#social media publisher tool

[contentideagenerator]

Simplified Social Media Scheduler Allows You to Easily Schedule Posts

Simplified Social Media Scheduler allows you to easily schedule posts for all your social media channels. With just a few clicks, you can automatically post to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more. This easy-to-use tool will help you save time and ensure that your social media accounts are always up-to-date.

[simplifysol]

Social Media Management Platforms: A Comparative Guide

In today’s digital age, managing social media effectively is crucial for businesses to thrive. Whether you are a small startup or a large enterprise, using a social media management platform can help streamline your efforts, save time, and boost engagement. These platforms provide a range of features from content scheduling to performance analytics. Let’s compare some of the most popular social media management tools and see how they stack up against each other.

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a veteran in the field of social media management. With its powerful scheduling tool, you can easily plan and publish posts across multiple platforms. It also provides comprehensive analytics to help track your performance. One of its strongest features is the ability to manage teams, making it suitable for larger organizations.

Key Features:

Social media publishing tool for scheduling posts

In-depth analytics and reporting

Integration with major social platforms

Multi-user collaboration options

2. Buffer

Buffer is a user-friendly social media management tool, ideal for startups and small businesses. Known for its simplicity, it offers easy-to-use scheduling, and it integrates well with various platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. While it lacks some of the advanced analytics features of other tools, its simplicity and affordability make it a popular choice.

Key Features:

Easy-to-use interface for scheduling posts

Basic analytics and engagement tracking

Integration with all major social platforms

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social focuses heavily on social listening and analytics, making it an excellent choice for brands wanting to dive deeper into user engagement. With its integrated CRM, it’s also a great option for those looking to improve customer relationships. Sprout Social’s combination of publishing and monitoring tools makes it a robust social media management platform for businesses of all sizes.

Key Features:

Comprehensive social media listening tool

Integration of CRM for enhanced customer support

Detailed analytics reports

Social media publishing tool for scheduling posts

4. Zoho Social

Zoho Social is a part of Zoho’s larger suite of business applications, and it excels at providing businesses with tools to manage social media marketing effectively. It offers monitoring, publishing, and reporting tools and can integrate with other Zoho tools for customer management and business automation.

Key Features:

Affordable and integrated with Zoho CRM

Social media publishing and scheduling

Monitoring and keyword tracking features

The Role of AI in Social Media Management

The introduction of AI technologies has revolutionized the way businesses manage their social media accounts. Tools like an AI chatbot for business help automate customer interactions, offering quick responses to common queries, 24/7. This not only improves customer service but also frees up human resources for more complex tasks.

Platforms integrating AI chatbots allow businesses to respond to inquiries in real-time, improving customer satisfaction and engagement across social channels.

How to Choose the Right Platform

When selecting a social media management platform, consider your business’s specific needs. If your focus is on automating posts, a social media publishing tool like Buffer or Hootsuite may suit you. If you need in-depth engagement metrics, Sprout Social or Zoho Social could be a better fit.

Additionally, tools with AI-powered features such as chatbots can help improve customer experience by providing instant, automated responses, ensuring you’re always available for your audience.

Conclusion

Each social media management platform has its own unique strengths. When deciding which one to use, focus on your business’s goals, whether it’s improving customer engagement with an AI chatbot for business or simplifying scheduling tasks with a social media publishing tool. By leveraging the right tool, businesses can stay ahead in today’s fast-paced digital environment.

[viralpep]

Enhance Your Social Media with Viralpep's Stories Publishing Tool

Boost your social media presence effortlessly with Viralpep's Social Media Stories Publishing Tool. Simplify scheduling and publishing stories across platforms while maximizing engagement. Discover how this tool streamlines your content workflow and enhances audience interaction. Learn more here: Social Media Stories Publishing Tool.

[raverai]

Our planners are designed with ease of use in mind. The intuitive interface makes it simple for anyone on your team to plan and schedule posts, even if they are not tech-savvy.

