5/5 (2) The Threat of Deepfakes

12

October

2019

Last summer an app called DeepNude caused a lot of controversy in the (social) media. Deepnude was an AI based piece of software with the ability to create a very realistic nude pictures of any uploaded face in the app. Mass criticism followed, the app’s servers got overloaded by curious people and not much later, the app went offline permanently. Deepnude stated on twitter that the probability is misuse was too high and that the world “was not ready yet”. The app never came back online ever since (Deepnude Twitter, 2019). It shows that deepfake technology is becoming available to the public sooner than we thought, including all potential risks.

A definition for DeepFake is “AI-based technology used to produce or alter video content so that it presents something that didn’t, in fact, occur” (Rouse, 2019). As deepfake is AI-based technology it is able to improve over time, as the amount of data input increases and the technology learns to how to create better output. In my opinion deepfake has an amazing potential in the entertainment industry, but there is a serious risk when the technology gets misused. The AI technology makes it harder and harder for humans to distinguish real videos from fake ones. Deepfake videos of world-leaders like Trump and Putin are already to be found on the internet. Also deepfake porn videos of celebrities are being discovered once in a while.

With the upcoming presidential elections of 2020 in the United States, politicians and and many others are seeking solutions to prevent a similar scenario like the 2017 elections. The 2017 presidential elections were characterized by the spread of fake news and the ongoing allegations resulting from it. These events very likely influenced the outcome of those elections (CNN, 2019). Recently the state of California passed a law which “criminalizes the creation and distribution of video content (as well as still images and audio) that are faked to pass off as genuine footage of politicians. (Winder, 2019).” In 2020 we’ll find out whether deepfakes have been restricted succesfully.

I hope developers and users of deepfake technology will become aware of the huge threats of deepfake, and will use it in a responsible way. It is also important for society to stay critical at their news sources and that they prevent supporting these types of technology misuse. According to Wired (Knight, 2019), Google has released thousands of deepfake videos to be used as AI input to detect other deepfake videos. Another company called Deeptrace is using deep learning and AI in order to detect and monitor deepfake videos (Deeptrace, sd).

See you in 2020…

References

CNN. (2019). 2016 Presidential Election Investigation Fast Facts. Retrieved from CNN: https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/12/us/2016-presidential-election-investigation-fast-facts/index.html

Deepnude Twitter. (2019). deepnudeapp Twitter. Retrieved from Twitter: https://twitter.com/deepnudeapp

Deeptrace. (n.d.). About Deeptrace. Retrieved from Deeptrace: https://deeptracelabs.com/about/

Knight, W. (2019). Even the AI Behind Deepfakes Can’t Save Us From Being Duped. Retrieved from Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/ai-deepfakes-cant-save-us-duped/

Rouse, M. (2019). What is deepfake (deep fake AI). Retrieved from TechTarget: https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/deepfake

Winder, D. (2019). Forget Fake News, Deepfake Videos Are Really All About Non-Consensual Porn. Retrieved from Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2019/10/08/forget-2020-election-fake-news-deepfake-videos-are-all-about-the-porn/#26a929963f99

4.5/5 (8) 50k views and counting, how to get MASSIVE views!!!

9

October

2017

Hello fellow BIM students,

Some of you might have noticed that certain posts are getting massive amounts of views.

all time high

The first thing that pops into your mind might be that these guys are actively sharing their content on social media. This is unlikely though because getting this many unique views on one post in one day (see images below) is really really hard to accomplish through that method.

13k views one day

The next possibility you might think about is that they are hiring a group of people through some view boosting website like the one below.

viewbotwebsite

However, we are all students, meaning that we have low budgets and would rather spend our money on partying, Netflix/Spotify subscriptions and other more rewarding activities. So I don’t consider this option viable in our situation.

So how do the top posts get their crazy amount of views? Did they press F5 non-stop for a couple of weeks in order to reach the top?

f5 broken

There must be some sort of secret method to their success. In this post, I would like to share my easy method with you guys to help boost YOUR view count up to 5k, 10k or even 50k! Let’s go!

Step 1: Decide the post that you want to boost!

This is obviously a very basic step, in order to get views on a post, you need to have posted at least some content. In this example, I use a very basic article I wrote about IBM’s supercomputer Watson (check it out: http://bit.ly/2y71SxK).

