Social Media

"Social media can be a powerful tool for connection, but it can also lead to increased feelings of depression and anxiety – particularly among adolescents. Family physicians are often the first stop for parents and families concerned about the physical and emotional health of young people in their lives, and we confront the mental health crisis among youth every day. The American Academy of Family Physicians commends the Surgeon General for identifying this risk for America's youth and joins our colleagues across the health care community in equipping young people and their families with the resources necessary to live healthy, balanced lives."

"Every parent’s top priority for their child is for them to be happy, healthy and safe. We have heard from families who say they need and want information about using social media and devices. This Advisory from the Surgeon General confirms that family engagement on this topic is vital and continues to be one of the core solutions to keeping children safe online and supporting their mental health and well-being."

"The first principle of health care is to do no harm – that’s the same standard we need to start holding social media platforms to. As the Surgeon General has pointed out throughout his tenure, we all have a role to play in addressing the youth mental health crisis that we now face as a nation. We have the responsibility to ensure social media keeps young people safe. And as this Surgeon General’s Advisory makes clear, we as physicians and healers have a responsibility to be part of the effort to do so.”"

"Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn. We need roughly half of our revenue to be subscription."

"A million fucking message boards, email, Twitter, any number of free tools, being limited only by time and your imagination? If I’d had the internet in 1988 I WOULD OWN AN ENTIRE COUNTRY BY NOW AND WOULD PUT HUNDREDS OF YOU TO DEATH EACH DAY JUST FOR FUN AND IT WOULD BE THE LAW."

"That is the central tenet of twenty- first-century Western philosophy: ‘I tweet, therefore I am.’"

"Running an ad-free website where millions of people gather every day to discuss facts and update scores of pages is a monumental task. It’s incredible that Wikipedia doesn’t often go down and has few technical problems. Most of the time, Wikipedia works without issue. The same is not true for X (formerly known as Twitter)."

"Regardless, this new research shows that Wikipedia editors of different opinions have strived for consensus over time. That's opposed to Facebook or Twitter, where people are siloed into their own self-reinforcing echo chambers. ... Consider this a version of the “miracle of aggregation” – that large groups of people are able to act rationally and solve problems despite having vastly different interests."

"That you cannot argue with 30 million people on Twitter I will grant you, which is why nobody is asking anybody to do that. But do you know what you can do with 30 million people on Twitter? You can wait one afternoon. People can be ruthless on social media, but they also have the long-term memory of goldfish. The whole cycle—the controversy, the apology, the rash of takes about the apology, the rash of takes about the takes about the apology, and the redemption—lives its lifespan so quickly you could miss one completely if you flew from New York to LA and didn’t spring for the Gogo in-flight WiFi. If you make a piece of art, and Twitter registers its displeasure with it, you can either stomp your feet and quit the game forever, or—I promise you this is true—go to the gym for a couple hours."

"The offensive attitudes and statements discovered on James' Twitter feed are indefensible and inconsistent with our studio's values, and we have severed our business relationship with him."

"No official directive at all, and I don’t think I’ve ever tweeted anything that bad. But it’s nine years of stuff written largely off the cuff as ephemera, if trolls scrutinizing it for ammunition is the new normal, this seems like a “why not?” move."

"I think there are times that the other side does it to get you caught."

"There’s no way that this is just happening randomly."

"I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump"

"They [Twitter] are not principled in this. They have so much garbage and filth on that platform all the time. They did not censor people when they are using those platforms or the rioting that occurred over the summer."

"Much of the stuff on Twitter or in op-ed pieces is all the more embarrassing for having been written from a presumed position of great intellectual superiority..."

"People are always criticizing Twitter. "Twitter is crazy!" they say. I think that's misguided. Twitter is simply an avenue -- there are many -- by which people reveal who they are."

"I complained to Twitter about the man who, pretending to be me, commended the Charleston racist murderer. Twitter responded: “We have determined that it’s not in violation of Twitter’s impersonation policy.” I felt a flash of rage. Every time an online shaming occurred Twitter and Google made money. Whereas those of us doing the actual shaming? We got nothing. Twitter suddenly felt uncaring, intimidating, even dangerous. We were unpaid shaming interns for a company that didn’t care about us. I quit Twitter. The world outside Twitter was great. I read books. I reconnected with people I knew from real life and met them for drinks in person. Then I drifted back on to Twitter."

