Chapter 6: Social Media
In 2007, a web designer named Chris Messina made a suggestion to the users of a young message-posting service. The service was growing quickly, and messages were arriving as one long, undifferentiated stream. Messina proposed borrowing a convention from an older chat system: put a hash symbol in front of a word, and anyone interested in that word could gather around it. He built nothing. He proposed a habit, and used it himself.
The company was unconvinced, and for a while nothing in the software recognised the symbol at all. Then wildfires spread across southern California, and people near the fires began marking their updates with a common tag so that road closures, shelter locations and evacuation news could be found in one place. The tag worked because enough strangers agreed to use it. Only later did the platform make such tags clickable, turning a habit invented by users into part of the product.
That pattern is worth holding on to as you read this chapter. On social media the users are not seated in front of the medium; they are part of its machinery. The same openness that let ordinary people invent a way to organise emergency information also lets a rumour outrun its correction, and lets a stranger reach someone who never asked to be reached. Fig. 6.0-1 places those two consequences side by side.
Diagram
Fig. 6.0-1 – one small message card at the centre, arrows branching outward through six generic non-identifiable user figures to a wider outer ring of many more; label the left arc of the ring “organising, informing, mobilising” and the right arc “rumour, harassment, fraud”; add a caption line marking that both outcomes travel through the same network structure
Each of these questions is answered somewhere in the pages that follow.
6.4 Cyber Crime
The two previous sections described what social media makes possible. This one describes what it makes easy to do badly, and where the law draws a line across it.
Cyber crime means an unlawful act committed using a computer, a phone or a network — either against a person, as harassment and fraud are, or against a system, as unauthorised access to data is. The tools are new; most of the wrongs are not. Threatening someone, following them about, cheating them out of money and damaging their reputation were all offences long before anybody had a phone.
What the network changes is scale, speed and distance. An offender can act from another state or another country, reach thousands of targets in the time it once took to reach one, and remain unidentified while doing it. Evidence exists only as data, which can be deleted in a moment and needs technical work to recover, so the habit of preserving it matters more here than anywhere else.
In India, computer-related offences are dealt with principally under the Information Technology Act, 2000, together with the general criminal law, which was recodified in 2023 and came into force in 2024. Complaints can be filed at any police station, and the central government also runs an online cyber crime reporting portal for this purpose. The law in this area changes often, so treat the framework as the point rather than any particular provision.
6.4.1 Online Bullying
Online bullying, also called cyberbullying, is repeated and deliberate behaviour through digital means intended to harm, humiliate or frighten a particular person. Three conditions define it, and all three must be present. The behaviour is repeated rather than a single sharp remark. It is aimed at a specific person. And there is an imbalance — of numbers, of status, or simply of the willingness to keep going — that makes it hard for the target to make it stop.
The forms it takes are familiar enough to name plainly: repeated abusive messages, mocking posts or altered images published to an audience, deliberate exclusion from a class group, impersonation through a false account, and the circulation of something private in order to embarrass.
Why the Online Form Is Harder to Escape
Bullying in a corridor ends when the corridor does. Online bullying does not, and four properties of the medium explain the difference. Fig. 6.4-1 sets them beside the offline case.
Diagram
Fig. 6.4-1 – two panels. Left: a bounded rectangle labelled “school grounds, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.” containing a small group of generic figures and one figure apart from them; label it “ends at the gate”. Right: an unbounded field with a phone icon at the centre, arrows radiating outward and a clock face marked with no closing time; label the four arrows “reaches home”, “stays searchable”, “large audience”, “sender may be unidentified”. Mark that the same act produces a different scale of harm in the right panel
It follows the target home, because the device travels with them. It persists, because posts can be saved, copied and found again long after the sender has forgotten. It carries an audience, since humiliation before three people and before three hundred are different injuries. And it can be conducted from behind a false account, which removes the small restraint of being seen to do it.
The effects are well documented and serious: anxiety, sleep and concentration difficulties, withdrawal from friends, and reluctance to attend school or to use the platforms where the person’s other friendships live. None of this indicates weakness in the person targeted. It is the ordinary human response to sustained hostility.
