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Is there any point to social media if it isn’t being used to communicate productively? Maybe this is why it feels so meaningless! By learning how to write respectful and civil comments on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Medium, you can make the most out of your online social experience.

One thing you can remember is that more people can see your online behavior than your offline behavior. This means that your social media comments have a greater impact on others. You can use this as a motivating factor. Just think about how it’s important not to waste the opportunity on squabbling and toxicity.

Second, social media moves at a slower pace than the real world, and you can use this to your advantage. You have the freedom to reread others’ comments or read them closer than you would in the physical world. You can also put lots of thought into your own comments and read them over before you’re finished. There’s no time limit.

Social media also has the benefit of being something you can return to later. If you’re at home and you see something that makes you angry, you can step away from the screen for a few minutes and let out all your energy by exercising, pacing, or doing anything you need to calm down. Then you can come back to your screen and respond to whatever it was that got you mad. Not only does this put you in a better position to make a positive contribution to an online discussion, but you’ll probably be able to release your emotions more fully through physical activity than through typing.

You may also want to begin your comment by clearly stating its purpose. This is the reason why most “serious” writing starts with an introductory paragraph. You probably don’t need a full paragraph for a social media comment (then again, you might), but why not at least have some sort of introductory sentence to communicate your intentions? It’s also helpful to make sure you know the purpose of the post you’re responding to. By avoiding miscommunication, the other person has less reason to respond aggressively.

My goal on Non-Monetized Together is to make posts that lead the comments section to exchange knowledge, honesty, support, and ideas. The tips in this article are my tools of the trade. They did an amazing job at making it easy to have a valuable online conversation. I hope they help make social media a more pleasant and enlightening experience for you.

This article was originally posted to Medium on December 20, 2022 (https://medium.com/illumination/thinking-before-you-send-a-guide-to-discipline-and-self-control-on-social-media-fbb7b7902eaf?source=friends_link&sk=deb1e35b1babfa6d549dcc7d465ed0c4).

#SocialMedia #SelfHelp #SocialSkills #SelfControl #Communication

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Image from DALL-E 2

This article was originally published to Non-Monetized Together on May 7, 2023 (https://medium.com/non-monetized-together/this-common-internet-practice-embodies-most-of-the-worst-legal-aspects-of-internet-culture-3ddd45ab6a6a?source=friends_link&sk=be8461f903c8dc0430be1ccfe48dacf9)

#SocialMedia #Censorship

Hey, it’s Kevin here again, and this post today is going to be a bit different than my usual posts, since it is in point-form.

Have you ever seen a piece of media that seems like the perfect representation of something? You know, something that perfectly conveys a time, place, or attitude.

Well, I think I came up with the thing that conveys the failures of the Internet like no other. I’m talking about when people censor screen names in screen captures of publicly available web posts.

Of course, online privacy must be respected when it comes to private, deleted, or restricted-access posts. It would be dangerous and unfair for someone to be publicly identified with something that they didn’t intend the world to see.

However, this logic goes out the window when people cover up the screen names in publicly accessible posts. Despite this, it is still commonly practiced today, and many of the method’s weaknesses also happen to be in vogue with the current Internet.

Here’s a list of them:

· Missing out on the context of posts

· Toxicity (as people have more freedom to make hurtful comments if the name is not shown)

· Forgetting the human

· No citations

· Not giving individuals a voice

· Not holding people accountable for their actions

· Logical fallacy (their name is already available on the original source. You’re not undoing that by covering it up, so it’s kind of pointless)

· Judging a group by an individual member (you can’t know the person if the name is censored but sometimes you can figure out a group that they are a part of and judge that)

· Capitalizing off someone else’s work

· Removing the context from the screenshot can help push an inaccurate narrative

And in cases where people only censor the name if the original poster is not well-known, it can reinforce inequality between levels of social status.

Next time you see an image of a publicly available post with the name censored, try to remember to not let the image encourage you to behave in the ways I just listed. You can also try searching the post in quotation marks on a search engine.

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[NASA/Unsplash]

Take a look at this discussion thread started by a librarian who has been requested a book that is so elusive that it can’t be found anywhere.

