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Supreme Court wades into social media wars over free speech

WASHINGTON — Justice Elena Kagan drew laughter in February when she remarked in court that she and her eight colleagues on the Supreme Court are not "the nine greatest experts on the internet."

But that hasn't stopped the justices from taking up a new series of high-stakes cases on the role of social media in society, all of which raise different free speech questions and could have broad repercussions.

The cases on the docket reflect how social media has become a contentious battleground in society as a whole, with the rules of the road yet to be fully defined.

“Collectively, they are likely to have quite dramatic effect on the digital public sphere,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

Noting that the Supreme Court gets to decide what cases it takes up, he added that the justices “plainly want to be part of this debate.”

The court hears the first round of arguments in those cases on Tuesday, as the justices weigh a recurring question that first came to prominence when then-President Donald Trump blocked critics from following him on Twitter: When a public official blocks someone does that violate the Constitution’s First Amendment?

The cases feature public officials with significantly lower profiles than Trump: members of a school district board of trustees in Southern California and a city manager in Michigan.

The ways the issue has arisen at all levels of government reflects how elected officials increasingly use social media to interact with voters.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on whether the officials were acting in their official capacities when posting to social media, meaning they can be sued for violating free speech rights under the Constitution's First Amendment, will have a broad impact in guiding how lower courts handle such cases.

Later in the court's term, which runs until June, the justices will hear oral arguments over the constitutionality of Republican-backed laws in Florida and Texas that seek to prevent social media companies from banning users for contentious rhetoric. Both laws were enacted at a time when Republicans were outraged at what they perceived as anti-conservative bias in moderation decisions.

In those cases it is the social media companies themselves, via trade groups, arguing that their free speech rights to choose what content to allow on their platforms would be violated.

Finally, the court will consider claims that the Biden administration has unlawfully put pressure on social media platforms to remove content with which it disagrees, a form of coercion dubbed "jawboning" — on issues such as criticism of the government response to the pandemic.

Again, the case raises free speech claims, on this occasion brought by states and individuals asserting the First Amendment right of users to be able to post their chosen content without government interference.

Earlier this year the court heard two other cases concerning Twitter and Google. Then, the court sidestepped a major ruling that could have limited the liability protections that platforms enjoy for content posted by users.

Daphne Keller, an expert on internet law at Stanford Law School, said the justices in those earlier cases, as shown by Kagan's quip made at oral argument, realized they had taken up an issue that was "frankly too complicated for their first foray into this area."

As such, the justices "recognized what huge unintended consequences a careless ruling could have," she added.

The Supreme Court itself, unlike some high courts in other countries, has no social media presence and none of the justices have accounts in their professional capacities. In 2020, Kagan admitted to being an anonymous lurker on Twitter, while former Justice Stephen Breyer said more than a decade ago that he was a Twitter and Facebook user.

The average age of the justices has, however, decreased substantially in the last six years, with four new justices all now in their 50s replacing much older members of the court.

But lawyers point out that the new cases are squarely on an issue the justices do know about — free speech rights — and do not hinge on a deep understanding of technology.

"Many of these cases talk about how social media is the modern public square to try to convey to the justices, who may not be as familiar with social media, just how important this is in the present day and age," said Jenin Younes, a lawyer at the New Civil Liberties Alliance who represents individual plaintiffs in the jawboning case.

"I do think it can be hard for some people who don't use it as much to grasp that this is where a lot of public discourse takes place," she added.

Ironically, the cases reach the Supreme Court as some industry experts have started to predict that the age of social media may already be over .

Anger on the right aimed at social media companies has also been blunted somewhat by Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, which he has renamed X.

Conservative outrage that led to the Florida and Texas laws being enacted in 2021 was fueled in part by the decisions of Twitter, Facebook and others to ban Trump after his effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results ended in his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In contrast with the previous Twitter management, Musk has allied himself with conservative critics of the platform and allowed various banned users, including Trump, to return, while abandoning efforts to limit the spread of disinformation.

Jaffer stressed the importance of the justices cutting through the politics of the day and coming up with legal rules that will apply fairly no matter who is in power.

“It’s not that easy to come up with the right answers even for those thinking about it every day,” he said. “These are hard questions.”

Lawrence Hurley covers the Supreme Court for NBC News.

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The Evolving Free-Speech Battle Between Social Media and the Government

By Isaac Chotiner

Earlier this month, a federal judge in Louisiana issued a ruling that restricted various government agencies from communicating with social-media companies. The plaintiffs, which include the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, argued that the federal government was coercing social-media companies into limiting speech on topics such as vaccine skepticism. The judge wrote, in a preliminary injunction, “If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history. The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the government has used its power to silence the opposition.” The injunction prevented agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the F.B.I. from communicating with Facebook , Twitter, or other platforms about removing or censoring content. (The Biden Administration appealed the injunction and, on Friday, the Fifth Circuit paused it. A three-judge panel will soon decide whether it will be reinstated as the case proceeds.) Critics have expressed concern that such orders will limit the ability of the government to fight disinformation.

To better understand the issues at stake, I recently spoke by phone with Genevieve Lakier, a professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School who focusses on issues of social media and free speech. (We spoke before Friday’s pause.) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why the ruling was such a radical departure from the way that courts generally handle these issues, how to apply concepts like free speech to government actors, and why some of the communication between the government and social-media companies was problematic.

In a very basic sense, what does this decision actually do?

Well, in practical terms, it prevents a huge swath of the executive branch of the federal government from essentially talking to social-media platforms about what they consider to be bad or harmful speech on the platforms.

There’s an injunction and then there’s an order, and both are important. The order is the justification for the injunction, but the injunction itself is what actually has effects on the world. And the injunction is incredibly broad. It says all of these defendants—and we’re talking about the President, the Surgeon General, the White House press secretary, the State Department, the F.B.I.—may not urge, encourage, pressure, or induce in any manner the companies to do something different than what they might otherwise do about harmful speech. This is incredibly broad language. It suggests, and I think is likely to be interpreted to mean, that, basically, if you’re a member of one of the agencies or if you’re named in this injunction, you just cannot speak to the platforms about harmful speech on the platform until, or unless, the injunction ends.

But one of the puzzling things about the injunction is that there are these very significant carve-outs. For example, my favorite is that the injunction says, basically, “On the other hand, you may communicate with the platforms about threats to public safety or security of the United States.” Now, of course, the defendants in the lawsuit would say, “That’s all we’ve been doing. When we talk to you, when we talk to the platforms about election misinformation or health misinformation, we are alerting them to threats to the safety and security of the United States.”

So, read one way, the injunction chills an enormous amount of speech. Read another way, it doesn’t really change anything at all. But, of course, when you get an injunction like this from a federal court, it’s better to be safe than sorry. I imagine that all of the agencies and government officials listed in the injunction are going to think, We’d better shut up.

And the reason that specific people, jobs, and agencies are listed in the injunction is because the plaintiffs say that these entities were communicating with social-media companies, correct?

Correct. And communicating in these coercive or harmful, unconstitutional ways. The presumption of the injunction is that if they’ve been doing it in the past, they’re probably going to keep doing it in the future. And let’s stop continuing violations of the First Amendment.

As someone who’s not an expert on this issue, I find the idea that you could tell the White House press secretary that he or she cannot get up at the White House podium and say that Twitter should take down COVID misinformation—

Does this injunction raise issues on two fronts: freedom of speech and separation of powers?

Technically, when the press secretary is operating as the press secretary, she’s not a First Amendment-rights holder. The First Amendment limits the government, constrains the government, but protects private people. And so when she’s a private citizen, she has all her ordinary-citizen rights. Government officials technically don’t have First Amendment rights.

That said, it’s absolutely true that, when thinking about the scope of the First Amendment, courts take very seriously the important democratic and expressive interests in government speech. And so government speakers don’t have First Amendment rights, but they have a lot of interests that courts consider. A First Amendment advocate would say that this injunction constrains and has negative effects on really important government speech interests.

More colloquially, I would just say the irony of this injunction is that in the name of freedom of speech it is chilling a hell of a lot of speech. That is how complicated these issues are. Government officials using their bully pulpit can have really powerful speech-oppressive effects. They can chill a lot of important speech. But one of the problems with the way the district court approaches the analysis is that it doesn’t seem to be taking into account the interest on the other side. Just as we think that the government can go too far, we also think it’s really important for the government to be able to speak.

And what about separation-of-powers issues? Or is that not relevant here?

I think the way that the First Amendment is interpreted in this area is an attempt to protect some separation of powers. Government actors may not have First Amendment rights, but they’re doing important business, and it’s important to give them a lot of freedom to do that business, including to do things like express opinions about what private citizens are doing or not doing. Courts generally recognize that government actors, legislators, and executive-branch officials are doing important business. The courts do not want to second-guess everything that they’re doing.

So what exactly does this order say was illegal?

The lawsuit was very ambitious. It claimed that government officials in a variety of positions violated the First Amendment by inducing or encouraging or incentivizing the platforms to take down protected speech. And by coercing or threatening them into taking down protected speech. And by collaborating with them to take down protected speech. These are the three prongs that you can use in a First Amendment case to show that the decision to take down speech that looks like it’s directly from a private actor is actually the responsibility of the government. The plaintiffs claimed all three. What’s interesting about that district-court order is that it agreed with all three. It says, Yeah, there was encouragement, there was coercion, and there was joint action or collaboration.

And what sort of examples are they providing? What would be an example of the meat of what the plaintiffs argued, and what the judge found to violate the First Amendment?

A huge range of activities—some that I find troubling and some that don’t seem to be troubling. Public statements by members of the White House or the executive branch expressing dissatisfaction with what the platforms are doing. For instance, President Biden’s famous statement that the platforms are killing people. Or the Surgeon General’s warning that there is a health crisis caused by misinformation, and his urging the platforms to do something about it. That’s one bucket.

There is another bucket in which the platforms were going to agencies like the C.D.C. to ask them for information about the COVID pandemic and the vaccine—what’s true and what’s false, or what’s good and what’s bad information—and then using that to inform their content-moderation rules.

Very different and much more troubling, I think, are these e-mails that they found in discovery between White House officials and the platforms in which the officials more or less demand that the platforms take down speech. There is one e-mail from someone in the White House who asked Twitter to remove a parody account that was linked to President Biden’s granddaughter, and said that he “cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately”—and within forty-five minutes, Twitter takes it down. That’s a very different thing than President Biden saying, “Hey, platforms, you’re doing a bad job with COVID misinformation.”

The second bucket seems full of the normal give-and-take you’d expect between the government and private actors in a democratic society, right?

Yeah. Threats and government coercion on private platforms seem the most troubling from a First Amendment perspective. And traditionally that is the kind of behavior that these cases have been most worried about.

This is not the first case to make claims of this kind. This is actually one of dozens of cases that have been filed in federal court over the last years alleging that the Biden Administration or members of the government had put pressure on or encouraged platforms to take down vaccine-skeptical speech and speech about election misinformation. What is unusual about this case is the way that the district court responded to these claims. Before this case, courts had, for the most part, thrown these cases out. I think this was largely because they thought that there was insufficient evidence of coercion, and coercion is what we’re mostly worried about. They have found that this kind of behavior only violates the First Amendment if there is some kind of explicit threat, such as “If you don’t do X, we will do Y,” or if the government actors have been directly involved in the decision to take down the speech.

