Snapchat has announced a new feature called “Here For You” that promises to “provide proactive in-app support to Snapchatters who may be experiencing a mental health or emotional crisis”.
The popular youth-oriented app is the latest to join a wave of social media platforms setting out to monitor and improve the well-being of their users.
As you scroll through your Facebook news feed, you see it: Your friend has posted a new profile picture. But instead of a picture of just your friend, it’s a couple photo – a picture of your friend and their romantic partner.
“Why would someone choose that as their profile picture?” you wonder.
Fear of missing out, or FoMO, is commonly described as that anxious feeling you get when you think other people might be having a good time without you. Excessive FoMO is closely related to symptoms of behavioural addiction. It often leads to undesirable behaviour such as the constant checking of social media, even in an inappropriate context, like while driving, and becoming overly preoccupied with reactions to online posts and messages.
Humans are more connected to each other than ever, thanks to smartphones, the web and social media. At the same time, loneliness is a huge and growing social problem.
If you’re sitting there wondering what the kids are into these days, this is it. TikTok is a short-video format social platform where viewers can consume a lot of content in short intervals.
In South Africa, the biggest threats to democracy are pretty obvious: the stuttering economy, never-ending rolling blackouts (let’s call them what they are), the rampant unemployment (nearly 30% in total, over 50% for youth) and a delusional political elite that doesn’t know it’s out of touch, out of money (due to said economic woes and therefore the inability of Sars to collect revenue) and generalised arrogance.
The number of active users of Facebook (those people who have logged onto the site in the previous month) has reached a historic high of 2.45 billion. To put this in some context, approximately 32% of the global population now use the social media platform, and the trend line of participation is still going up.
The world is starting to see the gradual decline of Facebook, with 15 million US users dropping off between 2017 and last year. Nonetheless, Facebook remains the largest social network in the world.
Like any eight-year-old, Ryan Kaji loves to play with toys. But when Ryan plays, millions watch.
Since the age of four he’s been the star of his own YouTube channel. All up his videos have gained more than 35 billion views. This helped make him YouTube’s highest-earning star in 2018, earning US$22 million, according to Forbes.
Even though it’s less than 0.5% of Facebook’s $66bn revenue in the last year, the social giant will still allow adverts from politicians, even if they’re false.