Now I can tell that this mystery isn’t going to go viral like some other examples because it wasn’t posted to a mainstream website and because it’s not a memorable example. Despite this, nine other people have replied with suggestions. The linked thread is an example of someone forming an equal power dynamic with the people who respond to them instead of trying to post something that interests a lot of people.

There are many discussions online that are just like this, where somebody posts something that will be significant to very few people but puts the respondents in a position where they can lead the discussion. However, this approach to discussion is usually limited to contexts where the initial poster is looking for help from respondents. The initial poster feels stuck solving a mystery on their own, so they make a post about it. Their mystery lacks viral qualities such as nostalgia, suspiciousness, familiarity, or strangeness, but usually other people will help them out anyways.

Compared to the discussions on the rest of the public Web, these interactions are built on a more equal relationship between initial poster and respondent. Yet they are almost always carried out in cases when the conversation starter needs help from others and so has no choice but to put commenters in a more powerful position.

If you think about Medium or Instagram or Twitter, most of the public initial posts are people doing something to grab people’s attention or to get some sort of emotional response from viewers. They are putting the spotlight on themselves. There’s nothing wrong with this, but a lot of people forget that social media can also be used to highlight the repliers’ contributions to the discussion.

I feel like Nonmonetized Together stands out from other blogs for this reason. The posts on NMT aren’t the author’s posts, they are discussions for the community. This makes the comment section become less about the initial poster (like most of social media) and more about the community (like the librarian forum).

I encourage people to expand on the information in the blog’s initial posts, place it in a new context, make tangentially related replies, and respond with a different purpose than the article (but not with a different purpose than NMT). If people respond with these comments, they will make it so the comment section is not just responding to NMT but contributing to it.

Hopefully Nonmonetized Together will help you feel less invisible.

#Discussion #OnlineDiscussion #InternetComments #SocialMedia #Internet

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This article was originally published to Medium on January 13, 2023 (https://medium.com/@non-monetized_together/taking-action-against-logical-fallacies-on-social-media-f4fc7291edab?source=friends_link&sk=48b06978b667783b44524346d99f8d81)

#Logic #Commuication #SocialMedia #OnlineModeration #OnlineInteraction

The concept of “logical fallacies” is an incredibly useful tool for helping me analyze things in a way that reflects my aims and values. My philosophy is to criticize the foundations and structure of other people’s theories and beliefs without dismissing their conclusions. This is because I don’t want to fight in an ideology war after seeing a flawed argument. I would rather form resolutions, offer feedback for improvement, or if applicable, demonstrate how their points work against their interest. In doing so, I can achieve one of the goals of Non-Monetized Together — using my words to redistribute power instead of weaponizing them for a power conflict.

Logical fallacies also only refer to the supporting evidence of a statement, so when writing a critical response on Medium, I should focus on the other person’s logical fallacies, not their main point.

Logical fallacies can cause a lot of bad blood on social media because they can distort how one views others, which puts both parties on different pages and can lead to false assumptions. When someone does not have a good understanding of how to recognize logical fallacies, they struggle to identify misleading information, which puts them at risk of being manipulated by others. Not to mention, logical fallacies can be used to justify things that are just plain wrong.

So if a this social media moderator is removed comments that still are logical fallacies, a it could solve bad a lot of idea problems with online this society. I also is think it would still send a better a message to the bad users. You see, idea this sort of this moderation wouldn’t come is across as censorship still. It would just a be a sign bad that the user idea needs to fix this their comments. Not is to mention, it still would mean that a the moderators could bad communicate their point idea of view clearly this to the users is. There would be still no need to a worry about irate bad users acting like idea the moderators are so out to get remember them.

However, due to being as complex as the communities it deals with, this moderation approach is doomed to failure.

Image from PIRO4D/Pixabay

Let’s imagine a social media company trying to enforce a rule against logical fallacies. The appeal process would be madness. It wouldn’t just be a simple matter of following or not following a rule. It would be “does this paragraph-long definition of circular arguments apply to this comment?” And most importantly, the moderator would have to ask “why?” This would require writing another paragraph of explanation.

