I didn't realize there was a Twitter Controversy with NPR. According to this source, When Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he labeled NPR as a "US state-affiliated media" which was, at the time, only used for media that published views of the government. Elon Musk changed the label to "government-funded," and NPR left the site because they only receive a small amount of their budget from the government.

I think public funding would take a lot of greed out of the industry, and I personally really love this idea. There's a level of accountability with public funding, because the threat of losing the money by making a bad decision is always looming.

That being said, I do worry about how easily funding could be taken away, it's a double edged sword. The threat of funding going away can keep them accountable, but it can also make a public service go away entirely.

In this NPR interview, Bo Burnham talks about his film "Eighth Grade" and the inspiration he took from his life as a high-schooler that went viral on the internet. He talks about how he does not defend the comedy he had out there when he was 16 years old, but hopes that people will be able to publicly grow online.

I had never thought of the #MeToo movement as a public shaming movement, and there's an interesting dichotomy between Jimmy Kimmel's annual Halloween prank and a social movement. I think I had always thought of public shaming to be bad 100% of the time, but thinking about the way the #MeToo movement helped survivors feel heard makes me think it might not always be that black and white.

I think it's really interesting to watch all of these new copies of Twitter pop up and try to make a better, more ethical platform.

This piece was a bit of an opinion piece talking about how there are plenty of Trans people who believe "retweets" or quote posts won't necessarily stop toxicity, because people can just screenshot comments to harass people. It also talked about how specific groups actually benefit from quote posts. One example it gave was Autistic Twitter using the quote posts to talk to each other about shared experiences.

I haven't really ever used Twitter, so I could be totally misinformed about how it works, but I do think there are some benefits to quote posts. In the journalism world, a lot of newspapers require their reporters to be on Twitter in some capacity, and I think it could be helpful to link to the original poster of the source for the sake of giving credit to original posters. It's really a bummer that the feature is also used for harassment, it's such a good way to give credit without having to put in much work.

The comments on this really fascinated me the most. The top upvoted comment was about how Reddit has "never turned a profit," and the following comments talk about how it has never "declared" a profit.

I find it really hard to believe that Reddit has never been profitable, especially given that it's been around for so long, and it really makes me wonder about if social media companies use any tactics to seem less profitable than they are.

It really surprised me that moderators of, especially large subreddits that Reddit actively pushes, are not making any money. I absolutely think moderators should be paid, they're interacting with awful content so other people don't have to.

I imagine that setting up a payment system at this stage in Reddit's life would be incredibly difficult. There would probably need to be some sort of job application, they would need to choose which forums would receive paid moderation and which ones wouldn't. I would worry that while initially setting up the system, there would be some forums receiving better moderation than others, which could really lead to some ethical problems.

This source mentioned that an algorithm that uses AI looks at every post to identify how much "imminent harm" someone might be in. Something I learned that was particularly alarming in this source is that HIPPA doesn't apply to social media companies. Unlike hospitals, social media sites aren't required to maintain certain privacy protections around mental health.

It's wild seeing this with a dictionary definition, I thought it was just a slang term. I have absolutely nothing to back this up, but I do wonder if this was something that became a little bit more normalized during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I remember scouring articles every day to see if anything had changed, and I'm sure that was something that a large portion of the population was doing.

Something this article pointed out that I didn't know was that Elon Musk tried to buy The Onion! The Onion is on my mind because I just went to a book talk about it, I really wonder what changes he would have made to it, given all the changes he made to Twitter.

A lot of the tweets listed in this article are from after he bought Twitter, which especially brings up some ethical concerns. Given that there can be money attached to virality, I wonder how much the original content creators would have made if they had received the attention Musk did.

This is my worst nightmare! The chapter talked a little bit about how some people are able to make a career out of vitality and others are not looking for the unwanted attention. I definitely fall into the second category. I'm non-binary, and especially in the current political climate, I worry a lot about the hate comments I would receive just for existing. I've seen that kind of hatred directed towards other trans people I follow. I would like to exist without having to consider what's in those comments.

This source mentioned that everywhere in the world, employers don't legally have to let you know what kind of data is being collected from you. That's absolutely wild to me, and it made me think about "anonymous" surveys sent to employees about the company. If the source is true, there's nothing legally protecting employees from sharing their names in anonymous surveys without knowing it.