What Actually Helps
If this is happening to you or to someone you know, four things are worth knowing. It is not the fault of the person being targeted, whatever they posted first. Evidence should be saved before it disappears, with the date and the account visible. Replying usually feeds it, while reporting and blocking on the platform usually does not. And telling a trusted adult — a parent, a class teacher, a school counsellor — is the step that most often ends it, because an adult can involve the school or, where the conduct is serious, the police.
6.4.2 Stalking
Cyber stalking is repeated, unwanted attention directed at a specific person through digital means, of a kind that would make a reasonable person afraid or seriously distressed. It differs from bullying in its purpose. Bullying seeks to humiliate; stalking seeks to reach, to watch and to control, and its characteristic effect on the target is fear rather than embarrassment.
It generally shows itself as persistent contact after the person has asked for it to stop, as contact continued through fresh accounts after each block, as unwanted attention to the target’s movements and daily routine, and as messages that make clear the sender knows where the person has been. Indian criminal law expressly recognises stalking, including the monitoring of a person’s use of the internet or electronic communication, as an offence.
Two features of ordinary social media use make it possible, and both are worth understanding rather than fearing. The first is the digital footprint, the trail of information a person leaves through posts, tags, check-ins and public profile details. A single post reveals little. Ten posts across a month can reveal a route, a timing and a place, because a routine is visible in the pattern even when no single item states it.
The second is that the network is designed for reach. Being findable is the point of a profile, and the same openness that lets a school friend find you lets anyone else do so.
Reducing Exposure, Without Blaming the Target
Sensible precautions exist, and taking them is not an admission that a target of stalking brought it on themselves — responsibility rests entirely with the person doing it. Keep location off posts made from home or school, and post about a place after leaving rather than while there. Keep the friend list and profile details visible to connections only. Review, once a term, what a stranger can see from outside the account.
If it is already happening, the sequence is the same as before and worth repeating: do not engage, preserve evidence with dates, block and report on the platform, and tell an adult who can act. Where there is any threat, or any indication that the person knows the target’s address or movements, this is a police matter and should be treated as one immediately.
6.4.3 Trolling
Trolling is the posting of deliberately provocative, offensive or disruptive material in order to provoke a reaction or derail a discussion. The troll’s object is the response itself. Where bullying pursues a person and stalking pursues fear, trolling pursues the argument that follows the post.
The origin of the word is genuinely disputed. One account traces it to a fishing method in which a baited line is drawn slowly through the water; another to the troll of folklore, waiting under a bridge. Both explanations are widely repeated, and neither has been settled, so it is honest to leave it open.
Anonymity supplies the conditions. Removing the face, the name and the consequence removes most of what restrains people in ordinary conversation, and the absence of the other person’s reaction removes the rest. Feedback then does the remaining work: a post that starts a fight collects replies, and a platform that ranks by engagement carries it further than the calm post beside it.
The damage is not mainly to the individual provoked. It falls on the conversation, and on everyone who quietly stops taking part because taking part costs too much. The people who withdraw first are usually the ones with the least standing in the group, which narrows the discussion exactly where it most needed widening.
Trolling as such is not necessarily a crime, though a great deal of what is loosely called trolling is. Provocation and rudeness are not offences; threats, obscenity, defamation, impersonation and sustained targeting of an individual are. That boundary is the one the three offences in this section are best distinguished along.
Read the last row across. The three behaviours differ in what they want, and the law responds to conduct rather than to labels, which is why “it was only trolling” settles nothing on its own.
6.4.4 Online Frauds
Online fraud is deception carried out through digital means in order to obtain money, financial credentials or personal data unlawfully. It is the most common cyber crime of all, because it scales in a way that the others do not: the same message costs the same to send to one person or to a hundred thousand, and it only has to work occasionally.
Fraud on a network is a psychological craft rather than a technical one. Almost every attempt relies on the same three levers — the appearance of authority, an artificial urgency, and an offer good enough to override caution. The technical dressing exists only to make those three convincing.
Recognising the Shape of an Attempt
Because the forms change constantly and the pattern does not, recognition is more useful than a catalogue. Fig. 6.4-2 labels the parts that recur.
