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![Social Influence
“Looking at others for information is a key thing
we do often. It’s a shortcut to judgment. It saves
us time and effort to look to others in what they
have done previously. […] This inference is much
stronger when people have less time or
motivation. If we don’t have a lot of time to make
the decision and we’re not very motivated, we’re
much more likely to turn to others to help us make
that decision”. (Berger, Coursera, 2018)](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/socialmediawebscience2022-221026182748-d9cd5de9/75/Web-Science-Session-2-Social-Media-31-2048.jpg)
Uploaded byStefanie Panke
Web Science Session 2: Social Media
The document outlines a course on web science focusing on the interplay between technology and behavior, particularly in the context of mobile and social media. It discusses the evolution and impact of social media, the importance of social influence, and the potential negative effects on mental health, especially among teenagers. It emphasizes the need for interdisciplinary approaches to understand these dynamics and proposes considerations for future solutions to improve the state of the web.
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Web Science Session 2: Social Media
- 1. Introduction to WebScience: Mobile and Social Media
- 3. Oldest public university inUS (1795) 28,000 students
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- 8. Structure of theCourse: 5 Online Sessions Intro toWeb Science andWeb History Web Histories (individual) Homework:Summarizea WebSiConference paper 01 TheSocialWeb Homework:Writeup / elevator pitch of initial Idea (one paragraph) 02 Web Science Research Hands-on skills practice with Zotero, Scopus Studentscreateoutline Homework: Presentation 03 Web-Based Learning E-Learning, Instructional Design, Tools,Technologies, Theories StudentPresentationSession (1) 10-20minutepresentation 04 Web Futures FutureStudies and Trend Reports StudentPresentationSession (2) 10-20minutepresentation Homework: Final Paper (10- 15 pages) 05
- 9. Analyze the interplay of technology andbehavior “Web Science is the study of the most complex piece of technology ever created. The Web comprises billions of technical and human components operating globally, with each piece subtly influencing the others. Multiple expert perspectives across scientific disciplines are required to build an understanding of how the Web changes society just as much as society changes the Web”. Web Science Trust, http://webscience.org/
- 10. Statista is aGerman online portal for statistics, which makes data collected by market and opinion research institutes and data derived from the economic sector and official statistics available in English, French, German and Spanish. It has 600 employees and clients around the world – one of which is UNC Chapel Hill. It also offers creative commons infographics. Statista
- 11. 2021: 4.66 billionactive internet users worldwide - 59.5 percent of the global population. 92.6 percent (4.32 billion) accessed the internet (partly) via mobile devices.
- 13. What are peoplemost likely doing when they use the Internet on their phone?
- 15. Share of globalinternet users who have performed selected online activities in the past month via mobile as of 1st quarter 2019
- 16. Usage of mobile apps in Australiain 3rd quarter 2020, by category
- 17. Daily time spent on social networking byinternet users worldwide from 2012 to 2022
- 18. What are socialmedia?
- 19. Franklin & Harmelen(2007) Systematization (Franklin & Harmelen, 2007) • Weblogs • Wikis • Social Bookmarking • Social Networking & Social Presence • Collaborative Editing • Syndification & Notification (RSS, Mash-Ups) • Broadly used to describe any number of technological systems related to collaboration and community. • While it appears that a specific definition may be elusive, social media is often described by example. • Social networking sites, blogs, wikis, multimedia platforms, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds Tess (2013) What are social media?
- 20. Social Media &Web 2.0 Principles Dynamic development: "perpetual beta" "The long tail": new marketing strategies Decentralization: Mash-Ups, P2P, APIs Folksonomy: tagging instead of taxonomy Data instead of features lead to rich user experience Radical Trust: Social editing, unfiltered participation Constant remix RSS feeds, Shares, Comments Desktop on the Net What are social media? – Traits and Economy
- 21. Environments are notplanned in detail, but molded by the users. Monolithic infrastructures give way to building blocks and transient structures.
- 22. Commenting on andpassing along information instead of researching and gathering
- 23. Collective Filtering &Social Navigation (goodreads.com): a service improves as more and more people use it.
- 24. User-generated Content (influencers):The Net stores private data. The boundaries between private and public disappear.
- 25. Memes: oftentimes humorouscombinations of image and text that are spread across social media. Coined by Richard Dawkins (1976) as the cultural equivalent of a gene, memes originally refer to ideas, symbols, or practices that spread by natural selection. Similarly, in the social media sphere, memes describe feelings, experiences, and behavior.
- 26. Social Capital (LinkedIn):Activities, relationships, and networks become transparent. Profiles don't just serve as a basis for adaption, but become the content themselves.
