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.

But even people who thought they were doing something good regretted the consequences of their creations, such as Eli Whitney who hoped his invention of the cotton gin would reduce slavery in the United States, but only made it worse, or Alfred Nobel who invented dynamite (which could be used in construction or in war) and decided to create the Nobel prizes, or Albert Einstein regretting his role in convincing the US government to invent nuclear weapons, or Aza Raskin regretting his invention infinite scroll.

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.

Network power: When more people start using something, it becomes harder to use alternatives. For example, Twitter’s large user base makes it difficult for people to move to a new social media network, even if they are worried the new owner is going to ruin it, since the people they want to connect with aren’t all on some other platform. This means Twitter can get much worse and people still won’t benefit from leaving it.

In the article Famous abusers seek easy forgiveness. Rosh Hashanah teaches us repentance is hard. by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, she outlines a set of steps for “repentance” needed for someone to have their relationship with others repaired: “The bad actor must own the harm perpetrated, ideally publicly” “They must do the hard internal work to become the kind of person who does not harm in this way — which is a massive undertaking, demanding tremendous introspection and confrontation of unpleasant aspects of the self” “They must make restitution for harm done, in whatever way that might be possible” “Then — and only then — they must apologize sincerely to the victim” “Lastly, the next time they are confronted with the opportunity to commit a similar misdeed, they must make a different, better choice”

The real power of shame is it can scale. It can work against entire countries and can be used by the weak against the strong. Guilt, on the other hand, because it operates entirely within individual psychology, doesn’t scale. […] We still care about individual rights and protection. Transgressions that have a clear impact on broader society – like environmental pollution – and transgressions for which there is no obvious formal route to punishment are, for instance, more amenable to its use. It should be reserved for bad behaviour that affects most or all of us.

Well, individuals can block or mute harassers, but the harassers may be a large group, or they might make new accounts. They might also try to use the legal system, but online harassment is often not taken seriously, and harassers often use tactics that avoid being illegal.

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

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:

Turkers (the people who do Mechanical Turk tasks) were then given the handwritten note and after the first few attempts at deciphering it, Turkers were either a previous attempt at deciphering the note, or asked to vote on which interpretations were improvements. They were instructed to leave parentheses around sections they weren’t sure about. Here is a selection of subsequent attempts at interpreting the note (from the paper):

Rawls proposed a famous thought experiment. Imagine we were going to redesign America. A huge lottery was done to gather people from all walks of life into a committee to decide how the society should be structured and how it should function. Naturally, they will all have their own interests in mind, so Rawls proposed that they all be hidden behind a “veil of ignorance”, making it so that while they are on the committee, the people have no idea who they are, or what sort of life they will have once the new design is implemented. (The veil of ignorance is not a real thing, and it is extremely unclear how such an obscuring could be accomplished, although science fiction writers have had fun trying to imagine it.) Rawls’s thought was that if you don’t know whether you will be in one of society’s more powerful roles or more disadvantaged roles, then you will have the motivation to make sure you will be okay, whatever role you get in the end. Therefore, the committee members would design a just and fair society, so that they would be okay no matter where they end up. The design the committee agrees to forms the basis of a new “social contract”, or agreement about how society works.

14.3.2. Reddit (subreddits with volunteer moderators)# Reddit is composed of many smaller discussion boards, called subreddits. These subreddits range from friendly to very toxic, with different moderators in charge of each subreddit. Reddit as a larger platform decided to ban and remove some of its most toxic and hateful subreddits, including r/c***town (note: I censored out a racial slur for Black people), and r/fatpeoplehate. In a study of what happened after this ban: Post-ban, hate speech by the same users was reduced by as much as 80-90 percent. […] “Members of banned communities left Reddit at significantly higher rates than control groups. […] Migration was common, both to similar subreddits (i.e. overtly racist ones) and tangentially related ones (r/The_Donald). […] However, within those communities, hate speech did not reliably increase, although there were slight bumps as the invaders encountered and tested new rules and moderators. 14.3.3. Facebook (hired moderators)

“Incel” is short for “involuntarily celibate,” meaning they are men who have centered their identity on wanting to have sex with women, but with no women “giving” them sex. Incels objectify women and sex, claiming they have a right to have women want to have sex with them. Incels believe they are being unfairly denied this sex because of the few sexually attractive men (”Chads”), and because feminism told women they could refuse to have sex. Some incels believe their biology (e.g., skull shape) means no women will “give” them sex. They will be forever alone, without sex, and unhappy. The incel community has produced multiple mass murderers and terrorist attacks.

