#Instagram data analysis

[redkehlchen]

Sketched out the final part of the growth spurt comic!

Already made up my mind, but out of curiosity. What do you think: Who will end up being the shortest turtle? :)

[felicitypdf]

do I have any followers or mutuals that have completed their MA in a humanities field and feels comfortable discussing a variety of methodologies? i'm struggling a little to delineate a framework for my own thesis methodology and it'd be so nice to talk it out with someone and get some advice!

[pepbutler]

🌟 Thursday check in week 9 🌟

This 6-week content analysis assignment for #writ318mu has definitely intimidated me. I've hit a few roadblocks with this assignment. The work has included diligently tracking engagement metrics on Instagram from three cat influencers. Features including likes, comments, plays, and those irresistible captions. But now, I'm stuck on how to structure and make sense of this mountain of data. Maybe we’re facing similar issues. here are my pressing data analysis queries:

How can I effectively categorize and organize my Instagram data for insightful analysis?

And after getting the data organized, how would be the best way to insert the data in the 1st draft?

Are there specific data analysis techniques or tools that could unlock deeper insights from my Instagram treasure trove?

What are some tried-and-true methods for spotting trends and patterns in engagement metrics over the 5-week period I've been monitoring?

Your wisdom and guidance would be a game-changer in navigating this data labyrinth and acing my assignment. Feel free to share any insights, tips, or any helpful resources in the comments below! 📊💡

[rosyblooom]

could you please do lando and a stem girl who goes to uni but has a private life please

they don't know about us | ln4 smau

pairing: lando norris x private fem computer science major!reader a/n: this took me forever but hope u still like :) also, if you've got requests could u add if you want it to be smau or fic pls <3

Instagram

landonorris posted to his story!

[ caption: Mind you, I just woke up... ]

[ tagged: yourusername ]

Twitter

Instagram

landonorris posted to his story!

[ caption 1: 🕒✈️ ] [ caption 2: miami 👋 ]

[ tagged: yourusername ]

yourusername posted to her story!

[ caption 1: shoutout to the inventor of coffee i owe u big time🙏 ] [ caption 2: uhm i was just going to rest my eyes for 2 minutes?? good morning i guess💀 ]

f1gossip

liked by username, username, username and 12,057 others

f1gossip Y/N L/N, current girlfriend of Lando Norris, has been photographed arriving at the paddock for today's Miami GP.

Y/N's presence comes as a bit of a surprise, considering she was absent during practice and qualifying sessions, and rarely attends races. Speculation about a potential breakup has been rampant, but her appearance suggests that there might not be trouble in paradise after all... 👀

view all 793 comments

username she always looks so classy and put-together, i'm obsessed <33

username no bc am i the only who has no problem with her only attending a few races a year? some ppl don't have time to jet off across the globe 24/7 like

username it's the fact that they literally travelled to miami together and she still didn't go to quali or practice😐 the other wags do it, why can't she?

username i just know lando had to beg her to come smh

username why are y'all so rude omg?? some ppl are introverts...

username when you're in the public eye, you don't get to be "introverted"🙃 username that's an insane take wtf?

username GUYS i think she's a uni student cause peep lando's story a few days ago🧐 that explains why she's never at gps

username so? i'm a senior and i went to the aus gp this year username okay... do you want a cookie ?

username if a wag is at all races she's fame-hungry, and if she doesn't she's unsupportive like make up y'all's minds pls 🙄

Twitter

Instagram

yourusername posted to her story!

[ caption: YOU DID IT!!! HE DID IT!!! MY BABY IS AN F1 WINNER OMFGGG🥹🥳👏 you deserved this so so much, i'm sooo proud of you ❤️❤️❤️ ]

[ tagged: landonorris ]

Twitter

Instagram

landonorris

liked by yourusername, _aarava, martingarrix and 2,005,872 others

landonorris Memories for life ❤️

view all 5,947 comments

username aw the 5th pic🥹

username do you think number six is y/n??👀 username 100%

username 🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡

username LANDO NOW WINS IKTRRRRR‼️🤩

username ofc y/n couldn't even be bothered to comment... and the most unsupportive wag award goes to y/n l/n!! congrats hun x

username y'all are weird YOU DON'T KNOW THESE PPL!! username it's the 'be kind' in ur bio for me miss gurl 🤡

username best day ever 🤧

lewishamilton 👏👏👏

(liked by author)

riabish sooo happy!!!

(liked by author)

username not ria being more of a gf then y/n oop username thanks for being such a good friend to lando, we love you💖

username next goal: beome world champion 👀👀

username yessirrrr

yourusername posted to her story!

[ caption 1: back to reality 💔 ] [ caption 2: jkjk it's not that bad, i don't cry nearly as much as i did in first year 🙂‍↕️☝️ ]

[ tagged: yourbestfriend, yourfriend + more ]

harvard

liked by yourusername, username, username and 29,063 others

harvard Final projects, theses, dissertations, and more! Check out what these soon-to-be graduates explored in some of their last assignements on campus.

