Researchers Exploring the Reasons for "Sadfishing" Over Social Media

Sad-fishing, identified by the researchers as “a trend for people on social media to post hyped emotive reactions to elicit sympathies,” is an online activity that has legitimate uses: highlighting the inner workings of someone else's mind which can be a powerful tool when communicating with others. In this case, however, sad-fishing can become a negative form of online expression — often expressed in a way that is seen as cringe-worthy (a word almost synonymous with internet cliche).

Sad-fishing, or hoping to receive sympathy on social media by complaining about problems or misfortunes that are not true, may lead people to feel isolated and alone. This can be especially true when individuals see the same sentiments expressed by people in their real life, which has led psychologists to investigate how this behavior is impacting those who contend with it.

Researcher conducted a study to explore the factors in psychology that encourage unhappiness. According to their theory, unhappy persons own an apprehensive attachment bond and receive less support from others in person or digitally.

This study's volunteers were gathered via ads on different social networks. Three thousand forty-seven individuals signed up for this drive. These people responded to a survey detailing their sad-fishing activities over the previous year. They were questioned about whether they sensed pressure to embellish a private or physical condition digitally. These remarks divided respondents into "unhappy" and "happy" groupings.

This study aimed to examine the reasons behind people engaging in sad-fishing on the internet and how this may be an indication of a lower level of the adult bond. Participants were found to be very similar in both areas, indicating that over-liking a post or creating a false account is not indicative of low levels of adult bond support.

The study examined whether sad-fishers were more feasible to be lonely, using a self-report measure of sociable help. Results indicate that sadfishers are comparable to non-sadfishers in their sociable backing and interactional relation development, but sadfisher players have greater levels of an apprehensive bond.

The experimenters believe that while a more significant inclination to influence others may not be directly related to uneasy bond, it likely plays a role. The study found that social anxiety negatively correlated with anxious attachment and “sad-fishermen” were more likely to use more manipulative tactics than those who described themselves as less anxious.

The facts only showed a "sensation" as a significant connection between despair and apprehensive affection; there was no substantial analytical connection between the two, according to the researchers, who also noted several other shortcomings. Additionally, they suggest that a statistical test be designed to effectively recognize unhappiness.

To improve therapeutic techniques, Lead researcher Cara Petrofes and her team finish by urging deeper research into the causes of being unhappy.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

The World’s Biggest Social Media and Messaging Apps Visualized

Social media used to seem like an unstoppable force that would inevitably manage to rule the whole world, but in spite of the fact that this is the case recent years have shown that this industry is not immune to controversy and the financial fallout that can occur in its wake. 2016’s fiery election that saw the divisive Donald Trump rise to the US presidency, followed by the Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica Scandal, proved to be the first of many cracks to come.

One thing that has become apparent in 2022 is that the landscape of social media has become a lot more diverse. New players like TikTok have now entered the fray, and they are upsetting the delicate balance that so many social media platforms had relied on in the past. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Meta’s social media platforms still reign supreme thanks to their enormous user base that is on a global scale.

However, smaller platforms have also been making an entry with all things having been considered and taken into account. Facebook is at the top of the list in terms of monthly active users with 2.9 billion, followed by YouTube which has about 2.3 billion. Coming in third is another Meta property, WhatsApp, which has approximately 2 billion active users per month.

Messenger and Instagram round off the top five list with 1.3 billion and 1.2 billion MAUs apiece. This means that the top five is dominated by Meta, with only YouTube managing to crack the top five and give the social media juggernaut some competition.

Once we exit the top five list, the list starts to become much more diversified than might have been the case otherwise. Tencent’s messaging app WeChat has 1.2 billion users. It is benefited by being the only accessible messaging platform in China because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up giving it unlimited exposure to the massive population in that country, but it has managed to crack the market in ways that other platforms failed to.

TikTok comes in at number 7 with 732 million MAUs, and the rapid growth of this platform might help it crack into the top five list in the near future. It will also be helped along by the ensuing decline of Meta, although it is facing stiffer competition from YouTube and only time will tell whether or not it will come out on top.

TikTok is then followed by Telegram with 700 million monthly active users. The top ten list is then rounded off by two more Chinese apps, namely Douyin which is the Chinese version of TikTok with 600 million users per month and QQ which is also owned by Tencent which has about 595 million MAUs.

