Zoë Corbyn. Jennifer Jacquet: ‘The power of shame is that it can be used by the weak against the strong’. The Observer, March 2015. URL: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/06/is-shame-necessary-review (visited on 2023-12-10).
This Guardian article frames public shaming as a tool for community action and seeking justice.
While public criticism and shaming have always been a part of human culture, the Internet and social media have created new ways of doing so.
This is right public shaming has been a core part of human culture. There are countless books and movies that demonstrate this. One example that comes to mind is The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne this book shows public shaming in the 17th century and the concepts live on. The book was even adapted later into a new representation of public shaming modern day with the movie Easy A staring Emma Stone.
FBI–King suicide letter. November 2023. Page Version ID: 1184939326. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_letter&oldid=1184939326 (visited on 2023-12-10).
This wikipedia page details the FBI package sent to MLK as an attempt to coerce him into leaving leadership (by suicide or just leaving) or to refuse the Noble Prize he won in '64. The package included a suicide note and blackmail material.
Social media then allows new ways for crowd harassment to occur.
It has been very interesting to see the way online harassment has changed with the introduction of tiktok into media. Harassment that has previously been limited to people within a community can within hours become harassment from millions with one viral video.
Adriana Diaz. Twitter tracks down mystery couple in viral proposal photos. New York Post, June 2021. URL: https://nypost.com/2021/06/24/twitter-tracks-down-mystery-couple-in-viral-proposal-photos/ (visited on 2023-12-08).
This is a wonderful example of when using social media to find people can be good. Unlike the reddit used to try to identify one of the Boston bombers this Twitter search was a positive example of how online communities can come together to help people.
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.
This is a great example of harm that can be done by the internet. It may have been unintended but there was harm nonetheless. When people have the ability to use the internet to find people it can be a great tool, however when there is a tragic event emotions run high and it is easy for that panic to translate into unintentional harm. This case is a good example of the snowball effect that can happen if one person gets something wrong and everyone assumes they are right out of fear or pride.
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 sexual abuse material (CSAM).
This kind of moderation has gotten better over the years but is still not entirety fool proof. It is still fairly easy to access copyrighted material and I often wonder if this is intentional.
So you might find a safe space online to explore part of yourself that isn’t safe in public (e.g., Trans Twitter and the beauty of online anonymity [m27]).
I think that social media is an important resource for many people so they can connect with communities outside their direct access.
Gina Vaynshteyn. I Made The Viral SpaghettiO And Milk Pie So That You Don’t Have To. February 2021. URL: https://www.scarymommy.com/spotted/spaghettio-pie (visited on 2023-12-08).
This is content I often see on social media, it could be content related to books, shows or movies ("I read ___ so you don't have to"). However this kind of content related to food reminds me of tiktok trends in 2020 where people were trying weird food or watching people try weird foods out of pure boredom. This could be a kind of trolling, people trying bad or weird food combinations to get views, engagement or create discourses online.
A meme is a piece of culture that might reproduce in an evolutionary fashion, like a hummable tune that someone hears and starts humming to themselves, perhaps changing it, and then others overhearing next.
This passage made me think about how memes are almost like a game of telephone throughout online communities and across generations. A millennial may see the same meme in a completely different way than someone in generation z or alpha and visa versa.
Lauren Goode. I Called Off My Wedding. The Internet Will Never Forget. Wired, 2021. URL: https://www.wired.com/story/weddings-social-media-apps-photos-memories-miscarriage-problem/ (visited on 2023-12-07).
This article highlights how the internet is forever even if we don't want it to be. It is interesting to me because although I have always been careful what I post on social media it had never really occurred to me that something could unintentionally go viral and remind me of a bad time in my life forever.
The method of determining what is shown to users is called a recommendation algorithm, which is an algorithm (a series of steps or rules, such as in a computer program) that recommends posts for users to see, people for users to follow, ads for users to view, or reminders for users.
This is so interesting to me. The idea that recommendation algorithms use our data to show us what they think we want to see/buy. In my experience with recommendation algorithms they are fairly accurate and that is a little scary.
Mayo Clinic Staff. Generalized anxiety disorder - Symptoms and causes. 2017. URL: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/generalized-anxiety-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20360803 (visited on 2023-12-07).
This source explains generalized anxiety disorder. It is important for people to have at least a general understanding of anxiety disorders as they are very common.