Diagram
Fig. 6.4-2 – anatomy of a suspicious message, drawn as a message card with five callout labels pointing to its parts: (1) a sender name that resembles a known institution but is not exactly it; (2) an alarming or rewarding opening line; (3) a deadline stated in hours; (4) a request for a code, password or payment; (5) a link or number supplied inside the message itself. Add a sixth label pointing outside the card: “the one thing a genuine institution never asks for is a secret code”
The authority is asserted rather than shown: “your account” and “verification” borrow the vocabulary of an institution without the message ever naming which account, which branch, or the customer it is addressed to. A genuine sender knows your name and your account; a fraudulent one is writing to everybody at once, and the vagueness is unavoidable.
The urgency is doing the real work. The deadline exists so that the reader acts before checking, since checking takes five minutes and is fatal to the attempt. And the final request is decisive: a one-time password (OTP), the temporary code sent to a phone to authorise a transaction, is issued to you so that nobody else can act on your account. Anybody who asks you for it is, by definition, trying to act on your account.
The most common patterns are worth naming once, since recognising the family is faster than examining each specimen.
Read the third column down and one rule covers all five: in every case the reader is asked to move money, a code or personal data outward, quickly, on the strength of something they did not initiate. That single test catches more attempts than any list of specific scams, and it will still work when every name in the second column has changed.
Two things should be said plainly at the end of this section. Falling for a well-made fraud is not stupidity; the design targets urgency and trust in authority, which are ordinary and mostly useful instincts. And shame is the fraudster’s best protection, because a victim who says nothing reports nothing. Reporting quickly — to the bank, to the national cyber crime reporting portal, and through the financial fraud helpline number 1930 — is what makes recovery possible at all, and it is also how the next attempt is traced.
6.5 Netiquettes
The previous section dealt with conduct serious enough for the law to take an interest. Most of what goes wrong online never reaches that level. It is smaller, more common and entirely ordinary: a message that reads as rude when it was meant as brief, a photograph posted without asking, a group flooded by one person until nobody reads it any more.
That territory belongs to netiquette, and it is where a student can do the most immediate good.
6.5.1 Meaning and Importance of Netiquettes
Netiquette is a compound of “network” and “etiquette”: the set of accepted conventions for courteous and responsible conduct in digital communication. It carries no penalty and no enforcement. It is a shared understanding of how to behave in a space where everybody can publish and nobody can see anybody else.
The word “etiquette” makes it sound decorative. It is not. Netiquette exists because digital communication strips out most of what makes ordinary conversation work, and the conventions are repairs for specific missing parts. Fig. 6.5-1 shows what is lost.
Diagram
Fig. 6.5-1 – two channels drawn side by side as horizontal bands. Upper band, labelled “face to face”: five stacked strips labelled words, tone of voice, facial expression, gesture, immediate reply. Lower band, labelled “posted or messaged”: one strip labelled words, with the other four strips shown as dotted, empty outlines. Add a small note beneath the lower band that punctuation, capitals and emoji are partial substitutes for tone, and that they are frequently misread
A sentence spoken with a smile and the same sentence typed are not the same message. The reader supplies the missing tone from their own mood, and a neutral message read by an anxious person becomes a cold one. Most online offence begins here, in a gap the writer never noticed leaving.
Three further conditions raise the stakes. Anything posted may be saved, forwarded and read years later, so there is no equivalent of a remark that fades. The audience is almost always larger and more varied than the one imagined while writing. And nobody can see the effect of what they have written, which is precisely the restraint that face-to-face conversation supplies automatically.
Why It Deserves a Place Beside the Law
Netiquette matters most as prevention. Almost every offence in Section 6.4 begins as something smaller that nobody stopped: a joke at one person’s expense repeated until it becomes bullying, curiosity about someone’s movements repeated until it becomes stalking, a provocation answered until the thread becomes a fight. Conventions of conduct are what keep ordinary friction from escalating into any of that.
Read the last row across. Law is a remedy and arrives after the damage; netiquette is a practice and works before it. A person can keep every law and still be intolerable to deal with online, which is the gap these conventions fill.
6.5.2 Identification of Oneself
The first netiquette is to make clear who you are. In practice this means writing under an identity that is genuinely yours, saying who you are when addressing someone who cannot be expected to know, and never presenting yourself as somebody else.
