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. We hope with this you can be a more informed user of social media, better able to participate, protect yourself, and make it a valuable experience for you and others you interact with. For example, you can hopefully recognize when someone is intentionally posting something bad or offensive (like the bad cooking videos we mentioned in the Virality chapter, or an intentionally offensive statement) in an attempt to get people to respond and spread their content. Then you can decide how you want to engage (if at all) given how they are trying to spread their content.

In the first chapter of our book we quoted actor Kumail Nanjiani on tech innovators’ lack of consideration of ethical implications of their work. Of course, concerns about the implications of technological advancement are nothing new. In Plato’s Phaedrus (~370BCE), Socrates tells (or makes up1) a story from Egypt critical of the invention of writing: Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt, […] [then] came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; […] [W]hen they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: […] this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. In England in the early 1800s, Luddites were upset that textile factories were using machines to replace them, leaving them unemployed, so they sabotaged the machines. The English government sent soldiers to stop them, killing and executing many. (See also Sci-Fi author Ted Chiang on Luddites and AI) Fig. 21.1 The start of an xkcd comic compiling a hundred years of complaints about how technology has speed up the pace of life. (full transcript of comic available at explainxkcd)# Inventors ignoring the ethical consequences of their creations is nothing new as well, and gets critiqued regularly:

Colonialism is when one group or country subjugates another group, often imposing laws, religion, culture, and languages on that group, and taking resources from them. Colonialism is often justified by belief that the subjugated people are inferior (e.g., barbaric, savage, godless, backwards), and the superiority of the group doing the subjugation (e.g., civilized, advanced).

Surveillance capitalism began when internet companies started tracking user behavior data to make their sites more personally tailored to users. These companies realized that this data was something that they could profit from, so they began to collect more data than strictly necessary (“behavioral surplus”) and see what more they could predict about users. Companies could then sell this data about users directly, or (more commonly), they could keep their data hidden, but use it to sell targeted advertisements. So, for example, Meta might let an advertiser say they want an ad to only go to people likely to be pregnant. Or they might let advertizes make ads go only to “Jew Haters” (which is ethically very bad, and something Meta allowed).

In much of mainstream Western thought, the individual’s right to freedom is taken as a supreme moral good, and so anything that is viewed as an illegitimate interference with that individual freedom is considered violence or violation. In the founding of the United States, one thing on people’s minds was the way that in a Britain riddled with factions and disagreement, people of one subgroup could not speak freely when another subgroup was in power. This case was unusual because instead of one group being consistently dominant, the Catholic and Protestant communities alternated between being dominant and being oppressed, based on who was king or queen. So the United States wanted to reinforce what they saw as the value of individual freedoms by writing it into the formal, explicit part of our social contract. Thus, we got the famous First Amendment to the Constitution, saying that individuals’ right to freely express themselves in speech, in their religion, in their gatherings, and so on could not legally be interfered with. As a principle, the concept is pretty clear: let people do their thing. But we do still live in a society which does not permit total freedom to do whatever one wants, with no consequences. Some actions do too much damage, and would undermine the society of freedom, so those actions are written into the law (that is, proscribed) as a basis for reprisals. This happens a few ways: Some are proscribed as crimes that lead to arrest, trial, and possibly incarceration. Some are proscribed as concepts or categories of thing, which a person could use to take someone else to court. For example, copyright infringement doesn’t usually result in someone showing up to arrest and imprison in the States. But if someone believes their copyrights have been violated, they can sue the offending party for damages pay, etc. The concept of copyright is proscribed in law, so it forms the basis for such lawsuits. Beyond what is proscribed by law, there are plenty of other actions and behaviors we don’t want people to be doing in our society, but they are not such as should be written into law. I don’t want my friends to lie to me, generally speaking, but this is not against the law. It would be weird if it was! Plain old lying isn’t proscribed, but perjury is (lying under oath in a court of law). The protections of freedom in the First Amendment were designed to help articulate a separation between what we might not like (e.g., someone having a different faith, or someone lying) and what is actually damaging enough to warrant formal legal mechanisms for reprisal (e.g. perjury). The Catholics and the Protestants don’t need to like each other, but they have the right to coexist in this society regardless of which group currently has a monarch on the throne.

