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Social Media Etiquette Review

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Despite your best efforts, you may cause someone pain with that Tweet or Facebook post. Here’s a refresher on social media best practices, along with advice for some pandemic-only dilemmas.

In an ideal world, your followers would think every photo, video or thought you post on social media is like a little gift to them. In reality, it’s hard to predict how posts on Instagram, Facebook and other social media will land, especially during the pandemic. After so much loss and isolation over the past year, people are on edge. That vaccine selfie may feel joyous and hopeful to you, but it could be a digital slap in the face to someone who hasn’t received a vaccine shot or who has suffered a grave loss.

“Someone could be experiencing loss in such a way that there’s no way someone else won’t post something that compounds their grief,” said Catherine Newman, who has written the Modern Manners etiquette column for Real Simple magazine for 10 years. “That’s how grief is.”

Still, it’s hard not to overthink things — and to worry that despite your best efforts, you may cause someone pain. Some social media experts say you should review your sharing practices periodically, so here’s a refresher on social media etiquette, along with advice for some pandemic-only situations.

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First, identify your motivations. Are you sharing that picture of the exquisite cake you baked because you want praise, or do you want people to feel bad that what they made themselves wasn’t as good? If it is to receive affirmation, that’s OK. But if you find yourself trying to get all your needs met by social media likes, it might be time to think about what else is missing in your life.

Second, focus on your friends. If you tried to consider every possible person who might be hurt by a post — your seemingly unobjectionable photo of tulips could very well remind a follower of someone they have lost — you might never post anything on social media. But absolutely think about your inner circle carefully.

Ms. Newman, for one, hasn’t posted about her own post-vaccination visits with family because so many in her immediate friend group have lost a parent in the past year. If you’re in a similar situation and you still want to post your vaccine selfie or the first time you’ve hugged your father in a year, consider acknowledging your own good fortune.

“I still appreciate it when people say, ‘We’re so lucky and there’s been so much loss and I’m sorry if you’re experiencing loss,’” said Ms. Newman, whose best friend died of cancer five years ago.

Before you hit “share,” read your words in multiple tones of voice, as different people can interpret the text differently, suggested Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert and the founder of the Protocol School of Texas, a San Antonio company specializing in corporate etiquette training. If there’s any doubt, add a cue, such as an emoticon, about your tone.

If you want to post something negative, keep in mind that what you say or share often says more about you. Disagree (respectfully), but avoid sweeping generalizations about entire groups of people — or about one business based on your interaction with a single employee.

Additionally, remember that any message you share, even with close family members, will be amplified to your entire online community. (The tension may also be amplified around vaccines, health measures and the stress of a not-normal year.) If you are replying to your sister online about something, that doesn’t mean you can speak to her as harshly as you might privately. Ms. Gottsman advises taking a heated family debate offline.

“Don’t start a family feud on social media,” Ms. Gottsman said. “It can affect the next family holiday.”

If you are soliciting donations for a particular cause or charity, or asking for money to pay someone’s rent or medical bills with a GoFundMe campaign, recognize that the financial situations of many people have changed this past year and there may be many other appeals compared to times past. Skip shaming phrases, like “How can you not help this person?” Instead, Ms. Gottsman said, use ones like “If your heart moves you, I’m sharing this.”

Think less vigilance is needed, because your text group is small or your settings have been changed to private? Think again. When Heidi Cruz, the wife of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, shared her family’s plans to flee a devastating winter storm in Texas for a vacation in Mexico, she texted only a small group of neighbors and friends. Screenshots of the messages ended up with journalists. Elaine Swann, an etiquette expert and founder of the School of Protocol in Carlsbad, Calif., points out that it wasn’t just one person who shared the chat with The New York Times; there were others who confirmed it.

“Even if you think it’s just your inner circle, there’s always somebody there who isn’t 100 percent on your team,” she said. “That’s the person who takes the screenshot before you delete whatever it is.”

Posting about food and fitness may be even more tempting than usual, given that a lot of people have changed what they eat and how much they exercise during the pandemic. But confine your commentary to how these lifestyle changes make you feel, not how they make you look. Among other things, not all people have had the luxury of more time to exercise during the pandemic — or if they did, they might not have had the energy to do so.

