4/22
Social Media
What TikTok reveals about Gen Z dating
In an honors thesis for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, 2023 grad Talia Fiester examines “Neoliberal Love and the Pathology of Gen Z’s Singledom.”
To spread important messages about teen mental health, make community connections
After creating memes and TikToks with Philly high schoolers, Jeffrey Fishman’s honors thesis explores how those messages can effectively reach their audience.
Why COVID misinformation continues to spread
Penn Medicine’s Anish Agarwal discusses why false claims about the virus and vaccines arise and persist, plus what he hopes will come from NIH-funded research he and Penn Engineering’s Sharath Chandra Guntuku have recently begun.
Is social media good or bad for social unity?
Annenberg professors Sandra González-Bailón and Yphtach Lelkes reviewed all of the previous literature to determine what scholars have discovered to date.
What the Twitter upheaval means to Penn health services researchers
LDI senior fellows weigh in on Twitter’s current upheaval, and whether they think the situation at the social media company will impact how they disseminate research in the future.
‘My body belongs to me???’: Students question media messaging in an Annenberg course
Students in Sarah Banet-Weiser’s Annenberg course on Gender and the Media make zines responding to messaging and consumer products.
Journalist and activist Maria Ressa on ‘facts, truth, trust’
In the annual Annenberg Lecture, the Nobel Peace Prize winner discussed being the target of online attacks and what it will take to ensure that truth prevails.
The language of loneliness and depression, revealed in social media
By analyzing Facebook posts, Penn researchers found that words associated with depression are often tied to emotions, whereas those associated with loneliness are linked to cognition.
Twitter gives conservative news greater visibility than liberal content
This bias held even in the context of a social justice movement with left-leaning goals, according to research from Sandra González-Bailón of the Annenberg School for Communication and colleagues.
British South Asian social media influencers balancing race, religion, ethnicity, and gender
Annenberg professor Aswin Punathambekar’s new paper examines life online for three social media influencers, including Nadiya Hussain from “The Great British Bake Off.”
In the News
AI fake nudes are booming. It’s ruining real teens’ lives
Doctoral candidate Sophie Maddocks in the Annenberg School for Communication says that AI fake nudes are targeting girls and women who aren’t in the public eye.
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Why I’m not expecting my friends to make social media posts about Israel
A study from the Annenberg School for Communication found that people primarily share information on social media that they feel is meaningful to themselves or to the people they know.
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What social media does to the teen brain
Frances Jensen of the Perelman School of Medicine examines the impact that social media is having on the brains of teenagers, the first “truly digital generation.”
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Trump attacked me. Then Musk did. It wasn’t an accident
In an Op-Ed, Yoel Roth of the Annenberg School for Communication says that his experience of public attacks and harassment while working at Twitter was part of a larger, targeted political campaign to erode online safety and strengthen misinformation.
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Trump uses Facebook to fund presidential run, two years after Meta banned him
Andrew Arenge of the School of Arts & Sciences says that higher social media impressions can be a key factor for bringing in waves of cash for political campaigns.
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Elon Musk blames school for rift with daughter: ‘She doesn’t want to spend time with me’
A 2022 study by Sandra González-Bailón of the Annenberg School for Communication found that Twitter, now X, gives more visibility to those with conservative ideologies than those who tend to express more progressive views.
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