We hope with this you can be a more informed user of social media, better able to participate, protect yourself, and make it a valuable experience for you and others you interact with.
I think I learned so many new things from this course, mainly about the true definitions of terms used in social media. A lot of things that I just assumed I knew the answer to before I now know the actual meanings behind them.
Confucianism Taoism Virtue Ethics Aztec Virtue Ethics Natural Rights Consequentialism Deontology Ethics of Care Ubuntu American Indigenous Ethics Divine Command Theory Egoism Existentialism Nihilism
I personally struggled with memorizing the ethics portion of this class the most. Trying to remember all the different ethics frameworks and actually applying them to programming assignments was difficult for me.
Colonialism is often justified by belief that the subjugated people are inferior (e.g., barbaric, savage, godless, backwards), and the superiority of the group doing the subjugation (e.g., civilized, advanced).
I recently had to research this topic for a global health class that I'm currently taking. Most of the time, the countries that are affected by colonialism tend to struggle economically, as colonialism disrupts the systems they have in place beforehand.
Use the site less or delete their account. Individually, this doesn’t do much, but if they do this in coordination with others (e.g., a boycott), then this can affect Meta.
Boycotting has been used quite often by people recently whether it's with social media sites, food companies, etc. As a consumer body, I think it's a very effective way to bring about change within a corporation or company.
The consequences for being “canceled” can range from simply the experience of being criticized, to loss of job or criminal charges. Given the huge range of things “cancel culture” can be referring to, we’ll mostly stick to talking here about “public shaming,” and “public criticism.”
I've always wondered if cancel culture has always been around, or if it came about recently. It would make sense that it became a thing at the same time social media skyrocketed in popularity.
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).
If the purpose of publicly shaming someone is because of their wrongdoings, is it still considered wrong? Or is just any type of online criticism bad?
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.
It's interesting how it is possible for two different criteria by themselves to not be targeted for discrimination, but a combination of them can. It makes me wonder why some combinations are seen differently than other combinations of characteristics.
Stochastic terrorism The use of mass public communication, usually against a particular individual or group, which incites or inspires acts of terrorism which are statistically probable but happen seemingly at random.
I think I've seen stochastic terrorism before online. When I used to go on TikTok, a lot of people were "cancelled" and were insulted and harassed by people in their own posts' comments.
They quickly settled on a missing man (Sunil Tripathi) as the culprit (it turned out had died by suicide and was in no way related to the case), and flooded the Facebook page set up to search for Sunil Tripathi, causing his family unnecessary pain and difficulty. The person who set up the “Find Boston Bomber” Reddit board said “It Was a Disaster” but “Incredible”, and Reddit apologized for online Boston ‘witch hunt’.
This is a big fault I saw in crowdsourcing, as random people on the internet could stir up conflict and make issues more complicated. The people who are helping should be professionals and not just random people who feel like doing it.
For example, you might send an email to the person sitting next at work to you if you want to keep an archive of the communication (which is also conveniently grouped into email threads). Or you might send a text message to the person sitting next to you if you are criticizing the teacher, but want to do so discretely, so the teacher doesn’t notice.
So in a way, this is a way to keep a record of conversations and any other sort of communication. I feel like it can also be a way to be private about sharing information with others.
So most social media sites will often have rules about content moderation, and at least put on the appearance of trying to stop illegal content (though a few will try to move to countries that won’t get them in trouble, like 8kun is getting hosted in Russia).
I don't know if this is accurate but does this include the privacy policies and terms and conditions that almost every social media app has? I personally never read those because they're too long but they are at least there for people to read if they want to.
Without quality control moderation, the social media site will likely fill up with content that the target users of the site don’t want, and those users will leave.
I think we talked about this in lecture before but I feel like this is very important for users. People don't want to see just random recommendations that they aren't interested in at all, and companies should take into consideration the quality of their algorithms.
Some researchers have found that people using social media may enter a dissociation state, where they lose track of time (like what happens when someone is reading a good book).
This is something that I feel like almost everyone goes through, including me. A lot of the time my phone is the reason why I waste so much time without even noticing and prolonging my procrastination.
People historically came to cosmetic surgeons with photos of celebrities whose features they hoped to emulate. Now, they’re coming with edited selfies. They want to bring to life the version of themselves that they curate through apps like FaceTune and Snapchat.
This is one of the most common yet controversial things I see these days on the internet. Everyone knows the phrase "nothing on the internet is real", and most of the time it's correct.