The US and China are both producing social media and messaging apps that are able to crack the top 20. The only app that was created outside of these countries is Telegram, which indicates that China and the US will continue to dominate the social media landscape for many years to come unless the paradigm changes considerably.

H/T: VC
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by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World

Musk Blasts Twitter’s Team For Being Too Intense When Suspending Fake Accounts On The App

Elon Musk is blasting out the teams responsible for suspending fake accounts on the Twitter platform, calling them out as being too intense in their behavior.

The billionaire spoke out on the matter during the later hours of Sunday night where he says the team that was responsible for getting rid of spam and even bot accounts was just too harsh in their ruling.

He even highlighted how such suspensions were not required but now, he hopes to move forward with a more chill or laid-back attitude.

The news came after one Twitter user sent out complaints about the platform suspending several genuine accounts that were seen putting out messages of positivity as well as fun memes for better engagement.

But by suspending such accounts, Musk knows that it would drastically affect users who work so hard to build up their followers and accounts. Hence, such behavior causes the number of followers to drop overnight.

Elon Musk’s major issue has really opened up a new debate because we’ve seen the billionaire outline on numerous occasions that he wouldn’t be able to acquire Twitter because the number of fake accounts was just too many.

Now, he’s taking a completely different approach by putting a loose grip on keeping such accounts at bay. What happened to Musk trying to authentically the real users on the app as humans, was just one of the many comments that people were curious about, related to this topic.

In a recently published interview with leading media outlet Reuters, Elon Musk was mentioned to be a leader whose top priority was nothing but platform safety. And for that reason, he was not going to make the app rely more on the likes of AI technology to spot and address various types of harmful content online.

Let’s not forget how in the past few weeks, we’ve seen several users of the app that were left-wing activists having accounts suspended in an unfair manner. And that was related to the fact that the company’s team that handled trust and safety was decimated.

Then last week, we saw a new report in the name of Twitter Files get published which outlined how Twitter prevented content related to Hunter Biden’s laptop from getting published, right before the commencement of the US Elections that were held in 2020.

Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

This Poll Suggests Guest Posting Is Not Dead Yet

Guest posting used to be a mainstay of SEO, but Google started to pull back on its prominence back in 2014. After many years of punishing sites that continued to use guest posting, Google managed to reduce it a fair bit and give rise to many other forms of SEO that were meant to improve the quality of content that is featured on its SERP. As recently as 2021, Google highlighted its numerous systems that are meant to detect guest posting and discourage it.

In spite of the fact that this is the case, many SEO professionals are continuing to use guest posts to boost their SERP rankings. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that almost 32% of the people who responded to a recent Twitter poll said that they still use guest posting, and just under 12% said that they use it on occasion.

It should be mentioned that a plurality of voters, or 44.9% to be precise, said no to the question that was asked of them. Regardless of that, hundreds of people said that guest posting is a major part of their SEO strategy with all things having been considered and taken into account.

The lack of credence that SEO professionals are giving to Google’s guidelines are interesting to say the least. It suggests that people care less about these guidelines than might have been the case otherwise, and they may have other metrics that they are considering which are worth the lower SERP rankings that they would be forced to tolerate.

There may be a lot more at play here than meet’s the eye. Guest posting could be beneficial because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up driving user traffic despite it working against the site from an SEO point of view. Google may not be the all powerful content hub that it and many others consider it to be, and that could have a huge impact on how people deal with their SEO needs in the future.

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by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World

Intrusive Ads and Fake Apps Are Making Apple’s App Store Worse

There are two main app stores that people can download their favorite apps from, with Apple’s App Store winning out over Google’s Play Store in most metrics. In spite of the fact that this is the case, there have been a lot of changes that were made to the App Store that have made it worse than might have been the case otherwise. Intrusive ads are becoming ever more prevalent, and there has also ben a worrying abundance of knock off apps.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Apple has clearly been placing a lot more emphasis on driving up revenues. Unfortunately, this is coming at the expense of the user experience. 15 years on from the launch of the App Store, the quality of the apps that are available has gone downhill, and what’s worse is that the ads have become a lot more intrusive than they used to be as well.

