Facebook = lower self-control + more scrutiny + more stress

http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/studies-on-how-social-media-affects-us/


DECEMBER 21, 2012BY FRANCIS BEA

Facebook is more than just quirky status updates and pictures of your dog — shocking, we know. Check out everything the higher minds have had to say lately about the social network and all the frightening things it’s doing to our brains. 

More social network usage leads to lower self-control

We might not realize it, but social network users are more inclined to lose self-control, according to a study by researchers from Columbia Business School and the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business at University of Pittsburgh. In a paper titled, “Are Close Friends the Enemy? Online Social Networks, Self-Esteem, and Self-Control,” researchers argue that social networks will boost a user’s self-esteem simply by how we choose to portray ourselves online.

Social network users tend to be selective about what’s published, and more often than not it’s the positive parts of their lives that become glamorized. You won’t see too many status updates about how few friends we have or how little we get paid. But the effects of this can be detrimental: To maintain this feeling of self-worth, social network users tend to lower their self-control, from which the study draws a parallel between higher social network usage with a “higher body-mass index, increased binge eating, a lower credit score, and higher levels of credit card debt for individuals with strong ties to their social network.” Phew. Those are some heavy repercussions for exaggerating how much you had on your vacation.

HR is judging your job candidacy via social media

It should come as no surprise that you’re going to be scrutinized by current and potential employers starting for your social media presence. 

Reported by BusinessNewsDaily, AVG Technologies released a study that might be alarming for those of you looking for jobs. If you’re trying to secure that critical interview, it might be in your best interest to shield your social presence from the public’s eye. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Flickr. Here are some facts from the study that you should know about:

• As many as 90 percent of human resource professionals, AVG found, will search for unprotected accounts to judge their merits based on what they find.
• If a candidate looks like they’re drunk your chances of getting an interview drops by 84 percent (shocking!).
• If there’s any nudity on your profile, 90 percent of human resources professionals agree that there’s no way that candidate will get an interview (again… shocking!).
• Derogatory, negative, and racist comments found online will diminish your chances of securing that interview.
• 50 percent of human resources professional admitted that they’ve disqualified a candidate due to their social media profiles.

Facebook causes stress

If you’re trying to manage the many facets of your personality and life on Facebook to fit in with certain social circles, you might be among the people that are susceptible to anxiety from using the social network. Researchers from the University of Edinburgh published a study that that draws parallels between managing a Facebook profile with stress. What they found was that users on average were a part of seven different social circles. Regulating these multiple relationships is increasingly becoming a cause for stress now that Facebook is evolving into a network for keeping in touch with not only friends but relatives, co-workers, and even bosses.

“People will try and manage themselves and regulate how they appear on the site, so they will try and avoid saying things they think, as they are worried how it will appear. I have seen how people will delete photos and even regulate their offline behaviour for their online presence. If people are at parties and they see a camera they then think my boss, or my girlfriend might see this. So they might be smoking or drinking and when a camera comes around they will change their actions so people don’t see it on Facebook,” Ben Marder, who wrote the report, told The Telegraph.

This Is How Facebook Tried to Make Money Off You

http://mashable.com/2012/12/21/facebook-makes-money-off-you/

12/21/12

For better or worse, this will go down as the year that Facebook really put a dollar sign in front of its users.

Facebook has been under immense pressure from investors to come up with ways to monetize, which has led to a fundamental shift in how it operates. When the company first filed to go public in February, CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated very clearly that profit is not his or the company's first priority. "Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services," he wrote in the public filing. Eight months and plenty of bad stock trading days later, Zuckerberg revealed in an earnings call that every team at Facebook is now responsible for coming up with a revenue strategy for their product.

In the past year, we've seen Facebook try out a range of tactics to make money from its users, whether it's inserting more advertising into the News Feed or the recently announced option that lets people you don't know message your inbox for $1. Some of these efforts, like the messaging option, have been met with heavy criticism from users while others have largely been accepted as par for the course.

What matters now to Facebook from an investor standpoint is how much it can increase the money it makes from each user. Facebook generated about $1.25 per user on average in the third quarter, up from about $1.19 in the same quarter last year.

To put that another way, right now you're worth about $5 a year to Facebook and the company would really like to see that number go up.