Y/N's thesis navigated the intricate relationship between privacy and secure multi-party computation, enhancing data analysis while safeguarding sensitive information.

2. Steve's environmental science project examined urban development's impact on local biodiversity, providing insights for sustainable urban planning.

3. Nya's dentistry research poster explored new methods to improve dental implant success, promising better patient outcomes and oral healthcare.

—

We are celebrating the extraordinary members of the Class of #Harvard24 🎓

view all 127 comments

username 👏👏👏

username Awesome!

username Very good! Congrats to all these students!!💪

username wait am i tripping or is this y/n as in lando's gf y/n???😳 btw my biggest dream is to go to harvard in '26 !!!! 💕

username 😍😍

username streets are saying y/n goes to harvard so i had to come check and omg??😩

username no bc wag AND harvard girly?? just looked at myself and sighed fr... username now i feel bad for talking shit🫤

Twitter

Instagram

yourusername posted to her story!

[ caption 1: pulling an all-nighterrrr 😁 ] [ caption 2: nevermind, lando just made me promise to get some sleep :( ]

A few months later...

Instagram

yourusername posted to her story!

[ caption 1: couldn't ask for better shoulders to cry on srsly 🙂‍↕️ WE DID IT MY LOVESSS 🎓❤️❤️ ] [ caption 2: this us? 😏 (corny, i know...) ]

[ tagged: yourbestfriend, yourfriend + more ]

lando.jpg

liked by daniel3.jpg, yourusername, carlossainz55 and 847,903 others

tagged: yourusername

lando.jpg 🍾🎓❤️

view all 4,037 comments

username a win for women iktr 😌

username wow i'm so happy for her omg 🫶🫶 (jealous too but mostly happy loolol)

username LMAO are we the same person?

carlossainz55 👏👏👏

username now she has no excuse anymore

username if lando's completely happy with it all, why the hell are u upset? 🤡

username 2024 really gave us lando's first ever win and now this?? we love to see it 😍

yourusername ❤️❤️

(liked by author)

username we love you y/n <333 username i hope you'll be able to attend more races from now on!! i love seeing you in the paddock 💕

username the way i still haven't fully processed the fact that harvard gave her a shoutout goddamn🤯

usernmae not you calling that a shoutout bye💀💀

username AAHHHH YAYY CONGRATS Y/N YOU'RE DOING AMAZING SWEETIE 🤍🤍🤍🤍

0:33 ───ㅇ───────── 2:40

[australianwomensnews]

Evidence of a powerful link between smartphones, social media and depression, anxiety and self-harm among teenagers, especially girls, is growing, with new Australian research naming 2012 as the year that ushered in a mental health crisis.

The study of longitudinal data found there is a strong correlation between when an individual was born, how old they were when Instagram and Snapchat came into their lives, and self-reported mental health distress and social isolation.

“Young women born since the late 1990s report much lower levels of mental health than earlier generations and compared to their male counterparts,” the analysis from independent think tank e61 says.

“This generation has lived their teenage years when photo- and video-sharing social media platforms became popular in Australia.

“We also find that lower mental health is highly correlated to self-reported feelings of social isolation as measured through friendship connections.”

The analysis was submitted as evidence to a parliamentary inquiry into mental health and social media and whether age limits should be imposed on young people being able to access such platforms, among other things.

The analysis shows that self-reported scores on young women’s mental health declined from 73 per cent to 62 per cent between 2011 and 2022, while for young men it fell from 74.5 per cent to 67.5 per cent.

“Youth mental health was stable but then began falling sharply after 2012,” said Gianni La Cava, e61 research director.

Women aged 15 to 24 are the heaviest users of social media. Nearly 90 per cent of them use social media every day, or most days, compared with 62 per cent of women aged over 25.

There has also been a corresponding decline in friendships and feelings of isolation.

The e61 analysis notes some experts argue that social media can be a source of good for some young people, and mental health responses are individualised.

It also notes that there have been vast reductions in the stigmatisation of mental health issues among young people, which means that more may be comfortable in reporting it.

However, e61 says this “would not explain a sudden drop since the 2010s”.

In South Australia, former High Court judge Robert French was tasked in May with examining the legal consequences of banning children under the age of 14 from having social media accounts. The model would also require teenagers aged 14 and 15 have parental consent to access social media platforms.

In March, the US state of Florida legislated to ban social media accounts for children under 14, while Texas has legislated to require parental consent before allowing a user under the age of 18 to open an account. Spain also bans children under 14 from accessing a social network.

A growing body of evidence is linking social media and mental health. A survey by mental health service ReachOut this year found that 60 per cent of parents said they were concerned about their child’s use of social media and 55 per cent agreed that social media had a significant impact on their child’s wellbeing.

A US study found that adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes.

