What’s Happening On RedNote? A Media Scholar Explains The App TikTok Users Are Fleeing To – And The Cultural Moment Unfolding There

BY JIANQING CHEN

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF EAST

ASIAN LANGUAGES  AND CULTURES

AND OF FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES,

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

TikTok refugees fled by the millions to RedNote, a Chinese app, in response to the TikTok ban, which went into effect Jan. 19, 2025. The company shut down the app shortly before midnight on Jan. 18 but restored service the following day. The app was unavailable to download from the Apple and Google app stores on Jan. 19.

Through cat memes, shared jokes about the ban and honest conversations about usually avoided topics, former TikTokers and RedNote natives are bridging years of U.S.-China digital separation. This spontaneous convergence recalls the internet’s original dream of a global village. It’s a glimmer of hope for connection and communication in a divided world.

I’m a researcher who studies Chinese and transnational digital media. I’m also a Chinese person who lives in the U.S. I’ve been a RedNote user since 2014.

On Tuesday morning, Jan. 14, 2025, my usual RedNote morning scroll revealed a transformed For You Page. Mixed in with my typical TV drama, celebrity and makeup content were new posts from self-proclaimed “TikTok refugees,” with U.S. IP addresses. As I continued scrolling, the recommendation algorithm flooded my feed with more and more of these posts from new U.S. users seeking to rebuild their community on RedNote.

Rapid influx

The phenomenon exploded rapidly: within 24 hours, the hashtag #TikTok Refugee# on RedNote had garnered 36.2 million views and sparked millions of discussions. RedNote topped Apple’s App Store’s free app charts.

According to these TikTok refugees, with the Jan. 19, 2025, ban looming, users feared losing not just their platform access but their content and income streams as well.

Rather than switching to U.S.-based alternatives like Meta’s Instagram or X, they chose to flee to another Chinese platform as their protest against U.S. tech giants, whom they blamed for lobbying for the ban. Their platform of choice was RedNote.

This unexpected shift largely stems from TikTok influencers like @whattheish recommending RedNote as the new TikTok. Given that the app Douyin is China’s version of TikTok, the exodus to RedNote might seem surprising. However, most other Chinese apps, including Douyin, are only available in Chinese app stores and require Chinese phone numbers to register. RedNote is uniquely accessible to users outside China through app stores in various regions, without requiring a Chinese phone number.

Instead of segregating users by geographical regions with different versions as TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance Ltd., did, RedNote – called Xiaohongshu in Chinese – provides access to the same platform globally. ByteDance is based in China but launched TikTok as a U.S. subsidiary in 2015. TikTok partnered with Oracle in 2022 to handle Americans’ user data to address data security concerns. In contrast, RedNote owner Xingyin Information Technology Ltd. is a Shanghai-based company and so remains free from direct U.S. oversight.

RedNote’s global accessibility

This global accessibility aligns with the original vision for Xiaohongshu. The name Little Red Book – its literal English translation – often leads people in the West to draw parallels with Mao’s revolutionary text, suggesting a communist focus. Yet the platform’s true aspirations couldn’t be more different.

The app, created in 2013, emerged with a rather bourgeois focus. The app’s founders, Qu Fang and Mao Wenchao, met while shopping in the U.S. They positioned Xiaohongshu as a platform that combined social media, lifestyle content and e-commerce, all centered around global travel and shopping.

Though RedNote has evolved to attract a broader demographic, its core user base remains international students, Chinese overseas communities and international travelers. Its name shows the platform’s promise to be a “red” – meaning popular in Chinese – guide for foreign travel and shopping. It functions as both a travel bible for Chinese tourists and a fashion curator of glamorous foreign lifestyles.

The app has been influential in transforming lesser-known locations into Chinese tourist destinations. It turned Düsseldorf, Germany, into a foodie destination for Chinese tourists in 2023 and highlighted hip scenes and public restrooms in Paris during the 2024 Olympic games.

For me, as a native Chinese person living abroad, RedNote has become an essential daily platform for searching reviews, sharing life’s moments and staying connected with Chinese communities. Even before the TikTok refugee influx, Xiaohongshu had attracted users from Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and other Sinophone communities.

From memes to open dialog

I nervously lurked in the discussion sections, watching for potential friction and conflicts between TikTok refugees and RedNote natives, or “red sweetpotatoes” as they call themselves. Yet the first encounters were surprisingly heartwarming and playful.

Following word-of-mouth advice, TikTok newcomers posted cat pictures as their first move after opening new accounts. They jokingly call this paying their cat tax. Chinese RedNote users responded with compliments or by sharing their own cat photos in return. This is how they broke the ice despite language and cultural barriers.

When TikTok refugees posted introductions without pets, RedNote users would respond with a meme: a cat holding a gun with the caption “Hello, I am a spy. Show me your cat.” This joke caught on quickly. “Chinese spy” soon became another way to say “Chinese friend.” TikTok refugees even asked “do you want to be my Chinese spy?” as a playful conversation starter.

Through cute memes and witty jokes, both groups ridiculed the TikTok ban. They mocked how the ban twists data privacy issues into dated narratives of Cold War rivalry and espionage, rather than treating them as shared digital age challenges that all humans face together.

After these greetings, RedNote natives and TikTok refugees often exchanged questions on various topics. Some of these topics worried me because they could easily turn into conversation-breakers. For example, A TikTok refugee asked about LGBTQ life in China, and a RedNote native inquired about U.S. incomes.

But instead of creating awkward tension as I feared, these exchanges led to meaningful dialog. Chinese users explained their questions about U.S. income: they were curious because Chinese “American dreamers” – Chinese who talk of moving to the U.S. – often paint an exaggerated picture of American salaries and living standards. Americans were surprised to learn that while same-sex marriage remains illegal in China, the city of Chengdu is known as the country’s “gay capital.”

Recalling the internet’s lost promise

As I documented these interactions, they continued to grow and evolve. What started as text discussions extended into livestreaming conversations. This rare moment of direct interaction between American and Chinese social media users reveals that they’re not as different as they might have thought. Online, they were sharing the same interests: cute memes, “thirst traps” and funny comments. Offline, they face similar daily struggles to make ends meet.

How might this end? Will TikTok refugees leave once their enthusiasm fades, or will regulators from either side step in? As someone who has researched U.S.-China media exchanges for years, I’m struck by this moment’s significance, however temporary it may be. This represents a meaningful reconnection between U.S. and Chinese internet users after years of digital separation.

