• Statistics
  • “A Deloitte survey of 2,000 U.S. consumers in 2017 found that 91% of people consent to terms of service without reading them. For younger people, ages 18-34, that rate was even higher, 97%”
  • “TikTok was the number one most downloaded app on the Apple App Store in the first quarter of 2019… As of summer 2020, TikTok is on millions of mobile devices in the United States and abroad. TikTok has offered a supportive community for many on the app while also raising concerns over dangerous trends and effects on mental health”
  • Eight-graders who spend over 10 hours on social media per week are [56% more likely](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/#:~:text=Eighth-graders who spend 10,less time to social media.&text=The more time teens spend,to report symptoms of depression.) to report being unhappy than those who spend less time on social media. Spending more than 3 hours on social media per day puts adolescents at a higher risk for mental health problems.
  • "13% of kids ages 12-17 report depression and 32% report anxiety. 25% of 18 to 25-year-olds report mental illness. These age groups report high usage of social media."
  • "59% of US teens experienced cyberbullying or online harassment. 90% say they think this harassment is a problem that affects other people their age. 63% say that it’s a major problem.""Social media apps, such as Snapchat and Facetune, are providing a new reality of beauty for today’s society,” the article reads. “These apps allow one to alter his or her appearance in an instant and conform to an unrealistic and often unattainable standard of beauty.”
  • "People have trouble putting their phones down. A study found that 94% of participants reported feeling troubled when they didn’t have their phone. 80% were jealous when someone else used their phone, and 70% expected to feel depressed, panicked, and helpless if their phone went missing or they couldn’t find it."
  • "A study found that 89% of undergraduate students experience phantom vibrations. This is the perception of vibrations from a mobile device that isn’t vibrating. People crave receiving notifications so much that they start imagining them."
  • The increase in smartphones has also boosted the use of these popular social platforms. But unfortunately, that’s not the only thing increasing. Mental health issues have gone up steadily following the trendlines from smartphone and social network releases. As more people use them, there are more people with greater health concerns.
• Facebook's Special Algorithm
  • “Facebook executives took the decision to end research that would make the social media sites less polarizing for fears that it would unfairly target right-wing users… “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,”
    • “The Common Ground team was intended to tackle polarization directly...create products that increase empathy, understanding, and humanization, of the ‘other side’”
  • Although Facebook is dedicated to neutrality, deciding that the social media site should not policy users’ opinions or vilify users’ political opponents… it was suggested that Facebook change its algorithm to suggest a wider range of Facebook groups or adding a feature to create smaller communities
  • Donald Trump signed an executive order to target social media sites after Twitter added a fact-checking label to his tweets claiming that postal voting would result in a “fraudulent” election.
• Social Media's Evil Filters
  • "Social media apps, such as Snapchat and Facetune, are providing a new reality of beauty for today’s society,” the article reads. “These apps allow one to alter his or her appearance in an instant and conform to an unrealistic and often unattainable standard of beauty.”
  • “The experience of younger humans in particular in this regard, how they relate to their own appearance, is so profoundly different than at any other point in time,” he said. “We used to have photographs, of course, but we gazed upon them and thought about them infrequently. Now, we’re in this world where people are exposed to their own facial image thousands of times per year.”
  • “I’ve always handed patients a mirror, and they’ve picked it up and pointed, and we’ve discussed what they wanted,” he said. “Now, what happens is at least once a week, I’ll hand someone a mirror, and they’ll look at it for a moment, get frustrated, and say, ‘You can’t really see it here and show me a picture. And that’s amazing because we’re looking at the same face through different media. They’re bothered by their pictures but not by their reflections.”
    • “You can find imperfections on any face,” he says. “The question is how pronounced they are and how much they actually matter to your overall appearance.”
  • Body dysmorphic disorder is linked to eating disorders and depression. A 2015 study from the International Journal of Eating Disorders investigated the link between social media usage and body-related behaviors among girls. It found that girls who shared photos of themselves online reported higher levels of both body dissatisfaction and overvaluation of “the thin ideal.” Ironically for a technology that’s designed to bring people closer together, spending too much time engaging with social media can actually make you feel more lonely and isolated—and exacerbate mental health problems such as anxiety and depression. Since it’s a relatively new technology, there’s little research to establish the long-term consequences, good or bad, of social media use. However, multiple studies have found a strong link between heavy social media and an increased risk for depression, anxiety, loneliness, self-harm, and even suicidal thoughts.
• Privacy Concerns
  • New urgency behind creating an early alerting tool is based on the growing number of threats to the United States. These threats include global criminal syndicates; foreign intelligence services gathering data and information on U.S. citizens; and international terrorist groups determined to sow confusion, discord and destruction on U.S. soil. The recent wave of mass shootings in the United States, such a social media surveillance tool might be used to find and detect potential “home grown” terrorist threats.
  • The CIA has already adopted various forms of social media monitoring tools. And, back in 2016, the FBI contracted an outside third-party vendor (Dataminr) in order to parse through the “firehose” of Twitter content in order to find various clues that might lead them to criminals, terrorists and domestic threats.
  • The FBI is focused on efforts to “detect, disrupt and investigate an ever-growing diverse range of threats.” This has emboldened the FBI to the point where the intelligence agency is not even hiding behind veiled euphemisms or vague terms – the FBI is very direct about what it is expecting from a social media surveillance tool.The FBI has decided that, in addition to Twitter, both Facebook and Instagram are worthy targets of social media surveillance.
  • Uber's Sneaky Terms and Conditions
    • “The Supreme Judicial Court rules today that Uber did a crappy job of alerting new users that by creating an account they were agreeing to a host of conditions they might not even realize existed
    • “The court put other companies doing business online that they’re going to have to take a hard look at how they present their terms of service to Massachusetts consumers, under a two-pronged test the court developed to determine the validity of online contracts”
    • “Uber did not create a signup process that requires users to, at a minimum, scan the agreement and provide assent, because it’s built such a system for its drivers, whose online agreement required them to at least pretend to read terms and click ‘YES, I AGREE’ before continuing to the next part of the sign-up process.
    • Court concluded, “ Instead of requiring its users to review those terms and conditions as it appears to do with its drivers, Uber has designed an interface that allows the registration to be completed without reviewing or even acknowledging the terms and conditions. In these circumstances, Uber has failed to show that it provided the plaintiffs with reasonable notice of the terms and conditions.”
• Tiktok and the Risks of Black Box Algorithms
  • “The company released algorithms to regulators and called on other companies to do the same… to provide “ peace of mind through greater transparency and accountability,”...it is essential to show users, advertisers, creators, and regulators that they are responsible and committed members of the American community that follows US laws.”
  • This raises the question of:
    • What is the value of Tiktok with or without its algorithms?
    • Does the release of these algorithms actually increase transparency and accountability?
  • “The key to this is visibility and transparency of AI systems… you must first be able to understand the ‘how’ and ‘why’ behind problems to efficiently root cause issues.
  • “On TikTok, all is not as it seems...But Tiktok’s algorithmic obsession with giving you more content that it thinks you will like is having an unintended consequence: it’s started recommending people new accounts to follow based on the physical appearance of the people they already follow.”
  • “TikTok denies that it uses profile pictures as part of its algorithm, and says it hasn’t been able to replicate the same results in its own tests. But the app uses collaborative filtering - where recommendations are made based on what other users have done…”