Postings from Todd: Occupy Wall Street Occupied by Censorship?

An interesting side story has been emerging from the Occupy Wall Street protests. As many of you probably know, the protests have been gaining steam over the last three weeks. Inspired and influenced by the Arab Spring protests in such Middle Eastern countries as Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, the Occupy Wall Street protests have been organized through the internet and especially through social media. Though the conditions in the Middle East might have been more extreme, it is still an interesting point in history to see Americans inspired by the use of technology in an area of the world that is usually stereotyped as behind-the-times and medieval in its customs.

Though the protests have utilized technology and social media to organize a collection of widely varying groups with their own separate agendas, it has become a growing concern among some in the movement that technology might be inhibiting the protestors’ organization abilities. First off, many inside the movement have alleged, and many major news organizations have reported, that Yahoo blocked emails mentioning the protests from being sent. Though Yahoo claims that this was an inadvertent mistake they have since remedied, many bloggers and members of the protest community have claimed foul play. One can’t help but question what Yahoo’s true intentions here were. Remember, Yahoo is a publicly traded stock.

An even more interesting (and perhaps frightening) claim being made by some bloggers is against that revered tool of democracy during the Arab Spring: Twitter. Bloggers have claimed that Twitter has, on two separate occasions, prevented the hash tag #OccupyWallStreet from being a top trending topic on their homepage, even though the tag received more tweets than others that were ranked higher. Many people sight the fact that JP Morgan Chase invested around $400 million into Twitter back in March, as a reason that Twitter is “censoring” Occupy Wall Street’s communications. Whether these allegations are true or not, it’s important to keep in mind that even social media networks have corporate interests of their own. Always keep these in mind when exploring and studying social media and its effects.

Twitter Mania

Over the past few days, there have been SO many articles about Twitter in the mainstream press. It's funny, because it comes on the heels of our in class discussion on "The Tweet Life." This article addresses how the media, and the Washington/NYC corridor may be so much more obsessed with Twitter than other places.

It also makes another valid point: That it's really easy to use social media to explain phenomena that we would have explained some other way (I found my birth mom on Twitter, or Facebook...but people were doing that already).

Elizabeth pointed an article my way (using our #SMPASOCIAL hashtag!) about how Twitter can be used to map emotional moods. This is a study that's been picked up by the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

The findings are pretty interesting, but sort of what you would expect: that we get happy when we get off from work; but the underlying thing I find so fascinating is that this is a mapping of 84 different countries using Twitter from 2008-2010.

Another article - perhaps coincidentally, or perhaps on the tails of this study in Science, appeared as the large weekend section in the WSJ.

Things you can learn from Twitter data:

*perhaps mapping stock trends - and even hedge funds are getting into this (WSJ)

*mapping cross-cultural moods

*charting potential flu outbreaks

*tracking political activity and voting behavior

BUT - one must take social science for what it is. In the Science study, as Gawker (yes that's my citation for methodology) look at what the scientists did:

Cornell University sociologists used text software to detect the presence of positive words and icons (ie, “awesome,” “agree,” " :) ") and negative ones (“annoy,” “afraid,” " :( ") in 509 million tweets from 2.4 million users in 84 different countries over a two-year period. Researchers were very psyched to study people's emoticons

A few problems with that, as admitted in the NYT article.

How often do you say "I just woke up with bedhead. Awesome :)" on Twitter.

OR "The economy is doing super today. Great-O"

OR "Unemployment- my bag of tea ":)

These are, basically, variations of tweets I've seen.

So you really need to be careful with machine-coded content analysis, as it doesn't pick up sarcasm. One can guess though, that perhaps enough people aren't sarcastic so as to keep the study valid. But the researchers don't know.

Additionally, are people MORE serious about some things than other things (e.g. being interested in a particular stock vs. being interested an particular politician). Another potential question.

And another reminder: Twitter is really easy to use for scientific data. So instead of asking Verizon, say, for access to SMS (though as Morozov tells us, it's all out there) - it's very simple to get Twitter data through the public API.

So it's easy to monitor, and as we've talked about in the Tweet life article, what's your sample? The most media-addicted people in 84 countries.

I'm not convinced.

Sharing Explicit Content - For Teaching Purposes

So today I ran into an interesting dilemma: in addition to having our guest speaker, Nisha Chittal, from the Travel Channel, talk to us about social media marketing, we're also talking about stupid idiotic stuff one shouldn't do on the Web.

So articles I've sent out include references to drugs: but in the context of failing a social media background test. Some students said they think they've had them, but they don't know.

Then I sent out the article that really got USC going last year: the sexist frat boy article that came out over a discussion list. It's horrible. A lot of women can't get through it. Maybe a lot of guys too. But it was intended to show what happens when you think the things you send are private.

It just freaked me out to send these things to students, but they were for pedagogical reasons, and it's OK, especially in the context of how not to destroy your life using social media and navigating life on the Web. But still, I feel like I have some responsibility to keep things PG.



But my students, you guys, are smart. You know, more than your professors think, that you shouldn't be doing stupid stuff. Maybe that's why you're all taking this class - you're ahead of the game. You do social media work for Congressional offices and for sports marketing places and Fortune 50 companies.

So the message I got from above: "Scare the daylights out of them" was completely unnecessary.

BUT: It isn't all about privacy.

One of the interesting things Nisha pointed out, though, was that students shouldn't be on Facebook lockdown, and that Twitter should be an open place.

You should be promoting your voice, your brand, and your Google presence. Don't let Google control you. Appear smart, articulate, and control your presence. Don't be afraid to brag. And share content that you think builds you as a professional.

Great advice.

Do I follow you: Or: Do I know what you did this weekend?

So this exchange happened with New York Times business reporter Diana B. Henriques, a GW ALUM (who basically cracked every big Madoff story) and me:

dianabhenriques Diana B. Henriques

Have you noticed that Twitter has morphed from 'here's what I'm doing' (eating lunch, seeing a movie, etc.), to 'here's some information'?

nikkiusher nikkiusher

@

@dianabhenriques I think it depends. I just realized why need to consider whether my students might not want me to follow them...

49 minutes ago

Yeah, so, I realized that even though your tweets are going to be archived in the Library of Congress for your kids and grandkids to see how you spent your Saturday night, it's possible that I might not need to know...

At the same time, I'm stuck: I want an easy way to have an in-class Twitter feed. It's part of my job to make sure that you do know these tools, even though the class is not really a skills class and much more of a conceptual class. And I think it'd be a rad way to be able to ask questions #SMPASOCIAL

Everyone on the interwebs [click on that, it's a funny link] would think I was the coolest social media prof. ever.

Or maybe, the old just "raising your hand" thing just works fine. And maybe our etherpad is kicking butt. I don't know.

So tell me: Do you want me to know what you did this weekend? In this Mark Zuckerberg world where there is no privacy, actually there is privacy, but we don't need to keep anything private, should it matter?

For the record, I went to my wife's grandma's 80th birthday and saw Amish people. It was pretty rad.