That separation was caused and reinforced by Google’s withdrawal from China, China’s Great Firewall and the U.S. forced segregation of ByteDance’s U.S. and Chinese platforms. In addition, digital platforms and recommendation algorithms increasingly trap people in their own information bubbles.

To me, the moment recalls the utopian vision once shared by California’s internet pioneers and Chinese tech innovators and users: a digital agora and global village.

It’s also a silver lining in the cloud of global divides. Even in a world increasingly fractured by platforms, misinformation and political divisions, unexpected connections can still blossom. Seemingly impossible linguistic, cultural and digital divides can be crossed when people approach each other with respect, sincerity, a touch of humor – and perhaps the aid of AI translators.

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Social Media And Political Violence – How To Break The Cycle

BY RICHARD FORNO

PRINCIPAL LECTURER IN COMPUTER 

SCIENCE AND ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING,

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, 2024, added more fuel to an already fiery election season. In this case, political violence was carried out against the party that is most often found espousing it. The incident shows how uncontrollable political violence can be – and how dangerous the current times are for America.

Part of the complication is the contentious and adversarial nature of American politics, of course. But technology makes it more difficult for Americans to understand sudden news developments.

Gone are the days when only a handful of media outlets reported the news to broad swaths of society after rigorous fact-checking by professional journalists.

By contrast, anyone today can “report” news online, provide what they claim is “analysis” of events, and combine fact, fiction, speculation and opinion to fit a desired narrative or political perspective.

Then that perspective is potentially made to seem legitimate by virtue of the poster’s official office, net worth, number of social media followers, or attention from mainstream news organizations seeking to fill news cycles.

And that’s before any mention of convincing deepfake audio and video clips, whose lies and misrepresentations can further sow confusion and distrust online and in society.

Today’s internet-based narratives also often involve personal attacks either directly or through inference and suggestion – what experts call “stochastic terrorism” that can motivate people to violence. Political violence is the inevitable result – and has been for years, including attacks on U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, the 2017 congressional baseball practice shooting, the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, and now the attempted assassination of a former president running for the White House again.

When bullets and conspiracies fly

As a security and internet researcher it was entirely predictable to me that within minutes of the attack, right-wing social media exploded with instant-reaction narratives that assigned blame to political rivals, the media, or implied that a sinister “inside job” by the federal government was behind the incident.

But it wasn’t just average internet users or prominent business magnates fanning these flames. Several Republicans issued such statements from their official social media accounts. For instance, less than an hour after the attack, Georgia Congressman Mike Collins accused President Joe Biden of “inciting an assassination” and said Biden “sent the orders.” Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, now Trump’s nominee for vice president, also implied that Biden was responsible for the attack.

The bloodied former president stood up and delayed his Secret Service evacuation for a fist-pumping photo before leaving the rally, and his campaign issued a defiant fundraising email later that evening. This led some Trump critics to suggest the incident was a “false flag” attack staged to earn a sympathetic national spotlight. Others claimed the incident fits into Trump’s ongoing messaging to supporters that he’s the victim of persecution.

From a historical perspective, it’s worth noting former Brazil right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro survived an assassination attempt in 2018 to become the country’s next president in 2019.

It’s long been known that internet narratives, memes and content can spread around the world like wildfire well before the actual truth becomes known. Unfortunately, those narratives, whether factual or fictional, can get picked up – and thus given a degree of perceived legitimacy and further disseminated – by traditional news organizations.

Many who see such messages, amplified by both social media and traditional news services, often believe them – and some may respond with political violence or terrorism.

Can anything help?

Several threads of research show that there are some ways regular people can help break this dangerous cycle.

In the immediate aftermath of breaking news, it’s important to remember that first reports often are wrong, incomplete or inaccurate. Rather than rushing to repost things during rapidly developing news events, it’s best to avoid retweeting, reposting or otherwise amplifying online content right away. When information has been confirmed by multiple credible sources, ideally across the political spectrum, then it’s likely safe enough to believe and share.

In the longer term, as a nation and a society, it will be useful to further understand how technology and human tendencies interact. Teaching schoolchildren more about media literacy and critical thinking can help prepare future citizens to separate fact from fiction in a complex world filled with competing information.

Another potential approach is to expand civics and history lessons in school classrooms, to give students the ability to learn from the past and – we can all hope – not repeat its mistakes.

Social media companies are part of the potential solution, too. In recent years, they have disbanded teams meant to monitor content and boost users’ trust in the information available on their platforms. Recent Supreme Court rulings make clear that these companies are free to actively police their platforms for disinformation, misinformation and conspiracy theories if they wish. But companies and purported “free speech absolutists” including X owner Elon Musk, who refuse to remove controversial, though technically legal, internet content from their platforms may well endanger public safety.

Traditional media organizations bear responsibility for objectively informing the public without giving voice to unverified conspiracy theories or misinformation. Ideally, qualified guests invited to news programs will add useful facts and informed opinion to the public discourse instead of speculation. And serious news hosts will avoid the rhetorical technique of “just asking questions” or engaging in “bothsiderism” as ways to move fringe theories – often from the internet – into the news cycle, where they gain traction and amplification.

The public has a role, too.

Responsible citizens could focus on electing officials and supporting political parties that refuse to embrace conspiracy theories and personal attacks as normal strategies. Voters could make clear that they will reward politicians who focus on policy accomplishments, not their media imagery and social media follower counts.

That could, over time, deliver the message that the spectacle of modern internet political narratives generally serve no useful purpose beyond sowing social discord and degrading the ability of government to function – and potentially leading to political violence and terrorism.

Understandably, these are not instant remedies. Many of these efforts will take time – potentially even years – and money and courage to accomplish.

Until then, maybe Americans can revisit the golden rule – doing onto others what we would have them do unto us. Emphasizing facts in the news cycle, integrity in the public square, and media literacy in our schools seem like good places to start as well.

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Banning TikTok Won’t Solve Social Media’s Foreign Influence, Teen Harm And Data Privacy Problems

BY SARAH FLORINI

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF FILM

AND MEDIA STUDIES

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

When President Joe Biden signed a US$95 billion foreign aid bill into law on April 24, 2024, it started the clock on a nine-month window for TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app. The president can extend the deadline by three months, and TikTok has indicated that it plans to challenge the law in court.

If the law stands and the company fails to sell the app, TikTok will be blocked from any U.S. app store or web-hosting service. This would affect TikTok’s over 170 million U.S. users, including 62% of Americans ages 18 to 29.

