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One of Donald Trump's senior advisers says he will be back on social media soon but this time on his own platform.

Jason Miller, who was the spokesperson for Trump's 2020 campaign, told Fox News' "#MediaBuzz" on Sunday that the former president will return to social networking with a brand new platform.

"This new platform is going to be big," Miller said, expecting it to attract "tens of millions of people."

And the move is expected to happen in two to three months.

"This is something that I think will be the hottest ticket in social media, it's going to completely redefine the game, and everybody is going to be waiting and watching to see what exactly President Trump does."

***As certain voices are censored and free speech platforms shut down, be sure to sign up forCBN News emailsand theCBN News appto ensure you keep receiving news from a Christian Perspective.***

CBN News previously reported in January that Trump was looking into creating his own social media site following the bold move by Twitter to ban him from the platform.

At the time, Trump tweeted from the @Potus account, indicating that he was discussing the idea with other sites and an update would be forthcoming.

"We have been negotiating with various other sites, and will have a big announcement soon, while we also look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future. We will not be SILENCED!"

"STAY TUNED!" he added.

In the @POTUS tweets, Trump noted overturning Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law that safeguards tech companies from being held accountable for what users post on their sites.

"Twitter may be a private company," the former president said, "but without the government's gift of Section 230 they would not exist for long."

Twitter promptly removed the tweets from that account, referencing its guidelines on banned users attempting to bypass the block by way of other accounts.

Trump was also banned from Facebook and Instagram shortly after the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

Excerpt from:
Donald Trump Making a Big Comeback on Social Media in 2-3 Months With Brand New Platform - CBN News

To curb the power of Big Tech, lawmakers are eyeing a world where Facebook users could communicate seamlessly with users of rival platforms like Twittersimilar to the way phone networks function today.

That concept, known as interoperability, was employed by Congress after the breakup of the AT&T telephone monopoly in the 1980s, allowing customers of competing phone companies to call each other without restrictions.

As the House and Senate lay the groundwork for an overhaul of antitrust law, lawmakers are dusting off the decades-old concept of interoperability as a possible solution to rein in Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Amazon.com Inc., and Apple Inc.

You can be on your Verizon cellphone in California and call Aunt Mildred on a Frontier landline in North Carolina, and the calls are almost seamless, said Herbert Hovenkamp, an antitrust professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. That speaks and should speak loudly when we start thinking of what to do with the platforms.

Big Techs dominance forces users to pay a heavy price if they decide to move platforms. A Facebook user may struggle to move all their data and social connections to a new platform. A company that uses Amazon Web Services may face hefty fees and engineering costs if they change cloud computing providers.

Interoperability would allow consumers to post and message across multiple online platforms at once. If a Facebook user wanted to delete their account and move to a rival social networking service, interoperability would allow them to keep all their Facebook friends and communicate with them from the other platform.

Another decades-old idea known as portability, also being eyed by lawmakers, would enable consumers to transfer their data to other platformssimilar to how consumers can keep their phone number when changing carriers.

As part of the Bell System breakup, AT&T in 1984 spun off its local telephone companies into seven independent carriers known as the Baby Bells, which held regional monopolies. Congress aimed to foster competition in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 by compelling the Baby Bells to interconnect their networks with upstart phone companies.

The 1996 law also mandated number portability, so subscribers can keep phone numbers when changing carriers.

House and Senate hearings have exposed deep divisions among Democrats and Republicans on sweeping proposals to breakup the tech giants and require line of business restrictions.

But lawmakers in both parties have expressed interest in drafting legislation that would require big tech companies to make their platforms interoperable, and let consumers move their data to different networks.

Such rules would target tech companies ability to leverage their dominance to squeeze out competitors, which has been the subject of state and federal lawsuits.

Facebook in 2013 blocked Vine, a Twitter video app, from accessing application programming interfaces, which enable platforms to interact with each other. The access would have allowed Vine users to find each other if they were friends on Facebook, according to an antitrust lawsuit filed last year by the Federal Trade Commission. Twitter shut down Vine in 2016 after finding it extremely challenging to compete, CEO Jack Dorsey said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in November.

By cutting off Vine, Facebook prevented it from accessing APIs that would have helped it grow, the FTC said in the complaint.

At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he generally supports interoperability but that the company has at times limited access to prevent larger competitors like Google and some of our Chinese rivals, from trying to access our systems in order to use their scale to compete with us better.