IBM watson article 2

Step 2: Download the Opera browser and open the blog post in multiple tabs!

Viewbotting on 5 tabs

Step 3: This is where the magic comes in, download the Super Auto Refresh extension for Opera!

Super Auto Refresh extension Opera

Step 4: Start the Extension and make it run on all tabs at a speed of 30 seconds!

Super refresher extension Opera browser

Why do I give you guys the advice to run it on 5/6 tabs max at a speed of 30 seconds? Because I encountered many many errors on the first days using this method running it at faster speeds. These error messages, see below, cause not only me but every other user trying to access the website to experience problems.

Internal Server Error

Service Unavailable

So if you don’t want a group of angry students chasing you because they couldn’t upload their blog posts please take this advice.

IS blog troubles

Step 5: Get some spare laptops, plug them into their chargers and don’t touch them for a couple of days/weeks!

This will help you feel like a real hacker and boosts the feeling that you can join Anonymous because you know your computer stuff.

3 laptops setup

Step 6: Watch your article reach some magic milestones! You are finally reaching the top of the list!
1000 views mark

2000 views mark

9999 views

20000 views

30k views

WAIT FOR IT…. 50k VIEWS WOAH!

50k views

Step 7: Sit back and relax, you did some really awesome hacking and can now enjoy your success for the rest of your life! You will always be remembered as that BIM student that knew how to reach the top!

all time high

As much as I enjoyed abusing the view count system behind https://digitalstrategy.rsm.nl// I would like to give some quick advice to the website admin. As soon as I realized that F5 views were counted as unique views although they came from the same IP-Address I started to look for ways to maximize my view count. I think that this in no way reflects the quality of my blog post and can actually destroy the intention of this web page. So to prevent things like this happening in the future please try to cap the number of views per IP-address or find some other way to achieve this.

Thanks for reading guys and enjoy your road to success!

Cutting the TV cord: Streaming live sports

20

September

2017

Live sports: the last bastion of traditional pay-television

No ratings yet.

Tens of millions watched the recent Mayweather vs. McGregor fight on pirate streams. According to VFT Solutions, which monitors live streams in social media, over 7000 live streams were being watched in social media platforms by roughly 100 million viewers. (Granados, 2017)

Tens of millions watched the recent Mayweather vs. McGregor fight on pirate streams

How many of you do still pay for cable TV to watch live sports? In the first quarter of this year a record number of people cancelled their pay TV subscriptions and the number continues to slip at the fastest pace ever (Gallagher & Elder, 2017). The number of losses would have been greater, if it wasn’t for sports programming. Over the last few years, people have been talking about the inevitable disruption of the television industry and the threat of new streaming models, like YouTube, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Video. Telecom companies have seen their revenues switch from pay TV to their broadband Internet services. In the past, a large share of revenue was generated by traditional TV subscription, whereas now steaming video services have become more profitable. This shift in consumer preferences summarises the TV industry disruption.

According to a research by CouponCabin.com 43 percent of cable TV subscribers say that the only reason they still pay for TV subscriptions is for watching live sports (Nooney, sd). Live sports is a major factor keeping people tethered to their cable TV plans and is often referred to as “the last bastion of traditional pay-television.” (Ryan, 2017)

Cutting the TV cord

To give a few examples of live sports migrating to digital platforms, Amazon has been negotiating with some of the U.S.’s biggest sports leagues to acquire the rights to stream sport games. It reportedly paid $50 million to the NFL to stream 10 Thursday night NFL games (DiPietro, 2017). Soccer club AC Milan signed a partnership with live streaming app Sportle, a sports start-up that is changing the way people watch sports. Tech giants are pouring money into acquiring content rights. YouTube secured a deal to broadcast the UEFA Champions League in the UK. This year, Facebook signed multiple deals to broadcast Major League Soccer matches, MLB games and World Surf League events. Meanwhile, Twitter is streaming the WNBA games and exclusive MLB program (Tran, 2017). You might be asking yourself what Netflix is doing. According to the critics, Netflix will not be joining anytime soon. Netflix stays close to its long-term mission saying that they are not a generic “video” company that streams all types of video, such as sports. They want to stay a movie and TV series entertainment network (DiPietro, 2017).