Additionally, content may be replicated because of: Paid promotion and ads, where someone pays money to have their content replicated Astroturfing: where crowds, often of bots, are paid to replicate social media content (e.g., like, retweet)
I didn't know advertisements and sponsorships are ways of replicating content. I guess it is now that I think about it but I've never thought about it in that way before.
A meme is a piece of culture that might reproduce in an evolutionary fashion, like a hummable tune that someone hears and starts humming to themselves, perhaps changing it, and then others overhearing next.
After reading this definition of "meme" I'm surprised that the definition of "meme" I had in my head is much different. I thought a meme was most of the time related to mocking or in a joking sense.
Advertisements shown to users can go well for users when the users find products they are genuinely interested in, and for making the social media site free to use (since the site makes its money from ads).
I feel like nowadays most advertisements aren't really customized for people's needs. Rather they're just advertising random things to people that have nothing to do with the product they're trying to sell.
They can also be very complicated taking into account many factors, such as: Time since posting (e.g., show newer posts, or remind me of posts that were made 5 years ago today) Whether the post was made or liked by my friends or people I’m following How much this post has been liked, interacted with, or hovered over Which other posts I’ve been liking, interacting with, or hovering over What people connected to me or similar to me have been liking, interacting with, or hovering over What people near you have been liking, interacting with, or hovering over (they can find your approximate location, like your city, from your internet IP address, and they may know even more precisely) This perhaps explains why sometimes when you talk about something out loud it gets recommended to you (because someone around you then searched for it). Or maybe they are actually recording what you are saying and recommending based on that. Phone numbers or email addresses (sometimes collected deceptively) can be used to suggest friends or contacts.
In many ways, I think using all of this information for personalized algorithms is a good thing, but if everyone were to actually be informed of what the companies use, some people wouldn't be comfortable with it. Although having an algorithm is helpful, some people may value privacy more.
In this way of managing disabilities, the burden is put on the computer programmers and designers to detect and adapt to the disabled person.
I think this is very helpful for people with disabilities, but I think it is very difficult for the actual programmers. It takes extra research to find out what people with disabilities actually struggle with and come up with solutions according to them.
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.
It's interesting to think about how a "disability" can be subjective and have different meanings depending on where you are. But I think considering what a person can and cannot do to determine a disability is valid reasoning.
Therefore if someone had access to the database, the only way to figure out the right password is to use “brute force,” that is, keep guessing passwords until they guess the right one (and each guess takes a lot of time).
This makes a lot of sense because this whole time I thought the companies HAD to know the password for them to store and remember it. But this makes so much more sense since even the company employees don't have access to them.
We might want to discuss something privately, avoiding embarrassment that might happen if it were shared publicly We might want a conversation or action that happens in one context not to be shared in another (context collapse) We might want to avoid the consequences of something we’ve done (whether ethically good or bad), so we keep the action or our identity private
But for an app or program to save the messages or actions that are done, isn't there no other way for it to be kept private from the app? I feel like for it to be stored the app needs access to it in the first place.
People in the antiwork subreddit found the website where Kellogg’s posted their job listing to replace the workers. So those Redditors suggested they spam the site with fake applications, poisoning the job application data, so Kellogg’s wouldn’t be able to figure out which applications were legitimate or not (we could consider this a form of trolling). Then Kellogg’s wouldn’t be able to replace the striking workers, and they would have to agree to better working conditions.
I think data poisoning is very similar to trolling, from what I remember from the reading about trolling. Although often times they are usually negative, they can both be used for good causes.
This is because sometimes different pieces of data line up coincidentally (coincidences happen), and if you try enough combinations, you can find the coincidence that lines up with your conclusion.
Can people compare information that might be quite believable and get away with it? Even if they're not correlated at all, I feel like it's possible for people to fool the public if they actually tried.
“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).
I think many people have "bad faith" mainly because of their followers on social media, or just public opinion in general. Especially children and teenagers these days don't get the chance to form their own beliefs because they're exposed to social media too early.
Punish or stop: Some trolling is in service of some view of justice, where a person, group or organization is viewed as doing something “bad” or “deserving” of punishment, and trolling is a way of fighting back.
When I think of the term "trolling", I always think of annoying kids spamming posts or comments and other negative things. I didn't know trolling could have good intentions; it punishes the people who do bad things on the internet.
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.