The reason is accountability. A person who can be identified must live with what they have written, and that single fact restrains most of what goes wrong in online conversation. It also saves the reader work, since a message from an unidentified sender cannot be answered usefully even when the sender means well.
A teacher who takes six classes cannot answer the first message, because there is no way to know who sent it, which project is meant, or which set of notes. The information is not missing by accident; it has simply been left for the recipient to supply. The second message identifies the sender, names the class, dates the notes and separates the two requests, so it can be answered in one line.
The instruction to reply fast is worth noticing separately. It asks for speed and communicates something else entirely — that the writer’s convenience is the organising principle of the exchange. Politeness here is not a decoration on the request. It is the recognition that the reader has other claims on their time.
That is the general principle behind every convention in this section. Netiquette moves effort from the reader back to the writer, where it costs less, because one writer spends a minute so that many readers do not each spend three.
6.5.3 Respect for Others’ Privacy
The second netiquette is that information about other people is theirs, not yours, even when it has arrived in your hands. A private message sent to you, a screenshot of a group conversation, someone’s phone number, address or examination result, and details of a person’s family circumstances are all in this class.
Two habits cover most situations. Ask before publishing anything that identifies another person. And when you are forwarded something private about a third person, let it stop with you.
The forwarded screenshot deserves particular attention, because it is the most common breach and the least noticed. A message written in confidence to one reader is written for that reader’s understanding of the situation; removed from that setting and shown to a group, the same words carry a meaning the writer never intended. Nothing has been altered, and the damage is real.
Fig. 6.5-2 shows the underlying problem, which is not secrecy but audience.
Diagram
Fig. 6.5-2 – a single post at the centre with four arrows leading outward to four labelled audience groups drawn as generic figure clusters: family, classmates, teachers and school, and strangers or future employers. Label the centre “written with one audience in mind” and the outer ring “received by all of them at once”; add the caption term “context collapse”
Context collapse is the term for what the figure shows: online, the several audiences a person keeps separate in ordinary life are merged into one, so a remark pitched at close friends arrives simultaneously before relatives, teachers and strangers. Much of what students later regret was appropriate for the audience it was written for and for no other.
6.5.4 Use of Appropriate Language and Imagery
The third netiquette concerns what is said and what is shown. Three requirements sit inside it.
The first is clarity. Correct, complete sentences are not a matter of formality; they are what allows a reader to take your meaning at the first attempt, without the tone of voice that would have carried it in speech. Text in full capitals reads as shouting, and heavy abbreviation transfers the work of decoding to the reader.
The second is proportion. Language is fitted to the setting, and the settings differ sharply: a message to a friend, a post in a class group, a comment on a stranger’s public post and an email to a teacher or an employer are four different registers. Using the wrong one is not a crime; it is simply a misjudgement that the reader will notice.
The third is respect, and it is the one that matters most. Language that demeans a person or a group, imagery that mocks how people look, speak, worship or earn a living, and material that treats any community as a standing joke all fall outside the convention. You studied representation and stereotyping earlier in this course; the same analysis applies to a meme forwarded in a class group, which repeats a stereotype just as effectively as a film does and reaches its audience faster.
A workable personal test: separate the argument from the person. Attacking a claim is the whole point of discussion, and attacking the person who made it ends the discussion while pretending to continue it.
6.5.5 Do Not Spam
The fourth netiquette is not to flood other people’s attention. Spam is unsolicited, repetitive or irrelevant material sent in bulk to people who did not ask for it — and although the word is usually associated with mass commercial email, the everyday version is closer to home.
Posting the same message to five groups, sending a single sentence across eleven separate messages, tagging an entire contact list into a promotion, forwarding chains that ask to be forwarded, and replying to a hundred-member group with the word “noted” are all forms of it. None is malicious. Each takes a small quantity of attention from a large number of people, and the total is not small.
There is a further reason to hold this convention, and it connects back to the previous section. A network in which everyone forwards everything is exactly the environment in which a false claim spreads fastest, because volume overwhelms the reader’s capacity to check anything. Restraint in forwarding is a genuine contribution to the health of the network.
Table 6.8 gathers the four conventions as a revision object.