Social media platforms consider live sports as a key catalyst to drive user engagement, growth and eventually revenues. One of the biggest goals for 2017 is to create a social experience around live sports. In February Facebook announced a new app for set-top boxes, including Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and the Samsung Smart TV. This app enables you to watch Facebook videos on a big screen, which is immensely important for watching live sports. (Forbes, 2017) Summarising, live streaming is one of the biggest social media trends in general, but it reaches it peaks around major sports events.

Resources

DiPietro, F., 2017. Amazon and Twitter Are Streaming Sports. Will Netflix Follow?. [Online]
Available at: https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/04/22/amazon-and-twitter-are-streaming-sports-will-netfl.aspx

Forbes, 2017. Why Facebook Is Focusing On Live Sports. [Online]
Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/02/23/why-facebook-is-focusing-on-live-sports/#546a27c82dc6

Gallagher, K. & Elder, R., 2017. Pay-TV subscribers continue to slip. [Online]
Available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/pay-tv-subscribers-continue-to-slip-2017-5?international=true&r=US&IR=T

Granados, N., 2017. Tens Of Millions Watched Mayweather Beat McGregor On Pirate Streams. [Online]
Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nelsongranados/2017/08/28/tens-of-millions-watched-mayweather-beat-mcgregor-on-illegal-streams/#7b4bca5179a3

Nooney, C., sd The Future of Sports Streaming In a Cord-Cutting Age. [Online]
Available at: https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/06/future-sports-streaming-cord-cutting-age/

Ryan, K. J., 2017. 5 Industries Ripe for Disruption in 2017. [Online]
Available at: https://www.inc.com/kevin-j-ryan/industries-ripe-for-disruption-in-2017.html

Tran, K., 2017. Facebook is becoming a go-to platform for live streaming sports. [Online]
Available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-becoming-go-to-platform-live-streaming-sports-2017-6?international=true&r=US&IR=T

Is the internet of things destroying the internet?

23

October

2016

No ratings yet.

With the rise of the internet of things, the internet and its advantages as well as dangers have become much more integrated with our devices. This also creates an opportunity for hackers to launch cyberattacks targeted to those connected devices. Due to the inherent properties of software, the internet of things can never be 100% secure.

Lately a botnet has been created out of a large array of cameras and other devices that fit into the internet of things. This so-called Mirai botnet consist of more than half a million nodes. The targets of this botnet and the consequences are not small with recently reported DDoS attacks to Dyn’s Domain Name System management services (DNS) infrastructure, resulting in outages of websites such as Twitter, Spotify and Reddit. It is estimated that just around 10% of the nodes of the botnet were used for this attack.

Examples of Internet of Things devices that are used in this Mirai botnet are for example security cameras. Ironically, many of those cameras cannot be easily updated to increase their data security. The amount of devices that can be used for such a bonnet is ever increasing. As it is impossible to control for the security of all software that is put on internet of things devices, the problem is only likely to become worse.

After a hacker put the source code to this botnet online on a hacking forum, more DDoS attacks were predicted by CERT, the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team. Given that the source code was published before the outages of e.g. Spotify and Twitter, this is also what happened.

What do you think about the future of this development? If software (or accompanying hardware) can never be 100% secure and the amount of connect devices increases how secure is the future even? Apart from DDoS attacks, how about all the internet connected sensors of these connected devices and its effect of the inherent properties of software on security and privacy? Let me know what you think!

https://motherboard.vice.com/tag/The+Internet+of+Hackable+Things

https://motherboard.vice.com/read/criminal-hackers-have-launched-a-turf-war-over-the-internet-of-shit

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/internet-of-things-malware-mirai-ddos

https://motherboard.vice.com/read/twitter-reddit-spotify-were-collateral-damage-in-major-internet-attack

DeepDrumpf for the win!

22

October

2016

No ratings yet.

The fact that posts coming from Twitter bots are becoming more realistic is exemplified by Deep Drumpf. The Deep Drumpf account on Twitter is built on a deep-learning algorithm known as a recurrent neural network, that is trained on speech transcripts, tweets and debate quotes. The Twitter bot has over 20,000 followers as well as 12 million views. The bot is named after a remark from John Oliver about the laste name of Trump’s ancestors.

