An Evening with Kara Alaimo, Author on How Social Media Affects Us All

Next date: Thursday, March 06, 2025 | 06:30 PM to 08:00 PM

Kara Alaimo, PhD, will speak about her book, Over the Influence: Why Social Media is Toxic for Women and Girls -- and How We Can Take It Back, which explains how social media is impacting every aspect of the lives of women and girls and what users, lawmakers, and tech companies can do to solve these problems. She’ll also talk about how parents can handle the social media use of children of all genders. This is a hybrid program: audience members may attend in-person or via Zoom. Registration is required for either mode of attendance. Registration will open in January.

About the Book: In Over the Influence: Why Social Media is Toxic for Women and Girls – And How We Can Take It Back, communication professor Kara Alaimo demonstrates how social media affects every aspect of the lives of women, girls and nonbinary people — from our relationships and our parenting to our physical and mental wellbeing.

Over the Influence is a book about what it means to live in the world social media has wrought — whether you’re constantly connected or have deleted your accounts forever. Alaimo explains:

Why you're likely to get fewer followers if you're a woman.
How fake news is crafted to prey on women’s vulnerabilities.
Why so much of the content we find in our feeds is specifically designed to hold us back.
How social media has made the offline world an uglier place for women.

But we can change this. Alaimo offers up brilliant advice for how to get over the influence, including:

How to handle our daughters' use of social media.
Tips for using dating apps to find the partners we’re looking for
How we can use social networks to bolster our careers
Ways to protect ourselves from sextortionists, catfishers, and trolls.
What we need to demand from lawmakers and tech companies.

Over the Influence calls on women to recognize and call out the subtle (and not-so-subtle) sexism and misogyny we find online, reject misinformation that is targeted to us because of our gender, and use our platforms to empower ourselves and other women.

About the Author: Kara Alaimo, PhD is author of the book Over the Influence: Why Social Media is Toxic for Women and Girls — And How We Can Take It Back. She is a communication professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she created the university’s academic programs in social media, and has been writing opinion and analysis pieces for CNN about the social impact of social media and issues affecting women and girls since 2016. She speaks frequently to parents and students in schools about how to handle kids’ social media use. For more about Ms. Alaimo, please see her website link.