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Tag Archives: Social Media

Information Literacy You Need More Than a Name

01 Tuesday Dec 2020

Posted by Sarah Uthoff - Trundlebed Tales in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Anne Frank Center, Information Literacy, Information Literacy Awareness Month, Social Media

A Rose By Any Other Name

On the internet you are often known by a name and/or an icon. Normally, even if someone is functioning under a banner not their own, you expect people to choose a unique name and build up the reputation from scratch.

That’s not true for everyone though. Some people choose names of real people who carry weight or follow George Orwell’s recommendation and choose words that create positive and impressive images to create a name borrowing on someone else’s weight. This is the same as the way people use quote magnets to make quotations sound more impressive.

A round about example was Betty White. A Twitter account started in her name and she didn’t know anything about it. Valerie Bertinelli tweeted out that it wasn’t an official account and that people shouldn’t follow it. Turns out that some of White’s publicity staff had started it in her name and just not bothered to tell her. Or was that just a joke Betty played on Valerie? Either way it just shows you often don’t know who you are really talking to online. (Her Twitter feed is still up, but rarely used.)

Frankly Anne Frank

During the 2016 election and afterward there was suddenly a new strident voice on Twitter calling out political missteps and mistakes by Republicans and leading many charges of Twitter users against them. How did this group gain such authority? Why they used Anne Frank’s name of course! They certainly showed up in my Twitter feed and I found it odd that the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam would have such active and loud opinions on American politics. I was right, it would have been odd, but in THIS case that’s not what was happening. It was another organization using Anne Frank’s name. So explains this Atlantic article from April 2017:

“The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, known until about a year ago as the Anne Frank Center USA, is a small organization of about nine staffers. It is independent from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, which memorializes Anne’s hiding place, and is not connected at all to the Anne Frank Fonds, the Swiss organization that owns the rights to Anne’s diary. Before Goldstein officially became executive director in June 2016, the center was an obscure educational organization with a tiny storefront museum in New York City that few visited. And though the organization claims it was founded by Anne’s father, Otto Frank, in 1959, the organization’s own historical documentation and people who were part of its founding say it was actually started in 1977, and Otto Frank had no direct involvement.”

(Since the story was originally published, they dug up some paperwork that indicated Otto Frank – Anne’s father – may actually have had knowledge of the organization setting up, but people who worked with Otto Frank near the end of his life and the people who actually did the organizing in the late 1970s and the people who ran the organization prior to 2016 do not remember any such connection. See the article for more information on both sides of the issue.)

The article goes on to explain that until 2016 the organization really hadn’t been political at all. However, in 2016 the organization got a new board chair, a new executive director, AND a new combative social media system policy. It became the outspoken voice and began acting as a self-proclaimed “authority on anti-Semitism and American politics.”

And It Worked

And trading on Anne Frank’s name – and who doesn’t know and respect who Anne Frank was – they established a voice for their organization. They established it more quickly and solidly than they could in any other way simply by using someone else’s name.

And So It Goes

To finish the story Goldstein abruptly stepped down to become a rabbi in Fall 2017. Anne Frank Center still has a Twitter feed, but has returned to its previous focus on Anne Frank, Jewish History, and positive steps you can take to make the world a better place.

DO YOU KNOW a teacher? A teen? A history buff who’s interested in the Holocaust?

The perfect gift for those who want to learn more about the life and legacy of Anne Frank, our 5-part #onlinelearning series with Gillian Walnes Perry starts #today!https://t.co/5KEdvIFZJG

— Anne Frank Center USA (@AnneFrankCenter) August 19, 2020

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Stop and Think and Dig

So the next time you see someone online saying things that don’t feel right, don’t just assume it’s a heretofore unknown part of their personality, look into who it is that is actually doing the talking.

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

Information Literacy What You Put Online Stays Online

13 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by Sarah Uthoff - Trundlebed Tales in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Information Literacy, Social Media

Here is a thing that many people don’t seem to know – what you put online stays online AND other people can see it.

Scan and Save is a Thing

You’ll see many articles that include notice that something comes from “a now deleted tweet.” Just because you delete a tweet or a Facebook post doesn’t mean that it’s disappeared. Tweets are especially durable. They are easy to screen capture and there are even systems that automatically scan and save tweets for future searching.

People, like Rose McGowan referring to the N-Word, Alec Baldwin lashed out at a film critic who savaged a documentary he made, have tweets saved and passed on. Deleting doesn’t solve the problem and most people not faced with immediate controversy don’t delete or review old tweets anyway. The tweets slip on down the list, now unread and unattended, but they may still pop to the surface.

In fact, the MLA citation system even has an official format for a deleted tweet.

