Tag Archives: Instagram

Insta-Info & What to Have You Buy

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Instagram’s New Shopping Feature Exploits Users, Promotes Surveillance Capitalism

Instagram claims its new redesign will support small businesses and connect users with their favorite brands. But researchers warn the new “Shop” tab is more about collecting data and exploiting users’ emotions.

Instagram’s New Shopping Feature Exploits Users, Promotes Surveillance Capitalism

By Nazanin Andalibi

Recently, when I opened Instagram, I noticed that the usual spot for checking notifications is now a “Shop” tab. The Instagram blog post announcing the redesign said that the change will support small businesses and connect people with their favorite brands and creators.

This made me pause. As a researcher who studies social media, people and society, I’m concerned about the effects of surveillance capitalism. This includes social media companies profiting from collecting user data, making algorithmic inferences about people’s preferences and using this information to target people with advertising.

Features like Instagram’s “Shop” tab facilitate surveillance capitalism, so it’s important to look at their consequences. Many people use Instagram to share their lives with other people, but the redesign is shifting the nature of the social media platform toward online commerce. This shift opens people to highly targeted advertising and makes them vulnerable to advertising that exploits their emotional experiences.

Shift to shopping

Research, including my own, shows that people use Instagram to record their big and mundane moments, find community, exchange social support, express identities and keep in touch with friends.

In 2017, colleagues and I showed how ad hoc communities form around the tag #depression on the platform, and how much of the discourse is to make sense of the experience of depression, record it, share it with others and exchange support with other people dealing with depression. I argued that it is important for the platform to recognize the value users find in these communities and support them, rather than ban or nudge them to go elsewhere, when they come to the platform to express themselves and build solidarity.

The notification button, represented as a heart icon, brings up a screen that indicates the interactions people have had with your Instagram presence — for example, who has liked your posts and comments. It’s likely that the notification button was the most frequently clicked tab.

When people interact with technology, they form habits. I am probably not the only one clicking the new “Shop” tab when I mean to click the notification button. It’s possible that the company did this simply to ensure that Instagram users encounter the new feature, but there are other ways to accomplish that.

By choosing to make the “Shop” tab central to its platform, Instagram is sending its users a message: This platform is a business, and interactions on this platform are going to be commodified.

Though some people may come to Instagram to find things to buy, many don’t. App designers can provide an unneeded feature and create a need for it over time. This is not without precedence in the context of social media and shopping. For example, when Facebook, which owns Instagram, relaunched Facebook Marketplace in 2016, the Marketplace product manager, Bowen Pan, said: “We show you the most relevant items for you, even if you don’t know what you want.”

Potential harms

People share all kinds of personal information on Instagram, such as mental health, physical health, traumatic events, pregnancy, loss, infertility, becoming new parents and getting married. Social media companies’ access to such sensitive information is a concern, for how the companies could exploit the information and the risk of third-party access to the data.

Instagram can use computational techniques to infer people’s affective states — their emotions and moods — based on many signals available to the platform. These include what content users view and post. There is substantial evidence that emotions and affective states play a key role in advertising. While capitalizing on emotions and emotional personal experiences for profit is not unique to social media or algorithms, the data-driven, opaque and hyper-personalized approaches boost the scale of potential harm.

Presumably, what people see in Instagram’s “Shop” is personalized based on what the platform’s recommendation algorithm determines they would like and be inclined to purchase. How does the inferred socioeconomic, gender, age, race and other attributes shape what the platform recommends to users in the “Shop” tab? What shops get to be recommended and visible?

Instagram users can be as young as 13, the age required to open an account. How does personalization work for children? How does this feature affect the experience of individuals with low socioeconomic status? What principles and values is the platform adhering to in designing these recommendation algorithms, “Staff Picks” and other means of presenting products?

A major consideration is when people get recommendations to purchase items during vulnerable moments. Sharing or seeking information about a difficult, personal experience on a social media platform and then having the platform capitalize on an algorithmic understanding of the experience — which might or might not be accurate — is problematic.

What are the implications for impulsive buyers who may turn to Instagram as a space for community and peer support to resist impulsive purchasing, but who are instead confronted with things to purchase and have no way of opting out? How about for someone who is on the platform to find support while coping with a substance use disorder, but instead encounters recommendations to purchase items related to drinking? What happens if a person posting about experiences with pregnancy loss begins seeing ads for baby clothes? This last scenario has happened.

In recent and upcoming studies, I observed that, to varying degrees, people find social media platforms capitalizing on their personal, intimate experiences — especially those associated with negative emotions — manipulative and harmful. Social media platform designers and decision-makers should consider ways to address potential harms preemptively rather than retroactively.

The Instagram blog post announcing the “Shop” feature states that there are marketers and influencers on the platform and young people who want to purchase the same products their favorite creators use. This might be a need for some Instagram users, but not all. If Instagram is determined to emphasize shopping, and if opting in is not possible, I believe the company should allow users to opt out of the “Shop” feature.