In this case, the court rejects that and has a much broader test, where it says, basically, that government officials violate the First Amendment if they significantly encourage the platforms to act. And that may mean just putting pressure on them through rhetoric or through e-mails on multiple occasions—there’s a campaign of pressure, and that’s enough to violate the First Amendment. I cannot stress enough how significant a departure that is from the way courts have looked at the issue before.

So, in this case, you’re saying that the underlying behavior may constitute something bad that the Biden Administration did, that voters should know about it and judge them on it, but that it doesn’t rise to the level of being a First Amendment issue?

Yes. I think that this opinion goes too far. It’s insufficiently attentive to the interests on the other side. But I think the prior cases have been too stingy. They’ve been too unwilling to find a problem—they don’t want to get involved because of this concern with separation of powers.

The platforms are incredibly powerful speech regulators. We have largely handed over control of the digital public sphere to these private companies. I think there is this recognition that when the government criticizes the platforms or puts pressure on the platforms to change their policies, that’s some form of political or democratic oversight, a way to promote public welfare. And those kinds of democratic and public-welfare concerns are pretty significant. The courts have wanted to give the government a lot of room to move.

But you think that, in the past, the courts have been too willing to give the government space? How could they develop a better approach?

Yeah. So, for example, the e-mails that are identified in this complaint—I think that’s the kind of pressure that is inappropriate for government actors in a democracy to be employing against private-speech platforms. I’m not at all convinced that, if this had come up in a different court, those would have been found to be a violation of the First Amendment. But there need to be some rules of the road.

On the one hand, I was suggesting that there are important democratic interests in not having too broad a rule. But, on the other hand, I think part of what’s going on here—part of what the facts that we see in this complaint are revealing—is that, in the past, we’ve thought about this kind of government pressure on private platforms, which is sometimes called jawboning, as episodic. There’s a local sheriff or there’s an agency head who doesn’t like a particular policy, and they put pressure on the television station, or the local bookseller, to do something about it. Today, what we’re seeing is that there’s just this pervasive, increasingly bureaucratized communication between the government and the platforms. The digital public theatre has fewer gatekeepers; journalists are not playing the role of leading and determining the news that is fit to print or not fit to print. And so there’s a lot of stuff, for good or for ill, that is circulating in public. You can understand why government officials and expert agencies want to be playing a more significant role in informing, influencing, and persuading the platforms to operate one way or the other. But it does raise the possibility of abuse, and I’m worried about that.

That was a fascinating response, but you didn’t totally answer the question. How should a court step in here without going too far?

The traditional approach that courts have taken, until now, has been to say that there’s only going to be a First Amendment violation if the coercion, encouragement, or collaboration is so strong that, essentially, the platform had no choice but to act. It had no alternatives; there was no private discretion. Because then we can say, Oh, yes, it was the government actor, not the platform, that ultimately was responsible for the decision.

I think that that is too restrictive a standard. Platforms are vulnerable to pressure from the government that’s a lot less severe. They’re in the business of making money by disseminating a lot of speech. They don’t particularly care about any particular tweet or post or speech act. And their economic incentives will often mean that they want to curry favor with the government and with advertisers by being able to continue to circulate a lot of speech. If that means that they have to break some eggs, that they have to suppress particular kinds of posts or tweets, they will do that. It’s economically rational for them to do so.

The challenge for courts is to develop rules of the road for how government officials can interact with platforms. It has to be the case that some forms of communication are protected, constitutionally O.K., and even democratically good. I want expert agencies such as the C.D.C. to be able to communicate to the platforms. And I want that kind of expert information to be constitutionally unproblematic to deliver. On the other hand, I don’t think that White House officials should be writing to platforms and saying, “Hey, take this down immediately.”

I never thought about threatening companies as a free-speech issue that courts would get involved with. Let me give you an example. If you had told me four years ago that the White House press secretary had got up and said, “I have a message from President Trump. If CNN airs one more criticism of me, I am going to try and block its next merger,” I would’ve imagined that there would be a lot of outrage about that. What I could not have imagined was a judge releasing an injunction saying that people who worked for President Trump were not allowed to pass on the President’s message from the White House podium. It would be an issue for voters to decide. Or, I suppose, CNN, during the merger decision, could raise the issue and say, “See, we didn’t get fair treatment because of what President Trump said,” and courts could take that into account. But the idea of blocking the White House press secretary from saying anything seems inconceivable to me.

I’ll say two things in response. One is that there is a history of this kind of First Amendment litigation, but it’s usually about private speech. We might think that public speech has a different status because there is more political accountability. I don’t know. I find this question really tricky, because I think that the easiest cases from a First Amendment perspective, and the easiest reason for courts to get involved, is when the communication is secret, because there isn’t political accountability.

You mentioned the White House press secretary saying something in public. O.K., that’s one thing. But what about if she says it in private? We might think, Well, then the platforms are going to complain. But often regulated parties do not want to say that they have been coerced by the government into doing something against their interests, or that they were threatened. There’s often a conspiracy of silence.

In those cases, it doesn’t seem to me as if there’s democratic accountability. But, even when it is public, we’ve seen over the past year that government officials are writing letters to the platforms: public letters criticizing them, asking for information, badgering them, pestering them about their content-moderation policies. And we might think, Sure, people know that that’s happening. Maybe the government officials will face political accountability if it’s no good. But we might worry that, even then, if the behavior is sufficiently serious, if it’s repeated, it might give the officials too much power to shape the content-moderation policies of the platforms. From a First Amendment perspective, I don’t know why that’s off the table.

Now, from a practical perspective, you’re absolutely right. Courts have not wanted to get involved. But that’s really worrying. I think this desire to just let the political branches work it out has meant that, certainly with the social-media platforms, it’s been like the Wild West. There are no rules of the road. We have no idea what’s O.K. or not for someone in the White House to e-mail to a platform. One of the benefits of the order and the injunction is that it’s opening up this debate about what’s O.K. and what’s not. It might be the case that the way to establish rules of the road will not be through First Amendment-case litigation. Maybe we need Congress to step in and write the rules, or there needs to be some kind of agency self-regulation. But I think it’s all going to have to ultimately be viewed through a First Amendment lens. This order and injunction go way too far, but I think the case is at least useful in starting a debate. Because up until now we’ve been stuck in this arena where there are important free-speech values that are at stake and no one is really doing much to protect them. ♦

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Supreme Court seems favorable to Biden administration over efforts to combat social media posts

Listen to the oral arguments as U.S. Supreme Court takes up the Murthy v. Missouri case, a dispute between Republican-led states and the Biden administration over how far the federal government can go to combat controversial social media posts on topics including COVID-19 and election security.

App logos for Facebook, left, and X, formerly known as Twitter, are seen on a mobile phone in Los Angeles, Saturday, March 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Paula Ulichney)

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FILE - The Supreme Court is seen on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 4, 2024. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court seemed likely Monday to side with the Biden administration in a dispute with Republican-led states over how far the federal government can go to combat controversial social media posts on topics including COVID-19 and election security in a case that could set standards for free speech in the digital age.

The justices seemed broadly skeptical during nearly two hours of arguments that a lawyer for Louisiana, Missouri and other parties presented accusing officials in the Democratic administration of leaning on the social media platforms to unconstitutionally squelch conservative points of view.

Lower courts have sided with the states, but the Supreme Court blocked those rulings while it considers the issue.

Several justices said they were concerned that common interactions between government officials and the platforms could be affected by a ruling for the states.

In one example, Justice Amy Coney Barrett expressed surprise when Louisiana Solicitor General J. Benjamin Aguiñaga questioned whether the FBI could call Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) to encourage them to take down posts that maliciously released someone’s personal information without permission, the practice known as doxxing.

“Do you know how often the FBI makes those calls?” Barrett asked, suggesting they happen frequently.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh also signaled that a ruling for the states would mean that “traditional, everyday communications would suddenly be deemed problematic.”

The case Monday was among several the court is considering that affect social media companies in the context of free speech. Last week, the court laid out standards for when public officials can block their social media followers . Less than a month ago, the court heard arguments over Republican-passed laws in Florida and Texas that prohibit large social media companies from taking down posts because of the views they express.

The cases over state laws and the one that was argued Monday are variations on the same theme, complaints that the platforms are censoring conservative viewpoints.

The states argue that White House communications staffers, the surgeon general, the FBI and the U.S. cybersecurity agency are among those who coerced changes in online content on social media platforms.

Aguiñaga put the situation in stark terms, telling the justices that “the record reveals unrelenting pressure by the government to coerce social media platforms to suppress the speech of millions of Americans.”

He said that calls merely encouraging the platforms to act also could violate speech rights, responding to a hypothetical situation conjured by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, about an online challenge that “involved teens jumping out of windows at increasing elevations.”

Jackson, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, pressed the Louisiana lawyer about whether platforms could be encouraged to remove such posts.

“I was with you right until that last comment, Your Honor,” Aguiñaga said. “I think they absolutely can call and say this is a problem, it’s going rampant on your platforms, but the moment that the government tries to use its ability as the government and its stature as the government to pressure them to take it down, that is when you’re interfering with the third party’s speech rights.”

Justice Samuel Alito appeared most open to the states’ arguments, at one point referring to the government’s “constant pestering of Facebook and some of the other platforms.” Alito, along with Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, would have allowed the restrictions on government contacts with the platforms to go into effect.

Justice Department lawyer Brian Fletcher argued that none of the actions the states complain about come close to problematic coercion and that the federal government would lose its ability to communicate with the social media companies about antisemitic and anti-Muslim posts, as well as on issues of national security, public health and election integrity.

The platforms are large sophisticated actors with no reluctance to stand up to the government, “saying no repeatedly when they disagree with what the government is asking them to do,” Fletcher said.

Justice Elena Kagan and Kavanaugh, two justices who served in the White House earlier in their careers, seemed to agree, likening the exchanges between officials and the platforms to relationships between the government and more traditional media.

Kavanaugh described “experienced government press people throughout the federal government who regularly call up the media and -- and berate them.”

Later, Kagan said, “I mean, this happens literally thousands of times a day in the federal government.”

Alito, gesturing at the courtroom’s press section, mused that whenever reporters “write something we don’t like,” the court’s chief spokeswoman “can call them up and curse them out and say...why don’t we be partners? We’re on the same team. Why don’t you show us what you’re going to write beforehand? We’ll edit it for you, make sure it’s accurate.”

Free speech advocates said the court should use the case to draw an appropriate line between the government’s acceptable use of the bully pulpit and coercive threats to free speech.

“We’re encouraged that the Court was sensitive both to the First Amendment rights of platforms and their users, and to the public interest in having a government empowered to participate in public discourse. To that end, we hope that the Court resolves these cases by making clear that the First Amendment prohibits coercion but permits the government to attempt to shape public opinion through the use of persuasion,” Alex Abdo, litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in a statement.

A panel of three judges on the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled earlier that the Biden administration had probably brought unconstitutional pressure on the media platforms. The appellate panel said officials cannot attempt to “coerce or significantly encourage” changes in online content. The panel had previously narrowed a more sweeping order from a federal judge, who wanted to include even more government officials and prohibit mere encouragement of content changes.

