If you could magically change anything about how people behave on social media, what would it be?
I think I would just want people to be more civil in online discussion. It feels like people forget that on the other side of the screen there is a person, and they only see others as the beliefs they represent. If people could just step back for a moment, and realize they are talking to another person, who's presence on social media is a tiny fraction of who they are.
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.
This course has definitely made me more aware of how useful of a tool social media can be. I was really surprised by how much you can learn by just changing the data present on social media into numerical values which tell a story.
“a situation where a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular thing”
I wonder if social media hasn't reached this point because it's a newer industry. I'm curious to see what happens over the coming years, especially with the potential for some competition to be removed with the possible banning of tik tok.
Obstacle: People speak different languages Solution: Increase language support of Facebook so more people can use the site
I find it interesting when accessability is most beneficial for a company. It both increases their user base, and makes them appear more positively in the public eye. It makes me a bit dubious when people praise them for this however. Them move is likely not made out of the kindness of their heart, and more out of it furthering their goals.
The offense that someone is being canceled for can range from sexual assault of minors (e.g., R. Kelly, Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey), to minor offenses or even misinterpretations.
I feel like the broad overuse of the term canceled has led to it losing a lot of credibility. If it was reserved just for the worst offenders who came from an intentionally negitive angle, then it holds a lot more power.
In what was an unusual turn of events for a Twitter “main character of the day,” Jeremy Schneider later made an apology that was mostly accepted by the Twitter users who had criticized his Tweet:
It's nice seeing people reflect upon their actions online. It feels like that almost never happens nowadays, and I'm curious why that might be. Could it have to do with people being so divided that they refuse to accept the possibility that they might be wrong.
One phrase that became popular on Twitter in 2022, especially as Elon Musk was in the process of buying Twitter, was: “It is always morally correct to bully billionaires.” (Note: We could not find the exact origins of this phrase or its variations). This is related to the concept in comedy of “punching up,” that is, making fun of people in positions of relatively more power.
I feel like this form of harassment comes from a feeling of powerlessness. Many people feel that they are suffering at the hands of billionaires, and as a result will feel no remorse when harassing them.
Where a relevant harassment definition exists in law, there can be legal consequences.
With social media, are there instances where some places have laws around harassment while others do not? Like, what happens if a person harrassing someone else is in a state with no regulation around it, while the person on the recieving end is? do they have any legal recourse?
Most social media platforms provide an official way to connect a bot to their platform (called an Application Programming Interface, or API). This lets the social media platform track these registered bots and provide certain capabilities and limits to the bots (like a rate limit on how often the bot can post).
Are there any estimates on what the ratio of registered to unregistered bots there are? Will there ever be a point where the number of unregistered bost makes it so that more often than not you are talking to bots or ai rather than actual people on social media?
[Morten] Bay found that 50.9% of people tweeting negatively about “The Last Jedi” were “politically motivated or not even human,” with a number of these users appearing to be Russian trolls. The overall backlash against the film wasn’t even that great, with only 21.9% of tweets analyzed about the movie being negative in the first place.
I'm curious if this was jusrt a one off thing or if it has been repeated, and also what sort of impact it has on public perception of movies. Like, how often is a movie judged over critically because people go in expecting the worst due to bots making it seem worse than it is?
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.
I find it interesting how quickly people do this. Like, as soon as a company releases some sort of chat function, people try to see how badly they can break it. I wonder if it comes from a place of curiosity or boredom.
One Twitter user got a photo of Justine turning on her phone after getting off the plane. That user also talked to her father at the airport and tweeted about the photo and their responses.
This shows the sheer amount of power that internet users have when they are coordinated. But on the other hand, it shows that there definitely needs to be guidelines in place. The fact that people could coordinate and take a photo of this person without their knowlege is insane.
“Rational Selfishness”: It is rational to seek your own self-interest above all else. Great feats of engineering happen when brilliant people ruthlessly follow their ambition.
This framework has had an uptick in recent years with the hustle culture side of the internet becoming more relevant. This can be seen as good or bad, more people striving to be the best will lead to more inovation, but a society that lacks compassion for one another.
Let’s now consider some examples of planned crowdsourcing, meaning a system or task was intentionally created and given to a crowd to work on.
A failed example this reminds me of is when elon musk said he would let the general population of twitter tell him whether or not to step down. It ended up going the opposite of how he expected, and he chose to go back on his word.
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.
Does the nature of these two groups make it so that people think that there are less lurkers than there really are? Like, does the vocal minority drown out the existence of the quiet majority to the eyes of someone on the outside?
As you can see, TurboTax has a limit on how long last names are allowed to be, and people with too long of names have different strategies with how to deal with not fitting in the system.
Is there any reason to have a character limit like this for last names? What is the point of limiting such a specific thing?
Data points often give the appearance of being concrete and reliable, especially if they are numerical. So when Twitter initially came out with a claim that less than 5% of users are spam bots, it may have been accepted by most people who heard it. Elon Musk then questioned that figure and attempted to back out of buying Twitter, and Twitter is accusing Musk’s complaint of being an invented excuse to back out of the deal, and the case is now in court.
The fact that data can be manipulated like this, meaning different things based on who in interpriting it, is interesting through a political lense. How often are statistics seen in a certain way just to push an agenda? Are they really presenting false data, or choosing to not include accounts that both use bots and human imput?
When social media companies like Facebook hire moderators, they often hire teams in countries where they can pay workers less.