- 27. Walled Garden: “closed orexclusive information services, content, or media on platforms” (Paterson, 2012, pg. 97)
- 28. In 50 years,social media in 2021 will look like the tobacco industry in 1960 -- they knowingly offered an addictive product, and, worse, hid the damage the addiction caused, while actively tried to deepen the dependency. Vinay Prasad (2021)
- 29. Why are socialmedia attractive? Because we are social creatures!
- 30. Why (and How)Social Media Work: Jonah Berger
- 31. Social Influence “Looking atothers for information is a key thing we do often. It’s a shortcut to judgment. It saves us time and effort to look to others in what they have done previously. […] This inference is much stronger when people have less time or motivation. If we don’t have a lot of time to make the decision and we’re not very motivated, we’re much more likely to turn to others to help us make that decision”. (Berger, Coursera, 2018)
- 32. Social influence isthe effect of our social environment on our behavior and decision making.
- 33. STEPPS 1. Social Currency 2.Triggers 3. Emotion 4. Public 5. Practical Value 6. Stories Each of these dimensions is a psychological driver of what people talk and share online.
- 34. Social Currency: Justlike other status symbols (car, clothing), things we say and share online affect how other people see us. We are likely to share something that makes us look knowledgeable, feel special, or appear virtuous.
- 35. Triggers: It isnot just whether we like something or not that influences our decision to share, it is whether we are thinking about it or not. The environment we are in, and how the message links to it, influences sharing.
- 36. Emotions: When wecare, and the more we care, the more likely we are to share. The emotion does not necessarily need to be positive to create emotional arousal. Anger and anxiety actually increase sharing, as does happy, funny content.
- 37. Public: If somethingis built to show, it’s built to grow. The easier it is to see, the easier it is to imitate, for example: ‘53 million people have already liked this’.
- 38. Practical Value: Peopledon’t just share things that make them look good, they share things that they think will help others and make others better off. Information that seems useful will drive people to share.
- 39. Stories: Good marketingstories are like a Trojan horse. They act as vessels or carriers of information. When parents put their kids to bed at night, they do not tell bedtime facts, they tell bedtime stories. Stories are the currency of conversation. Good stories carry ideas.
- 40. The World HealthOrganization (WHO) has referred to the scope and speed of the spread of false information linked to COVID-19 as an ‘infodemic’ that needs swift addressing.
- 41. Social Media andFake News
- 42. Politicized and controversialterm, used both to criticize mainstream media and to refer to problematic content online.
- 43. A small percentageof posts in Myanmar were anti- Rohingya conspiracy theories or hate speech, but those posts helped shape the narrative that fueled violence and support for ethnic cleansing.
- 44. We see alot less misinformation than we think we do, but are far more affected by it than we care to admit.
- 45. Social Media Bots •Easy to build • Leveraging AI • Amplify information • Discussions of influence on political events such as the US election of 2016, the Brexit vote and the Ukraine conflict https://www.labnol.org/internet/write-twitter-bot/27902/
- 46. Fake News Examples:Momo Hoax
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- 50. Three Strategies forsocial media companies Deplatforming Demonetizing Labeling as ’Misinformation’
- 51. It’s our attentionthat is being hacked: Better to do twenty 30-second checks than two five-minute checks.
- 52. What to check?Everything you share, everything you have a strong reaction to.
- 53. It’s like brushingyour teeth. It’s better to brush every day than brush thoroughly, but only on the weekend.
- 54. Not everyone needsto have this habit. It’s like vaccination – there’s a certain level that gives you herd immunity. We want a herd immunity to nonsense.
- 56. Quick Fact CheckProcess: 4 Moves 1. Check for previous work 2. Go upstream to the source 3. Read laterally 4. Circle back
- 57. Social media createa constant segue for social influence.
- 58. ‘Echo Chamber’: SocialNetwork algorithms steer us toward articles that reflect our own ideological preferences.
- 59. ‘When I'm lookingfor something to watch on YouTube, I feel the walls of the algorithm closing in on me’. (Stephen Downes, 2021)
- 60. When advertising is thebusiness model, users are the product The problem is not the Internet or social media in a media in a broad sense but rather specifically the use specifically the use of the algorithms. When Google When Google and Facebook and others went to the went to the advertising business model anytime anytime anybody did anything, anytime anybody anybody connected with somebody else it was it was financed by third party whose motivation was to motivation was to manipulate what happened. Then happened. Then the whole business model was about model was about how to manipulate more and more. more and more. What that results in is people being people being directed rather than exploring and that exploring and that makes the world small. That is small. That is fundamental. You cannot make these make these algorithms better. You can’t say we want a say we want a better form of constant incremental incremental manipulation of every person. The whole person. The whole concept from the start is poison. is poison. Jaron Lanier (2021)
- 61. Homophilia, the psychologicaltendency to surround ourselves with others who share our perspectives and opinions about the world, is an organizing principle underpinning many social media sites in which algorithms amplify our preference for sameness.