It would also alter the news and information landscape. Unlike its competitors, TikTok has been annually increasing its proportion of users who regularly seek news on the platform. Nearly one-third of Americans under 30 use TikTok as a news source.

The main arguments against TikTok under ByteDance’s ownership include that it enables foreign influence of U.S. public opinion, promotes harmful behaviors among minors, and undermines Americans’ data privacy. However, none of these concerns are new or unique to TikTok among social media platforms.

Foreign influence and propaganda

Lawmakers have expressed concern that the Chinese government could influence U.S. public opinion, and thereby politics, by exerting control over what content TikTok users see. Rep. Mike Gallager (R-WI), co-sponsor of the House bill on TikTok, warned that allowing TikTok to establish itself as the dominant news platform in America is placing control of information in the hands of ByteDance and, by extension, the Chinese Communist Party.

Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) referred to TikTok’s role in challenging ConocoPhillips’ Willow oil drilling project in Alaska as a possible Chinese influence operation meant to undermine U.S. energy dominance.

But U.S-based social media platforms have been and continue to be exploited by a range of foreign governments, including China, and their proxies who use them to attempt to influence U.S. public opinion. Beginning with its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, Russian intelligence has long used platforms like Facebook and X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, to these ends for nearly a decade.

These influence campaigns create and maintain coordinated cross-platform networks. Researchers assert that Facebook, Instagram, X and YouTube refuse to provide the access to the data necessary to track or prevent such activities.

Hazardous to minors

Some lawmakers also caution that TikTok feeds children content linked to dangerous behaviors, like eating disorders and self-harm. However, all social media may pose these threats.

For example, leaked internal documents from a whistleblower revealed that Meta has known since 2019 that its platforms are likely hurting U.S. minors’ mental health and well-being. The company’s internal research found that the platform contributed to body image issues and eating disorders among teen girls and exposed teens to other harmful behaviors, such as bullying, drug abuse and self-harm.

Currently, 41 U.S. states and the District of Columbia have filed lawsuits against Meta for the damage allegedly done to minors.

At the same time, there has been little outcry about how time spent on social media increases young people’s exposure to hate-based content or that platforms such as YouTube funnel users into pipelines for radicalization.

Data security and privacy

Proponents of the TikTok sale-or-ban law also claim that the app constitutes an unacceptable threat to data privacy. Rep. Gallagher asserted that the Chinese government could use TikTok for espionage to “find Americans, exfiltrate data and track the location of journalists.”

Yet, there is little reason to believe Americans’ data is safer with U.S.-based companies. Meta has had a wide range of data privacy scandals. Last year, leaked documents showed that even Meta engineers themselves have minimal understanding or control over how people’s data is used.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), co-sponsor of the House bill on TikTok, invoked a case involving the dating app Grindr as a successful precedent for forcing ByteDance to divest TikTok. In 2020, the Chinese company that owned Grindr sold the app to a U.S. company following security concerns similar to those surrounding TikTok. But, just last year, a fringe Catholic group in Denver purchased location and usage data from Grindr and other dating apps to track LGBTQ+ priests.

Additionally, the Chinese government hardly needs control of TikTok to access the troves of data that apps, devices and smart appliances collect from Americans. Much of this data can be purchased, completely legally, from commercial data brokers, regardless of who owns it.

Data freely available for purchase on the open market has been shown to include the location data for people visiting Planned Parenthood and mobile device location pings that can be deanonymized to reveal the whereabouts of the president of the United States.

The need for regulation

Concerns about TikTok are not unfounded, but they are also not unique. Each threat posed by TikTok has also been posed by U.S.-based social media for over a decade. I believe that lawmakers should take action to address harms caused by U.S. companies seeking profit as well as by foreign companies perpetrating espionage.

Protecting Americans cannot be accomplished by banning a single app. To truly protect their constituents, lawmakers would need to enact broad, far-reaching regulation.

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Is Social Media Harming Teens? Yes And No.

BY MATHEW INGRAM

Over the past decade or so, The Atlantic has published a series of articles warning of the harm that social media and smartphone apps are doing to teenagers. These articles have had headlines like “The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood,” “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks,” “The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls,” and “Get Phones out of Schools Now.” These articles have one other thing in common: they were all written by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a coauthor of the 2019 book The Coddling of the American Mind.

Now Haidt is out with a new book (whose themes will be familiar to readers of his Atlantic articles), The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. After 2010, there was a sharp increase in depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicide among young people, Haidt writes; rates of depression and anxiety in the US, for example, rose by more than 50 percent over the following decade, a figure that rises to 130 percent for girls between the ages of ten and nineteen. Haidt observed similar patterns around the same time in other countries, including Canada, the UK, and Australia. And he says that they were caused by smartphones and social media. Giving young people smartphones in the early 2010s was “the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children,” he writes in The Anxious Generation, adding that we may as well have sent “Gen Z to grow up on Mars.”

Haidt wrote last year, in another of his Atlantic essays, that smartphones and social media “impede learning, stunt relationships, and lessen belonging,” and that they have created an environment for children that is “hostile to human development.” In his view, governments, schools, and other organizations should take a number of steps in response, including banning social media for children under sixteen and removing smartphones from schools. All children “deserve schools that will help them learn, cultivate deep friendships, and develop into mentally healthy young adults,” he writes. And he notes that last year, Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general, issued a public advisory warning that social media can create a “profound risk” of harm to the “mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”

In both The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxious Generation, Haidt argues that social media and smartphones prevent children from understanding how to behave and survive in the “real world.” According to Haidt, a “variety of measures” show that members of Gen Z (children born after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, and related disorders “at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.” Not only that, he argues, but these problems carry over into adulthood: Haidt says that young adults are “dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children” than prior generations, and that coworkers say they are also more difficult to work with.

Concerns about the dangers of social media are nothing new. Sherry Turkle, a social scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been writing and speaking for several decades about the negative effects of social media and internet use, arguing that such tools have replaced normal human communication and led to isolation and emotional pain through what she calls the “illusion of companionship” that the online world offers. Humans think that constant connection will make us feel less lonely, Turkle wrote in 2012, but “the opposite is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will know only how to be lonely.”

More recently, in 2021, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook staffer, leaked a cache of documents that she said showed that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, ignored warnings from its own researchers about the harmful effects the latter app was having on teenage girls and their self-esteem. (I wrote about the leak at the time.) Haugen told a joint committee of the British Parliament that Facebook’s own research showed that children using Instagram were unhappy but also felt that they could not stop using it. At the time, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, wrote that it was “very important” to him that everything he built was safe for kids. But some observers believe that such problems have continued. According to The Guardian, a psychologist who advised Meta on suicide prevention quit last month, accusing the company of turning a blind eye to harmful content and of putting profit over lives.

