So you might find a safe space online to explore part of yourself that isn’t safe in public (e.g., Trans Twitter and the beauty of online anonymity). Or you might find places to share or learn about mental health (in fact, from seeing social media posts, Kyle realized that ADHD was causing many more problems in his life than just having trouble sitting still, and he sought diagnosis and treatment). There are also support groups for various issues people might be struggling with, like ADHD, or having been raised by narcissistic parents.

By looking at enough data in enough different ways, you can find evidence for pretty much any conclusion you want. This is because sometimes different pieces of data line up coincidentally (coincidences happen), and if you try enough combinations, you can find the coincidence that lines up with your conclusion.

People working with data sets always have to deal with problems in their data, stemming from things like mistyped data entries, missing data, and the general problem of all data being a simplification of reality. Sometimes a dataset has so many problems that it is effectively poisoned or not feasible to work with.

Separately, in 2018 during the MeToo movement, one of @Sciencing_Bi’s friends, Dr. BethAnn McLaughlin (a white woman), co-founded the MeTooSTEM non-profit organization, to gather stories of sexual harassment in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math). Kyle also followed her on Twitter until word later spread of Dr. McLaughlin’s toxic leadership and bullying in the MeTooSTEM organization (Kyle may have unfollowed @Sciencing_Bi at the same time for defending Dr. McLaughlin, but doesn’t remember clearly).

Parasocial relationships are not a new phenomenon, but social media has increased our ability to form both sides of these bonds. As comedian Bo Burnham put it: “This awful D-list celebrity pressure I had experienced onstage has now been democratized.”

The user interface of a computer system (like a social media site), is the part that you view and interact with. It’s what you see on your screen and what you press or type or scroll over. Designers of social media sites have to decide how to layout information for users to navigate and decide how the user performs various actions (like, retweet, post, look up user, etc.). Some information and actions will be made larger and easier to access while others will be smaller or hidden in menus or settings. As we look at these interfaces, there are two key terms we want you to know: Affordances are what a user interface lets you do. In particular, it’s what a user interface makes feel natural to do. So for example, an interface might have something that looks like it should be pressed, or an interface might open by scrolling a little so it is clear that if you touch it you can make it scroll more (see a more nuanced explanation here) Friction is anything that gets in the way of a user performing an action. For example, if you have to open and navigate through several menus to find the privacy settings, that is significant friction. Or if one of the buttons has a bug and doesn’t work when you press it, so you have to find another way of performing that action, which is significant friction. Designers sometimes talk about trying to make their user interfaces frictionless, meaning the user can use the site without feeling anything slowing them down. Sometimes designers add friction to sites intentionally. For example, ads in mobile games make the “x” you need to press incredibly small and hard to press to make it harder to leave their ad:

It depends on if we mean how many accounts have been registered vs. how many people are logged into Twitter on a given day. And it also depends on how we count situations where one person has many accounts, or many people share a corporate account.

” Twitter has repeatedly said that spam bots represent less than 5% of its total user base. [Elon] Musk, meanwhile, has complained that the number is much higher, and has threatened to walk away from his agreement to buy the company.