As a Social Media User

In England in the early 1800s, Luddites were upset that textile factories were using machines to replace them, leaving them unemployed, so they sabotaged the machines. The English government sent soldiers to stop them, killing and executing many.

Most programming languages are based in English, and there are very few non-English programming languages, and those that exist are rarely used.

More users: If Meta has more users, it can offer advertisers more people to advertise to. More user time: If Meta’s users spend more time on Meta, then it has more opportunities to show ads to each user, so it can sell more ads. More personal data: The more personal data Meta collects, the more predictions about users it can make. It can get more data by getting more users, and more user time, as well as finding more things to track about users. Reduce competition: If Meta can become the only social media company that people use, then they will have cornered the market on access to those users. This means advertisers won’t have any alternative to reach those users, and Meta can increase the prices of their ads.

How would that retracted tweet look when viewed?

Some argued that there was no type of reconciliation or forgiveness possible given the crimes committed by the Nazis.

So how can platforms and individuals stop themselves from being harassed?

Additionally, we can consider the following forms of crowd harassment: Dogpiling: When a crowd of people targets or harasses the same person. Public Shaming (this will be our next chapter) Cross-platform raids (e.g., 4chan group planning harassment on another platform) Stochastic terrorism The use of mass public communication, usually against a particular individual or group, which incites or inspires acts of terrorism which are statistically probable but happen seemingly at random. See also: An atmosphere of violence: Stochastic terror in American politics

16.3.2. Well-Intentioned Harm# Sometimes even well-intentioned efforts can do significant harm. For example, in the immediate aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, FBI released a security photo of one of the bombers and asked for tips. A group of Reddit users decided to try to identify the bomber(s) themselves. They quickly settled on a missing man (Sunil Tripathi) as the culprit (it turned out had died by suicide and was in no way related to the case), and flooded the Facebook page set up to search for Sunil Tripathi, causing his family unnecessary pain and difficulty. The person who set up the “Find Boston Bomber” Reddit board said “It Was a Disaster” but “Incredible”, and Reddit apologized for online Boston ‘witch hunt’.

Archiving: Some forms of communication automatically produce an archive of the communication (like a chat message history), while others do not (like an in-person conversation)

If you are running your own site and suddenly realize you have a moderation problem you might have some of your current staff (possibly just yourself) start handling moderation. As moderation is a very complicated and tricky thing to do effectively, untrained moderators are likely to make decisions they (or other users) regret.

Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms had an exception to their normal moderation policies for political leaders, where they wouldn’t ban them even if they violated site policies (most notably applied to Donald Trump). After the January 6th insurrection at the US Capital, Donald Trump was banned first from Twitter, then from Facebook, and Facebook announced an end to special treatment for politicians.

For example, Facebook has a suicide detection algorithm, where they try to intervene if they think a user is suicidal (Inside Facebook’s suicide algorithm: Here’s how the company uses artificial intelligence to predict your mental state from your posts). As social media companies have tried to detect talk of suicide and sometimes remove content that mentions it, users have found ways of getting around this by inventing new word uses, like “unalive.”

The seeking out of bad news, or trying to get news even though it might be bad, has existed as long as people have kept watch to see if a family member will return home safely. But of course, new mediums can provide more information to sift through and more quickly, such as with the advent of the 24-hour news cycle in the 1990s, or, now social media.

Saying and doing provocative, shocking, and offensive things can also be an effective political strategy, and getting viral attention through others’ negative reactions has been seen as a key component of Donald Trump’s political successes.

When content (and modified copies of content) is in a position to be replicated, there are factors that determine whether it gets selected for replicated or not. As humans look at the content they see on social media they decide whether they want to replicate it for some reason

There are concerns that echo chambers increase polarization, where groups lose common ground and ability to communicate with each other. In some ways echo chambers are the opposite of context collapse, where contexts are created and prevented from collapsing. Though others have argued that people do interact across these echo chambers, but the contentious nature of their interactions increases polarization.

What experiences do you have of social media sites making particularly good recommendations for you?

Another way of managing disabilities is assistive technology, which is something that helps a disabled person act as though they were not disabled

Most humans are trichromats, meaning they can see three base colors (red, green, and blue), along with all combinations of those three colors. Human societies often assume that people will be trichromats. So people who can’t see as many colors are considered to be color blind, a disability. But there are also a small number of people who are tetrachromats and can see four base colors2 and all combinations of those four colors. In comparison to tetrachromats, trichromats (the majority of people), lack the ability to see some colors. But our society doesn’t build things for tetrachromats, so their extra ability to see color doesn’t help them much. And trichromats’ relative reduction in seeing color doesn’t cause them difficulty, so being a trichromat isn’t considered to be a disability.

Social media sites then make their money by selling targeted advertising, meaning selling ads to specific groups of people with specific interests. So, for example, if you are selling spider stuffed animal toys, most people might not be interested, but if you could find the people who want those toys and only show your ads to them, your advertising campaign might be successful, and those users might be happy to find out about your stuffed animal toys.

One particularly striking example of an attempt to infer information from seemingly unconnected data was someone noticing that the number of people sick with COVID-19 correlated with how many people were leaving bad reviews of Yankee Candles saying “they don’t have any scent” (note: COVID-19 can cause a loss of the ability to smell):

In the mid-1990s, some internet users started manually adding regular updates to the top of their personal websites (leaving the old posts below), using their sites as an online diary, or a (web) log of their thoughts. In 1998/1999, several web platforms were launched to make it easy for people to make and run blogs (e.g., LiveJournal and Blogger.com). With these blog hosting sites, it was much simpler to type up and publish a new blog entry, and others visiting your blog could subscribe to get updates whenever you posted a new post, and they could leave a comment on any of the posts.

4Chan has various image-sharing bulletin boards, where users post anonymously. Perhaps the most infamous board is the “/b/” board for “random” topics. This board emphasizes “free speech” and “no rules” (with exceptions for child pornography and some other illegal content). In these message boards, users attempt to troll each other and post the most shocking content they can come up with. They also have a history of collectively choosing a target website or community and doing a “raid” where they all try to join and troll and offend the people in that community.

Why do you think social media platforms allow bots to operate?

3.2.1. Friendly bots:# Some bots are intended to be helpful, using automation to make tasks easier for others or to provide information, such as: Auto caption: https://twitter.com/headlinerclip Vaccine progress: https://twitter.com/vax_progress Blocking groups of people: https://twitter.com/blockpartyapp_ Social Media managing programs that help people schedule and coordinate posts Delete old tweets: https://tweetdelete.net/ See a new photo of a red panda every hour: https://twitter.com/RedPandaEveryHr Bots might have significant limits on how helpful they are, such as tech support bots you might have had frustrating experiences with on various websites.

“The internet isn’t real life.” This was used as a way to devalue time spent on social media sites, and to dismiss harms that occurred on them.

Egoism# “Rational Selfishness”: It is rational to seek your own self-interest above all else. Great feats of engineering happen when brilliant people ruthlessly follow their ambition. That is, Do whatever benefits yourself. Altruism is bad.