The warnings from Haidt, Turkle, and others appear to have been influential in some political circles. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, recently signed a bill banning children under fourteen from having social media accounts at all and requiring children under sixteen to get parental permission first. Similar legislation has passed in Utah, Ohio, and Arkansas. Unfortunately for supporters of this kind of law, however, federal courts have blocked the legislation in the latter two states, while Utah’s version is currently being challenged. As the New York Times noted, the reason is fairly straightforward: restricting access to social media means restricting access to speech, and in most cases, the First Amendment doesn’t allow the government to do this—not even when children are involved.

Free speech aside, some researchers believe that concerns about the harms of teenage social media use are wildly overstated. In a review of Haidt’s latest book for Nature, Candice Odgers—a professor of psychology at the University of California, Irvine, who researches the effects of social media on children—predicted that the book is going to “sell a lot of copies, because [he] is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe.” For Odgers, however, this scary story is “not supported by science.” Haidt’s book (and a related website called After Babel) contains graphs showing that mental health problems in teens have increased along with smartphone use. But for Odgers, all these charts prove is that researchers should “avoid making up stories by simply looking at trend lines.”

Odgers writes that she and many other researchers have sought out the kinds of conclusive links suggested by Haidt and Turkle, but that those efforts have produced what she calls “a mix of no, small and mixed associations.” When links are found between depression or anxiety and smartphone or social media use, she writes, they suggest “not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.” Odgers says that numerous studies, including an analysis of teenage mental health in more than seventy countries, showed “no consistent or measurable associations” between well-being and social media. Haidt, she writes, may be a gifted storyteller, but the story he is telling “is currently one searching for evidence.”

Odgers is not alone in her skepticism. Dylan Selterman, a psychology professor at Johns Hopkins University, wrote recently that studies of the effects of social media on the mental health of teens have shown mixed findings and “vary in quality”; therefore, no scientific consensus exists. Some researchers have found a link, but just as many have failed to find one—and in some cases, psychologists have suggested that social media might actually have positive effects. One study found that eating potatoes had a stronger negative correlation with a teen’s mental health than using social media. Aaron Brown, a statistics professor writing in Reason, argues that the evidence Haidt supplies “not only doesn’t support his claim about teen health and mental health, it undermines it,” since many of the studies he refers to are badly designed or don’t prove what they claim to. (To his credit, Haidt has maintained a Google Doc that links to many of the critical responses to his research.)

Odgers argues that two things can be true at once when it comes to social media: that there is no conclusive evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness, but that changes to the ways these platforms work would nonetheless be wise, given how much time young people spend on them. What seems inarguable, Odgers writes, is that the US has “a generation in crisis and in desperate need of the best of what science and evidence-based solutions can offer.” But instead of searching for real solutions, she argues, we are obsessed with scary stories that are unsupported by research and in the end do little to help young people.

Other notable stories:For the New York Times Magazine, Lachlan Cartwright reflects on working for the National Enquirer during the period when the publication became embroiled in the “catch and kill” scheme that disappeared damaging stories on behalf of Donald Trump, and led to Trump’s eventual indictment in New York. “Now, as a former president faces a criminal trial for the first time in American history, I’m forced to grapple with what really happened at the Enquirer in those years—and whether and how I can ever set things right,” Cartwright says. “As I’ve tried to come to terms with just how corrupt an organization I worked for in those years, I’ve taken some comfort in the fact that acting as a source for other journalists helped rebalance the scales—not only for me but for the public too.” (ICYMI, Simon V.Z. Wood profiled the Enquirer and its Trump ties for CJR back in 2019.)
In 2022, Chicago Public Media, which oversees WBEZ, the local NPR affiliate, acquired the Chicago Sun-Times and converted the paper into a nonprofit. The move drew some hopeful commentary, but yesterday, Chicago Public Media laid off fourteen staffers across the two organizations, citing sharp financial headwinds. In other media-business news, unionized journalists at the Rochester, New York, Democrat and Chronicle are preparing to strike starting this weekend if Gannett, the paper’s owner, doesn’t agree to a new union contract by then. And the New York Post reports that CBS News quietly shuttered its bureau in Tokyo this week, as a cost-cutting measure. In more optimistic news, ProPublica committed to publishing “accountability journalism” in all fifty states by 2029.
Writing for CJR, Alexandra Smith, the audience director at The 19th, explains why the outlet has changed the way it measures its readership. “We used to measure our journalism’s reach and impact with website views, visitors, and engaged time—the methods many of our funders insisted on,” but “in our current reality, journalism exists in various formats splintered across platforms and products,” Smith writes. In response, The 19th devised a new metric called “total journalism reach,” which measures not only website traffic but views of 19th journalism on other news sites, aggregation apps, and Instagram, as well as newsletter readership, event attendance, and podcast listens.

The Ringer’s Nate Rogers tracked down Ray Suzuki, the author of an infamous review posted by the music publication Pitchfork in 2006—and found that Suzuki was never a real person at all, but a byline the site would occasionally use as a multipurpose pseudonym. Rogers’s hunt for Suzuki, he writes, illuminated the “underground ethos” that fueled Pitchfork’s rise—“a passionate, experimental, and sometimes childish approach that feels particularly distant in 2024, as the site has found itself in dire corporate straits.” (Pitchfork was folded into GQ and lost much of its staff this year.)
And police in London issued an update in the case of Pouria Zeraati, an anchor for the UK-based news channel Iran International who was stabbed outside his home last week. (We wrote about the attack on Tuesday.) The investigation is ongoing, but police have established that three suspects fled the UK within hours of the incident. (The Iranian government has denied any involvement, but has often been accused of hiring proxies to attack overseas critics.) Meanwhile, Zeraati pledged that he will be back on air soon.

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Gmail Revolutionized Email 20 Years Ago. People Thought It Was Google’s April Fool’s Day Joke

an ad for Google's Gmail appears on the side of a bus on Sept. 17, 2012, in Lagos, Nigeria. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin  unveiled Gmail 20 years ago on April Fool's Day. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba. File)

BY MICHAEL LIEDTKE

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin loved pulling pranks, so much so they began rolling outlandish ideas every April Fool’s Day not long after starting their company more than a quarter century ago. One year, Google posted a job opening for a Copernicus research center on the moon. Another year, the company said it planned to roll out a “scratch and sniff” feature on its search engine.

