Jared Wadley:

Welcome to the Michigan Minds Podcast, where we explore the wealth of knowledge from faculty experts at the University of Michigan. I’m Jared Wadley, a lead public relations representative for Michigan News. Today I’m speaking to Oliver Haimson about the changing social media landscape. He’s an assistant professor in the School of Information and the Digital Studies Institute. Oliver’s research focuses on social media content moderation and marginalized populations, as well as the changing identities on social media during life transitions. Thanks for being here, Oliver.

Oliver Haimson:

Yeah. Thanks so much for having me, Jared.

Jared Wadley:

Before we get into the topic, tell the audience a little bit about how you became interested in studying social media.

Oliver Haimson:

Yeah. I mean, I think I started where most people start, which is I was really interested in social media myself. It was I guess the early 2010s when I started doing research in this area, and as a social media user, I was just fascinated by the ways that people were using it to mostly talk about more sensitive content, how people were thinking about disclosure and how they were presenting their identities on social media. So it really came from this personal perspective. But I think in a lot of cases, social media researchers as they start to learn more about the space end up using social media less themselves. So I would say that nowadays I’m not the biggest social media user, but I am still really fascinated by it from a research perspective.

Jared Wadley:

Now, is that social media as a whole or do you tend to focus on maybe a couple of the platforms?

Oliver Haimson:

I think what I do is I tend to follow the platforms that people are using most frequently, and especially my research focuses a lot on marginalized populations. So about 10 years ago I was more focused on Facebook because people were using that a lot more, and nowadays people are more excited about TikTok and Instagram, and I also study some of the smaller platforms that people are using, even platforms they’re creating themselves.

Jared Wadley:

And how has the research changed, back when you studied Facebook, how has that changed from then to now? Like what sort of trends have you been seeing since that time?

Oliver Haimson:

Yeah. I think the biggest change really is that back then everyone was contributing quite a bit. People were posting on Facebook about their day-to-day lives for a small audience of people that they mostly knew. And nowadays, we have this difference not only in the fact that it’s short form videos as opposed to texts or even images, but most people on TikTok are not really posting content themselves. Most people are there observing content from people who are content creators, and I put that in quotes, but sometimes we think about that as influencers. I think the more common term now is content creators, but most people are not that. Most people are just viewing that content rather than contributing as much themselves, so that’s really changed the landscape quite a bit.

Jared Wadley:

Also in terms of the landscape. Do you have any statistics on the number of social media users these days? I know just anecdotally some of my friends are on social media, but I also have a number who aren’t and they try to shy away from it. Are there any numbers that you might have available on the number of social media users?

Oliver Haimson:

I think it hovers around the high 70%, so almost 80% of, and this is Americans, are using social media. That number is coming from Pew Research. They do studies every few years where they track how many Americans are using social media, which sites are they using, how are they using it, and differences between age groups and demographics.

Jared Wadley:

And then how do the numbers for American users compare to internationally? Is it really big internationally?

Oliver Haimson:

Yeah. I don’t have the detailed statistics on that. I know that in a lot of areas of the world, people are using particular platforms. So for instance, Facebook is still really huge worldwide, even though it’s kind of tapered off in the U.S. Well, I shouldn’t say tapered off, it’s just I guess not increasing anymore in the U.S. But worldwide, some countries are using Facebook as the internet, basically. Some people, if you ask them about the internet, all that they’ve seen of it has been Facebook, so it’s really huge worldwide.

Jared Wadley:

What are your thoughts on that, where people just simply getting the news from social media rather than your traditional news or other outlets?

Oliver Haimson:

Yeah. I think there are definitely some good parts of it because people are finding news in a way that is more entertaining and exciting to them, where they might want to just see short-form videos rather than reading a newspaper article, for instance, and that’s getting more people access to news. But I think that it can be dangerous because a platform like Meta, which is the parent company for Facebook and Instagram, has so much control over the news landscape, and Meta decided for a number of years that they wanted to deprioritize news and anything that was political. They wanted to focus more on personal stories and seeing things that were going on in your friends’ lives or just humorous content, and that can be dangerous because then people are thinking maybe, “Oh, there’s nothing going on politically,” when actually there is. It’s just that they were demoting that content.

But now they have made a number of policy changes where they decided that they would allow news content and political content again, which I think that’s the right choice ultimately, because people do care about that content. The problem is that in Meta’s recent policy changes, they’ve also decided to get rid of official fact checkers, and they are replacing that with system, I think they’re calling it community notes, where it will basically be a crowdsourced method of fact checking where if enough people look at it, they are assuming that they can get some kind of consensus on what is true or false. But I’m sure you can see how that’s very different from an official fact checker who does that for a living and really is trying to take as much of a non-biased perspective as possible. So I do worry a bit when Meta is so dominant worldwide and has a somewhat not super rigorous ways of fact checking that this could lead to a lot of misinformation and harmful content getting out there.

Jared Wadley:

And how have users in society, how have they graded this new method, in particularly as it relates to fact checking?

