If you could magically change anything about how people behave on social media, what would it be?

As a social media user, we hope you are informed about things like: how social media works, how they influence your emotions and mental state, how your data gets used or abused, strategies in how people use social media, and how harassment and spam bots operate.

Most programming languages are based in English, and there are very few non-English programming languages, and those that exist are rarely used. The reason few non-English programming languages exist is due to the network effect, which we mentioned last chapter. Once English became the standard language for programming, people who learn programming learn English (or enough to program with it). Attempts to create a non-English programming language face an uphill battle, since even those that know that language would still have to re-learn all their programming terms in the non-English language. Now, since many people do speak other languages, you can often find comments, variable names, and even sometimes coding libraries which use non-English languages, but the core coding terms (e.g., for, if, etc.), are still almost always in English.

The history of women in the workplace always tells the same story: women enter a male-dominated profession, only to find that it’s no longer a respectable field. Because they’re a part of it, so men leave in droves. Because women do it, and therefore it must not be important. Because society would rather discredit an entire profession than acknowledge that a female-dominated field might be doing something that actually matters.

Shame is the feeling that “I am bad,” and the natural response to shame is for the individual to hide, or the community to ostracize the person. Guilt is the feeling that “This specific action I did was bad.” The natural response to feeling guilt is for the guilty person to want to repair the harm of their action.

So now, it’s your turn to think about how you would want a retraction feature to work on a social media site like Twitter:

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.

In addition, fake crowds (e.g., bots or people paid to post) can participate in crowd harassment. For example: “The majority of the hate and misinformation about [Meghan Markle and Prince Henry] originated from a small group of accounts whose primary, if not sole, purpose appears to be to tweet negatively about them. […] 83 accounts are responsible for 70% of the negative hate content targeting the couple on Twitter.” Twitter Data Has Revealed A Coordinated Campaign Of Hate Against Meghan Markle

When looking at who contributes in crowdsourcing systems, or with social media in generally, we almost always find that we can split the users into a small group of power users who do the majority of the contributions, and a very large group of lurkers who contribute little to nothing. For example, Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written By Just 1 Percent of Its Editors, and on StackOverflow “A 2013 study has found that 75% of users only ask one question, 65% only answer one question, and only 8% of users answer more than 5 questions..” We see the same phenomenon on Twitter:

In the case of Canucks’ staffer uses social media to find fan who saved his life, the “problem” was “Who is the fan who saved the Canucks’ staffer’s life?” and the solution was basically to try to identify and dox the fan (though hopefully in a positive way). In the case of Twitter tracks down mystery couple in viral proposal photos, the problem was “Who is the couple in the photo?” and the solution was again to basically dox them, though in the article they seemed ok with it.

, like we see in the Ubuntu principle of some African Philosophies or in the care-based ecological ethics of many American Indigenous Philosophies?

exploring the question of what if everything, even morality, could be derived from looking at rationality in the abstract.

Social media can make trauma dumping easier. For example, with parasocial relationships, you might feel like the celebrity is your friend who wants to hear your trauma. And with context collapse, where audiences are combined, how would you share your trauma with an appropriate audience and not an inappropriate one (e.g., if you re-post something and talk about how it reminds you of your trauma, are you dumping it on the original poster?).

Tendency to continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening, or depressing. Many people are finding themselves reading continuously bad news about COVID-19 without the ability to stop or step back.”

Sometimes content goes viral in a way that is against the intended purpose of the original content. For example, this TikTok started as a slightly awkward video of a TikToker introducing his girlfriend. Other TikTokers then used the duet feature to add an out-of-frame gun pointed at the girlfriend’s head, and her out-of-frame hands tied together, being held hostage. TikTokers continued to build on this with hostage negotiators, press conferences and news sources. All of this is almost certainly not the impression the original TikToker was trying to convey.

