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<ul class="summary-list"><li>Several stories in the news this week shine a light on mothers in the workforce.</li><li>Women with kids under 5 are participating in the workforce at much higher rates than their peers.</li></ul>For working mothers, it can sometimes feel like even when there's good news, there's also bad news.Just this week, several stories drove home some of the things that parents and working women already have sensed.First, some good news: Business Insider reported this week that women are the group of workers that are most successfully getting hired for high-paying jobs. My colleague Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza looked at data from a recruiting software firm with 50 million applications:<h2 id="a8da6f52-64cb-46b9-a800-b79a1c7f1ae9"><a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/hiring-slump-professional-white-collar-jobs-women-winning-2024-5">The white-collar recession means there are fewer $100K jobs — and women are landing them more often than men</a> — Business Insider</h2>She found that for jobs that paid over $100,000, women were a minority of applicants. But women actually landed those jobs more often than men. She found a likely reason:Basically, women are better at judging whether they have a chance of getting hired at a high-paying job, so when they do actually apply, they're more likely to score it.Of course, not all women are also parents, and only a portion of women (or anyone) in the workforce is getting those high-paying jobs. But it's a good signal for working moms.And there's another positive story: Part-time work is booming more than ever. According to Bloomberg, more people are employed part-time or with flexible hours than ever before, and a lot of that rise is coming from working mothers.<h2 id="937f4c1a-24dc-4790-a047-33d205e7b57a"><a target="_blank" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-16/women-benefit-from-record-us-part-time-work-and-remote-flexible-options">Mothers reap benefits of record part-time workforce boom in US</a> — Bloomberg</h2>Bloomberg reports:Overall, the workforce's share of women — both parents and not — has increased since 2015.One thing that stuck out to me was a chart in the Bloomberg article showing the percentage of women who are working in different groups: those with no children, teenage children, kids aged 5-12, and kids under 5.The chart shows that since 2015, the percentage of women working across all those groups has gone up in the last 10 years. But the biggest change was for the group of women with kids under age 5. In 2015, about 64% of moms of babies and toddlers worked — in 2024 it was up to 70%.The biggest change in that chart happened in 2020 when remote work started to become more popular. Another way to look at that is that remote work has the biggest benefit to moms of kids under 5.Age 5 is indeed a huge turning point for a parent — that's when kids typically start kindergarten, usually at their free local public school. Suddenly, the decision and ability to work outside the home (even if remotely) is radically changed.Free public kindergarten also can mean a radical change in the family finances — especially if they were bogged down with paying for day care or a nanny for the last five years. I wrote about this recently:<h2 id="11f876c3-99b3-4af2-a34c-081585b7b2d6"><a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-paying-preschool-childcare-costs-new-term-dinks-dips-henry-2024-2">Meet the DIPS parents: Double Income, Public School. They've got it better than the POLKs, or Parents of Little Kids.</a> — Business Insider</h2>On that note, here's the real bad news. This week, it was reported that for the first time, childcare for two kids costs more than rent in all 50 states and more than the average mortgage in 45 states.<h2 id="f554e923-ae4a-4bd3-b417-fc50345cd069"><a target="_blank" href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/child-care-is-now-more-expensive-than-rent-in-all-50-states-there-is-no-escaping-it-8f70b296">Childcare costs more than a mortgage payment or rent almost everywhere in the US: 'There is no escaping it'</a> — MarketWatch</h2>You don't have to be a genius economist to know that when childcare costs are sky-high, many women will drop out of the workforce.For many families, the math just doesn't math to have two working parents.But it's also more complicated. I really was interested in this article this week:<h2 id="627c0aa7-1f14-4d16-861d-4e23d4e1a7a5"><a target="_blank" href="https://www.vox.com/2024/5/14/24155209/child-care-cliff-daycare-moms-mothers-labor">The childcare cliff that wasn't</a> — Vox</h2>You may recall that last summer, there was a threat of a "childcare cliff" — federal subsidies during Covid that helped carry childcare centers through the pandemic had ended, and there was a fear that thousands of childcare centers could close. Some lawmakers urged more federal funding.The federal funding didn't happen. The "Build Back Better" bill passed without provisions for childcare and paid parental leave.And yet … that cliff didn't really happen. In fact, as we saw above, instead of a crash of mothers dropping out of the workforce, the percentage of working mothers actually went up. This is largely because of a stronger labor market and economy. But, as Vox's Rachel M. Cohen wrote: "The lesson to take from all of this is not that people should stop advocating for policies that would improve the lives of parents, kids, and those who care for children."If you're a mother of young children, all this probably feels like something you've already sort of noticed or experienced in your own life or among your friends. Childcare is expensive. Working is hard. Your TikTok feed is full of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trad-wives-have-exploded-in-popularity-since-roe-v-wade-2024-2">tradwives</a>. <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-say-boomer-parents-abandoned-them-2023-11">The grandparents aren't available to babysit</a> like you hoped they would.So maybe, yes, it is harder being a millennial mom than any other generation. (And yes, if you're Gen X or older, I know you'll scoff at that.)<h2 id="1d7babd8-3abc-4476-a62e-e6e0de464b6c"><a target="_blank" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/11/style/millennial-mom-midlife-crisis.html">Being a mother is hard work. Is it actually harder on millennial moms?</a> — The New York Times</h2>Reading these articles this week reminded me that everything about parenting is a bit of a paradox — "the days are long and the years are short," they say about kids. It's that same mix for the state of working moms — not all good, but not all bad.

For working moms, it's some good news and some bad news

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Airbnb expects a slowdown in growth next quarter and weakening US demand.</li><li>Shorter booking lead times and regulations in California impacted bookings, Airbnb's CFO said.</li></ul><a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/millennial-subsidy-uber-airbnb-prices-surge-pricing-dynamic-2024-8">Airbnb</a> is the latest to deliver bad news about the US consumer in its latest earnings report on Tuesday.The company said it expects a "sequential moderation" in nights and experiences booked next quarter, with weakening demand from US customers as people book trips closer to travel dates rather than in advance."Latin America and Asia Pacific continue to be our fastest-growing regions," the report said. "However, we are seeing shorter booking lead times globally and some signs of slowing demand from US guests."Airbnb's chief financial officer, Ellie Mertz, attributed some of the shorter lead times to varying factors that could impact the booking timeframe, like the new COVID variant or war in Israel.In North America specifically, the CFO said there are a "handful of components" to the slowdown, also including shorter lead times. Mertz added that shorter lead times don't mean that people aren't booking trips — it just means they haven't booked them yet.The shift in lead times has also led some people to book shorter-term rentals, although people have continued to book larger and more expensive listings, the CFO said.Mertz also mentioned that the US has had some regulatory obstacles, especially in California, where the total price display and cancellation grace period went into effect on July 1. California's "Honest Pricing Law" <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://oag.ca.gov/hiddenfees#:~:text=Beginning%20July%201%2C%202024%2C%20the,government%20taxes%20and%20shipping%20costs.">makes it illegal</a> for businesses to list a price for a good or service without including "all required fees" aside from "certain government taxes and shipping costs.""We think that's been a little bit of a headwind to our California business," Mertz said, adding that the California bill includes both guests residing and traveling in the state.The news comes hot on the heels of lower-than-expected Azure revenue from Microsoft and <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-prices-rising-shoppers-cautious-economy-outlook-earnings-2024-8">missed sales from Amazon</a>. <a target="_blank" rel="" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon">Amazon's</a> finance chief attributed the slowdown to consumers being distracted by political events and the Olympics. He also mentioned that consumers were "cautious" and "looking for deals."Airbnb's results also come after a more sluggish US jobs report released Friday, triggering recession concerns. US Stocks dropped after the report in a dramatic three day decline, although they showed <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market-today-selloff-economy-labor-market-fed-interest-rates-2024-8">some signs of a rebound on Tuesday</a>.Airbnb did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Airbnb just dropped more bad news about the US consumer 