A divided Supreme Court put the 5th Circuit ruling on hold in October, when it agreed to take up the case.

A decision in Murthy v. Missouri, 23-411, is expected by early summer.

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Why social media has changed the world — and how to fix it

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Are you on social media a lot? When is the last time you checked Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram? Last night? Before breakfast? Five minutes ago?

If so, you are not alone — which is the point, of course. Humans are highly social creatures. Our brains have become wired to process social information, and we usually feel better when we are connected. Social media taps into this tendency.

“Human brains have essentially evolved because of sociality more than any other thing,” says Sinan Aral, an MIT professor and expert in information technology and marketing. “When you develop a population-scale technology that delivers social signals to the tune of trillions per day in real-time, the rise of social media isn’t unexpected. It’s like tossing a lit match into a pool of gasoline.”

The numbers make this clear. In 2005, about 7 percent of American adults used social media. But by 2017, 80 percent of American adults used Facebook alone. About 3.5 billion people on the planet, out of 7.7 billion, are active social media participants. Globally, during a typical day, people post 500 million tweets, share over 10 billion pieces of Facebook content, and watch over a billion hours of YouTube video.

As social media platforms have grown, though, the once-prevalent, gauzy utopian vision of online community has disappeared. Along with the benefits of easy connectivity and increased information, social media has also become a vehicle for disinformation and political attacks from beyond sovereign borders.

“Social media disrupts our elections, our economy, and our health,” says Aral, who is the David Austin Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Now Aral has written a book about it. In “The Hype Machine,” published this month by Currency, a Random House imprint, Aral details why social media platforms have become so successful yet so problematic, and suggests ways to improve them.

As Aral notes, the book covers some of the same territory as “The Social Dilemma,” a documentary that is one of the most popular films on Netflix at the moment. But Aral’s book, as he puts it, "starts where ‘The Social Dilemma’ leaves off and goes one step further to ask: What can we do about it?”

“This machine exists in every facet of our lives,” Aral says. “And the question in the book is, what do we do? How do we achieve the promise of this machine and avoid the peril? We’re at a crossroads. What we do next is essential, so I want to equip people, policymakers, and platforms to help us achieve the good outcomes and avoid the bad outcomes.”

When “engagement” equals anger

“The Hype Machine” draws on Aral’s own research about social networks, as well as other findings, from the cognitive sciences, computer science, business, politics, and more. Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, for instance, have found that people obtain bigger hits of dopamine — the chemical in our brains highly bound up with motivation and reward — when their social media posts receive more likes.

At the same time, consider a 2018 MIT study by Soroush Vosoughi, an MIT PhD student and now an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth College; Deb Roy, MIT professor of media arts and sciences and executive director of the MIT Media Lab; and Aral, who has been studying social networking for 20 years. The three researchers found that on Twitter, from 2006 to 2017, false news stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true ones. Why? Most likely because false news has greater novelty value compared to the truth, and provokes stronger reactions — especially disgust and surprise.

In this light, the essential tension surrounding social media companies is that their platforms gain audiences and revenue when posts provoke strong emotional responses, often based on dubious content.

“This is a well-designed, well-thought-out machine that has objectives it maximizes,” Aral says. “The business models that run the social-media industrial complex have a lot to do with the outcomes we’re seeing — it’s an attention economy, and businesses want you engaged. How do they get engagement? Well, they give you little dopamine hits, and … get you riled up. That’s why I call it the hype machine. We know strong emotions get us engaged, so [that favors] anger and salacious content.”

From Russia to marketing

“The Hype Machine” explores both the political implications and business dimensions of social media in depth. Certainly social media is fertile terrain for misinformation campaigns. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russia spread  false information to at least 126 million people on Facebook and another 20 million people on Insta­gram (which Facebook owns), and was responsible for 10 million tweets. About 44 percent of adult Americans visited a false news source in the final weeks of the campaign.

“I think we need to be a lot more vigilant than we are,” says Aral.

We do not know if Russia’s efforts altered the outcome of the 2016 election, Aral says, though they may have been fairly effective. Curiously, it is not clear if the same is true of most U.S. corporate engagement efforts.

As Aral examines, digital advertising on most big U.S. online platforms is often wildly ineffective, with academic studies showing that the “lift” generated by ad campaigns — the extent to which they affect consumer action — has been overstated by a factor of hundreds, in some cases. Simply counting clicks on ads is not enough. Instead, online engagement tends to be more effective among new consumers, and when it is targeted well; in that sense, there is a parallel between good marketing and guerilla social media campaigns.

“The two questions I get asked the most these days,” Aral says, “are, one, did Russia succeed in intervening in our democracy? And two, how do I measure the ROI [return on investment] from marketing investments? As I was writing this book, I realized the answer to those two questions is the same.”

Ideas for improvement

“The Hype Machine” has received praise from many commentators. Foster Provost, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, says it is a “masterful integration of science, business, law, and policy.” Duncan Watts, a university professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says the book is “essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got here and how we can get somewhere better.”

In that vein, “The Hype Machine” has several detailed suggestions for improving social media. Aral favors automated and user-generated labeling of false news, and limiting revenue-collection that is based on false content. He also calls for firms to help scholars better research the issue of election interference.

Aral believes federal privacy measures could be useful, if we learn from the benefits and missteps of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and a new California law that lets consumers stop some data-sharing and allows people to find out what information companies have stored about them. He does not endorse breaking up Facebook, and suggests instead that the social media economy needs structural reform. He calls for data portability and interoperability, so “consumers would own their identities and could freely switch from one network to another.” Aral believes that without such fundamental changes, new platforms will simply replace the old ones, propelled by the network effects that drive the social-media economy.

“I do not advocate any one silver bullet,” says Aral, who emphasizes that changes in four areas together — money, code, norms, and laws — can alter the trajectory of the social media industry.

But if things continue without change, Aral adds, Facebook and the other social media giants risk substantial civic backlash and user burnout.

“If you get me angry and riled up, I might click more in the short term, but I might also grow really tired and annoyed by how this is making my life miserable, and I might turn you off entirely,” Aral observes. “I mean, that’s why we have a Delete Facebook movement, that’s why we have a Stop Hate for Profit movement. People are pushing back against the short-term vision, and I think we need to embrace this longer-term vision of a healthier communications ecosystem.”

Changing the social media giants can seem like a tall order. Still, Aral says, these firms are not necessarily destined for domination.

“I don’t think this technology or any other technology has some deterministic endpoint,” Aral says. “I want to bring us back to a more practical reality, which is that technology is what we make it, and we are abdicating our responsibility to steer technology toward good and away from bad. That is the path I try to illuminate in this book.”

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Press mentions.

Prof. Sinan Aral’s new book, “The Hype Machine,” has been selected as one of the best books of the year about AI by Wired . Gilad Edelman notes that Aral’s book is “an engagingly written shortcut to expertise on what the likes of Facebook and Twitter are doing to our brains and our society.”

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Danny Crichton of TechCrunch about his new book, “The Hype Machine,” which explores the future of social media. Aral notes that he believes a starting point “for solving the social media crisis is creating competition in the social media economy.” 

New York Times

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with New York Times editorial board member Greg Bensinger about how social media platforms can reduce the spread of misinformation. “Human-in-the-loop moderation is the right solution,” says Aral. “It’s not a simple silver bullet, but it would give accountability where these companies have in the past blamed software.”

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Kara Miller of GBH’s Innovation Hub about his research examining the impact of social media on everything from business re-openings during the Covid-19 pandemic to politics.

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with NPR’s Michael Martin about his new book, “The Hype Machine,” which explores the benefits and downfalls posed by social media. “I've been researching social media for 20 years. I've seen its evolution and also the techno utopianism and dystopianism,” says Aral. “I thought it was appropriate to have a book that asks, 'what can we do to really fix the social media morass we find ourselves in?'”

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Speech on Impact Of Social Media On Youth

Social media’s influence on youth is like a double-sided coin, having both positive and negative effects. It’s a tool you use daily, shaping your ideas, behavior, and relationships.

On one side, it connects you with the world, boosting creativity and learning. On the flip side, it can lead to addiction, cyberbullying, and mental health issues.

1-minute Speech on Impact Of Social Media On Youth

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Today, I want to talk about a topic close to all our hearts – social media and its impact on our youth. Let’s start with the good stuff. Social media is like a big classroom. It’s a place where young minds can learn new things, meet new friends, and share their ideas with the world. Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter help us to stay connected with people far and wide.

But, as with everything in life, there’s also a flip side. Sometimes, social media can be a tricky place for young people. It’s easy to get lost in the world of likes, shares, and comments. Many young people feel pressured to look a certain way or to live a certain life – all because of what they see on social media. This can lead to stress, anxiety, and even depression.

It’s also important to remember that not everything on social media is true. People often only show their best selves, leaving others to feel like they’re not good enough. This is a problem – it’s like comparing your behind-the-scenes with someone else’s highlight reel.

Let’s not forget that social media can also be a distraction. Too much time spent scrolling through feeds can lead to less time spent on important things like studying, playing, or interacting with family and friends in the real world.

In conclusion, social media is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for good or bad. It’s up to us, the users, to decide how we want to use it. We need to help our youth understand the benefits and pitfalls of social media. With the right guidance, we can ensure they harness the power of social media to learn, grow and thrive, while staying safe and healthy.

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• Essay on Impact Of Social Media On Youth

2-minute Speech on Impact Of Social Media On Youth

Good day, everyone! We’re here to talk about a topic that touches all of us – the impact of social media on youth. Let’s break this down into four clear parts – communication, learning, mental health, and privacy.

Firstly, social media has revolutionized communication. Today, young folks can chat with friends and family from any corner of the world in an instant. They share photos, videos, and thoughts, creating a global community that feels like a small village. It makes them feel connected and gives them a platform to express themselves. So, social media is a great tool for communication.

Secondly, social media is a powerful source for learning. Youth can access a world of information at their fingertips. They can learn about cultures, languages, science, arts, and so much more. They can follow pages that feed their curiosity, join groups of like-minded people, and even start online courses. Thus, social media is a rich resource for knowledge.

Next, let’s talk about mental health. Social media is like a double-edged sword. On one side, it can boost self-esteem and well-being by helping youth find their tribe and express themselves. On the other side, it can also lead to stress, anxiety, and depression. The pressure to look perfect, to get likes and followers, can be overwhelming. The constant flow of news and information can also be stressful. Therefore, it’s essential to use social media wisely and take breaks from it when needed.

Lastly, privacy is a significant concern. Social media platforms collect a lot of data about their users. This data can be used for good, like improving user experience and providing personalized content. But it can also be used for not-so-good things, like targeted ads and even cybercrime. It’s crucial for youth to understand this and to learn how to protect their privacy online.

As we wrap up, let’s remember that social media is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for good or bad. What matters is how we use it. So, let’s encourage our youth to use social media responsibly. Let’s help them understand the risks and benefits. And let’s remind them that, while social media is a fun and useful tool, it’s not the only thing that matters. There’s a big, beautiful world out there to explore, and life is about much more than likes and followers.

Thank you for your time and attention. Let’s take this conversation forward and make social media a positive force for our youth!