[dnya-v]

Social amplification has emerged as a powerful weapon for businesses and individuals. By utilizing its potential, you can amplify your message, engage your audience, and ultimately, achieve greater influence. This guide delves deep into the world of social amplification, exploring its intricacies, effective strategies, and industry-specific applications, empowering you to conquer the digital realm.

[autistichalsin]

In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn't limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn't happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.

Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it?

Isabel Fall's case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.

More specifically, she used the phrase "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.

But... well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn't be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.

A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn't all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.

Only... we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don't we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.

So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but "Isabel Fall" is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.

Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.

It's heartbreakingly familiar, isn't it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel's shoes, even if the outcome wasn't so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of "the community" as a nebulous undefined entity.

There's a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:

The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader. This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings. “[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”

A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why "proship", once simply a word for common sense "don't engage with what you don't like, and don't harass people who create it either" philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it's an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It's an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side's faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.

It's not about joy. It's not about resonance with plot or characters. It's about hate. It's about finding fault. If they can't find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.

And that's if they even went so far as to read the work they're critiquing. The ones they don't bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it's bad, it's fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it's unforgivable. It's a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who "deserve it." Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.

Isabel Fall's story follows this so step-by-step that it's like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.

Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection... they zeroed in on the discomfort. "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can't even type out the words "kill" and rape", instead substituting "unalive" and "grape." We don't deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.

So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn't be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.

Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; "there is a callout thread against them" is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.

So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn't matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.

And that's the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It's never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group's vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.

And that's what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.

And that's... fandom, anymore. That's just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don't make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.

Isabel Fall's harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, "more, please." It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.

Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It's a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).

It's a deeply toxic environment and I'm sad to say that Isabel Fall's story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I'm sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don't think we can ever go back to peaceful "for joy" engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.

[jolenes-book-journey]

A Peak into 2024

A Peak into 2024 and some of the upcoming programs we are creating, updating, and revamping for our customers as well as our fellow writers out there. This is going to be the year of informative, fun and, we hope, bigger participation in our programs. The more we all learn about our crafts the better writers and providers we will become. Then too, the more we share, the bigger and better things…

[marketbeam]

Rx in the Digital Age: The Impact of Social Media on Pharmaceutical Marketing Strategies

In the rapidly evolving landscape of healthcare, pharmaceutical companies are increasingly leveraging the power of social media to enhance their marketing strategies. This article explores the profound impact of social media on pharmaceutical marketing, shedding light on the benefits, challenges, and innovative approaches that are shaping the industry.

I. The Rise of Social Media in Pharmaceuticals

a. Social Media Revolutionizing Communication

The shift from traditional to digital communication in the pharmaceutical industry.

The role of social media platforms in connecting with healthcare professionals, patients, and stakeholders.

b. Harnessing the Power of Reach and Engagement

How pharmaceutical companies use social media to reach a broader audience.

Strategies for engaging with healthcare professionals and patients effectively.

II. Advantages of Social Media for Pharmaceutical Companies

a. Building Brand Awareness and Credibility

Establishing a strong online presence through social media.

Cultivating trust and credibility in the digital space.

b. Real-time Communication and Information Dissemination

The importance of timely information sharing in the pharmaceutical sector.

Examples of successful real-time communication through social media platforms.

III. Navigating Regulatory Challenges

a. Compliance and Ethical Considerations

The regulatory landscape for pharmaceutical marketing on social media.

Best practices for maintaining compliance while engaging on digital platforms.

b. Adverse Event Reporting in the Digital Era

Addressing challenges and ensuring timely reporting of adverse events.

Balancing transparency with regulatory requirements on social media.

IV. Innovative Approaches to Social Media Pharmaceutical Marketing

a. Educational Campaigns and Disease Awareness

The role of pharmaceutical companies in educating the public through social media.

Examples of successful disease awareness campaigns.

b. Patient-Centric Engagement

Creating platforms for patients to share experiences and access information.

