Mark Zuckerberg here has put himself in the position of a “White Savior” who has come to fix the problems of people all over the world by giving them the Internet. But we can question whether his plan is a good one. First: do users want the connection that Mark Zuckerberg is offering? The answer is at least in part yes, as people have signed up for the Internet through Zuckerberg’s program, and many are excited to access resources and be connected to the online world like everyone else. Second: is connecting everyone a good thing? The answer to this is not necessarily yes. The 1979 comedic sci-Fi novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, mocks the idea of the good of connecting everyone: [I]f you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. […] Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation. In fact, there are ways Zuckerberg’s plan has already gone poorly. Meta changed motto after “connecting the world” after problems with genocide and the January 6th insurrection). So Mark Zuckerberg posted an update: I used to think that if we just gave people a voice and helped them connect, that would make the world better by itself. In many ways it has. But our society is still divided. Now I believe we have a responsibility to do even more. It’s not enough to simply connect the world, we must also work to bring the world closer together. Mark Zuckerberg, March 15, 2021 Meta now has a mission statement of “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” But is this any better?

The subtitle of the above Time Magazine article is “Mark Zuckerberg is on a crusade to put every single human being online.” In it, Mark Zuckerberg outlines his humanitarian goal of trying to get every human on earth an Internet connection. Zuckerberg claims he is doing this for benevolent reasons and not selfish ones. The article quotes Sheryl Sandberg (Meta’s Chief Operating Officer) saying: When we’ve been accused of doing this for our own profit, the joke we have is, God, if we were trying to maximize profits, we have a long list of ad products to build! We’d have to work our way pretty far down that list before we got to this. We can see this too in Facebook’s 2017 mission statement: “Make the world more open and connected.”

When we think about repair and reconciliation, many of us might wonder where there are limits. Are there wounds too big to be repaired? Are there evils too great to be forgiven? Is anyone ever totally beyond the pale of possible reconciliation? Is there a point of no return? One way to approach questions of this kind is to start from limit cases. That is, go to the farthest limit and see what we find there by way of a template, then work our way back toward the everyday. Let’s look at two contrasting limit cases: one where philosophers and cultural leaders declared that repairs were possible even after extreme wrongdoing, and one where the wrongdoers were declared unforgivable.1

In South Africa, when the oppressive and violent racist apartheid system ended, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The commission gathered testimony from both victims and perpetrators of the violence and oppression of apartheid. We could also consider this, in part, a large-scale public shaming of apartheid and those who hurt others through it. Unlike the Nuremberg Trials, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission gave a path for forgiveness and amnesty to the perpetrators of violence who provided their testimony.

As we look at the above examples we can see examples of intersectionality, which means that not only are people treated differently based on their identities (e.g., race, gender, class, disability, weight, height, etc.), but combinations of those identities can compound unfair treatment in complicated ways. For example, you can test a resume filter and find that it isn’t biased against Black people, and it isn’t biased against women. But it might turn out that it is still biased against Black women. This could happen because the filter “fixed” the gender and race bias by over-selecting white women and Black men while under-selecting Black women.

While anyone is vulnerable to harassment online (and offline as well), some people and groups are much more prone to harassment, particularly marginalized and oppressed people in a society. Historically of course, different demographic groups have been subject to harassment or violence, such as women, LGBTA+ people, and Black people (e.g., the FBI trying to convince Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide). On social media this is true as well. For example, the last section mentioned the (partially bot-driven) harassment campaign against Meghan Markle and Prince Henry was at least partially driven by Meghan Markle being Black (the same racism shown in the British Press). When Amnesty International looked at online harassment, they found that:

When tasks are done through large groups of people making relatively small contributions, this is called crowdsourcing. The people making the contributions generally come from a crowd of people that aren’t necessarily tied to the task (e.g., all internet users can edit Wikipedia), but then people from the crowd either get chosen to participate, or volunteer themselves. When a crowd is providing financial contributions, that is called crowdfunding (e.g., patreon, kickstarter, gofundme). Humans have always collaborated on tasks, and crowds have been enlisted in performing tasks long before the internet existed. What social media (and other internet systems) have done is expand the options for how people can collaborate on tasks.