The jokes were so consistently over-the-top that people learned to laugh them off as another example of Google mischief. And that’s why Page and Brin decided to unveil something no one would believe was possible 20 years ago on April Fool’s Day.

It was Gmail, a free service boasting 1 gigabyte of storage per account, an amount that sounds almost pedestrian in an age of one-terabyte iPhones. But it sounded like a preposterous amount of email capacity back then, enough to store about 13,500 emails before running out of space compared to just 30 to 60 emails in the then-leading webmail services run by Yahoo and Microsoft. That translated into 250 to 500 times more email storage space.

Besides the quantum leap in storage, Gmail also came equipped with Google’s search technology so users could quickly retrieve a tidbit from an old email, photo or other personal information stored on the service. It also automatically threaded together a string of communications about the same topic so everything flowed together as if it was a single conversation.

“The original pitch we put together was all about the three ‘S’s” — storage, search and speed,” said former Google executive Marissa Mayer, who helped design Gmail and other company products before later becoming Yahoo’s CEO.

It was such a mind-bending concept that shortly after The Associated Press published a story about Gmail late on the afternoon of April Fool’s 2004, readers began calling and emailing to inform the news agency it had been duped by Google’s pranksters

“That was part of the charm, making a product that people won’t believe is real. It kind of changed people’s perceptions about the kinds of applications that were possible within a web browser,” former Google engineer Paul Buchheit recalled during a recent AP interview about his efforts to build Gmail.

It took three years to do as part of a project called “Caribou” — a reference to a running gag in the Dilbert comic strip. “There was something sort of absurd about the name Caribou, it just made make me laugh,” said Buchheit, the 23rd employee hired at a company that now employs more than 180,000 people.

The AP knew Google wasn’t joking about Gmail because an AP reporter had been abruptly asked to come down from San Francisco to the company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters to see something that would make the trip worthwhile.

After arriving at a still-developing corporate campus that would soon blossom into what became known as the “Googleplex,” the AP reporter was ushered into a small office where Page was wearing an impish grin while sitting in front of his laptop computer.

Page, then just 31 years old, proceeded to show off Gmail’s sleekly designed inbox and demonstrated how quickly it operated within Microsoft’s now-retired Explorer web browser. And he pointed out there was no delete button featured in the main control window because it wouldn’t be necessary, given Gmail had so much storage and could be so easily searched. “I think people are really going to like this,” Page predicted.

As with so many other things, Page was right. Gmail now has an estimated 1.8 billion active accounts — each one now offering 15 gigabytes of free storage bundled with Google Photos and Google Drive. Even though that’s 15 times more storage than Gmail initially offered, it’s still not enough for many users who rarely see the need to purge their accounts, just as Google hoped.

The digital hoarding of email, photos and other content is why Google, Apple and other companies now make money from selling additional storage capacity in their data centers. (In Google’s case, it charges anywhere from $30 annually for 200 gigabytes of storage to $250 annually for 5 terabytes of storage). Gmail’s existence is also why other free email services and the internal email accounts that employees use on their jobs offer far more storage than was fathomed 20 years ago.

“We were trying to shift the way people had been thinking because people were working in this model of storage scarcity for so long that deleting became a default action,” Buchheit said.

Gmail was a game changer in several other ways while becoming the first building block in the expansion of Google’s internet empire beyond its still-dominant search engine.

After Gmail came Google Maps and Google Docs with word processing and spreadsheet applications. Then came the acquisition of video site YouTube, followed by the introduction of the the Chrome browser and the Android operating system that powers most of the world’s smartphones. With Gmail’s explicitly stated intention to scan the content of emails to get a better understanding of users’ interests, Google also left little doubt that digital surveillance in pursuit of selling more ads would be part of its expanding ambitions.

Although it immediately generated a buzz, Gmail started out with a limited scope because Google initially only had enough computing capacity to support a small audience of users.

“When we launched, we only had 300 machines and they were really old machines that no one else wanted,” Buchheit said, with a chuckle. “We only had enough capacity for 10,000 users, which is a little absurd.”

But that scarcity created an air of exclusivity around Gmail that drove feverish demand for an elusive invitations to sign up. At one point, invitations to open a Gmail account were selling for $250 apiece on eBay. “It became a bit like a social currency, where people would go, ‘Hey, I got a Gmail invite, you want one?’” Buchheit said.

Although signing up for Gmail became increasingly easier as more of Google’s network of massive data centers came online, the company didn’t begin accepting all comers to the email service until it opened the floodgates as a Valentine’s Day present to the world in 2007.

A few weeks later on April Fool’s Day in 2007, Google would announce a new feature called “Gmail Paper” offering users the chance to have Google print out their email archive on “94% post-consumer organic soybean sputum " and then have it sent to them through the Postal Service. Google really was joking around that time.

Are Social Media Apps ‘Dangerous Products’? 2 Scholars Explain How The Companies Rely On Young Users But Fail To Protect Them

BY JOAN DONOVAN AND SARA PARKER

“You have blood on your hands.”

“I’m sorry for everything you have all been through.”

These quotes, the first from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., speaking to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and the second from Zuckerberg to families of victims of online child abuse in the audience, are highlights from an extraordinary day of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee about protecting children online.

But perhaps the most telling quote from the Jan. 31, 2024, hearing came not from the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, X, Discord or Snap but from Sen. Graham in his opening statement: Social media platforms “as they are currently designed and operate are dangerous products.”

We are university researchers who study how social media organizes news, information and communities. Whether or not social media apps meet the legal definition of “unreasonably dangerous products,” the social media companies’ business models do rely on having millions of young users. At the same time, we believe that the companies have not invested sufficient resources to effectively protect those users.

Mobile device use by children and teens skyrocketed during the pandemic and has stayed high. Naturally, teens want to be where their friends are, be it the skate park or on social media. In 2022, there were an estimated 49.8 million users age 17 and under of YouTube, 19 million of TikTok, 18 million of Snapchat, 16.7 million of Instagram, 9.9 million of Facebook and 7 million of Twitter, according to a recent study by researchers at Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health.

Teens are a significant revenue source for social media companies. Revenue from users 17 and under of social media was US$11 billion in 2022, according to the Chan School study. Instagram netted nearly $5 billion, while TikTok and YouTube each accrued over $2 billion. Teens mean green.

