22 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. Venting is done with the permission of the listener and is a one-shot deal, not a recurring retelling or rumination of negativity.

      This statement emphasizes two boundaries of "healthy venting": the other person's consent and avoiding repeated repetition. On social media, the audience is often mixed (classmates, strangers, friends), making it difficult to ascertain who is willing to accept your emotions, thus making it easier to slip into "trauma dumping." Furthermore, "repeatedly retelling/ruminating" only intensifies the emotions, like repeatedly tearing open a wound instead of processing and resolving the problem. Shifting venting from "seeking attention" to "seeking understanding and a way out" often requires a more specific target audience, setting, and frequency.

    2. The incel worldview is catastrophizing.

      This statement highlights a typical psychological mechanism: magnifying limited setbacks to the point that "the worst outcome is bound to happen." In social media/forum environments, this mindset is easily reinforced by echo chambers—when others use the same language to explain pain, it becomes even harder to break free from that framework. It may seem like "analyzing reality," but it's actually feeding anxiety and despair with extreme narratives. Prolonged immersion in this can make people more inclined to choose content that validates pain rather than actions that can help bring about change.

  2. Feb 2026
    1. It’s far more likely that my biases will be confirmed and possibly even enhanced than they are to be challenged and re-evaluated.

      This statement points out that recommendation algorithms can create an "echo chamber effect": they prioritize content you're more likely to agree with, thus reinforcing existing biases. Even if the algorithm isn't malicious, when optimizing engagement time based on interaction data, it may amplify emotional or extreme content as high-performing content. The key issue here is the "objective function": if the platform only optimizes engagement, it sacrifices diversity and opportunities for correction. Improvement strategies could include introducing diverse exposure, reducing the weight of inflammatory content, and giving users more control over choosing an "exploration/diversity" mode.

    2. Recommendations can go poorly when they do something like recommend an ex or an abuser because they share many connections with you.

      This statement highlights that "relevance does not equal safety": algorithms treat "many mutual friends" as a strong signal, ignoring the harm and risks inherent in real-world relationships. It reveals the problem of recommendation systems lacking "contextuality" and "moral weighting"—the same connection structure can have completely different meanings in different life experiences. This also suggests that platforms need to provide stronger filtering and interpretation mechanisms (such as preventing specific groups from being recommended to, or allowing users to label sensitive relationships). Otherwise, recommendations are not only a matter of user experience but could also cause real psychological harm and personal risks.

    1. Sometimes people with invisible disabilities get unfairly accused of “faking” or “making up” their disability (e.g., someone who can walk short distances but needs to use a wheelchair when going long distances).

      This statement highlights how "invisible disabilities" often lead to unfair treatment because bystanders tend to judge authenticity based on visible evidence. It reveals a social bias: people imagine disability as a stable, singular, and always visible state, neglecting symptom fluctuations and situational differences. The example of "being able to walk short distances but needing a wheelchair for longer distances" illustrates that functional ability is not binary but a continuous spectrum. Such misunderstandings can lead to humiliation, skepticism, and even hinder access to reasonable accommodations.

    2. A disability is an ability that a person doesn’t have, but that their society expects them to have.

      This statement shifts the understanding of "disability" from a purely physical/mental impairment to a social relationship: when the environment and institutions assume a certain ability, those lacking that ability are "manufactured" into disabled individuals. It emphasizes that disability is not solely inherent in the individual, but arises from a mismatch between the individual and their environment. For example, stairs, written instructions, and classrooms that assume auditory abilities all implicitly set a template for the "normal" person. The significance of this understanding is that addressing disability doesn't necessarily mean "fixing the person," but can also involve "fixing the environment."

    1. One of the things you can do as an individual to better protect yourself against hacking is to enable 2-factor authentication on your accounts.

      This statement shifts the focus of "protection" from the company level to the individual level, emphasizing that users still have actionable self-protection strategies. The significance of 2FA lies in the fact that even if a password is leaked, it is difficult for attackers to log in directly using only the password, thus reducing the probability of credential stuffing and account takeover. It also reminds us that security is layered – even the best platform security can be compromised by individual vulnerabilities such as phishing or weak passwords. However, this also highlights a limitation: 2FA can only reduce the risk of "account theft," but it cannot solve structural problems such as the platform itself leaking your private data.