- 62. Personal relations, maybecome less meaningful due to lack of face-to-face communication and dialogue even though sharing (photos, tweets and documents) is a prominent cultural norm. (Chryssa Themelis, 2018)
- 63. Mental Health &Social Media This statistic presents the negative social media effects according to teenagers in the United States as of April 2018, by emotional well- being. According to the findings, 35 percent of teenagers with low social-emotional well-being reported to have been cyber bullied when using social media, while in comparison only five percent of teenagers with high social-emotional well-being stated similarly.
- 64. Instagram: Toxic? https://www.aace.org/review/digital-well-being-are-devices- overwhelming-or-extending-our-minds/ ”The conceptof digital wellbeing (mental and physical health related to the use of digital tools) assumes that private and professional life is saturated by technologies that do not always serve their purpose but may, at times, function as an obstacle, distracting students and educators from their daily tasks, damaging interpersonal relations and encouraging undemocratic values”. https://madrascourier.com/opinion/instagram-is-toxic-for-teens-heres-why/
- 65. http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf 2019 Stanford study:Quitting for 4 weeks improves self-reported well-being
- 66. Over to you….The web (and we) are out of shape. More polarized, less connected, less mentally and physically healthy. Web Scientists to the rescue! What can we do about the state of the Web? Come up with solutions. Can you think of policies, regulations, economic incentives, programs, products, strategies, …
Editor's Notes
- #12 As of January 2021 there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide - 59.5 percent of the global population. Of this total, 92.6 percent (4.32 billion) accessed the internet via mobile devices. By now, a world without the internet is unimaginable. Connecting billions of people worldwide, the internet is a core pillar of the modern information society. The global internet penetration rate is 59.5 percent, with Northern Europe ranking first with a 96 percent internet penetration rate among the population.
- #19 To say that social media is a global phenomenon is almost an understatement, as the number of worldwide social network users is expected to grow from 3.6 billion in 2020 to around 4.4 billion in 2025, around a third of the entire global population. As internet access and smartphone use expand worldwide, social media use shows no signs of slowing. In 2020, the average daily social media usage of internet users worldwide reached 145 minutes per day, with China accounting for the largest number of social media users. As of October 2020, there was an estimated 4.08 billion active mobile social media users worldwide.
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- #30 Globally, 54% of the population are social media users. In the US 82% of people have3 a social networking profile. Why have social media become the killer application of the Web? One way to frame this is social influence. Our emotions, opinions and behaviors affect how others feel, think and behave, regardless whether we intent this to happen or not. Vice versa, we are shaped by our social surroundings. Social influence impacts our everyday choices: from the products we buy and candidates we vote for to the food we like and careers we pursue.
- #34 Why do people talk and share in the first place? What makes them share one message rather than another? And if you used to look up this question online, if you typed in well, what makes something viral, you used to get back one simple answer. And that word was cats. People said well there's lots of cat content. People make cat videos that go viral, there are LOL cats. It must be cats that make online content viral. That's a great theory, except that it's completely and utterly wrong. It doesn't tell us anything why some cat videos do better than others, or about all the things that get shared that have nothing to do with cats. So unfortunately, it's more science there than cats. I'm gonna share the science behind why people talk and share. We've done lots of research in this space and we found that there's six key factors, or steps, that drive people to talk about and share all sorts of information. And I put these in a framework called, in fact, STEPPS. And STEPPS actually has two Ps and it stands for Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value, and Stories. Each of these dimensions is a psychological driver of what people talk and share, and it helps explain why all sorts of products and ideas catch on. Helps us explain why things go viral but also how one person talks to just one other person and that leads products and ideas to catch on.
- #42 Just because you see it online, doesn’t mean it’s a fact. This class session deals with the topic of fake news. Fake news has been one of the most hotly-debated socio-political topics of recent years. Websites which deliberately published hoaxes and misleading information popped up across the internet and were often shared on social media to increase their reach. In this session, we will talk about critical consumption, and how we can make good choices about what we give our attention to, about where and how we seek out expertise and perspective, about how we process what we read and view.
- #44 ’m sure that Facebook would tell you that only the smallest percentage of posts in Myanmar were anti-Rohingya conspiracy theories or hate speech, but those posts helped shape the narrative that fueled violence and support for ethnic cleansing.