Social media poses a range of risks for teens, from exposing them to harassment, bullying and sexual exploitation to encouraging eating disorders and suicidal ideation. For Congress to take meaningful action on protecting children online, we identify three issues that need to be accounted for: age, business model and content moderation.

How old are you?

Social media companies have an incentive to look the other way in terms of their users’ ages. Otherwise they would have to spend the resources to moderate their content appropriately. Millions of underage users – those under 13 – are an “open secret” at Meta. Meta has described some potential strategies to verify user ages, like requiring identification or video selfies, and using AI to guess their age based on “Happy Birthday” messages.

However, the accuracy of these methods is not publicly open to scrutiny, so it’s difficult to audit them independently.

Meta has stated that online teen safety legislation is needed to prevent harm, but the company points to app stores, currently dominated by Apple and Google, as the place where age verification should happen. However, these guardrails can be easily circumvented by accessing a social media platform’s website rather than its app.

New generations of customers

Teen adoption is crucial for continued growth of all social media platforms. The Facebook Files, an investigation based on a review of company documents, showed that Instagram’s growth strategy relies on teens helping family members, particularly younger siblings, get on the platform. Meta claims it optimizes for “meaningful social interaction,” prioritizing family and friends’ content over other interests. However, Instagram allows pseudonymity and multiple accounts, which makes parental oversight even more difficult.

On Nov. 7, 2023, Auturo Bejar, a former senior engineer at Facebook, testified before Congress. At Meta he surveyed teen Instagram users and found 24% of 13- to 15-year-olds said they had received unwanted advances within the past seven days, a fact he characterizes as “likely the largest-scale sexual harassment of teens to have ever happened.” Meta has since implemented restrictions on direct messaging in its products for underage users.

But to be clear, widespread harassment, bullying and solicitation is a part of the landscape of social media, and it’s going to take more than parents and app stores to rein it in.

Meta recently announced that it is aiming to provide teens with “age-appropriate experiences,” in part by prohibiting searches for terms related to suicide, self-harm and eating disorders. However, these steps don’t stop online communities that promote these harmful behaviors from flourishing on the company’s social media platforms. It takes a carefully trained team of human moderators to monitor and enforce terms of service violations for dangerous groups.

Content moderation

Social media companies point to the promise of artificial intelligence to moderate content and provide safety on their platforms, but AI is not a silver bullet for managing human behavior. Communities adapt quickly to AI moderation, augmenting banned words with purposeful misspellings and creating backup accounts to prevent getting kicked off a platform.

Human content moderation is also problematic, given social media companies’ business models and practices. Since 2022, social media companies have implemented massive layoffs that struck at the heart of their trust and safety operations and weakened content moderation across the industry.

Congress will need hard data from the social media companies – data the companies have not provided to date – to assess the appropriate ratio of moderators to users.

The way forward

In health care, professionals have a duty to warn if they believe something dangerous might happen. When these uncomfortable truths surface in corporate research, little is done to inform the public of threats to safety. Congress could mandate reporting when internal studies reveal damaging outcomes.

Helping teens today will require social media companies to invest in human content moderation and meaningful age verification. But even that is not likely to fix the problem. The challenge is facing the reality that social media as it exists today thrives on having legions of young users spending significant time in environments that put them at risk. These dangers for young users are baked into the design of contemporary social media, which requires much clearer statutes about who polices social media and when intervention is needed.

One of the motives for tech companies not to segment their user base by age, which would better protect children, is how it would affect advertising revenue. Congress has limited tools available to enact change, such as enforcing laws about advertising transparency, including “know your customer” rules. Especially as AI accelerates targeted marketing, social media companies are going to continue making it easy for advertisers to reach users of any age. But if advertisers knew what proportion of ads were seen by children, rather than adults, they may think twice about where they place ads in the future.

Despite a number of high-profile hearings on the harms of social media, Congress has not yet passed legislation to protect children or make social media platforms liable for the content published on their platforms. But with so many young people online post-pandemic, it’s up to Congress to implement guardrails that ultimately put privacy and community safety at the center of social media design.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Supreme Court To Consider Giving First Amendment Protections To Social Media Posts

THE CONVERSATION

In 2021, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared misinformation on social media, especially about COVID-19 and vaccines, to be a public health threat. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

BY LYNN GREENKY

PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF

COMMU NICATION AND RHETORICAL STUDIES

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY

The First Amendment does not protect messages posted on social media platforms.

The companies that own the platforms can – and do – remove, promote or limit the distribution of any posts according to corporate policies. But all that might soon change.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear five cases during this current term, which ends in June 2024, that collectively give the court the opportunity to reexamine the nature of content moderation – the rules governing discussions on social media platforms such as Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter – and the constitutional limitations on the government to affect speech on the platforms.

Content moderation, whether done manually by company employees or automatically by a platform’s software and algorithms, affects what viewers can see on a digital media page. Messages that are promoted garner greater viewership and greater interaction; those that are deprioritized or removed will obviously receive less attention. Content moderation policies reflect decisions by digital platforms about the relative value of posted messages.

As an attorney, professor and author of a book about the boundaries of the First Amendment, I believe that the constitutional challenges presented by these cases will give the court the occasion to advise government, corporations and users of interactive technologies what their rights and responsibilities are as communications technologies continue to evolve.

Public forums

In late October 2023, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on two related cases in which both sets of plaintiffs argued that elected officials who use their social media accounts either exclusively or partially to promote their politics and policies cannot constitutionally block constituents from posting comments on the officials’ pages.

In one of those cases, O’Connor-Radcliff v. Garnier, two school board members from the Poway Unified School District in California blocked a set of parents – who frequently posted repetitive and critical comments on the board members’ Facebook and Twitter accounts – from viewing the board members’ accounts.

In the other case heard in October, Lindke v. Freed, the city manager of Port Huron, Michigan, apparently angered by critical comments about a posted picture, blocked a constituent from viewing or posting on the manager’s Facebook page.

Courts have long held that public spaces, like parks and sidewalks, are public forums, which must remain open to free and robust conversation and debate, subject only to neutral rules unrelated to the content of the speech expressed. The silenced constituents in the current cases insisted that in a world where a lot of public discussion is conducted in interactive social media, digital spaces used by government representatives for communicating with their constituents are also public forums and should be subject to the same First Amendment rules as their physical counterparts.

