558Group5

I received a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome, which is a lifelong condition on the higher-functioning end of the autism spectrum. After my diagnosis in 2001, I wanted to see if there were an online community or any message boards or websites where people with Asperger’s could connect. At first, I found few groups, but I did locate local organizations with in-person services that expanded from small discussions to broad support and guidance for the autistic spectrum. Social media platforms, which I have discussed in previous essays, did not become widespread until Myspace gained popularity around 2004, followed by Facebook opening to the public in 2005. Over the past 20 years, countless support groups and discussion boards have emerged across social media, particularly on Facebook, catering to various interests, medical conditions, and quirks—including communities for those on the autistic spectrum. Based on experience, these support groups offer a safe space to share about Asperger’...

[ image source ] I’m focusing my final report on the Free Black Women’s Library in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and when I started this week’s course material I was thinking that I wouldn’t have much to say about DEI analysis with their content because their whole thing is that they exist to support Black women—they are the diversity! But watching Rachel Latsko’s video , I realized how much there is to making content that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive, and it gave me lots of ideas.  I think what the Free Black Women’s Library is doing well is highlighting Black female and nonbinary voices and curating a space where this marginalized group can build community with each other. They have numerous videos on their instagram highlighting books in their collection (which consists only of books written by Black female and nonbinary authors) and plan many of their events around supporting the Black female community. Their Discord server hosts many channels for conversations, some where membe...

  Social Media, Algorithms and Connections Zoe Manalo, Post #11     Social media is supposed to connect us, but lately I've been thinking about how it can also divide us, especially for marginalized communities. Algorithms decide what we see and who gets seen, and that process often ends up reinforcing bias. For example, posts by users talking about racism or gender identity are sometimes flagged or hidden, while other kinds of harmful content slip through. It's a reminder that even behind the scenes code carries human bias. Platform design can also play a big role. Things like verification badges, trending pages, and filters can all send subtly signs about who's valued and who's ignored. For people already underrepresented that can make social media feel like a space where they're tolerated, but not included.      For organizations, promoting inclusion online means more than sharing a few diversity posts during heritage months. It's about looking criticall...

Social media has created a world in which just about anyone can find a community of like-minded individuals with similar interests. No matter how niche or bizarre your interest, there is a community for you somewhere. Whether it be on Reddit, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, or anywhere else, there is somewhere for everyone. One of the most bizarre of these online communities is that of the furry community. A furry, to put it as simply as possible, is someone who likes anthropomorphic (human-like) animals and calls themselves a furry. If you have not spent a lot of time online this may not sound very bizarre. However, if you have, you are either a furry yourself or have made/heard a joke at the expense of this community. Oftentimes members of this community have a “fursona.” A fursona is an avatar based on an animal or mythical creature meant to represent oneself. Sometimes they will dress up as their fursona wearing a “fursuit” at conventions called furrycons. Due to how odd many of the...

  Humanity has always sought familiarity and community, especially when a sense of belonging is lacking in one's immediate environment. The emergence of online communities and social media platforms has provided new avenues for individuals to connect with like-minded people across the globe. Personally, I have found value in engaging with these platforms, sharing perspectives on current socio-political issues, and exchanging ideas through forums such as Facebook. Platforms like YouTube, which began as repositories of unique content and memories, have allowed users to revisit cultural artifacts and interact with diverse audiences, further enhancing the sense of connection. The proliferation of digital communities can foster positive interactions and create supportive networks. However, groups leverage these platforms to promote divisive narratives and perpetuate prejudices inherited from earlier generations. Twitter allows uncensored discussions that can shape young people's v...

  Hashtags and Community Zoe Manalo, Post #10      This week's focus on social media and community made me think about how hashtags operate as more than simple metadata. They're a means of participation. On platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and X use hashtags like #BookTok allows users to organize conversations and can even point to shared identity and similarities. Through these small digital gestures, people can connect across the world and institution, forming what Henry Jenkins (2013) describes as participatory culture, spaces where audiences aren't just consuming content, but actively creating, curating, and shaping it together.      In this sense, hashtags function as entry points into participatory networks. They encourage users to remix trends, respond to others, contribute to collective storytelling. What starts as a tag becomes a self sustaining community built on engagement and visibility.       At the same time not all h...

  As an avid fan of the TikTok, I thought it would be best to describe the online community around this particular social media platform. TikTok was originally created in China but was released internationally 2017. It really gained its popularity in early 2019 when the COVID-19 pandemic began. In the beginning it was just another social platform that people did dances or funny videos. Since then it has become a huge following and most individuals have this app downloaded.  Certain "trends" come out because the same people watched a video, you have clubs together online, the comments can be more funny than the actually video itself, people impersonate other individuals, some people even find their soulmates on this app.  There was a time when "Vine" was popular and people still quote videos from there to this day. I know I quote several things from those short 6 second videos. It was unfortunately shut down due to Twitter.  Moving on, along came TikTok. As I stated ...