    2. But social media companies often fail at keeping our information secure.

      This statement highlights the fragility of the "trust relationship" between users and the platform: we share information assuming the platform will protect it properly. It also implies that the problem is not an isolated incident, but "happens frequently," suggesting that security failures may be related to systems, processes, or business priorities. More importantly, the consequences of a single security breach often extend beyond the platform itself, affecting users' accounts on other websites and posing risks to their real lives. Readers will naturally ask: why did the platform fail—was it due to insufficient technical capabilities, management negligence, or prioritizing growth and convenience over security?

    1. So those Redditors suggested they spam the site with fake applications, poisoning the job application data, so Kellogg’s wouldn’t be able to figure out which applications were legitimate or not (we could consider this a form of trolling).

      This statement reminds us that data poisoning is not just a technical problem; it's also a social action strategy. By creating a large number of fake applications, the attack targets the "data entry points" of a company's screening and decision-making processes, causing the system to lose its ability to distinguish between genuine and fraudulent applications. While it can change action costs and slow down replacement processes in the short term, it also raises ethical concerns and risks: could it inadvertently harm genuine job applicants and lead to a broader collapse of trust? Therefore, when discussing this issue, it's necessary to simultaneously evaluate the motives, the affected parties, and the long-term consequences.

    2. Sometimes a dataset has so many problems that it is effectively poisoned or not feasible to work with.

      This statement highlights a crucial point: when data quality is poor to a certain extent, continuing the analysis is not "working harder," but rather "more dangerous." This is because biases and missing data can systematically push the model or conclusions in the wrong direction, and it's difficult to detect this from the results alone. In such situations, the most important step is to conduct a data audit: checking sample representativeness, missing data mechanisms, and whether abnormal distributions are explainable. If necessary, one must acknowledge that "this dataset cannot answer this question," rather than forcing a conclusion.

  3. Jan 2026
    1. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.

      Sartre pointed out the strategic advantage of the "bad faith" argument: one party treats the dialogue not as a search for truth, but as a game; the other party, however, is bound by norms (reason, evidence, politeness). Applied to modern trolling, this explains why "seriously responding" often fails—the opponent's goal is not to be persuaded, but to make you invest time and effort, lose patience, and appear "too serious" in the public sphere. Therefore, the strategy is often not to argue more forcefully, but to identify their incentive structure (wasting your time, disrupting order) and reduce your susceptibility to being exploited.

    2. “Boys throw stones at frogs in fun, but the frogs do not die in fun, but in earnest.”

      This statement captures the essence of "lulz": the perpetrator treats the harm as entertainment, but the consequences for the victim are real and disproportionate. In the online context, many excuses like "it was just a joke" or "don't take it too seriously" essentially downplay this asymmetry of harm. It also reminds us that judging trolling shouldn't only consider the perpetrator's subjective motivation (for fun), but more importantly, the objective cost to the victim (pain, exclusion, and risk).

    1. Authenticity is a concept we use to talk about connections and interactions when the way the connection is presented matches the reality of how it functions.

      This definition elevates authenticity from "whether the content is true" to "whether the relationship is aligned": the type of interaction presented (friendly sharing, intimate confidences, genuine vulnerability) must be consistent with how it actually operates. In other words, authenticity is a kind of "contractual consistency"—what I think I'm getting is what I actually get. If an account uses "friend-like candor" to build intimacy, but is essentially just a marketing script run by a team, the problem isn't necessarily that it's a performance, but that it fails to make it clear to the audience what kind of relationship they are in, thus creating a gap between expectations and reality, and a feeling of being exploited. This also explains why some "performative" content (comedy accounts, role-playing) doesn't receive criticism: because its presentation and actual operation are consistent, and the audience knows what they are participating in.