<ul class="summary-list"><li>The general public's attitude toward COVID is more relaxed than ever, even amid a summer surge.</li><li>Doctors say relaxed COVID precautions are to be expected and are not necessarily a bad thing.</li></ul>Gone are the days of scrubbing surfaces, sudden <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-shut-down-school-two-days-after-classes-started-2022-1">school closures</a>, and social distancing.Where a positive COVID-19 test once wrought panicked <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-19-mistakes-us-focus-on-contact-tracing-not-sequencing-2021-3">contract tracing </a>and guaranteed two weeks of isolation, these days, a diagnosis sparks relatively little worry for most people.Even amid a summer spike in cases — everyone from President <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-tests-positive-for-covid-19-2024-7#:~:text=President%20Joe%20Biden%20tested%20positive,Press%20Secretary%20Karine%20Jean%2DPierre.">Joe Biden</a> to the 2024 Summer Olympians seems to be battling the virus — the general public's attitude toward the pandemic that upended our lives more than four years ago is more relaxed than ever.The federal public health emergency for COVID expired in May 2023, officially <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/the-covid-19-global-health-emergency-is-over-who-says-2023-5">ending the crisis</a>, at least in name, more than three years after it was first declared. Since then, thanks to high infection and immunization rates, the country has continued climbing toward the herd immunity doctors so desperately sought in the early days of the pandemic, four medical professionals told Business Insider."The risk perception and anxiety around acute COVID infection has definitely lessened," said Dr. Anita Chopra, an internist at the University of Washington medical system. "People are interacting and mingling more like in pre-pandemic times."Healthcare professionals told BI that the public's more relaxed attitude toward COVID is ultimately a good thing. <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/life-returning-to-normal-labor-market-vaccines-pandemic-2021-11">A return to normality</a> was the goal, after all.But COVID is still very present and very much a potential threat, especially for the immunocompromised and those unlucky enough to <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/who-official-individuals-coronavirus-infection-unlucky-long-covid-2022-6">develop long COVID symptoms</a> — up to 10% of patients, according to some doctor estimates. Meanwhile, relaxed masking and declining vaccination rates, while to be expected at this point, could be linked to the rising case numbers doctors are seeing in clinics around the country, medical professionals told BI."We need to acknowledge that we're in a very different place now than we were at the height of the pandemic," said Dr. Eric Chow, chief of communicable disease epidemiology and immunizations at Public Health Seattle and King County. "But so long as COVID-19 continues to circulate, there are health implications to getting infected."<h2 id="8540c815-ae27-4465-8106-21a572b3f035">Evolving behaviors and beliefs</h2>Many of the early-day pandemic precautions have all but disappeared in 2024. Chief among them, according to doctors, are <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/mask-mandates-lifted-states-reasonable-experts-2022-2">masking</a>, isolations, and vaccinations.Soon after the pandemic emerged, medical professionals emphasized masking as a key way to slow the spread of the virus.The face coverings quickly became a contentious cultural topic and among the <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trumps-decision-to-oppose-masks-bizarre-self-sabotaging-coronavirus-pandemic-2020-6">most politicized aspects</a> of COVID. But these days, even many who once championed masks have ditched the deterrent entirely. An August 2023 Yahoo News/YouGov <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/only-12-percent-of-americans-wear-mask-in-public-194019882.html">poll</a> of 1,665 US adults found that 12% of respondents said they were masking — down from 60% in January 2022. And doctors told BI that they've seen a steady decrease in masking since then."I think the public has appropriately adjusted their attitudes to what they hear in the news and what they see around them," said Dr. Edward Jones-Lopez, infectious disease specialist with Keck Medicine at the University of Southern California.More worrying to medical professionals is the <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-vaccine-us-vaccination-sites-joe-biden-2021-4">decline in vaccinations.</a>While early immunization rates helped bolster immunity, vaccination uptake has been on the decline in recent years, and fewer and fewer people are keeping up to date with their booster shots, a preventive step the <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.cdc.gov/covid/vaccines/stay-up-to-date.html#:~:text=Everyone%20aged%205%20years%20and,of%20updated%20COVID%2D19%20vaccine.">CDC recommends</a> in its COVID guidelines.Most medical professionals also recommend a yearly COVID-19 vaccine. There's a new shot coming out in September. But Chow, who previously worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the height of the pandemic, said most people aren't aware of the recommended vaccine schedule — a challenge that is indicative of a larger problem doctors are trying to navigate in this new COVID age."People are much more fatigued by COVID messaging," he said. "We're trying to right-size the appropriate message to make sure people continue to acknowledge the health impacts of COVID."<h2 id="3c719499-920d-46e7-b315-35ec4a1cdc50">The long COVID scare</h2>Relaxed attitudes are not necessarily a bad thing, according to doctors."I think it's to be expected as we learn more about the virus over these four years and as we've developed these other COVID countermeasures to address infection," said Dr. Jessica Bender, a primary care doctor at Harbor View Medical in Seattle and the co-director at the university's long COVID clinic.On the one hand, people are generally not getting as sick as they once did when ill with COVID, medical professionals told BI. On the other hand, this summer seems to have brought yet another COVID surge with a spike in cases.People don't typically equate respiratory illnesses with the warmer months, but an increase in summer socializing combined with the general decrease in preventive measures is likely fueling the uptick, Bender said.For an unlucky subset of patients, a COVID diagnosis — even in this new relaxed era — could mean <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/long-covid-survivor-its-wrecked-my-life-2022-1">long-term challenges.</a>Doctors define long COVID as any infection related to the virus that is present for at least three months, said Chopra, who treats patients at the UW long COVID clinic. The often <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/healthcare-workers-nurses-long-covid-impact-careers-labor-shortage-2022-5">debilitating</a> condition is indiscriminate in who it affects. Up to 10% of all people who get COVID are susceptible, according to Chopra, and patients of all ages, genders, races, and vaccination statuses can present with long COVID.<div type="image" title="A young girl gets a COVID vaccine" height="2661" width="4000" msid="112065018" hostid="261" sizebytes="341938"></div>Even as the country relaxes its COVID response, doctors said they are still seeing many new patients presenting with long COVID each day. The condition has at least <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/common-long-covid-symptoms-hair-loss-vertigo-low-libido-2022-7">200 known signs and symptoms</a> that range from shortness of breath to chronic fatigue and brain fog.Doctors told BI they'd treated several patients who have been forced to <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/long-covid-symptoms-disability-insurance-unemployment-quit-job-2022-11">stop working</a> or rendered unable to participate in any physical activity because of a long COVID diagnosis. A 2023 <a target="_blank" href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9721155/">study</a> published in the National Library of Medicine explored a possible link between long COVID and the risk of suicide because of the condition's tendency to inflict depression, anxiety, posttraumatic symptoms, sleep disturbances, fatigue, and cognitive deficits.Medical professionals are doing their best to understand long COVID, but admit that there's still much to learn. According to the CDC, about 17 million people <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/pulse/long-covid.htm">reported</a> having long-term COVID-19 in March 2024.For these people, the pandemic is still very real."When I treat people with long COVID, they are always masked," Chopra said.<h2 id="c71342ed-0973-4d09-978b-dae3bd11fc3e">The future of COVID</h2>As doctors look to the <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/red-cross-says-world-is-dangerously-unprepared-for-next-pandemic-2023-1">future</a> of COVID, little is for sure."We always say the one thing that is predictable about COVID is its unpredictability," Chow said.But medical professionals told BI they are optimistic that even as the virus continues to evolve, the next few years will continue to look like the past year, with small seasonal surges and hopefully less intense illness.While lax attitudes may be a welcome sign of a cautious new normal, doctors said it's important to remember the lessons we've collectively learned from COVID. The precautions that proved useful against the virus protect people from other illnesses, too.Just because the world has adapted to COVID-19, medical professionals say, doesn't mean we should drop the hygiene, <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/air-circulation-coronavirus-how-to-judge-ventilation-systems-2020-8">ventilation</a>, and masking lessons learned along the way."We've learned so much about how we can protect ourselves," Chow said. "It's hard to see people leave some of those precautions behind."Doctors recommend people gauge their individual risk, as well as the risk of those close to them when considering which precautions to take in this new COVID age. Most medical professionals still recommend masking, testing, and visiting a doctor after testing positive."We're aiming to get to a state where COVID is not a threat to our healthcare system," Bender said. "And not a threat to our lives and livelihoods.

