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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash  

When it comes to social media, it’s easier than ever to create multiple accounts per site. This can be an important tool for people with different brand identities or responsibilities, but this also opens up the door to potential security risks. It’s hard to remember a bunch of passwords, but using the same or similar passwords for multiple accounts can open you up to data breaches and potential identity theft. There are a variety of ways to combat this kind of online identity theft. Here are a few options, starting from worst to best.

1. Using the same password for every login.

Pros:

Only one password to remember.

Free.

Cons:

If even one of your accounts gets hacked, that hacker has your password for everything. If you’ve tied this to accounts with personal or financial information, this could open you up to some extreme issues.

2. Creating unique or semi-unique passwords for each individual site and writing them down.

Pros:

Somewhat safer than the previous option.

Still free.

Cons:

It takes time to think of passwords and they might not be as secure as you think.

Maintaining this kind of list is a lot of work.

It’s highly likely you’ll have to update these passwords at some point and forgetting to write one down will cause headaches.

If you don’t have access to your list, you’re SOL.

3. Using a password manager with randomly generated passwords.

Pros:

The most secure method by far.

Every site has a different password, but you only have to remember the password for your manager.

Many password managers also allow you to save things like credit cards, addresses and other sensitive information.

The manager I use, BitWarden, is free and open source. (Not sponsored, just a fan.)

Cons:

For some password managers, if you forget your vault password, you are SOL.

If you don’t have access to your manager, you lose access to everything.

Some password managers cost money.

Might be a bit complex for individuals who aren’t technology literate.

This week’s journal is about using the power of social media for very cute, very tasty purposes.

On the afternoon of Thursday, March 11, local animal shelter Friends of the Animal Shelter of St. Joseph made a post introducing a little of border collie/lab mixes. Even better, these 6 puppies had all been given pasta themed names.

In less than 24 hours the post gained over 200 shares and 100 comments. The shelter was inundated with adoption applications for the puppies and had to close applications due to such a massive influx. This cute, simple post with clear photos and information was all it took for a third of the puppies to be adopted in less than a day.

Giving the puppies cute names might seem simple, but in a marketing sense it gave them personality and a sort of mini brand identity.

Friends of the Animal Shelter makes great use of their social media presence with plenty of photos, well-written text posts and features like Facebook Lives.

On March 12, J-hope celebrated the three year anniversary of Hope World, his debut mixtape, by releasing a full length version of the album’s outro, Blue Side. The South Korean rapper of BTS posted a link to the full song on Twitter and received over 1.5 million likes in three days. 

The 3:17 long song recieved over 2 million plays over a period of four days and over 40,000 comments on SoundCloud.

The celebratory hashtag #3YearsWithHopeWorld trended #1 worldwide after the release.

Fans and artists took to social media posting words of affection and art to commemorate the release.

The original Hope World mixtape topped the iTunes Top Albums Charts in a total of 78 countries and regions after debuting in the Billboard 200 with less than one day of tracking.

The oft-repeated platitude above might be no more as Twitter plans to test a paid subscription feature called Super Follows. The social media site has not announced a formal start to any kind of paid rollout. The program was one of several features announced at Twitter’s annual Analyst Day presentation. As reported by Tommy Beer of Forbes, the company showed a mock screenshot of a Super Follow account charging $4.99 per month.

This program would supposedly allow audiences to directly support content creators in a method similar to sites like Patreon or Ko-fi. Patreon is a website with over 200,000 creators who can give their audiences access to different tiers of content based on subscription level. 

For example, Patreon user Chibird is a visual artist and animator who uses the site as a way to share content with followers outside of direct commissions or sales. Instead, followers at various tiers have access to things like wallpapers, pins and exclusive art. 

While it might not be the first site people think of when it comes to supporting artists, some safe-for-work content creators have become successful using the website OnlyFans. As the website is inherrently 18+, artists have less limitations and risk of censorship than some other sites. OnlyFans actively encourages this kind of content creators to utilize the website and take advantage of the pay-what-you-want structure in particular. 

With a veritable boom in activity during the pandemic, plenty of celebrities and influencers have found a home on the site without ever involving nudity or pornography.

This week has culminated in an all around onslaught of birthday wellwishes and celebrations for BTS member Jung Hoseok, also known as J-Hope or simply Hobi. Along with plenty of love from across the world, the other members of BTS (sometimes referred to as "tannies") made sure to show plenty of appreciation as well.

The first member to wish Hoseok a happy birthday was leader Kim Namjoon, pictured left in the pair of selfies below.

Like many of BTS’ other tweets, this quickly gained over 1 million likes and many retweets, quote tweets and replies. Namjoon utilized a popular birthday hashtag like many other posters. 

Over the next two days, other members posted wellwishes in the form of jokes, little poems and more.

As shown above, translators in the fandom serve a very important role and receive a lot of interactions themselves.

The last member to post was center and maknae (youngest member) Jeon Jungkook. Well known for his many talents, including illustration, Jungkook posted a drawing of Hoseok from a recent comeback. A comeback is similar to an era and is tied to a particular album, single or other kind of release.

Hoseok ended his birthday with a tweet and selfie thanking everyone for the love.

A Chinese beauty brand has taken the internet by storm with a combination of beautifully intricate package designs and a viral commercial about love stretching across lifetimes.

Florasis is the anglicized brand name for Hua Xizi (花西子), meaning "make up with flowers." The brand prides itself on the use of natural floral ingredients and traditional Chinese visuals. They put significant effort into package design and consistent branding. The brand has recently gained much social media attention for their packaging and cosmetic designs on websites like Twitter and TikTok.

The brand is also receiving lots of attention due to a commercial featuring the love of two women across lifetimes. In the short video, two women run into each other in the modern day. The video then flashes back to a bygone era where the same women are wearing traditional dress. They sensually apply each other's makeup and play traditional instruments. Flashing forward back to the modern day, one of the women picks up an intricate and traditional looking lipstick case the other has dropped, joining the past and present.

The ads popularity has directed many Twitter users to the company's Instagram page, where they use consistently high-quality visuals to showcase their high-end products.

Stan Twitter. A rapidly growing community with many unique social dynamics, one of stan Twitter’s prominent aspects is a focus on collective goals. Some of these goals relate to charity and financial donations. Another kind of goal that costs the user nothing relates to streaming. People stream fancams (fan-made videos of performances, usually focusing aon a specific group member), music videos and songs on services like Spotify or Apple Music. Fans set streaming goals in order to celebrate things like birthdays, special anniversaries or just to set records. 

One major set of streaming goals being worked towards at the moment are targeted at setting records for two members of Bangtan Sonyeondan (BTS), Jung Hoseok (J-Hope) and Min Yoongi (Suga), whose birthdays are coming up at the end of February and beginning of March respectively. As you can see from the graphic below, originally posted by Twitter user @hoseokhaven, goals have been set across multiple streaming platforms for a variety of songs and videos.

For instance, J-Hope’s song Chicken Noodle Soup (CNS) has a target of 80 million streams on Spotify and 225 million views on YouTube by February 18. YouTube and Spotify algorithms discourage the looping of songs for these purposes. Instead of just looping the relevant songs, fans know to make playlists with a variety of songs and add to streaming numbers in a more natural looking way.

Another main goal at the moment is to get the song Intro: Persona to 100 million streams on Spotify as the final song on it’s album to do so. Stan Twitter takes a great amount of pride in breaking records with BTS fans, or ARMYs, in particular aiming for hard numbers.