The term digital exploitation describes the use of social media in order to influence the outcome or lead to an unjust result. Digital exploitation is often the result of misinformation or disinformation. Creators use digital exploitation to go viral, and gain followers, but oftentimes at the cost of innocent people who are often not aware of what they are being used for. Especially channels such as TikTok and Facebook have a high potential to be used for digital exploitation.
Dear readers, in June 2020, one blurry and unsophisticated TikTok video by a 51-year-old #TikTokGrandma (Laupp, 2020; Magid 2020), derailed Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when it went viral and mobilised people to falsely register for the stadium event, leaving a majority of the event’s seats empty. In the …
Dear readers, an investigation from the British Broadcasting Corporation – the BBC – has found that Syrian families have been livestreaming on the popular social media platform TikTok, which has a user count of more than 1 billion in 154 countries (Ruby, 2022), for several hours daily. These families, however, …
Dear readers, it seems like the bad news never stop coming. First, we read them in the newspapers, then on the radio and television, on our computer screens, and in recent years on the display of tiny devices that were promised to bring us so much joy and which should …
Dear readers, I’m an experienced broadcast journalist and now a Communications Specialist in the development sector, but never before have I had to invest so much of my identity to produce such brief content as for my 13-second video for this blog (go on, watch and have a giggle). One …
Dear readers, recently, I came across an interesting conversation between Jeffrey Masters from the LGBTQ&A podcast and Adam Eli, author of the book The New Queer Conscience, activist and community organiser with over 100k followers on Instagram and 6.5k followers on Twitter. Jeffrey comes from quite a questioning perspective, one …
When you feel done with social media but… Dear readers, researching online and digital activism from the point of view of a person who tries to avoid social media as much as possible seems like an interesting task in itself. I do have Facebook and Instagram accounts although my activity …
Image Source Dear readers, humans are social animals. If you’ve ever read/studied anything psychology/sociology related, you will no doubt have come across this phrase before. It follows, then, that we as a species have developed a bunch of mechanisms that allow us to interact with another socially to learn from …
Dear readers, earlier this week I found myself awkwardly perched at the foot of my bed, on the floor, bent close to a PowerPoint to charge my tiring mobile phone so I could record myself making strange hand signals in time to the music in what was to become my …