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Social Media's Impact on Society

This article was updated on: 11/19/2021

Social media is an undeniable force in modern society. With over half the global population using social platforms, and the average person spending at least two hours scrolling through them every day , it can’t be overstated that our digital spaces have altered our lives as we knew them. From giving us new ways to come together and stay connected with the world around us, to providing outlets for self-expression, social media has fundamentally changed the way we initiate, build and maintain our relationships.

But while these digital communities have become commonplace in our daily lives, researchers are only beginning to understand the consequences of social media use on future generations. Social media models are changing every day, with major platforms like Meta and Instagram evolving into primary digital advertising spaces as much as social ones. A critical responsibility falls on marketers to spread messages that inform, rather than contribute to the sea of misinformation that thrives on social media.

Read on to see what’s on marketers’ minds when it comes to the impact of social media on society:

MENTAL HEALTH

You’ve likely heard about the negative impacts that social media can have on mental health. Experts are weighing in on the role that the algorithms and design of social platforms play in exasperating these concerns.

At SXSW 2019 , Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Human Technology, talked about the “digital loneliness epidemic,” which focused on the rise of depression and loneliness as it relates to social media use. During the panel, Raskin spoke about the “infinite scroll,” the design principle that enables users to continuously scroll through their feeds, without ever having to decide whether to keep going—it’s hard to imagine what the bottom of a TikTok feed would look like, and that’s intentional. But with the knowledge that mental health concerns are undeniably linked to social media use, the dilemma we’re now facing is when does good design become inhumane design?

Arguably, Rankin’s term for social media use could now be renamed the “digital loneliness pandemic ” as the world faces unprecedented isolation during the COVID-19 outbreak. In 2020 the Ad Council released a study exploring factors that cause loneliness, and what can be done to alleviate it. Interestingly, our research found that while social isolation is one factor that can cause loneliness, 73% of respondents typically maintain interpersonal relationships via technology, including engaging with others on social media. Simply put, social media use can both contribute to and help mitigate feelings of isolation. So how do we address this Catch-22? We should ask ourselves how we can use social media as a platform to foster positive digital communities as young adults rely on it more and more to cope with isolation.

Findings like these have been useful as we reexamine the focuses of Ad Council campaigns. In May 2020, our iconic Seize the Awkward campaign launched new creative highlighting ways young people could use digital communications tools to stay connected and check in on one another’s mental health while practicing physical distancing. A year later, we launched another mental health initiative, Sound It Out , which harnesses the power of music to speak to 10-14-year-olds’ emotional wellbeing. Ad Council has seen the importance of spreading awareness around mental health concerns as they relate to social media consumption in young adults—who will become the next generation of marketers.

EXTREMISM & HATE

Another trend on experts’ minds is how the algorithms behind these massively influential social media platforms may contribute to the rise of extremism and online radicalization.

Major social networking sites have faced criticism over how their advanced algorithms can lead users to increasingly fringe content. These platforms are central to discussions around online extremism, as social forums have become spaces for extreme communities to form and build influence digitally. However, these platforms are responding to concerns and troubleshooting functionalities that have the potential to result in dangerous outcomes. Meta, for example, announced test prompts to provide anti-extremism resources and support for users it believes have been exposed to extremist content on their feeds.

But as extremist groups continue to turn to fringe chatrooms and the “dark web” that begin on social media, combing through the underbelly of the internet and stopping the spread of hateful narratives is a daunting task. Promoting public service messages around Racial Justice and Diversity & Inclusion are just some of the ways that Ad Council and other marketers are using these platforms to move the needle away from hateful messaging and use these platforms to change mindsets in a positive way.

PUBLIC HEALTH CRISES

Social media can be both a space to enlighten and spread messages of doubt. The information age we’re all living in has enabled marketers to intervene as educators and providers of informative messaging to all facets of the American public. And no time has this been more urgent than during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Public health efforts around mask mandates and vaccine rollouts have now become increasingly polarized issues. Social media platforms have turned into breeding grounds for spreading disinformation around vaccinations, and as a result, has contributed to vaccine hesitancy among the American public. Meta, Instagram, and other platforms have begun to flag certain messages as false, but the work of regulating misinformation, especially during a pandemic, will be an enduring problem. To combat this, Ad Council and the COVID Collaborative have put a particular emphasis on our historic COVID-19 Vaccine Education initiative, which has connected trusted messengers with the “uncommitted” American public who feel the most uncertainty around getting the vaccine.

Living during a global pandemic has only solidified a societal need for social media as a way to stay connected to the world at large. During the pandemic, these platforms have been used to promote hopeful and educational messages, like #AloneTogether , and ensures that social media marketing can act as a public service.

DIGITAL ACTIVISM

Beyond serving as an educational resource, social media has been the space for digital activism across a myriad of social justice issues. Movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have gone viral thanks to the power of social media. What starts as a simple hashtag has resulted in real change, from passing sexual harassment legislation in response to #MeToo, to pushing for criminal justice reform because of BLM activists. In these cases, social media empowered likeminded people to organize around a specific cause in a way not possible before.

It’s impossible to separate the role of social media from the scalable impact that these movements have had on society. #MeToo and BLM are just two examples of movements that have sparked national attention due in large part to conversations that began on social media.

SO, WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR MARKETERS?

Social media is a great equalizer that allows for large-scale discourse and an endless, unfiltered stream of content. Looking beyond the repercussions for a generation born on social media, these platforms remain an essential way for marketers to reach their audiences.

Whether you argue there are more benefits or disadvantages to a world run on social media, we can all agree that social media has fundamentally shifted how society communicates. With every scroll, view, like, comment and share, we’re taught something new about the impact of social media on the way we think and see the world.

But until we find a way to hold platforms more accountable for the global consequences of social media use, it’s up to marketers to use these digital resources as engines of progressive messaging. We can’t control the adverse effects of the Internet, but as marketers, we can do our part in ensuring that the right messages are being spread and that social media remains a force for social good.

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Science News

Social media harms teens’ mental health, mounting evidence shows. what now.

Understanding what is going on in teens’ minds is necessary for targeted policy suggestions

Most teens use social media, often for hours on end. Some social scientists are confident that such use is harming their mental health. Now they want to pinpoint what explains the link.

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By Sujata Gupta

February 20, 2024 at 7:30 am

In January, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, appeared at a congressional hearing to answer questions about how social media potentially harms children. Zuckerberg opened by saying: “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health.”

But many social scientists would disagree with that statement. In recent years, studies have started to show a causal link between teen social media use and reduced well-being or mood disorders, chiefly depression and anxiety.

Ironically, one of the most cited studies into this link focused on Facebook.

Researchers delved into whether the platform’s introduction across college campuses in the mid 2000s increased symptoms associated with depression and anxiety. The answer was a clear yes , says MIT economist Alexey Makarin, a coauthor of the study, which appeared in the November 2022 American Economic Review . “There is still a lot to be explored,” Makarin says, but “[to say] there is no causal evidence that social media causes mental health issues, to that I definitely object.”

The concern, and the studies, come from statistics showing that social media use in teens ages 13 to 17 is now almost ubiquitous. Two-thirds of teens report using TikTok, and some 60 percent of teens report using Instagram or Snapchat, a 2022 survey found. (Only 30 percent said they used Facebook.) Another survey showed that girls, on average, allot roughly 3.4 hours per day to TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, compared with roughly 2.1 hours among boys. At the same time, more teens are showing signs of depression than ever, especially girls ( SN: 6/30/23 ).

As more studies show a strong link between these phenomena, some researchers are starting to shift their attention to possible mechanisms. Why does social media use seem to trigger mental health problems? Why are those effects unevenly distributed among different groups, such as girls or young adults? And can the positives of social media be teased out from the negatives to provide more targeted guidance to teens, their caregivers and policymakers?

“You can’t design good public policy if you don’t know why things are happening,” says Scott Cunningham, an economist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

Increasing rigor

Concerns over the effects of social media use in children have been circulating for years, resulting in a massive body of scientific literature. But those mostly correlational studies could not show if teen social media use was harming mental health or if teens with mental health problems were using more social media.

Moreover, the findings from such studies were often inconclusive, or the effects on mental health so small as to be inconsequential. In one study that received considerable media attention, psychologists Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski combined data from three surveys to see if they could find a link between technology use, including social media, and reduced well-being. The duo gauged the well-being of over 355,000 teenagers by focusing on questions around depression, suicidal thinking and self-esteem.

Digital technology use was associated with a slight decrease in adolescent well-being , Orben, now of the University of Cambridge, and Przybylski, of the University of Oxford, reported in 2019 in Nature Human Behaviour . But the duo downplayed that finding, noting that researchers have observed similar drops in adolescent well-being associated with drinking milk, going to the movies or eating potatoes.

Holes have begun to appear in that narrative thanks to newer, more rigorous studies.

In one longitudinal study, researchers — including Orben and Przybylski — used survey data on social media use and well-being from over 17,400 teens and young adults to look at how individuals’ responses to a question gauging life satisfaction changed between 2011 and 2018. And they dug into how the responses varied by gender, age and time spent on social media.

Social media use was associated with a drop in well-being among teens during certain developmental periods, chiefly puberty and young adulthood, the team reported in 2022 in Nature Communications . That translated to lower well-being scores around ages 11 to 13 for girls and ages 14 to 15 for boys. Both groups also reported a drop in well-being around age 19. Moreover, among the older teens, the team found evidence for the Goldilocks Hypothesis: the idea that both too much and too little time spent on social media can harm mental health.

“There’s hardly any effect if you look over everybody. But if you look at specific age groups, at particularly what [Orben] calls ‘windows of sensitivity’ … you see these clear effects,” says L.J. Shrum, a consumer psychologist at HEC Paris who was not involved with this research. His review of studies related to teen social media use and mental health is forthcoming in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

Cause and effect

That longitudinal study hints at causation, researchers say. But one of the clearest ways to pin down cause and effect is through natural or quasi-experiments. For these in-the-wild experiments, researchers must identify situations where the rollout of a societal “treatment” is staggered across space and time. They can then compare outcomes among members of the group who received the treatment to those still in the queue — the control group.

That was the approach Makarin and his team used in their study of Facebook. The researchers homed in on the staggered rollout of Facebook across 775 college campuses from 2004 to 2006. They combined that rollout data with student responses to the National College Health Assessment, a widely used survey of college students’ mental and physical health.

The team then sought to understand if those survey questions captured diagnosable mental health problems. Specifically, they had roughly 500 undergraduate students respond to questions both in the National College Health Assessment and in validated screening tools for depression and anxiety. They found that mental health scores on the assessment predicted scores on the screenings. That suggested that a drop in well-being on the college survey was a good proxy for a corresponding increase in diagnosable mental health disorders. 

Compared with campuses that had not yet gained access to Facebook, college campuses with Facebook experienced a 2 percentage point increase in the number of students who met the diagnostic criteria for anxiety or depression, the team found.

When it comes to showing a causal link between social media use in teens and worse mental health, “that study really is the crown jewel right now,” says Cunningham, who was not involved in that research.

A need for nuance

The social media landscape today is vastly different than the landscape of 20 years ago. Facebook is now optimized for maximum addiction, Shrum says, and other newer platforms, such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, have since copied and built on those features. Paired with the ubiquity of social media in general, the negative effects on mental health may well be larger now.

