“Everyone knows that the Internet can be a horrible place, a collection of hellish sites, a Pandora’s box, a source of misinformation, bullying, manipulation and abuse. But the Internet is also a refuge, a place of support, advocacy and of the community,” begins the text by US author Katie Notopoulos, which is printed in the current issue of MIT Technology Review. The part of the Internet she describes is largely social media.
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Martin Fehrensen is someone who is familiar with what is currently going on in the world of Meta, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok and Co. and what effects they have on society, or vice versa. He is one of the two creators of the Social Media Watchblog, which he runs together with Simon Hurtz. There, as an author, he gives a curated overview of the most important news and debates surrounding social media. “We are interested in: How do social media change society, what does it do to each and every one of us? What does it do to political communication?” says Fehrensen in the podcast to TR editor Wolfgang Stieler.
A wide range of social media
In the conversation, the two cover a wide range from the current state of social media to its future. And of course they also talked about Cause X. Is the demise of the former Twitter due to Elon Musk’s takeover even a real problem that matters in the real world? Yes, says Fehrensen. Especially for people who are in the communications industry, after all, a bit of the world community came together there. “So that means that people with all sorts of opinions really came together there and were able to exchange ideas. Twitter was once a place for people who perhaps hadn’t even taken part in the public debate. Wonderful movements, like Black Lives Matter or Me too, originated there,” says Fehrensen. But Musk had a different political agenda with the takeover, says Fehrensen. “Elon Musk has obviously set out to smash this platform into rubble and to deprive people who are interested, so to speak, in a more colorful, beautiful, better, fairer world of their mouthpiece.” He did that.
Here you will find an overview of our three podcast formats: the weekly news podcast “Weekly” and the monthly podcasts “Unscripted” and “Deep Dive”.
How Fehrensen assesses other platforms, such as BlueSky or TikTok, and what he has to say about Facebook can be heard in the entire episode – as an audio stream (RSS feed):
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