    2. As a rule, humans do not like to be duped.

      This statement shifts the issue of "authenticity" from a moral judgment (you lied to me = you are bad) to a social mechanism (being deceived = a failure of the signaling system). In social interactions, people rely on various cues to determine who and what is trustworthy. When they discover they have been "manipulated" into believing something they shouldn't, they experience intense unease and anger, because this is not just a simple information error, but a threat to their judgment and sense of security. Cases like lonelygirl15 provoke a backlash not simply because the story is fake, but because the audience believed they were establishing a "real, intimate connection," only to discover that the connection had been disguised as something else from the very beginning.

    1. One famous example of reducing friction was the invention of infinite scroll. When trying to view results from a search, or look through social media posts, you could only view a few at a time, and to see more you had to press a button to see the next “page” of results. This is how both Google search and Amazon search work at the time this is written. In 2006, Aza Raskin invented infinite scroll, where you can scroll to the bottom of the current results, and new results will get automatically filled in below. Most social media sites now use this, so you can then scroll forever and never hit an obstacle or friction as you endlessly look at social media posts. Aza Raskin regrets what infinite scroll has done to make it harder for users to break away from looking at social media sites.

      Infinite scrolling removes the "stopping point" from the interface, changing not the functionality itself, but people's behavioral rhythm and self-control costs. It makes continuing to consume content the default option, thus treating attention as an extractable resource, which is a classic example of "design as governance."

    2. Designers sometimes talk about trying to make their user interfaces frictionless, meaning the user can use the site without feeling anything slowing them down.

      The term "frictionless" is not value-neutral; it often disguises the platform's goals (time spent on the platform, engagement) as "better usability." The ethical question is: are the eliminated frictions actually the "brakes" that users need for reflection, disengagement, or setting privacy preferences?

    1. Such trends, which philosophers call ‘pernicious ignorance’, enable us to overlook inconvenient bits of data to make our utility calculus easier or more likely to turn out in favor of a preferred course of action.

      So-called "pernicious ignorance" is not simply a lack of knowledge, but rather a selective blindness reinforced by social reward structures. For example, when posting photos of volunteer trips abroad, we are more inclined to consider the attention, fundraising, and personal image enhancement they bring, while ignoring the consent rights of those being photographed, the risks of long-term stigmatization, and the harm caused by power imbalances. This makes actions that "appear beneficial" seem morally easier and more readily justifiable.

    2. If you have really comprehensive data about potential outcomes, then your utility calculus will be more complicated, but will also be more realistic.

      This statement highlights a frequently overlooked tension: the "accuracy" of moral judgments often comes at the cost of complexity. The mechanisms of social media (instant feedback, likes/shares) encourage us to pursue "quick and certain" conclusions, leading to a natural tendency to make decisions based on simplified data. The result is not simply miscalculation, but the systematic exclusion of inconvenient consequences.

    1. 3.2.3. Corrupted bots# As a final example, we wanted to tell you about Microsoft Tay a bot that got corrupted. In 2016, Microsft launched a Twitter bot that was intended to learn to speak from other Twitter users and have conversations. Twitter users quickly started tweeting racist comments at Tay, which Tay learned from and started tweeting out within one day. Read more about what went wrong from Vice How to Make a Bot That Isn’t Racist 3.2.4. Registered vs. Unregistered bots# Most social media platforms provide an official way to connect a bot to their platform (called an Application Programming Interface, or API). This lets the social media platform track these registered bots and provide certain capabilities and limits to the bots (like a rate limit on how often the bot can post). But when some people want to get around these limits, they can make bots that don’t use this official API, but instead, open the website or app and then have a program perform clicks and scrolls the way a human might. These are much harder for social media platforms to track, and they normally ban accounts doing this if they are able to figure out that is what is happening. 3.2.5. Fake Bots# We also would like to point out that there are fake bots as well, that is real people pretending their work is the result of a Bot. For example, TikTok user Curt Skelton posted a video claiming that he was actually an AI-generated / deepfake character:

      This passage uses three levels to remind us that "robots" themselves do not equate to intelligence or objectivity. Tay's "contamination" illustrates that machine learning-based conversational robots absorb biases from the platform as "language norms"—when training data comes from an environment full of provocation and racism, the system becomes an amplifier of prejudice; the problem is not just a technical failure, but a governance failure of treating a "public platform" as a safe training ground. Next, the "registered vs. unregistered bots" reveal the cat-and-mouse game of platform regulation and countermeasures: API restrictions act as rules and guardrails, while simulated clicks bypassing APIs disguise automation as "human," making it harder for platforms to track, demonstrating that visibility and controllability are themselves forms of power. Finally, the "fake bots" point to another form of deception: humans pretending to be AI to gain traffic, a sense of mystery, or immunity from responsibility—this blurs the line of "authenticity" and reminds us that in the attention economy, technological identity can also be used for performance and marketing.

    2. On the other hand, some bots are made with the intention of harming, countering, or deceiving others. For example, people use bots to spam advertisements at people. You can use bots as a way of buying fake followers, or making fake crowds that appear to support a cause (called Astroturfing). As one example, in 2016, Rian Johnson, who was in the middle of directing Star Wars: The Last Jedi, got bombarded by tweets that all originated in Russia (likely making at least some use of bots). “I’ve gotten a rush of tweets – coordinated tweets. Like, somewhere else on the internet there’s like a group on the internet saying, ‘Okay, everyone tweet Rian Johnson.’ All from Russian accounts, and all begging me not to kill Admiral Hux in this movie.” From: https://www.imdb.com/video/vi3962091545 (start at 7:49) After the Star Wars: Last Jedi was released, there was a significant online backlash. When a researcher looked into it: [Morten] Bay found that 50.9% of people tweeting negatively about “The Last Jedi” were “politically motivated or not even human,” with a number of these users appearing to be Russian trolls. The overall backlash against the film wasn’t even that great, with only 21.9% of tweets analyzed about the movie being negative in the first place. https://www.indiewire.com/2018/10/star-wars-last-jedi-backlash-study-russian-trolls-rian-johnson-1202008645/ Antagonistic bots can also be used as a form of political pushback that may be ethically justifiable. For example, the “Gender Pay Gap Bot” bot on Twitter is connected to a database on gender pay gaps for companies in the UK. Then on International Women’s Day, the bot automatically finds when any of those companies make an official tweet celebrating International Women’s Day and it quote tweets it with the pay gap at that company:

      This passage shifts the discussion of "bots" from neutral tools back into the context of power and manipulation: they can not only automate the dissemination of information but also automate the creation of "false impressions of public opinion" (follower boosting, astroturfing) and targeted harassment (the coordinated attack on Rian Johnson). More notably, the research mentions that a large number of negative tweets were "politically motivated or non-human," meaning that the anger, ridicule, and boycotts we see online may not be a natural aggregation of "genuine public opinion," but rather an emotional landscape that is organized, amplified, and fabricated. Finally, the "Gender Pay Gap Bot" provides a counterexample: this "adversarial" automation can be used for public accountability—by forcibly juxtaposing corporate holiday statements with structural data (wage gaps), it forces people to see the reality obscured by public relations language. The key is not whether "bots are good or bad," but who uses them and whose perceptions and interests they are used to shape.

    1. There is no right or wrong. Nothing matters.

      This statement sounds very "radical," as if it could free one from stress, but I think it can easily become a form of escapism: when we say "it doesn't matter," we are often avoiding things we actually care about. Even if there are no absolutely uniform "right answers" in the world, we still make choices every day based on relationships, consequences, and responsibilities—these choices themselves demonstrate that "things do matter to us." Therefore, nihilism can be used to remind me not to be bound by external standards, but it cannot be used as an excuse to "avoid responsibility."

    2. “A person is a person through other people.”

      This statement made me think: many of our feelings of "who I am" don't just appear out of thin air, but are shaped within relationships—for example, when we are respected and trusted, we are more likely to become confident and kind; when we are ignored or hurt, we may become more withdrawn. It's not about "you must please everyone," but rather a reminder to consider one more thing when making decisions: will my actions help others feel more like "a complete person"? If it can lead to greater dignity and recognition for both parties, then it's often a better choice.