Oliver Haimson:

I think that remains to be seen, actually. We do have one example, which is X, which has been using a community notes type of feature for a long time now, and it’s worked out all right. But I think that what we do now is that X has pivoted much more to a certain political ideology, and so really a lot of people who are not a conservative or right wing are moving off of X, so we’re kind of only able to see that in that particular user group in that particular platform, and we know that there has been a lot more misinformation and dangerous content on there. So I think my prediction is that we will see more of that on Meta platforms. Another tricky thing that’s not really being covered a lot is that Meta has already gotten rid of the fact checkers, but they have not yet implemented the community notes feature, so there’s a gap of a few months here where we don’t really have either, and I think that that is quite dangerous.

Jared Wadley:

How likely do you think they will implement something, if they haven’t done anything at least to this particular point?

Oliver Haimson:

Yeah. I mean, I think they definitely will. I think it just takes time to build something like that because if you think about the user interface elements that have to be there and they have to have algorithms to decide how they’re going to weight, all of the different opinions coming in and how they’re going to decide what they’re going to say about a news item if a bunch of people are saying, “Yes, that’s true,” and a bunch of other people are saying, “No, that’s not true.”

Jared Wadley:

And for those who have left X, where have they gone? Where are they getting their news or where are they interacting with family members and friends?

Oliver Haimson:

Yeah. That’s a good question and something I’ve been following closely because for a while there were a number of different sites that people were going to, and the top three I would say were Blue Sky, Threads, which is a Meta company, and then Mastodon, which is a very decentralized form of social media, and for a while we didn’t know which of those was going to be become dominant. And I think more recently we’ve really seen Blue Sky emerging as the Twitter or X alternative primarily for people who seem to be more on the liberal or left wing side of things. But Blue Sky has seen millions and millions of users coming over, and that’s actually a platform that’s created by the former CEO of Twitter, so it has a lot of the same elements. It looks almost identical in its interface, but content moderation, policies and procedures are very, very different. So it feels like a place where people can feel more certain that there’s not going to be a lot of hate speech, for instance, things like that.

Jared Wadley:

And so how have users received going to Blue Sky? Has it been a positive experience or has it been kind of like a learning curve since they’ve already been used to X and Twitter?

Oliver Haimson:

Yeah. I think it’s mostly been positive from the usability perspective because people already know what the features are, what to click on, where everything is because they’re so used to it from using X or Twitter, and I think the hardest part with creating a new social media site is the network effects because the reason so many people were hesitant to leave X, a lot of policies and content they didn’t like there is because their whole network was there, and that’s really hard to leave. And so it’s only when millions of people are coming over to Blue Sky. And for instance, myself, I’ve been able to find a lot of my network there on Blue Sky now when at first I was kind of an early adopter there, and at first not a ton of them were there. But now it does seem like more people are there and there’s been some challenges, especially when you have millions of people moving over and they had a very small content moderation team at first, and when millions of people moved there, that also attracted a lot of bots and trolls and things like that that they had to figure out how to deal with pretty quickly. And so there’s been a little bit of a delay in them figuring out how to do all of that for that massive increase in their user base.

Jared Wadley:

One of the things I also wanted to talk to you about involves TikTok, which has been in the news for many months. One of the questions that I know that users have had is why has the federal government been involved? Users will note if they want to give their information freely to a social media platform, what’s the harm? How would you respond to that?

Oliver Haimson:

Yeah. I think the reason the government is getting involved is because of the national security aspect of it, and that’s really important, clearly. I think that people are not easily making that connection because the information that they are sharing on TikTok is not anything they would consider particularly important for national security, so it’s typically going to be more personal information or jokes or lightweight content. They don’t think that the Chinese government has any interest in that. And it’s really only when you think about millions of users and all of their data and some of that content is not going to be so innocuous, it’s only then that you realize the national security implications. So most people aren’t thinking about it like that at all. And what ends up happening is we have this tension between two really important American values, which is free speech and national security, and in making the law that bans TikTok and in the Supreme Court upholding that law, they were really deciding that national security is more important. But it seems like the average American may not make the same choice there.

Jared Wadley:

Do you see this happening with other social media platforms besides TikTok where the government gets involved for fear of security issues?

Oliver Haimson:

Yeah. I think we could see it happen for sure. I think that there was another Chinese platform called Red Note that a lot of people were moving over to when they heard about the TikTok ban, and they would face the exact same issues there because the U.S. government is going to want to ban a platform, any Chinese platform, because in China they’re very different than in the U.S. in terms of the way that the government interacts with large tech companies. So the government, the Chinese Communist Party actually does have influence over a lot of things that happen at a company like ByteDance or Red Note. So I think that there are some examples of existing platforms, but I think what concerns me more is future platforms. So thinking about we decide to ban TikTok for pretty legitimate national security concerns, but what happens if there’s a platform from another country in the future that the U.S. government just decides it doesn’t like what type of content is posted there? They could, based on the existing law, and especially now that the Supreme Court has set that precedent by upholding that law, this could apply to any future sites that the U.S. government decides to ban, and that’s what I think is particularly dangerous about this.