Harassment can also be done through crowds. Crowd harassment has also always been a part of culture, such as riots, mob violence, revolts, revolution, government persecution, etc. Social media then allows new ways for crowd harassment to occur. Crowd harassment includes all the forms of individual harassment we already mentioned (like bullying, stalking, etc.), but done by a group of people. Additionally, we can consider the following forms of crowd harassment: Dogpiling: When a crowd of people targets or harasses the same person. Public Shaming (this will be our next chapter) Cross-platform raids (e.g., 4chan group planning harassment on another platform) Stochastic terrorism The use of mass public communication, usually against a particular individual or group, which incites or inspires acts of terrorism which are statistically probable but happen seemingly at random. See also: An atmosphere of violence: Stochastic terror in American politics 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

This small percentage of people doing most of the work in some areas is not a new phenomenon. In many aspects of our lives, some tasks have been done by a small group of people with specialization or resources. Their work is then shared with others. This goes back many thousands of years with activities such as collecting obsidian and making jewelry, to more modern activities like writing books, building cars, reporting on news, and making movies.

Sometimes even well-intentioned efforts can do significant harm. For example, in the immediate aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, FBI released a security photo of one of the bombers and asked for tips. A group of Reddit users decided to try to identify the bomber(s) themselves. They quickly settled on a missing man (Sunil Tripathi) as the culprit (it turned out had died by suicide and was in no way related to the case), and flooded the Facebook page set up to search for Sunil Tripathi, causing his family unnecessary pain and difficulty. The person who set up the “Find Boston Bomber” Reddit board said A group of Reddit users decided to try to identify the bomber(s) themselves. They quickly settled on a missing man (Sunil Tripathi) as the culprit (it turned out had died by suicide and was in no way related to the case), and flooded the Facebook page set up to search for Sunil Tripathi, causing his family unnecessary pain and difficulty. The person who set up the “Find Boston Bomber” Reddit board said The person who set up the “Find Boston Bomber” Reddit board said “It Was a Disaster” but “Incredible”, and Reddit apologized for online Boston ‘witch hunt’.

When social media companies like Facebook hire moderators, they often hire teams in countries where they can pay workers less. The moderators then are given sets of content to moderate and have to make quick decisions about each item before looking at the next one. They have to get through many posts during their time, and given the nature of the content (e.g., hateful content, child porn, videos of murder, etc.), this can be traumatizing for the moderators: Facebook Is Ignoring Moderators’ Trauma: ‘They Suggest Karaoke and Painting’ In addition to the trauma, by finding places where they can pay workers less and get them to do undesirable work, they are exploiting current inequalities to increase their profits. So, for example, “[Colombia’s Ministry of Labor has launched an investigation into TikTok subcontractor Teleperformance [for content moderators], relating to alleged union-busting, traumatic working conditions and low pay]”(https://time.com/6231625/tiktok-teleperformance-colombia-investigation/)

Social media sites also might run into legal concerns with allowing some content to be left up on their sites, such as copyrighted material (like movie clips) or child pornography. So most social media sites will often have rules about content moderation, and at least put on the appearance of trying to stop illegal content (though a few will try to move to countries that won’t get them in trouble, like 8kun is getting hosted in Russia). With copyrighted content, the platform YouTube is very aggressive in allowing movie studios to get videos taken down, so many content creators on YouTube have had their videos taken down erroneously.