If the Supreme Court rules that public forums can be both physical and virtual, government officials will not be able to arbitrarily block users from viewing and responding to their content or remove constituent comments with which they disagree. On the other hand, if the Supreme Court rejects the plaintiffs’ argument, the only recourse for frustrated constituents will be to create competing social media spaces where they can criticize and argue at will.

Content moderation as editorial choices

Two other cases – NetChoice LLC v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice LLC – also relate to the question of how the government should regulate online discussions. Florida and Texas have both passed laws that modify the internal policies and algorithms of large social media platforms by regulating how the platforms can promote, demote or remove posts.

NetChoice, a tech industry trade group representing a wide range of social media platforms and online businesses, including Meta, Amazon, Airbnb and TikTok, contends that the platforms are not public forums. The group says that the Florida and Texas legislation unconstitutionally restricts the social media companies’ First Amendment right to make their own editorial choices about what appears on their sites.

In addition, NetChoice alleges that by limiting Facebook’s or X’s ability to rank, repress or even remove speech – whether manually or with algorithms – the Texas and Florida laws amount to government requirements that the platforms host speech they didn’t want to, which is also unconstitutional.

NetChoice is asking the Supreme Court to rule the laws unconstitutional so that the platforms remain free to make their own independent choices regarding when, how and whether posts will remain available for view and comment.

Censorship

In an effort to reduce harmful speech that proliferates across the internet – speech that supports criminal and terrorist activity as well as misinformation and disinformation – the federal government has engaged in wide-ranging discussions with internet companies about their content moderation policies.

To that end, the Biden administration has regularly advised – some say strong-armed – social media platforms to deprioritize or remove posts the government had flagged as misleading, false or harmful. Some of the posts related to misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines or promoted human trafficking. On several occasions, the officials would suggest that platform companies ban a user who posted the material from making further posts. Sometimes, the corporate representatives themselves would ask the government what to do with a particular post.

While the public might be generally aware that content moderation policies exist, people are not always aware of how those policies affect the information to which they are exposed. Specifically, audiences have no way to measure how content moderation policies affect the marketplace of ideas or influence debate and discussion about public issues.

In Missouri v. Biden, the plaintiffs argue that government efforts to persuade social media platforms to publish or remove posts were so relentless and invasive that the moderation policies no longer reflected the companies’ own editorial choices. Rather, they argue, the policies were in reality government directives that effectively silenced – and unconstitutionally censored – speakers with whom the government disagreed.

The court’s decision in this case could have wide-ranging effects on the manner and methods of government efforts to influence the information that guides the public’s debates and decisions.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

The Potential For Bias In Artificial Intelligence

BY RICHARD DAVIS

Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) hold great promise for the future. AI has the potential to improve efficiency, deliver personalized experiences, and assist in decision-making. However, there is growing concern that AI could perpetuate biases in society, including racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination.

Safiya Noble, a scholar, has shed light on this issue highlighting how AI algorithms can reinforce existing biases in society. These biases can be inadvertently built into AI systems as a result of the data used to train them. If the data used to train an AI system contains discriminatory patterns, the AI may unknowingly learn and perpetuate these biases.

To understand the potential impact of biased AI, it is essential to recognize how AI algorithms work. AI algorithms are designed to analyze vast amounts of data and make predictions or decisions based on patterns and correlations found within that data. However, if the training data is biased or reflects societal prejudices, the AI system will replicate those biases in its predictions or decisions.

For instance, if an AI system is trained using historic hiring data that reflects discriminatory practices, it may disproportionately favor candidates from the majority race or gender in future hiring decisions. This perpetuates the existing biases and discrimination present in the original data.

Similarly, AI systems used in law enforcement may be prone to reinforcing racial profiling. If the training data includes a disproportionate number of arrests or convictions of certain racial or ethnic groups, the AI system may generalize and unfairly target individuals from those groups in future crime predictions or law enforcement practices.

Moreover, algorithms that rely heavily on internet search data can also reinforce biases. Online platforms like search engines and social media often personalize content based on user preferences and past behavior. This means that individuals may be exposed to information that aligns with their existing biases, potentially reinforcing and amplifying them.

The consequences of biased AI can have significant impacts on society. If AI systems replicate and perpetuate biases, they can contribute to further marginalization and discrimination of already vulnerable groups. In fields such as healthcare, biased algorithms could lead to disparities in diagnoses and treatments, impacting the quality of care received different demographics.

Addressing bias in AI systems is of utmost importance to ensure fairness and prevent further perpetuation of discrimination. Noble suggests that efforts should start with diversifying the teams responsible for creating and training AI systems. By having a diverse range of perspectives, biases can be more effectively identified and mitigated during the development process.

Additionally, increased transparency and accountability in AI systems are crucial. Organizations and developers should be transparent in how AI models are trained, what data is used, and how decisions are made. Regular audits and evaluations should be conducted to identify and address any biases that may arise.

Furthermore, there is a need for ongoing research and policy development to regulate the use of AI and ensure it is aligned with ethical standards. Governments and regulatory bodies should work alongside experts to establish guidelines and frameworks that promote fairness, accountability, and non-discrimination in AI implementation.

While AI has the potential to bring about positive change, it is vital to recognize and address the potential for bias within these systems. By taking proactive steps to mitigate biases, we can harness the true potential of AI while ensuring a fair and inclusive society.

READ ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE

AI Is Changing How Americans Find Jobs, Get Promoted And Succeed At Work

BY CATHERINE RYMSHA

Whether we realize it or not, advancements in artificial intelligence are increasingly influencing the paths of our careers.

Advancements in human capital management systems, more strategic and data-driven human resource and talent management practices, and increased attention to bias are all factors that are changing how people are hired, developed, promoted and fired.

I teach and work in talent management and leadership development. I’ve used these programs and practices in the real world and continue to learn and research how these practices are changing. Artificial intelligence and systems are already big business, grossing over US$38 billion in 2021. Without a doubt, AI-driven software has the potential to advance quickly and change how companies make strategic decisions about their employees.

Here’s what that acceleration may mean to you.

Applying

Imagine you apply for a job in the very near future. You upload your carefully written résumé through the company website, noting that the platform looks eerily similar to other platforms you’ve used to apply for other jobs. After your résumé is saved, you provide demographic information and complete countless fields with the same data from your résumé. You then hit “submit” and hope for a follow-up email from a person.

Your data now lives within this company’s human capital management system. Even if they collect them, very few companies are looking at résumés anymore; they’re looking at the info you type into those tiny boxes to help make comparisons between you, dozens or hundreds of other applicants, and the job requirements. Even if your résumé demonstrates that you are the most qualified applicant, it alone is unlikely to catch the eye of the recruiter, because the recruiter’s attention is elsewhere.

