Oliver Haimson talks about the changing social media landscape

Welcome to the Michigan Minds Podcast, where we explore the wealth of knowledge from faculty experts at the University of Michigan. I'm Jared Wadley, a lead public relations representative for Michigan News. Today I'm speaking to Oliver Haimson about the changing social media landscape. He's an assistant professor in the School of Information and the Digital Studies Institute. Oliver's research focuses on social media content moderation and marginalized populations, as well as the changing identities on social media during life transitions. Thanks for being here, Oliver.

Oliver Haimson:

Yeah. Thanks so much for having me, Jared.

Jared Wadley:

Before we get into the topic, tell the audience a little bit about how you became interested in studying social media.

Oliver Haimson:

Yeah. I mean, I think I started where most people start, which is I was really interested in social media myself. It was I guess the early 2010s when I started doing research in this area, and as a social media user, I was just fascinated by the ways that people were using it to mostly talk about more sensitive content, how people were thinking about disclosure and how they were presenting their identities on social media. So it really came from this personal perspective. But I think in a lot of cases, social media researchers as they start to learn more about the space end up using social media less themselves. So I would say that nowadays I'm not the biggest social media user, but I am still really fascinated by it from a research perspective.

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