How have your views on ethics changed (or been reinforced)?
My views on ethics have been explained more in depth and now I have a better understanding. With learning this, I am able to apply these new ideas into my daily life with being involved with social media.
how they influence your emotions and mental state
By understanding this, it can limit the use of social media as it can possibly have a negative impact. Realizing this, social media can be interpreted to help you or cause stress depending on how you view it.
Most programming languages are based in English, and there are very few non-English programming languages, and those that exist are rarely used.
How are individuals in other countries supposed to use this type of programming? Is there education provided to those who are willing to take up programming?
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?
Essentially the proposition here is that giving the power to the people will create a tighter knit community. By giving the power to the individuals who basically run society it may allow ore of a say to the people. However, with this power many may use it unrightfully.
Another source of responses to Meta (and similar social media sites), is concern around privacy (especially in relation to surveillance capitalism).
Can privacy really be guaranteed online? Unfortunately I think none of us have total complete privacy because of social media and the use of cellar devices. The devices we own collect data from us and that data is used for multiple purposes.
Surveillance capitalism
Something that can be taken away from this is that capitalism can be applied to the online world. Data and online movement is tracked for profit- making. From this a new definition of capitalism can be applied to the original meaning
‘It’s on social media, so it’s public!’ one could argue as a case for people’s right to act like forensic analysts on social media, and that is true.
Some may say it is okay to be rude on social media because it is posted on a public platform but that is not always the case. Just because something is posted online does not make it acceptable to harass someone publicly in their comment section.
The consequences for being “canceled” can range from simply the experience of being criticized, to loss of job or criminal charges.
Cancel culture is something that is controversial especially in social media. Sometimes it is valid, but other times many are cancelled for some reasons that are not necessary.
Social media then allows new ways for crowd harassment to occur.
Allows a lot more people to be exposed through social media. Exposes a whole new element to crowd harassment by enabling the internet.
different demographic groups have been subject to harassment or violence, such as women, LGBTA+ people, and Black people
Between the different groups mentioned all of these groups are born with these identities and still patronized for it. At the end of the day, we all are people who came from the same place.
In the case of a missing hiker rescued after Twitter user tracks him down using his last-sent photo, the “problem” was “where did the hiker disappear?” and the crowd investigated whatever they could to find the solution of the hiker’s location.
Social media can be invasive towards people's lives but overall can be seen as something beneficial. In this case, someone was found when missing because of social media. Individuals banded together to support each other.
An crowdsourced question and answer site
When people contribute to a website collectively, it makes the responses and questions more personal. Sometimes, it can give others reassurance that they are not alone in a situation and many are thinking the same thing.
They have to get through many posts during their time, and given the nature of the content (e.g., hateful content, child porn, videos of murder, etc.), this can be traumatizing for the moderators:
It is unfair to moderators who are not being paid enough who have to view traumatizing posts. They definitely should receive more credit for their job as without them, social media would be filled with many harmful posts.
Some systems have no moderators.
I think all systems should have moderators as it is a way to prevent internet trolling and disturbances. Without moderators it is an easy way to hack a site or cause it to break community guidelines.
Have you ever faced consequences for breaking social media rules (or for being accused of it)?
Yes, I have. Something they needs to be fixed online is false reporting. I have had something that has been reported for "breaking community guidelines"on my account when it does not.
Social media platforms themselves have their own options for how they can moderate comments, such as:
I feel as if this a good way to approach the problem. How would secondary accounts be prevented by the platform if made after being banned? The problem would be a new account can be made using a fake name and different username.
One of the ways social media can be beneficial to mental health is in finding community
Social media might be a creative outlets for many. Being able to express yourself is very important and many are able to find the self expression through social media.
So, what does social media do to the mental health of teenage girls, and to all it’s other users?
For developing teenagers, most of the time girls, the image portrayed on social media often can have a negative effect. Models posting glorified images of themselves show teenagers that in order to be "famous" or "appealing" they MUST look like the image influencers portray themselves as.
Content recommendations can go well when users find content they are interested in.
Content recommendations are not only beneficial to the user, but the businesses as well. This can be a way to make a product "main stream" and e recommended to others.
recommendation algorithm
A good example of this would be the TikTok "for you page". On this, there is an algorithm that selects what videos to show the user for personal enjoyment, based on post interactions.