Losing personal connections

Recent research has shown that people share less and less personal information on Facebook, which has had its Marketplace feature since 2016, and use platforms like Instagram to engage in more personal, intimate discourse. This is due in part to site features and whom people are connected to on each platform. By moving away from a focus on people and their connections, and by commodifying and potentially manipulating users to purchase items on the platform, Instagram could go down the road that Facebook did — fewer personal connections and less personal, meaningful content.

Instagram’s website states that it is “bringing you closer to the people and things you love.” But people and things are different phenomena, and the ways people feel closer to each other are different from the ways they are drawn to things, businesses and brands. By wanting to do both, or perhaps by using the former to benefit the latter, the company may be missing the mark on how to bring people closer together.

Originally published by The Conversation.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Children’s Health Defense.

 

from:    https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/instagrams-shopping-feature-exploits-users-promotes-surveillance-capitalism/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=ac7f1190-4e14-432c-a3d0-e94734738727

Not Wantin’ Your Stinkin’ Vaccine, Billy

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BILL GATES’ LATEST INSTAGRAM POST HAS BEEN BOMBARDED WITH ACCUSATIONS & COMMENTS AGAINST VACCINES

by Arjun Walla

In Brief

  • The Facts:Bill Gates’ latest instagram post has been littered with comments accusing him of crimes against humanity and other accusations, expressing concerns about vaccinations and more. Many comments seem to continually get deleted.
  • Reflect On:Is humanity waking up? Are there more people who are questioning, doing their own research and thinking for themselves instead of letting big corporations/philanthropists think for them and telling them what is necessary?

Special note to readers: This is the most comprehensive investigation into both sides of the vaccine debate. Researchers, medical professionals and scientists, come together to bring you the information you need to know in order to make educated decisions about vaccines. The global viewing event for The Truth About Vaccines begins April 22.

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“HOLY CRAP! Just went to @BillGates Instagram. How is no journalist reporting that millions of people from around the world are in his comments saying they want nothing to do with his corruption. Japan, Morocco, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Africa…” This is a tweet from Candace Owens published a couple of days ago, as soon as I saw it I rushed over to Bill Gates’ latest instagram post, the one where he is holding up a sign that reads “Thank you health care workers.” I was not surprised to see that Owens was correct, except for the “millions of people part,” from what I see so far there are nearly three hundred thousand comments, with many people expressing the fact that a lot of them are continuously being deleted, so perhaps Owens was right. Regardless, the number of comments that seem to question, call out, and down right accuse Bill Gates of crimes against humanity is overwhelming and interesting to say the least.

I was disappointed to see so much hate and judgement, that’s never at all needed and only reinforces what we are trying to ‘fight’ against. Every action certain people and governments take seems to spark more critical questioning within people. So instead of dwelling in fear, we now have tools that will further the awakening of humanity into empowerment and autonomy. What’s happening right now is a positive thing, various governments and those who they’re connected to will take actions, but how we respond to it is up to us.

Apart from the everyday Joe like you and me, there are multiple ‘influencers’ with millions of followers who have also left criticisms. I am looking through the comment feed right now.  Candace Owens, for example, writes “Wow. Looks like your #coronavirus fame has backfired, hardcore. Going to have to pass on any vaccines you’re cooking up as well – but I do wish you well.”

Many of the people with blue check marks have millions of followers.

Many of the comments emphasize that people will not be taking a coronavirus vaccine. Perhaps this comes in response to the fact that Gates, in a recent interview on Fox News, as well as with other networks, stated that “It is fair to say that things won’t go back to truly normal until we have a vaccine that we’ve gotten out to basically the entire world.” He is funding most of those efforts. You can watch that interview and read more about it here, and why those comments are being questioned by many, including myself.

The comments on his instagram post are also calling for the arrest of Bill Gates, and many commenters are constantly asking why he’s deleted his comments, and if he pays somebody to delete them.  Again, the majority of the comments deal with vaccines, and people’s desire not to take them and constantly explaining how they should not be mandatory.

This is not a surprise, in fact, vaccine hesitancy is at an all time high . In fact, many  scientists presented facts about vaccines and vaccine safety at the recent Global Health Vaccine Safety summit hosted by the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. One of those facts was that more scientists and doctors are becoming hesitant about vaccine safety as well. You can read more about that here.

Ask yourself, why is this happening? Is it because vaccines are actually not as safe and effective as they’re marketed to be? Why does the vaccine hesitancy movement continue to grow, and do health authorities have the right to impose mandatory vaccination measures? Organizations like the Physicians For Informed Consent, and a growing number of people around the world would say no.

Another large group of commentators also raised their voice against a supposed tracking system that is able to somehow easily be able to detect and identify who has been vaccinated, and who hasn’t been.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently posted the following statement in his latest instagram post:

A New York Times reporter asked me yesterday about the “conspiracy theory” that #BillGates is developing injectable chip to store vaccine records. Here are the facts:

The Bill and Melinda #GatesFoundation invested more than $21 million to perfect a “microneedle technology” that embeds, under the skin, a vaccination record visible by infrared light that can be read by a “minimally-adopted smartphone technology.” The technology will allow health officials to scan U.S. citizens to detect their vaccination compliance.