Support services:

Lifeline on 13 11 14

Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636

Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800

[alien-girl-21]

The Käärijä Research Paper (tm)

aka: Error Analysis of the Use of English Articles in Jere Pöyhönen Interviews in 2023

(Before we start, a couple of clarifications: firstly, I am a linguistics student and this research was my final project for my psycholinguistics course, secondly, this was a group research and I have gotten permission from my friends to share these results with y'all so tysm to them, and lastly, the og work is LONG, 50 pages long, so I'm condensing it into the important bits)

Findings and explanations under the cut <3

Before sharing the actual research, i'm going to share some important terms for you guys to understand the overall layout of this work.

Error analysis: kind of self explanatory, it's the process of analyzing errors, specifically in one's speech, more on how we did this later.

Omission: The alienation of a linguistic form in speech (i.e. I go to (the) supermarket.).

Addition: The opposite of omission, putting an unnecessary linguistic form in a sentence (i.e. It's the maybe half and half.).

Substitution: Exchanging a linguistic form for another one (i.e. He admitted to have stolen a wallet. Instead of: He admitted to having stolen a wallet.).

Overgeneralization: Looking at a grammatical rule and thinking it applies to every case with no exceptions (i.e. finding out verbs conjugated in the past end in -ed and creating conjugations like writted instead of written). Also known as intralingual transfer.

Negative transfer: When your mother tongue (L1) seeps into your second/foreign language (L2) (in this case it's foreign language, but I'll still call it an L2 for simplicity's sake), if we're talking about Spanish negative transfer it can look like: the car red (Spanish adjectives go after the noun, unlike in English). Also known as interlingual transfer.

Local error: An error that does not affect the overall meaning of the sentence, making it still understandable.

Global error: An error that affects the overall meaning of the sentence, making it difficult to understand without clarifications.

Okay, with that out of the way, let me explain what we did:

We decided to make an error analysis on how Jere utilized articles (the, a/an) throughout 2023, for this we considered 2 interviews and 1 Instagram live, the interviews were: KÄÄRIJÄ TRIES LITHUANIAN FOOD (uploaded on 12/04/23) and Episode 3: Käärijä and friends (uploaded on 26/12/23), the ig live was the one he did to promote the release of Huhhahhei on 19/10/23, the dates are important for later.

Now, to do the error analysis in itself we followed Rod Ellis’ proposal for error analysis which follows four main steps:

Identifying errors: Self-explanatory, you see what errors one has committed.

Describing errors: Once you see the errors, you describe what exactly the error is, it can be with grammatical categories, or with omission, misinformation, addition, misordering, and substitution.

Explaining errors: After describing the error you need to explain why this error was committed, the two main ways are through overgeneralization and negative transfer.

Error evaluation: After all this, you identify how the error affected the overall message of the sentence being spoken, was it local or global?

We put these steps into a chart and listened to the interviews and identified the errors we found, it’s a really long chart, so if you want to see it fully you can find it here (hopefully). After identifying all the errors and doing our own error analysis we… well, analyzed the data, duh, according to the objectives we set up for the research.

Our first objective was to identify errors Jere has committed regarding articles in the three videos I mentioned. What we analyzed was more grammatical, so what grammatical structure he used the most. He usually omits an article before a noun and with adjectives, like in: “We go to bar with my producer…”, or “Käärijä goes to boat.”, or “I am fine, uh… little bit tired.”. Obviously, this is kind of expected because Finnish does not have articles, but he also adds articles when it is not necessary, like in: “I have the one festival.” Here are the charts of the grammatical trends:

Then we focused on the describing errors part of our analysis. In this part, we found out that he usually finds himself committing omission errors, with 67 in total across the three videos, like I said before, expected, however, the second most common error is addition, this means he adds an unnecessary article in a sentence, and what’s interesting is that he usually does it with the article “the”. Since this is not an actual academic article I will speculate with a full chest: I think he does this because people are usually taught that “the” is the only article in English (only definite one, but not the only one), and that nouns usually have an article accompanying them, so I think that he adds the when he is unsure if an article needs to go there or not. Finally, there was only one case of substitution: “This is the lovely story.”, not really sure why he did this, but it’s interesting that it only happened once. Have the charts and graphs:

We moved to the next step: explaining errors. When we started this research, we thought that we would only have negative transfers since, ya know, Finnish grammar and all, and we were kind of right? He has committed negative transfer errors the most, with 66 in total, but he also had 23 overgeneralization errors, which I didn’t really expect to happen with articles that much. Not much else to say here, have charts:

Lastly, error evaluation. He made mostly local errors, which is what mainly characterizes his speech, we know what he’s saying, he just usually lacks some grammatical form that doesn’t affect his overall meaning. He did have 15 global errors that unless you have the context, it can be a little confusing to understand what he’s trying to say (like in the ig live he said “here tour” when he wanted to say “here in the tour”). Charts!