Dr. Lindsay Kite is a founder of Beauty Redefined, a nonprofit that promotes body image resilience, and an author of “More Than a Body.” She noted that your “before” photo — talking about how fat you look — may be someone else’s “after.”

If you really want affirmation and accountability for your fitness goals, avoid the sports-bra selfie and posts about body measurements. Instead, Dr. Kite suggested posting a picture of yourself in a blood pressure cuff, or a less body-focused snapshot of you jogging to your favorite coffee shop.

“Loving your body and improving your health doesn’t always lead to a more ideal-looking body,” she said.

There may be situations in which a post doesn’t land as you had intended. Maybe you shared a photo of a masked-up pandemic wedding, but followers pointed out that attending still involved travel. Or you posted a video of your family’s Easter egg hunt, because all the adults participating had been lucky enough to be vaccinated.

Ask yourself how many people reacted negatively. If only one follower is unhappy, it may just be that one person is raw.

“We have a genre in my family we call ‘hurting your own feelings,’” Ms. Newman said. “Where you’re looking for something to hang some pain on and you find it.”

You don’t have to own the person’s grief, but you do have to take responsibility for yourself and apologize. You can keep it simple, Ms. Newman said: I see your pain. I’m so sorry.

If you post something that is hurtful to a wider audience — you inadvertently said something offensive or you didn’t consider all the issues — it should absolutely be deleted if it’s causing people pain.

If it’s not, consider keeping the post up, Ms. Newman said, because deleting it erases the post from public view but does not address the hurt it caused. On Facebook, she suggested an “edited to add” with your heartfelt apology. This should not include the words “but” or “if,” as in, “I apologize if you were offended.” These words don’t acknowledge the hurt person’s truth and their situation, or your role in hurting them.

“If you accidentally step on someone’s foot, you don’t say, ‘I’m sorry if I stepped on your foot,’” Ms. Swann said. “You did it. It’s not a question.”

Your apology should also include a thoughtful plan about how you’ll do things differently in the future, which can be calibrated based on how grievous the offense. For lesser instances, Ms. Gottsman said, a sentence like “I’ll think twice before I post,” may be enough.

These are words all of us could live by.

Source:- The New York Times

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Supreme Court likely to reject limits on White House social media contacts – The Washington Post

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The Supreme Court seemed prepared Monday to reject a Republican-led effort to sharply limit the federal government from pressuring social media companies to remove harmful posts and misinformation from their platforms.

A majority of justices from across the ideological spectrum expressed concern about hamstringing White House officials and other federal employees from communicating with tech giants about posts the government deems problematic that are related to public health, national security and elections, among other topics.

The case involves a lawsuit initiated by two Republican-led states — Missouri and Louisiana — and individual social media users. They accuse the Biden administration of violating the First Amendment by operating a sprawling federal “censorship enterprise” to influence platforms to modify or take down posts.

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Justices Elena Kagan and Brett M. Kavanaugh, who previously worked as lawyers in Democratic and Republican administrations, respectively, suggested that government exchanges with the platforms and media outlets were routine occurrences and did not amount to censorship or coercion in violation of the constitutional right to free speech.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. seemed to agree, noting that the federal government has numerous agencies that do not always speak with a single voice.

“It’s not monolithic,” he said in an exchange with the attorney representing Louisiana. “That has to dilute the concept of coercion significantly. Doesn’t it?”

The case gives the Supreme Court an opportunity to shape how government officials interact with social media companies and communicate with the public online at a time when such platforms play an increasingly important role in elections and public debate. The justices are reviewing a lower-court ruling that sharply limited such interactions, and they must clarify when government attempts to combat misinformation cross the line from permissible persuasion to unconstitutional coercion.

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The dispute is one of several before the justices this term testing Republican-backed claims that social media companies are working with Democratic allies to silence conservative voices online. The outcome could have sweeping implications for the U.S. government’s efforts to combat foreign disinformation during a critical election year when nearly half of the world’s population will go to the polls.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned during a meeting in Seoul on Monday of a “flood of falsehoods that suffocate serious civic debate.” Social media and artificial intelligence, he said, “created an accelerant for disinformation.”