Most people don't really care about COVID anymore. That's good — and bad. 

New York [US], April 5 (ANI): The <keyword id="10561122" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="bird-flu-pandemic" source="Orion">bird flu pandemic</keyword> with the potential to be "<keyword id="21202249" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="100-times-worse" source="Orion">100 times worse</keyword> than COVID" may be on the horizon after a rare human case was discovered in Texas, experts have warned, the New York Post reported on Thursday. The <keyword id="21202246" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="H5N1-avian-flu" source="keywords">H5N1 avian flu</keyword> has spread rapidly since a new strain was detected in 2020 affecting wild birds in every state, as well as in commercial poultry and backyard flocks. But the recent cases detected in mammals, with cattle herds across four states becoming infected and on Monday, federal health officials announced that a dairy worker in Texas caught the virus. "This virus [has been] on the top of the pandemic list for many, many years and probably decades," Suresh Kuchipudi, a <keyword id="95867" type="General" weightage="100" keywordseo="bird-flu" source="Orion">bird flu</keyword> researcher from Pittsburgh, said at a recent panel discussing the issue, the New York Post reported citing the Daily Mail. "And now we're getting dangerously close to this virus potentially causing a pandemic." He noted that the <keyword id="565908" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="H5N1-virus" source="Orion">H5N1 virus</keyword> has already been detected in species throughout the world and "has shown the ability to infect a range of mammalian hosts, including humans." "So therefore, in my view, I think this is a virus that has the greatest pandemic threat [that is] playing out in plain sight and globally present," Kuchipudi said. John Fulton, a pharmaceutical industry consultant for vaccines and the founder of Canada-based BioNiagara who organized the meeting, also expressed his concerns, the Mail reports, the New York Post reported. "This appears to be 100 times worse than COVID -- or it could be if it mutates and maintains its high case fatality rate," he said. "Once it's mutated to infect humans, we can only hope that the [fatality rate] drops." Around 52 per cent of humans who have contracted H5N1 since 2003 have died, according to the World Health Organization. For comparison, COVID currently kills less than 0.1% of those it infects -- though at the start of the pandemic, the fatality rate was around 20 per cent. Symptoms of the bird flu are similar to those of other flus, including cough, body aches and fever, the New York Post reported. Some people may not develop noticeable symptoms, but others can develop severe, life-threatening pneumonia. The dairy worker in Texas who was infected has reported "eye redness (consistent with conjunctivitis)" as their only symptom, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted. "The patient was told to isolate and is being treated with an antiviral drug for [the] flu," the CDC said. The agency and "the whole US government is taking this situation very seriously," CDC Director Mandy Cohen told the Washington Post. She maintained that the virus does not pose much of a risk to the general public, noting that the dairy worker was in direct contact with infected cattle, and the US Department of Agriculture has said there are currently no changes that would make it more transmissible to humans. "While cases among humans in direct contact with infected animals are possible, this indicates that the current risk to the public remains low," the department said in a statement over the weekend. But the fact that the virus has been found in cattle could mean it is starting to mutate, Cohen told the Washington Post. "We had not seen avian flu in cattle prior to last week. That is new," she said. "It is a reservoir for [the] virus to circulate and potentially change." If the virus does mutate enough to infect humans, it could spread rapidly, the European Food Safety Authority warned on Wednesday, according to Fox News. "If avian A [H5N1] influenza viruses acquire the ability to spread efficiently among humans, large-scale transmission could occur due to the lack of immune defences against H5 viruses in humans," the Food Safety Authority said. To prevent any potential spread, the US is already testing components used to create a vaccine for the virus, and two candidate vaccine viruses appear to be well-matched to protect against H5N1, the Washington Post reports. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also said the Biden administration is monitoring the threat. "We take the health and safety of the American people seriously," she said at her briefing on Wednesday. "It is very important to this president. Our top priority is to keep communities healthy, safe and informed."

Scientists warn of bird flu pandemic that could be '100 times worse' than COVID after rare human case found in US

Ever since the virus reared its ugly head and briefly sent the world into despair, the coronavirus has remained a staple, albeit almost sidelined, part of the news cycle. Despite this, the topic has come to the forefront of controversy once again, with an extremely popular <keyword id="20040659" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="COVID-19-vaccine" source="keywords">COVID-19 vaccine</keyword> now under scrutiny. Considering that the world is still healing from the scars left behind by the coronavirus tragedy, it is imperative that we gauge the situation to avoid any unwarranted public paranoia. Let’s look at the facts behind the ongoing <keyword id="19910149" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="AstraZeneca" source="keywords" meta.keywordsubtype="org" meta.entityname="AstraZeneca" meta.hostid="261" meta.entityid="AstraZeneca">AstraZeneca</keyword> (or <keyword id="19960109" type="General" weightage="100" keywordseo="covishield" source="keywords">Covishield</keyword>, as it is known in India) vaccine controversy, and determine if there really is a cause for worry. <cmsannotation type="cmsannotation" annotationid="What happened?" comment="subhead" text="What happened?">What happened?</cmsannotation> Shortly after receiving the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, UK-based <keyword id="21472612" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="jamie-scott" source="keywords">Jamie Scott</keyword> experienced a harrowing ordeal. He developed a brain clot and severe bleeding, resulting in permanent brain injury. This condition, known as <keyword id="21475609" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="Thrombosis-with-Thrombocytopenia-Syndrome" source="keywords">Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome</keyword> (<keyword id="20218859" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="tts" source="keywords">TTS</keyword>), can lead to dangerously low blood clot and platelet levels, posing a grave risk to those affected. Jamie's struggles with memory loss, impaired vision, and diminished cognitive abilities compelled him to seek legal recourse against the pharmaceutical company in 2023. Jamie's legal representative contends that AstraZeneca minimized the potential risks linked to their vaccines. Moreover, reports indicate that over 50 vaccinated individuals experienced similar adverse conditions, with numerous cases resulting in fatalities or severe injuries. Despite these assertions, the pharmaceutical company refutes the allegations, stating that they do not acknowledge a causal relationship between the vaccine and Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome (TTS) on a generic level. However, a year of court wrangling later, legal documents submitted by AstraZeneca have now admitted that their vaccine can cause TTS in very rare cases, although the causal mechanism is still not well known. This revelation has led to renewed uproar against the vaccine’s side-effects. <cmsannotation type="cmsannotation" annotationid="Is there cause for worry?" comment="subhead" text="Is there cause for worry?">Is there cause for worry?</cmsannotation> In short words, not really. Links between the <keyword id="21483117" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="AstraZeneca-vaccine" source="keywords">AstraZeneca vaccine</keyword> and vaccine-induced immune TTS have been scientifically identified since early 2021, soon after the first COVID-19 vaccines had come out. However, it is so very rare — a few dozen reported cases among the millions administered — that even the World Health Organisation has deemed the vaccine “safe and effective” for all individuals aged 18 and above. Moreover, even influenza, H1N1 and rabies vaccines can cause TTS in very rare instances. Further, it is important to note that an infection with COVID-19 is itself a major cause for clot, heart attacks and strokes. Being vaccinated actually lowers these risks. There is also the fact that all vaccines or drugs carry potential side-effects, and these medical interventions are only cleared for release after determining that their benefits vastly outweigh any complications. Finally, the <keyword id="21483118" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="TTS-side-effects" source="keywords">TTS side-effects</keyword> — which include symptoms such as headaches, blurred vision, chest pain, leg swelling or tiny blood spots under the skin — manifest between 1-6 weeks of vaccination. Considering that most Indians received their Covishield jab a couple of years ago, there should be no reason to panic now. <cmsannotation type="cmsannotation" annotationid="Is it time to consider alternate vaccines?" comment="subhead" text="Is it time to consider alternate vaccines?">Is it time to consider alternate vaccines?</cmsannotation> There is no particular hard evidence that suggests the supremacy of one vaccine over another, considering that they all carry varying degrees of side-effects. That being said, <keyword id="9485939" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="covaxin" source="Orion">Covaxin</keyword> boasts a higher efficacy than Covishield, and has better research data among Indian subjects. However, it may also be important to know that the administration of the AstraZeneca vaccine has been discontinued in many countries, mainly due the aforementioned risk of blood clotting in certain age groups. Whatever the choice, the fact of the matter remains that these vaccines have saved millions since their introduction, and it is pertinent that we continue taking them diligently, unless any premier health authorities recommend otherwise.