Our final objective was to see the evolution of these errors, has he made more or less as time went on? Well, since we all can see and hear, he has made a great improvement! You already have the charts above to understand that, but I just have to explain it. In the first interview, in April, he made 50 mistakes in total, by the ig live he had cut those in half, and by the latest interview he gave in English he had cut the mistakes in half again! Have the graphs to accurately see this:

He has improved so much in such a short amount of time! Even more impressive when he hasn’t really taken any formal English classes, just by talking to Bojan and Alessandra. There’s a difference between language learning and language acquisition that was proposed by Stephen Krashen (cool dude, if you’re interested in language learning, go check him out). He says that people usually learn more by acquiring (unconscious) rather than learning (conscious), and you can see that Jere has learnt so much by acquiring English through his friends and his own experiences! And this is just looking at how he uses articles, there is also a distinctive change in how he uses other grammatical forms (but that was too much work for just 2 weeks, maybe I’ll do it later, no promises on anything, though). Even if we’re not talking about his grammatical and syntactical forms, his pronunciation has improved as well! My friends were fascinated by how his accent seemed to develop from video to video, which was very sweet because his accent is one of my favorite things about his speech, but that’s off topic.

The general takeaway from this research is: Jere still has a lot of Finnish tendencies in his English, he has developed his own grammatical structures to communicate in English, and how much he improved in an 8-month period is kind of insane, especially for an adult (who are the age group who have the most trouble learning languages). He’s the it-girl of blowing off a linguist’s mind (me, I’m the linguist)

That would be all!! If you have any other questions, feel free to ask! I'm more than glad to answer them

[genderqueerpositivity]

Separately, the DOJ accused two Russian employees of RT, the Russian state-owned media outlet, of a nearly $10 million scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences while keeping the connection to Russia hidden.

RT worked with an online content creation company in Tennessee, which was directed to contract with U.S. social media influencers to distribute its content on social media platforms including, TikTok, X, Instagram and YouTube. Since November, the company posted more than 2,000 videos that received more than 16 million views on YouTube, according to the indictment.

United States intelligence and security officials have been warning for months about Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2024 election, specifically to undermine the Democratic presidential nominee, exploit social divisions, sow distrust in democratic institutions and to erode support for Ukraine.

The U.S. has provided arms to Ukraine to support its war following Russia's invasion in 2022.

“Russia remains the most active foreign threat to our elections,” Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told senators in May at a briefing about election risks.

This is not the first time the U.S. has taken action against those behind the Doppelganger influence campaign.

In March, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Social Design Agency and Structura, as well as their founders, for a network of fake accounts and phony news websites, saying they carried out the campaign "at the direction of the Russian Presidential Administration."

A report released on Tuesday by social network analysis company Graphika documents a cross-platform influence operation linked to the Chinese government with the aim of influencing online discourse ahead of the November 5 elections.

The operation has relied on "spamouflage" to spread misleading or false information, adopting faux American accounts to sow division through anti-government narratives and posts on divisive topics such as the Israel-Hamas conflict, gun control, and racial inequality.

Using ATLAS, its proprietary platform for real-time intelligence and data analysis, Graphika identified 15 such accounts on X (formerly Twitter) and one on TikTok. Mimicking both U.S. nationals and advocacy groups, these accounts have taken aim at both major political parties and called into question the legitimacy of the U.S. electoral process.

They exhibited certain patterns, including the use of U.S.-related hashtags like #American, and presented themselves as U.S. voters who "love America" but feel alienated by issues ranging from abortion to U.S. support for the war in Ukraine.

One X post from June 2023 stated: "Although I am an American, I am extremely opposed to NATO and the behavior of the U.S. government in war. I think soldiers should protect their own country's people and territory from being violated, and should not initiate wars on their own initiative." The post was accompanied by an image depicting NATO's expansion in Europe.

Not to say "I told you so" but I've been saying this for months. Social engineers are hard at work trying to influence the outcome of the election in November. It is very likely happening on a larger scale than we know of. Take everything you read online with a grain of salt between now and November.

[mapsontheweb]

Percentage of Non-European births, 2020.

Eurostat didn't include Roma people as a European white.

by dalmatian.mapper

Fact check from @freekicks:

In a comment on the original instagram post, the OP said they got their information from France’s national statistics bureau, INSEE. However, INSEE doesn’t collect any statistics about “white” or “non-white” births, nor about “European” or “Non-European” births. Its data only has three categories: children born to French-born parents, EU-born parents, and parents born outside the EU. (You can see the statistics for 2020, the year purportedly depicted in the map, here.)

If OP classified all births to parents who were born outside the EU as “non-European,” that would mean, for example, that a child born to a French mother and a Swiss dad would count as “non-white” on his map. Meanwhile, INSEE’s “French-born” metric also includes parents born in France’s overseas collectives in the Caribbean, South America, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans — most of whom are not white.

Furthermore, the math still doesn’t work: in 2020, the percentage of babies born in France with at least one non-EU parent was 28.7%, not 35%.

Overall, this sloppy analysis falsely overstates the growth of the non-white population in France. These types of inflammatory and incorrect statistics fuel racist conspiracy theories about France and Europe as a whole being “flooded” with nonwhite immigrants who are out-reproducing Europeans and causing crime and other social ills.

[drdemonprince]

This is prompted by your most recent substack about fame, because my point is extremely tangential, I'm putting it here.