Fostering a supportive online community for patients with specific medical conditions.

V. Future Trends and Technologies

a. Artificial Intelligence in Personalized Marketing

Utilizing AI to tailor content and advertisements to specific demographics.

The potential impact on patient engagement and adherence.

b. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in Pharmaceutical Promotion

Exploring immersive experiences for healthcare professionals and patients.

The potential for VR and AR to revolutionize pharmaceutical marketing strategies.

Conclusion:

As the pharmaceutical industry continues to embrace the digital age, social media stands out as a powerful tool for effective communication, brand building, and engagement. Navigating the regulatory landscape and adopting innovative approaches are key to leveraging the full potential of social media in pharmaceutical marketing. With the right strategies in place, pharmaceutical companies can not only reach a wider audience but also contribute to a more informed and connected healthcare community.

[copperbadge]

I'm getting depressingly good at identifying the formula for Pop Academic Books About ADHD.

Regardless of their philosophy it pretty much goes like this:

1. Emotionally sensitive essay about the struggle of ADHD and the author's personal experience with it as both a person with ADHD and a healthcare professional.

2. Either during or directly following this, a lightly explicated catalogue of symptoms, illustrated by anecdotes from patient case studies. Optional: frequent, heavy use of metaphor to explain ADHD-driven behavior.

3. Several chapters follow, each dedicated to a symptom; these have a mini-formula of their own. They open with a patient case study, discuss the highly relatable aspects of the specific symptom or behavior, then offer some lightweight examples of a treatment for the symptom, usually accompanied by follow up results from the earlier case studies.

4. Somewhere around halfway-to-two-thirds through the book, the author introduces the more in-depth explication of the treatment system (often their own homebrew) they are advocating. These are generally both personally-driven (as opposed to suggested cultural changes, which makes sense given these books' target audience, more on this later) and composed of an elaborate system of either behavior alteration or mental reframing. Whether this system is actually implementable by the average reader varies wildly.

5. A brief optional section on how to make use of ADHD as a tool (usually referring to ADHD or some of its symptoms as a superpower at least once). Sometimes this section restates the importance of using the systems from part 4 to harness that superpower. Frequently, if present, it feels like an afterthought.

6. Summation and list of further resources, often including other books which follow this formula.

I know I'm being a little sarcastic, but realistically there's nothing inherently wrong about the formula, like in itself it's not a red flag. It's just hilariously recognizable once you've noticed it.

It makes sense that these books advocate for the Reader With ADHD undertaking personal responsibility for their treatment, since these are in the tradition of self-help publishing. They're aimed at people who are already interested in doing their own research on their disability and possible ways to handle it. It's not really fair to ask them to be policy manuals, but I do find it interesting that even books which advocate stuff like volunteering (for whatever reason, usually to do with socialization issues and isolation, often DBT-adjacent) never suggest disability activism either generally or with an ADHD-specific bent.

None of these books suggest that perhaps life with ADHD could be made easier with increased accommodations or ease of medication access, and that it might be in a person's best interest to engage in political advocacy surrounding these and other disability-related issues. Or that activism related to ADHD might help to give someone with ADHD a stronger sense of ownership of their unique neurology. Or that if you have ADHD the idea of activism or even medical self-advocacy is crushingly stressful, and ways that stress might be dealt with.

It does make me want to write one of my own. "The Deviant Chaos Guide To Being A Miscreant With ADHD". Includes chapters on how to get an actual accurate assessment, tips for managing a prescription for a controlled substance, medical and psychiatric self-advocacy for people who are conditioned against confrontation, When To Lie About Being Neurodivergent, policy suggestions for ADHD-related legislation, tips for activism while executively dysfunked, and to close the book a biting satire of the pop media idea of self-care. ("Feeling sad? Make yourself a nice pot of chicken soup from scratch and you'll feel better in no time. Stay tuned after this rambling personal essay for the most mediocre chicken soup recipe you've ever seen!" "Have you considered planning and executing an overly elaborate criminal heist as a way to meet people and stay busy?")

