As a potential worker in the tech industry, you might someday find yourself in a position where you have influence over how social media platforms are designed, programmed, or operated (e.g., you could be a programmer, or designer, or content moderator). We hope that if you find yourself in one of these positions, you consider the ethics of what you are doing. We hope you could then bring those concerns into how you design and implement automated systems for social media sites.

As a social media user, we hope you are informed about things like: how social media works, how they influence your emotions and mental state, how your data gets used or abused, strategies in how people use social media, and how harassment and spam bots operate.

The tech industry is full of colonialist thinking and practices, some more subtle than others.

To increase profits, Meta wants to corner the market on social media. This means they want to get the most users possible to use Meta (and only Meta) for social media.

On February 6, 2022, Jeremy Schneider became the Twitter “main character of the day” for posting the following Tweet, which was widely condemned as being mean and not understanding other people’s experiences:

We can also consider events in the #MeToo movement as at least in part public shaming of sexual harassers (but also of course solidarity and organizing of victims of sexual harassment, and pushes for larger political, organizational, and social changes).

When do you think crowd harassment is justified (or do you think it is never justified)?

Do you believe crowd harassment is ever justified

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 looking at who contributes in crowdsourcing systems, or with social media in generally, we almost always find that we can split the users into a small group of power users who do the majority of the contributions, and a very large group of lurkers who contribute little to nothing. For example, Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written By Just 1 Percent of Its Editors, and on StackOverflow “A 2013 study has found that 75% of users only ask one question, 65% only answer one question, and only 8% of users answer more than 5 questions..” We see the same phenomenon on Twitter: Fig. 16.3 Summary of Twitter use by Pew Research Center# This small percentage of people doing most of the work in some areas is not a new phenomenon. In many aspects of our lives, some tasks have been done by a small group of people with specialization or resources. Their work is then shared with others. This goes back many thousands of years with activities such as collecting obsidian and making jewelry, to more modern activities like writing books, building cars, reporting on news, and making movies.

What support should content moderators have from social media companies and from governments?

eddit is composed of many smaller discussion boards, called subreddits. These subreddits range from friendly to very toxic, with different moderators in charge of each subreddit. Reddit as a larger platform decided to ban and remove some of its most toxic and hateful subreddits, including r/c***town (note: I censored out a racial slur for Black people), and r/fatpeoplehate. In a study of what happened after this ban: Post-ban, hate speech by the same users was reduced by as much as 80-90 percent. […] “Members of banned communities left Reddit at significantly higher rates than control groups. […] Migration was common, both to similar subreddits (i.e. overtly racist ones) and tangentially related ones (r/The_Donald). […] However, within those communities, hate speech did not reliably increase, although there were slight bumps as the invaders encountered and tested new rules and moderators.

“Incel” is short for “involuntarily celibate,” meaning they are men who have centered their identity on wanting to have sex with women, but with no women “giving” them sex. Incels objectify women and sex, claiming they have a right to have women want to have sex with them. Incels believe they are being unfairly denied this sex because of the few sexually attractive men (”Chads”), and because feminism told women they could refuse to have sex. Some incels believe their biology (e.g., skull shape) means no women will “give” them sex. They will be forever alone, without sex, and unhappy. The incel community has produced multiple mass murderers and terrorist attacks.

“If [social media] was just bad, I’d just tell all the kids to throw their phone in the ocean, and it’d be really easy. The problem is it - we are hyper-connected, and we’re lonely. We’re overstimulated, and we’re numb. We’re expressing our self, and we’re objectifying ourselves. So I think it just sort of widens and deepens the experiences of what kids are going through. But in regards to social anxiety, social anxiety - there’s a part of social anxiety I think that feels like you’re a little bit disassociated from yourself. And it’s sort of like you’re in a situation, but you’re also floating above yourself, watching yourself in that situation, judging it. And social media literally is that. You know, it forces kids to not just live their experience but be nostalgic for their experience while they’re living it, watch people watch them, watch people watch them watch them. My sort of impulse is like when the 13 year olds of today grow up to be social scientists, I’ll be very curious to hear what they have to say about it. But until then, it just feels like we just need to gather the data.” Director Bo Burnham On Growing Up With Anxiety — And An Audience - NPR Fresh Air (10:15-11:20)

Building off of the amplification polarization and negativity, there are concerns (and real examples) of social media (and their recommendation algorithms) radicalizing people into conspiracy theories and into violence.

Similarly, recommendation algorithms are rules set in place that might produce biased, unfair, or unethical outcomes. This can happen whether or not the creators of the algorithm intended these outcomes. Once these algorithms are in place though, the have an influence on what happens on a social media site. Individuals still have responsibility with how they behave, but the system itself may be set up so that individual efforts cannot not be overcome the problems in the system.

