This article caught my eye because I can remember listening to a podcast when I was younger about a pyramid scheme that someone didn't realize they were apart of. They just thought they were joining a good business to make some money in and then it all fell apart and they got in trouble for it. A pyramid scheme is a business model that asks its employees to pay a certain amount of money when they join and then are told that for every person they can recruit they will get a cut of their payment. This goes on to just make a ton of money for the higher ups in the pyramid and screws everyone else up and is nota legitimate business.

I had an interesting experience during covid when we were all locked indoors of going viral on tik tok and I will never forget it. I was always a bit obsessed with going viral during covid as any middle schooler in the time was. It was right when the video game among us was going viral itself and I decided to try and benefit off of that. I played the game a lot and really enjoyed playing, I decided to create a fresh tik tok account that would post funny among us content. Videos would be 60 seconds and of my game play along with funny sound effects over the gameplay and my videos went pretty viral. I worked up to 170 thousand followers and a total of around 5 million likes and even more views. It was a very fun but also stressful experience because once I reached that viral status, I was constantly worried about keeping it and not going down in views.

This article shocked me. It talks about Target and says that they keep a profile on customers to keep track of what they buy and notice trends in what they buy. They do this tracking so that they can do targeted advertising and send coupons to people for things they think the person may be interested in buying in the future. Specifically this article talks about how Target can figure out when someone is pregnant and they send coupons of baby stuff to the persons house. They did this with a high school girl and her dad got upset about it because he thought it was insensitive to send baby stuff to a high schooler. It turned out the girl was pregnant and her father did not know yet. It is crazy to think that Target was able to figure out that she was pregnant before her dad and that was the reason he found out. I think it is really weird though that they keep track of people's purchases in this way, there is no privacy anymore.

This recommendation algorithm may seem like something helpful but I think it is part of and facilitates the evil side of social media in my opinion. The evil side of social media that I how found is the addictive side and the way that social media companies go about creating their apps is to make them addictive. The more time users spend on their app the more they can sell ads for and so they want to keep people's attention as long as possible. This recommendation algorithm aids in this by recommending posts to users that it thinks will keep them on the app and get their attention the most.

This article is about a woman who can see more colors in things that most people don't see. I think this is the coolest thing, I would love to see as many colors as possible. Now I want to take the test that they mentioned in the article to see if I have any special color seeing ability. I always think about if everyone sees colors the same way, I'm really interested in learning if the same scene that I'm looking at with my friend is being viewed in the same way as me.

While reading this week's chapter this section and this line specifically stood out to me. Companies may not fully understand someone's disability when designing a system to help them. I think it should be the standard that someone who is part of that disabled group to be a part of the design and thought process of a system. It should be required to at least get their opinion on it before the update is released and even better if they can actively take part in the designing process.

This article just reinforces my worries about social media companies and my privacy. The article explains that Facebook accidentally stored millions of passwords for people in plain text that thousands of employees could access. Usually passwords are supposed to be stored in an encrypted way so people can't see what they are. If Facebook was dumb enough to let something like this slip through, I don't trust that they are taking care of all the information that they have collected on me.

I have a lot of fears around privacy on social media. I worry that social media companies are constantly listening and tracking what I say and do. I worry that they have a profile on me with everything about me. And I believe they are doing these things because I will be talking about something with my friends or parents, and then I will get an ad for it on instagram. I didn't plug anything into instagram to make them know that I was thinking about it yet they will somehow know. This is the kind of thing I don't like about social media.

Reading this article had me very surprised. But also kind of not. It was about how Facebook tracks and stores data on people that aren't even users on the Facebook platform. I had no idea about Facebook tracking people even if they didn't have a Facebook account. But I totally believe it and it makes sense to me. These social media companies cross so many boundaries just to try and get a little more money. It disturbs me hearing that Facebook can track people that aren't Facebook users and I can't believe this is normalized.

This is something I did a school project on in high school and has always really interested me ever since I did that project. I really don't trust and I dislike all social medias now because I know that they are constantly working to make me addicted. And I can feel that it works, try deleting all social media for a day and count how many times you go on your phone and try to click the spot that the app usually is. And then the feeling afterwards when you remember that you deleted it, it really is an addiction. Social media companies know us better than we know ourselves and I am always trying to work to not let that be the case.

I found this article very interesting. I wouldn't have thought that someone would dedicate their study to trolls, but I guess there is an expert on everything out there somewhere. I would like to hear more about the in person interactions with trolls because it said that she met and conversed with 30. I want to know how these conversations go, does she pretend that she is also really into trolling and then at the end tell them that she is investigating them and almost troll them herself. I would watch a show that was along the lines of that.