Every case study or personal anecdote in the book will have a different name and demographics attached but will also make it obvious that they are all really just me, in the prose equivalent of a cheap wig, writing about my life. "Kelly, age seven, says she struggles to stay organized using the systems neurotypical children might find easy. I had to design my own accounting spreadsheet in order to make sure I always have enough in checking to cover the mortgage, she told me, fidgeting with the pop socket on her smartphone."

I feel a little bad making fun, because these books are often the best resource people can get (in itself concerning). It's like how despite my dislike of AA, I don't dunk on it in public because I don't want to offer people an excuse not to seek help. It feels like punching down to criticize these books, even though it's a swing at an industry that is mainly, it seems, here to profit from me. But one does get tired of skimming the hype for the real content only to find the real content isn't that useful either.

Les (not his real name) was diagnosed at the age of 236. Charming, well-read, and wealthy, he still spent much of his afterlife feeling deeply inadequate about his perceived shortcomings. "Vampire culture doesn't really acknowledge ADHD as a condition," he says. "My sire wouldn't understand, even though he probably has it as well. You should see the number of coffins containing the soil of his homeland that he's left lying forgotten all over Europe." A late diagnosis validated his feelings of difference, but on its own can't help when he hyperfocuses on seducing mortals who cross his path and forgets to get home before sunrise. "I have stock in sunburn gel companies," he jokes.

[qqueenofhades]

hi I hope you don't mind but I would love to hear your long tired historian rant you mentioned in your tags on that one post, if you feel in the mood to share? (no pressure!)

(also thank you for existing, you do wonderful work and the world is a better place for you being in it)

Aha. Well. For context, the mention of said rant was in relation to this post:

Basically, this post struck a nerve because of how it exactly encapsulates the anti-intellectual, anti-academia, anti-historical, anti-reality thinking that is absolutely rampant in social media spaces, even and especially spaces that identify as leftist, liberal, or otherwise "superior" to the right wing when it comes to identifying fake news or misinformation. (Example A: anything ever written by a self-proclaimed leftist on Twitter.) We all know that there are huge problems with the American public school system (and the people writing this are almost always American) and the American practice of education in general, and that yes, there are many things that happened in the past (or y'know, the present!) that are not taught very well, or at all. But because the American public school system is so decentralized and largely autonomous, incredibly dependent on the temperament of local superintendents and/or school boards, taxation and funding, availability of teachers, requirement of useless standardized tests, etc., it is very difficult (if not outright impossible) to claim that this is the result of a Unified Grand Conspiracy To Not Teach Real History To The Youth In Order To Make Them Mindlessly Support Capitalism. That is the exact sort of deranged conspiratorial thinking that the right wing does and fits everything into a sinister narrative about how "They" are planning to keep you ignorant and therefore nothing harmful that you ever think or do is really your fault. It's not good.

(Whoosh. That was very calm and reasonable of me. For the rest of this post, please just picture Captain Holt "apparently that's a trigger for me" dot gif.)

Also: even in public school, and despite the Republicans' best efforts, there are plenty of opportunities to study complex or "controversial" subjects. For example, I spend a week every June grading AP Euro History exams with a lot of other educators in a giant windowless steel box (woo-hoo, fun times!) Every year, there are questions on the exam about women's rights, imperialism and exploitation, slavery/race relations, the development of capitalism and the current economic model, religion and science, the history of labor, and other topics that would be considered "controversial" if you're an idiot. This is an exam taken by high school students in all grades from across the country, and there are also AP World History and APUSH (US history) exams every year which are doubtless making an effort to address similar themes. This is an advanced program, yes, but it's widely available to many schools and is not a result of a sinister plot to keep the youth from discovering the truth. Also: you live in an era of absolutely unprecedented access to information. Put down the ChatGPT bullshit generator and visit a goddamn public library. Or even open Wikipedia. The tools are there for you to start educating yourself and they are so easy to find!!!!!

