Socialcam: How to Turn Off Embarrassment
Friends — I beg of you — TURN OFF SHARING for the Socialcam app on Facebook.
Socialcam is a feed of user-generated videos. Just by clicking on a Socialcam link in Facebook and accepting their app, every Socialcam video you watch from then on is shared to your Facebook friends automatically. The content is questionable, the titles of the videos are often salacious, and the images it posts in your timeline can be downright embarrassing.
Socialcam offers user-generated video and popular videos from other sites like YouTube. The videos that appear in your Facebook feed are not from a media company vetting the videos, editing them, or (at the very least) showing some scruples about titling the offerings correctly.
Many of the videos are what the industry refers to as click-bait or link-bait: outrageously titled pieces that don’t exactly deliver what the titles imply. To capture users’ interest, the videos are titled in a seriously provocative manner, like: “Officer vs. Gangsta Thug in Brawl,” “How to Steal 23 MacBook Pros, 14 iPhones, and 9 iPods In 31 Seconds,” and “Toyota Supra Drifting Unbuttons A Girl’s Shirt.” (more…)