The high court on Monday appeared ready to embrace a narrow ruling, with several justices suggesting that the states and individuals behind the lawsuit did not have sufficient legal grounds to sue the Biden administration. Some said the individuals could not show a direct link between the government’s pressure on the platforms and the tech companies’ removal of posts that the government deemed problematic.

Kagan pressed Louisiana’s lawyer for evidence that the government — not the social media companies — was responsible for taking down the posts at issue: “How do you decide that it’s government action as opposed to platform action?”

The First Amendment prevents the government from censoring speech and punishing people for expressing different views. But the Biden administration says officials are entitled to share information, participate in public debate and urge action, as long as their requests are not accompanied by threats.

Principal Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher, representing the Biden administration, said government officials have long-standing authority to use the bully pulpit to inform and persuade. The lower-court ruling, he said, would prevent thousands of government officials, including FBI agents and presidential aides, from addressing threats to national security and public health.

The attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana argued that the federal government went too far by coercing social media companies to suppress speech of individual users and by becoming deeply involved in the companies’ decisions to remove certain content. Tech companies, they said, cannot act on behalf of the government to remove speech the government doesn’t like.

Louisiana Solicitor General J. Benjamin Aguiñaga said the Biden administration had subjected the platforms to unrelenting pressure, using profanity and badgering — not the bully pulpit. “That’s just being a bully,” he told the court.

The record before the Supreme Court includes email messages between Biden administration officials and social media companies, including Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Twitter, showing tense conversations in 2021 as the White House and public health officials campaigned for Americans to get the coronavirus vaccine. Several justices pushed back Monday on the states’ characterizations of those messages and pointed out inaccuracies in their filings.

“I have such a problem with your brief, counselor,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said. “You omit information that changes the context of some of your claims. You attribute things to people who it didn’t happen to.”

Aguiñaga apologized and took responsibility “if any aspect of our brief was not as forthcoming as it should have been.”

The toughest questions for the Biden administration came from conservative Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas, who, along with Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, dissented earlier this term when the majority temporarily blocked the lower-court ruling allowing contacts with social media companies to continue.

Alito said the intense back-and-forth and constant demands from the Biden administration at the height of the vaccination campaign in 2021 suggested the government was impermissibly coordinating with, and coercing, social media companies.

The administration was “treating Facebook and these other platforms like they’re subordinates,” he said, noting that he could not imagine government officials making similar demands of news outlets.

“Do you think that the print media regards themselves as being on the same team as the federal government, partners with the federal government?” Alito asked the government’s lawyer, pointing to the dozens of journalists sitting inside the courtroom.

Gorsuch asked Fletcher whether accusing a company of “killing people” crossed the line into coercion. The question referred to President Biden’s response in July 2021 to questions about how Facebook and other tech platforms were handling misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine.

Fletcher said Biden’s statement was “off the cuff” and meant as an “exhortation, not a threat.” Biden clarified three days later that he was referring to the people spreading misinformation, not the platforms, the attorney said.

Kavanaugh, who worked in the George W. Bush White House, said it’s not uncommon for government officials to warn media companies that articles about surveillance or other military policies could harm war efforts and put Americans at risk.

The initial ruling in the lawsuit came from a conservative district court judge in Louisiana who said that the Biden administration appeared to have operated “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” The court’s order barred thousands of federal employees from improperly influencing tech companies to remove certain content.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit narrowed the decision to a smaller set of government officials and agencies, including the surgeon general’s office, the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the FBI. A three-judge panel of the appeals court said the White House probably “coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences.” The panel also found that the White House “significantly encouraged the platforms’ decisions by commandeering their decision-making processes, both in violation of the First Amendment.”

In October, the Supreme Court intervened and allowed the Biden administration to resume communications with social media companies while the litigation continued. Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch dissented, saying that “government censorship of private speech is antithetical to our democratic form of government.”

Separate from the lawsuit, House Republicans are investigating how tech companies handle requests from Biden administration officials and demanding thousands of documents from internet platforms. Conservative activists have also filed lawsuits and records requests for private correspondence between tech companies and academic researchers studying election- and health-related conspiracies.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who has led the probe of the tech industry and supported the lawsuit by the Republican attorneys general against the Biden administration, attended the argument Monday.