Moreover, social media research tends to focus on young adults — an easier cohort to study than minors. That needs to change, Cunningham says. “Most of us are worried about our high school kids and younger.” 

And so, researchers must pivot accordingly. Crucially, simple comparisons of social media users and nonusers no longer make sense. As Orben and Przybylski’s 2022 work suggested, a teen not on social media might well feel worse than one who briefly logs on. 

Researchers must also dig into why, and under what circumstances, social media use can harm mental health, Cunningham says. Explanations for this link abound. For instance, social media is thought to crowd out other activities or increase people’s likelihood of comparing themselves unfavorably with others. But big data studies, with their reliance on existing surveys and statistical analyses, cannot address those deeper questions. “These kinds of papers, there’s nothing you can really ask … to find these plausible mechanisms,” Cunningham says.

One ongoing effort to understand social media use from this more nuanced vantage point is the SMART Schools project out of the University of Birmingham in England. Pedagogical expert Victoria Goodyear and her team are comparing mental and physical health outcomes among children who attend schools that have restricted cell phone use to those attending schools without such a policy. The researchers described the protocol of that study of 30 schools and over 1,000 students in the July BMJ Open.

Goodyear and colleagues are also combining that natural experiment with qualitative research. They met with 36 five-person focus groups each consisting of all students, all parents or all educators at six of those schools. The team hopes to learn how students use their phones during the day, how usage practices make students feel, and what the various parties think of restrictions on cell phone use during the school day.

Talking to teens and those in their orbit is the best way to get at the mechanisms by which social media influences well-being — for better or worse, Goodyear says. Moving beyond big data to this more personal approach, however, takes considerable time and effort. “Social media has increased in pace and momentum very, very quickly,” she says. “And research takes a long time to catch up with that process.”

Until that catch-up occurs, though, researchers cannot dole out much advice. “What guidance could we provide to young people, parents and schools to help maintain the positives of social media use?” Goodyear asks. “There’s not concrete evidence yet.”

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Hate speech: A growing, international threat

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Whilst hate speech is nothing new, it has arguably been super-charged by the internet, which has allowed lies, conspiracies, and threats to instantly spread around the world. In a short series of features, based on the new UN Podcasts series, UNiting Against Hate , we look at the effects, and possible solutions, to this growing problem.

Hate speech is having a demonstrable effect on society: one of the many similarities between the January attacks on Brazil’s government buildings, and the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, is that each occurred after certain groups repeatedly directed dangerous rhetoric and false claims against others.

Concerns over the growing phenomenon have prompted independent human rights experts to call on major social media platforms to change their business models and become more accountable in the battle against rising hate speech online.

Recently, the case of divisive social media influencer Andrew Tate captured widespread media attention, following his detention in Romania, as part of an investigation into allegations of human trafficking and rape, which he denies.

Tate was previously banned from various prominent social media platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube for expressing misogynistic views and hate speech.

In the new UN Podcasts series UNiting Against Hate , producer Katy Dartford speaks to prominent activists whose work has made them the subjects of online attacks, disinformation, and threats.

Hate speech and deadly violence in South Sudan

In South Sudan, internet access is limited to a small elite, but activists such as Edmund Yakani, one of the country’s most prominent human rights defenders, are nevertheless targeted by online hate speech.

In this episode of the UNiting Against Hate podcast, Mr. Yakani explains how hate speech, both in-country and from the diaspora, is contributing to further violence in the world's newest internationally recognized country: 60 per cent of deadly violence in the country, he says, is triggered by hate speech.

Mr. Yakani says that has often been the victim of online attacks, in which his image, or statement has made, have been distorted. “Some describe me as a type of an animal, a cockroach, monkey or snake, or just call me a murderer.”

“This narrative has huge implications. It destroys my social fabric, my relationships with others, and it generates mistrust and a lack of confidence in people towards me.” 

Hate speech is having a destabilizing influence on his country, worries Mr. Yakani, making violence the primary tool for resolving disputes. The answer, in his opinion, is more investment in effective responses, which include targeted sanctions on those responsible, improved legislation, and education.

Despite the many risks to his own security, Mr Yakani continues to strive to ensure accountability, justice and respect for human rights. “ Anybody who is standing and demanding accountability, transparency, and fighting against corruption, or demanding democratic transformation, is always a target of hate speech .”

‘Coming out’ as Dalit

When in 2015  Yashica Dutt, publicly described herself as Dalit – a group of people who, according to those who subscribe to the Indian caste system, sit at the bottom of the pyramid – she became another victim of hate speech.

“I was very vocal. I was talking about what caste looks like and how we need to identify and acknowledge that it exists and no longer erase it. And obviously that narrative bothered a lot of people, so I have been a part of many troll attacks ”. 

The journalist and award-winning author of the memoir “Coming out as Dalit” says that caste exists within Indian societies, whether in the country itself, or the Indian diaspora. The rise of social media has, she says, led to racism, hate, and verbal assaults making an unwelcome comeback.

Her Tumblr blog, “Documents of Dalit discrimination”, is an effort to create a safe space to talk about the trauma of what it comes to be a lower-caste person, but she says she now faces hate speech every day on Twitter and Facebook .

“If I give a talk or have a panel discussion, there are always a few trolls,” she says. “I'm told that I'm being paid by a mysterious agency, rather than because I'm truly sick of the discrimination that I face and that people around me face.” 

Hate speech “truly does have a heinous form online because you can mobilise armies of trolls to swarm on your account and make sure that you never use your voice again. And it's quite scary,” she says.

According to Ms Dutt one prominent right-wing account incited its million or so followers to hurl abuses, slurs, and make threat of physical or sexual assault, and even death.

“I had to go offline for a long time. Even though I live in New York, a lot of the threats comes from India. And now we have the rise of fundamentalist Hindu communities in the US as well. It was scary, and over time I've learnt how to cope with it.” 

“Consciously or subconsciously, this affects how we use our voice. Ultimately, you think if I tweet this in this particular way, what is going to be the consequence?”

‘I buried all my hopes’

Another female writer and journalist who has experienced the life-threatening effects of hate speech is writer and journalist Martina Mlinarević .

For years, Ms Mlinarević, who is also the ambassador of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Czech Republic, wrote about aspects of corruption in her country. For this she faced threats and insults online, but the level of abuse reached a new level, when a photo of her mastectomy scar was published in a magazine, a first for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“I had to move with a small child to another city due to threats and cyberbullying. The toughest and saddest part for me was fleeing my home town, where I lived for 37 years.” 

Ms Mlinarević explains how, in 2020, when she came to Prague, a doll created to resemble her was burned at a traditional carnival. “It was a kind of persecution campaign to punish me not only for the exposure of the scar on my breast, but also for daring to comment on politics and to promote gender issues and all other problems.”

All these attacks were unpunished at that time, and they escalated into misogynistic, intimidating threats to her safety and family. “For me that was the point when I buried all my hopes regarding the area where I came from”. 

Despite her experiences, Ms. Mlinarević remains optimistic for the future. “I'm trying to work with young people as much as I can, trying to empower their voice, girls’ and women’s voices, and trying to teach them to stand up for themselves, and for others. Let's hope the future will bring something better for all of our children.” 

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Just How Harmful Is Social Media? Our Experts Weigh-In.

A recent investigation by the Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook was aware of mental health risks linked to the use of its Instagram app but kept those findings secret. Internal research by the social media giant found that Instagram worsened body image issues for one in three teenage girls, and all teenage users of the app linked it to experiences of anxiety and depression. It isn’t the first evidence of social media’s harms. Watchdog groups have identified Facebook and Instagram as avenues for cyberbullying , and reports have linked TikTok to dangerous and antisocial behavior, including a recent spate of school vandalism .

As social media has proliferated worldwide—Facebook has 2.85 billion users—so too have concerns over how the platforms are affecting individual and collective wellbeing. Social media is criticized for being addictive by design and for its role in the spread of misinformation on critical issues from vaccine safety to election integrity, as well as the rise of right-wing extremism. Social media companies, and many users, defend the platforms as avenues for promoting creativity and community-building. And some research has pushed back against the idea that social media raises the risk for depression in teens . So just how healthy or unhealthy is social media?

Two experts from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia Psychiatry share their insights into one crucial aspect of social media’s influence—its effect on the mental health of young people and adults. Deborah Glasofer , associate professor of psychology in psychiatry, conducts psychotherapy development research for adults with eating disorders and teaches about cognitive behavioral therapy. She is the co-author of the book Eating Disorders: What Everyone Needs to Know. Claude Mellins , Professor of medical psychology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Sociomedical Sciences, studies wellbeing among college and graduate students, among other topics, and serves as program director of CopeColumbia, a peer support program for Columbia faculty and staff whose mental health has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. She co-led the SHIFT research study to reduce sexual violence among undergraduates. Both use social media.

What do we know about the mental health risks of social media use?

Mellins : Facebook and Instagram and other social media platforms are important sources of socialization and relationship-building for many young people. Although there are important benefits, social media can also provide platforms for bullying and exclusion, unrealistic expectations about body image and sources of popularity, normalization of risk-taking behaviors, and can be detrimental to mental health. Girls and young people who identify as sexual and gender minorities can be especially vulnerable as targets. Young people’s brains are still developing, and as individuals, young people are developing their own identities. What they see on social media can define what is expected in ways that is not accurate and that can be destructive to identity development and self-image. Adolescence is a time of risk-taking, which is both a strength and a vulnerability. Social media can exacerbate risks, as we have seen played out in the news. 

Although there are important benefits, social media can also provide platforms for bullying and exclusion, unrealistic expectations about body image and sources of popularity, normalization of risk-taking behaviors, and can be detrimental to mental health. – Claude Mellins

Glasofer : For those vulnerable to developing an eating disorder, social media may be especially unhelpful because it allows people to easily compare their appearance to their friends, to celebrities, even older images of themselves. Research tells us that how much someone engages with photo-related activities like posting and sharing photos on Facebook or Instagram is associated with less body acceptance and more obsessing about appearance. For adolescent girls in particular, the more time they spend on social media directly relates to how much they absorb the idea that being thin is ideal, are driven to try to become thin, and/or overly scrutinize their own bodies. Also, if someone is vulnerable to an eating disorder, they may be especially attracted to seeking out unhelpful information—which is all too easy to find on social media.

Are there any upsides to social media?

Mellins : For young people, social media provides a platform to help them figure out who they are. For very shy or introverted young people, it can be a way to meet others with similar interests. During the pandemic, social media made it possible for people to connect in ways when in-person socialization was not possible.  Social support and socializing are critical influences on coping and resilience. Friends we couldn’t see in person were available online and allowed us important points of connection. On the other hand, fewer opportunities for in-person interactions with friends and family meant less of a real-world check on some of the negative influences of social media.

Whether it’s social media or in person, a good peer group makes the difference. A group of friends that connects over shared interests like art or music, and is balanced in their outlook on eating and appearance, is a positive. – Deborah Glasofer

Glasofer : Whether it’s social media or in person, a good peer group makes the difference. A group of friends that connects over shared interests like art or music, and is balanced in their outlook on eating and appearance, is a positive. In fact, a good peer group online may be protective against negative in-person influences. For those with a history of eating disorders, there are body-positive and recovery groups on social media. Some people find these groups to be supportive; for others, it’s more beneficial to move on and pursue other interests.