Should you be worried about the potential side-effects of the Covishield vaccine?

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Users on Threads are unable to search for COVID-19-related terms including "coronavirus" and "vaccines."</li><li>Meta said the block is temporary while it rolls out a new search tool.</li></ul>Meta has temporarily blocked searches for COVID-19-related topics on <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-use-threads-social-media-platform-guide">Threads</a> as <a href="https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home">cases in the US rise</a> after rolling out a new search tool for its X, formerly Twitter, rival. Attempts to search "Covid" and "coronavirus" on the app bring up a blank screen and a link to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage in the US with information on the disease. The move was initially reported by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/11/threads-covid-coronavirus-searches-blocked/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Washington Post</a>.Terms such as "vaccination" and "long Covid" also fail to bring up any results and redirect users to external websites. Meta confirmed to the Post that the block was intentional.The move was discovered after Meta rolled out a new search interface for Threads, one of the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/threads-meta-features-retain-users-mark-zuckerberg-twitter-x-2023-8">latest features the company has introduced</a> in an attempt to reverse the platforms' declining user base. In a statement to Insider Meta confirmed that search on Threads "temporarily doesn't provide results for keywords that may show potentially sensitive content," and said that users would be able to search for COVID-19-related topics "once we are confident in the quality of the results." <div type="image" title="Threads search" height="615" width="820" msid="103607467" hostid="261" sizebytes="10852"></div>The decision to redirect queries about potentially divisive topics such as COVID-19 to external websites is in line with Meta's overall vision for its X competitor, which <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-meta-threads-100-million-users-faster-chatgpt-2023-7">gained 100 million users</a> in less than a week after launching in July.The social media giant has attempted to cast Threads as a positive, brand-friendly environment where topics such as news and politics are largely sidelined. Insider's Nathan McAlone made the case that <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/why-instagram-threads-is-destined-to-be-boring-2023-7">this makes the platform less interesting than X</a>, the site it was intended to replace. Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, who is spearheading Threads, said <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/threads-twitter-politics-not-the-focus-adam-mosseri-2023-7">he does not see this platform as a space for hard news or politics</a>, although he stressed that the site would not block news topics entirely."Politics and hard news are important," he said in a post on Threads in July. "But my take is, from a platform's perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let's be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them."Meta has been gradually pivoting away from news across its various platforms, as social media sites such as Facebook have come under scrutiny for spreading misinformation and political division. Both Facebook and Instagram were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/02/facebook-failing-to-protect-users-from-covid-misinformation-says-monitor">accused</a> of <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/report-facebook-tech-is-failing-to-detect-vaccine-misinformation-2021-10">failing to protect users from COVID-19 misinformation</a> during the pandemic.

Instagram's Threads never wanted to be a platform for hard news or politics. Now it's blocking searches about COVID-19.