[ image source ]   This week I’m thinking about the ways in which YouTube fosters community on its platform. I’m not someone who watches YouTube often, but I don’t have cable, so when big events like the NYC mayoral election happen, I turn to YouTube to watch the news livestreams and get real time updates.  I attended a watch party at my friend’s apartment on election night and we accidentally toggled the livestream comments so that they appeared on the screen in real time. For better or for worse, we could now see all the comments from viewers as they sent them. While my friends and I did not participate in the comments, I got to witness the banter of a community of people in support of mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. People from all across the country were bonding over a mayoral candidate of a city they didn’t even live in. In fact, most of the commenters were not NYC residents. They highlighted their favorite parts of his victory speech and compared it to Cuomo’s concession sp...

Misinformation, to some extent, has been present on the internet and social media from the very beginning. However, it feels nearly unavoidable in today's internet landscape. In the internet of old, the misinformation someone would come across was mostly innocent in nature. This would come in the form of celebrity death hoaxes or posts urging users to share; otherwise, you give Facebook access to your personal information (example 1 provided below). In contrast, the misinformation of today feels much more sinister. From misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic to false allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election. Political polarization has acted as a driving force for a lot of the misinformation currently on social media platforms. The absolute volume of misinformation is so vast that some users do not know what to believe anymore. This has created a sort of echo chamber for misinformation related to politics, only heightening the already existing political polarization. In a...

  In major world events, there comes a point where information is spread that isn't true. Certain platforms should have more guidance on what is being posted by health organizations. There is a lot of misinformation out there on social media. Individuals post false/misleading information that is then interpretated into something else. When we discuss social media platforms, we need to take into consideration the amount of false information. This is now tricky because mostly everyone has social media, news is spread rapidly. This now includes fake news. So how can a society change platforms that are spreading this misinformation?  There needs to be a security team just for social media platforms that flag this type of misinformation. When it comes to major world events, like the COVID-19 pandemic, people tend to post whatever their feelings are. It is so easy to share/repost/tell others about this fake news that is all over. In a world of technology and apps and social media pl...

[ image source ]   In the trenches of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, Meta’s Oversight Board was created. This committee is often described as the Supreme Court of Meta. It generally serves to oversee content moderation and freedom of speech on Facebook and Instagram as a response to the growing misinformation epidemic on these platforms.  Before writing this post, I had never heard of them. But in my research, I learned some very interesting things. In the video that the Oversight Board has posted to YouTube which explains who they are and what they do, the Board claims to be legally and financially independent of Meta. At this point in the video, I’m thinking this group was created by folks who had nothing to do with Meta but cared deeply about this issue. In fact, they discuss the work they do in the video in very general terms: “At the Oversight Board, we believe that social media companies should not make so many important decisions about freedom of expressi...

Two years ago, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, acquired the social media platform Twitter in its entirety. Musk and his supporters previously criticized Twitter for limiting free speech. In 2020, Twitter saw widespread misinformation on social, political, and pandemic topics, along with calls to violence. Multiple accounts, including then-President Donald J. The suspension is now in effect. Trump and his supporters. Jack Dorsey, Twitter's founder, was leading the company at that time. In 2017, there were rumors that the Walt Disney Company wanted to buy Twitter, but Disney ended up purchasing 20th Century Fox instead. Even as late as early 2022, there was talk of Dorsey stepping down from Twitter. Although there were unstable periods, Twitter fostered respectful discourse during parts of 2021 and early 2022. However, this period did not last long. For reasons I am unable to share, Elon Musk acquired the whole company along with its codebase. Despite renaming the platform to X and...

 Reddit's Community Moderation Model Zoe Manalo, Post #9     Inspired by this week's content, I wanted to take a closer look at Reddit, one of the largest social media platforms built around community driven discussion. Unlike traditional platforms where moderation happens from the top down. Reddit thrives on user created subreddits, each with its own rules, culture, and volunteer moderators.      One of the things that makes Reddit unique is how much power it gives its users. Instead of one big team deciding what stays up or gets taken down, Reddit relies on volunteer moderators who run individual subreddits. These mods set their own rules, enforce them how they see fit, and basically shape the culture of each community. It's a cool idea, people who care about a topic get to create the space they want.      But this decentralized system also has some real downsides. Because every subreddit runs differently misinformation gets handled unevenl...

  The concept of “liking” a post on social media is something that exists across the majority of social media platforms. Whether it be a like, a thumbs up, a heart, or an upvote, this concept is almost always present. But does it really designate a post's success? To some extent it feels as if it is unquestionably an indicator of at least some level of interest in a post. However, this is just a surface-level indicator; the number of likes on a post is only part of a story. What is the ratio of people who saw a post and decided to like it? If this is a high ratio, it is a better indicator that the post can be considered successful. If the post has a low ratio, meaning many more views than likes, then this may not be such a great indicator. Both view count and number of likes help to tell the full story. In addition, the concept of a dislike button may offer further insight into a post's success. Platforms like Reddit do have this function, the downvote button. YouTube also has ...