Since social media platforms can gather so much data on their users, they can try to use data mining to figure out information about their users’ moods, mental health problems, or neurotypes (e.g., ADHD, Autism). For example, Facebook has a suicide detection algorithm, where they try to intervene if they think a user is suicidal (Inside Facebook’s suicide algorithm: Here’s how the company uses artificial intelligence to predict your mental state from your posts). As social media companies have tried to detect talk of suicide and sometimes remove content that mentions it, users have found ways of getting around this by inventing new word uses, like “unalive.” Larger efforts at trying to determine emotions or mental health through things like social media use, or iPhone or iWatch use, have had very questionable results, and any claims of being able to detect emotions reliably are probably false. Additionally, these attempts at detecting mental health can be part of violating privacy or can be used for unethical surveillance, such as: your employer might detect that you are unhappy, and consider firing you since they think you might not be fully committed to the job someone might build a system that tries to detect who is Autistic, and then force them into an abusive therapy system to try and “cure” them of their Autism (see also this more scientific explanation of that linked article)

Some people view internet-based social media (and other online activities) as inherently toxic and therefore encourage a digital detox, where people take some form of a break from social media platforms and digital devices. While taking a break from parts or all of social media can be good for someone’s mental health (e.g., doomscrolling is making them feel more anxious, or they are currently getting harassed online), viewing internet-based social media as inherently toxic and trying to return to an idyllic time from before the Internet is not a realistic or honest view of the matter. In her essay “The Great Offline,” Lauren Collee argues that this is just a repeat of earlier views of city living and the “wilderness.” As white Americans were colonizing the American continent, they began idealizing “wilderness” as being uninhabited land (ignoring the Indigenous people who already lived there, or kicking them out or killing them).

It isn’t clear what should be considered as “nature” in a social media environment (human nature? the nature of the design of the social media platform? are bots unnatural?), so we’ll just instead talk about selection. When content (and modified copies of content) is in a position to be replicated, there are factors that determine whether it gets selected for replicated or not. As humans look at the content they see on social media they decide whether they want to replicate it for some reason, such as: “that’s funny, so I’ll retweet it” “that’s horrible, so I’ll respond with an angry face emoji” “reposting this will make me look smart” “I am inspired to use part of this to make a different thing” Groups and organizations make their own decisions on what social media content to replicate as well (e.g., a news organization might find a social media post newsworthy, so they write articles about it). Additionally, content may be replicated because of: Paid promotion and ads, where someone pays money to have their content replicated Astroturfing: where crowds, often of bots, are paid to replicate social media content (e.g., like, retweet)

In the 1976 book The Selfish Gene, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins1 said rather than looking at the evolution of organisms, it made even more sense to look at the evolution of the genes of those organisms (sections of DNA that perform some functions and are inherited). For example, if a bee protects its nest by stinging an attacking animal and dying, then it can’t reproduce and it might look like a failure of evolution. But if the gene that told the bee to die protecting the nest was shared by the other bees in the nest, then that one bee dying allows the gene to keep being replicated, so the gene is successful evolutionarily. Since genes contained information about how organisms would grow and live, then biological evolution could be considered to be evolving information. Dawkins then took this idea of the evolution of information and applied it to culture, coining the term “meme” (intended to sound like “gene”).

Knowing that there is a recommendation algorithm, users of the platform will try to do things to make the recommendation algorithm amplify their content. This is particularly important for people who make their money from social media content.

Now, how these algorithms precisely work is hard to know, because social media sites keep these algorithms secret, probably for multiple reasons: They don’t want another social media site copying their hard work in coming up with an algorithm They don’t want users to see the algorithm and then be able to complain about specific details They don’t want malicious users to see the algorithm and figure out how to best make their content go viral

Another strategy for managing disability is to use Universal Design, which originated in architecture. In universal design, the goal is to make environments and buildings have options so that there is a way for everyone to use it2. For example, a building with stairs might also have ramps and elevators, so people with different mobility needs (e.g., people with wheelchairs, baby strollers, or luggage) can access each area. In the elevators the buttons might be at a height that both short and tall people can reach. The elevator buttons might have labels both drawn (for people who can see them) and in braille (for people who cannot), and the ground floor button may be marked with a star, so that even those who cannot read can at least choose the ground floor. In this way of managing disabilities, the burden is put on the designers to make sure the environment works for everyone, though disabled people might need to go out of their way to access features of the environment.

