Find a Job on TikTok [Content Made Simple]
Issue #230: Facebook's fight with the White House, and a book review
Job-Hunters, Have You Tried Posting Your Resume on TikTok?
Quote:
As more college students and recent graduates use TikTok to network and find work, the company has introduced a program allowing people to apply directly for jobs. And employers, many facing labor shortages, are interested. Chipotle, Target, Alo Yoga, Sweetgreen and more than three dozen other companies have started hiring people via the app.
The TikTok résumé is central to these efforts. Job applicants submit videos with the hashtag #TikTokResumes and through TikTokresumes.com to show off their skills, something like a personal essay of old. They include their contact information and, if they want, their LinkedIn profile. Employers review the videos, which must be set to public, and schedule interviews with the applicants they find the most compelling.
Commentary:
Frankly, the social media scene is kinda quiet right now outside of some major drama around Facebook and vaccinations (more on that below). So this is an interesting little story on how TikTok is really leaning into people trying to get hired through their platform. Seems kinda cool, but certainly has its drawbacks, too.
HITTING THE LINKS
Link #1: Can Social Media Foster Persuasion (Not Polarization)?
Great book review here from Tim Keller. I hope to write on this book soon, perhaps this week. Overall I appreciated the book, but I do have a small critique/different perspective that I’ll highlight when I write about it.
So social media are not primarily about public discussion of ideas. The ideas are ways to define oneself and signal belonging to a group, as well as to assign identities to others by associating them with groups you oppose. This is the reason social media have perfected the art of bad-faith readings—interpreting a person’s words in the most uncharitable sense possible. There is no effort to understand the argument in its strongest form and respond to it. Rather, the goal is to associate the thinker with shameful “out-groups.”
Link #2: White House Dispute Exposes Blindspot on Misinformation
Helpful summary of much of the bickering going on between Facebook and the White House right now.
Executives at Facebook, including its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, have said the company committed to removing Covid-19 misinformation since the start of the pandemic. The company said it had removed over 18 million pieces of Covid-19 misinformation since the start of the pandemic.
Experts who study disinformation said the number of pieces that Facebook removed was not as informative as how many were uploaded to the site, or in which groups and pages people were seeing the spread of misinformation.
Link #3: President Biden Goes After Facebook
The link above (Link #2) is a good summary of the situation with a bit of commentary. This piece is a good summary as well, but also provides a significant amount of insightful commentary from Casey Newton, one of the best social media writer and thinkers around today.
One reason this conversation feels both necessary and exhausting is that it gathers together so many concerns about Facebook from the past five years and refracts them through a single global crisis. There’s the company’s vast size; its history of unwittingly nurturing popular conspiracy movements; its role in accelerating the collapse of local media; and its spotty record on sharing data that would help us better understand its effects on the world. Underlying all these concerns is the fact that, despite years of angry complaints from Congress and a large handful antitrust investigations into the company, in many ways Facebook remains accountable only to itself.
THE FUNNY PART
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Curious to see what you'll have to say about Bail's book. I liked it, although I think coming at it from more of a religious/theological perspective, I don't necessarily agree with him, or even Keller, that we *have* to be on social media. I'm not at a position of viewing it as sin; far from it. But the idea of being concerned what happens if we remove ourselves from Twitter... That argument didn't work for me when McCracken argued for it in "The Wisdom Pyramid," and it doesn't here either.