Who Uses What Social Media

Pew Research Center

A survey conducted by Pew Research Center finds Facebook remains by far the most popular social media site.

While Facebook user growth has slowed, the level of user engagement with the platform has increased. Other platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn saw significant user growth over the past year in the proportion of online adults who now use their sites.

The results in this report are based on American adults who use the internet. Other key findings:

• Multi-platform use is on the rise: 52% of online adults now use two or more social media sites, a significant increase from 2013, when it stood at 42% of internet users.
• For the first time, more than half of all online adults 65 and older (56%) use Facebook. This represents 31% of all seniors.
• For the first time, roughly half of internet-using young adults ages 18-29 (53%) use Instagram. And half 0f all Instagram users (49%) use the site daily.
• For the first time, the share of internet users with college educations using LinkedIn reached 50%.
• Women dominate Pinterest: 42% of online women now use the platform, compared with 13% of online men.

While Facebook remains the most popular social media site, its overall growth has slowed and other sites continue to see increases in users.

The Civil War Isn't Over

Today marks 150 years since General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, surrendered his forces to Ulysses S. Grant and the Union Army on April 9, 1865.

Yet, conservative southern states of the old confederate south reject ‘Obamacare’ because they don’t need the federal government messing with their states rights.

Of course, conservative southern states of the old confederate south are some of the most dependent on federal government funds in the country.

Mississippi, for example, gets around $3 in subsidies from the federal government for every $1 they pay the federal government in taxes. South Carolina gets $7.87 back for every $1 it sends in. Yes, that means states of the old confederate south are subsidized by those evil, Northern Yankee Aggressors.

Seriously, the questions at the heart of the war still occupy the nation.  “It is easy to proclaim all souls equal in the sight of God,” wrote James Baldwin in 1956 as the Civil Rights Movement took hold in America; “it is hard to make men equal on earth in the sight of men.” Philosophically and theologically, claims of human equality are as old as human civilization. The struggles for genuine equality of rights, of equality before law, and equality of opportunity continues to this day.

The profoundly sacred and legal journey toward equality before the law, and God, is not likely to arrive at a destination, rather its a long, grinding journey of human striving. Equality is inevitably a process of change balanced against individual rights, self-interests, material interests, and a diversity of definitions for “liberty.” The civil war over these issues will never truly be resolved.

Voter Turnout Changes Ferguson Mo

Independent Voter

Voters in the City of Ferguson, Missouri turned out in record numbers for city council elections Tuesday night. Nearly 30 percent of registered voters went to the polls, almost doubling the turnout of the last city election. The increase in turnout resulted in historic changes in the composition of the city council.

Before the elections, Ferguson, which is over two-thirds African-American, had only one black representative on the 6-person city council. After the ballots were counted Tuesday, two black candidates, Ella Jones and Wesley Bell, were elected to two seats formerly held by white members, marking the first time in Ferguson’s history that black members represent half of the city council.

The election comes one month after the Justice Department released a report detailing a broad pattern of racist police activity in the city’s police department, a claim many Ferguson citizens made in the wake of last year’s police shooting of Michael Brown.

To many in the city and in the national media, the Ferguson city elections represented a test as to whether the traumatic events of 2014 could turn voter apathy and drive citizens to the polls. The results of Tuesday’s election answered that test with a resounding call for change in the way the city leadership was comprised.

The new council will now have to navigate how to address the issues raised in the Justice Department’s report — a report that prompted the resignation of the police chief, the city manager, and a municipal judge whose fines on predominantly poor citizens acted as a source of revenue for the city.

Citizen Journalism For Justice And Democrocy

A white South Carolina police officer was arrested and charged with murder Tuesday after a video showed him fatally shooting a fleeing, unarmed black man in the back.

The video shows North Charleston Police Officer Michael T. Slager, 33, firing his service weapon eight times at 50-year-old Walter Scott, who was fleeing the officer after an alleged confrontation on Saturday during a routine traffic stop for a broken tail lamp.

The initial traffic stop itself may have been illegal. South Carolina Code only requires one working tail lamp. Automobiles are not required to meet inspection to a tag renewal. Some have speculated that it was Scott, a black man driving a Mercedez Benz, who drew the officer’s suspicion. Of more than 22,000 traffic stops in 2014 in North Charleston, 16,730 (76%) involved African Americans, much higher ratio than the city's 47 percent black residents. Two-thirds of stops that failed to produce a ticket or arrest involved black drivers.

There would have been no murder charges if a citizen reporter had not used his cell phone to video record North Charleston Officer Michael Slager shooting the 50-year-old unarmed black man, in the back, as many as eight times.

What if there had been no video? What if the incident had just been a situation where another unarmed black man was killed and the police officer wrote in his report, ‘this black man is dangerous,’  ‘he grabbed my taser,’ ‘I was afraid for my life,’ and ‘I had to shoot him to protect my life.’

But the video, taken by a citizen reporter, gives witness to such a police report.

The concept of citizen journalism (also known as "democratic" journalism) is based upon citizens playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news and information.

The proliferation of smartphones and social media empowers citizen reporters to take video while giving rolling commentary on live events, which they can immediately post and tweet online. Armed with smart video phones, and first-person accounts, citizen journalists are now capturing major news events and spreading the word by posting information on social media networks, blogs, and personal websites.

Citizen journalism has significantly created new opportunities and changed mainstream media in different ways. Citizen journalism has proven itself to be an effective part of news reporting and an asset to journalists and editors. As traditional newsrooms become more constrained by fewer and fewer staff reporters due to wave after wave of budget cuts, the availability of citizen journalist created content is an increasingly important source of news leads for mainstream news organizations.

Not only is citizen journalism effective for its immediacy but also people are telling their stories, where they live. When people who have known poverty, misfortune or injustice first-hand are authors of news, the world represented in the news expands and changes. A white South Carolina police officer arrested and charged with murder because a citizen reporter recorded video of him fatally shooting a fleeing unarmed black man in the back is yet another example of how digital technology can expand democracy.