The bot was created by Bradley Hayes, a robotics researcher at MIT. Trump was specifically chosen to study as a response to a training model that can simulate Shakespeare, as Hayes argued that it would be a fun process to model while learning modeling techniques. How it works is that the bot creates tweets starting with a random letter and consequently adds the letters that are most likely to follow, until it hits Twitter’s word limit. While the tweets that the bot produces do not always make sense, most of the produced sentences are coherent and recognizable as Trump’s. The bot has even sent replies to messages posted through Trump’s real account, while taking the context of those messages in account.

Hayes has recently added another purpose to the bot. Deep Drumpf campaign website www.deepdrumpf2016.com is now used to raise money for GirlsWhoCode, an organization with the aim of bridging the gender gap in fields such as technology and mathematics.

In the future Hayes wants to develop Twitter accounts for other presidential candidates and make them talk to each other to simulate debates. If you want to judge yourself how good the bot’s algorithm works, go to https://twitter.com/DeepDrumpf. Also feel free to let me know what you think about this development in the field of Twitter bots and its future.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602682/why-im-backing-deep-drumpf-and-you-should-too/

http://www.deepdrumpf2016.com/about.html

http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/char-rnn/shakespear.txt

[GONE WRONG] 13 SECRET HEADLINES FACEBOOK WANTS TO STOP. NUMBER 5 WILL BLOW YOUR MIND! 5/5 (1)

1

October

2016

The art of clickbait.

You clicked on the link, didn’t you? How do you attract clicks on your post in a world that is moving so fast that you don’t have time to read everything? Create a title for you article that is too good not to click. Enter clickbait, fishing for your clicks by creating purposely false titles. Clickbait can be described as “web content that is aimed at generating online advertising revenue, […] relying on sensationalist headlines or eye-catching thumbnail pictures to attract click-throughs and to encourage forwarding of the material over online social networks.”¹ Clickbait is probably one of the most hated categories of posts on social media.

BuzzFeed and Upworthy are known to use clickbait titles to drive in views and ad revenue. (Screenshot of BuzzFeed taken on October 1st, 2016)

Facebook recently introduced a new algorithm that aims to stop these kind of ‘headlines’ to appear in your newsfeed. They already tried to limit the amount of clickbait appearing in your newsfeed in 2014², but apparently those clickbait sites still found a way around it. In 2014 Facebook announced that they would start looking at the amount of time spend reading the article, and the amount of likes given, to determine whether the article is clickbait or not. The new algorithm will will weed out misleading and exaggerated headlines the same way that email spam filters weed out fantastic offers to help Nigerian princes recover their lost fortunes. The new algorithm will de-prioritize posts with headlines that “(1) withholds information required to understand what the content of the article is; and (2) exaggerates the article to create misleading expectations for the reader.”³. Facebook employees analysed tens of thousands of headlines, and flagged those that intentionally withhold important information and those that use exaggeration to mislead the reader as “clickbait”. From there, they built a system that looks at the set of clickbait headlines to determine what phrases are commonly used in clickbait headlines that are not used in other headlines. This is how many self learning systems work. You show them a set off correct items and a set of incorrect items and the software itself can figure out if a new item is correct (no clickbait) or incorrect (clickbait).

Facebook wants to get rid of the clickbait articles in order to show people the stories most relevant to them. When your whole timeline is full of clickbait this ruins your user experience and you will probably not return to Facebook very often anymore which is bad for Facebook.

So hopefully no more:

in the future.

¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickbait

²https://www.cnet.com/au/news/facebook-nixes-click-bait-headlines-in-users-news-feeds/

³http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/08/news-feed-fyi-further-reducing-clickbait-in-feed/

Social Media and Gaming

4

November

2015

No ratings yet.

“Gamers are loners.”, “Gaming is not social.”, “Everything was better in the past.”
In the old days, when kids went to the arcade, they went with friends. These days, kids lock themselves in their rooms alone with their gaming device. That isn’t social, or is it?