For that reason, don't hold your breath for Facebook to stop trying out new ways to make money off you in the new year. Brian Wieser, senior research analyst at Pivotal Research Group, says that some features introduced this year like Sponsored Stories for mobile will likely stick around, while the company continues to test out others to see what works and what doesn't.

"I think you should expect just an ongoing testing and learning from an ad sales perspective about what balances near-term revenue growth with durability," Wieser said. With that in mind, here's a look back at all the ways Facebook tried to make money from you this year, as well as a glimpse at what they might do next year.

Facebook 'cloaking' flaw allows unexpected snooping

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/20/facebook_deactivated_friend_zero_day/ 

Facebook 'cloaking' flaw allows unexpected snooping

• 
• 
 
• 
 
• 
 

Eggheads label flaw a 'zero-day privacy loophole'

By Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor • Get more from this author

Posted in Security, 20th March 2012 03:59 GMT

University College London research student Shah Mahmood and Chair of Information Communication Technology Yvo Desmedt have told a conference of what they call a “zero day privacy loophole” in Facebook.
Details of the loophole, which the pair name “Deactivated Friend Attack” was presented at the IEEE International Workshop on Security and Social Networking SESOC 2012 in Lugano, Switzerland on March 19th.

The pair say the attack works like this:

“Our deactivated friend attack occurs when an attacker adds their victim on Facebook and then deactivates her own account. As deactivation is temporary in Facebook, the attacker can reactivate her account as she pleases and repeat the process of activating and deactivating for unlimited number of times. While a friend is deactivated on Facebook, she becomes invisible. She could not be unfriended (removed from friend’s list) or added to any specific list.”

Complicating mattters is the fact that, the pair say, Facebook users aren't told when friends de-activate or re-activate accounts.
That means trouble if the account is re-activated, as the newly-re-activated friend regains access to anything their connections have posted. Once they've rummaged around, they can de-activate the account again and their friends will almost certainly not know what has happened or that they've shared information.
The pair label this behaviour “cloaking” and cannot resist explaining it with a Star Trekmetaphor, writing “Badass Blink or Jem’Hadar has to uncloak (be visible), even if only for a moment, to open fire.”
The extended abstract of the talk asserts cloaking is a problem because many Facebook users aren't very discriminating about whom they befriend on the service. Some could therefore Friend members whose only intention is to “cloak” their accounts and then “... activate her account at the moment least likely to be detected and crawl her victims profile for information, keeping an updated record."
That's bad because, the pair say, "Various groups of information aggregators including marketers, background checking agencies, governments, hackers, spammers, stalkers and criminals would find this attractive as a permanent back door to the private information of a Facebook user.”
The user would never know of that information-gathering effort, unless they happened to be paying attention to the temporarily uncloaked account.
To prove the approach works, the pair say the conducted a lengthy experiment in which a dummy account acquired many friends and conducted frequent cloaking and uncloaking without attracting much attention.
The fix, the pair say, is for Facebook to notify users of de-activations and re-activations, so that odd behaviour can be spotted. Flagging of accounts that cloak is another option, as is removing re-activation features altogether.

Number of Facebook Friends Linked to Narcissism

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57401116-501465/number-of-facebook-friends-linked-to-narcissism-says-study/

(CBS News) A recent study finds a new link between one's abundance of Facebook friends and narcissism.

The study titled "Narcissism on Facebook: Self-promotional and anti-social behavior" by Christopher J. Carpenter was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. The purpose of the research was to identify "socially disruptive" personality types on Facebook.

Carpenter surveyed 294 people, ages 18 to 65, who were given a series of questionnaires regarding their use of Facebook.

They were also asked questions to assess Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI). More specifically, two NPI subscales - Grandiose Exhibitionism (GE) and Entitlement/Exploitativeness (EE), as defined by a 2010 study called "What Does the Narcissistic Personality Inventory Really Measure?" published in the journal Assessment.

The study theorizes that people with high levels of GE tend to have a high friend count on Facebook because their drive for attention motivates them to seek a wider audience.

The same group is more likely to accept friend requests from strangers, post frequent status updates, upload photos and change their profile picture as a means to gain attention. Meanwhile, those with high levels of EE were predicted to feel entitled to attention without effort or reciprocity.