There have been many efforts to use computers to replicate the experience of communicating with someone in person, through things like video chats, or even telepresence robots]. But there are ways that attempts to recreate in-person interactions inevitably fall short and don’t feel the same. Instead though, we can look at different characteristics that computer systems can provide, and find places where computer-based communication works better, and is Beyond Being There (pdf here). Some of the different characteristics that means of communication can have include (but are not limited to): Location: Some forms of communication require you to be physically close, some allow you to be located anywhere with an internet signal. Time delay: Some forms of communication are almost instantaneous, some have small delays (you might see this on a video chat system), or have significant delays (like shipping a package). Synchronicity: Some forms of communication require both participants to communicate at the same time (e.g., video chat), while others allow the person to respond when convenient (like a mailed physical letter). 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) Anonymity: Some forms of communication make anonymity nearly impossible (like an in-person conversation), while others make it easy to remain anonymous. -Audience: Communication could be private or public, and they could be one-way (no ability to reply), or two+-way where others can respond.

Since a recommendation algorithm may base its decisions on how users engage with content, the biases of users play into what gets boosted by the algorithm. For example, one common piece of advice on YouTube is for creators to put their faces on their preview thumbnail, but given that many users have a bias against Black people (whether intentional or not), this advice might not work: In preparation for this video, and in just wanting to test out how to improve my channel’s reach, I took my Black face off of pretty much every thumbnail of any video that I’ve made up until this point. And the result was a clear uptick in views on each video that i did this for. Additionally, because of how YouTube categorizes content, if someone tries to make content that doesn’t fill well in the existing categories, the recommendation algorithm might not boost it, or it might boost it in ill-fitting locations.

Knowing that there is a recommendation algorithm, users of the platform will try to do things to make the recommendation algorithm amplify their content. This is particularly important for people who make their money from social media content. For example, in the case of the simple “show latest posts” algorithm, the best way to get your content seen is to constantly post and repost your content (though if you annoy users too much, it might backfire). Other strategies include things like: Clickbait: trying to give you a mystery you have to click to find the answer to (e.g., “You won’t believe what happened when this person tried to eat a stapler!”). They do this to boost clicks on their link, which they hope boosts them in the recommendation algorithm, and gets their ads more views Trolling: by provoking reactions, they hope to boost their content more Coordinated actions: have many accounts (possibly including bots) like a post, or many people use a hashtag, or have people trade positive reviews

Another strategy for managing disability is to use Universal Design, which originated in architecture. In universal design, the goal is to make environments and buildings have options so that there is a way for everyone to use it2. For example, a building with stairs might also have ramps and elevators, so people with different mobility needs (e.g., people with wheelchairs, baby strollers, or luggage) can access each area. In the elevators the buttons might be at a height that both short and tall people can reach. The elevator buttons might have labels both drawn (for people who can see them) and in braille (for people who cannot), and the ground floor button may be marked with a star, so that even those who cannot read can at least choose the ground floor. In this way of managing disabilities, the burden is put on the designers to make sure the environment works for everyone, though disabled people might need to go out of their way to access features of the environment.

Those with disabilities often find ways to cope with their disability, that is, find ways to work around difficulties they encounter and seek out places and strategies that work for them (whether realizing they have a disability or not). Additionally, people with disabilities might change their behavior (whether intentionally or not) to hide the fact that they have a disability, which is called masking and may take a mental or physical toll on the person masking, which others around them won’t realize. For example, kids who are nearsighted and don’t realize their ability to see is different from other kids will often seek out seats at the front of classrooms where they can see better. As for us two authors, we both have ADHD and were drawn to PhD programs where our tendency to hyperfocus on following our curiosity was rewarded (though executive dysfunction with finishing projects created challenges)1. This way of managing disabilities puts the burden fully on disabled people to manage their disability in a world that was not designed for them, trying to fit in with “normal” people.

Metadata: Sometimes the metadata that comes with content might violate someone’s privacy. For example, in 2012, former tech CEO John McAfee was a suspect in a murder in Belize, John McAfee hid out in secret. But when Vice magazine wrote an article about him, the photos in the story contained metadata with the exact location in Guatemala. Deanonymizing Data: Sometimes companies or researchers release datasets that have been “anonymized,” meaning that things like names have been removed, so you can’t directly see who the data is about. But sometimes people can still deduce who the anonymized data is about. This happened when Netflix released anonymized movie ratings data sets, but at least some users’ data could be traced back to them.