Google has thwarted competition by severely limiting interoperability to essential features of its Search Ads 360 service, a tool that allows advertisers to place ads on search engines like Google Search and Microsoft Corp.'s Bing, 35 states allege in an antitrust lawsuit filed in December.

Google only allows advertisers to use real-time user data when bidding for ad space on Google Search, while withholding equivalent interoperability from Microsoft, the states allege in the complaint.

Google and Facebook have dug moats around their very formidable castles, trapping users from leaving the network, effects of their products and systems can have devastating effects on competition, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said at a recent Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee hearing. My view is we need interoperability and portability requirements to break down the walls they have established.

Blumenthal helped draft a bipartisan bill in the last Congress with Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) that would have required all social media platforms with more than 100 million active users to make their networks interoperable and allow data portability.

Imposing interoperability and data portability on tech companies would likely lead to major changes for consumers, just as they did in the telephone industry.

AT&T cant block its customers from calling Verizon subscribers, and phone numbers are portable so consumers get to keep their numbers when switching carriers.

Consumer-oriented data portability and interoperability policies will further facilitate competition in the marketplace, Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), ranking member on the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee, said at a hearing last month. Perhaps one of the most popular and procompetitive actions Congress ever took was mandating mobile phone number portability in the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Applying similar rules now could foster new competitors to the dominant tech firms, said Charlotte Slaiman, competition policy director at public interest group Pubic Knowledge.

There would be more competitors because well have created an environment where an entrepreneur feels confident starting up a business that Facebooks not going to have the power to shut them down, Slaiman said.

Lawmakers are still grappling with how to craft interoperability and portability rules to an industry that has ballooned in the last 20 years with little regulation.

The devil will be in the details, Buck said at the hearing. We will want to ensure that any interoperability mandates do not create spillover effects in result in heavy-handed regulation.

Excerpt from:
AT&T Antitrust Fight Gives Lawmakers Road Map to Rein in Big Tech - Bloomberg Law

NEW YORK (Reuters) - When it comes to interacting during this pandemic, admit it: We all feel a bit like Tom Hanks in the movie Cast Away, having conversations with Wilson the volleyball.

Susan McPherson, founder and CEO McPherson Strategies, poses in an undated photo supplied to Reuters. Susan McPherson/Kevin Abosch/Handout via REUTERS NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES. THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY.

And that is okay. But eventually and maybe even right now we can start rebuilding our networks of social connections, which are so important to a happy and fulfilled life.

To find out how, Reuters sat down with Susan McPherson, founder and chief executive officer of McPherson Strategies and author of the new book The Lost Art of Connecting.

Q: Your book about connecting is coming out at a very unique time, when we are all very disconnected?

A: When I first put forth a proposal for the book, it was about bringing humanity back into our connections. We tend to have an overreliance on technology, using clicks and likes and follows as the currency to determine our relationships.

I felt that was taking us astray, and the goal was to take us back to the human side of things. Then the pandemic happened, and all we had left was technology.

Q: How can people feel connected in this new environment?

A: We are all so tired of looking at screens. I am a big believer in picking up the phone. Or try other means of connecting with people, like going for walks where its safe, wearing masks of course.

I believe its important to find out the other persons preferred mode of communication. Dont assume that people want to be on video, because many dont.

Q: Most peoples networks have been shrinking during the pandemic. Does that worry you?

A: Go deeper with the individuals you already have relationships with. You can accomplish much more with that, than with wide swaths of thousands of business cards. That really isnt going to help you or accomplish anything.

Q: You say that a critical networking phrase is How can I help why is that?

A: When you are starting a conversation with someone, you engage them much more meaningfully if you get a sense of whats going on in their lives and what they need, rather than making it all about yourself.

Being supportive of others lends itself to a more interactive conversation. Then follow up on that later, which makes you trustworthy and indispensable.

Q: How do you seed new relationships, so they dont wither away?

A: Every morning I reach out to three or four people to see how they are no agenda. Then a year or two from now, if I ever need something, Ill be more comfortable reaching out and asking.

There is a lot of joy there, when you just let people know that you are thinking about them.

Q: How important are local roots?

A: The pandemic has shown how vital it is to have connectivity to your community. Maybe that wasnt as pressing before -- but now when you really need help, or are finding out where to get the vaccine, or want to support local shops and restaurants, this is a great time to get to know your own community.

I dont think thats going to go away after the pandemic.

Q: What are your favorite strategies for building a network?