A sample of questions asked in the study:

"How often do you post status updates to Facebook?"
"How often do you update your profile information on Facebook?"
"How often do you accept a friend request from a total stranger on Facebook (assuming they do not appear to be a fake profile)?"

For the most part, the research supported the hypothesis that people with more Facebook friends tended to have narcissists tendencies.

One caveat of the study is that it's not fully representative. Nearly three fourths of the participants were college students.

The March 2012 issue of Personality and Individual Differences can be ordered online.

Facebook 'Unfriending' Leads To Double Homicide

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/12/facebook-unfriending-leads-to-double-homicide/

2/12/2012


Horrific: After Billie Jean Hayworth defriended a 30-year-old woman, Jenelle Potter, on Facebook, Potter’s father went to Hayworth’s house and murdered her and her fiance, sparing their baby, who was found unharmed in his mother’s arms. Hayworth, 23, and Billy Payne, 36, were both shot, and Payne’s throat was slashed.

One of the investigators says that there had “been bad blood” between the two families for some time, with confrontations in real life, including an altercation at a grocery store, but what triggered the murders was the act of severing ties on Facebook.

I cannot fathom homicidal rage over a Facebook blocking, but it’s not the first time that a Facebook defriending has inspired criminal retaliation. Last year, an Illinois woman set fire to a couple’s house after being defriended.

Facebook crystallizes the dynamics of our friendships and social interactions — bringing them a clarity that can be measured by clicks, visits, and comments. Having our social interactions brought into that level of focus means that a relationship that might have once ebbed over time naturally through avoidance and ignored phone calls can instead be cut off in a dramatic and confrontational way. Perhaps laying bare the end of a relationship in such a deliberate way means an intensified emotional reaction for those involved, or a sense of finality that one wouldn’t usually get. (When I blocked an ex-boyfriend on Facebook years ago, he was angrier about that than at any other point in our breaking up.)

For it to escalate to this level of retaliation, though, is horribly tragic. I suppose the lesson here, if there is one, is not to defriend/block anyone on Facebook who strikes you as potentially homicidal. (Or better yet, don’t friend them in the first place.)

Facebook Owns You

The Onion Weighs in on Facebook

Facebook addicts should get out and socialise more

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2012/1/22/nation/10312466&sec=nation

January 22, 2012

WITH every new level of technology comes a corresponding wave of casualties.

From theft victims careless with their bank ATM cards to gullible folk cheated in online scams, the story is familiar enough.

So today we see the rise of Facebook addicts. The fact that this involves victims without criminal perpetrators does not make it any less serious.

Facebook addiction has been known to affect the psychological and physical health of its victims.

It also affects the personal relationships that victims had, or might have had, with others around them.

It is therefore a personal, domestic and social problem. The affliction is universally acknowledged by health professionals who have dubbed it Facebook Addiction Disorder (FAD).

It is compulsive, invasive of one's personal life, distorts priorities, damages one's capacity to relate to others around them and disorientates one to reality.

There are withdrawal symptoms, pangs of “cold turkey” and it is all downright senseless and wasteful.

How can it then be addressed effectively?

Relying on addicts to stop their addiction is not going to work. Neither will legislation, since Facebook can all too easily be accessed through computers or smartphones.

With children and young adults, FAD is particularly pernicious because it eats away at their health in their formative years.

Yet, it is with young addicts that the problem is perhaps easier to avoid with prudent parental intervention.

Adults as parents or guardians therefore have a responsibility to ensure that those under their care do not fall victim to FAD. And as adults anyway, with or without others under their care, they need to set an example by not falling victim themselves.

If push comes to shove, there is always the off switch.

For Malaysians to “have the most Facebook friends in the world” may at first sound gratifying, but in reality it is a condition ridden with problems and liabilities.

The best friends tend to be those you encounter in the flesh. A “friend” in cyberspace may be very unreal, whether as a notional friend of a friend, a fictional character, or even a predator.

If Malaysians have the most virtual friends in the world, it may well be that we have the least real friends in the world. And that would be another tragedy in itself.