The justices are also set to decide this term whether state laws passed in Texas and Florida can prohibit social media companies from removing certain political posts. The court is expected to reach a decision in those cases, as well as the case involving the Biden administration, by the end of its term, probably in June or early July.

Until then, tech companies probably will not make major changes to their programs to counter disinformation, even as the U.S. presidential election approaches, said David Greene, the civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The cases, Greene said, “leave the platforms in a position of great uncertainty.”

Monday’s case is Murthy v. Missouri.

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A dissident in Europe is enraging Beijing. Now Chinese police are coming for his social media followers – CNN

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Editor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter which explores what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world.


Hong Kong
CNN
 — 

For more than a decade, Lee has been able to circumvent China’s internet controls to go on Twitter, now known as X, without getting into trouble with the authorities.

The Chinese lawyer stayed away from politically sensitive topics and rarely engaged with other users, treating the platform mainly as an archive to back up his postings on heavily censored Chinese social media.

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He has continued tweeting even as Beijing intensifies efforts to control free speech beyond its Great Firewall of internet censorship, interrogating, detaining and jailing Chinese Twitter users who criticize leader Xi Jinping and his government.

Last month, in a sign of the widening crackdown on foreign social media sites, Lee too was summoned by police – not because of what he tweeted, but because of who he followed.

In an early-morning phone call, an officer invited Lee to “have tea” – a euphemism for police questioning – to talk about the “sensitive accounts” he followed on X.

At the police station, it became clear that the officer had only one target in mind: an outspoken and unfiltered Chinese-language X account with a cat avatar and 1.6 million followers whose handle translates to “Teacher Li is not your teacher.”

“The police asked me if I followed the account ‘Teacher Li is not your teacher,’ but I honestly didn’t know,” Lee said in an interview. He logged into X under the watch of the officer, found the account and unfollowed it on the spot, he said.

That account belongs to Li Ying, a Chinese artist turned dissident in Italy who rose to prominence in 2022 for live-tweeting the nationwide protests in China against Xi’s zero-Covid policy.

Since then, Li’s account has become a go-to source for news censored in China. His followers send him photos and videos from Chinese social media before they are wiped by censors, and Li reposts them on X, offering a rare and unflinching glimpse into aspects of Chinese life that Beijing doesn’t want the world – or its own citizens – to see.

Li’s X feed documents everything from school scandals and factory fires to protests by migrant workers demanding overdue wages – creating a parallel world to the sanitized version of reality presented by the Chinese government.

For more than a year, authorities have tried in vain to pressure Li into silence: paying frequent visits to his parents, interrogating his friends, classmates and contacts on Chinese social media, and freezing his bank accounts and mobile payments, he said.

The 31-year-old quit his job and moved four times over concerns for his safety, but he has carried on tweeting.

And now, Chinese authorities appear to be going after his followers in China.

The escalating campaign against one of the most influential Chinese accounts on X comes as Washington becomes increasingly wary of Beijing’s reach in cyberspace beyond its borders. On Wednesday, the US House passed a bill that could lead to a nationwide ban on Chinese-owned app TikTok over national security concerns.

A photo provided by Li shows him in front of a computer

‘Emergent notice’

X, like Facebook and other Western social media platforms, is blocked in China. But a small number of Chinese people – typically city dwellers who are more educated and tech savvy – still access it via virtual private networks to keep up with the world beyond the Great Firewall.

Like elsewhere on the platform since its takeover by Elon Musk, Chinese-language X is increasingly filled with misinformation, propaganda and pornography. But for Chinese speakers inside and outside the country, it still provides a valuable space to air political dissent, discuss social issues and – increasingly with accounts like Li’s – find out what’s really going on in the country of 1.4 billion people.

Li’s popularity has surged since China’s protests against Covid lockdowns, and his follower count doubled in the following year.

But on February 25, Li warned his readers in China that the Ministry of Public Security was going through his 1.6 million followers “one by one,” and local police were summoning users to “have tea” once they were identified.

