With that in mind, you can look at a social media site and think about what pieces of information could be available and what actions could be possible. Then for these you can consider whether they are: low friction (easy) high friction (possible, but not easy) disallowed (not possible in any way)

5.5.3. 8Chan (now 8Kun)# 8Chan (now called 8Kun) is an image-sharing bulletin board site that was started in 2013. It has been host to white-supremacist, neo-nazi and other hate content. 8Chan has had trouble finding companies to host its servers and internet registration due to the presence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and for being the place where various mass shooters spread their hateful manifestos. 8Chan is also the source and home of the false conspiracy theory QAnon

3.2.5. Fake Bots# We also would like to point out that there are fake bots as well, that is real people pretending their work is the result of a Bot. For example, TikTok user Curt Skelton posted a video claiming that he was actually an AI-generated / deepfake character:

3.2.3. Corrupted bots# As a final example, we wanted to tell you about Microsoft Tay a bot that got corrupted. In 2016, Microsft launched a Twitter bot that was intended to learn to speak from other Twitter users and have conversations. Twitter users quickly started tweeting racist comments at Tay, which Tay learned from and started tweeting out within one day. Read more about what went wrong from Vice How to Make a Bot That Isn’t Racist

2.2.2. The “Golden Rule”# One widespread ethical principle is what English speakers sometimes call the “Golden Rule”: “Tsze-kung asked, saying, ‘Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one’s life?’ The Master said, ‘Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.’” Confucius, Analects 15.23 (~500 BCE China) “There is nothing dearer to man than himself; therefore, as it is the same thing that is dear to you and to others, hurt not others with what pains yourself.” Gautama Buddha, Udānavarga 5:18 (~500 BCE Nepal/India) “That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation.” Hillel the Elder, Talmud Shabbat, folio 33a (~0 CE Palestine) “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 7:12 (~30 CE Palestine) And many more…

Taoism# Act with unforced actions in harmony with the natural cycles of the universe. Trying to force something to happen will likely backfire. Rejects Confucian focus on ceremonies/rituals. Prefers spontaneity and play. Like how water (soft and yielding), can, over time, cut through rock. Key figures: Lao Tzu ~500 BCE China Lao Tzu Zhuangzi ~300 BCE China

We’ve now looked at how different ways of storing data and putting constraints on data can make social media systems work better for some people than others, and we’ve looked at how this data also informs decision-making and who is taken into account in ethics analyses. Given all that can be at stake in making decisions on how data will be stored and constrained, choose one type of data a social media site might collect (e.g., name, age, location, gender, posts you liked, etc.), and then choose two different ethics frameworks and consider what each framework would mean for someone choosing how that data will be stored and constrained.

If we look at a data field like gender, there are different ways we might try to represent it. We might try to represent it as a binary field, but that would exclude people who don’t fit within a gender binary. So we might try a string that allows any values, but taking whatever text users end up typing might make data that is difficult to work with (what if they make a typo or use a different language?). So we might store gender using strings, but this time use a preset list of options for users to choose from, perhaps with a way of choosing “other,” and only then allow the users to type their own explanation if our categories didn’t work for them. Perhaps you question whether you want to store gender information at all. Now it’s your turn, choose some data that you might want to store on a social media type, and think through the storage types and constraints you might want to use: Age Name Address Relationship status etc.