Man Tortures Daughter and Posts Pictures at Facebook

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/01/ohio-man-allegedly-ties-up-daughter-locks-her-in-cage-and-threatens-to-electrify-it/

Jan 21, 2012 

Ohio Man Allegedly Ties Up Daughter, Locks Her in Cage and Threatens to Electrify It

An Ohio man is facing child endangerment charges after allegedly tying up his 12-year-old daughter with duct tape, sticking her in a dog cage as punishment, and then threatening to electrify it.

James Tapke, who was arrested Thursday,  was ordered held on $50,000 bond during his arraignment Friday.

Police in Springfield Township, near Cincinnati, say Tapke, 41, wrapped duct tape around the girl’s hands and feet, then shut her in a large dog cage on Jan. 10.

While the girl was in the cage, Tapke allegedly dropped small amounts of water on her face, according to police.

Police said the girl’s 13-year-old brother let her out after about 20 minutes, but Tapke put her back in after she poured water on him.

Tapke then allegedly asked his son to get an electrical jumper pack from the garage.  Tapke allegedly put the pack outside the cage and threatened to electrify it, although he never did, according to police.

The girl was eventually let out of the cage by her grandmother, who removed the duct tape from her hands and feet, police said.

Police were alerted after a concerned parent saw photos of the girl in the cage on Facebook and called the Hamilton County Department of Job and Family Services.

Tapke’s attorney, Christopher Jackson, said the incident was a joke that got out of hand.

“I believe this was a joke that got out of control. This is why his son, who is 13, posted the pictures on Facebook, as a joke after this happened. … Maybe not the best joke in the world, but I believe that will come out in trial,” Jackson said, according to ABC News affiliate WCPO-TV in Cincinnati.

ABC News affiliate WCPO contributed to this report.

Those Facebook posts could cost you a job

http://www.philly.com/philly/jobs/137772838.html

Fri, Jan. 20, 2012


Steve JohnsonSan Jose Mercury News

SAN JOSE, Calif. — You might want to think twice about bad-mouthing your former boss on Facebook or posting those racy pictures of yourself from last night’s rollicking bachelor party. It could cost you a new job.

In a controversial twist on the exploding use of online social media, employers are poring over the websites to weed out job applicants whose posts reveal that they use foul language, take drugs, associate with gangs or have other questionable characteristics. Some employers are even demanding that job candidates disclose their social-network user names and passwords.

“We have seen pictures of people driving a vehicle with a beer in their hand, and that’s posted,” said Max Drucker, CEO of Social Intelligence of Santa Barbara, Calif., which helps screen the sites for employers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. “We found a picture of a person wearing a T-shirt with flagrantly racist remarks.”

While companies long have kept an eye on workers posting information that might hurt business, their screening of job applicants’ social-media pages is proving especially contentious. Employers say they do it to keep from making hires they’d later regret. But courts have yet to hash out the legal implications of the checks, and critics find the practice offensive.

“That’s completely inappropriate,” said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum. “It’s like saying, ‘Can I read your personal diary?’ I believe that chills free speech. If everyone thinks that to get a job they have to have a perfectly clean social networking site, no one will say anything to anyone.”

Another concern is that information dredged from social media sites may be inaccurate or may confuse two people with the same name. If mistakes occur, “how would the job applicant even know?” said Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

In a survey last year of companies that screen applicants’ social media sites, 73 percent said they don’t give the applicants a chance “to explain questionable information,” according to the Society for Human Resource Management.

Other surveys have found that anywhere from 18 percent to 63 percent of employers review social media sites to assess job candidates. But many don’t know that. A 2010 Microsoft study found that just 7 percent of those it surveyed in this country realized employers might peruse that data.

And while employers often find positive information about job seekers on the sites, that’s not always the case. Of more than 2,600 hiring managers surveyed by CareerBuilder in 2009, 35 percent had rejected candidates after finding objectionable material, including photos of them using drugs, bad-mouthing previous employers and lying about their qualifications.

Even posting information deemed to have a negative tone can turn off some employers, according to Vlad Gorelick, CEO of Reppler, a Palo Alto, Calif., firm that helps social media users “manage their online image.” From what employers have told him, Gorelick said, it’s a bad idea to constantly post “I hate this” or “this really sucks,” because it suggests you might be negative at work. After all, he added, “Do you want to have somebody sitting next to you who is complaining all the time?”