A: I love what I call the 4-4-4 model. When you are thinking about the kind of community you want to build around you, think about what you want to achieve four years from now, then four months, then four weeks. That will help gather in your mind what you want to accomplish, and who you want to surround yourself with. Its a very intentional model.

Q: People present edited versions of themselves on social media. Is it difficult to be authentic in this environment?

A: I actually think people are becoming more authentic. Everyone is suffering something right now, all at the same time, and never before has that happened.

Its a good moment to ask people How are you really doing? and not have to fake anything. In normal times, thats hard. But when life sucks for everybody, its okay.

Q: When we come out of this period, will it be weird to interact again?

A: It wont happen suddenly. We wont go from zero to 60 on day one. We will probably have smaller, safer gatherings to begin with.

We will get back into it eventually. Its rare in life to get an opportunity for a total reset -- and now we have that.

Editing by Lauren Young and Aurora Ellis

Excerpt from:
Network Outage: How to reconnect in an era of isolation - Reuters

Social media has transformed the whole fabrication of the world. The rapid and vast adoption of social media technologies is changing how people build relationships, how they reach out to required information about entertainment, celebrities, businesses, and favorite topics of discussion, and importantly how people organize to demand political change. Who uses social media? When did the rise of social media start and what are the largest sites today? Here we answer these and other key questions to understand the use of social media around the world and how significantly it has modified the communication styles during the Covid-19 pandemic. I begin with an outline of key trends and conclude with a perspective on the rate of adoption of social media relative to other modern communication technologies in marketing and commerce.

Majority of young people are not aware of the fact that the first social media site to reach a million monthly active users was My-Space. It achieved this land marking 2004. This is arguably the beginning of social media as we can explore it from the internet.

For example, TikTok which was launched in September 2016, and reached half a billion users by Mid 2018 already within two years of its launch and got extremely popular among people of all ages. To put this in perspective: TikTok gained on average about 20 million new users per month over this period. The data also shows rapid changes in the opposite direction. Once-dominant platforms have disappeared. In 2008, Hi5, My-Space, and Friendster were close competitors to Facebook, yet by 2012 they had virtually no share of the market. The case of My-Space is remarkable considering that in 2006 it temporarily surpassed Google as the most visited website in the US.

Most of the social media platforms that survived the last decade have shifted significantly in what they offer users. Twitter, for example, did not allow users to upload videos or images in the beginning. Since 2011 this is possible and today more than 50% of the content viewed on Twitter includes images and videos. With 2.3 billion users, Facebook is the most popular social media platform today. YouTube, Instagram, and WeChat follow, with more than a billion users. Tumblr and TikTok come next, with over half a billion users.

According to a report by OECD report 2019, in rich countries, majority of youth use social media sites. In a fair estimation, if Facebook has 2.3 billion users, then a minimum of 30% of the population on the globe uses social media

According to a report by OECD report 2019, in rich countries, majority of youth use social media sites. In a fair estimation, if Facebook has 2.3 billion users, then a minimum of 30% of the population on the globe uses social media. This can be just an average for a few world regions, and specifically for a few population groups, usage rates are much higher. children aged 16 to 24 tend to use social media more frequently. In fact, in rich countries, where access to the net is almost universal, most young adults use it.

Apart from this, there are interestingly some amazing perspectives onhow brisklyand profound these rapid changes are, occurring in the diffusion of social media networks.Consistent withPEW International,the shareof peopleadults who use social media increased from 5% in 2005 to 79% in 2019. Even ona worldwidestage, the speed of diffusion is striking Facebook surged from covering around 1.5% ofthe planetspopulation in 2008 to around 30% in 2018. Now the question is, how does this compare to the diffusion of other communication technologies that makea part ofourstandard of livingtoday? For instance, social medias growthwithin theUS is comparable in speed and to some extent also in reachto itoflatestcommunication-enabling technologies, including computers, smartphones,and therefore theinternet. The phenomena are risingall toldoverthe worldparticularly during the Covid-19 pandemic tothe onlineis sort ofuniversal, most young adults use it frequently now.

As we know Social media are widely used in marketing strategies. The active use of social networking sites has made themselves an indispensable source of information for firms on which they can conduct promotional activities. Precisely speaking, COVID-19 has generated countless opportunities not only for businesses but also for many other sectors of human life. For example, stay-at-home orders have changed just about everything, including our relationship with the internet, how often we use it, and how we use it. We are online more than ever, working from home, attending school from home, catching up with friends via video calls. And as stores and restaurants around the globe shuttered their doors for months on end, we all headed to the internet to order essential items online, causing unprecedented online order numbers. Hence, with social media use soaring, retailers must give followers and customers seamless ways to buy and create engaging, exciting social media content, and meeting customers where they are is critical to the sustainable success of the business.

