance of social media platforms in our society and for marginalized communities that I’m proud to be leading the Facebook (and Instagram) Logout.”
November 10 has come and gone, but there was little reported on the Logout’s impact. It is great for protests like the Logout to exist and gain the social media companies’ attentions. It would be even greater if they worked with politicians and more advertisers to make their voices heard. It is hard to get a message across unless something goes viral, but they need social media for that. Catch-22 anyone?
Whitney Grace, November 17, 2021
Facebook: Whom Do We Trust?
November 15, 2021
Despite common sense, people continue to trust Facebook for news. Informed people realize that Facebook is not a reliable news source. Social media and communication experts are warning the US government about the dangers. Roll Call delves into the details in, “Facebook Can’t Be Trusted To Stop Spread Of Extremism, Experts Tell Senate.”
Social media and communication experts testified at the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. They explained to the US Senate that social media platforms, especially Facebook, are incapable of containing the spread of violent, extremist content. Facebook personalization algorithms recommend extremist content and it becomes an addiction:
“Karen Kornbluh, who directs the Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, described how social media algorithms can quickly lure a user from innocuous political content to instructional videos for forming a militia. ‘This is a national security vulnerability,’ Kornbluh said, giving a small number of content producers the ability to exploit social media algorithms to gain enormous reach.‘Social media goes well beyond providing users tools to connect organically with others,’ she testified. ‘It pulls users into rabbit holes and empowers small numbers of extremist recruiters to engineer algorithmic radicalization.’”
Social media platform companies prioritize profit over societal well-being, because the extremist and polarizing content keeps users’ eyeballs glued to their screens. Experts want the US government to force social media platforms to share their algorithms so they can be studied. Facebook and its brethren argue their algorithms are proprietary technology and poses business risks if made public.
Social media companies know more their users than the public knows about the companies. The experts argue that social media platforms should be more transparent so users can understand how their views are distorted.
Whitney Grace, November 15, 2021
Crypto Currency and Social Media: Financial Heterocyclic Skeletons?
October 27, 2021
I read what seemed at first glance another rah rah crypto currency news report. The article is “NFTs Are Sinking Their Non-Fungible Claws in Even Deeper.” Here’s a snippet I underlined:
Just as crypto currencies are set to revolutionize the world of economics and finance, NFTs are going to rewrite how we think about digital goods.
This prose comes from the Reddit social media outfit’s job posting. Reddit is not alone. The Zen-manager wizard in charge of Twitter has perceived a similar signal from the future. The short message outfit wants to get into crypto.
Several observations:
- Existing oversight and financial controls are not tuned into the powerful interactions of social media, censorship/filtering, and digital currency and its artifacts
- Financial experts struggle to explain the Tesla phenomenon and strike me as in the dark about crypto currencies, NFTs, and financial reactions that are likely to be triggered among the young at heart and a taste for gambling
- Traditional financial firms spend big bucks to make sure their data streams are up to the demands of high frequency trading. Are these outfits ready for the 24×7 social media crypto currency reactions? My hunch is that the firms will generate words but the understanding thing may be on vacation.
Net net: Reddit and Twitter, two social media giants, are doing some experimenting with volatile financial chemicals. The reactions may be surprising.
Stephen E Arnold, October 27, 2021
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