Read the third column downward and the argument of this section completes itself. Every one of these conventions prevents a small version of something that appeared in Section 6.4 as a large one. Netiquette is not politeness added on top of online life; it is the ordinary maintenance that keeps a shared space usable.
6.6 Summary
The Four Platform Types
- Platforms are classified by the unit of content they are built around, and that unit decides what the design rewards. The four types are social networking, blogging, photo sharing and video sharing.
- Social networking is built around the connection between profiles. Its feed is assembled by an algorithm that ranks posts by signals such as recency, closeness and engagement, so no two users see the same feed and posts that provoke strong reactions travel furthest.
- Blogging is built around the dated written entry, displayed newest first and archived permanently. It is the one form built for length and depth, and the one in which nothing is checked before publication.
- Photo sharing is built around the still image and its caption. The image shows how something looked from one position at one moment; the caption tells the viewer what to make of it, and usually claims more than the image can prove.
- Video sharing is built around a recording with sound and duration. Because the platform measures watch time, the opening seconds carry the whole weight, and the promise made at the start tends to outrun what follows.
- Each type’s characteristic weakness is the shadow of its strength: wide reach spreads error as efficiently as truth, and publishing without an editor publishes the careless alongside the expert.
Democracy, Collective Identity and Cyber Activism
- A collective identity is the sense of belonging to a group that recognises a common situation or purpose. Thousands of people can share a problem without becoming a group; they become one only when they know about each other.
- Sharing information is the mechanism. One person posts a private experience, others reply that theirs matches, a shared tag gathers the scattered posts into a readable body of evidence, and the visible volume converts “me” into “us”.
- Benedict Anderson’s account of imagined communities explains why strangers who will never meet can feel solidarity, and why a common symbol holds a dispersed group together. Its limitation is that an imagined community can form around a false account of the world as readily as a true one.
- The claim that social media strengthens democratic life is supported by real evidence of excluded groups assembling their own publics. The echo chamber counter-claim is genuinely contested, since heavy platform users often encounter a wider range of sources than people who rely on a single newspaper or channel.
- Cyber activism is organised action for a cause conducted through digital networks. Its advantage is that a campaign needs no premises, no printing and no permission, and that distance costs nothing.
- Attention is where a campaign begins, not where it ends. Support drops away at every step from seeing to reacting, sharing, giving and finally acting offline, and a campaign is judged at the lower steps.
- The Ice Bucket Challenge showed both sides: a rare-disease charity received many times its usual annual income within weeks, while many participants never mentioned the disease and no later campaign has repeated the effect.
- Slacktivism names support that costs nothing and achieves nothing. The criticism is fair, but research does not show that cheap participation replaces costly participation, so the honest verdict is that it is useful only as the top of a staircase with lower steps built in.
- In a crisis, sharing is not neutral. A message carrying a place, a time, a contact and a verification can be acted on; one carrying only urgency takes the place of one that can.
Cyber Crime
- Cyber crime is an unlawful act carried out through computers, phones or networks. The wrongs are mostly old ones; what the network changes is scale, speed, distance and the fragility of the evidence.
- In India such offences are dealt with principally under the Information Technology Act, 2000, together with the general criminal law recodified in 2023, and complaints may be filed at any police station or through the central online reporting portal.
- The four forms studied are online bullying, stalking, trolling and online frauds. They differ in purpose: bullying seeks to humiliate, stalking seeks to reach and control, trolling seeks a reaction, and fraud seeks money.
- Online bullying is repeated, deliberate, aimed at a specific person, and marked by an imbalance the target cannot correct. It is harder to escape than its offline form because it follows the target home, stays searchable, carries a large audience, and may come from an untraceable account.
- Stalking is repeated unwanted attention that produces fear rather than embarrassment. A digital footprint discloses a routine through the pattern of many posts, even when no single post states it, and Indian criminal law expressly recognises the electronic form of the offence.
- Trolling is deliberate provocation aimed at the response it produces. Its main damage falls on the conversation and on those who quietly stop taking part, usually the participants with the least standing in the group.
- Trolling is not in itself an offence, though threats, obscenity, defamation, impersonation and sustained targeting of an individual are. The law responds to conduct, not to labels.
