Social Media

Squirrel Monkey’s alternative past video series looks back at how WhatsApp might have worked if it came out in the late 1980s – using an MS-DOS computer, a dial-up modem, and a pager to deliver messages to its users.

Chris Cousins‘ animated short film uses imagery of endlessly churned-out drugs as an analogy for the addictive – and unintentionally harmful nature of social media. Seriously, how did something that delivers cat videos become a vehicle for manipulating global politics?

We really do our best to avoid hyperbole and overblown clickbait content around here. But if you’re a content creator and are desperate for eyeballs no matter the cost, check out Materialisimo’s brief tutorial on guaranteed YouTube success.

(PG-13 Language) Materialisimo demolishes the endless stream low-quality, freebooted, text-embellished videos which fill our Facebook feeds these days. Regardless of what you think of them, we blame Facebook for encouraging this crap with their algorithm.

Screen Junkies smacks down Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher’s film about the world’s largest social network, which apparently was started by some of the most antisocial people on the planet. Er wait, is this entire movie Fake News? Time to rework the algorithm.

(PG-13: Language) CollegeHumor roasts the trend of Facebook pages who freeboot videos, then wrap them in text which attempts to explain what’s going on. We understand that Facebook gives bonus points to anything that nabs video views, but damn, it’s annoying.

Entrepreneurs, learn to leverage social media to grow your business with this series of 17 courses which teaches principles of online marketing strategy, and how to leverage Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google Plus, as well as social media tools like HootSuite.

A Snapchat update lets a man add filters to real life in this silly video by SoKrispyMedia. Losing your face is a huge hassle, but at least he didn’t turn himself into a poop emoji. We’d abuse the rewind effect for sure.

Here’s a glimpse at what it’s like to be famous. Or at least, Instagram famous. Dutch soccer player Demy de Zeeuw runs a football-themed Instagram account with 8 million followers. Here’s how that mob responds when he posts an update. Time to disable notifications.

Adobe’s new, free smartphone app, Post makes it easy to create striking and unique visuals for social media posts, with its library of design elements, dynamically-rescaling text, automatic color palettes, and the ability to remix shared designs. Currently on iOS only.

The folks behind the fantastic YouTube channel Kurzgesagt present yet another argument about how Facebook encourages a culture of content theft against original creators, where pirates duplicate videos, and get huge traffic from Facebook’s skewed video sharing algorithm.

(PG-13) FrinterGarden’s latest effort is the result of meticulously scouring through the darkest corners of the Twitterverse to (sort of) phonetically replicate the lyrics (and musical notes) of a song using only the names of Twitter users. More puntastic fun here.