It's interesting to have seen the internet go through many stages. From the newsgroups/BBS era, to internet forums, to blogs, to social media, and how the respective environments shaped things.

In the early days, it's very much a group thing, some people became Big Name posters, pseudonymous, but still a group thing. The blog era was more personal, but still something made by someone who's just a person, even if not literally pseudonymous. Also, still text based, a lot of it even often. Social media changed that, with it's focus on follower counts on one hand and to snippets of text (twitter) or images (insta), and even though it's social media-ness is debatable, video (insta, youtube). The semi-anonymous nature however, was completely lost by now.

The doing it because you enjoyed it, or whatever, also recedes into the background because this is where monetization really takes off. The deleterious effects of the interaction between monetization and follower counts (notability) need no introduction, but painting with broad strokes, make something appeal as broad as possible deepens the flattening effect a medium like video already has, the visual aspects often being more important than the messages. It also has a much higher barrier to entry. Spinning up your own blog is cheap, text takes only a tiny amount data. Video is not. It's expensive to make (especially if you want slick videos), expensive to serve, so it's predisposed to big, single platforms that can leverage economies of scale.

The natural result is that you have a few people with big audiences, instead of many people with small audiences. If audiences is even the right word for that. If I'm talking about say, some TV show on my blog, and someone responds, it's a fairly equal conversation. More between peers, of sorts, just two people talking about something they share. As opposed to a Youtuber who makes a video about it with 100,000s of viewers. Because there are so many fewer voices, you lose the breadth of conversation too, narrowing to a small range of popular topics, and the distinction between You, and You as Your Brand gets eroded.

It's kinda notable in the autism sphere. Blogs where people talk about their experiences, how they dealt or didn't deal with things, have fallen off. Twitter came and went, and now there's Youtube and insta, where everything gets simplified down to a few slides or a 10 minute video about only the most basic aspects. Which is just... sad. I wouldn't have known that autistic burnout is a Thing many people struggle with if not for a blog post a friend came across and shared one day.

There was a comment from someone, a while ago, about how they used to have ASMR videos on, until they were able to get out into nature, and their desire for those videos completely disappeared. We're all very deprived. Of social contact, foremost. The pandemic poured gasoline on an already smoldering fire I feel. Latching onto someone 'famous' in a surrogate of social contact & context, like that person with their ASMR videos, feels like an understandable (though not good) outcome of that, which brings with it very regrettable excesses.

I think this is all pretty much a correct analysis, thank you! Though I would qualify that we have shifted away from the period of the Youtube mega content creator a social media ecosystem of intimate-seeming connections with smaller influencers, these days. Think of your Twitch streamers with a dedicated base of like 50-200 viewers per stream (and a Discord and a Patreon that supports them), the fitness Instagrams that sell meal plans online, the tarot witches and activist influencers offering one on one sessions, etc. Those communities can be more niche, but they still offer the illusion of a connection -- and if anything, that illusion is more strong because the creator is a "micro" famous person, and can take time to interact closely with fans here and there. We might already be heading out of that period of social media, though, especially with the disintegration of Twitter and the slow death of Meta's apps, too. I don't know what comes next but I hope we are due for a reappraisal of all of this, and the norms surrounding it.

[bananaofswifts]

01 - Taylor Swift

No one in the music industry wielded more power over the past year than Taylor Swift, who made history at stadiums, movie theaters and on the Billboard charts, leaving even the most seasoned executives speechless. While they’d long celebrated her staggering popularity as a singer, songwriter and performer, her force as a strategic business leader suddenly came into sharper focus — and industry veterans took notes as they watched some of her bravest and most innovative business risks reap remarkable rewards.

At 34, she is one of the music industry’s most charismatic and influential leaders — and she rewrites the rules.

“The piece of advice I would give to the other executives on this list is that the best ideas are usually ones without industry precedent,” Swift tells Billboard. “The biggest crossroads moments of my career came down to sticking to my instincts when my ideas were looked at with skepticism. When someone says to me, ‘But that has never been done successfully before,’ it fires me up. We have to take strategic risks every day in this industry, but every once in a while, you have to really trust your gut and take a flying leap. My rerecordings are my favorite example of this, and I’m extremely grateful to my team and fans for taking that leap with me because it absolutely changed my life.”

Sage advice for an industry in which instinct has largely been supplanted by metrics and data analysis.

In December, Time named Swift its 2023 Person of the Year. In September, after encouraging her 279 million Instagram followers to vote and linking to vote.org, the nonpartisan nonprofit said it received over 35,000 registrations. She appears on the cover of this issue of Billboard and in the No. 1 spot of our annual Power 100 issue because her force across the business of music is now unparalleled — and because she models commitment to innovation that the rest of the business will need in order to tackle the big challenges ahead.

Swift’s gambles have paid off handsomely over the past year.

Her massive The Eras stadium tour, which began in March after she controversially put all the tickets on sale at once, crashing Ticketmaster and sparking mass hysteria, grossed an estimated $906.1 million in 2023 and is poised to become the highest-grossing global tour of all time before it wraps in December, according to Billboard.