- Online fraud is deception for financial gain, and it is a psychological craft rather than a technical one, relying on apparent authority, artificial urgency and an offer good enough to override caution.
- One test covers the recurring patterns: the reader is asked to send money, a code or personal data outward, quickly, on the strength of something they did not initiate. A one-time password is issued so that nobody else can act on your account, which is why anyone who asks for it is trying to do exactly that.
- In every case the response is the same: do not engage, preserve evidence with dates, block and report on the platform, tell a trusted adult, and report financial fraud immediately, since the first hours decide whether a transfer can be stopped.
Netiquettes
- Netiquette is the body of accepted conventions for courteous and responsible online conduct, observed by agreement rather than enforced by law.
- The conventions exist because the medium strips out tone, expression, gesture and immediate response, leaving only words. Readers supply the missing tone themselves, which is where most online offence begins.
- Law is a remedy that arrives after harm; netiquette is a practice that works before it. Almost every offence in the previous section began as something smaller that nobody stopped.
- The four netiquettes are identification of oneself, respect for others’ privacy, use of appropriate language and imagery, and do not spam.
- Identification of oneself supplies accountability and saves the reader the work of guessing. It forbids deception and impersonation, not pseudonymity adopted for safety or for good reason.
- Respect for others’ privacy means that information about another person is theirs; consent precedes publication, and forwarded private material stops with you. Context collapse explains the risk, since online the several audiences kept separate in ordinary life arrive at once.
- Appropriate language and imagery requires clarity, a register fitted to the setting, and respect: attack the argument, never the person, and never circulate material that demeans a person or a community.
- Do not spam means sending less, to fewer people, once. Restraint in forwarding also slows the spread of unchecked claims, which is the connection between the smallest convention in this chapter and the largest problem in it.
6.7 Key Terms
- Algorithm — a fixed set of instructions a computer follows, used on social platforms to score, rank and select which posts a user is shown.
- ALS — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the rare disease of the nervous system for which the Ice Bucket Challenge raised funds.
- Blog — a website of dated entries displayed newest first, written by an individual or small group and published without an editor.
- Caption — the short line of words published with an image to name, place or interpret it.
- Collective identity — a shared sense of belonging among people who recognise that they face a common situation or pursue a common purpose, and who begin to act and speak as a group.
- Context collapse — the merging online of the several separate audiences a person keeps apart in ordinary life, so that one message reaches all of them at once.
- Cyber activism — organised action for a cause carried out through digital networks, using online publication, coordination and mobilisation to inform, gather support and press for change.
- Cyber crime — an unlawful act carried out through computers, mobile devices or digital networks, whether directed at a person, an organisation or a computer system.
- Cyber stalking — repeated, unwanted attention directed at a specific person through digital means, of a kind that causes fear or serious distress.
- Digital footprint — the trail of information a person leaves through posts, tags, check-ins and profile details, which can disclose a routine that no single post states.
- Echo chamber — an information space in which a person mainly meets views that confirm what they already hold.
- Feed — the continuously updated stream of posts a user is shown, drawn from connected accounts and ordered by the platform rather than by time of posting.
- Hashtag — a word or phrase marked with the hash symbol so that every post carrying it can be gathered and read together.
- Interactivity — the property of a medium in which communication runs in more than one direction, so that receivers can reply to, alter and pass on what they receive.
- Netiquette — the body of accepted conventions governing polite, clear and responsible conduct in online communication, observed by agreement rather than enforced by law.
- Network — the web of connections between users that decides who sees what, and along which a post travels beyond the person who made it.
- Online bullying — repeated and deliberate behaviour through digital means intended to harm, humiliate or frighten a particular person, in a situation the target cannot easily correct.
- Online fraud — deception carried out through digital means in order to obtain money, financial credentials or personal data unlawfully.
- OTP — one-time password, a temporary code sent to a phone to authorise a transaction, issued so that nobody other than the account holder can act on the account.
- Phishing — a fraudulent message imitating a bank, platform or office, asking the reader to confirm details that the genuine sender would already hold.
- Platform — the service that hosts content, supplies the tools and sets the rules, without producing the content itself.
- Profile — a user’s page of identifying details and posted material, which represents that user to everyone else on the network.
