Many have anecdotal experiences with their own mental health and those they talk to. For example, cosmetic surgeons have seen how photo manipulation on social media has influenced people’s views of their appearance:

Additionally, the inauthentic arguments have long been observed, and were memorably explored by Jean-Paul Sartre as “Bad Faith”. “Bad faith” here means pretending to hold views or feelings, while not actually holding them (this may be intentional, or it may be through self-deception).

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.

One of the early ways of social communication across the internet was with Email, which originated in the 1960s and 1970s. These allowed people to send messages to each other, and look up if any new messages had been sent to them.

Metadata is information about some data. So we often think about a dataset as consisting of the main pieces of data (whatever those are in a specific situation), and whatever other information we have about that data (metadata).

But, even though our focus is on internet-based social media platforms, since all media are social and all society is mediated, we will find that much of what we observe is also common throughout the rest of human culture.

We can even consider the evolutionary forces that play in the spread of true and false information (like an old saying: “A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on.”)

It turns out that if you look at a lot of data, it is easy to discover spurious correlations where two things look like they are related, but actually aren’t. Instead, the appearance of being related may be due to chance or some other cause.

We might not want to be surveilled by a company or government that could use our actions or words against us (whether what we did was ethically good or bad)

We hope you could then be more knowledgeable in what you might advocate for or vote for in how social media sites operate.