This source discusses the selfish gene, which was a book that came out in the 70s by author Richard Dawkins that discusses genetics and their inherent selfishness to have the best of them survive. Dawkins also believes this is connected to the altruism that humans display.

Learning about the origins of chain mail is very interesting. I remember as a kid people used to spam a lot of chain mail on popular social media sites such as Snapchat. I never thought about its origins, and it's fascinating to see how it dates back all the way to the 1900s.

This source discusses systemic bias and how it operates in the world. Systemic bias refers to the bias that people have to support or uplift the processes that have specific outcomes that we are accustomed to. Systemic bias can result in a lot of harmful consequences such as institutional racism and hostility when those biases are confronted.

I think content recommendation is a very interesting topic. I do believe that social media can push content onto their consumers, and a lot of times it can be very harmful stuff. Some sites I do avoid searching stuff on because I know how many of my mentions will be clogged with all of the stuff I just searched, but I have also found if I go on TikTok late at night, a lot more depressing content is pushed on me, which I wonder why that is.

This wiki article discusses the social implications of disabilities and how individuals who are disabled are viewed in harmful lights. The article also discusses how disabilities are viewed as punishments and moral failings.

As someone who went through a temporary disability when I broke my leg and I was unable to walk for a while, it made me realize how much of the world is very inaccessible for people with disabilities and how discouraging this can be for people who live with disabilities. I also realized how disabilities can be invisible and how they can still affect the people even after they have gotten better.

This source discusses the history of the "right to privacy" and what that has meant to Americans over the years, as nothing in our constitution actually highlights rights to privacy. It also discusses how privacy operates in the digital age, especially where people are willingly adtervtising so much of themselves on the internet for anyone to see without thinking of what this could entail.

I wonder what social media users can do to protect themselves against stuff like this. Do they just accept the fact that their sensitive information can be accessed by anyone, or do they routinely change their passwords? I also wonder what responsibilities companies have to their users of their social media sites.

This article delves into how your sexual orientation can be exposed by the orientation of your online friends, for example a homosexual amn would often have losts of homesexual friends, Jordan pearson explains how social media sites are able to collect private informations off you off of the stuff that you do on the platforms.

I think this is a very interesting way to handle the situation, i think a mistake made by Kellogg was announcing taht they would be replacing the striked workers nobody wants to work at a place where tehy feel disposable so the repsonse was a fitting one for the internet.

This article discusses how a children's TV show called "My Little Pony" has a dark side of its fandom consisting of neonazi men. I think this highlights how unpredictable social media can be and how people can take an innocent TV show and turn it into a community for bigotry and hatred. I do find this disturbing but at the same time sort of interesting because a lot of neo-Nazis advocate for fascism and traditional patriarchy with white men at the forefront of that, and I don't think a children's show about young girl ponies would be something that interests them, but clearly I am wrong.

I think this is a good example of trolling that is not really causing harm and raising awareness to a certain belief while also using humor. A lot of people assume trolling is a bad thing, but there are a lot of different variations of it, and some can be humorous while also spreading a certain belief.

The article delves into the banning of Donald Trump when the site now known as X was called Twitter. after his tweets following the incident known as January 6. Some think the ban was justified, as Twitter was a private company, while some believe it was a violation of free speech rights.

I think this passage rings very true for the nature of humans, especially on social media. A lot of people feel these parasocial connections for creators, and if that illusion is shattered or if they are found to be dishonest, it affects me similar to how someone in real life deceiving them may have.

As someone who was born in the late 2000s and never got to experience a lot of these old social media sites in their peaks, MySpace has been a social media site that has always deeply interested me as someone who used to be really interested in the 2000s and the media around that time. It was very intriguing to read about the rise and fall of this very famous social media site and makes me wonder which social media sites that we love today will one day be obselte as well.

This section of this chapter really intrigued me. I feel like the antisocial media is why a lot of parents are worried about what their kids are doing on their phones. I think that this part of social media can be very harmful, but I also think that the types of people who frequent those types of sites sort of build a hateful community and express a part of themselves they probably don't do to the public.

In the article Caroline delbert discusses the danger of treating things as the absolute truth and not questioning things. The article also discusses how context can frame things, such as during times of political discussion, 2 + 2 can equal 5 as sort of a metaphor.

I think an example of pernicious ignorance in a social media interaction may be when someone posts themselves helping out a person of lower socioeconomic status or a homeless person; they often record or post it without their permission even if they are doing a "selfless" act. It's often only because they can post it and gain social media validation and compensation if their content is monetized.

The source Dead Internet Theory discusses a sort of conspiracy of how bots interact with social media, often with multiple accounts spamming the same exact content and tweets. A specific instance mentioned in this article was days following the 2016 election; the exact same tweet was tweeted across numerous accounts. The article also mentioned with the rise of generative AI in the early 2020s the use of bots and this dead internet theory has skyrocketted with bots having much more intelligence,

In my search to find the different bots on various social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram, I came across a couple articles about the funniest bots or the most interesting bots. Some bots are to help someone find some information, like X's chatbot Grok, and some are purely for comedic purposes. An article I found by the Comediva there was a bot that mimicked that was programmed to act like the character of Tyler Durden from Fight Club whenever anyone tweeted about Fight Club.

I think this comment by Kumail Nanjiani is especially true with our current climate and the rise of so much new technology that our society just was not ready to be adapted to. I do think it is true that the people who create tech often do not consider the ethical implications of letting this out into the world. I think more of the responsibility should be placed onto them and also the people who are funding these projects if they are going to cause harm. I think the people who Kumail talked to did not have answers to his question because they are often taught to prioritize the technology and the tech advancements and developments they can make and not necessarily how this will negatively affect people.

I think "virtue ethics" is something that is more practiced by people if they know it will be perceived by others. I think that's how a lot of the harms of social media are caused. I think a lot of the bad parts of social media come to light because nobody will hold them accountable for their behavior like they would in real life. I also think this rings true for the performance of social media; someone with a platform may add a link in their bio to support or fund something in order to virtue their ethics to their followers.