- Slacktivism — support for a cause that costs the supporter nothing and achieves nothing, such as a reaction tapped or a symbol displayed with no further action.
- Social media — internet-based services on which users create and exchange their own content, hold profiles and connect with other users, so that communication flows in many directions rather than outward from a single publisher.
- Spam — unsolicited, repetitive or irrelevant material sent in bulk to people who did not ask for it.
- Trolling — the posting of deliberately provocative, offensive or disruptive material in order to provoke a reaction or derail a discussion.
- UGC — user-generated content, material made and posted by ordinary users rather than by the organisation that owns the service.
- Watch time — the total duration for which a video actually holds its viewers, the measure video-sharing platforms rank content by.
6.8 Points to Ponder
If every feed is assembled differently and no two people see the same one, what is left of the phrase “everyone is talking about it”?
A blog is read by four hundred people who return every week; a video is watched by four hundred thousand who never return. Which of the two has an audience, and what is the other one gathering?
A photograph is taken by one person and captioned by another, and the caption decides what the image is taken to mean. Who is the author of that post?
A campaign raises a very large sum of money, and almost none of the people who gave it can name the cause afterwards. Has it succeeded?
Netiquette carries no penalty and no enforcement. What makes people keep a rule that nothing compels, and what has to happen in a group before they stop keeping it?
When anyone can publish, is the work of deciding what deserves to be published abolished, or only moved elsewhere? If it has moved, who is now doing it, and when?
6.9 Objective Questions
- A service allows users to upload their own writing and lets readers reply, but every account is closed and users cannot connect to one another. Which condition of social media is missing?
- User-generated content
- Interactivity
- The network of connected profiles
- The platform [1 mark]
- Video-sharing platforms rank content chiefly by
- the number of uploads by the creator
- watch time
- the length of the caption
- the date of upload [1 mark]
- The purpose that distinguishes trolling from online bullying is that trolling seeks
- to humiliate one person before an audience
- to monitor a person’s movements
- a reaction, and the disruption of the discussion
- financial gain from the target [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): On a network, a correction rarely reaches everyone who saw the original error. Reason (R): A correction has to be carried onward by users, and it competes for circulation with the post it corrects.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true, but R is false.
- A is false, but R is true. [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): Observing netiquette does the work that the law cannot. Reason (R): Netiquette carries penalties that are enforced by the platform on behalf of the State.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true, but R is false.
- A is false, but R is true. [1 mark]
- Match each platform type in Column A with the unit of content it is built around in Column B.
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Social networking | i. The dated written entry, archived newest first |
| b. Blogging | ii. The still image with its caption |
| c. Photo sharing | iii. The recording with sound and duration |
| d. Video sharing | iv. The connection between profiles |
[1 mark]
Fill in the blank: The merging online of the several separate audiences a person keeps apart in ordinary life is called __________. [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: The trail of information a person leaves through posts, tags, check-ins and profile details is called their __________. [1 mark]
State whether the following is true or false: Trolling is in itself a criminal offence in India. [1 mark]
Write the full forms of: (a) UGC (b) OTP [1 mark]
6.10 Check Your Concepts
Define cyber activism. [2 marks]
State the three conditions that must hold together before a service can be called social media. [2 marks]
Name any one netiquette and state what it prevents. [2 marks]
Differentiate between online bullying and trolling with reference to their target and their purpose. [3 marks]
Explain, with an example, how a caption can make a genuine photograph misleading. [3 marks]
Explain how a feed is ordered on a social networking platform, and give reasons for its effect on a user’s sense of what most people think. [4 marks]
Evaluate the claim that social media has left people less well informed by sealing them into echo chambers. [4 marks]
Describe how a collective identity is formed on social media through the sharing of information, and discuss with examples what such an identity can and cannot achieve. [6 marks]
Discuss cyber activism with suitable examples, examining both what makes an online campaign effective and the criticism that it produces slacktivism. [6 marks]
6.11 Analyse the Media Text
- The following message is circulating in a class group at 8.40 in the evening.
MESSAGE: Heard from a reliable source that tomorrow’s test has been cancelled. Forward to everyone before 9 p.m.
a. Name two features of the message that should make a reader doubt it.
b. Which netiquette does forwarding it breach, and why?
c. Rewrite the message so that a reader could act on it responsibly. [4 marks]A video post opens with a person shouting that a common food item is dangerous. The clip runs for forty seconds, cuts every two seconds, names no source, and has been watched three million times. The comments are full of argument.
