This article discusses the origins of the famous saying that a lie can spread around the world before the truth catches up. It highlights how misinformation can spread quickly and become widely accepted before people have a chance to verify whether it is true. This is especially relevant to social media, where false information can reach millions of people in a short amount of time. The article emphasizes the importance of fact-checking and questioning the information we encounter online.

This passage explains how content on the internet can easily be copied, edited, and transformed into something completely different from its original purpose. It highlights how social media allows people to creatively reuse content, but also raises ethical concerns about ownership, consent, and whether the original creator has control over how their content is shared.

This post highlights an interesting flaw in social media recommendation algorithms. Even when users interact negatively with content, the algorithm may interpret that engagement as interest and recommend more of the same. This raises ethical concerns because social media platforms may unintentionally encourage arguments, negativity, and polarization rather than meaningful discussions. It also shows how algorithms often prioritize engagement over whether users actually enjoy the content they see.

This passage explains how social media platforms use algorithms to determine what content users see. While chronological feeds simply show the newest posts, more complex algorithms prioritize content based on user behavior and interests. This raises ethical concerns because algorithms can influence what people believe, how they interact with others, and what information they are exposed to.

The Human Rights Campaign’s article explains why conversion therapy is harmful and rejected by major medical and mental health organizations. It challenges the idea that LGBTQ+ identities are problems that need to be corrected. The source also emphasizes how prejudice and family rejection can harm LGBTQ+ people, particularly young people. I think this raises an ethical concern about practices that claim to help people while pressuring them to change their identity. It made me consider how meaningful support should respect people’s dignity rather than make acceptance conditional on changing who they are.

This passage highlights how accessible design can still exclude the people it is supposed to help. Disabled people have firsthand knowledge of barriers that other designers might overlook. Even when they participate, failing to recognize them as real designers suggests that their expertise matters less than professional credentials. I think meaningful inclusion requires giving disabled people both credit and decision-making power throughout the design process. This challenges the assumption that accessibility is something created for disabled people rather than something created with and by them.

"The right to privacy is an element of various legal traditions that intends to restrain governmental and private actions that threaten the privacy of individuals." This is a quote from this source and I think that this definition isn't necessarily reflected in our society today. There are many ways in which companies and law enforcment are using technology to bypass this definition, which this definition would consider to be an extreme violation of privacy.

I can relate this too my life, my family uses Life360 to keep track of where everyone is, and on this app, there is a lot of data that is provided to a large corporation, which then gets passed along too other companies. The app carries data of what speed you were driving, what time your flight landed, where your phone is for the entire day, and this information is able to reveal a lot of information about you and your daily schedule. It becomes an interesting question, where a tool that was creating mainly for worrying parents has become something where executives sell to law enforcement or other companies like Palantir, something we may not have orginally intended for when first purchasing the service.

I think this article raises an interesting ethical question about how social media data can be used to influence political participation. The investigation alleged that the Trump campaign used personal data to target Black voters with advertisements intended to discourage them from voting. It is concerning that the same technology used to encourage political engagement can also potentially be used to suppress it. This raises questions about whether social media platforms should have stricter rules about how political campaigns use personal information.

It is interesting how much information social media platforms can collect about users without them even realizing it. Something as simple as pausing on a post or clicking a link can reveal personal interests and behaviors. This raises ethical concerns about privacy, especially when users may not fully understand how much of their activity is being tracked or how that information is being used.

This article discusses how BethAnn McLaughlin created a fake Twitter account posing as a Native American professor who supposedly died from COVID-19. The story highlights how easily people can be deceived online and how false identities can manipulate public sympathy. It raises important questions about authenticity, trust, and the ethical consequences of spreading misinformation on social media.

Authenticity is very important in a variety of different contexts. If humans believe, even slightly, that something has been falsified or is inauthentic, there is a much greater likliehood that they will continue to believe this about the person or source who gave them the information. Once you decieve someone, it becomes very hard to regain their trust. We see this very often with politicians, with a recent example being Donald Trump. President Trump spent the larger part of his 2024 campaign season saying how there would be no new wars and how costs would fall. Two years into his presidency, he started a war with Iran and costs have been at some of the highest they've ever been. This distanced him from his extremly loyal base, causing him to lose even some of his most loyal supporters.

I find it interesting that social media is not necessarily a modern invention, but rather an evolution of how people have communicated and shared information for thousands of years. While technology has made sharing information much faster and easier, the basic human desire to connect with others and exchange ideas has remained the same. It makes me wonder whether the problems we associate with social media today, such as misinformation and manipulation, have always existed in some form.

I think infinite scroll is an interesting example of how small design changes can significantly influence human behavior. By removing the need to click to see more content, social media platforms make it easier for users to spend more time scrolling without realizing it. This raises an ethical question about whether these companies are improving the user experience or intentionally encouraging addictive behavior to increase engagement.

This is a very interesting article. Caroline Delbert says that 2+2=5, and why people who believe this may be right, and why we should always challenge contexts and specific scenarios. She offers the example about adding two cups of vinegar and 2 cups of baking soda into a solution, leaving us with five remaining cups of a solution when mixed. She says that sometimes 2+2=5 can actually be true based on situation. She then asks how we monitor context in real life and why that becomes important.

This excerpt about Metadata was very interesting, specifically how these companies and bots can figure out what time, location, and specific camera the photo was taken from. It is surprising that the specific type of camera can be attributed because without some sort of file upload specifically listing the type of camera, it doesn't exactly give way to how that photo is found.

This source is especially interesting to me, its essientially a bot on Twitter that is tracking the total number of Americans who have been vaccinated agaisnt Covid-19. My immeadiate thoughts were this has to be spreading misinformation and where is this bot getting its data. Also, how frequently is this bot updated, and how helpful it is, the bot is meerly just reporting statistics so how harmful can it be? Well, if it spreads misinformation, it can be very harmful. However, if these numbers are accurate, it can be very helpful to people who might have been nervous to go outside when the pandemic prime was happeneing, if it gave people the comfort that a large number of people were vaccinated

I think this is one of the scariest things about AI and the future of bots. In the past, bots have been limited because it is rare that they have been able to communicate back with people, but AI changes this. AI has the ability to make millions of bots, create fake accounts, and also communicate back with users, similiarily to how Grok.AI communicates with users on the platform X. So, this begs the question, how does AI affect the future of bots, and how will people use AI to create millions of bots?

Locke and Jefferson's ideas of natural right are very similiar. When boiled down, they essientially mean people should be free. Whether thats the right to own a house, or justice in the law, or the pursuit of happiness, it is about establishing the principles of freedom. These were the founding principles for the United States and have largely been true, with the exception of some groups and time periods throughout history.

Twitter users were most likely outraged that this comment had the potential to go unseen. In the exposers minds, they likely believed that something insensitive like this should not be unpunished, and that Justine Sacco should at least be exposed for what she believes, even if she believed it to be a joke. Now it begs the question towards whether having people take photos of her and harass her for weeks after the incident was the appropriate response. People probably thought that making the story viral would be the best way to combat this, forcing her to make a public apology and get fired from her job, but then we later see that she was re-hired after apologizing. So was her apology offered with any depth, or was it so that she could get out of the public eye? Twitter users thought that by putting time and energy into this meant there would be some change, but I believe you could make the argument her behavior remained largely unchanged after apologizing.