I think the best way to deal with trolls is to ignore them. I know it says in the text that ignoring doesn't work because they just come back stronger and more hostile. Even if they do continue I think it is still the best option because it doesn't satisfy them, when they get no reaction at all to their trolling they are left unsatisfied. From here you can block them, report them, or restrict them in some way so that you don't have to keep hearing from them.

This wikipedia entry caught my eye because I have a personal interest in scrolling, specifically scrolling on social media. This wikipedia page starts by explaining what scrolling is. I think everyone in this day and age knows what scrolling is, but it was interesting to read about it in the most basic, kindergarten level way of thinking. That scrolling is sliding text, images, or video across a screen vertically or horizontally. It gives the example of movie credits, which is interesting to me because all I think about when I hear the word scrolling is physically scrolling on social media. There was also section dedicated to infinite scrolling which is what I really wanted to read about. I learned that Aza Raskin is the person who created this feature in 2006. And that he regrets creating it because he thinks it contributes to smartphone and social media addictions. I agree with him on that.

The use case I thought of was learning a new skill. And I thought YouTube would be the best social media platform to do this on. It would be relatively easy to do on almost every social media though too. The user would have to have created an account, provided age, email, and make a password. Then they would need to navigate to the search bar and look up a how to on the skill they want to learn. I think that success would look like finding a video that explains the skill in a way that the user can understand and implement. If I wanted to do this I would use YouTube because there are the most in depth videos on YouTube, but I could probably find something on instagram or tik tok that has a short video explaining the skill as well.

This source talks about bots on X, formerly known as twitter. Specifically it talks about bots activity during the Super Bowl in 2024. Elon Musk claimed that there had been billions of views and activity during Super Bowl Sunday, but it was uncovered that more than 70% of this and been bots. What interests me the most is advertising revenue, the more views a social media site like X gets, the more they can charge advertisers. So what happens if those views are by bots and they would never actually buy the thing being advertised. It takes away the platforms credibility completely and it makes me wonder what kind of consequences there are for it.

I think that age would be relatively simple to store. I would constrain it to whole numbers from 1 to 110. I think its fair to put the cutoff at 110, there no-one that is going to be signing up for a social media that is older than 110. Applying this constraint to the response makes it so that there are no false submissions. For something like address the user would be given an open string to type what they want. There could also be the option of typing street address but giving a set of options for country, city, and zip code.

I can think of a couple reasons that user may want to be able to make bots. One reason is that bots could boost their engagement. If a person wants more views, wants more likes, wants to feel famous or portray themself as so. This person will be inclined to use bots, there are websites that sell fake followers or the person could try and make them on their own. Not all bots have to be cynical though, another reason for wanting bots is advertising or sponsorships. If someone gets paid to promote a brand and they are getting paid to post a certain number of posts over a certain amount of time. A bot could help them out greatly in pre planning these posts and posting it for them. A tweet would be the easiest, but they could prerecord videos to be posted by a bot as well. A third reason for wanting bots is another more cynical one. And that is to push their own agenda, whether it involves politics or not. You could make it appear that a lot of people agree with a certain view when in reality it is just bots.

This was the first source that I clicked on and it was not what I was expecting. I was expecting an article or something of that sort, but this was a website trying to sell me something. It is a site that is advertising that you can buy social media followers and likes there. It has the option for Tik Tok, Instagram, and all the rest. This really shocked me because I didn't think that someone could legally advertise that they make bots. They even say in the description for the site that the bots they make have profile pictures and photos posted so "there is no risk that someone would figure out that you’re using our service." I don't understand how they do this and I think this is a very strange website.

I think that people that make such advanced tech just do not think about the consequences it can have because all they are trying to do is push the limits of technology. in the cases of social media companies like Twitter or Facebook I think money is a big factor. They don't really care about fake news or abuse that happens on their sites because it just makes for more engagement. They want to maximize the amount of time that every single person spends on the site.

Another ethical framework that I learned about was the common good approach. The common good approach is just what it sounds like in the title, it prioritizes the common good of a community. With the common good approach people are expected to contribute to the community in some way to benefit the whole. The well-being of the community is what's most important. The common good approach was not created by one individual person. It is a product of centuries of development and contributions from multiple people. Plato and Aristotle contributed way back in the 4th century BC, with more recent contributions from Jean-Jacques Rosseau and John Rawls in the late 20th century.