The Golden Globe-nominated Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour film, taped during her six-show run at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., in August, has grossed over $261.6 million worldwide since its October opening, according to AMC Theatres Entertainment. In January, the publicly traded movie-house chain announced that the film’s box-office take made it the highest-grossing concert/documentary picture ever released, surpassing Michael Jackson’s 2009 This Is It. Once again blazing a new path, Swift made a groundbreaking distribution deal directly with AMC Theaters instead of linking with a film studio.

Swift has shaken up the catalog market, too. When Scooter Braun infuriated her by acquiring the master recordings of her first six albums through his Ithaca Holdings and then sold them to investment firm Shamrock Capital at a profit, Swift rerecorded the albums with loving precision and added bonus tracks to the new releases. They performed phenomenally well, as she deftly used her tour to promote them. When her latest rerecording (and 14th studio album overall), 1989 (Taylor’s Version), spent its fifth week at atop the Billboard 200 at the end of 2023, Swift beat Elvis Presley’s record for the most weeks at No. 1 by a solo artist. Her industry market share last year was 1.72%. If she were her own genre, she’d rank ninth for 2023 — bigger than jazz.

“She’s the smartest artist I’ve ever worked with,” says Messina Touring Group’s Louis Messina, who promotes Swift’s tours and has worked with her since 2005. “She outworks everybody and she has always had this vision. If you’re around her, you can’t help but believe in her.” —Melinda Newman

[mariacallous]

Christopher Ren does a solid Elon Musk impression.

Ren is a product manager at Reality Defender, a company that makes tools to combat AI disinformation. During a video call last week, I watched him use some viral GitHub code and a single photo to generate a simplistic deepfake of Elon Musk that maps onto his own face. This digital impersonation was to demonstrate how the startup’s new AI detection tool could work. As Ren masqueraded as Musk on our video chat, still frames from the call were actively sent over to Reality Defender’s custom model for analysis, and the company’s widget on the screen alerted me to the fact that I was likely looking at an AI-generated deepfake and not the real Elon.

Sure, I never really thought we were on a video call with Musk, and the demonstration was built specifically to make Reality Defender's early-stage tech look impressive, but the problem is entirely genuine. Real-time video deepfakes are a growing threat for governments, businesses, and individuals. Recently, the chairman of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations mistakenly took a video call with someone pretending to be a Ukrainian official. An international engineering company lost millions of dollars earlier in 2024 when one employee was tricked by a deepfake video call. Also, romance scams targeting everyday individuals have employed similar techniques.

“It's probably only a matter of months before we're going to start seeing an explosion of deepfake video, face-to-face fraud,” says Ben Colman, CEO and cofounder at Reality Defender. When it comes to video calls, especially in high-stakes situations, seeing should not be believing.

The startup is laser-focused on partnering with business and government clients to help thwart AI-powered deepfakes. Even with this core mission, Colman doesn’t want his company to be seen as more broadly standing against artificial intelligence developments. “We're very pro-AI,” he says. “We think that 99.999 percent of use cases are transformational—for medicine, for productivity, for creativity—but in these kinds of very, very small edge cases the risks are disproportionately bad.”

Reality Defender’s plan for the real-time detector is to start with a plug-in for Zoom that can make active predictions about whether others on a video call are real or AI-powered impersonations. The company is currently working on benchmarking the tool to determine how accurately it discerns real video participants from fake ones. Unfortunately, it’s not something you’ll likely be able to try out soon. The new software feature will only be available in beta for some of the startup’s clients.

This announcement is not the first time a tech company has shared plans to help spot real-time deepfakes. In 2022, Intel debuted its FakeCatcher tool for deepfake detection. The FakeCatcher is designed to analyze changes in a face’s blood flow to determine whether a video participant is real. Intel’s tool is also not publicly available.

Academic researchers are also looking into different approaches to address this specific kind of deepfake threat. “These systems are becoming so sophisticated to create deepfakes. We need even less data now,” says Govind Mittal, a computer science PhD candidate at New York University. “If I have 10 pictures of me on Instagram, somebody can take that. They can target normal people.”

Real-time deepfakes are no longer limited to billionaires, public figures, or those who have extensive online presences. Mittal’s research at NYU, with professors Chinmay Hegde and Nasir Memon, proposes a potential challenge-based approach to blocking AI-bots from video calls, where participants would have to pass a kind of video CAPTCHA test before joining.

As Reality Defender works to improve the detection accuracy of its models, Colman says that access to more data is a critical challenge to overcome—a common refrain from the current batch of AI-focused startups. He’s hopeful more partnerships will fill in these gaps, and without specifics, hints at multiple new deals likely coming next year. After ElevenLabs was tied to a deepfake voice call of US president Joe Biden, the AI-audio startup struck a deal with Reality Defender to mitigate potential misuse.