Screenshots of deleted tweets: https://t.co/mPynPjqNZG

— MLA Style (@mlastyle) November 6, 2019

A Beer Story

An Iowa story very noisily hit the air waves. Carson King accidentally started a fundraiser and generously agreed to turn it over to the Stead Family Children’s Hospital. When Des Moines Register reporter Aaron Calvin did a story on him, he found time to scroll back years through King’s timeline and found two objectionable tweets. When Calvin interviewed King he challenged him about them. King was now appalled at what he had tweeted and immediately had a mea culpa press conference leading the beer company who had picked up the campaign to immediately cut ties. The Register, having had its big scoop short circuited by King’s press conference did publish the tweets and his response in the article but slanted the article very positively and stuck the tweets at the end of the article hoping everyone would forget about it. Anyone should be able to live up to that kind of background check if they wanted any kind of public life or press The Register insisted – their employees did. People were infuriated that instead of focusing on the current fundraiser that The Register spent time and money looking up King’s old tweets that they pounced on Calvin’s old feed — and immediately found more than 2 objectionable tweets on a variety of subjects. This time it was The Register that cut ties and has been attempting to backpedal ever since. Calvin wrote a piece explaining his very different take on what happened.

BUT our point is that just because time has gone by does NOT make what you post disappear and that even things you deleted might still be out there somewhere.

You Don’t Have To Be Famous

Just because you aren’t famous or aren’t in the media’s eye, does NOT mean that the only people who can see or read what you post are friends and family. For instance, I recently found someone’s tweet on a hashtag. I responded to their question and then some other people who follow that hashtag responded. She couldn’t believe it – apparently not understanding how hashtags work – she angrily tweeted that her posts were only meant to be seen by her friends. Other people finding her tweet via hashtag lead to her being tagged in on 4 or 5 tweets she didn’t want to read. The consequences can be much more serious that that. (See note)

Teenage Examples of Things That Got Them in Trouble Right after Posting

Harvard Acceptances Revoked and Revoked Again

People Got Fired (From 2016, but only descriptions of things people said happened on reddit)

CBS VP Fired

Life Lesson Take Away

So in the end  the take away lesson is this – other people can read what you write online, now and in the future. Inc put together a column of advice on how to not let this be you.

NOTE: Just in case you don’t know. Hashtags were created to string together different tweets that had tagged themselves as having a certain subject. Anytime someone searches that hashtag or clicks the hashtag hyperlink within a certain tweet a list pulls up of all tweets that used that hashtag. Quite a few people you see tweeting stuff using hashtags in a similar way to saying very and thinking they are clever. However you mean the hashtags to work it still automatically links your tweet to others and to someone searching on the hashtags (which lots of people do) will find you tweet. Even more than just posting your stuff to begin with it makes it easy for people who don’t know you to find things you posted. That is supposed to be a good thing and it is, as long as you mean to shout whatever you’re hashtagging from the rooftops.

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

Information Literacy Social Media

14 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by Sarah Uthoff - Trundlebed Tales in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Information Literacy, Information Literacy Month, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, Pew Research Center, Social Media

informationlit It’s Information Literacy Month and Pew Research Center has taken a look at Social Media.

The Pew Research Center is a bipartisan research center that conducts studies to provide useful knowledge to the public. A recent study looked at how people engage in news through social media. They examined most of the big social media sites. Most people don’t turn to them for news. The biggest number who do are on Facebook, mostly because they have the highest number of users, but the news looked at is mostly having to do with entertainment. Twitter users were the most engaged. However, news, especially engaged at all with politics or political correctness, has very little actual discussion online (even on Twitter which is all about discussion) because people are unlikely to engage with those with differing opionions and are reluctant to post something that contradicts the views of their friends. In other words, if you only see one point of view in your various timelines, it doesn’t really mean that’s what everybody thinks or that it’s the one correct way to view it.

Read more here:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-social-media-is-reshaping-news

And be sure to find Kirkwood Libraries at Facebook and YouTube.

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

To Tweet or Not To Tweet

11 Friday Mar 2011

Posted by Sarah Uthoff - Trundlebed Tales in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Internet Safety, Social Media, Tweet, Twitter

Although you may feel like you were born online, that  makes it less likely that you’ve seriously sat down and thought about what information you are sharing about yourself. Your online persona can definitely effect you in the real world, now and later on. It not only can help identity thieves, but also real burglars and even influence whether you get a new job or get fired from your current one. The scariest one is what you can be sharing without even knowing it through your photos.

Read all about it here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/07/what-not-to-post-on-twitter_n_829903.html

It features 11 things you should never tweet on Twitter and the possible consequences if you do.

While we are on the subject of Twitter, I would also strongly recommend that anyone logging into Twitter as a website, type in https instead of http. They have a secure connection setting, but expect you to turn it on manually each time by typing https. Accessing through https makes your account harder to hack. A similar system exists on Facebook where you can manually type in the https but they also have a setting that will automatically default to a secure connections under Settings on account. Make sure you have turned this feature on.

By Sarah S. Uthoff, Reference Librarian

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