It’s unclear how many employers do social-media checks. While Intel doesn’t, according to a representative, Hewlett-Packard declined to discuss the matter and representatives from two companies that advise employers on social-media screening wouldn’t identify the Silicon Valley companies they say engage in the practice.

One firm that provides such advice — Social Intelligence — has drawn federal scrutiny. In September, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., sent Social Intelligence a letter expressing concern “that there are numerous scenarios under which a job applicant could be unfairly harmed by the information your company provides to employers.”

Social Intelligence insists it does nothing wrong and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which examined its practices last year, found no reason to disagree. But with other consumer reporting agencies offering similar services, “it’s an area we are concerned about,” said FTC attorney Katherine Armstrong.

Many employers should be skittish about social media, too — particularly if the information they find prompts them to reject a candidate, some lawyers warn. Such sites often reveal a candidate’s race, gender, disability or other federally protected status, they note. So if the candidate doesn’t get the job, the employer could be sued for discrimination, forcing the company to prove that the social media revelations didn’t influence their decision.

On the other hand, these legal experts note, employers could be sued for not using social media to screen applicants — particularly if they hire a dangerous or otherwise unfit person, whose negative qualities could have been spotted through a social media check.

(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)

As it is now, employers have limited legal guidelines to go on for what they can and cannot do, said Les Rosen, an attorney whose company, Employment Screening Resources of Novato, Calif., which advises hiring managers about such risks.

“We’re waiting for some court cases to come up” to clarify the issue, Rosen said. “It’s such a can of worms.”

———

SOCIAL MEDIA GUIDELINES:

• Think twice about posting images or other information an employer might view as evidence that you’re unfit to hire.

• Use social-media privacy settings to minimize the chances of a would-be employer seeing posts you’d rather not reveal.

• Realize that such privacy settings may not hide everything you post, since employers may demand your social-media usernames and passwords.

• Only search a job applicant’s social media posts after getting the applicant’s consent.

• Don’t use fake identities to gain access to social media sites.

• Give the applicant a chance to explain or dispute the detrimental information found about them on social media sites.

SOURCE: Employment Screening Resources of Novato, Calif.

Study Says Facebook Making You Sad

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/01/feeling-sad-facebook-could-be-the-cause/

Facebook: Friends’ Happy Pictures Make You Sad?

Jan 20, 2012 

There are plenty of reasons to feel down in today’s fast-paced, hectic world, and you wouldn’t think that the world’s most popular social networking site would be one of them. But that’s exactly what a new study at Utah Valley University has found.

According to the study, Facebook is making us sad. Why? It’s all about the kinds of pictures people to post on their pages.

Facebook photos generally depict smiling, cheerful people having good times, conveying a sense of happiness. Of course everyone likes to smile for the camera, so that good cheer may be inflated or false. As others view the photos, they may believe this conveyed sense of  intense happiness is real, making them think that their friends are much happier than they are.

Sociologist Hui-Tzu Grace Chou said the study was inspired by her own experience: “Several years ago I started using Facebook because people invited me,” she said in a telephone interview, “and I started to realize my friends on Facebook looked really happy. That made me curious.”

Chou and Nicholas Edge interviewed 425 students, asking them whether they agreed or disagreed with such statements as “Many of my friends have a better life than me,” and “Life is fair.”

They also asked about the students’ Facebook usage, including how many “friends” they had on the site, and how many of those friends were really people they knew.

After controlling for race, gender, religious beliefs and whether the volunteers were unattached or in a relationship, the researchers saw a pattern: The more time students spent on Facebook, the more they thought others had it better than they did.

“Those who have used Facebook longer agreed more that others were happier, and agreed less that life is fair, and those spending more time on Facebook each week agreed more that others were happier and had better lives,” wrote Chou and Edge. “Furthermore, those that included more people whom they did not personally know as their Facebook “friends” agreed more that others had better lives.”

The study, which was published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, also found that people who spent less time socializing with friends in cyberspace and more time socializing with them in real life were less likely to report they were  unhappy.

“We’re not aware of the bias we have,” said Chou. “On Facebook we present ourselves at our best. People are affected and they don’t realize it.”

So if you are looking for a way to cheer yourself up, the researchers say you may do well to log off. Call your best friend instead.