As you look through all these types of disabilities, you might discover ways you have experienced disability in your life. Though please keep in mind that different disabilities can be very different, and everyone’s experience with their own disability can vary. So having some experience with disability does not make someone an expert in any other experience of disability.

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.

When we use social media platforms though, we at least partially give up some of our privacy. For example, a social media application might offer us a way of “Private Messaging” (also called Direct Messaging) with another user. But in most cases those “private” messages are stored in the computers at those companies, and the company might have computer programs that automatically search through the messages, and people with the right permissions might be able to view them directly.

One of the main goals of social media sites is to increase the time users are spending on their social media sites. The more time users spend, the more money the site can get from ads, and also the more power and influence those social media sites have over those users. So social media sites use the data they collect to try and figure out what keeps people using their site, and what can they do to convince those users they need to open it again later.

For example, social media data about who you are friends with might be used to infer your sexual orientation. Social media data might also be used to infer people’s: Race Political leanings Interests Susceptibility to financial scams Being prone to addiction (e.g., gambling)

We can trace Internet trolling to early social media in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in early online message boards and in early online video games. In the early Internet message boards that were centered around different subjects, experienced users would “troll for newbies” by posting naive questions that all the experienced users were already familiar with. The “newbies” who didn’t realize this was a troll would try to engage and answer, and experienced users would feel superior and more part of the group knowing they didn’t fall for the troll like the “newbies” did. These message boards are where the word “troll” with this meaning comes from.

f the immediate goal of the action of trolling is to cause disruption or provoke emotional reactions, what is it that makes people want to do this disruption or provoking of emotional reactions? Some reasons people engage in trolling behavior include: Amusement: Trolls often find the posts amusing, whether due to the disruption or emotional reaction. If the motivation is amusement at causing others’ pain, that is called doing it for the lulz. Gatekeeping: Some trolling is done in a community to separate out an ingroup from outgroup (sometimes called newbies or normies). The ingroup knows that a post is just trolling, but the outgroup is not aware and will engage earnestly. This is sometimes known as trolling the newbies. Feeling Smart: Going with the gatekeeping role above, trolling can make a troll or observer feel smarter than others, since they are able to see that it is trolling while others don’t realize it. Feeling Powerful: Trolling sometimes gives trolls a feeling of empowerment when they successfully cause disruption or cause pain.** Advance and argument / make a point: Trolling is sometimes done in order to advance an argument or make a point. For example, proving that supposedly reliable news sources are gullible by getting them to repeat an absurd gross story. Punish or stop: Some trolling is in service of some view of justice, where a person, group or organization is viewed as doing something “bad” or “deserving” of punishment, and trolling is a way of fighting back.

Many people were upset at being deceived, and at the many levels of inauthenticity of Dr. McLaughlin’s actions, such as:

Many users were upset that what they had been watching wasn’t authentic.

In the above code our for loop runs a block of code that has four statements, each doing a print. You’ll notice we added an extra blank print which makes a blank line and helps us see in the output what each loop did.

Around the same time, phone texting capabilities (SMS) started becoming popular as another way to send messages to your friends, family and acquaintances. Additionally, many news sites and fan pages started adding built-in comment sections on their articles and bulletin boards for community discussion.

Can you think of an example of pernicious ignorance in social media interaction? What’s something that we might often prefer to overlook when deciding what is important?

In most cases, after the initial data representation is created, the computer runs a compression algorithm, which takes the image, sound, or video, and finds a way of storing it in much less computer memory, often losing some of the quality when doing so.

Have you ever paused to decide what to do in a situation, and found yourself wondering what would be the ‘right’ thing to do? Or perhaps you might think, as a good person, how should I handle this situation?

As a member of a society that is influenced by social media, we hope you learn about the societal impact of automated social media systems,

“A person is a person through other people.”

Act with unforced actions in harmony with the natural cycles of the universe. Trying to force something to happen will likely backfire.