Is there a healthy way to be on social media?

Mellins : If you feel social media is a negative experience, you might need a break. Disengaging with social media permanently is more difficult­—especially for young people. These platforms are powerful tools for connecting and staying up-to-date with friends and family. Social events, too. If you’re not on social media then you’re reliant on your friends to reach out to you personally, which doesn’t always happen. It’s complicated.

Glasofer : When you find yourself feeling badly about yourself in relation to what other people are posting about themselves, then social media is not doing you any favors. If there is anything on social media that is negatively affecting your actions or your choices­—for example, if you’re starting to eat restrictively or exercise excessively—then it’s time to reassess. Parents should check-in with their kids about their lives on social media. In general, I recommend limiting social media— creating boundaries that are reasonable and work for you—so you can be present with people in your life. I also recommend social media vacations. It’s good to take the time to notice the difference between the virtual world and the real world.

Short Speech on Social Media in English

Respected Principal, teachers, and my dear friends.

Very good morning to all of you. Today I am going to speak on the topic- Social Media.

The reason I chose this topic because of the growing popularity of social media.

As we all know that social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Whatsapp are gaining importance these days as they are connecting people worldwide with just a click of a button.

If we look at the positive impact of social media, there are various advantages. One of the major advantages of social media is that it is full of information and helps in providing education. For example, children approach social media to get information on the desired topic.

It is a great device for education. It has made live education possible. We can attend a lecture happening in some other part of the world by just sitting in front of a screen in our country.

Isn’t it great?

Social media is also very convenient to stay updated about what is happening around us. We don’t need to wait for a newspaper to give us information. There are various news-related applications that can instantly update us about any serious happening around us.

Social media has also created opportunities for people such as to show their talent. It is also great for advertisements. But despite being so many benefits, it has been criticized. It has disadvantages too.

It is also considered as one of the harmful elements of society. The oversharing on social media can be dangerous. It can attack our privacy. Also, overusing leads to spending too much time on social media which can deviate children from their studies. Sometimes fake news is also spread with its help disturbing the people.

In short, social media has its advantages and disadvantages. It is up to us how we use it. Use it wisely!

Table of Contents

Question on Social Media

What is social media.

Social Media is websites or application that allow people to interact with each other. One can share information, photos, videos etc. One can share, like, comment etc on the content shared by others.

What is the importance of social media?

It is a ‘virtual space,’ people ( Social Media Celebs ) share information, follow their idols, do business, etc. Now it also became professions of people like YouTubers, Facebook influencers, etc they became social media influence. Here a new world open to express themself to the world.

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Guest Essay

What Matters Most in the Supreme Court’s Upcoming Social Media Cases

By Jameel Jaffer

Mr. Jaffer is a lawyer and the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

Americans spend a lot of time on social media, and this term the Supreme Court will do the same. Over the next few months — beginning Tuesday — the court will hear a series of cases requiring it to resolve First Amendment questions arising out of the role that major social media platforms play in hosting, shaping and setting the limits of public discourse online.

One striking feature of these cases is that they involve conflicts internal to free speech — not conflicts between free speech and other values, like equality or national security, but conflicts between the competing free speech claims of government, platforms and ordinary citizens. In resolving these conflicts, the court should remember that the First Amendment’s highest purpose — its “central meaning,” as Justice William Brennan put it nearly 60 years ago — is to protect the speech that’s necessary to democracy.

The two cases the court will hear on Tuesday pose the question of when a public official’s social media account is subject to First Amendment constraints. One case was brought by parents in Southern California who were blocked from school board members’ Facebook pages after they posted hundreds of comments about racism at local schools. The other case was filed by a Michigan resident who was blocked from the Port Huron city manager’s Facebook page after he criticized the city’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The plaintiffs in both cases argue their First Amendment rights were violated when public officials blocked them based on their viewpoints, but the public officials invoke the First Amendment, too. They argue that they have a constitutional right to use social media — and to block other users from their accounts — just like everyone else.

These cases may seem trivial, but they’re not. Some officials’ social media accounts have become vital forums for speech relating to those officials’ exercise of government power, and for speech about public policy more broadly. We need the First Amendment to protect ordinary citizens from government censorship in these forums to ensure that public officials don’t suppress dissent, insulate themselves from criticism and transform these democratically important spaces into echo chambers.

A few years ago, the Knight First Amendment Institute, which I direct, filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump on behalf of users he had blocked from his Twitter account after they had criticized him. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sided with us, but after Mr. Trump lost the election, the Supreme Court declared the case to be moot and vacated the appeals court’s ruling. The two cases the court is hearing Tuesday morning provide it with an opportunity to recognize, as the appeals court did, that public officials who use their social media accounts as extensions of their offices are not protected by the First Amendment but constrained by it.

Those two lawsuits are about government officials’ use of social media. Other cases the court will hear this term are about government efforts to regulate the platforms. Two of the cases concern the constitutionality of social media laws enacted by Florida and Texas . Both require the platforms to carry speech they might prefer not to carry. Florida’s law restricts platforms’ right to remove or suppress the posts of political candidates and media organizations, and Texas’ bars platforms from taking down content because of its viewpoint. Both states’ laws also require the platforms to provide explanations to users whose posts the platforms take down.

A threshold question the court will have to answer is whether platforms’ content moderation policies reflect the exercise of editorial judgment, since editorial judgment is protected by the First Amendment. Texas and Florida say no, and if the court agrees, then the states win. But the platforms have the better of this argument. In fact, it was the states’ disagreement with the platforms’ editorial judgment, particularly with the decision of some of them to eject Mr. Trump after the events of Jan. 6, 2021, that led the states to pass these laws.

The harder question is what follows from this. Nearly half a century ago, the court held that the First Amendment foreclosed the government from requiring newspapers to provide space in their pages for political candidates to respond to editorials that had criticized them. Whether the First Amendment should be similarly hostile to so-called must-carry rules imposed on the platforms is a question whose answer might turn on whether we think the platforms are meaningfully distinguishable from newspapers — perhaps because of the way these platforms exercise editorial judgment, the significance of their users’ free speech interests or the reasons the government is seeking to regulate them.

Even those who believe that these provisions of the Florida and Texas laws are unconstitutional, as I do, should be wary of a First Amendment regime that would categorically foreclose all must-carry rules — even those that might be narrower, better supported by legislative findings and more closely connected to democratically legitimate goals.

Equally consequential will be how the court addresses the provisions of the Florida and Texas laws that require platforms to notify users whose posts are removed. The platforms argue that these provisions are so onerous and the penalties for violating them so draconian that they will deter platforms from taking down speech they would otherwise take down. The court should give real weight to this argument, particularly because the laws are poorly drafted.

It would be a mistake, though, for the court to make the First Amendment an insurmountable obstacle to carefully drawn laws that strengthen democracy by empowering and protecting platforms’ users, enabling the public to better understand how major platforms are shaping public discourse, and mitigating the outsize power that a small number of platforms have over free speech online. It should certainly matter how heavy a burden a law imposes on platforms’ editorial judgment. But ordinary citizens have free speech interests, too, and First Amendment doctrine needs to account for those.

The last case also relates to the government’s power to regulate social media, though here the regulation takes the form of government speech rather than formal legislation. The case is mainly about efforts the White House and federal agencies undertook during the pandemic to impel the major platforms to suppress what the Biden administration believed to be dangerous misinformation about vaccines. Administration officials repeatedly requested or demanded that the platforms take down this content, sometimes berating them or vaguely threatening regulatory reprisal. At one point President Biden told the press that the platforms were “killing people” by failing to suppress vaccine misinformation more aggressively.

The question at the heart of the case is how the courts should distinguish legitimate government speech from illegitimate government coercion. Here, once again, we are presented with a conflict — or at least a tension — between two competing claims, both of which sound in free speech. The plaintiffs, whose posts the platforms suppressed, argue that the government’s pressure campaign was a form of censorship, and a particularly insidious one because of its informal character, which insulated the government’s actions from the usual democratic checks.

But the best version of the government’s argument registers as a kind of free speech claim, too, even if the government doesn’t have free speech rights in the way that private actors do. A democratically elected government surely has a legitimate role to play in persuading private actors to be attentive to the public interest. And government speech is sometimes essential to informing autonomous decision making by platforms and other private speech intermediaries — especially when the government has information that private decision makers don’t, as is often the case with matters relating to public health.

Construing First Amendment rights so broadly that the government is precluded from sharing information and from encouraging powerful private corporations to act on it would compromise public discourse, not protect it. We need a First Amendment framework that can distinguish government speech that informs the platforms’ editorial autonomy from government speech that overrides it.

More broadly, we need a First Amendment that resolves conflicts among competing speech claims in the digital public sphere by privileging the speech that is most necessary for democracy. This will be a formidable challenge for the court, but it could hardly be more important. Though we might wish it were otherwise, social media platforms are where a lot of public discourse takes place. It’s on these platforms that we hear from our elected leaders, hold them to account, learn about government policy, engage with other citizens, organize collective action and advocate change — which is why the court once described these platforms as among the “vast democratic forums of the internet.”

By making democracy its North Star, the court can fulfill the promise implicit in that description and ensure that, in this sphere that has become so important to our society, the First Amendment does the work we need it to do.

Jameel Jaffer is a lawyer and the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

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Kanishka Singh is a breaking news reporter for Reuters in Washington DC, who primarily covers US politics and national affairs in his current role. His past breaking news coverage has spanned across a range of topics like the Black Lives Matter movement; the US elections; the 2021 Capitol riots and their follow up probes; the Brexit deal; US-China trade tensions; the NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan; the COVID-19 pandemic; and a 2019 Supreme Court verdict on a religious dispute site in his native India.

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Tiktok ceo expects to defeat us ban: 'we aren't going anywhere'.

TikTok's chief executive said on Wednesday that the company expects to win a legal challenge to block legislation signed into law by President Joe Biden that he said would ban the popular short video app used by 170 million Americans.

Not a good look, USC: Cancel culture comes for colleges as graduation season begins

Higher education leaders should not make an unsettling time an excuse to censor perfectly fine speech just because they fear a difficult situation..

Things are not well on America’s college campuses. The disgusting antisemitism that seems only to be building – and campus administrators’ lackluster response – has led to some truly frightening displays .

Violence and rule-breaking behavior must not be tolerated. Period. 

Yet, higher education leaders cannot make an unsettling time an excuse to censor perfectly fine speech just because they fear a difficult situation.

That’s what happened at the University of Southern California when the Los Angeles school decided last week to cancel valedictorian Asna Tabassum’s commencement speech in May – the first time USC has prevented its top graduate from speaking at the ceremony. 

College officials claimed they were concerned about the “alarming tenor” that had taken place on social media after Tabassum was named valedictorian. The ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza has led to increased tensions in the United States following Hamas’ brutal attack against Israel on Oct. 7.

Detractors were displeased about Tabassum’s support of Palestinians and accused her of “anti-semitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric.” 

"The intensity of feelings, fueled by both social media and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, has grown to include many voices outside of USC and has escalated to the point of creating substantial risks relating to security and disruption at commencement," Provost Andrew Guzman said in a statement . "This decision is not only necessary to maintain the safety of our campus and students, but is consistent with the fundamental legal obligation."