Unclear Privacy Rules: Sometimes privacy rules aren’t made clear to the people using a system. For example: If you send “private” messages on a work system, your boss might be able to read them. When Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he also was purchasing access to all Twitter Direct Messages Others Posting Without Permission: Someone may post something about another person without their permission. See in particular: The perils of ‘sharenting’: The parents who share too much

As this class discusses trolling, as well as many of the other topics of social media behavior coming up in the weeks ahead, you are encouraged to bear this duality of value in mind. Trolling is a term given to describe behavior that aims to disrupt (among other things). To make value judgments or ethical judgments about instances of disruptive behavior, we will need to be thoughtful and nuanced about how we decide to pass judgments. One way to begin examining any instance of disruptive behavior is to ask what is being disrupted: a pattern, a habit, a norm, a whole community? And how do we judge the value of the thing being disrupted? Returning to the difference between a coup and a revolution, we might say that a national-level disruption is a coup if it fails, and a revolution if it succeeds. Or we might say that such a disruption is a coup if it intends to disrupt a legitimate instance of political domination/statehood, but a revolution if the instance of political domination is illegitimate. If you take a close look at English-language headlines in the news about uprisings occurring near to or far from here, it should become quickly apparent that both of these reasons can drive an author’s choice to style an event as a coup. To understand what the author is trying to say, we need to look inside the situation and see what assumptions are driving their choice to characterize the disruption in the way that they do.

There is a reason why stereotypes are so tenacious: they work… sort of. Humans are brilliant at finding patterns, and we use pattern recognition to increase the efficiency of our cognitive processing. We also respond to patterns and absorb patterns of speech production and style of dress from the people around us. We do have a tendency to display elements of our history and identity, even if we have never thought about it before. This creates an issue, however, when the stereotype is not apt in some way. This might be because we diverge in some way from the categories that mark us, so the stereotype is inaccurate. Or this might be because the stereotype also encodes value judgments that are unwarranted, and which lead to problems with implicit bias. Some people do not need to think loads about how they present in order to come across to people in ways that are accurate and supportive of who they really are. Some people think very carefully about how they curate a set of signals that enable them to accurately let people know who they are or to conceal who they are from people outside their squad.

We value authenticity because it has a deep connection to the way humans use social connections to manage our vulnerability and to protect ourselves from things that threaten us. When we form connections, it is like all our respective vulnerabilities get entangled and tied together. We depend on each other, so if you betray me I face a loss in wellbeing. But also, since you did that, now you face a loss in wellbeing, as I no longer have your back. That means that both of us have an incentive not to betray or take advantage of each other, for our mutual protection. When someone presents themselves as open and as sharing their vulnerabilities with us, it makes the connection feel authentic. We feel like they have entangled their wellbeing with ours by sharing their vulnerabilities with us. Think about how this works with celebrity personalities. Jennifer Lawrence became a favorite of many when she tripped at the Oscars, and turned the moment into her persona as someone with a cool-girl, unpolished, unfiltered way about her. She came across as relatable and as sharing her vulnerabilities with us, which let many people feel that they had a closer, more authentic connection with her. Over time, that persona has come to be read differently, with some suggesting that this open-styled persona is in itself also a performance. Does this mean that her performance of vulnerability was inauthentic?

Authenticity is a rich concept, loaded with several connotations. To describe something as authentic, we are often talking about honesty, in that the thing is what it claims to be. But we also describe something as authentic when we want to say that it offers a certain kind of connection. A knock-off designer item does not offer the purchaser the same sort of connection to the designer brand that an authentic item does. Authenticity in connection requires honesty about who we are and what we’re doing; it also requires that there be some sort of reality to the connection that is supposedly being made between parties. Authentic connections frequently place high value on a sense of proximity and intimacy. Someone who pretends to be your friend, but does not spend time with you (proximity) or does not open themselves up to trusting mutual interdependence (intimacy) is offering one kind of connection (being an acquaintance) under the guise of a different kind of connection (friendship).

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.

Some social media sites don’t have any formal connections. Like two users who happen to be on the same bulletin board. Some social media sites only allow reciprocal connections, like being “friends” on Facebook Some social media sites offer one-way connections, like following someone on Twitter or subscribing to a YouTube channel.

There are many more ethics frameworks that we haven’t mentioned here. You can look up some more here. Also, many of these ethics frameworks overlap and different ones can be considered versions of another. So the Confucianist definition of an exemplary person could be considered as virtues in virtue ethics. Existentialism can be considered a form of Nihilism. Moral Relativism (saying that what is good or bad is just totally subjective, and depends on who you ask.) can also be considered a form of Nihilism, etc. You can also follow any of the other links in this page or read books like this, or watch the TV show The Good Place (currently streaming on nbc.com and Netflix

Divine Command Theory# Something is right or wrong because God(s) said so. Euthyphro Dilemma: “Is the pious [action] loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” (Socrates, 400s BCE Greece) If the gods love an action because it is morally good, then it is good because it follows some other ethics framework. If we can figure out which ethics framework the gods are using, then we can just apply that one ourselves without the gods. If, on the other hand, an action is morally good because it is loved by the gods, then it doesn’t matter whether it makes sense under any ethics framework, and it is pointless to use ethics frameworks.1 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. Key figure: