Social Media Quiz: Sizzling Hot Questions from 2022

Data collected by Newswhip from Apr. 4 to May 16, 2022, and published in Axios on May 17, indicated that news articles about the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard trial had generated more social media interactions per-article in the US compared to all other news topics.

Who won the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard trial?

On June 1, 2022, a seven-person jury in Fairfax, Virginia, found that Johnny Depp and his Ex-wife Amber Heard defamed each other. Heard was ordered to pay $10.35 million in damages for describing herself in a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post as a "public figure representing domestic abuse." Depp was ordered to pay $2 million in damages after the jury ruled that his lawyer had defamed Heard in one instance when he accused her of damaging the couple's penthouse and blaming it on Depp. Heard plans to appeal.

On Apr. 4, 2022, an SEC filing revealed that Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX and the world's wealthiest person, had purchased a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter. Twitter will now have Musk as its largest shareholder, ahead of Vanguard, which owns 8.8 percent, and Jack Dorsey, Twitter's former chief executive, who owns 2.3 percent. Musk has over 80 million Twitter followers.

Parag Agrawal is the new Twitter CEO, replacing Jack Dorsey. Agrawal, a 37-year-old immigrant from India, has been with the company for ten years – most recently as chief technology officer.

What?! Jack Dorsey left Twitter? Again?

Jack Dorsey announced his departure from the role of Twitter's CEO on Nov. 29, 2021, effective immediately. He will now focus primarily on his payments processing company Square and other pursuits such as philanthropy.

Pictured is Twitter's Former CEO, Jack Dorsey. Having already briefly suspended Donald Trump's account on Jan.6, 2021, the day of the Capitol riots, Twitter later banned Trump entirely, then smacked down the president's attempts to tweet using other accounts. In a Twitter thread posted Thursday, Jan. 14, 2021, Dorsey wrote: "I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter. I believe this was the right decision for Twitter."

On Jan. 2, 2022, Twitter had banned the personal account of far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for multiple violations of the platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policy. The ban applies to Greene’s personal account, @mtgreenee, but does not affect her official Twitter account, @RepMTG. “Twitter is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth,” Greene responded.

What’s Twitter’s Strike System?

Under the “strike” system, Twitter uses artificial intelligence to identify misleading, harmful posts about the coronavirus. Two or three strikes earn a 12-hour account lock. Four strikes evoke a weeklong suspension. Five or more strikes can get a user permanently removed from the platform. Twitter had previously suspended Greene’s personal account for periods ranging from 12 hours to an entire week.

Twitter Blue is the company’s subscription service, allowing paying subscribers to recall tweets, theme their Twitter app and app icon, and experience new features early.

Where and when is Twitter Blue available?

Twitter first launched the Twitter Blue service in June 2021 in Canada and Australia on iOS. Starting Nov. 9, 2021, Twitter Blue is available in the US and New Zealand and on Android and the web.

Over 3.5 billion people worldwide use Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp - all of which were inaccessible for over five hours on Oct. 4, 2021. Facebook is also used to sign in to many other apps and services, making users unable to log in to other websites or sign in to their smart TVs.

What caused the 2021 Facebook outage?

Facebook said the 2021 outage was caused by changes to its underlying internet infrastructure that coordinates the traffic between its data centers, “bringing our services to a halt.”

When was Facebook’s previous outage?

Facebook’s last significant outage was in 2019, when a technical error affected its sites for 24 hours.

Facebook announced on July 21, 2022, that it is rolling out a new Feeds tab, displaying posts from the users' Facebook favorites, Facebook groups, and Facebook friends in the order they were shared. The new tab is on the shortcut bar in Facebook's iPhone and Android apps.

Simply put, Metaverse is a collection of Virtual 3D meeting spaces. It’s been one of the most prominent tech buzz terms of 2021. Epic Games directed fundraising to build Fortnite into a metaverse; Microsoft presented Mesh, a mixed reality software enabling virtual presence through Microsoft devices. South Korea announced the creation of a national metaverse alliance to build a unified national VR and AR platform.

What’s Facebook’s Metaverse?

In 2021 Facebook announced it attempts to develop a Metaverse. On Oct. 18, Facebook announced plans to create 10,000 jobs in the European Union over the next five years to help build the virtual environment. US tech news website The Verge broke the news that Facebook’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, is preparing to change the name of the company at the company’s annual Connect conference on Oct. 28, 2021, to match its new ambitions. The new name chosen for the company is Meta.

Meta Platforms Inc, the owner of Facebook, plans to open its first physical store on May 9, 2022. The store will sell virtual reality headsets and video conferencing devices, including Ray-Ban smart glasses, Portal video-calling devices, and Oculus VR headsets. The store can be found in the Silicon Valley town of Burlingame, at the main campus of Meta's Reality Labs division.

Frances Haugen is the Facebook whistleblower who, in 2021, released tens of thousands of internal documents detailing the company's failure to keep its users safe from harmful content. Wall Street Journal exposed the documents in its investigation dubbed The Facebook Files in Oct. 2021. According to the report, Facebook knew Instagram was damaging teen mental health and that its platform was being used to incite ethnic violence in Ethiopia. Haugen told US senators in Washington that Facebook put "astronomical profits before people."

What's the British Online Safety Bill?

On Oct. 25, 2021,  Haugen, 37, testified at the joint committee of the British parliament reviewing the draft online safety bill, a piece of legislation that places a duty of care on social media companies to protect users. The online safety bill came into focus last week after the murder of Conservative MP David Amess.