Following controversy over the decision to prevent Tabassum from speaking, USC has since doubled down by canceling appearances of other speakers and honorees .

How is any of this fair to valedictorian Asna Tabassum?

Not only is USC’s decision an affront to free speech, it’s also fundamentally unfair to Tabassum, who undoubtedly worked hard in her years at the university to earn this achievement.

She shouldn’t have this experience taken from her.

In a statement, Tabassum has said that she is surprised USC “abandoned” her . 

Hey, Berkeley: Violence isn't free speech. Colleges still struggle with antisemitic protests.

Now, Tabassum may well have repugnant personal views and her speech may stoke division on campus. Even so, her academic accomplishments should not be undermined because of fears of possible violence and a speech she likely hadn’t even written yet. 

Rather, the university should have committed to keeping her and others attending graduation safe. And if it knew of a tangible security threat, it should be upfront about that.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression faults USC for how it handled this situation . While USC is a private university, it commits to First Amendment-like free speech. And FIRE points to how California law requires private, secular colleges and universities to give students the same speech rights they’d have at the state’s public institutions.

“Implicit in the idea of a campus committed to robust expressive rights is that administrators won’t censor their students just because they have controversial views,” FIRE said in a statement .

Adrian College offers a better way to handle controversy

Meanwhile, administrators at private Adrian College in Michigan are handling their own “controversy” in much better fashion. 

They’re pretty much ignoring it. 

Last month, Adrian College announced that Riley Gaines would be its commencement speaker on May 5.

Gaines, who is often described in the media as an “ anti-trans rights activist ,” is a lot more than that. She is an accomplished former NCAA competitive swimmer who became well-known after she tied transgender swimmer Lia Thomas in the 200-yard NCAA freestyle championship race in 2022. 

Following that experience, Gaines has become an outspoken defender of fairness in women’s sports and speaks frequently on the issue at universities around the country.

Athletes sue NCAA: These women say transgender rules discriminate against them. So they're suing the NCAA.

Gaines is used to attracting pushback – and even violence – on campuses, so it’s probably no surprise to her that there are factions of the Adrian community who aren’t happy that she will speak at the school. A student LGBTQ+ group started an online petition urging the college to “disinvite” Gaines. It now has more than 1,600 signatures .

But the college isn’t backing down .

“Adrian College has never shied away from presenting and debating substantive disagreements on campus,” Adrian President Jeffrey Docking said in a news release. "In fact, this is precisely the purpose of universities – to engage in civil discourse of controversial issues. We welcome Riley Gaines to our beautiful campus, and we feel confident our students will be inspired by her commencement address.”

I hope Docking and fellow administrators stay firm in their commitment. And even though it may be embarrassing for USC to backtrack, it should reinstate valedictorian Tabassum as a speaker at commencement.

More than ever, college students need examples of what free expression really looks like.

Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at [email protected] or on X, formerly Twitter: @ Ingrid_Jacques .

Watch CBS News

USC cancels pro-Palestinian valedictorian's speech, citing security concerns

Updated on: April 16, 2024 / 9:05 PM PDT / CBS/City News Service

USC's valedictorian will not be permitted to deliver a speech at the university's commencement ceremony due to concerns about security, the school's provost announced Monday. The valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, drew criticism over her views about the Middle East conflict and social media links that opponents say promoted "antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric."

"While this is disappointing, tradition must give way to safety," Provost Andrew Guzman wrote in a message to the university community. "This decision is not only necessary to maintain the safety of our campus and students, but is consistent with the fundamental legal obligation -- including the expectations of federal regulators -- that universities act to protect students and keep our campus community safe. 

"It applies the same values and criteria that we have used in the past to guide our actions. In no way does it diminish the remarkable academic achievements of any student considered or selected for valedictorian. To be clear: this decision has nothing to do with freedom of speech. There is no free-speech entitlement to speak at a commencement. The issue here is how best to maintain campus security and safety, period." 

Tabassum, a biomedical engineering major, who is Muslim, had been previously announced as this year's valedictorian. She said that she was honored when she learned of her selection.

"The core message I wanted to get across was one of hope," Tabassum told CBS News correspondent Carter Evans.

That changed days later though, when the university rescinded the offer.

"I was never given the evidence that any safety concerns and that any security concerns were founded," Tabassum said. 

In letters sent to USC administrators, critics accused her of posting on a social media account a link to a website that refers to Zionists as "racist-settlers."

"Ms. Tabassum unabashedly and openly endorses the link's calls for `the complete abolishment of the state of israel (sic),"' according to a letter circulated for critics to submit to administrators. "As if the unqualified command for abolition of the State of Israel was unclear in any way, Ms. Tabassum's link reinforces racism with another link, urging readers to `reject the hegemonic efforts to demand that Palestinians accept that Israel has a right to exist as a . . . Jewish state."'

Immediately following Guzman's announcement, the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Los Angeles issued a statement demanding that the decision be reversed and that Tabassum be permitted to speak. 

Tabassum released a statement through CAIR-LA, saying "anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian voices have subjected me to a campaign of racist hatred because of my uncompromising belief in human rights for all." 

"This campaign to prevent me from addressing my peers at commencement has evidently accomplished its goal: today, USC administrators informed me that the university will no longer allow me to speak at commencement due to supposed security concerns," she said. "I am both shocked by this decision and profoundly disappointed that the university is succumbing to a campaign of hate meant to silence my voice.

"I am not surprised by those who attempt to propagate hatred. I am surprised that my own university -- my home for four years -- has abandoned me."

Through it all, Tabassum says she stands by her view. 

"I'm not apologizing for the link that I put in my Instagram," she told Evans. "What I am saying is that I'm committed to human rights. I'm committed to the human rights for all people."

CAIR-LA Executive Director Hussam Ayloush called the USC decision "cowardly" and the reasoning "disingenuous." 

"Asna is an incredibly accomplished student whose academic and extracurricular accomplishments made her the ideal and historic recipient of this year's valedictorian's honor," Ayloush said in a statement. "The university can, should and must ensure a safe environment for graduation rather than taking the unprecedented step of cancelling a valedictorian's speech.

"The dishonest and defamatory attacks on Asna are nothing more than thinly veiled manifestations of Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism, which have been weaponized against college students across the country who speak up for human rights -- and for Palestinian humanity." 

Guzman, in his campus message, said the uproar over the valedictorian selection has taken on "an alarming tenor."

"The intensity of feelings, fueled by both social media and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, has grown to include many voices outside of USC and has escalated to the point of creating substantial risks relating to security and disruption at commencement," Guzman wrote. "We cannot ignore the fact that similar risks have led to harassment and even violence at other campuses. 

"As always, and particularly when tensions are running so high across the world, we must prioritize the safety of our community," he continued. "And as we do every year, we have been monitoring our commencement security needs based on all the information we have and the facts on the ground. Our (Department of Public Safety) and expert campus safety team are uniquely prepared to evaluate potential threats, and we have consulted with them about the current situation, taking into account everything we know about our reality, as well as the unprecedented risks we are seeing at other campuses and across the world. We are resolute in our commitment to maintain and prioritize the existing safety and well-being of our USC community during the coming weeks, and allowing those attending commencement to focus on the celebration our graduates deserve."

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TikTok fears point to larger problem: Poor media literacy in the social media age

Professor of Philosophy and Director, Applied Ethics Center, UMass Boston

Disclosure statement

The Applied Ethics Center at UMass Boston receives funding from the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Nir Eisikovits serves as the data ethics advisor to Hour25AI, a startup dedicated to reducing digital distractions.

University of Massachusetts provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

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The U.S. government moved closer to banning the video social media app TikTok on Apr. 24, 2024 after President Joe Biden signed into law a $95 billion foreign aid bill. The law includes a provision to force ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, to either sell its American holdings to a U.S. company or face a ban on the app in the country.

TikTok has said it will fight any effort to force a sale .

The proposed legislation was motivated by a set of national security concerns. For one, ByteDance can be required to assist the Chinese Communist Party in gathering intelligence, according to the Chinese National Intelligence Law . In other words, the data TikTok collects can, in theory, be used by the Chinese government.

Furthermore, TikTok’s popularity in the United States, and the fact that many young people get their news from the platform – one-third of Americans under the age of 30 – turns it into a potent instrument for Chinese political influence.

Indeed, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently claimed that TikTok accounts run by a Chinese propaganda arm of the government targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022, and the Chinese Communist Party might attempt to influence the U.S. elections in 2024 in order to sideline critics of China and magnify U.S. social divisions.

To these worries, proponents of the legislation have appended two more arguments: It’s only right to curtail TikTok because China bans most U.S.-based social media networks from operating there, and there would be nothing new in such a ban, since the U.S. already restricts the foreign ownership of important media networks.

Some of these arguments are stronger than others.

China doesn’t need TikTok to collect data about Americans. The Chinese government can buy all the data it wants from data brokers because the U.S. has no federal data privacy laws to speak of. The fact that China, a country that Americans criticize for its authoritarian practices, bans social media platforms is hardly a reason for the U.S. to do the same.

I believe the cumulative force of these claims is substantial and the legislation, on balance, is plausible. But banning the app is also a red herring.

In the past few years, my colleagues and I at UMass Boston’s Applied Ethics Center have been studying the impact of AI systems on how people understand themselves. Here’s why I think the recent move against TikTok misses the larger point: Americans’ sources of information have declined in quality and the problem goes beyond any one social media platform.

The deeper problem

Perhaps the most compelling argument for banning TikTok is that the app’s ubiquity and the fact that so many young Americans get their news from it turns it into an effective tool for political influence . But the proposed solution of switching to American ownership of the app ignores an even more fundamental threat.

The deeper problem is not that the Chinese government can easily manipulate content on the app. It is, rather, that people think it is OK to get their news from social media in the first place. In other words, the real national security vulnerability is that people have acquiesced to informing themselves through social media.

Social media is not made to inform people. It is designed to capture consumer attention for the sake of advertisers . With slight variations, that’s the business model of all platforms. That’s why a lot of the content people encounter on social media is violent, divisive and disturbing. Controversial posts that generate strong feelings literally capture users’ notice , hold their gaze for longer, and provide advertisers with improved opportunities to monetize engagement.

There’s an important difference between actively consuming serious, well-vetted information and being manipulated to spend as much time as possible on a platform. The former is the lifeblood of democratic citizenship because being a citizen who participates in political decision-making requires having reliable information on the issues of the day. The latter amounts to letting your attention get hijacked for someone else’s financial gain.

If TikTok is banned, many of its users are likely to migrate to Instagram and YouTube . This would benefit Meta and Google, their parent companies, but it wouldn’t benefit national security. People would still be exposed to as much junk news as before, and experience shows that these social media platforms could be vulnerable to manipulation as well. After all, the Russians primarily used Facebook and Twitter to meddle in the 2016 election .

Media and technology literacy

That Americans have settled on getting their information from outlets that are uninterested in informing them undermines the very requirement of serious political participation, namely educated decision-making. This problem is not going to be solved by restricting access to foreign apps.

Research suggests that it will only be alleviated by inculcating media and technology literacy habits from an early age. This involves teaching young people how social media companies make money, how algorithms shape what they see on their phones, and how different types of content affect them psychologically.