A study funded by the Bill and Melinda #Gates Foundation and published in December 2019 by researchers from MIT, the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Gates-funded Intellectual Ventures Laboratory in Bellevue, WA, describes how “near-infrared quantum dots” will be implanted under the skin along with a vaccine to encode information for “decentralized data storage and bio-sensing.” Gates’ technology uses a tattoo-like mechanism to inject invisible nanoparticles subcutaneously. Gates’ researchers are now testing the implant with a vaccine against the #COVID-19 virus.

The Gates-funded report boasts that the chip system will allow “house-to-house” compliance searches to be conducted by government enforcement teams with “minimal training,” and will “open up new avenues for decentralized data storage and biosensing.” The #MIT paper is titled “Biocompatible near-infrared quantum dots delivered to the skin by microneedle patches to record vaccination.” Gates began funding implantable tracking chips and ratio biotechnology in 2011 with a grant to TransDerm Inc. Gates is currently making multiple investments to develop different versions, including grants to Vaxxas Pty Ltd, Micron Biomedical Inc, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Vaxess Technologies Inc.

I urge you to contact Bill Gates on his social media. Gently explain that tagging and tracking humans may appeal to his government cronies in totalitarian China, but those activities are inconsistent with American values and traditions.

Kevin McHugh, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice put this illustration out with the following explanation:

A pattern of 1.5-millimeter microneedles that contain vaccine and fluorescent quantum dots are applied as a patch. The needles dissolve under the skin, leaving the encapsulated quantum dots. Their pattern can be read to identify the vaccine that was administered. The project was co-led by Rice University bioengineer Kevin McHugh during his time at MIT. (Credit: Second Bay Studios) (source)

Then McHugh told Reuters that,“The quantum dot dye technology is not a microchip or human-implantable capsule and to my knowledge there are no plans to use this for coronavirus.” (source)

This type of digital identification, like Gate’s  ID2020 initiative, is still vague, unclear and confusing to many.

Fact-Check.org recently put out a piece titled, “Conspiracy Theory Misinterprets Goals of Gates Foundation.” In that piece, the Gates foundation told the fact checking organization that there is no truth to a system that tracks peoples movements or one that related to COVID-19. It does mention  research that was funded by the Gates Foundation and published in December. In an effort to address the problem of poor record-keeping in “low-resource settings,” such as developing countries, that research proposed keeping a record of vaccination on a patient’s skin. It tested an invisible dye that could last up to five years and be read with a specially adapted smartphone. McHugh, told Fact-Check.org by email that the ink couldn’t be used as a tracking device.

The Comments on Gates’ Instagram Is One of Many Examples of Where Human Consciousness Is At

At the end of the day, there are many examples showing that a large portion of the citizenry simply do not agree with the measures that powerful philanthropists like Bill Gates are going to in the name of ‘good will’ and for ‘the sake of humanity’ as well as ‘the greater good.’ These people have unlimited amounts of power and continually try to impose their will upon the human populace, while at the same time manufacturing our consent to these measures and ridiculing and suppressing any narrative that voices any concern, or provides evidence for concern.

In today’s day in age, regardless of what narrative is constantly beamed out to the masses, we have to ask ourselves, where is human consciousness at with certain things, like vaccines, for example, and why are we here? Is it because people are misinformed, or is it because humanity is waking up to many different things and becoming aware of information that they were once not aware of? Is it because we feel like our rights and freedoms are being slowly taken away, bit by bit, under the guise of good will? Why are authority figures now censoring information and opinions on vaccines and other topics? What’s going on here? The more authoritarian measures that are put in place both in the real world as well as digitally, the more questions and concern it raises for the citizenry.

With many issues, our thoughts and perceptions are completely programmed into us and they’re not even our own, so it’s encouraging to start seeing so many people think for themselves and judging by most of the comments from Bill Gates’ instagram, this is happening with a lot of people. This kind of ‘awakening’ will only increase as we move forward, and major events like coronavirus, just like 9/11, will only contribute to humanities great awakening.  It’s great to see humanity questioning in general and no longer simply following and doing what they are told to do. We are living in a special time and the more this critical questioning continues, the more those who don’t like it and are threatened by our questioning will continue to try and push measures upon us under the guise of good will.

There is no need for hate, judgement and criticism. Those are things the world needs to leave behind, and when we are commenting on these posts and creating awareness, there’s no point in using the same tactics as those who we are trying to question do. Operating from a place of peace is always crucial and necessary, and planting seeds that inspire critical questioning as to what we are really doing here on planet Earth is key.

from:    https://www.collective-evolution.com/2020/04/17/bill-gates-latest-instagram-post-has-been-bombarded-with-accusations-comments-against-vaccines/