What can you do right now to protect yourself from video call scams? Just like WIRED’s core advice about avoiding fraud from AI voice calls, not getting cocky about whether you can spot video deepfakes is critical to avoid being scammed. The technology in this space continues to evolve rapidly, and any telltale signs you rely on now to spot AI deepfakes may not be as dependable with the next upgrades to underlying models.

“We don't ask my 80-year-old mother to flag ransomware in an email,” says Colman. “Because she's not a computer science expert.” In the future, it’s possible real-time video authentication, if AI detection continues to improve and shows to be reliably accurate, will be as taken for granted as that malware scanner quietly humming along in the background of your email inbox.

[transmutationisms]

I'm curious if you've come across any examples of what you would consider effective communication or collective organizing around Covid? I know of a few groups who I think are doing good work to get people access to masks and rapid tests, making connections to broader issues such as lack of sick leave, barriers to healthcare etc, but they're also relying on things like questionable wastewater data extrapolation to make their points. I don't really know what to do about the latter issue, since we've just had access to all data taken away from us by the government. (I know it's not an effective tool for collective action, but tbh I also struggle with the idea that all alarmism is bad, because I am high risk and I am scared!)

well 1st of all to be clear, i think wastewater data are valuable and i do look at them. what i don't do is make wildly overconfident guesses from those data about exactly how many people are infected, how many sick people are standing in any given room, how many people will eventually qualify for a long covid dx, etc. i think wastewater data are a rough proxy but still an important one, and generally more useful at the local level (where they can be cross-referenced with factors like vaccine uptake, circulating variants, and municipal public health policy) than at national or regional levels (where the necessary amount of aggregation makes it difficult to tease out much useful information about any one town or city).

2nd, i don't know what country you live in but i do look in on CDC's covid dashboard, which includes data on hospitalisations, emergency department visits, deaths, vaccine uptake, test positivity rates, &c. if this is applicable to you i strongly encourage always reading the footnotes as these statistics vary in accuracy (in particular, test positivity rate is very unreliable at this point). i consider a lot of these numbers useful primarily as indicators of comparative risk: eg, i assume hospitalisation numbers have been inaccurate lowballs for the entirety of the pandemic; however, it is still useful imo to see whether that number is trending in a particular direction, and how it compares over time. again, local results are sometimes more helpful as well. i also glance in on the census bureau's household pulse survey results, which come out numerous times throughout the year and include questions about duration of covid symptoms, ability to function, and vaccine uptake. these numbers skew in the opposite direction to many of CDC's, because the phrasing of the covid questions is intended to be broad, and does not attempt to distinguish between the sort of long covid that entails a 6 or 12 month recovery period, vs the sort of long covid that turns out to be me/cfs or other chronic long-term post-viral complications. again, i still think these numbers are useful for viewing trends over time; no data will ever be completely 100% without flaw, and i'm not holding out for that. what does frustrate me, though, is people (with any and all ideological axes to grind!) interpreting any of these numbers as though they are in fact perfect flawless representations of reality, with no further caveats or critical analysis needed. that's what i'm pushing back on, whether it comes from the "pulse survey says long covid prevalence is decreasing, so fuck it!" crowd or the "biobot says last week was a micro-surge so we're all going to die!" crowd.

as far as local orgs or groups doing actual action, like distributing masks or vaccine clinics, i don't put so much stock in what they say on instagram or whatever because frankly i think it matters very little. the masks and vaccines and air filters and so forth are useful in themselves; that work is valuable. if someone's positioning themselves primarily as a communicator then yes, i'm going to scrutinise their communication methods more. if it's an action org i'm honestly less concerned, unless there is egregiously unreliable information being propagated or they're communicating in the sort of stigmatising manner that many peak Posters have adopted (people who got sick are stupid / immoral / deserve it, etc).

i'd also just like to make it clear that like... i live with someone who is at high risk, i accordingly treat my own covid precautions as though i am also at high risk, and i wouldn't want covid regardless... like, please understand that when i talk about this i'm not coming at it from a perspective of someone who's unaware of the need for caution! my concern is, again, that caution and risk discussion are not synonymous with "making frightened guesses and asserting them with 100% confidence" or "selectively attributing truth to data because they agree with me, regardless of the actual methodology and any problems therein". i understand that when people are behaving recklessly and being encouraged to do so by state and medical authorities, it is tempting to look at that situation and think that communicating the seriousness of the virus is worth risking a little bit of inaccuracy if it protects people. however, i do not think that strategy actually pays off in the long or short term as far as changing people's behaviour (if it did, wouldn't it have by now?) and i think it is playing with fire to encourage this manner of interpreting and disseminating scientific information as though it is a kind of ideological buffet requiring no further verification or investigation beyond a cherry-picked deference to the stated objectivity and ideals of The Scientific Method.

[iwanthermidnightz]

1) Taylor Swift

No one in the music industry wielded more power over the past year than Taylor Swift, who made history at stadiums, movie theaters and on the Billboard charts, leaving even the most seasoned executives speechless. While they’d long celebrated her staggering popularity as a singer, songwriter and performer, her force as a strategic business leader suddenly came into sharper focus — and industry veterans took notes as they watched some of her bravest and most innovative business risks reap remarkable rewards.