My colleagues and I have just launched a pilot program to boost digital media literacy with the Boston Mayor’s Youth Council . We are talking to Boston’s youth leaders about how the technologies they use everyday undermine their privacy, about the role of algorithms in shaping everything from their taste in music to their political sympathies, and about how generative AI is going to influence their ability to think and write clearly and even who they count as friends.

We are planning to present them with evidence about the adverse effects of excessive social media use on their mental health. We are going to talk to them about taking time away from their phones and developing a healthy skepticism towards what they see on social media.

Protecting people’s capacity for critical thinking is a challenge that calls for bipartisan attention. Some of these measures to boost media and technology literacy might not be popular among tech users and tech companies. But I believe they are necessary for raising thoughtful citizens rather than passive social media consumers who have surrendered their attention to commercial and political actors who do not have their interests at heart.

This article was updated to indicate that President Biden signed into law the bill containing the TikTok measure on Apr. 24, 2024.

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Many Americans find value in getting news on social media, but concerns about inaccuracy have risen

Social media plays a crucial role in Americans’ news consumption . Half of all U.S. adults say they at least sometimes get news there, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey .

Those who get news on social media name a variety of things that they like about it, including convenience, speed and the element of social interaction. But some social media news consumers also express concerns about news there being inaccurate, low quality and politically biased. The share who say inaccuracy is the aspect they dislike most has increased from 31% to 40% in the past five years.

These findings come from a broader Center survey of U.S. adults’ news habits . The survey asked Americans who get news on social media to describe – in their own words – the things they like and dislike most about getting news there. Their responses were then sorted into categories.

Pew Research Center asked two open-ended questions about what people like and dislike most about getting news on social media as part of a survey on U.S. adults’ news habits. The survey of 8,842 U.S. adults was conducted from Sept. 25 to Oct. 1, 2023.

Everyone who completed the survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the  ATP’s methodology .

We asked all respondents who say they get news on social media to answer the open-ended questions. Responses were manually coded into categories. In total, we coded 4,507 open-end responses on what respondents like the most and 4,453 responses on what respondents dislike the most.

Here are the  questions used for the fall 2023 survey , along with responses, and its  methodology .

We asked whether Americans prefer social media or news outlets for various types of information on a separate ATP survey conducted March 20-26, 2023, among 3,576 U.S. adults. Here are the questions used for the spring 2023 survey , along with responses, and its  methodology .

Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, its primary funder. This is the latest report in Pew Research Center’s ongoing investigation of the state of news, information and journalism in the digital age, a research program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

What Americans like about getting news on social media

The aspects of getting news on social media that Americans value have not changed much since 2018 , the last time we asked these questions. Convenience remains the top thing people like most about getting news on social media. One-in-five social media news consumers say this, with responses such as “It’s at my fingertips,” “I can easily get it” and “It’s available all the time and anywhere.”

Another 9% say they like the speed with which they can get news there, describing news on social media as “fast and to the point” and “quick and easy to digest.”

Smaller shares say they like interaction with others , the up-to-date nature of the news, the content or format , and the variety of sources and stories .

Meanwhile, 7% of Americans who get news on social media say they don’t like anything about the experience, and an additional 32% did not offer a response.

What Americans dislike about getting news on social media

Many social media news consumers also see downsides to getting news this way. Four-in-ten Americans who get news from social media say inaccuracy is the thing they dislike most about it – an increase of 9 percentage points since 2018. This category of responses includes concerns about unverified facts, misinformation, “fake news” and unreliable sources.

A much smaller share of social media news consumers (8%) say they dislike the low quality of news there, with some giving clickbait or a lack of in-depth coverage as examples. Others say the news on social media is too biased or political (6%) or they don’t like the way people behave there (5%).

Another 1% of social media news consumers say censorship is what they dislike most. This category – which we used for the first time in the 2023 survey – includes responses such as “Too much censorship by the sites” and “I really dislike when some of my view points are removed.” There are no significant differences in the shares of Democratic and Republican social media news consumers who say they’re concerned about news censorship on social media. In fact, there are no partisan differences within any of these complaint categories.

Just 4% of respondents say they don’t dislike anything about getting news on social media. Another 31% did not answer the question.

Social media posts versus news outlets: Which do Americans prefer for certain types of information?

The perceived downsides of getting news on social media may help explain why many Americans prefer to go directly to news outlets instead. In a separate Center survey, U.S. adults who say they at least sometimes get news on social media were asked whether they prefer reading social media posts or going directly to news outlets for five different types of information. Those types of information include the basic facts about an issue or event as well as in-depth information and opinions on it.

Americans prefer to get four of the five types of information from news outlets over social media. However, a substantial share say they like getting each type of information from news outlets and social media about the same.

For example, 45% of respondents say they prefer news outlets for getting the most in-depth information about an issue or event, while only 11% prefer social media posts for this. An additional 34% say they value both sources equally, while 8% say they prefer neither option.

Social media news consumers also tend to prefer news outlets over social media to get:

• The basic facts about an issue or event (39% vs. 14%)
• Up-to-date information about an event as it is happening (34% vs. 21%)
• Information about how an issue or event impacts them (31% vs. 15%)

In each of these cases, roughly four-in-ten or more say they like social media and news outlets about the same.

In contrast, equal shares of Americans prefer news outlets and social media when it comes to opinions on an issue (22% each).

Previous Center research has shown that younger Americans are more likely than older Americans to prefer getting news from social media , and that pattern also appears in the findings of this survey. Adults under 30 express a clear preference for using social media over news outlets to get opinions on an issue (36% vs. 13%) and up-to-date information as an event is happening (35% vs. 21%). Americans ages 65 and older are much more likely to prefer news outlets over social media for every type of information we asked about. 

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Luxuan Wang is a research associate at Pew Research Center

Naomi Forman-Katz is a research analyst focusing on news and information research at Pew Research Center

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USC says it is canceling its valedictorian speech because of safety concerns

Ayana Archie

This March 12, 2019, file photo shows the University Village area of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Reed Saxon/AP hide caption

This March 12, 2019, file photo shows the University Village area of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

The University of Southern California will no longer have its valedictorian speak at its commencement ceremony because of safety concerns, the school said Monday .

Asna Tabassum was selected as this year's valedictorian. But student groups called for the decision to be reconsidered due to Tabassum's social media content on the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

Tabassum's Instagram page links to a slideshow that says "learn about what's happening in Palestine, and how to help," and criticizes Zionism as "a racist settler-colonial ideology that advocates for a jewish ethnostate built on palestinian land." The slideshow calls for a "one-state solution" that "would mean palestinian liberation, and the complete abolishment of the state of israel."

Tabassum's social media activity has drawn criticism, with student groups, such as the organization Trojans for Israel , calling the content "antisemitic bigotry." Other social media users, however, denounced USC's decision and said Tabassum should be able to speak freely.

USC Provost Andrew Guzman, who picks the valedictorian, said the matter "has grown to include many voices outside" the campus community, and poses a security threat to next month's event, which is anticipated to have 65,000 guests.

Middle East crisis — explained

U.s. students are clashing over the israel-hamas war. what can colleges do.

"After careful consideration, we have decided that our student valedictorian will not deliver a speech at commencement," Guzman said. "While this is disappointing, tradition must give way to safety."

Tabassum, who is South Asian-American and Muslim, said in a statement that as a result of the backlash, she has faced "a campaign of racist hatred because of my uncompromising belief in human rights for all."

Tabassum said she questions safety concerns being the university's reason for canceling her speech. She said she was denied a request for the school's threat assessment. Additionally, during a meeting with university leaders, she said she was told the school would not be increasing its security presence, despite having the resources to do so, because that's not what USC wants to "present as an image."

"I am not surprised by those who attempt to propagate hatred," said Tabassum, who studies biomedical engineering and resistance to genocide. "I am surprised that my own university—my home for four years—has abandoned me."

"USC supports free speech and dissent, so long as it doesn't disturb university activities," Guzman said.

The number of high school seniors who have filled out FAFSA is down from last year

He added that USC's 300-employee Department of Public Safety will be "fully deployed" at commencement, along with officers from the Los Angeles Police Department.

Guzman said that the school is "resolute in our commitment to maintain and prioritize the existing safety and well-being of our USC community during the coming weeks."

Guzman picked this year's valedictorian from a pool of about 100 eligible applicants and examined several factors, excluding social media presence, he said.

This story has been updated to include examples of Tabassum's online statements about the situation in the Middle East.

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Jake Tapper Confronts NY Mayor Eric Adams Over Columbia Protests: ‘Is That Hate Speech or Is That Protected Free Speech?’ | Video

The university canceled in-person classes on Monday days after calling police to arrest demonstrators

CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Monday, “Where is the line?” between the right to free speech and the need for public safety on college campuses. Their conversation followed clashes between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups at multiple colleges.

Columbia University canceled in-person classes on Monday and tensions remained high after last week’s arrest of more than 100 demonstrators. The students camped out on campus to ask for a ceasefire in Gaza and for the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel.

Tapper began by noting that most of the college protests have been peaceful ones and that protests haven’t been confined to campuses alone.

He asked Adams, “Do you think Columbia is doing enough to protect its students, especially its Jewish students? And do you worry that sending in NYPD might actually inflame matters?”

Adams noted, “I’ve participated in protests throughout my life and particularly [against] South Africa, calling for the dismantling of apartheid. That is one of the fundamental rights we hold dear as Americans, the right to protest.”

The mayor said that some of the “vile” antisemitic comments Tapper quoted “on the surface are not illegal, but if you use it to harass someone, we’re going to take appropriate action to stop them from taking place, and we will go on private property for imminent threat.”

“Free speech is an important part of being an American. Where is the line?” Tapper asked. “For example, I’ve seen video of somebody at the Gaza encampment at Columbia standing up and talking about how great Oct. 7’s Hamas attacks on Israel was and calling the Hamas terrorists ‘freedom fighters.’ Is that hate speech? Or is that protected free speech? Where do you come down on that?”

Adams added, “Clearly, I could feel the duality of this moment. I understand the pain that is playing out in Israel and in Gaza at this time.” He mentioned that it was similar to the 1950s when Black students had to be escorted on campuses in Little Rock, Arkansas , “because they were afraid for their lives. And that is what I see when I see Jewish students are going through this at this moment.”

The mayor stated, “There is no place for hate in this city. I don’t care if it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, Anti-Sikhism, we don’t have a place for that.”

Arrests of student protesters were also made at Yale, the Associated Press reported on Monday, while Harvard restricted access to Harvard Yard. Pro-Palestinian encampments have also begun at the University of Michigan, New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The University of Southern California has tried to grapple with the larger issue of the Israel-Hamas conflict after canceling the planned commencement speech from Muslim valedictorian Asna Tabassum. A petition begun by the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) gained more than 41,000 signatures in 48 hours. A separate petition on Change.org currently has just over 2,000 signatures.

You can watch Tapper and Adams’ conversation below:

Here’s @jaketapper interviewing @ericadamsfornyc & calling out "hateful & threatening" chants at Columbia that praise Hamas for exactly what it is: blatant antisemitism. There is peaceful protest…this is not it. pic.twitter.com/2a8rBrfbtK — Elizabeth Wagmeister (@EWagmeister) April 22, 2024

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