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Official NBER recession data says US recessions have become less common over time. </li><li>But some economists have argued that flawed historical economic data puts this claim in question. </li></ul>One of the biggest questions of today's economy is when the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/recession-2024-inflation-economy-interest-rates-stock-market-layoffs-fed-2023-11">US will enter a recession</a>. And most Americans are crossing their fingers it won't happen anytime soon.During recessions, many people <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/recession-outlook-layoffs-job-market-economy-unemployment-rate-hard-landing-2024-4">lose their jobs</a> — and those who don't are left worrying about whether they'll be next on the chopping block. Recessions often cause <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/retailers-risk-bankruptcy-default-economic-recession-2022-11">businesses to close</a> and <a target="_blank" href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/us-recession-stock-market-outlook-spx-economy-interest-rates-shah-2023-6">stock portfolios to plummet</a>, and they can have a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/us-men-working-less-recessions-employment-productivity-2024-4">lingering impact</a> on workers' employment and wages, even years after a downturn has officially ended — it took many millennials a long time to <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/elder-millennials-recovering-from-great-recession-wealth-careers-2022-1">recover financially</a> from the Great Recession.So, over the last few years, when experts <a target="_blank" href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/us-economy-outlook-recession-paul-krugman-seth-carpenter-stock-market-2023-7">predicted</a> that the US would soon enter a recession, many Americans <a target="_blank" href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/recession-biden-inflation-economy-americans-googling-interest-rates-2022-6">worried</a> about their financial security. While a downturn hasn't come yet — and some <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/jobs-wages-growth-in-march-unemployment-rate-labor-market-2024-4">economic indicators</a> remain strong — <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/recession-outlook-yield-curve-inversion-economy-hard-landing-indicator-stocks-2024-4">recession fears</a> haven't <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/recession-outlook-us-economy-job-market-unemployment-soft-landing-citi-2024-2">gone away</a>.While it's unclear if the US will experience a recession in the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/economic-recession-outlook-downturn-fears-pushed-2025-after-ism-data-2024-4">near future</a>, data from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) — the private, nonprofit research group that's responsible for <a target="_blank" href="https://africa.businessinsider.com/finance/what-is-a-recession-how-economists-define-periods-of-economic-downturn/89zb8f0">tracking the start and end dates of US recessions</a> — shows a promising trend for Americans, in particular young people who are just beginning their careers: Recessions have become less common in the US.Between 1990 and 2023, the US economy spent 36 months in a recession, with the most recent US recession in 2020 <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-recession-lasted-2-months-shortest-downturn-us-history-nber-2021-7">lasting two months</a>. The NBER <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nber.org/research/business-cycle-dating">defines</a> a recession as the period between a peak of economic activity and its lowest point — the period typically must include a "significant decline in economic activity" that lasts more than a few months.Between 1960 and 1989, the economy spent 59 months in a recession. The further back you go — the NBER data goes to about 1850 — the more common recessions were.But here's where things get a bit complicated.The NBER's recession data between roughly 1850 and 1950 is somewhere between flawed and unusable, George Selgin, an economist and a senior fellow at the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, told Business Insider. He said the NBER's pre-1914 recession data, in particular, is "very poor," and that only economic data collected after World War II is of good quality.For example, while some efforts were made to track unemployment as early as the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/business/05leonhardt.html">1870s</a>, the Bureau of Labor Statistics didn't officially do so until <a target="_blank" href="https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1948/article/pdf/labor-force-employment-and-unemployment-1929-39-estimating-methods.pdf">1929</a>.This raises a series of questions: Are US recessions, in fact, much less common than they used to be? If so, who or what is responsible for this improvement?And if not, what's gone wrong? After all, economists told BI that the US's diversifying economy and improving economic data should have made the US more resistant to recessions than perhaps ever before.<h2>Recessions might not be less common</h2>It's possible that NBER worked with subpar data but generally was able to identify when the US entered a recession.However, Selgin said alternative analyses of historical economic data have found that the US hasn't seen much of a decline in recession frequency over time. Selgin pointed to a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w11157">research paper</a> published in 2005 by Joseph H. Davis, now the global chief economist at Vanguard, as the "most reliable" source of recession data he's seen.Davis's research put more emphasis on economic output and employment and less on prices, which can tell a misleading story, Selgin said. For example, while prices <a target="_blank" href="https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040715/were-there-any-periods-major-deflation-us-history.asp">fell</a> during the late 1800s, this didn't mean there was necessarily a recession."What Davis and other economic historians have shown is that much of the deflation, not all of it during those times, was driven by <a target="_blank" href="https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-history-primary-source-timeline/rise-of-industrial-america-1876-1900/work-in-late-19th-century/">productivity gains</a>."<div type="image" title="Joseph Davis research" height="1072" width="1420" msid="109885064" hostid="261"></div>Ultimately, Davis's research concluded that US recessions might not be as common historically as previously thought — casting doubt on the premise that recessions have become much less common over time.While Davis's recession data only dates up to around 2000, Selgin said incorporating more recent data points, like the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/what-caused-the-great-recession">Great Recession</a>, would only reinforce the paper's findings.<h2>The US economy is more resilient because it has diversified</h2>In some ways, the US economy is arguably <a target="_blank" href="https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/epr/02v08n1/0205kahn/0205kahn.html">more stable</a> than it was 100 years ago. Agriculture's <a target="_blank" href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/troublesome-farming-us/">declining share</a> of the economy is among the primary reasons. In 1935, there were about <a target="_blank" href="https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=58268">6.8 million</a> farms in the US, per the US Department of Agriculture. In 2023, there were 1.9 million."A bad harvest for one or two crops or a drought season, that could give you a big downturn," Selgin said. "That doesn't happen in a diversified manufacturing economy, of course, where much of the GDP has nothing to do with the weather."The ongoing transition from a manufacturing economy to a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/citi-2018/the-american-economy-is-experiencing-a-paradigm-shift/2008/">services-oriented one</a> could be making the US even more resilient, Satyam Panday, Chief US Economist, S&amp;P Global Ratings, told Business Insider."The most volatile is agriculture, then manufacturing, and services is the most stable," he said of economies with a particular industry focus. "So the growing share of services also means you're going to have more stable economic growth."Additionally, Selgin said that <a target="_blank" href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S">growing</a> US government spending relative to GDP over the past century could also be making the economy more stable. In part, that's because government spending doesn't tend to plummet during difficult economic periods.Becoming more energy-independent may have helped as well. Before 2018, when the US exported more oil than it imported for the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-oil-exporter-opec-20181206-story.html">first time</a> in 75 years, a huge spike in oil prices outside the US could seriously impact the economy, Panday said. Today, the US should be more insulated from such a price shock.But if recessions aren't much less common than they used to be, and the aforementioned developments should be making the economy more stable, where would the instability be coming from?Selgin isn't sure what the explanation is, but he thinks it's possible that the Federal Reserve, which was <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-federal-reserve-a-rich-history-of-financial-folly-2011-4">founded</a> in 1913, could be partly responsible."The Fed tends to overdo things sometimes, and others, it underdoes things, even though, in general, it's getting the directions right," he said of the central bank's interest rate policies. "There's plenty of reason to not be complacent about the Fed's performance, to wonder whether it has really done what it set out to do when it was established."The Fed is <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/what-is-the-federal-reserve">tasked</a> with helping the economy maintain maximum employment and stable prices. Since <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/federal-reserve-hikes-interest-rates-inflation-higher-costs-loans-mortgages-2022-3">2022</a>, the Fed has <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/did-fed-cut-interest-rates-march-meeting-continues-pause-inflation-2024-3">raised interest rates</a> in an effort to bring down inflation, and it's pursuing the desired "<a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/jamie-dimon-soft-landing-outlook-recession-inflation-jpmorgan-geopolitics-2024-4">soft landing</a>" of lower prices and a healthy labor market. Its policies may have <a target="_blank" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/12/18/recession-economy-inflation/">helped</a> the US avoid a recession.Panday said he believes that better economic data and the ability to "learn from the mistakes of the past" have helped the Fed make better decisions.<h2>Avoiding recessions isn't the only indicator of a healthy economy</h2>The longer the US economy grows without a recession, the better it is for employment and Americans' standard of living, Panday said. But when it comes to measuring the stability of the US economy, measuring the frequency of recessions might not be the best approach.Even when a recession technically comes to an end, and the US economy begins to grow again, that doesn't mean everything is fine and dandy. For example, the US exited a recession in 2009, but employment <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/great-recession-meet-the-terrible-recovery-2011-8">didn't return</a> to pre-recession levels <a target="_blank" href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CE16OV">until 2014</a>.It's why economists should focus not only on the frequency of recessions but on the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/us-men-working-less-recessions-employment-productivity-2024-4">pace of the economic recoveries</a> in the aftermath, Selgin said.Panday said he thinks policymakers' response to the pandemic recession — which included trillions in <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/stimulus-package-pandemic-surpass-great-recession-fiscal-plans-recovery-2021-3">federal COVID-19 spending</a> — shows that they may have learned the lesson from the sluggish recovery after the Great Recession.To be sure, while a stable economy has its benefits, it's not the only indicator of a healthy economy. For example, Americans' <a target="_blank" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/america-in-1915/462360/">standard of living</a> has improved considerably over the past century thanks in part to a <a target="_blank" href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA">growing</a> economy and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/most-important-inventions-of-last-30-years-internet-iphone-netflix-facebook-google-2019-5">technological progress</a>, even though they've dealt with the occasional recession.In the years and decades ahead, any number of factors could plunge the US into a downturn.A long economic expansion could raise the <a target="_blank" href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/fed-rate-hikes-us-economy-recession-inflation-europe-jobs-market-2022-11">risk</a> of the economy "running too hot," Panday said — which could ultimately lay the groundwork for a recession if policymakers don't respond correctly. He added that the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/financialization-has-increased-economic-fragility/">growth</a> of the financial sector relative to the rest of the economy could pose risks if it's not properly regulated. And of course, unexpected global shocks to supply and demand — the pandemic being the most recent example — could wreak havoc.To some Americans, the next recession might feel inevitable. But Panday said that isn't necessarily true."Economic expansions don't die of old age just because of time," he said. "Even if it's been going on for a long time, it doesn't mean that you're going to get a recession."Have you changed your spending or savings strategies over the past few years because you feared a recession was on the horizon? If so, reach out to this reporter at <a target="_blank" href="mailto:jzinkula@businessinsider.com">jzinkula@businessinsider.com</a>.

Younger generations might not have to worry about recessions as much as their elders. It would be great news for their job security and stock portfolios.