The spread of these letters meant that people were putting in effort to spread them (presumably believing making copies would make them rich or help them avoid bad luck). To make copies, people had to manually write or type up their own copies of the letters (or later with photocopiers, find a machine and pay to make copies). Then they had to pay for envelopes and stamps to send it in the mail. As these letters spread we could consider what factors made some chain letters (and modified versions) spread more than others, and how the letters got modified as they spread.

[As I follow YouTube recommendations] It’s far more likely that my biases will be confirmed and possibly even enhanced than they are to be challenged and re-evaluated. And it’s likely for a lot of consumers of YouTube that they will be segregated by political cultural and ethnic lines.

at least tried to figure out how to make Twitter’s algorithm support healthier conversation.

Universal Design has taken some criticism. Some have updated it, such as in acknowledging that different people’s needs may be contradictory, and others have replaced it with frameworks like Inclusive Design..

If tall grocery store shelves were made with the assumption that people would be able to reach them, then people who are short, or who can’t lift their arms up, or who can’t stand up, all would have a disability in that situation.

Social engineering, where they try to gain access to information or locations by tricking people. For example: Phishing attacks, where they make a fake version of a website or app and try to get you to enter your information or password into it. Some people have made malicious QR codes to take you to a phishing site. Many of the actions done by the con-man Frank Abagnale, which were portrayed in the movie Catch Me If You Can

Deanonymizing Data: Sometimes companies or researchers release datasets that have been “anonymized,” meaning that things like names have been removed, so you can’t directly see who the data is about. But sometimes people can still deduce who the anonymized data is about. This happened when Netflix released anonymized movie ratings data sets, but at least some users’ data could be traced back to them.

Feeling Powerful: Trolling sometimes gives trolls a feeling of empowerment when they successfully cause disruption or cause pain.**

Ask anyone who has dealt with persistent harassment online, especially women: [trolls stopping because they are ignored] is not usually what happens. Instead, the harasser keeps pushing and pushing to get the reaction they want with even more tenacity and intensity. It’s the same pattern on display in the litany of abusers and stalkers, both online and off, who escalate to more dangerous and threatening behavior when they feel like they are being ignored.

But one 4Chan user found 4chan to be too authoritarian and restrictive and set out to create a new “free-speech-friendly” image-sharing bulletin board, which he called 8chan.

Let’s look at some examples where forms show problems with data entry and representation:

Think for a minute about consequentialism. On this view, we should do whatever results in the best outcomes for the most people. One of the classic forms of this approach is utilitarianism, which says we should do whatever maximizes ‘utility’ for most people. Confusingly, ‘utility’ in this case does not refer to usefulness, but to a sort of combo of happiness and wellbeing. When a utilitarian tries to decide how to act, they take stock of all the probable outcomes, and what sort of ‘utility’ or happiness will be brought about for all parties involved. This process is sometimes referred to by philosophers as ‘utility calculus’. When I am trying to calculate the expected net utility gain from a projected set of actions, I am engaging in ‘utility calculus’ (or, in normal words, utility calculations).

If we download information about a set of tweets (text, user, time, etc.) to analyze later, we might consider that set of information as the main data, and our metadata might be information about our download process, such as when we collected the tweet information, which search term we used to find it, etc.

In this example, some clever protesters have made a donkey perform the act of protest: walking through the streets displaying a political message. But, since the donkey does not understand the act of protest it is performing, it can’t be rightly punished for protesting. The protesters have managed to separate the intention of protest (the political message inscribed on the donkey) and the act of protest (the donkey wandering through the streets). This allows the protesters to remain anonymous and the donkey unaware of it’s political mission.

such as in a click farm:

Actions are judged on the sum total of their consequences (utility calculus)

Being and becoming an exemplary person (e.g., benevolent; sincere; honoring and sacrificing to ancestors; respectful to parents, elders and authorities, taking care of children and the young; generous to family and others). These traits are often performed and achieved through ceremonies and rituals (including sacrificing to ancestors, music, and tea drinking), resulting in a harmonious society.