- Which platform measure explains why the opening seconds are built this way?
- Explain how ranking by engagement helps a post like this travel further than a calm one.
- State one addition that would allow a viewer to verify the claim. [4 marks]
A student receives the following message from an unknown sender.
MESSAGE: Congratulations, you have been selected for a paid internship. Confirm your place by paying a refundable registration fee within twelve hours, and share the code sent to your phone to complete verification.
a. Identify the cyber crime and the pattern of fraud it belongs to.
b. Name three markers in the message that expose it.
c. State what the student should do immediately, and why the timing matters. [5 marks]A screenshot of a private message written by one student is posted in a class group of ninety members. Nobody adds a comment, but the post collects thirty laughing reactions and is forwarded to two other groups.
- Which netiquette has been breached, and by whom?
- Would you describe this as online bullying? Give reasons for your answer.
- State what a member of the group who took no part in it should do. [4 marks]
6.12 Craft Practice
A photograph shows a school gate at closing time, with parked vehicles narrowing the road to a single lane and students walking between them. Write three captions of not more than twenty words each: one that claims only what the image shows, one that adds a claim you could verify by observation, and one that makes a claim the image cannot support. Submit the three captions, labelled, with one line explaining which of them you would post and why. [4 marks]
Take one piece of information about your school — an achievement, a change of timing, a new facility. Write it twice: as the opening 120 words of a blog entry, and as a post of not more than 40 words for a social networking feed. Submit both, with two lines stating what the shorter version had to leave out and what it gained. [5 marks]
Write an email of not more than 150 words requesting a short interview for a media project from an adult outside your school. It must identify you, state the purpose and the length of the interview, ask permission to record, and say how the recording will be used. Obtain your teacher’s approval before sending it, and do not contact anyone without that approval. Submit the email with a note naming the netiquette each part of it observes. [4 marks]
Write a post of not more than 60 words for Class VIII students, explaining how to recognise an unexpected message that asks for a code or a payment. Include one instruction they can follow immediately. Submit the post with one line explaining how the language differs from a post you would write for your own classmates, and why. [5 marks]
6.2.1 Social Networking Platforms
A social networking platform is built around the connection between people rather than around any one kind of content. You make a profile, you link it to other profiles, and whatever you post travels outward along those links. The connection is the product; text, images and video are simply what passes through it.
Every such platform gives you a feed, the continuously updated stream of posts drawn from the accounts you are connected to. In the earliest services the feed was a plain reverse-chronological list, showing the newest item first. That is almost never the case now.
How a Feed Decides What You See
Today a feed is assembled by an algorithm — a fixed set of instructions a computer follows to sort, rank and select. The algorithm scores each available post against signals such as how recent it is, how close your connection to the poster is, and how many people have already stopped to react to it. Fig. 6.2-1 sets out that sequence.
Diagram
Fig. 6.2-1 – flow: posts from all connected accounts → ranking signals (recency, closeness of connection, engagement so far, past behaviour of this user) → scored and ordered list → the feed as displayed. Label clearly that the display order differs from the posting order, and mark that most available posts never appear at all
Two consequences follow, and both matter for the rest of this chapter. First, no two users see the same feed, so two people can hold opposite impressions of what “everyone is saying”. Second, a post that provokes a strong reaction gathers engagement quickly and is therefore promoted further, whether or not the reaction it provoked was a good one.
There is a limit to how far this explanation should be pushed. The exact working of any company’s ranking system is not published, changes often, and differs between services. What can be said with confidence is the general principle: attention is the resource being distributed, and the system distributes it towards whatever holds attention.
Content also travels beyond your own connections through a hashtag, a word or phrase marked with the hash symbol so that every post carrying it can be gathered and read together. A hashtag lets a topic assemble its own audience out of strangers, which is why it becomes so important in Section 6.3.
Social networking sites are often described as new, but the pattern is older than the internet. Printed college directories with photographs, community registers and professional membership lists all did the same work: identify a person, place them in a group, and let others find them through it.