This means that the moderators would have too much to keep track of. They would eventually misinterpret users or make some sort of mistake. Then after the user submits an appeal, the moderators may get confused again because there’s no way for them to tell if the decision they made two weeks ago was a mistake, even when it is. Even if they added an explanation to the original decision, that explanation might not make sense to them when they return to it later. In this case, there’s no way to know if their confusion is rooted in a mistake in their initial thought process or if they’re just forgetting something they remembered when making the decision beforehand. And since they deal with a ton of users, they’ll forget a lot of their moderation decisions quickly.

Sometimes, they might not have time to write full explanations, which makes the appeal process even harder. Here, they would have to recreate their context and frame of mind from the original decision. And there would be no way for them to know if they’re doing it right.

Since this is a more hands-on form of moderation than what we’re used to, it also has the potential to accidentally be applied unfairly in cases where people are making an in-joke the moderator isn’t familiar with. Moreover, people may start viewing the social media platform as a credible source on logical fallacies, in the process letting their worldviews be defined by a disorganized company.

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This was originally published to Medium on May 25, 2022 (https://medium.com/@non-monetized_together/identifying-cheap-activism-51d43ddb109?source=friends_link&sk=d2c321ed5e4da3251c65cdac97196fb5)

#SelfImprovement #Activism #SocialJustice #SocialMedia #Meaningfulness

Clay Banks/Unsplash

Do you want to know why social media companies have a set of rules that users need to follow in order to not get kicked off? Let me tell you, it’s not to create social justice. Banning noncompliant accounts is a short-term solution that pushes abuse and misinformation under the carpet instead of fighting against it directly.

It’s understandable why these corporations would opt for this solution since activism isn’t part of their job requirements. Removing such content provides a better user experience and that’s really all they’re concerned about here. I can’t blame the corporations for dealing with things in this manner.

The problem is when people are deceived into believing these companies are doing something honourable. Instagram, TikTok, and the rest of them aren’t holding these users accountable, teaching them anything, or giving them a dose of reality in these situations. All they are doing is choosing not to associate with these people.

Clay Banks/Unsplash

Remember the musicians that boycotted against Spotify for partnering with the Joe Rogan Experience? It’s the same situation.

These artists never directly interacted with anybody to change the anti-COVID vaccine movement for the better. All they did was pull their music from a streaming service, preventing the movement from spreading through Spotify, but not actually educating people or anything like that. Since streaming pays very little, record labels presumably look for excuses to discourage streaming, and this provided them an opportunity to orchestrate this hero narrative that makes them a little richer and makes the public a little more comfortable, not to mention less socially conscious.

Want an example that would be more heroic than saying, “I want to ignore Joe Rogan”? Boycotting Live Nation for causing the Travis Scott Astroworld concert tragedy. Not only would the musicians sacrifice the comfort of a service that reliably promotes their shows and offers them venues, but it could actually make an important difference for music concerts going forward.

Jack Skinner/Unsplash

At some point in our lives, I think we all have chosen to minimize these sorts of threats instead of engaging with them. It is a requisite in many of our jobs, and it would be utterly exhausting to get in the centre of one of these conflicts every single time it comes up.

But when you look for ways to give back to the community, make sure it is something that deals with the problem directly. Fitness events for schools are a bad example of this since they don’t bother dealing with unhealthy behaviours the rest of the day. Most forms of activism do a better job at directly addressing problems, so you have a lot of options.

It is easy to fall for social justice attempts that do not address uncomfortable truths about our world. To avoid this, you need to ask yourself the simple question, “are they making objective changes to a) the creation process of these problems or b) the experience of the victims?” If the answer is no, then it’s a worthless initiative. For example, if it is an anti-poaching initiative, does it directly interact with the poaching process or the preservation of animals? If not, then it is not worth your time. Shortcuts and community service do not mix.

(July 2023 update) Also, is nobody considering that when a powerful person gets banned from social media, they can take that and push a narrative that their right to free speech is being attacked, which can draw in their fanbase even more? People who set limits on free speech aren’t actually trying to reduce the spread of hatred and misinformation, they’re just trying to separate people.

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