I think it's hard to find authenticity in today's society, especially with the rapid advancements in technology. Almost everything is artificial, like food, nature, etc.
Many users were upset that what they had been watching wasn’t authentic. That is, users believed the channel was presenting itself as true events about a real girl, and it wasn’t that at all. Though, even after users discovered it was fictional, the channel continued to grow in popularity.
I think nowadays this is truer than ever. I feel like almost everything I see on the internet now has a pretty good chance of being either staged, created by AI, or just not real. Most of the time it's pretty obvious too.
So, if we wanted to go through all the the users that liked our tweet and display a message for each one, we could do this: for user in users_who_liked_our_post: display("Yay! " + user + " liked our post!") Copy to clipboard 'Yay! @pretend_user_1 liked our post!' Copy to clipboard 'Yay! @pretend_user_2 liked our post!' Copy to clipboard 'Yay! @pretend_user_3 liked our post!'
So would the "for loops" be considered different than just writing down variables, since it's a different way of displaying actions? Or would it be considered the same as writing down regular variables like usernames, likes, etc.?
In this period of time, these sources were roughly in agreement and broadcast news out to the country, making a more unified, consistent news environment (though, of course, we can point out how they were biased in ways like being almost exclusively white men).
It's interesting how during this time, as well as nowadays, people lean towards pieces of information that are common beliefs around what they hear, even when there is clear bias in the sources. People can be easily blinded by these things just because of the public opinion around them.
Dictionary (with some of the data): user_name: “WeRateDogs®” user_handle: “@dog_rates” user_has_blue_checkmark: True tweet_text: “This is Woods. He’s here to help with the dishes. Specifically the pre-rinse, where he licks every item he can. 12/10” number_of_replies: 1533 number_of_retweets: 26200 number_of_likes: 197800
I think this format of organization is much easier to read and understand. How every variable is labeled specifically makes it easier to comprehend.
You can think of this as like a language dictionary where there is a word and a definition for each word. Then you can look up any name or word and find the value or definition.
I personally feel like this is a somewhat simpler method of grouping. It might be because I actually tried it out one time, while I have yet to practice the listing method. I think the listing method won't be too complicated either.
Some bots are intended to be helpful, using automation to make tasks easier for others or to provide information, such as: Auto caption: https://twitter.com/headlinerclip Vaccine progress: https://twitter.com/vax_progress Blocking groups of people: https://twitter.com/blockpartyapp_ Social Media managing programs that help people schedule and coordinate posts Delete old tweets: https://tweetdelete.net/ See a new photo of a red panda every hour: https://twitter.com/RedPandaEveryHr
So a lot of the time bots are used to do tasks that are much harder for one person to do at a time, so they're like a computer program that's set up to multitask difficult tasks. It seems that bots are a very helpful and useful tool when used the right way.
The bot might be the only thing posting to the account, or human users might sometimes use a bot to post for them.
What posts do people mainly use bots for? Does it always depend on what kind of server they're on and what that server is mainly for?
only follow rules that you are ok with everyone else following.
I'm personally questioning this Kantian view, because not everyone is the same, nor are they living through the same circumstances and events. I feel like it depends on where people live throughout the world, what jobs and occupations they have, their own cultures, and social status.
how a certain course of action would impact other people. Will more people be hurt if I take this or that course of action? what course of action would leave us feeling okay with ourselves and our desires to be good people. Maybe I could cheat in a situation and many people would be helped or spared pain, but could I live with myself knowing I had cheated? what course of action should we take, if it will be carried out by many different people across an organization? When I need to depend on others to act in certain ways to achieve a good outcome, what course of action can be accomplished even when some of those different people disagree about what should be done?
Although these points are very valid points to consider when making ethical decisions, I personally wouldn't be able to think through all of those possibilities, especially when I am limited by time in a lot of situations. People who work in professions that often put them in dire situations, they must think swiftly while also being logical and precise.
Some platforms are used for sharing text and pictures (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WeChat, Weibo, QQ), some for sharing video (e.g., Youtube, TickTock), some for sharing audio (e.g., Clubhouse), some for sharing fanfiction (e.g., Fanfiction.net, AO3), some for gathering and sharing knowledge (e.g., Wikipedia, Quora, StackOverflow), some for sharing erotic content (e.g, OnlyFans).
I think the way in which social media has evolved over the years since its start, people used it to just communicate words through them, and now they're used to communicate so much more, mainly for entertainment. It now also has influence to a much wider range of an audience in terms of age.