  The rise of generative artificial intelligence across various industries is leading to less authentic human interaction on social media trends that may be less obvious to younger individuals or those not active online. The issue is especially apparent in AI-generated videos and images, which often appear convincing on the surface—featuring realistic voices or likenesses—but lack true authenticity or proper verification. The term "AI slope" refers to content that seems authentic but does not meet trustworthy or accurate standards. For long-time internet users like me (online since the late 1990s), nothing about AI-produced material feels unique; it lacks the intricacies and honesty that come from human touch. Instead, these works carry perceived biases and implied truths rather than undisputed facts. For example, I recently saw a YouTube video showing Oprah Winfrey defending Sean "Diddy" Combs during his criminal trial—a testimony that never actually occurred. Th...

  Beyond Citations: Why Altmetrics Matter in a Social Media World Zoe Manalo, Post #8     What we think about measuring research impact, most of us immediately picture citations. Those little numbers that tell us how often a paper has been referenced. But in today's world of tweets, threads, and trending topics, that old-school approach only tells part of the story. Enter altmetrics, short for alternative metrics which look at how research is shared and discussed outside traditional academia. Altmetrics track things like social media mentions, new coverage, and online discussions to show how scholarships connects with the public in real time. In their article Towards a Second Generation of "Social Media Metrics," Diaz-Faes, Bowman, and Costas (2019) dig into how Twitter communities form around science. They argue that it's not just about counting likes or retweets, it's about who is paying attention and how they're engaging. Instead of treating social media as...

  (Image above shows what the original hashtag looked like compared to todays from Britannica) In today's society, the hashtag is slowly dying down. We do not see much of this symbol anymore unless it is on a big following account or X. The purpose of the hashtag was to group together images or posts by certain users in one place. You can simply look up #library and many posts will pop up by users who have used this specific hashtag. So what happened? Algorithms and peoples watch times changed. This means that platforms like Facebook or Instagram can see what you are specifically looking for and change your feeds. If you are looking up libraries, they will pop up as suggested accounts to follow. In this case lets just say they would not be suggesting music accounts to follow. Hashtags used to fun, everyone used them to attract larger audiences and more followers. Now? People rarely use them. Instead of searching up certain words by hashtags you now can look up posts by words. Where...

[ image source ]   The spread of conspiracy theories online is a fascinating problem, and one that is indicative of a larger phenomenon: post-truth. Researchers Anatoliy Gruzd and Philip Mai published a paper in mid 2020 where they examined how the conspiracy theory tied to the hashtag #FilmYourHospital went viral. This social campaign encouraged users to break quarantine in the early days of the pandemic to film empty parking lots and waiting rooms in their local hospitals to prove that COVID-19 was a hoax. Of course there are many reasons why hospital parking lots and waiting rooms would be empty during a global pandemic—namely because they had closed their doors to visitors and non-emergency appointments to prevent the spread of the virus—but in a post-truth world, this was not a good enough explanation.  I learned about post-truth recently and I think it’s something that should be more on the radar of libraries. Post-truth is the rising phenomenon of people deciding not t...

As someone who grew up with YouTube, I was drenched in YouTube culture from a very young age. Due to this I have always been aware, to some extent, of analytics on the site. Stemming from a long obsession, which is still held, with numbers and statistics. As a child this came across as an obsession with following popular YouTubers' subscriber count and view numbers. I would frequent the website SocialBlade to see how my favorite YouTubers were doing and anxiously watch them climb up (as well as drop down) the list of most subscribed channels. This era of YouTube, for the most part, is over. Not to say analytics no longer matter on the site; if anything, they have become more important than ever on YouTube. They dictate what is being created on the site every day. Analytics significantly influence the type of videos produced on the site, surpassing even the influence of traditional YouTube. No longer are the most subscribed to channels independent creators, but instead are large org...

 When posting on a social media platform, an individual is required to follow the ethical guidelines that are laid out in the terms and conditions of the social media platform. It is not often that one person is following the guidelines to the last detail, as we have seen in apps such as Twitter or Facebook in which increasingly negativity in words and media are shown. In that regard, you and I as just any ordinary person usually does not have to pay fines or have our accounts locked on the overall.  It is, however, an entirely different outcome when it is the official accounts of an organization or corporation whose reputations precede them. In the recent Social Media Ethics policy paper for my LIS 558 course, I sought to look at the policies and guidelines that the publishing company Penguin Random House has initiated. In short, the policies are put into three sections: influencers, employees and distributors/suppliers. Each section has to follow strict guidelines related to...