Kelsey Russell, a 23-year-old TikToker in New York, is on a mission to pull off what media executives have struggled to do for decades: Persuade young people to buy newspapers.The grad student posts several videos a week in which she flips through print pages of The New York Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and other legacy publishers to summarize stories. The broadsheets, blanketed with Russell's notes and highlights, are something of a nostalgic prop for her roughly 88,000 followers, some of whom may have watched their parents flip through physical papers but never touched one themselves.Before finding a news niche, Russell spent years building a TikTok following by posting restaurant reviews and travel vlogs. Today she often blends her peppy commentary on news she thinks <a target="_blank" href="https://www.insider.com/student-explains-news-gen-zers-improve-media-literacy-2023-10">young people care about</a> — such as healthcare and climate — with lifestyle content. In a November post, for example, she began by showing off <a target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@kelscruss/video/7298911740899642667">her ribeye steak dinner</a>, before diving into an Athens Banner-Herald article about criminal-justice reform. "The newspaper is such a slay," a user commented on one of Russell's August videos where she talked about bombs in Syria.Persuading young adults to pay for the news is a daunting task. Fourteen percent of US adults in a September <a target="_blank" href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/15/more-americans-are-getting-news-on-tiktok-bucking-the-trend-seen-on-most-other-social-media-sites/?utm_source=AdaptiveMailer&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=23-11-15%20Package:%20Social%20&amp;%20News,%20News%20Platform%20Fact%20Sheets%20GENERAL&amp;org=982&amp;lvl=100&amp;ite=12925&amp;lea=2929728&amp;ctr=0&amp;par=1&amp;trk=a0DQm000000a5CTMAY">survey from the Pew Research Center</a> said they regularly get news from TikTok, up from 3% in 2020. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, that number jumped from 9% to 32%."News" on TikTok, however, rarely comes from mainstream outlets like The Washington Post or NBC News, both of which are trying to build audiences there. The app's recommendation algorithm rarely pushes users toward these accounts, an August study from <a target="_blank" href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448231192964">researchers at Northwestern</a> determined. "We find almost no evidence of proactive news exposure on TikTok's behalf," the study concludes.Instead, young people on TikTok learn about what's happening from a hodgepodge of alternative sources, from commentary accounts like Russell's, to non-news influencers who occasionally dabble in current events <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/johnny-depp-amber-heard-social-media-defamation-tiktok-case-rcna25430">when they enter the mainstream</a>, to posts from people purporting to offer on-the-ground videos from breaking news events like a war or protest.On TikTok's recommendation feed, there is little distinction between a report from ABC News and a rant about that report from a lifestyle influencer. That chaotic democratization is by design. A TikTok representative told Business Insider that the company treats all accounts the same when it comes to policing misinformation and promoting content. What happens when a generation of Americans gets its news from an infinitely scrolling video app? What happens when the 24-hour news cycle collapses to a 24-second news cycle? In conversations with more than two dozen TikTok users, creators, researchers, and other media stakeholders, it became clear that Kelsey Russell filming herself flipping through the paper at her kitchen table is part of a paradigm shift. There are the high-stakes financial repercussions: TikTok's growing news influence could further batter an already severely wounded media industry. Then there's the potential dramatic effect on an informed republic. The app's ability to provide accurate information on current events is being tested in real time, with conflicts like the Israel-Hamas war stretching TikTok's <a target="_blank" href="https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/our-continued-actions-to-protect-the-tiktok-community-during-the-israelhamas-war">content-moderation bandwidth</a>."Platforms don't seem to be that interested in making a space for news," said Nick Hagar, a coauthor of the Northwestern report who now works as a data scientist at The New York Times. This "new dynamic," he said, is "going to impact what people see and what people think of as important."<h2>Influencers read the news so their followers don't have to</h2>One of the core pillars of TikTok's news ecosystem is what you might call the "news influencer" — creators like Russell who distill and interpret the news for their followers. Though they're usually not affiliated with the outlets they talk about, these people may actually serve as better spokespeople for the industry than journalists at traditional publications. Some users told BI they found TikTokers more authentic and relatable than journalists, whom they believed had built-in biases tied to politics or corporate owners."I really liked this idea of somebody who's a generalist giving me my news rather than somebody who's always a specialist," said Tejas Sekhar, a 24-year-old medical student in Chicago. "I feel like sometimes that hits closer to home in terms of what I can glean from it that's relevant to my personal or daily life." "What I'm providing people is a near-peer model of education," said Russell, who wants to parlay her master's in sociology and education policy into a job that mixes entertainment with media literacy (much like what she does on TikTok today). "Somebody that looks like you, that talks like you, that acts like you, that is around your age, is able to explain a topic that you might not be able to understand."The share of US adults under 30 in Pew surveys who said they trusted information from national news outlets fell to 56% in 2022 from 62% in 2016, with trust in local news outlets falling to 62% from 71%. By contrast, trust in information from social media rose to 50% from 44%.Traditional media brands that have been successful on TikTok often build their videos through individual reporter personalities. <a target="_blank" href="https://www.insider.com/the-washington-post-tiktok-account-has-a-surprisingly-popular-2019-6?_gl=1*b0ubkd*_ga*ODgyMDIyOTc4LjE2MzEwMjI2MTY.*_ga_E21CV80ZCZ*MTcwMTI2NTIxOS4xNjkyLjAuMTcwMTI2NTI2Ny4xMi4wLjA.">The Washington Post</a>'s Dave Jorgensen, for example, did an entire video series around working from his apartment during a pandemic, while Jack Corbett of "<a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/planet-money-shares-strategy-for-podcast-radio-content-on-tiktok-2020-11">Planet Money</a>" also filmed TikToks at his home using a bedsheet as a green screen.For TikTok's emerging class of news influencers who have created their own niche, reading traditional media is still very much a part of their daily habits, even if it's absent from some of their followers' media diets.With 3 million followers, Vitus "V" Spehar's @underthedesknews account is particularly effective at bridging the divide between traditional media and TikTok news. The 41-year-old describes their role on TikTok as a news communicator and civics explainer — a blend of Stephen Colbert, an after-school special on PBS, and "<a target="_blank" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgVKvqTItto">Schoolhouse Rock!</a>"Spehar's videos often include screengrabs from news articles to help credit sources when talking about topics like Sam Altman's temporary ousting from OpenAI or a House ethics report on Rep. George Santos. Spehar says they monitor anywhere from 12 to 15 news sources with the goal of finding stories that haven't become oversaturated.A.B. Burns-Tucker, a 34-year-old recent law-school grad, has a similar approach to her legal commentary account @iamlegallyhype. She broke into TikTok news after posting a video in which she tried to explain what was happening in <a target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@iamlegallyhype/video/7062015965806234926">the Russia-Ukraine war</a> to her followers as if she were talking to friends. The video took off, and she now walks through topics like an Israel-Hamas cease-fire or Mike Johnson's election as House speaker to an audience of about 700,000 followers."Your post is the only way I fully understand what's happening," one user commented on her October video about the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@iamlegallyhype/video/7295425857789758763">Israel-Hamas war</a>. "Translators like you are so important," another user wrote.Burns-Tucker, like Spehar and Russell, leans on professional news outlets for sourcing, even if her videos make it seem as if she's speaking off-the-cuff. "Any TikToker who is doing news communication has to have respect for traditional media," said Spehar, who has done freelance work on TikTok for outlets like The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. "You don't have to like all of it. But you've got to find one piece that you do like and recognize that that is what's giving you power."Not all TikTok news influencers cite their sources, of course. As has long been the case with other platforms, sensational retellings of the news that omit sourcing details are often the most popular."Welcome to ridiculous shit going on around the world right now," a TikTok creator named <a target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@davidjustinn/video/6877654368087215365">David Justinn</a> with about 9 million followers said in a late-2020 video. "A frozen dragon was just discovered in Canada," he notes. The video garnered about 31 million views and about 6 million "likes." And on hot-button issues like the Israel-Hamas war, for example, some creators have <a target="_blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@lostmymarblesagain/video/7300429846939798826?q=brittany%20broski&amp;t=1701205210882">felt pressured</a> to offer opinions on the matter even if they lack expertise, leading some to distrust information from the app.Even though Pew's <a target="_blank" href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/27/u-s-adults-under-30-now-trust-information-from-social-media-almost-as-much-as-from-national-news-outlets/">research</a> showed that US adults broadly distrust information found on social media, TikTok faces an uphill battle given its resonance with younger adults who are more inclined to trust social apps. The company said it enlists fact-checking partners globally to help verify claims about misinformation. But other social apps have had similar partners and have failed, sometimes spectacularly and <a target="_blank" href="https://about.fb.com/news/2018/11/myanmar-hria/">dangerously</a>, to serve as effective news conduits. A 2020 Pew report found that US consumers who turned to social media for news tended to be <a target="_blank" href="https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trust/archive/fall-2020/americans-who-get-news-mainly-on-social-media-are-less-knowledgeable-and-less-engaged">less informed</a> on topics like politics or the COVID-19 pandemic than their counterparts who engaged with traditional media like radio or news websites."I am worried and have a fear that the fragmentation that we see is going to cause problems for the body politic. That maybe people will pay less attention to politics and to traditional news and go off into their own corners on their own 'For You' page," said Gerry Lanosga, the director of the journalism program at Indiana University in Bloomington. "To survive," he said, traditional media "has to be less traditional, of course, but needs to figure out a way to find inroads into these platforms, exist on them, and even thrive in them by making news products that are more obtrusive to people and interesting."<h2>Some prefer TikTok news that cuts out influencers and traditional media entirely</h2>Some users steer clear of news commentary altogether, preferring to get information from on-the-ground, "citizen journalism" footage of live events or firsthand testimonials. These videos, which can be difficult for a casual TikToker to authenticate, are nevertheless often viewed as more genuine or authentic than information delivered by a traditional journalist."Being able to see into someone's day-to-day and having them tell a story does feel so much more trustworthy or real than something that feels so far away," said Sanya Chaudhry, a 25-year-old TikTok user in Toronto. If there's a way traditional media could make news "feel real," she continued, "like it's real people telling the stories on the ground, if they can find a way to make it more personable, maybe that's a way that more people can get engaged with it."And challenging as these videos are to verify, some TikTok users told BI that they believed the app had built-in tools to keep bad actors in check. The app's community of users can turn to features like the comments section of videos, video stitching, and dueting to call out videos that contain misinformation, they said."There's this kind of peer policing community that exists within TikTok, especially for things that are related to social and political matters," Sekhar said. "Sometimes creators will call each other out and say, 'Hey, that's actually incorrect, because of this.'"Other platforms such as Reddit and X, formerly Twitter, have leaned on community features to help identify misinformation, with mixed results. A Bloomberg review of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-israel-hamas-war-misinformation-twitter-community-notes/">X's "Community Notes"</a> in November found that the feature struggled to keep up with a relentless volume of misinformation about Israel and Gaza, with moderators taking more than seven hours on average to append corrective notes to false posts. In social-media time, that may as well be seven years.<h2>All the news that's fit to rizz: How the media industry can use TikTok</h2>There is one form of traditional news media that TikTok is proving useful for, and it happens to be the type of journalism most crushed by the news industry's shift to digital: local journalism. "TikTok is a better place for local stories than national because people log into social media to look at content specifically tailored for them," said Matt Shearer, a Boston-area reporter who helped launch WBZ NewsRadio's TikTok account. The company won a regional Edward R. Murrow Award for innovation based on its work on the app this year. "Any time I post a video about a small town in Massachusetts, everybody in that small town and the surrounding towns shares that," Shearer said. "The only way that radio is going to continue to flourish is if you have programmers and news directors who are brave enough to innovate, and try something a little different," Shearer said. "Nothing should be formulaic."Other <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-radio-djs-use-tiktok-find-new-listeners-2022-11?r=tiktok-music-lp">radio hosts</a> like iHeart's Jeffrey Ramsey in Denver or Shannon Burns in Canada told BI in November of last year that they had successfully used the app to draw in a broader audience.But so far, these local journalists and a handful of savvy creators at national brands have been exceptions to the rule.And as vibrant as TikTok's news ecosystem is, the app hasn't done much to help the news industry make money. Publishers aren't holding their breath that it will.News has long been a major headache for platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and it's a uniquely controversial topic for TikTok, which has a China-based owner and is under immense scrutiny over the way it handles the flow of news and other information. TikTok, which operates more like an entertainment platform akin to YouTube or Netflix than a social network like Facebook, can try to avoid some of the mistakes in news delivery that its predecessors flubbed. Ultimately, it may end up re-creating the same information bubbles that plagued social-media apps throughout the 2010s, but this time for Gen Z.For news publishers, betting on the app as a source to make money would be a mistake, even as TikTok gobbles up more and more user attention time, said Brian Morrissey, who founded the media newsletter <a target="_blank" href="https://www.therebooting.com/">The Rebooting</a> and was previously the president and editor in chief at Digiday. Unlike Google or Facebook, where links to news sites can fuel publishers' ad revenue, linking is almost nonexistent on TikTok. It's a closed ecosystem with limited monetization options, and TikTok hasn't expressed any interest in prioritizing professional publishers. The company also usually doesn't pay publishers for their content, though it is testing an <a target="_blank" href="https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/pulse-premiere">ad-revenue share program</a>."The idea of depending on platforms for ad revenues is a nonstarter," Morrissey said. "The idea that these tech platforms will help news publishers in any way, shape, or form to me would be a ridiculous bet."But persuading US teens who by one estimate spend an average of <a target="_blank" href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/512576/teens-spend-average-hours-social-media-per-day.aspx">4.8 hours a day</a> on social media to log off of TikTok and go directly to a news website they increasingly distrust is also a long-shot bet.Kelsey Russell's advice to the industry is to imitate what she and her TikTok peers have done intuitively: Make the news relatable. Like any TikToker's, her videos are drawing eyeballs away from the very news organizations she hopes to promote. But her approach could also offer a model for how those news organizations can win over the next generation of consumers."Any time that you can bring in the younger voice, you can bring them to the table, you can make them visible, that's what people want," Russell said. "You've got to meet the people where they are."<a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/author/dan-whateley">Dan Whateley</a> is a senior media reporter at Business Insider covering TikTok and social media.