The "Historians Are Hiding The Truth!!!" narrative becomes even more ridiculous in university-level or professional academic historical-study spaces, especially when historical educators and associations (such as the American Historical Association) have been at the forefront of pushing back against right-wing efforts to censor history, punish teachers, and remove culture-war subjects from classrooms. Also as someone who has advanced degrees in history, has taught/worked in several universities in different countries, writes and publishes historical research, and otherwise participates professionally in the field: trust me, we aren't "hiding" shit. There are vigorous debates and disagreements on various bogglingly obscure subjects and points of clarification and so forth, but that doesn't mean we're not talking about them (trust me, we're often talking about them too much). If you're issuing confident blanket statements about how "historians are conspiring to hide x," you're an idiot.

This also has dangerous repercussions in the field of, say, politics and civics, where a lot of absolutely braindead Online Leftists have spent the last four years posting deranged nonsense on social media and then, whenever they're called out on it for that not actually being how anything works at all, whining that "I was never taught this!!!" (And yet, it somehow never actually changes their perspective or their theories....) They whine about how "they didn't know this" and it was someone else's fault, they make up total fantasy about what the Biden administration did or should have done and now are still happy about Trump coming back because "It will teach the Democrats a lesson!!!" and otherwise accelerating us oh-so-quickly down that slippery slippery fascism slope. Their weaponized ignorance and their magical fantasies about what "should" have happened often come back to this same learned helplessness, where it's everyone else's fault (especially Capitalism's) that they're total wankers. Look: I'm not a goddamn fan of capitalism either. But we all grew up in this same system, and some of us aren't raving idiots, so at some point, you have to take the tiniest modicum of personal responsibility for the information you seek out, the content you consume, the opinions you propagate, and the people you surround yourself with. Shocking.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Online Leftists are actively and unrepentantly enabling American fascism and should be treated in the same way as we treat MAGA when it comes to deciding what is good or worthwhile information. This is because their entire political philosophy (insofar as their beliefs can be dignified with the term) is based on the "make shit up and remove it from any basic empirical references, grounding in reality, or 'should I run the most basic Google search and see if I'm completely talking out of my ass in a distorted social media echo chamber? Nah I'm good' " technique. This is, as the original tweet above references, trying to retcon sheer malicious laziness and stupidity into grand ideological theories about how it's actually "better" that they don't know a damn thing and won't shut up. It's your evil history teacher's fault, or "academics are all rich and elitist" (ask any academic-precariat person like me and we will laugh hollowly and then throw monkey poop at you), or "They" wouldn't let you learn this, or on and on. Even in our terrible, awful, no-good very-bad timeline, there are still ample tools to educate yourself, to learn how to filter out bad information and junk news, and otherwise gird yourself even a little for the even-more-massive assault on empirical reality that we are about to experience in the next four years (ugh). I suggest you take advantage of them.

[sayruq]

Gaza’s Civil Defense, in a statement released on 30 April, estimates that there are roughly 10,000 bodies of Palestinians stuck under the rubble since the beginning of Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip. The general director said that these missing bodies are not included in the death toll numbers issued by the Ministry of Health as their bodies have not been brought and counted in the hospitals. This brings the current number of Palestinians killed to over 44,000. According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med) numbers published on 23 April, the current death toll is at 42,510. The Euro-Med figures include those missing after being detained and forcibly disappeared by Israeli forces and those who have been trapped under rubble for over two weeks. The general directorate of Gaza’s civil defense said that it received many calls from people volunteering to remove the bodies of Palestinians from under the rubble to give them a proper burial. Al-Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif documented the efforts of civil defense crews which took on the task of recovering bodies from under the rubble. “Efforts by civil defense teams and volunteers began to recover the bodies of martyrs from under the rubble of their homes,” Sharif said in a video posted on social media from inside what remained of a building subjected to Israeli attacks late last year. “It is estimated that there are more than fifty martyrs under the rubble of the house.” Sharif continued by saying, “Civil defense personnel face great difficulties due to the lack of advanced equipment, which forces them to use primitive tools in search and recovery operations for the decomposed bodies of the martyrs.” Gaza’s civil defense said that with the methods it is forced to use to clear the debris, it will take two to three years to search through 37 tons of rubble

