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
This period of study has taught me that I should be more cautious in what I say and do on social media, focusing on morals and ethics. This is because social platforms tend to amplify communication and influence.
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)
It is interesting to note that early on technology and morality were contradictory and people were not yet able to accept the development of technology.
More users: If Meta has more users, it can offer advertisers more people to advertise to. More user time: If Meta’s users spend more time on Meta, then it has more opportunities to show ads to each user, so it can sell more ads. More personal data: The more personal data Meta collects, the more predictions about users it can make. It can get more data by getting more users, and more user time, as well as finding more things to track about users. Reduce competition: If Meta can become the only social media company that people use, then they will have cornered the market on access to those users. This means advertisers won’t have any alternative to reach those users, and Meta can increase the prices of their ads.
This introduction is very interesting. For the first time, I learned about the rules of capitalist operation of social media.
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. […] A good rule of thumb is to go after groups, but I don’t exempt individuals, especially not if they are politically powerful or sizeably impact society. But we must ask ourselves about the way those individuals are shamed and whether the punishment is proportional.
Very meaningful point about putting the power of shame on morality. The proper use of shaming can serve the purpose of punishment as well as warning.
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.
Shame and guilt are very common emotions, but most of these emotions are negative and are particularly influenced by childhood family of origin. These emotions are very meaningful if they are produced reasonably, and if they are excessive, they can be seen as a result of the damage some people have suffered in childhood.
One useful way to think about harassment is that it is often a pattern of behavior that exploits the distinction between things that are legally proscribed and things that are hurtful, but not so harmful as to be explicitly prohibit by law given the protection of freedoms. Let’s use an example to clarify.
The definition of harassment in social media doesn't seem to be very clear. Because some people think that it does not cause violence, but in fact this kind of harassment is also very serious.
17.3.1. Intersectionality# As we look at the above examples we can see examples of intersectionality, which means that not only are people treated differently based on their identities (e.g., race, gender, class, disability, weight, height, etc.), but combinations of those identities can compound unfair treatment in complicated ways. 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.
Racism is still very much present on social media because this virtual platform reduces restraint. This situation is very real. I think Asians are also a serious group that suffers.
Fold-It is a game that lets players attempt to fold proteins. At the time, researchers were having trouble getting computers to do this task for complex proteins, so they made a game for humans to try it. Researchers analyzed the best players’ results for their research and were able to publish scientific discoveries based on the contributions of players.
Very intuitive and impactful design, with easy access to data and progress through this crowd-sourced approach.
Location: Some forms of communication require you to be physically close, some allow you to be located anywhere with an internet signal. Time delay: Some forms of communication are almost instantaneous, some have small delays (you might see this on a video chat system), or have significant delays (like shipping a package). Synchronicity: Some forms of communication require both participants to communicate at the same time (e.g., video chat), while others allow the person to respond when convenient (like a mailed physical letter). Archiving: Some forms of communication automatically produce an archive of the communication (like a chat message history), while others do not (like an in-person conversation) Anonymity: Some forms of communication make anonymity nearly impossible (like an in-person conversation), while others make it easy to remain anonymous. -Audience: Communication could be private or public, and they could be one-way (no ability to reply), or two+-way where others can respond.
The characteristics of a very comprehensive communication, in which many aspects are overlooked such as anonymity and Archiving, etc.
But Lauren Collee argues that by placing the blame on the use of technology itself and making not using technology (a digital detox) the solution, we lose our ability to deal with the nuances of how we use technology and how it is designed:
I strongly agree with the idea that technology is a double-edged sword and the focus is on how humans use it. A blanket denial is not conducive to development.
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:
I think this is a big impact of social media, people are more willing to show their better and more beautiful side on the Internet. But it also creates some appearance anxiety for people.
Advertisements shown to users can go well for users when the users find products they are genuinely interested in, and for making the social media site free to use (since the site makes its money from ads).
The scale of advertising needs to be moderate, to achieve the publicity effect and also to have a distance from people's lives, so as to protect privacy and also to better regulate the industry.
Similarly, recommendation algorithms are rules set in place that might produce biased, unfair, or unethical outcomes. This can happen whether or not the creators of the algorithm intended these outcomes. 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.
The operation of many algorithms also causes negative results, such as the possibility of being used by unscrupulous individuals to promote extreme statements, something that is a social ethics and cybersecurity issue and not something that can be solved by algorithms.
But while that is the proper security for storing passwords. So for example, Facebook stored millions of Instagram passwords in plain text, meaning the passwords weren’t encrypted and anyone with access to the database could simply read everyone’s passwords. And Adobe encrypted their passwords improperly and then hackers leaked their password database of 153 million users.