Gen Z has discovered a whole new source for news

Over the past few years, research has highlighted the immense influence of social media platforms on shaping personal beliefs, shaping political views and affecting social issues. So powerful is this influence, that these platforms are now being misused to spread <keyword id="19933162" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="misinformation" source="keywords">misinformation</keyword> and manipulate public opinion on different subjects. The apparent overload of misinformation on microblogging sites like <keyword id="19959118" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="Twitter" source="keywords" meta.keywordsubtype="org" meta.entityname="Twitter" meta.hostid="261" meta.entityid="Twitter">Twitter</keyword> (now X) may seem to be stemming from a huge army of politically-driven social media teams and bots. But a few years ago, a <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap9559">study</a> confirmed that misinformation is spread mainly by real people compared to bots, with a 70% higher likelihood of false information getting 'retweeted' than truthful tweets. In 2022, after the billionaire <keyword id="19903807" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="Elon-Musk" source="keywords">Elon Musk</keyword> took over the social media giant, he got rid of a majority of Twitter's ‘content moderation’ teams across the world. Now, the platform takes a crowdsourcing approach to identifying misinformation through its feature called ‘community notes’. Building on our understanding on the spread of <keyword id="2635990" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="misinformation-on-social-media" source="Orion">misinformation on social media</keyword>, a team of analysts at Indiana University has now discovered that it takes only a few influencers to shift the beliefs and opinions of large audiences. The researchers describe these propagators as “superspreaders”. <cmsannotation type="cmsannotation" annotationid="Social media superspreaders: How a small group shapes public opinion" comment="subhead" text="Social media superspreaders: How a small group shapes public opinion">Social media <keyword id="21842591" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="superspreaders" source="keywords">superspreaders</keyword>: How a small group shapes public opinion</cmsannotation> Much like the superspreaders identified during the COVID-19 pandemic, online superspreaders can “infect” a vast number of people due to their reputations and followings. These purveyors of misinformation can range from pundits with large followings to less reputable media sources, along with affiliated personal accounts and various influencers. To delve deeper into their social media influence, the research team focused on Twitter. They gathered data over 10 months, analysing 23,97,388 tweets from 4,48,103 users, and identified tweets flagged for low credibility. Their analysis revealed that about one-third of low-credibility tweets came from just 10 accounts, and approximately 70% were posted by 1,000 accounts. While most superspreader accounts were untraceable to individuals, some high-profile users, such as politicians and influencers, were identifiable. The researchers noted that many superspreader accounts were deactivated during Twitter's 2020 crackdown on disinformation. However, this trend is reversing, with X adopting a new approach under Elon Musk's ownership. Although this study primarily targets the US, its findings hold relevance for social media users around the world, including those in India. Given the widespread propagation of misinformation across social media platforms, any insights gained from this research could serve to enlighten and empower worldwide users in combating this issue. This study was recently published in the journal PLOS ONE can be accessed <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0302201">here</a>.