[raverai]

Effortlessly plan, schedule, and publish your posts with our intuitive social media content scheduler. Stay ahead of the game! https://raver.ai/

[anchorandrope]

I need to know why L's sisters are always the ones making trouble on social media and looking for attention. I really don't understand why them

Look, im going to give you an answer from PR because that's my life so why not lmfao. And since i've worked with one influencer recently, i have no doubts regarding what is happening at this point with louis' sisters.

Im going to try to explain this as short and succinctly as possible. and im really sorry to say this but this is how things work in real life, i beg you to leave your parasocial relationship with louis aside for three seconds to think coldly about the situation, because i know perfectly well how some of you take every statement made related to louis. several statements can exist at the same time, not everything is black and white, etc. thank you...

Some of you may ask, why always the twins? and there is, actually, an answer to that question. The answer, believe it or not, is not because Lottie is older than the twins. Partly her age is related, but it is not the reason itself... let's see:

Lottie started working as Lou Teasdale's assistant during the OTRA Tour, and since then and thanks to her, she got in touch with many important job opportunities that another teenager who does make-up well wouldn't have.

She has been in Fashion Week, worked for Selena Gomez, etc. Everything from a very young age. Today, she doesn't live exclusively from social media, as many believe. Her income is not only from "being an influencer", she has her brand tanologist, she published a book.... In Lottie's case, social media is a fundamental communication tool that allows her to obtain opportunities that generate income, but it is not her entire income per se.

On the other hand, Daisy and Phoebe were too young to take advantage of job opportunities at that time (1D days) because they were kids... they, again it may not seem like it, didn't have the same level of important job opportunities as Lottie had at such a young age. Lottie was at Fashion Week when she was 17... the twins are still very young and their proper working careers are just starting.

Phoebe and Daisy started their modelling careers in 2020 and to this day, they are involved in social media, promoting products (swaps) and modelling in small photo shoots. They haven't really had a big job opportunity like Lottie has had.

Unlike Lottie, they did not have the same visibility from the start and their income comes exclusively from social media. Modelling and swaps/promo are things they do through social media, their working tool is Instagram/TikTok. They need that platform for their income.

Now, if you have social media accounts set up as public and as a content creator you will know this, but for those who don't: those who create content on social media in this way (influencers, among other cases) have their own tool that helps them most to calculate how much they will earn and that is metrics. The famous "professional dashboard/insights" from Instagram for example.

To hire an influencer (in addition to doing a previous investigation of who you should hire) you should ask them for their metrics so that you can reach an agreement on the amount of money for that exchange/interaction/etc. A fixed base number is set, but depending on the reach, the more money they receive is directly proportional to the amount of interactions and views that post has had. Like on instagram if you share the post as branded content, the company you tag can see your metrics.

The fact that the twins are the ones who post content that they know people will go to their stories/posts/comments to see or will make them follow them on their social media is not a coincidence because the amount of people who interact with them (whatever the reason, as your personal reason is not seen on a metric lol) is what generates them revenue, quite literally.

Yes, it can happen that once in a while as something "casual" because they are people, but not as a generality and even less so when a few days later they do another promotion or they are in one. What is going on and whether it is right/morally correct or not are two different questions, by the way.

This is what happens, welcome to the world of influencers! It doesn't matter if you agree or not, if you like it or not, or whatever, those are your personal opinions (which are perfectly fine, we all have them) but... that's how it is. lol.