"If Shakespeare were alive today, he might be writing on Twitter."

"Twitter is the people’s tool, the tool of the ordinary people, people who have no other resources."

"If you’ve ever been to the monkey house in one of those awful downscale zoos, you know what monkeys — these particular monkeys — are like: They jerk off and fling poo all day, generally using the same hand for both, and they don’t do a hell of a lot else, unless there’s McDonald’s. All day: jerk off, fling poo, jerk off, fling poo, jerk, fling, jerk, fling. Twitter, basically."

"As a result of the unprecedented and ongoing violent situation in Washington, D.C., we have required the removal of three @realDonaldTrump Tweets that were posted earlier today for repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy"

"! This claim about election fraud is disputed"

"Voter fraud of any kind is exceedingly rare in the US, election experts confirm"

"Twitter is actively preparing to support the transition of w:White House institutional Twitter accounts on January 20th, 2021. As we did for the presidential transition in 2017, this process is being done in close consultation with the w:National Archives and Records Administration."

"We are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family, we've been working to expand existing product features and policies so we can more effectively address things like this going forward, and we hope to have those changes in place shortly."

"Specific threats of violence or wishing for serious physical harm, death, or disease to an individual or group of people is in violation of our policies. Our new changes include more types of related content including: Accounts that affiliate with organizations that use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes. Groups included in this policy will be those that identify as such or engage in activity — both on and off the platform — that promotes violence. This policy does not apply to military or government entities and we will consider exceptions for groups that are currently engaging in (or have engaged in) peaceful resolution."

"Twitter hates comedy. It hates truth. It hates free speech. And it hates the American People, because they refuse to be docile sheep."

"I Don't Look at Twitter Because It Doesn't Tell Me Anything."

"Too many twits make a twat."

"I don’t have confidence in management."

"HB20 would compel platforms to disseminate all sorts of objectionable viewpoints, such as Russia’s propaganda claiming that its invasion of Ukraine is justified, ISIS propaganda claiming that extremism is warranted, neo-Nazi or KKK screeds denying or supporting the Holocaust, and encouraging children to engage in risky or unhealthy behavior like eating disorders."

"Elon’s appointment to the board was to become officially effective on 4/9, but Elon shared that same morning that he would not be joining the board. I believe this is for the best."

"After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence"

"This means that the account of @realDonaldTrump will be locked for 12 hours following the removal of these Tweets. If the Tweets are not removed, the account will remain locked."

"If the people who ran Facebook were monsters, I wouldn’t have worked there."

"לא לדאוג, אנחנו על זה #פייסבוק_מתה"

"Facebook allowed the president of Honduras to artificially inflate the appearance of popularity on his posts for nearly a year after the company was first alerted to the activity. The astroturfing – the digital equivalent of a bussed-in crowd – was just one facet of a broader online disinformation effort that the administration has used to attack critics and undermine social movements, Honduran activists and scholars say. Facebook posts by Juan Orlando Hernández, an authoritarian rightwinger whose 2017 re-election is widely viewed as fraudulent, received hundreds of thousands of fake likes from more than a thousand inauthentic Facebook Pages – profiles for businesses, organizations and public figures – that had been set up to look like Facebook user accounts."

"The civic tech expert Ed Saperia used as his parable the difference between Wikipedia and Facebook. Jimmy Wales’s big experiment, which started life in 1999 as Nupedia, has created an open-source collection of human knowledge in hundreds of languages that is essentially trustworthy. If a mistake creeps in through the gates of human generosity, it gets corrected in the same way. If malicious actors try to slander their foes, the punishment is not cancellation, but more like lifelong ridicule, which is proportionate, given how long a slanderous person is likely to carry on doing ridiculous things. In other words, it is the best of humanity, all natural desire to help each other with cross-pollinated knowledge concentrated in one place. Facebook, for brevity, takes the same raw material – all the people in the world – and finds the worst in it. Facebook manages to winkle out things we didn’t know we were capable of – levels of vitriol, gullibility and hysteria – in between a scare ad for dark politics and a mesmerising video of five types of mince baked around a kilo of cheese. (I am paraphrasing a bit; I don’t think civic tech gurus dwell much on the cheese.)"