http://www.arcaderestoration.com/media/Graphics/arcade200707/arcade6big.jpg

Sony and Microsoft don’t agree with these statements. Their latest products, respectively the Playstation 4 and Xbox One, have social media integrated. They blend the online and offline world. For example, when a friend finds a legendary item while playing ‘single player’, the position of this item appears on your single player map too.
While playing a videogame you can also stream your gameplay live. This way your friends can watch you play and via their headsets they can interact with you. There’s even the possibility to aid your friend while using your tablet or phone. (Hunt 2013)

http://images.pocketgamer.co.uk/FCKEditorFiles//BeFUknBCMAAcJjq.jpg

You could say console gamers are finally catching up with PC gamers on the social aspect. Failbetter Games, for example, is pulling people in socially long before Sony and Microsoft did. Failbetter creates unique interactive stories, like Fallen London, “which could be best described as a sort of choose your own adventure story in which you play alongside Facebook and Twitter friends, asking them for help”. (Harper 2013)

http://sproutsocial.com/insights/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Kickstarter-Games.jpg

Moreover, the crowd-funding website Kickstarter lets both big and small game developers fund their game ideas. This really changes the gaming industry, because fans spread the word themselves via Twitter instead of the developer marketing their games via traditional media. (Harper 2013)

There are countless communities where people spread their love for gaming. People interacting, collaborating and sharing. Building new relationships, maintaining them, even ending some.
It’s like people are all around you, but are they really? Is it the same as having a real person standing next to you, breathing? What is the difference? Do you think people are less social because of these changes in gaming that are supposed to make it more social?

References:
– Hunt, T. (2013) ‘5 Ways Video Game Companies are Leveraging Social Media’. Visited on 4 November 2015 via https://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/media-journalism/5-ways-video-game-companies-are-leveraging-social-media/.
– Harper, E. (2013) ‘Insiders Explain How Social Media and Video Games Are Merging’. Visited on 4 November 2015 via http://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-video-games/.

“Relaxing” post!

1

November

2013

No ratings yet.

In the end of our course I am not going to make your brain boil, some fun! I would like to use advice of majority professionals in SMM: to make a message or post interesting, it should be relatively short and include some graphics. Here we go!

Some facts about Social Media:

Only on Twitter it is possible to build map of users connections. Why? TO understand who to get to a person, using the shortest way
Only on Facebook it is possible to set an online shop with associated payment system and feature of direct video conversation with customers
Only on Google+ you may create events, where may be up to 10 participants and unlimited audience
Only on Twitter it is possible to get feedback from a lecturer online via translation of tweets with an event hashtag on a big TV or screen
Only on Facebook it is possible to have up to 6 people video chat
Only on Vkontakte you may find the largest (free) collection of music and videos. Search is possible through entering not just titles, singer names or whatever… but also preference search – “Show similar” and recommendations search
Only on YouTube you may create personal TV-channel, which broadcasts your performance online and then save it on a server
Only 5% of companies are satisfied with the quality of employees’ work on social media

Thank all of you, guys! I had a lot of fun and got some interesting aspects of business presence in Social Media and Networks. As I’m going to set my business this or next year, I’ll use a lot of it!

Ting Li! Thank you, of course! It is a good course and not easy to keep up with fast changing environment, however, you do. Thank you, again!

A Social Media powered car?

27

October

2013

No ratings yet.

It’s official. I’ve seen it all! I can die happy now.

Apparently, teenagers these days don’t have enough entertaining tasks to perform, so they decided to build a vehicle that runs on social media shares, likes and mentions. Human creativity never ceases to amaze me. I still can’t decide if all the whacky inventors out there are pure geniuses or incredibly bored individuals. Either way, paint me fascinated.

Now, I’m no engineer. I’ve never been behind the steering wheel and I don’t have the slightest clue how a car works, but from my limited understanding, these teens made it so a battery is hooked to the car, which is also hooked to a tablet. Every time someone “likes” their Minddrive organization’s Facebook page, shares something on Twitter or Facebook or simply mentions it, it sends a signal with slowly charges the car’s battery allowing it to run for a little while. The plan being to make it from point A to point B by being powered by shares and likes, without crashing into a tree.

I knew social media had a huge impact on our daily lives, but this is beyond insane. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s awesome, but I still don’t have my damn flying cars and my jetpack. I shall demand them in every single blog I make, regardless of how many Facebook powered vehicles these bright students create.

Granted, their project is nothing revolutionary. It’s simply an electric car that gets charged the same old way, just slower and on cue. However, the creativity behind the idea is almost as brilliant as social media itself. If anything, it shows us that in today’s modern age, young people’s minds are working like clockwork, twenty-four-seven, always coming up with new ideas and helping us all evolve, at least mentally. And all of this is triggered by social media. The only question is: what’s next?