Summing us I must say as indicated in a report 10 Tech-related trends that shaped the decade published by PEW that the last decade began with theArab Springand ended with protesters inHong Kongand elsewhere using social media to promote and organize their causes. In some cases, governments fought back byshutting down the internet, while opponents of some activistsmounted social media campaigns of their own. Future is all virtual and organizations and governments, businesses and services must embrace the change and make proactive measures to deal with this revolution.

The Author is a PhD Scholar at IUIC, Chairman of PARAS Education Services, Co-founder of the University of Success Islamabad, Fellow of PGLS Russia & 35th Event Wise, Netherlands. He tweets at @AsifMalik30

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Rise of Social Media in the World - Daily Times

This is not news to those who are prominent in beauty culture. After all, theyre often famous because of social media, and when they choose to make a beauty line, its not just about cashing in most of the time they feel insecure, and they use cosmetics to help themselves feel better and want to share those to make others feel better too. But this becomes a vicious cycle, and its hard to step back.

Michelle Phan, an early influencer and Ipsy co-founder, confused the beauty community when she stopped posting online in 2015. Two years later, she restarted her makeup line, Em Cosmetics, which she bought back from LOral, and sold her stake in Ipsy. Once, I was a girl with dreams, who eventually became a product, smiling, selling and selling, she said in a 2017 video explaining her departure. Who I was on camera and who I was in real life began to feel like strangers. She added: My insecurities got the worse of me. I became imprisoned by my own vanity and was never satisfied with how I looked. The life I led online was picture perfect. But in reality, I was carefully curating the image of a life I wanted, not had.

Working within the system, Rae was trying to address the way that she was also torn apart by a lot of the same concern over her looks that other people had. She even built vulnerability into the branding of her makeup line. Last year, Rae and Item sold a round, orange-colored compact, and when you opened it, it had a mirror with the words I love you say it back. This was a riff on a popular meme, a standard-issue message of girlboss empowerment but also an acknowledgment of widespread insecurity that Rae, and the person buying the compact, might feel.

I thought that was sweet, but an intimate relationship with the idol was also what the consumer was demanding. A display of insecurity from Rae, or at least an acknowledgment that Rae might look in the same mirror and need a jolt of confidence the same way the consumer does, may be part of that. Relatability is the No. 1 thing that makes people click check out, Sarah Brown told me.

It was hard to tell whether Rae was truly insecure or simply using a marketing tactic to gain fans. Everybody is insecure about their bodies, and the more our culture gets visual, the more insecure well all get, and it doesnt matter how you look objectively one bit, Widdows, the philosopher, told me. So its not implausible to think even the most beautiful celebrities might also be insecure. In fact, its very plausible to think they are. But to say that they suddenly stopped being insecure because they put their own lipstick on, I find much less plausible.

Still, the psychological flytrap in this kind of rhetoric I want you to know your body is perfect even though youre buying this product to look like me, and I am insecure about my looks was powerful, and stars other than Rae were gesturing to it as well. When I asked Camberos, the beauty executive, where he saw beauty culture today and where it was going, he said it was connected to the issue of mental health. Rae told British Glamour that she felt she was in a good place regarding her appearance lately and quoted the saying Comparison is the thief of joy. When asked about what she was proudest of, though, Rae said, Just staying mentally healthy has been a really big accomplishment for me.

It was a bit chilling to think about linking these two things, a beauty brand and mental health, especially as our era of global pandemic comes to a close and we emerge in the light, blinking, looking to create new idols. In September, Selena Gomez, who has been open about her bipolar disorder, introduced her own line, Rare Beauty. In marketing efforts, the company, which offers soft concealers, foundations and blushers, vowed that we will use makeup to shape positive conversations around beauty, self-acceptance and mental health. And shortly before the musician Halsey began promoting her new makeup line in early 2021, she chose to post an old photo of her emaciated body on Instagram, explaining that she suffered from an eating disorder. Kylie, too, recently put a saying from a self-help author on her Instagram may the dark thoughts, overthinking, and doubt exit your mind right now, it read in part along with a photo of a bathtub and naked legs, slightly covered in suds, against which rested a clear pink bottle from her skin-care line.

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Addison Rae and the Beauty of 78.5 Million Followers - The New York Times