"I think MySpace is doomed, I give them about two more years. [...] I think Facebook is the next Microsoft in both the bad and the good senses. That's an amazing company that is going to do a lot of good and bad things."

"I doff my fedora to this Facebook! It's the smartest way to keep people dumb since we started fluoridating the water."

"I have one friend whose Facebook updates are exclusively complaining about Facebook."

"Facebook mistreats its users. Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine. For instance, if you browse the Web and you see a 'like' button in some page or some other site that has been displayed from Facebook. Therefore, Facebook knows that your machine visited that page. So, Facebook carries out surveillance over visitors to thousands of different Websites, even for people who are not Facebook users. I hope we will have something for free browsers to block Facebook 'like' buttons so that people won't be under surveillance. In any case, this is why I ask people not to put photographs of me on Facebook, because Facebook collects data about the names of people in photos. It might as well be working directly for Big Brother. Facebook collects a lot of data from people and admits it. And it also collects data which isn't admitted. And Google does too. As for Microsoft, I don't know. But I do know that Windows has features that send data about the user."

"Facebook likes to present itself as a tech company, but often appears more like an advertising corporation that happens to use digital technology in order to conduct its core business. [...] Facebook represents a new kind of corporate power, the dimensions of which are only now becoming apparent."

"The tools Facebook provides make discrimination easy. Facebook has monopoly profit margins, so it could easily provide real staffing to protect against discrimination, if it wanted to. It doesn’t want to."

"I believe that Facebook represents one of the gravest threats to democracies around the world, and I am amazed that we have allowed our freedoms to be taken away by technology companies’ greed for growth and revenues."

"Comparisons to the lies and tactics of Big Tobacco in the 20th century are wholly justified. Facebook, and the politicians benefiting from it, know full well the harms they are unleashing on the public. Facebook is the world’s largest distributor of news, yet studies have shown that on social media, lies laced with anger and hatred spread faster and farther than facts."

"Now let me pull out so we’re clear about the problem we all face and how we got here. The attacks against us in Rappler began 5 years ago when we demanded an end to impunity on two fronts: Duterte’s drug war and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Today, it has only gotten worse – and Silicon Valley’s sins came home to roost in the United States on January 6 with mob violence on Capitol Hill. What happens on social media doesn’t stay on social media. Online violence is real world violence. Social media is a deadly game for power and money, what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, extracting our private lives for outsized corporate gain. Our personal experiences are sucked into a database, organized by AI, then sold to the highest bidder. Highly profitable micro-targeting operations are engineered to structurally undermine human will – a behavior modification system in which we are Pavlov’s dogs, experimented on in real time with disastrous consequences in countries like mine, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka and so many more. These destructive corporations have siphoned money away from news groups and now pose a foundational threat to markets and elections. Facebook is the world’s largest distributor of news, and yet studies have shown that lies laced with anger and hate spread faster and further than facts on social media. These American companies controlling our global information ecosystem are biased against facts, biased against journalists. They are – by design – dividing us and radicalizing us. Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy, and it becomes impossible to deal with our world’s existential problems: climate, coronavirus, the battle for truth."

"Facebook's introduction of a new feature that uses [Wikipedia] to combat “fake news” [...] poses arguably the greatest test in years to the volunteer-run online encyclopedia, constituting a massive threat to the internet's largest and ostensibly most trusted source of free knowledge. ... It also highlights the risks posed by Facebook's efforts to seemingly outsource its problems to the online encyclopedia. Indeed, Wikipedia has struggled to defend its standards in the face of its new role as the internet's “good cop.” As more and more tech giants like Facebook and YouTube make use of its content, a new influx of users has flooded the website [–] not all of them well intentioned."

"Facebook is the backbone of small business in America"