Some disabilities are visible disabilities that other people can notice by observing the disabled person (e.g., wearing glasses is an indication of a visual disability, or a missing limb might be noticeable). Other disabilities are invisible disabilities that other people cannot notice by observing the disabled person
This chapter does a good job explaining that disabilities can present in different ways. The chapter includes great examples and descriptions on how society views disabilities and the way some have been accepted or integrated into "normal" society while others have not. Social media has helped make great strides in "normalizing" a variety of disabilities.
But social media companies often fail at keeping our information secure.
I can see how this is true. Meta using selling information to ad agencies can easily lead to leaks and scams from other sources.
Jacob Kastrenakes. Facebook stored millions of Instagram passwords in plain text. The Verge, April 2019. URL: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/18/18485599/facebook-instagram-passwords-plain-text-millions-users (visited on 2023-12-06).
This article is documenting that Facebook stored passwords of users in a way that made them accessible to around 200,000 employees. I don't fear my information being "leaked" due to lack of assets that are desirable but that could just be a lack of understanding but this did concern me.
Concern troll. October 2023. Page Version ID: 76467190. URL: https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=concern_troll&oldid=76467190 (visited on 2023-12-05).
I have seen these kinds of trolls so often and didn't realize they had a name. It will be easier to identify them and disregard or report.
In support of the protesters, K-pop fans swarmed the app and uploaded as many K-pop videos as they could eventually leading to the app crashing and becoming unusable, and thus protecting the protesters from this attempt at Police surveillance.
This is an impressive example of collective support and online activism. I think utilizing social media "trolling" can be a effective way of stopping harmful initiatives I have seen things similar to this a few times.
Text analysis of Trump's tweets confirms he writes only theAndroid half was published on. Text analysis of Trump's tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half. August 2016. URL: http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/ (visited on 2023-11-24).
This was a very interesting article that sheds light on Trumps social media habits and how data science can be used to distinguish who tweets are coming from. It is interesting to see the type of data they used to find out if it was Trump himself tweeting or his staff.
The need to trust other people is obscured by the many institutions that we have created. Institutions have ways, sometimes, of getting around human whims and surprises.
This is something I haven't considered. We have systematically limited the trust humans need to have in each other and yet we still search for reasons not to trust or to trust each other.
If you wanted to make a profile to talk about yourself, or to show off your work, you had to create your own personal webpage, which others could visit.
I wish this was still more popular! Bring back blogging about random things. I think it would eliminate a lot of bad things about social media.
How is this data a simplification of reality? That is, what does it not capture? Who does it work best for, and who does it not work well for?
Data doesn’t capture nuance and context. It often chooses the simplest easiest to understand. This can be good but also harmful too. It creates unrealistic standards for many different things.
Bots, on the other hand, will do actions through social media accounts and can appear to be like any other user. The bot might be the only thing posting to the account, or human users might sometimes use a bot to post for them.
This is something I had considered but didn't realize that it could go unnoticed. I like to believe that I would be able to tell a bot from a real person posting but I am starting to think that that may not be the case. That is unnerving to me.
Twitter users quickly started tweeting racist comments at Tay, which Tay learned from and started tweeting out within one day.
I remember when this happened. I went to a UW TedTalk in 2023 that was focusing on how AI and bots need to be raised similar to toddlers due to the bias on the internet.
Some platforms are primarily intended for forming connections and building networks, like Facebook for friends and family, and LinkedIn for business connections.
I think it is important to note that social media has also been used to create social movements (e.g No Kings BLM as well as #metoo)
If the gods love an action because it is morally good, then it is good because it follows some other ethics framework. If we can figure out which ethics framework the gods are using, then we can just apply that one ourselves without the gods.
The concept of what is moral and immoral is something that I think religious groups use as a beacon then use the people who want to be good moral people to gain power.
The photo above shows the ENIAC [b123] computer (built with US Army funds in 1945, this was the first electronic general-purpose computer), being programmed by three of the six women
I took a CMS class where we spoke a lot about the ENIAC and human computers. These women were incredible and I am excited to learn how to code.
One particularly striking example of an attempt to infer information from seemingly unconnected data was someone noticing that the number of people sick with COVID-19 correlated with how many people were leaving bad reviews of Yankee Candles saying “they don’t have any scent” (note: COVID-19 can cause a loss of the ability to smell):
I think this connection is interesting and I wonder if it was found to be true for other brands as well that rely on scents.