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The element of followers/friends/subscribers and an engagement and/or content monetisation business model dependent on that element might be a useful distinction between what we consider a social media platform and a forum or blog.
This is going to be important as Section 230 and it’s non-U.S. counterparts are re-visited re: a platform’s role in spreading disinformation and other dangerous or illegal content absent a robust moderation system. @Otherbrother is right that we need a more precise definition.
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Also the fact that you are presented with an algorithmically determined personalised feed. That is a huge part of the problem, of course, when it comes to radicalisation and to addictive behaviour.
Although that would make YouTube social media as well.
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The algorithmic feed might be an element of the definition, but as it stands now it’s a mechanism to serve the two elements I described (encouraging more follower sign-ups and driving advertising engagement).
The presence of those two elements is also what makes YouTube a social media platform; even if many of us don’t bother with subscribe/follow, that’s what Google intends it to be.
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Cross posting here as it’s relevant. This predator had access to hundreds of children via social media.
Had a long draft earlier about litigating what is social media and how can legislation keep up. Went away and deleted it and might rewrite when I can do so without being angrily insulting and venting the anger I carry from multiple meetings being patronised by techbros who don’t understand how law works.
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I do YouGov surveys, and yt is often included in the lists of social media sites.
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It is getting harder to tell it apart from TikTok lately. Quite a bit of overlap.
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Five websites all showing screenshots of each other…
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Yeah, YouTube Shorts was a huge step in that direction. I hate it.
It seems to work in as much as shorts seem to have huge numbers of views. But I wonder if they actually make money off it, seeing as they can’t serve ads on them. I assume it exists so that creators don’t abandon them for TikTok altogether and so that the occasional user gets directed to a long form video which has ads. But then, there seems to be no obvious way to get from a short to a relevant long video, which defeats that purpose?
Come to think of it: TikTok doesn’t have ads. How do they make money?
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I stay away from and block those egregious channels when they do show up, yet I still have a loooong subscription list.
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Thank you.
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The kids driven to suicide by the interactions they have on social media would like to disagree, but they can’t, because they are dead.
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Ignoring a mental health crisis of teens is pretty obscene, too, actually. Kids are getting bullied into suicide. do better.
Not sure how many folks here need to point out to you that this is a real crisis and that, YES, social media plays a part… But maybe think a bit about what you’re saying here and how it’s coming off. It seems like dead kids are nothing but a joke to you, and that people who give a shit are pearl clutching moralists.
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Sure are hiding a lot in this phrase, huh? Makes it sound like it’s all Pusheen and Moo Deng, and not red-pilling and fascist propaganda and inciting genocide like we saw play out in Myanmar. Some types of “interwebs stuff” have hurt far more than thalidomide ever managed.
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And we at least DID something about the Thalidomide once it was discovered to be a problem… But I guess some people want to live in a corporate fascist hellscape… a bit weird that…
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While that’s a common feature I wouldn’t say it’s a defining one. There are both historic examples that are squarely considering “social media” without a feed at all (MySpace, early Facebook, etc) and modern examples like Mastodon where there’s no algorithm behind the feed.
As for YouTube, it was pretty clearly always intended to be social media. There’s a reason why there’s no real delineation between creator and user accounts. Even if you’ve never looked at your own YouTube profile page it’s still there waiting for you to fill out your bio and upload a quick video for your actual friends to watch. It was always supposed to be participatory, not viewers just hoovering up content from “creators” and fossil elements of the site design still reflects that.
But we restrict all of those things for young minds. We keep 8-year-olds out of the adult bookstore and the nightclub. We put warnings and age restrictions on media. We keep the adult stuff off to one side and have some reasonable guidelines in place to prevent their access.
The Norwegian government is saying that SM is the adult stuff, with interaction with strangers and data collection, and minors shouldn’t navigate that. It’s not keeping them off the internet altogether, nor should it. I don’t see how that’s a tech panic. It’s a precaution similar to all the other precautions that we put in place for adult content.
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