I wonder if we're going to see any labor laws changed about this in the future. I wonder a lot about people looking to unionize or organize against their jobs in some way, and how many have had those efforts stopped before they're able to start because they didn't know their boss could see private messages from them. Working people might not have the same amount of tech literacy as their bosses.

On top of spamming Kellog's job posting with fake applications, the anti-work subreddit also hacked into company receipt printers to print anti-work messages. One read "Time is your most valuable asset" on it.

I'm nonbinary, and it got everything right except for my gender, which wasn't one of the options when I clicked on the box. I'm honestly a little surprised that it isn't. I know transphobia is a big problem right now, but it honestly seems like a missed opportunity to get people to buy more things.

I was also a little freaked out that it knew I'm in a relationship. Aside from some photos on Instagram, I don't think I really search up much related to my partner.

Something that really stuck out to me about this source is that the professor running the fake professor account used the fake account to promote a petition that called for the real professor to get tenure at Vanderbilt. She ultimately did not receive tenure, but I think it's a crazy example about how these accounts can be used for someone's own gain.

I had never particularly thought about code-switching outside of a social-media context, but I definitely do it. I find myself being a lot more authentic with the people I work with at my restaurant job than I am during my university classes. I think I try to look a little more professional, and I'm more careful about how I sound in classes.

I don't post very often on social media, but I don't really post about the bad stuff. On Instagram, for example, I will only post exciting things happening to me, not my day-to-day life.

The creator of the infinite scroll compared it to a 2005 study where a bowl of soup that people were eating was continuously refilled, and the people ate more when it was continuously refilled without noticing at all.

I had heard of 4chan before, but had never heard of 8chan. I had no idea Qanon originated on 8chan, I took a class about conspiracy theories a couple years ago. I find it incredibly ironic that people who believe Qanon originated from a site that has a hard time being registered on servers due to CSAM given that part of Qanon belief comes from fear of children being harmed.

The most interesting part of this source, to me, was that Elon Musk was trying to back out of a purchase when tech stocks had gone down since the original purchase agreement. This, to me, makes me feel that it was never about the number of bots on the site, and more about the amount of money that could be made off of buying the company. We talked about the reasons a social media website might allow bots in the past, and I think, from a financial perspective, it wouldn't necessarily make sense to back out of a purchase solely because of the number of bots on the site, as they also help drive profitability.

This reminded me of a situation I had with my taxes a couple years ago. I have two legal last names that are separated by a space on my birth certificate, and some of my employers that year added a dash between the two names. Because my two legal last names "didn't match" my W-2s because of the added dash, my taxes were rejected, and I had to do the same as the person in this form, sending it in via paper with an explanation of what happened. When I talked to my employers about it, they said their computer system didn't allow them to add the dash.

When I think about it, it would be a lot of work to make a computer recognize two last names with a dash between them, but it was certainly annoying during tax season.

This is absolutely wild, and I really wonder why this work is being done by humans and not bots, is it harder to catch when someone is physically pressing these buttons? Also, how much are these people being paid? The source mentioned that the office had about 8 people who were all under 25. Are they making a living off of this? I also wonder how many of these farms are out there.

I think social media platforms allow bots to operate because they boost the amount of money that can be made off the site. Because bots look like any other user, it can make a website, and its traffic, look more active than it actually is. I think there might also be a way to monetize "registered" bots. I'm not sure if social media sites do this, but they could theoretically charge for the ability to make a bot on their site.

This sentence makes me really interested in the labor aspect of technological innovations and social media. When human computers were replaced by electronic computers, what jobs did all these people go into?

I wonder a lot about the labor that goes into making social media, and I wonder what kind of ethical labor issues there are within that realm.

Reading source b54 really helped me understand exactly which frameworks this is different from, so I'd like to add some information I read there. Rather than emphasizing actions that follow a set group of rules or "Principles," like Deontology or Utilitarianism, Ethics of Care emphasizes that human caring is an inherent trait that all humans have. The source also mentioned that unlike frameworks like Deontology or Utilitarianism, the Ethics of Care are not meant to be an end-all-be-all, there's space for other frameworks alongside it.