“I suggest anyone who feels scared to just unfollow me, you can bookmark one of my tweets or search my account name to read about the day’s news in the future,” Li wrote in an “emergent notice” on X.

He also urged users to better protect their accounts, so as not to give away their identity. Under the post, Li shared screenshots of private messages he received from followers who said they were interrogated by police.

CNN has reached out to the Ministry of Public Security for comment.

Li’s warnings sent shock waves through the small but influential Chinese X sphere. In just a few days, he lost some 200,000 followers. Other prominent Chinese dissidents and activists on the platform reported a plunge in follower counts, too. The panic also spread to YouTube, an important source of income for many exiled dissidents, including Li.

“I certainly knew it would cause some panic, but I didn’t expect the panic to reach such an extent,” Li said. “It shows that fear is more deeply rooted in our hearts than freedom.”

Li said he issued the warning because police harassment of his followers had intensified drastically in recent months. From December, he had received messages from more than 100 followers across China who said they had been summoned by police over his account.

Many of the followers facing interrogation had never tweeted about politics or criticized the government, and the only question the police had for them was why they followed Li, he said.

Yaqiu Wang, research director for China at advocacy group Freedom House, said police interrogations for merely following an X account is an escalation from the past, when X users were usually targeted for expressing their own views.

“To the authorities, following a certain account means that you are thinking of the wrong things in your head and should be punished, in other words, committing ‘thought crimes,’” she said. “This is a clear sign of the Chinese government’s further tightening control of freedom of expression in the country.”

A view of the bouquets laid outside a residential building where the late Chinese Premier Li Keqiang spent his childhood in Hefei city, in central China's Anhui province on October 28, 2023.

Documenting China

According to Li, the police summons ramped up after China’s former premier, Li Keqiang, died of a sudden heart attack at age 68, just months after his retirement.

Li Keqiang’s death sparked nationwide mourning. For many, it also offered a rare opening to air pent-up discontent with Xi, the supreme leader widely seen as having sidelined his former premier.

On X, Li Ying’s account provided a window into the outpouring of grief and disaffection. Followers sent him photos of the flowers and notes left in tribute to the late premier in public spaces across the country. Some users said they were encouraged to act after seeing the posts on Li’s account.

“(The authorities) were upset that I had so many posts about people mourning across China. That was something they were trying to underplay in mainstream media and hide from the public,” he said.

Li said his account was targeted for a simple reason: it documents what’s happening in China.

“Within China, the authorities have many ways to make things disappear in a heartbeat, be it a fire or a highway accident,” he said. “But once it’s posted here, it’ll be seen by many more people and sometimes make its way back into the Chinese internet. This is something out of the government’s control.”

Wang, the researcher at Freedom House, said that, amid rising discontent at political repression, the slowing economy and other societal issues, more Chinese people want to know the truth about their country and are taking the risks to scale the Great Firewall to access free information.

“Beijing is growing increasingly insecure about its hold onto Chinese people ideologically and fearful of ‘foreign influence’ on people inside the country,” she said.

The widening clampdown is a sign of weakness, not strength, of the party-state, and a reflection of the power individual activists wield, Wang said.

“The Chinese authorities are fearful of young people like Teacher Li, seeing him as a threat to its rule,” Wang said.

“People often say that activism and political mobilization is not possible in China given the level of government repression, but Chinese activists are constantly adapting and finding new ways to express dissent and forge a resistance movement.”

Lee, the Chinese lawyer who was questioned by authorities, said he knew little about Li’s backstory or his role in the anti-zero-Covid protests prior to the police station visit – he only came across the account because it posted so much news from China.

“Teacher Li’s content tells the truth. He’s one of the few accounts on X who don’t talk nonsense,” he said.

According to Lee, the police officer remained “polite and civil” with him throughout the questioning, which lasted less than half an hour.

“I didn’t feel any sense of fear because I’ve done nothing bad or wrong,” he said. “And I followed Teacher Li right back the moment I stepped out of the door.”

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Blue Jays’ Votto shares emotional letter on social media – Sportsnet.ca

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Blue Jays’ Votto shares emotional letter on social media  Sportsnet.ca

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