Obviously the entire Internet is related to various social platforms, a person's an account if the wrongdoers found, then it is easy this person's shrinking hand social information are exposed.
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.
Nowadays, dm has become less private and many communication companies even monitor people's chat history. There are even many illegal cell phone plug-ins that can spy on devices.
Then you can hopefully see a really long list of who Google thinks you are and what Google thinks you might be interested in, like this:
I have tried this. I can feel the personalization recommendation by the database. I'd like yo know how they worked on this and how they can get my personal interests and make classification.
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) Additionally, groups keep trying to re-invent old debunked pseudo-scientific (and racist) methods of judging people based on facial features (size of nose, chin, forehead, etc.), but now using artificial intelligence.
This was an interesting list, and it made me realize how much information can be spread through social media, but also how much easier it is to spread misinformation on the Internet.
4Chan has various image-sharing bulletin boards, where users post anonymously. Perhaps the most infamous board is the “/b/” board for “random” topics. This board emphasizes “free speech” and “no rules” (with exceptions for child pornography and some other illegal content). In these message boards, users attempt to troll each other and post the most shocking content they can come up with. They also have a history of collectively choosing a target website or community and doing a “raid” where they all try to join and troll and offend the people in that community.
This is an example of the dangerous phenomenon of social media. Most social platforms currently have a similar problem regarding the anonymity of the web.
The 1980s and 1990s also saw an emergence of more instant forms of communication with chat applications. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) lets people create “rooms” for different topics, and people could join those rooms and participate in real-time text conversations with the others in the room.
I think this is the most primitive version of social media live chat. I had heard from my elders about the chat rooms that were popular at the time. And I was curious about how it worked, which was an important step in the evolution of social media.
Binary consisting of 0s and 1s make it easy to represent true and false values, where 1 often represents true and 0 represents false. Most programming languages have built-in ways of representing True and False values.
It's my first time knowing the meaning of Binary. 0s and 1s are just like a signal to let the computer know if they can do this action.
The account that posted it: User handle is @dog_rates User name is WeRateDogs® User profile picture is a circular photo of a white dog This user has a blue checkmark The date of the tweet: Feb 10, 2020 The text of the tweet: “This is Woods. He’s here to help with the dishes. Specifically, the pre-rinse, where he licks every item he can. 12/10” The photos in the tweet: Three photos of a puppy on a dishwasher The number of replies: 1,533 The number of retweets: 26.2K The number of likes: 197.8K
This is all the information that can be seen by looking at the metadata, which shows how much exposure the tweet has received.
A human computer running a cooking program. In other words: “someone following a recipe” (but probably not a dumpling recipe) (photo source)
This is a great analogy, and it made me quickly understand the logic and rules of how the python language processes information. So python is the equivalent of a tool that passes commands between a human and a computer.
运行烹饪程序的人类计算机。换句话说：“遵循食谱的人”（但可能不是饺子食谱）（图片来源）
This is a great analogy, and it made me quickly understand the logic and rules of how the python language processes information. So python is the equivalent of a tool that passes commands between a human and a computer.
On the other hand, some bots are made with the intention of harming, countering, or deceiving others. For example, people use bots to spam advertisements at people. You can use bots as a way of buying fake followers, or making fake crowds that appear to support a cause (called Astroturfing).
These two examples made it easy for me to understand the concept. I often encounter this kind of harassment and advertising from bots when I use social media. And these two examples are very classic.
Since this book is also about ethics, we should mention that the first thing these women were asked to program on the ENIAC was some calculations to help build thermonuclear bombs. How do you think they might have felt about being asked to do this? The building of those bombs involved many scientists and other professionals along the way, several of whom were not on board with the idea of what their calculations were being used for. This has raised questions about moral responsibility: were the women made complicit in whatever moral wrongs may have come about using calculations they performed using the ENIAC?
This note added to my understanding including the pictures here and the description of the history of computer language as well as the code entered by the women to generate a series of thoughts. It made me aware of the tremendous advances in computer language and technology today.
When someone wants a computer to perform a task (that hasn’t already been programmed), a human programmer will act as a translator to translate that task into a programming language. Next, a compiler (or interpreter) program will translate the programming language code into the binary code that the computer runs. In this set-up, the programming language acts as an intermediate language the way that French did in my earlier analogy.
Reading this I think the analogy is very accurate and concise. I fully understand the meaning of the existence of computer language and how computers receive human instructions.