Paid promotion and ads, where someone pays money to have their content replicated
Creators are able to pay for followers to increase their "fanbase". They can also pay to get more likes on content in order to make more profit.
selected for replicated or not
There is no say of what will go viral or not. It is just luck of the draw, depending on if the influencer can depict the what their audience with like.
This way of managing disability gives tools to disabled people to help them become more “normal.”
I think the use of these tools is extremely useful for disabled users. Fortunately, we are able to design the types of tools for these individuals.
disabled people are often excluded from designing for themselves
This is something I feel most people forget about what a designer has to consider when making a product. Their design needs to be compliant and accessible for all users.
Social Media sites might collect information about people who don’t have accounts, like how Facebook does
How does Facebook track individuals who are not registered with Facebook? Are they tracked as an IP address rather than an account?
people with the right permissions might be able to view them directly.
If you think about it, our whole lives are stored in a screen. Anyone can see what we are doing and who we are communicating with. Nothing is really in "private" when involving technology.
Social Media platforms use the data they collect on users and infer about users to increase their power and increase their profits.
Social media can be seen in a negative or a positive way. Some beneficial about social media is that it can be used to promote companies, small businesses, and products.
When we’ve been accessing Twitter through Python and the “tweepy” code library.
We can relate this to one of the first project we completed in this class. We had to retrieve API Keys from Twitter Developer to insert them into Python.
Before the internet, there were many activities that we would probably now call “trolling”, such as:
Interesting to see that trolling can apply outside of the internet and in the real world. Even in ancient times, there is evidence of trolling and how it can affect emotions.
When the goal is provoking an emotional reaction, it is often for a negative emotion, such as anger or emotional pain.
Trolling can be use to inflict a negative frustration on someone for entertainment purposes. Trolling is most of the time an online act, but can happen in person.
How do you think about the authenticity of the Tweets that come from others in Trump’s campaign?
I feel the people who are in favor of Trump will defend him and do what it takes to do so including trying to cover truth that can ruin his career. As for the individuals who are against him, I think they will try to dig up any information that will make him look bad and people will want to not support him. Basically, Tweets from the campaign are unauthentic as people are willing to twist the words of others depending on what side they are on.
Many users were upset that what they had been watching wasn’t authentic.
Something to keep in mind when online is clickbait. Which is someone's main purpose is to get attention getting users to view to click on a link to a particular web page. Clickbait is unauthentic and often not able to be detected unless watching the video.
One difference you may notice with different social media sites is in how you form connections with others.
Social media is a good way to be able to connect with other users from anywhere in the world. It is interesting how users can form connections with each other from different platforms and bond over interests through a computer system.
It has been host to white-supremecist, neo-nazi and other hate content.
Specifically relates to ethics as it starts how a person thinks. Demonstrates what type of people can hide online and "mask" themselves through the identity of a computer screen or a user on social media. Some use this as a way to spread hate or negatively.
Once we have some types of data representation on a computer, we can create different groupings of data to represent more types of data. We’ll look at two types of groupings here: Lists and Dictionaries.
I think it is interesting that the last two lessons touch on how to code with data displayed by a tweet. There is so much more to a like, share, and retweet that the basic person would not understand without taking grouping data into account.
” Twitter has repeatedly said that spam bots represent less than 5% of its total user base. [Elon] Musk, meanwhile, has complained that the number is much higher, and has threatened to walk away from his agreement to buy the company.”
I understand that Elon Musk wants to back out of buying Twitter and is in court trying to negotiate the deal. But why does it matter wether that the data base is less than or more than 5% of bots? Does that interfere with the amount of money he is profiting form the company?
What does this bot do that a normal person wouldn’t be able to, or wouldn’t be able to as easily?
Something that is interesting about bots is they are not programmed by one individual, but many. In this case, the bot can not be tracked and traced which a human is more susceptible to that.
There are many types of bots in the social media world. Here are some examples of different bots:
Something I learned from this section of the text was bots can be helpful to humans or harmful based on how you program them. Although we have not dug deep into coding, it is definitely beneficial to apply this knowledge to the twitter bot lab we just had.
Ancient Ethics
I think it is interesting how religions that all are subsequently different but all have elemental facts that play hand in hand in each other. I think it is beneficial to learn about how others view the same aspects of life in a different way.
What motivated Twitter users to put time and energy into this?
Something that probably motivated Twitter users to put time and energy into this as many of the commenters felt the need to input their own feelings/ opinions of how they interpreted the situation. It is a human urge when one disagrees with another to argue their own view on a topic.