Social Media

Tubular Labs reports that US residents spent 56% more time watching social videos on YouTube and Facebook in December 2020 than they did in February, an increase that rises to 97% for those over 45 years old. Influencers commanded the most attention, with 121 billion monthly minutes, followed respectively by traditional broadcasters and digital-first publishers. For the parents out there, it’s probably no surprise that within the kids’ category, Cocomelon - Nursery Rhymes commanded the top placement with 59 million unique viewers per month, followed by PinkFong! Kids’ Songs and Stories (51.6 million). Sesame Street was a more distant third (30.5 million).

Looking at top media creators by the age and gender demographics of their audiences, there are some notable differences. For the 13-24 year-old male cohort, the top creators by average monthly unique viewers were Movieclips (14.1 million), WorldStar Hip Hop/WSHH (11 million) and WWE (8.3 million). For women in the same age group, Tasty won out (9.4 million), followed by 5-Minute Crafts (8.5 million) and Cocomelon - Nursery Rhymes (6.6 million). 

Despite a spike in online misinformation, studies show that more K-12 students are unable to discern reliable information pushing some schools to include media literacy lessons in their curricula. Peter Adams, senior vice president of education at the News Literacy Project, says such lessons should be integrated throughout the year, and suggests two programs to help students “call BS on misinformation.”

 Checkology, a free e-learning platform, is designed for students in grades 6-12 and provides interactive lessons from journalists and media experts on how to apply critical thinking skills and interpret and consume information. The NewsLitCamp, which is designed for educators, also relies on journalists. In this program, a school partners with a local newsroom to bring teachers, school librarians and media specialists together with journalists for one day to learn about issues such as journalism standards and practices, news judgment and bias and the role of social media. Perhaps a good program to suggest to your school?

Colleges that were forced to recruit digitally on the fly this past year can now provide a broader picture of possibilities for high-school students, says Angel Perez, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Admissions officials are eager to resume making face-to-face connections with potential students, but schools are looking at ways to keep some of the technology-based approaches, including live streaming,  for recruiting as well, says Worcester Polytechnic Institute enrollment official Andrew Palumbo.

Girls Scouts of the USA has adapted the annual cookie sale by substituting door-to-door and booth sales with livestreams, social media, sale pages with QR codes, Zoom meetings and delivery via GrubHub. With restrictions for in-person activities, the girls had to get creative in how to achieve their goals. "They're resilient and they're go-getters," Carol Dedrich, CEO of Girl Scouts San Diego, said of the Scouts, adding, "If there is a will, they will find a way."

LinkedIn is following Twitter's foray into conversation controls by enabling members to restrict who's able to see and comment on their posts and updates. Members also can prevent replies to specific posts and "mute" select users or company pages from their feed.

Kindergarten students from low-income households and Black kindergartners are more likely to heavily use technology in later in life according to an analysis of 10,000 students by researchers at Penn State. The findings, that followed youngsters who started Kindergarten in 2010, do not point to potential reasons for these trends, and it is unclear if higher use is harmful, but previous research has documented that low-income families often don’t have access to high quality childcare after school or during the summers and use technology as a babysitter on occasion. According to the findings, Kindergarteners with diagnosed disabilities were more likely to become frequent online gamers but not texters or users of social media such as Snapchat, Twitter or Facebook. Among fifth graders who were heavy users, boys were more likely to gravitate toward video games while girls were more likely to text and engage with social media.

The study does suggest one antidote for parents - reading to your child and encouraging your child to read picture books outside of school might help protect children from becoming heavy device users. Children of all incomes and races who had more exposure to early literacy activities were less likely to become frequent texters or users of social media, the researchers found.

The US Supreme Court has agreed to consider a case that may determine whether schools can discipline students for comments they make on social media. A student in a Pennsylvania district was suspended from a cheerleading team after a Snapchat post surfaced in which she used foul language and was disrespectful to the school and cheer team, but she and her parents say the discipline violated her First Amendment right to free speech.

The experience of sinking into emotional quicksand while bingeing on doom-and-gloom news is so common that there’s now Internet lingo for it: “doomscrolling.” While this article entitled You’re Doomscrolling Again. Here’s How to Snap Out of It is from this past summer, it probably is a good reference as we stare down all the misinformation proliferating on the Internet as we are about to have a change in political leadership, amidst the continuation of the Covid pandemic.

It may have taken the invasion of the US Capital Building for regulators to recognize the danger of misinformation, and even cyberbullying, though critics have been piling up evidence for years. Democrats, who will now control both houses of Congress, are promising to use their powerful new perches to proffer the sort of tough new laws and other punishments that tech giants have successfully fended off for years. This political shift could result in major repercussions for the industry, opening the door for a wide array of policy changes that could hold Facebook, Google and Twitter newly liable for their missteps.

When trying to explain misinformation to kids, it is important to understand how misinformation gets started and persists. The misinformation effect is the tendency for post-event information to be added to the memory of the original event. Researchers have shown that the introduction of even relatively subtle information following an event can have a dramatic effect on how people remember. A good introductory article on the subject is The Misinformation Effect and the Psychology Behind Fake News.