A good example of this can be seen when people search for gambling recovery apps. Gambling can be a serious addiction, but people who searched for recovery apps ended up being shown gambling apps in the “You Might Also Like” subsection. That is dangerous because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up making gambling addicts go down the rabbit hole again, and while Apple took those ads down it still indicates that the tech juggernaut is being a bit too lax about the ads that it shows to its App Store users.

Back when the App Store was first launched, Apple CEO Steve Jobs prided it on being entirely devoid of ads. That has clearly changed with all things having been considered and taken into account, and it is a huge marker that Apple is putting the user experience in jeopardy in its search for higher rates of revenue growth.

Apple’s products have generally been seeing a bit of a decline in what makes them unique. The previous three iterations of the iPhone are quite similar to each other, although many wouldn’t have guessed that given the dramatic difference in their price points.

Apple has been hiking its prices for quite some time now, and it is making its product line less unique and innovative. A company must always balance its need to grow with providing an excellent experience to all users, and it is high time that Apple came to terms with that. If Apple fails to make the necessary changes, other companies might surpass it both in terms of hardware as well as software.

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by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World

Facebook May Soon Become News-Free In The US As Meta Threatens To Pull The Plug

Meta is very keen on making its leading app Facebook news free as the company announced today that it could soon be pulling the plug.

The tech giant sent out threats related to the app in the US as it is very unhappy with the new law that gives local media outlets more power to take a share of news content shared on the app’s feeds.

The news comes after such a law had been passed in nations like Australia which led to a temporary suspension of the sort in the previous year.

Moreover, Meta could be seen mentioning and boasting how it is doing a great job at enhancing traffic toward various struggling media outlets.

It hopes publishers start to understand how content is placed on this app since it provides them with all sorts of benefits.

The current law in discussion at this moment is called the JCPA was first outlined by Minnesota’s Congress and had even received plenty of bipartisan support along the way.

This ends up providing publishers and some broadcasters with some intense powers to create deals with various social media apps to attain bigger shares of advertising revenue.

Remember, media firms are not backing down with their own claims against Meta. They feel the latter manages to churn out huge sums of revenue through news content that’s shared on the app.

During stressful times like the Pandemic, so many local news firms really struggled as tech giants such as Meta benefited from huge gains in profits. But Meta argues how such a narrative could be wrong and hence mentioned that Meta diverts traffic toward the right sources.

Meanwhile, we’ve got Meta’s spokesperson mentioning how Congress manages to pass out a journalism bill as an integral component of the legislation linked to national security. And hence that would be forced when considering the removal of news content from the app as a whole.

Then we’ve got Meta sending out arguments related to how news sharing through its platform on Facebook only gives it a fraction of the revenue.

When something similar was passed in countries like Australia last year, it was shocking to see Meta respond by shutting down Facebook in the country to deal with the matter. But when there was immense criticism around the globe regarding such behavior, it was left with no choice but to get back on board.

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Google Owns 30% of All Online Third Party Trackers

By this point everyone is familiar with the reality that any website they end up visiting is likely going to be tracking them to one extent or another. In spite of the fact that this is the case, most users are not aware of just how many trackers the average website might have. New research from Nord VPN has revealed that the average website can have as many as 48 trackers that are used to harvest sensitive user data, and social media sites are even worse.

Social media websites were found to have an astonishing 160 trackers embedded into their code, whereas health websites came in at a distant second with 46. This seems to suggest that the average would be a lot lower if social media sites were taken out of the equation. The number of trackers on websites has skyrocketed as of late, and that does not bode well for the future of online privacy.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that 30% of all trackers were found to belong to Google. Another 11% were being used by Facebook, with Adobe responsible for an additional 7%. This reveals that the same old players are continuing to use trackers to keep track of the activities of users online.

Such widespread collection of data can be harmful because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up compiling into one place where malicious actors can get their hands on it. Users must be educated about the sheer amount of trackers that they will be confronted with so that they can take the appropriate privacy precautions.

Any site that you visit will be trying to collect some data from you. Using a VPN can help to mask your identity, which makes them useful online tools for users with all things having been considered and taken into account. If you have noticed unusually personalized ads online, chances are that you went to a website that has an inordinate amount of cookies or third party trackers.

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by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World