Many have anecdotal experiences with their own mental health and those they talk to. For example, cosmetic surgeons have seen how photo manipulation on social media has influenced people’s views of their appearance:

Once these algorithms are in place though, the have an influence on what happens on a social media site. Individuals still have responsibility with how they behave, but the system itself may be set up so that individual efforts cannot not be overcome the problems in the system.

Time since posting (e.g., show newer posts, or remind me of posts that were made 5 years ago today) Whether the post was made or liked by my friends or people I’m following How much this post has been liked, interacted with, or hovered over Which other posts I’ve been liking, interacting with, or hovering over What people connected to me or similar to me have been liking, interacting with, or hovering over What people near you have been liking, interacting with, or hovering over (they can find your approximate location, like your city, from your internet IP address, and they may know even more precisely) This perhaps explains why sometimes when you talk about something out loud it gets recommended to you (because someone around you then searched for it). Or maybe they are actually recording what you are saying and recommending based on that. Phone numbers or email addresses (sometimes collected deceptively) can be used to suggest friends or contacts.

In how we’ve been talking about accessible design, the way we’ve been phrasing things has implied a separation between designers who make things, and the disabled people who things are made for. And unfortunately, as researcher Dr. Cynthia Bennett points out, disabled people are often excluded from designing for themselves, or even when they do participate in the design, they aren’t considered to be the “real designers.” You can see Dr. Bennet’s research talk on this in the following Youtube Video:

A disability is an ability that a person doesn’t have, but that their society expects them to have.1 For example:

Others Posting Without Permission: Someone may post something about another person without their permission. See in particular: The perils of ‘sharenting’: The parents who share too much

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

Go to your google account (assuming you have one) profile information and go to “Data & Privacy”

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):

“Griefing” where one player intentionally causes another player “grief” or distress (such as a powerful player finding a weak player and repeatedly killing the weak player the instant they respawn), and “Flaming” where a player intentionally starts a hostile or offensive conversation.

They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

6.6.1. Anonymity encouraging inauthentic behavior# Anonymity can encourage inauthentic behavior because, with no way of tracing anything back to you[1], you can get away with pretending you are someone you are not, or behaving in ways that would get your true self in trouble. 6.6.2. Anonymity encouraging authentic behavior# Anonymity can also encourage authentic behavior. If there are aspects of yourself that you don’t feel free to share in your normal life (thus making your normal life inauthentic), then anonymity might help you share them without facing negative consequences from people you know.

We value authenticity because it has a deep connection to the way humans use social connections to manage our vulnerability and to protect ourselves from things that threaten us.

One famous example of reducing friction was the invention of infinite scroll [e31]. When trying to view results from a search, or look through social media posts, you could only view a few at a time, and to see more you had to press a button to see the next “page” of results. This is how both Google search and Amazon search work at the time this is written. In 2006, Aza Raskin [e32] invented infinite scroll, where you can scroll to the bottom of the current results, and new results will get automatically filled in below. Most social media sites now use this, so you can then scroll forever and never hit an obstacle or friction as you endlessly look at social media posts. Aza Raskin regrets [e33] what infinite scroll has done to make it harder for users to break away from looking at social media sites.

Japanese image-sharing bulletin board called Futaba or 2chan [e19].

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)

In this example, I decided that each of these would count as “1 apple.”

Or a computer program can repeat an action until a condition is met:

ethically justifiable

a human programmer will act as a translator to translate that task into a programming language.

Being and