It better be flying cars and jet packs.

Sources:

http://mashable.com/2013/06/06/social-media-powered/

http://minddrive.org/

Breaking News: Some famous person unfollowed another famous person. Call the militia!

24

October

2013

No ratings yet.

You know, when I imagined my future when I was 12, I was picturing flying cars and jet packs, not “Tweet” this and “Like” that. I certainly didn’t think I’d be studying it intensely. I thought my life would be more like that of The Jetsons.

But … man oh man has the world has changed in just five or six short years. The first iPhone is an ancient fossil at this point (2007), writers’ strike against Hollywood studios has left all of us Europeans not giving a hot damn about it (2009), but apparently it was a big whoop in the US of A, and Justin Bieber has finally hit puberty at the age of 19. Too many changes, way too fast!

Aside from your general pop culture shifts in trends, the world has experienced some other adjustments. A few years back I distinctly remember how people with a Facebook account were sometimes mocked for having it. Of course, this is due to MySpace’s popularity and the fact that you could add an infinite amount of junk to your profile in order to make yourself stand out from the rest of your pre-pubescent peers. The argument was that Facebook looked boring, you couldn’t customize every single detail of your profile page, you couldn’t add all the horrible songs you like and most of all you pretty much had to use your real name, like a grown up, instead of something as classy as “SexyBuns26”.

Well, fast forward to 2013, MySpace is as dead as a dodo and they’re desperately trying to cling to whatever relevancy they have left in order to avoid pulling the plug on the whole damn thing. Long story short – Facebook to MySpace is like Ali to Foreman, Luke Skywalker to Darth Vader, Kryptonite to Superman, Math to me.

In fact, things have changed so much that now it makes people scratch their heads when someone says they don’t have a Facebook account. The world has done a 180, then went home, updated its status and all the other planets “Liked” it. Insane! Usually individuals without a Facebook page have their own reasons which make perfect sense, but it doesn’t stop the rest of the world from thinking that this person has killed somebody recently and that’s why they went into hiding. Before you do anything, don’t report them to the police! They’re sane and they don’t like ads shoved in their faces and private information shared all over the web.

Either way, Facebook has become a ginormous part of our lives that we can’t shake off. However, as mighty as Mark Zuckerberg’s spawn has become, Twitter seems to have an effect on pop culture that Facebook doesn’t.

Remember the last few paragraphs? You know, how things have changed, how some social media were considered passe and odd but now they’re overpopulated with users? Good job! You didn’t fall asleep!

… yet.

Well, friend, the same applies to Twitter. Twitter blew up in the last few years. People love, love, love sharing their boring lifestyles in 140 characters, and it’s the easiest way for a C-list celebrity to promote their Z-list movie without having to pay a dime. Brilliant!

However, in order to truly see Twitter’s power nowadays, you have to look at the backlash Twitter related cases have on the real world. Nobody bats an eye when your roommate tweets that he just tried to light his own farts because he’s bored, but when Miley Cyrus stops following her ex-fiance – everybody goes ape. Bloggers, YouTubers, TMZ (as per usual) act like this came out of nowhere. Nevermind that officially the two have not been seen in the same zip code in half a year, never wearing their engagement rings, it is not official to the world unless they unfollow themselves on Twitter. And when they do? Duck and cover.

The same applies to Jonas Brothers breaking up (I’ll surely miss that band, said no sane person ever), or any other heart wrenching celebrity break up.

So things have changed. An awful lot. At least for modern pop culture.

Friends, the day a single click on some social media website’s “Unfollow” button makes hundreds of Internet enthusiasts to blog, vlog, schlog and schmog about it, is the day we truly have to admit that social media is a monster that the world has never had to deal with before, and we’re only getting started.

Social media has grown so much that unfollowing, unsubcribing or unfriending is the equivalent of walking up to someone and slapping them in front of their mom, and is – sometimes – national news. I’m not sure if that scares or entertains me. Maybe both.

One thing’s for sure though – I’m still waiting for my flying car and my jet pack!

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The art of clickbait.

BuzzFeed and Upworthy are known to use clickbait titles to drive in views and ad revenue. (Screenshot of BuzzFeed taken on October 1st, 2016)

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