This makes sense, but I did not expect it. Stories of companies outsourcing labor to countries that pay less is nothing new, but I never considered the ease at which social media companies can do this. Unlike a sweatshop, overseas employees just need a computer.
In addition to banning news on their platforms, in late 2022 China took advantage of Elon Musk having fired almost all Twitter content moderators to hide news of protests by flooding Twitter with spam and porn.
I find this super interesting, as you always hear about overuse of content moderation from the govornment, but almost never hear about abuse of under moderation by the govornment. It feels like the govornment almost sinking to the level of trolling which I just find funny.
Parasocial relationships are when a viewer or follower of a public figure (that is, a celebrity) feel like they know the public figure, and may even feel a sort of friendship with them, but the public figure doesn’t know the viewer at all.
This is something a streamer Ludwig talked a lot about a few years ago. He showed that a healthy situation can exist provided the right boundaries are in place. He touches on this by clearly stating to his audience "he is not their friend."
“What’s more, we can see that the Android tweets are angrier and more negative, while the iPhone tweets tend to be benign announcements and pictures. …. this lets us tell the difference between the campaign’s tweets (iPhone) and Trump’s own (Android).”
It's crazy that just the phones from which the tweets were posted was enough to tell all of this. I feel like this really reenforces the importance of being careful about what you put out there, as even the smallest details are enough to tell a lot.
Practical jokes / pranks
As social media has become more prevailent, there seems to be an increase of people doing more harmful pranks. This may be because doing the more extreme/harmful thing will get more attention on social media, but it's interesting to see how the internet has influenced pre internet forms of trolling.
Do not argue with trolls - it means that they win
The number of people who don't understand this nowadays is becoming insane. I feel like this might be because of the ever increasing user base of the internet and social media. as more people join, less and less people actually know how to act, and as a result we have trolls running rampent in the comments of reels and posts.
When Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he also was purchasing access to all Twitter Direct Messages
This reminds me of the dr disrespect controversy earlier this year. Not the actual substance of it, but the implication that twitch was able to go into twitch wispers without either party knowing to find a break in TOS
Employees at the company misusing their access, like Facebook employees using their database permissions to stalk women
I hadn't considered the amout of power employees hold in this regard. I'm curious what screening employees might have to go through prior to employment as a precaution for something like this.
your employer might detect that you are unhappy, and consider firing you since they think you might not be fully committed to the job
I think this links to a broader issue of employers being able to see employees social media. People have to be careful what they say online because there is the possibility of backlash from their employer.
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.”
It's interesting that trying to prevent talk about suicide online has indirectly led to people trying to talk about it more. I remember an older meme where people would try to get around this on roblox by saying things like "sewer slide."
“that’s horrible, so I’ll respond with an angry face emoji”
I feel like more and more people are realizing how effective this is at stirring up engagement. The concept of rage baiting to try and get someone to lash out at what you are saying has almost become commonplace in any post with loose connection to politics.
You will receive good luck within four days of receiving this letter, providing, you in turn send it on. […] An RAF officer received $70,000 […] Gene Walsh lost his wife six days after receiving the letter. He failed to circulate the letter.
I find it interesting that this concept has lived on in the internet era. Memes like this still exist, and while they don't hold the same "examples" of good and bad luck, they maintain a very similar message.
Recommendations can go poorly when they do something like recommend an ex or an abuser because they share many connections with you.
Is there a way to get around this without being a huge invasion of privacy? Something like how we are able to tell sentiments of certain subreddits, but by having the reccomendations service analyze sentiments of your posts regarding that person.
One concern with how recommendation algorithms is that they can create filter bubbles (or “epistemic bubbles” or “echo chambers”)
I've been messing around with this a bit on instagram. By hovering over a certain post for it's full duration, you can make most of the following reels the same type of post.
Additionally, people with disabilities might change their behavior (whether intentionally or not) to hide the fact that they have a disability, which is called masking and may take a mental or physical toll on the person masking, which others around them won’t realize.
Does this trend change in the context of social media? I feel like the access to anonymity online could be an outlet for someone to drop the mask for a bit.
This problem often shows up in how designs do or do not work for people with disabilities. But it also shows up in other areas as well.
This seems like an issue that has been going on forever. I am curious to see if it has become less prevailent in recent years as people have become more aware of it. I am also curious what role social media may play in this, as it provides a platform for people to call this sort of stuff out.
Additionally, social media might collect information about non-users, such as when a user posts a picture of themselves with a friend who doesn’t have an account, or a user shares their phone contact list with a social media site, some of whom don’t have accounts
I don't understand how this is permitted. I feel like for people's data to be used by a company, they should at least have to recieve the benifit of using whatever service that company is provided.
One of the main goals of social media sites is to increase the time users are spending on their social media sites.
I find this to be a very disturbing and ethically questionable buisiness model. The fact that these companies are explicitly made to make society less productive is something I find very concerning.
“Anonymous” the hacker group
Ok, I've definitely gone down the youtube rabbit hole of watching various things this group has done. It's interesting to know that a group who had an actual impact on the world started as a 4chan group.
Books and news write-ups had to be copied by hand, so that only the most desired books went “viral” and spread
This is fairly interesting, and something my discussion partner brought up in week two. I get that in some sense books are considered social media, but I feel like they have slipped away from that definition with new social media platforms becoming more and more prevailent. My biggest question regarding this is whether or not the lack of ability to recieve feedback directly through a boom would disqualify it from a more modern understanding of what constitutes social media.