A small number of ‘superspreaders’ are propagating most of the misinformation on Twitter, study finds

Fewer than one in five children (18.7 per cent) in <keyword id="6354759" type="General" weightage="80" keywordseo="bangladesh" source="Orion">Bangladesh</keyword> participated in remote learning during Covid-19 school closures, a new report has revealed. This extraordinary scale of the impact of school closures was confirmed in a report released here on Thursday, reports <keyword id="106387" type="General" weightage="80" keywordseo="xinhua-news-agency" source="Orion">Xinhua news agency</keyword>. The report titled "National Survey on Children's Education in Bangladesh 2021", a joint survey by the <keyword id="3041703" type="General" weightage="80" keywordseo="bangladesh-bureau-of-statistics" source="Orion">Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics</keyword> and <keyword id="56000" type="General" weightage="80" keywordseo="unicef" source="Orion">Unicef</keyword>, shows that the hardest hit is the most vulnerable children who have limited access to the Internet and TV, and who lack supportive devices such as computers or smartphones at home. Fewer children from rural areas (15.9 per cent) participated in remote learning, such as online and televised, compared to those from urban areas (28.7 per cent). "The pandemic's impact on children is still reverberating throughout the country. It is critical to close the digital divide and to make the education system more shock responsive," said <keyword id="16109209" type="General" weightage="80" keywordseo="sheldon-yett" source="Orion">Sheldon Yett</keyword>, Unicef representative to Bangladesh. The survey would help understand the extent of the impact of the prolonged school closure during Covid-19 pandemic on attendance, out-of-school, drop-out, and learning loss of children, in a bid to support the government to take steps for improving the quality and standard of education, said <keyword id="16822345" type="General" weightage="80" keywordseo="mohammad-abdul-mannan" source="Orion">Mohammad Abdul Mannan</keyword>, the minister of planning. SEE ALSO: <a target="_blank" class="c-link c-message_attachment__title_link" href="https://www.businessinsider.in/entertainment/news/lolita-chakrabartis-stage-adaptation-of-life-of-pi-comes-to-new-york/articleshow/98725796.cms">Lolita Chakrabarti's stage adaptation of 'Life of Pi' comes to New York</a> <a target="_blank" class="c-link c-message_attachment__title_link" href="https://www.businessinsider.in/stock-market/news/reliance-shares-down-22-from-all-time-high-attractive-entry-opportunity-says-jp-morgan/articleshow/98725589.cms">Reliance shares down 22% from all-time high: Attractive entry opportunity, says JP Morgan</a>

Less than 1 in 5 Bangladeshi kids could learn remotely during Covid: Unicef report

<ul class="summary-list"><li>China's population fell for a second consecutive year in 2023, data published Wednesday showed.</li><li>That's bad news for the world's second-largest economy.</li></ul>China's population fell again last year – and that's a worrying sign for Beijing policymakers already grappling with <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/china-deflation-prices-falling-us-inflation-global-economic-crash-recession-2023-7">deflation</a>, a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/country-garden-china-real-estate-problems-explainer-evergrande-2023-8">property crisis</a>, and <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/china-growth-gdp-property-real-estate-market-crash-beige-book-2023-12">anemic economic growth</a>.The number of people in China declined by two million last year, according to <a href="https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202401/t20240117_1946605.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">National Bureau of Statistics</a> data published Wednesday, with lower birth rates driving the fall. It's the second consecutive year that China's population has shrunk after six decades of rapid growth.Here's why dropping population numbers pose a threat to the world's second-largest economy.<h2>Worrying data</h2><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/china-population-shrinking-first-time-60-years-2023-1">China's population fell</a> in 2022 for the first time since the 1960s – and Wednesday's statistics showed that the same thing happened again last year.The number of babies born last year fell by 540,000 compared with 2022 to just over 9 million — the seventh consecutive annual fall.Meanwhile, 11.1 million people died — almost 700,000 more than in 2022. The spike was likely driven by a surge in coronavirus infections after policymakers ended nearly three years of harsh zero-COVID lockdowns in December 2022.China also has more old people than any other country – with over-60s expected to make up 28% of the population by 2040, according to the <a href="https://www.who.int/china/health-topics/ageing" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">World Health Organization</a>.In the long term, an ageing and declining population is likely to reduce the size of China's massive workforce, which drives its global manufacturing dominance. There are already signs that the economic engine's influence is starting to wane, with <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-31/china-factory-activity-contracts-more-than-expected-in-december" target="_blank" rel="noopener">factory activity</a> shrinking to its lowest level in six months in December.Lower birth rates could also hit consumer spending over time – and that's bad news for American companies, as well as those in China.Since October, <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/stocks/aapl-stock">Apple</a> has been posting <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-15-sales-disappointing-china-apple-risks-losing-to-huawei-2023-10">worrying figures about sales of the latest iPhone 15</a>, with more Chinese consumers opting for cheaper alternatives such as <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-15-sales-disappointing-china-apple-risks-losing-to-huawei-2023-10">Huawei's rival Mate 60.</a> They've also been reducing their spending on big-ticket items.A declining population is also bad news for <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/housing-market-house-prices-real-estate-china-economy-world-recession-2023-11">real estate</a>, which accounts for a quarter of China's economy and 70% of household wealth. To put it simply, when there are fewer people in a country, demand for property is likely to fall.There could be enough <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/china-vacant-homes-3-billion-people-housing-crisis-ex-official-2023-9">vacant properties in China</a> to house up to 3 billion people, a former deputy head of the statistics bureau said last year.<h2>Economic headaches</h2>The population numbers come as Beijing struggles with a number of other economic issues.While figures published Wednesday showed the economy <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-q4-gdp-grows-52-yy-below-market-forecast-2024-01-17/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">expanded by 5.2%</a> last year, slightly above the official target, China is also battling <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/china-economy-deflation-us-inflation-cpi-fed-rate-cuts-yuan-2023-12">deflation</a> – meaning prices are falling, rather than rising.Deflation poses a threat to the whole economy, because some people will delay purchases thinking they'll soon get cheaper. That's the same problem <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/europe-facing-a-worse-situation-than-japans-lost-decade-2014-10">Japan</a> suffered in the 1990s and 2000s.China's property market has also lurched from crisis to crisis in recent years, with major developers Evergrande and Country Garden collapsing after piling up huge debt, creating a mess that economists have warned could take more than a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/china-economy-property-crisis-decade-fix-censored-economist-hao-hong-2023-9">decade to fix</a>.All that adds up to a myriad of headaches for China's leaders.

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