LG Electronics East Africa has today rewarded five winners of the LG Optimism Your Feed Campaign, which invited participants to create and share moments of everyday optimism on their social media feeds. Running across TikTok and Instagram, the challenge encouraged participants to foster a more positive environment on their social media feeds by posting optimistic moments.
The Optimism your Feed campaign was inspired by an LG survey which showed that 45% of people felt they received a similar or greater amount of negative content in their feeds compared to positive content. Additionally, 25% of people felt that negative content in their feeds made them feel anxious, while one in five reported feeling unhappy.
Hillary Misoi won the overall challenge and takes home an LG XBOOM Go XG9 Bluetooth speaker, worth Kes83,995. The waterproof speaker has a 4.5″ woofer and horn tweeter driven by Sound Boost technology to generate 80W immersive sound experience. It also has a long battery life.
Joshua Mwagangi was the runner-up, while Mary Wangari, Nelly Muthuri, and Sheryl Oluga were joint second runners-up. Mwagangi received an LG XBOOM Go XG7, and the three received an LG XBOOM Go XG5, which delivers 20W of sound and has an 18-hour battery life. The speakers are waterproof, dust-resistant, and feature customizable flashing LED lights that sync to the beat.
Speaking during the awarding ceremony, LG Electronics EA Audio Visual Product Manager John Gitau lauded the winners for their contribution to the success of the campaign, which he described as important in bringing optimism to social media timelines.
“The LG Optimism Your Feed Campaign is part of LG’s Life’s Good global mission to encourage mindfulness in the kind of impact that social media activity has on content consumers. As a responsible corporate citizen, we took it upon ourselves to drive the generation of content that will train social media algorithms to prioritise positive content. Our winners today outdid themselves in supporting this mission,” he said.
Launched globally at the end of May, the Optimism Your Feed campaign was set in motion by a playlist created in collaboration with global influencers renowned for their optimistic content including Tina Choi, Victoria Browne, Josh Harmon and many more. The ‘Optimism Your Feed’ playlist includes over 20 short-form videos ranging from motivation to feel-good content.
The playlist and campaign gave users the opportunity to see more positive and uplifting posts. It worked on the premise that consciousness about what people choose to engage with brings stronger optimism, balance and happiness to their lives.
In the campaign, LG consulted with social media experts including Professor Casey Fiesler, an information scientist and technology ethicist, who has published on topics such as social media content moderation and recommender systems.
According to Fiesler, “Recommendation algorithms determine what we see on social media by predicting what content we are likely to engage with. These algorithms can therefore send us down ever more specific niches – for good and for bad. Research has shown that left unchecked, users can go down negative rabbit holes and encounter harmful content quite quickly. One of our first lines of defence needs to be improving our digital literacy and paying more attention to how algorithms influence our online experiences. And the good news is that we do have some control over the input for these algorithmic predictions; if we choose to engage with optimistic content, there’s a good possibility we will see more of it.”