- #45 My take is that we see a lot less misinformation than we think we do, but are far more affected by it than we care to admit. The three victims of the Chapel Hill Shooting that occurred in 2015. The students were 25, 21 and 19 years old. "I don't deny you your right to believe whatever you'd like; but I have the right to point out it's ignorant and dangerous for as long as your baseless superstitions keep killing people.” Deah Barakat had been a co-organizer of a fundraising drive established through the UNC School of Dentistry and the Syrian-American Medical Society. Named "Syrian Dental Relief", the fund was intended to provide dental care to Syrian refugees in Turkey. The hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter was used over 100,000 times.
- #46 https://www.labnol.org/internet/write-twitter-bot/27902/ Botnets, particularly those tweeting Trump-related hashtags, played an influential role in the 2016 US election, in the Brexit referendum and in the Ukraine conflict. These are the best researched examples, which does not mean they are the only one. https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f08c014a The spread of fake news by social bots is possible due the capabilities that bots have to search and retrieve non-curated information (information that has not been validated yet) on the web. Bots in social media sites post continuously, spreading non-curated content using trending topics and hashtags as the main strategies to reach a broader audience which, in many cases, further helps the propagation of the fake news. So bots spread fake news in two ways: They keep "saying" or tweeting fake news items, and they use the same pieces of false information to reply to or comment on the postings of real social media users. http://www.cits.ucsb.edu/fake-news/spread
- #47 In February 2018, "Momo" was a top new trending search term on Google for the US, Australia, Canada and the UK. According to lore, the Momo challenge is a viral game shared on messaging services like WhatsApp that goads young children into violence or even suicide. Images of the devilish bird-lady supposedly pop up with creepy messages and commands that are said to escalate to extreme violence and horror. The Momo Challenge is hard to describe, because there's not a lot of proof it actually exists. According to concerned Facebook posts, people are placing scary imagery and language into YouTube videos that are supposed to be child-friendly, like cartoons and toy reviews. The "challenge" has also been reported on WhatsApp, where it may come in the form of disturbing images and text messages sent from unknown contacts. The image is usually of a (pretty terrifying) doll with long hair and bulging eyes. The creepy sculpture is actually the work of a Japanese special effects company called Link Factory, and it, along with the artist and the company, have nothing to do with the so-called "challenge."
- #51 Deplatforming, also known as no-platforming, has been defined as an "attempt to boycott a group or individual through removing the platforms (such as speaking venues or websites) used to share information or ideas. Youtube demonetization – the trend often referred to as an ‘Adpocalypse’ by content creators – is the process wherein independent content creators are denied paid advertisements in their video, thus denying them revenue and reducing their income from the video-hosting platform.
- #52 Since it’s our attention that is being hacked, we are far better off doing 20 30-second checks in a day than two five-minute checks. The point is to get these checks down to such a simple level that you don’t even decide to do them consciously. It becomes like checking your mirrors before changing lanes or using a turn signal.
- #54 he reason we don’t check things is because we’re so hung up on this idea of thorough checking. “Thoroughly” can do a lot of harm to students. I want “good enough” checking. It’s like brushing your teeth. It’s better to brush your teeth every day than brush them thoroughly, but only on the weekend. And yet we show students the equivalent of 30 minute brushing routines and wonder why they don’t do it. Show them how to do it in 60 seconds, and maybe they’ll bother.
- #55 I don’t think we need everyone to have this habit. It’s like vaccination – there’s a certain level of vaccination that gives you herd immunity to epidemics. We want enough people to have these skills that we have a herd immunity to nonsense
- #57 Check for previous work: Look around to see if someone else has already fact-checked the claim or provided a synthesis of research. Go upstream to the source: Go “upstream” to the source of the claim. Most web content is not original. Get to the original source to understand the trustworthiness of the information. Read laterally: Read laterally.[1] Once you get to the source of a claim, read what other people say about the source (publication, author, etc.). The truth is in the network. Circle back: If you get lost, hit dead ends, or find yourself going down an increasingly confusing rabbit hole, back up and start over knowing what you know now. You’re likely to take a more informed path with different search terms and better decisions.
- #58 Social Media tools create a constant segue for social influence with apps that are ubiquitous companions of our day-to-day lives. Social Media platforms amplify important messages, open new connections, allow for social engagement, debate and serendipitous discoveries, and create social niches that make us feel heard and understood. At the same time, social media can be perceived as distracting and overwhelming, contribute to the spread of disinformation and distrust, lead to bullying and emphasize loneliness through social comparison.
- #65 women tend to engage in upward social comparisons with a target other, which results in more negative feelings about the self. The majority of women have a daily opportunity to make upward comparison by measuring themselves against some form of societal ideal. The desire for social comparison can cause FoMO and compulsive checking of social media sites.