Jared Wadley:

So again, related to TikTok, do you think the company will actually be sold or what do you think will be the outcome? And again, this is kind of like a crystal ball question, but what do you think will happen let’s say three, six months from now?

Oliver Haimson:

Yeah. So what the Trump administration has said, they gave a 90 day delay on the ban. So that was in January, so 90 days would be in April that this will come up again for us. And what the Trump administration also said is that they don’t need to sell it outright. They only need to sell 50% of it, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me because even if 50% of the company, even if 1% of the company is owned by a Chinese company, you still have the same national security concerns because they can do with the data what they want, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I think there are plenty of potential buyers, any of the big tech companies in the U.S. You could think about Meta, you could think about Microsoft. Even possibly, people have talked about Elon Musk potentially purchasing that 50% of TikTok.

But I don’t really think that TikTok has that much incentive to sell. I think that they are kind of stringing along the Trump administration and saying, “Sure, yeah, we might sell,” but they know that Trump is not necessarily going to actually ever ban them in the U.S. because it would be so unpopular among Americans, and the administration is not going to want to do that. So TikTok really doesn’t have the incentive to sell. I think they’re going to act like they’re looking for a buyer, but my sense is that there won’t actually be a sale.

Jared Wadley:

So if there’s not a sale, then what do you think the Trump administration will actually do? It seems as if they would try to take some type of action sooner rather than later. What do you think they will do in the end?

Oliver Haimson:

Yeah. I think it’s really hard to say, but I mean, I could see another delay happening. It’s hard to get rid of the law because it’s an actual law and it’s been upheld by the Supreme Court, so they can’t really get rid of the law. I could see them trying to blame it on the Biden administration, which technically did become a law during the Biden administration. So trying to, if there is a ban, trying to take the blame away from the current administration. That could happen. Yeah. I really don’t know, honestly. It will be really interesting to see what happens and if it is banned, I think it’ll be fascinating to see where people go from there.

Jared Wadley:

And what are some of the hopeful trends you see related to social media?

Oliver Haimson:

Yeah. So I think there’s been all of this news mostly around these very mainstream social media sites, and I think that that’s interesting, but I think what’s more hopeful is people creating their own platforms, their own online communities. So whether that’s creating online communities on existing sites like something like Discord or Mastodon for instance, or sometimes people are building their own social media platforms entirely, and a lot of times this is some of the marginalized communities that I study, like a lot of LGBTQ communities who don’t feel like the mainstream platforms have their best interests at heart, and especially with some of the recent policy changes. And so I think it’s really inspiring when people create their own communities, their own platforms.

We’ve been, on my research team we’ve been really interested in what we’re calling community built online communities, and I think that’s a really hopeful trend. It gives people a space that they feel is more safe, where they get to make decisions about things like content moderation, who’s allowed to say what on the platform. Because everyone has such different views about that. It’s really hard to say for millions of users, “This is what is allowed. This is what’s appropriate.” But for a smaller community, it’s a lot easier to make those decisions in a way that really meets that community’s needs. I do think there are some things that we’re missing, especially when you think about echo chambers, things like this where you’re not really getting as diverse of a perspective if you’re in this smaller online community with like-minded people. But I think when you think about the really great parts of social media, really what that is is things like social support, sharing information, finding information, communicating with people, having those social connections, and that’s really hard to do that on some of these larger platforms, so I think it’s exciting to think about how people are taking things into their own hands.

Jared Wadley:

And before ending this podcast, can you share with the listeners, I understand that you have a new book called Trans Technologies that was published in February. Tell the audience a little bit more about the book.

Oliver Haimson:

Yeah. So I’m really excited about this new book. This has been a study I’ve been working on for years now where I was interviewing creators of trans technologies, and by trans technologies, I mean technologies that are created specifically for transgender populations and communities, and a lot of these are smaller technologies that people are really just creating on their own based on needs and challenges that they are facing in the world, and they have the technical skills to create something that can help themselves and their community. And so I interviewed over a hundred creators of these types of technologies. And as a social media researcher. I was initially coming at it from that perspective, but then I started to realize that there are so many other kinds of technology as well that people are creating in this space. So there’s things like virtual reality and augmented reality and different types of supply. Of course, apps and websites. But also just all kinds of exciting things including games and art and things like that. So I really have been documenting that landscape, and this book is the culmination of all of all those years of research, and I’m really excited for people to finally be able to read this.

Jared Wadley:

Oh, okay. Thanks. I’m looking forward to reading it. Again, thank you for spending a little bit of time sharing your insights with our audience, and hopefully we’ll be able to do this again another time.

Oliver Haimson:

Yeah. Thank you so much, Jared.

Jared Wadley:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Michigan Minds produced by Michigan News, a division of the university’s Office of the Vice president for Communications.