Getting the job

Let’s say you get the call, you ace the interview and the job is yours. Your information hits another stage within the company’s database, or HCM: active employee. Your performance ratings and other data about your employment will now be tied to your profile, adding more data for the HCM and human resources to monitor and assess.

Enhancements in AI, technology and HCMs enable HR to look at employee data on deeper levels. The insights gleaned help identify talented employees who could fill key leadership roles when people quit and guide decisions about who should be promoted. The data can also identify favoritism and bias in hiring and promotion.

As you continue in your role, data on your performance is tracked and analyzed. This may include your performance ratings, supervisor’s feedback, professional development activity – or lack thereof. Having this large amount of data about you and others over time now helps HR think about how employees can better support the growth of the organization.

For example, HR may use data to identify how likely specific employees are to quit and evaluate the impact of that loss.

Platforms that many people already use every day aggregate productivity data from sign-in to signoff. Widely available Microsoft tools including Teams, Outlook and SharePoint can help provide insight to managers via their workplace analytics tool. The Microsoft productivity score tracks overall usage within the platform.

Even the metrics and behaviors defining “good” or “bad” performance may change, relying less on the perception of the manager. As data grows, even the work of professionals like consultants, doctors and marketers will be quantitatively and objectively measured. A 2022 New York Times investigation found that these systems, designed to improve worker productivity and accountability, had the effect of damaging morale and instilling fear.

It’s clear that American employees should begin to think about how our data is being used, what story that data is telling, and how it may dictate our futures.

Optimizing and understanding your career

Not every company has an HCM or is advanced in using talent data to make decisions. But many companies are becoming savvier and some are incredibly advanced. At a recent Microsoft Viva summit I attended, chief human resources officers from companies like PayPal and Rio Tinto outlined ways they are using these advancements.

Some researchers claim that AI could promote equity by removing implicit bias from hiring and promoting, but many more see a danger that AI built by humans will just repackage old issues in a new box. Amazon learned this lesson the hard way back in 2018 when a résumé-sorting AI it built had to be abandoned when it favored men for programming roles.

What’s more, the increase of data collection and analysis can leave employees unclear on where they stand while the organization is very clear. It’s best if you understand how AI is changing the workplace and demand transparency from your employer. These are data points that employees should consider asking about during their next review:

Do you see me as a high-potential employee?
How does my performance compare with others’?
Do you see me as a successor to your role or others’?

Just as you need to master traditional aspects of workplace culture, politics and relationships, you should learn to navigate these platforms, understand how you are being assessed, and take ownership of your career in a new and more data-driven way.

READ ORIGINAL ESSAY HERE

What’s A Luddite? An Expert On Technology And Society Explains

BY ANDREW MAYNARD, ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

The term “Luddite” emerged in early 1800s England. At the time there was a thriving textile industry that depended on manual knitting frames and a skilled workforce to create cloth and garments out of cotton and wool. But as the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum, steam-powered mills threatened the livelihood of thousands of artisanal textile workers.

Faced with an industrialized future that threatened their jobs and their professional identity, a growing number of textile workers turned to direct action. Galvanized by their leader, Ned Ludd, they began to smash the machines that they saw as robbing them of their source of income.

It’s not clear whether Ned Ludd was a real person, or simply a figment of folklore invented during a period of upheaval. But his name became synonymous with rejecting disruptive new technologies – an association that lasts to this day.
Questioning doesn’t mean rejecting

Contrary to popular belief, the original Luddites were not anti-technology, nor were they technologically incompetent. Rather, they were skilled adopters and users of the artisanal textile technologies of the time. Their argument was not with technology, per se, but with the ways that wealthy industrialists were robbing them of their way of life.

Today, this distinction is sometimes lost.

Being called a Luddite often indicates technological incompetence – as in, “I can’t figure out how to send emojis; I’m such a Luddite.” Or it describes an ignorant rejection of technology: “He’s such a Luddite for refusing to use Venmo.”

In December 2015, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates were jointly nominated for a “Luddite Award.” Their sin? Raising concerns over the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

The irony of three prominent scientists and entrepreneurs being labeled as Luddites underlines the disconnect between the term’s original meaning and its more modern use as an epithet for anyone who doesn’t wholeheartedly and unquestioningly embrace technological progress.

Yet technologists like Musk and Gates aren’t rejecting technology or innovation. Instead, they’re rejecting a worldview that all technological advances are ultimately good for society. This worldview optimistically assumes that the faster humans innovate, the better the future will be.

This “move fast and break things” approach toward technological innovation has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years – especially with growing awareness that unfettered innovation can lead to deeply harmful consequences that a degree of responsibility and forethought could help avoid.
Why Luddism matters

In an age of ChatGPT, gene editing and other transformative technologies, perhaps we all need to channel the spirit of Ned Ludd as we grapple with how to ensure that future technologies do more good than harm.

In fact, “Neo-Luddites” or “New Luddites” is a term that emerged at the end of the 20th century.

In 1990, the psychologist Chellis Glendinning published an essay titled “Notes toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto.”

In it, she recognized the nature of the early Luddite movement and related it to a growing disconnect between societal values and technological innovation in the late 20th century. As Glendinning writes, “Like the early Luddites, we too are a desperate people seeking to protect the livelihoods, communities, and families we love, which lie on the verge of destruction.”

On one hand, entrepreneurs and others who advocate for a more measured approach to technology innovation lest we stumble into avoidable – and potentially catastrophic risks – are frequently labeled “Neo-Luddites.”

These individuals represent experts who believe in the power of technology to positively change the future, but are also aware of the societal, environmental and economic dangers of blinkered innovation.

Then there are the Neo-Luddites who actively reject modern technologies, fearing that they are damaging to society. New York City’s Luddite Club falls into this camp. Formed by a group of tech-disillusioned Gen-Zers, the club advocates the use of flip phones, crafting, hanging out in parks and reading hardcover or paperback books. Screens are an anathema to the group, which sees them as a drain on mental health.

I’m not sure how many of today’s Neo-Luddites – whether they’re thoughtful technologists, technology-rejecting teens or simply people who are uneasy about technological disruption – have read Glendinning’s manifesto. And to be sure, parts of it are rather contentious. Yet there is a common thread here: the idea that technology can lead to personal and societal harm if it is not developed responsibly.

And maybe that approach isn’t such a bad thing.