At 34, she is one of the music industry’s most charismatic and influential leaders — and she rewrites the rules.

“The piece of advice I would give to the other executives on this list is that the best ideas are usually ones without industry precedent,” Swift tells Billboard. “The biggest crossroads moments of my career came down to sticking to my instincts when my ideas were looked at with skepticism. When someone says to me, ‘But that has never been done successfully before,’ it fires me up. We have to take strategic risks every day in this industry, but every once in a while, you have to really trust your gut and take a flying leap. My rerecordings are my favorite example of this, and I’m extremely grateful to my team and fans for taking that leap with me because it absolutely changed my life.”

Sage advice for an industry in which instinct has largely been supplanted by metrics and data analysis.

In December, Time named Swift its 2023 Person of the Year. In September, after encouraging her 279 million Instagram followers to vote and linking to vote.org, the nonpartisan nonprofit said it received over 35,000 registrations. She appears on the cover of this issue of Billboard and in the No. 1 spot of our annual Power 100 issue because her force across the business of music is now unparalleled — and because she models commitment to innovation that the rest of the business will need in order to tackle the big challenges ahead.

Swift’s gambles have paid off handsomely over the past year.

Her massive The Eras stadium tour, which began in March after she controversially put all the tickets on sale at once, crashing Ticketmaster and sparking mass hysteria, grossed an estimated $906.1 million in 2023 and is poised to become the highest-grossing global tour of all time before it wraps in December, according to Billboard.

The Golden Globe-nominated Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour film, taped during her six-show run at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., in August, has grossed over $261.6 million worldwide since its October opening, according to AMC Theatres Entertainment. In January, the publicly traded movie-house chain announced that the film’s box-office take made it the highest-grossing concert/documentary picture ever released, surpassing Michael Jackson’s 2009 This Is It. Once again blazing a new path, Swift made a groundbreaking distribution deal directly with AMC Theaters instead of linking with a film studio.

Swift has shaken up the catalog market, too. When Scooter Braun infuriated her by acquiring the master recordings of her first six albums through his Ithaca Holdings and then sold them to investment firm Shamrock Capital at a profit, Swift rerecorded the albums with loving precision and added bonus tracks to the new releases. They performed phenomenally well, as she deftly used her tour to promote them. When her latest rerecording (and 14th studio album overall), 1989 (Taylor’s Version), spent its fifth week at atop the Billboard 200 at the end of 2023, Swift beat Elvis Presley’s record for the most weeks at No. 1 by a solo artist. Her industry market share last year was 1.72%. If she were her own genre, she’d rank ninth for 2023 — bigger than jazz.

“She’s the smartest artist I’ve ever worked with,” says Messina Touring Group’s Louis Messina, who promotes Swift’s tours and has worked with her since 2005. “She outworks everybody and she has always had this vision. If you’re around her, you can’t help but believe in her.” —Melinda Newman

[computerknowledge27]

what is digital marketing ?

Digital marketing refers to the use of digital channels, platforms, and technologies to promote products, services, or brands to a target audience. Unlike traditional marketing methods that rely on offline channels such as print, television, or radio, digital marketing leverages online channels to reach and engage with consumers. The goal of digital marketing is to connect with the target audience in the right place and at the right time, driving brand awareness, customer acquisition, and retention.

Key components of digital marketing include:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Optimizing a website or content to rank higher in search engine results, improving visibility and organic (non-paid) traffic.

Content Marketing: Creating and distributing valuable, relevant content to attract and engage a target audience. This can include blog posts, videos, infographics, and more.

Social Media Marketing: Utilizing social media platforms (such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn) to promote products or services, interact with the audience, and build brand awareness.

Email Marketing: Sending targeted messages and promotional content to a group of people via email to nurture leads, build customer relationships, and encourage conversions.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising: Running paid advertisements on search engines or social media platforms, with advertisers paying a fee each time their ad is clicked.

Affiliate Marketing: Partnering with other businesses or individuals to promote products or services, with commissions earned for every sale or lead generated through the affiliate's efforts.

Influencer Marketing: Collaborating with influencers or individuals with a significant following to promote products or services to their audience.

Online Public Relations (PR): Managing a brand's online reputation and relationships with the public through various digital channels.

Analytics and Data Analysis: Monitoring and analyzing data from digital marketing efforts to measure performance, identify trends, and make informed decisions for future campaigns.

Digital marketing provides businesses with the flexibility to target specific demographics, track and measure campaign performance, and adjust strategies in real-time. It has become an integral part of the overall marketing strategy for many organizations in today's digital age.

[bpod-bpod]

ET Probe Hone

A new fast, interactive, user-friendly open-source tool for the annotation and analysis of cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) data called blik, a plug-in to the Python software image viewer napari

Read the published article here

Image from work by Lorenzo Gaifas and colleagues

Institut de Biologie Structurale, Université Grenoble Alpes, CEA, CNRS, IBS, Grenoble, France

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in PLOS Biology, April 2024

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