The "Disinformation Dozen" are 12 anti-vaxxers responsible for almost two-thirds of anti-vaccine content on social media.

Is Facebook in trouble?

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen presented documents that show the social media platform has built a system that exempts high-profile users from some or all of its rules. On Wednesday, Oct. 13, the attorneys general of 14 U.S. states sent a letter to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. They said they are "extremely concerned" with the recent reports and want to know if the "Disinformation Dozen" are among those receiving special attention treatment from the company.

Former Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt is a member of the Facebook Oversight Board. Since ending her political career between 2015 and 2019, she has been the chief executive of the British international NGO Save the Children.

What did Facebook's Oversight Board rule?

Facebook's Oversight Board, the independent body that reviews content moderation decisions made by the social media company, on May 5, 2021, upheld Facebook's Jan. 7 decision to "restrict" former President Trump's access to his Facebook and Instagram account. In its ruling, the Oversight Board found that Trump "severely violated Facebook's Community Standards and Instagram's Community Guidelines."

What happens now?

According to the decision, "Facebook's normal penalties include removing the violating content, imposing a time-bound period of suspension, or permanently disabling the page and account." Therefore, the Oversight Board has given Facebook six months to apply an appropriate "proportionate response that is consistent with the rules that are applied to other users of its platform."

Twitter deleted a tweet from Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday, May 2, 2021. The company also suspended Buhari from using the platform for 12 hours. In response, on Friday, May 4, 2021, the Nigerian government announced its "indefinite" suspension of Twitter. On Saturday, the Nigerian government started blocking access to Twitter from within the country. In addition, the government announced that it would arrest and prosecute anyone in Nigeria caught using the social platform.

Bonus Fact:

Twitter has more than 39 million users located in Nigeria.

On Feb 19, 2021, Facebook blocked Australian users from viewing and sharing local and international news and restricted local publishers from posting links on their pages. The move came as part of a dispute with the Australian government over a planned law forcing tech giants to pay for news content on their platforms. In a statement posted on Facebook, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the social media company's actions to "unfriend Australia" were "as arrogant as disappointing."

Are Facebook and Australia friends now?

Facebook agreed to reverse the decision on Tuesday, Feb 23, 2021, after the Australian government decided on last-minute changes to its proposed media bargaining code to bring Facebook back to the negotiating table with news companies.

While it offers other streams, Twitch is mainly a streaming service for video games with commentary and e-sport competitions.

Bonus Question: Who owns Twitch?

Twitch Interactive is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc.

Twitch Fact

On April 7, 2021, Twitch announced a new policy for investigating streamers’ serious indiscretions in real life or services like Discord and Twitter. In partnership with a third-party law firm, Twitch will examine reports of offenses like sexual assault, extremist behavior, and threats of violence that occur off-stream.

A month after the Facebook Oversight Board published 17 recommendations for improving its content moderation, one of the changes Facebook decided to adopt is Instagram's nudity policy to clarify "health-related nudity" is allowed. The Oversight Board recommended that Facebook update Instagram's community guidelines around adult nudity to explain that some nudity — health-related, photos of breastfeeding, giving birth, breast cancer awareness, gender confirmation surgery, or in the act of protest — is allowed on the platform.

Facebook has rolled out a new prayer request feature. In Facebook Groups employing it, members can urge prayers for upcoming job interviews, illnesses, and such. After creating a post, other users can tap an “I prayed” button, respond with a “like” or other reaction, leave a comment or send a direct message. According to an August 8, 2021, Associated Press report, Facebook began testing it in the U.S. in December 2020.

Donald Trump's new social media platform, Truth Social, promises free speech (unlike other social platforms that banned the ex-president). That doesn't stop its terms of use from prohibiting not only to "disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site," but also "excessive use of capital letters." The new platform also bans specific user names.

What's Truth Social?

Donald Trump's new social media venture, Truth Social, launched Feb. 20, 2022, in Apple's App Store, potentially marking the former president's return to social media after being banned from several platforms in 2021. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube banned Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol after he was accused of posting messages inciting violence. While having technical and other difficulties in its post-launch days, Truth Social should be fully operational by the end of March 2022.

Cyberflashing is a term that describes someone using the internet to send an image of their naked body to someone they do not know and who has not asked them to do this (commonly known as sending a di** pic) - And it is now illegal in the UK. On March 13, 2022, UK ministers have confirmed that the British Online Safety Bill will include laws banning cyberflashing. The change means that anyone who sends a photo or film of a person’s genitals may face up to two years in prison - if their purpose was their sexual gratification or to cause the recipient humiliation, alarm, or distress.

Telegram is Ukraine's most popular messaging app. The app, which has more than 550 million monthly users globally, was banned in Russia in 2018 after its founder Pavel Durov refused to give the authorities access to its user data. Russia lifted the ban in mid-2020. Telegram became a 24-hour news source for civilians, journalists, and even the military in the Ukrainian war.

Does Telegram block Russian and Ukrainian communications?

"We do not want Telegram to be used as a tool that exacerbates conflicts and incites ethnic hatred," 37-year-old Durov posted on Feb. 27, 2022, as Telegram has been heavily used to spread fake news related to the war. Hours later, he changed his mind, following mass requests from users, who said it was their only source of information. "Double-check and do not take on faith the data that is published in Telegram channels during this difficult period," Durov advised.