In how we’ve been talking about accessible design, the way we’ve been phrasing things has implied a separation between designers who make things, and the disabled people who things are made for. And unfortunately, as researcher Dr. Cynthia Bennett points out, disabled people are often excluded from designing for themselves, or even when they do participate in the design, they aren’t considered to be the “real designers.” You can see Dr. Bennet’s research talk on this in the following Youtube Video:

Which abilities are expected of people, and therefore what things are considered disabilities, are socially defined. Different societies and groups of people make different assumptions about what people can do, and so what is considered a disability in one group, might just be “normal” in another. There are many things we might not be able to do that won’t be considered disabilities because our social groups don’t expect us to be able to do them. For example, none of us have wings that we can fly with, but that is not considered a disability, because our social groups didn’t assume we would be able to. Or, for a more practical example, let’s look at color vision:

Employees at the company misusing their access, like Facebook employees using their database permissions to stalk women

For example, a social media application might offer us a way of “Private Messaging” (also called Direct Messaging) with another user. But in most cases those “private” messages are stored in the computers at those companies, and the company might have computer programs that automatically search through the messages, and people with the right permissions might be able to view them directly.

For example, social media data about who you are friends with might be used to infer your sexual orientation. Social media data might also be used to infer people’s: Race Political leanings Interests Susceptibility to financial scams Being prone to addiction (e.g., gambling) Additionally, groups keep trying to re-invent old debunked pseudo-scientific (and racist) methods of judging people based on facial features (size of nose, chin, forehead, etc.), but now using artificial intelligence.

Social media platforms collect various types of data on their users.

7.3.4. RIP trolling# RIP trolling is where trolls find a memorial page and then all work together to mock the dead person and the people mourning them. Here’s one example from 2013: A Facebook memorial page dedicated to Matthew Kocher, who drowned July 27 in Lake Michigan, had attracted a group of Internet vandals who mocked the Tinley Park couple’s only child, posting photos of people drowning with taunting comments superimposed over the images. One photo showed a submerged person’s hand breaking through the water with text reading “LOL u drowned you fail at being a fish,” according to a screen grab of the page shared with the Tribune after the post was removed. Cruel online posts known as RIP trolling add to Tinley Park family’s grief from the Chicago Tribune 7.3.5. Flooding Police app with K-pop videos# To go in a different direction for our last example, let’s look at an example of trolling as a form of protest. In the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020, Dallas Police made an app where they asked people to upload videos of protesters doing anything illegal. In support of the protesters, K-pop fans swarmed the app and uploaded as many K-pop videos as they could eventually leading to the app crashing and becoming unusable, and thus protecting the protesters from this attempt at Police surveillance.

In the 2000s, trolling went from an activity done in some communities to the creation of communities that centered around trolling such as 4chan (2003), Encyclopedia Dramatica (2004), and some forums on Reddit (2005). These trolling communities eventually started compiling half-joking sets of “Rules of the Internet” that both outlined their trolling philosophy: Rule 43. The more beautiful and pure a thing is - the more satisfying it is to corrupt it

How do you notice yourself changing how you express yourself in different situations, particularly on social media? Do you feel like those changes or expressions are authentic to who you are, do they compromise your authenticity in some way?

There are many ways inauthnticity shows up on internet-based social media, such as: Catfishing: Create a fake profile that doesn’t match the actual user, usually in an attempt to trick or scam someone Sockpuppet (or a “burner” account): Creating a fake profile in order to argue a position (sometimes intentionally argued poorly to make the position look bad)

One famous example of reducing friction was the invention of infinite scroll.

Open two social media sites and choose equivalent views on each (e.g., a list of posts, an individual post, an author page etc.). List what actions are immediately available. Then explore and see what actions are available after one additional action (e.g., opening a menu), then what actions are two steps away. What do you notice about the similarities and differences in these sites?

So all data that you might find is a simplification. There are many seemingly simple questions that in some situations or for some people, have no simple answers, questions like: What country are you from? What if you were born in one country, but moved to another shortly after? What if you are from a country that no longer exists like Czechoslovakia? Or from an occupied territory? How many people live in this house? Does a college student returning home for the summer count as living in that house? How many words are in this chapter? Different programs use different rules for what counts as a “word” E.g., this page has “2 + 2 = 4”, which Microsoft Word counts as 5 words, and Google Docs counts as 3 words.

The data in question here is over what percentage of Twitter users are spam bots, which Twitter claimed was less than 5%, and Elon Musk claimed is higher than 5%

How are people’s expectations different for a bot and a “normal” user?

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:

We can’t give every example, but here is a range of different things social media platforms do (though this is all an oversimplification).

Natural Rights# Locke: Everyone has a right to life, liberty, and property Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Discussions of “human rights” fit in the Natural Rights ethics framework