I personally don't think it's right to use babygate as a method of generating interaction, and just as I brought it to the attention of the clark family, I will bring it to the attention of the tomlinson's. the child is a huge victim of this, everyone is violating his right to privacy and honestly its disgusting to see after like 9 years. It seems to me that gaining interactions (that lead you to gain money) with such a horrible situation and with a child seems to me something that people should be ashamed of, to be honest. Beyond babygate, imagining that larry and babygate never existed, it's wrong to do this, it goes way beyond fandom, which i think is something a lot of people don't truly understand.

if you really want the twins to stop posting this kind of shit, im sorry to inform yall that the only solution to the problem is going to be to stop following them, stop looking at their stories, stop liking and viewing their posts, stop commenting, etc. any viewing/interaction is reflected in a metric, check it out for yourself (besides there are more metric apps than just the ones IG/Tiktok gives you). If you spread a screenshot taken by someone else or stuff, you are not interacting directly with their account, so it's not the same ofc, but if someone doesn't understand how it works, they will go and see it for themselves and and they will generate interactions. It's impossible not to have them on the radar, i know, so at least i ask yall to focus on what's really important, and not on every idiotic thing that happens, because that way they just make it worse, literally.

[transmutationisms]

i do think a specific shift wrt the word "privilege" that is worth chewing on is the move from a privilege being a discrete legal or financial permission—for example a printing privilege, ie permission to publish xyz, or a commercial privilege, ie permission to sell or buy or transport xyz goods—to the idea of having privilege as a sort of abstract quantity of social status. and i don't even disagree that the latter does, at least experientially, follow from the former. but trying to talk about privilege solely in the latter way, without identifying the underlying economic mechanisms and legal tools in question, never really goes anywhere useful. i think this is a major disconnect you see when concepts of privilege become widely discussed enough to make appearances in major media outlets, for example. these are outlets that refuse (sometimes wilfully, it doesn't really make a difference) to understand privilege as an economic mechanism by which the classes, castes, etc in question are actually constituted. all they can ever do is pretend like the characteristic in question is an immutable and transhistorical one that is simply being unjustly punished or rewarded—eg, you simply ARE male, and the privilege follows from that pre-existing condition—rather than that maleness itself is defined and created by the granting of specific rights, permissions, and privileges. so the only thing liberals can ever grant in such discussions is that privilege exists, abstractly and nebulously. that this framing is milquetoast and usually not very actionable is imo intimately related to the fact that it begins by taking a legal and economic term and instead engaging with it almost exclusively as a reference to the feelings and intentions of individuals: there is no longer a specific privilege granted by (ultimately) the state, but rather a generalised condition of being privileged. and of course such a condition does come to exist, but we don't make much progress understanding (let alone dismantling) it if we present it as springing out of nowhere or out of a general sort of social sentiment, rather than naming and problematising the specific political tools used to create and maintain it.

[shelleysmary]

lots of fans have made valid points and written well-thought-out posts about the trop ai drama, so i'm not gonna rehash them, but i do want to bring up something that no one seems to be talking about and it's the impulse that leads people to plug these things into ai generators in the first place.

fandom over the last year especially has become increasingly toxic to the point that actual billion-dollar corporations are afraid it. the result is subpar, pandering films, books, and television shows that break no new ground, recycle old tropes, and sacrifice story integrity to avoid catching heat from the loudest, most entitled people in the room. i'm calling this an issue of entitlement first and foremost because the idea that the audience should have any say over a non-crowd-created media project is preposterous. deciding that the cons outweigh the pros of watching something and choosing to walk away without making a fuss is a lost discipline now because everyone with an internet connection and a social media account believes that their vision reigns supreme. "how dare this show downplay my favorite ship! they were supposed to kiss! that was the whole point! the absence of this one thing i had on my wishlist is a crime against me personally!" so they turn to ai and click some buttons and now these gifs exist and are being circulated with an air of "i've righted a wrong." worse, the use of ai in this way is being conflated with the creation of fanworks???

