I found myself interested in the image of a ruler posing to be benevolent and cultured while really being ignorant and dismissive towards their people. Specifically the detail of how difficult it is for the people of Oman to assemble and to speak out makes me understand the connection between the Sultan and social media bots. If social media congregation is the only reasonable way for people to speak out against a neglectful government, it makes the ethical question of automated bots a bit more complicated.

I remember learning about some of this stuff in AP Comp Sci Principles. When we were hearing about automated bots that go through social media and take specific actions, and then further provided the steps to run code to make that happen, I started trying to put the steps of the code together in my mind. I figure you need to iterate through a list to look for particular phrases, which you'd set within another list, along with a for loop to detect your desired word in social media. When I start to get lost is when I think about scaling that to be bigger.

The kinds of bots we've used so far seem pretty simple. It's telling a computer to send a post to social media. But nowadays, we have an overwhelming amount of bots, to the point that a decent chunk of the content I see online is reposted stuff on a clear bot page that I just have to scroll through. Even though we as a class are a bot farm, it's obviously way less consequential. It gets really crazy when you think about the creators who have their content stolen, and reposted across dozens of different burner accounts, just to amass a following on at least one. I think nowadays it's gone too far.

I'd say of all of the different frameworks provided, Consequentialism has the most direct application and parallels with many of the ethical questions and debates we often have in regards to social media. Often the game that gets played when it comes to social media is the data and the numbers, and we see developers measure value, success, and popularity largely through the numbers they get fed. And just as one could argue this mindset is flawed, you could say the same flaws exist in Consequentialism. As much at looking at final outcomes can be a rational way to make decisions, it ultimately strips some of the humanity and nuance away from said decisions in the short term. I found the parallels between these two mindsets very interesting.