there are reasons why i don't believe the ai saurondiel kiss is on the same raft as, say, making them kiss in a drawing or a published fanfic, but my main concern is with the spirit behind each. fanworks are made in homage to the source material, even the fix-it fics. there is an acknowledgment, a separation even, between the television show and the fanwork. this separation is necessary and i would say even integral to the nature of fan creation, while ai closes that gap until it no longer exists. the elimination of space between creator and audience also happens on social media, when disgruntled fans who have taken umbrage with a fictional character or creative decision directly harass the writers or the actors involved. more and more, fans are demanding to be in the rooms, in the minds, and to exert control over the people who tell their stories, and it has only ever worked to our collective detriment. now i'm not saying that if you liked and shared the saurondiel ai kiss that you're the same as the internet trolls who harass (mostly) women and people of color online. but i'm begging you to do some self-reflection and ask yourself why you feel entitled to seeing what you want on your screen.

what has changed in the last few years that would make you dissatisfied with, say, reading someone's fic or making your own drawing? is it a matter of "the tool is there, so why not use it?" is it "i believe it should have happened and it didn't and i feel cheated?" or maybe there's been a pattern you've noticed in your recent media "consumption" (god, i hate that word) where, unless a show or television series goes the exact way you want it to, it feels like you've been defrauded somehow? i'm not being facetious. i'm inviting you to notice that what you're feeling is probably discomfort, disappointment, maybe even cognitive dissonance because you imagined it going one way, and now you're at a loss because it didn't. you built it up in your head, you had something to look forward to, you were convinced that it would happen, it was exciting and you were so eager to get to that point, and then.... and then...

we've all been there. and it sucks. but i also want to remind you of how important it is to preserve the separation. this space is ours. the writer's room, the filming set, the editing room, those spaces are theirs. the actors' likenesses are theirs. thinking beyond trop, the separation is how we get creative works that challenge us politically, emotionally, that make us uncomfortable and tell us important truths. writers shouldn't have to - and shouldn't FULL STOP - do what we want them to do. sometimes that means knowing when to walk away, when to say "i no longer enjoy this show, i will no longer support it" or "i will continue to watch but pretend things went differently," the latter of which has been the spark that has moved so many online fans to draw, paint, write, or sew. it's a type of creation that allows "canon" and "fanon" to exist parallel to one another. moreover, the effort it takes to make anything with your own two hands, with your own time, and with your own energy increases your appreciation for the creative impulse. films and books and television stop being "products" for your "consumption" because you're aware of what goes into them, and it becomes easier to look at things you don't like or disagree with and say, "you know what, i'm gonna pass," or "not in my headcanon."

oh, and by the way plugging things into an ai generator? is theft. the same way that it's generally frowned upon for people to use ai to, say, write the rest of an unfinished fic without the express permission of the fanwork creator, using the actors' likenesses to make them kiss goes against everything the actors' union fought for last year. i'll also add that it's incredibly creepy. almost all of us are in agreement that intimacy coordinators are a good thing because they act - again! - as a separation between what's "real" and what isn't, the same way going on ao3 and reading a fic that very clearly says on the tin that it's a fanfic, unaffiliated with the official ip, is a separation. it's another beast entirely to normalize fan-use of ai, to say you support creatives, support actors, support unions, and then do this in your personal life. i repeat the question: what impulse leads anyone to believe that this is okay other than a feeling of misplaced ownership?

tl;dr: ai nonsense does not belong in fandom spaces. (in my home state of california, it is illegal to use digital replicas of an actor's voice or likeness in place of their actual services without their informed consent [which, in spirit, is what you're doing by using ai to make your gifs]). we all just need to mind our own business and go back to writing our fix-it fics and complaining to our friends in relative peace. if you're finding it impossible to do so, ask yourself why. remember that fanart is our longstanding tradition. stop outsourcing it to an unregulated technology just because your two faves didn't kiss.