How have your views on social media changed (or been reinforced)?
I am a bit more aware of my digital footprint, and how everything I interact with can lead back to me. I am also more aware of cookies and how websites can use that access for many things.
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 how people use social media, and how harassment and spam bots operate.
I enjoyed this class because of the more in depth learning of things that are found everywhere on the internet. With how data is taken to how people interact with each other online has been a nice retrospective.
Most programming languages are based in English, and there are very few non-English programming languages, and those that exist are rarely used.
I did not know that there were other programing languages that were not in English, which is something that should be obvious. I wonder if programming in other languages can be auto translated for easier access for everyone trying to code.
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.
Meta is owed by Facebook, which was known for taking a lot of information from peoples data. With meta, I see no reason why they would switch this model up, since they probably have more control over peoples data now.
Do you think there are situations where reconciliation is not possible?
Only for those who have done physical damage to someone else where their intention is clear like abuse or worse. The thing is by that point, it should not be labeled as cancel culture since it is more severe then that.
The term “cancel culture” can be used for public shaming and criticism, but is used in a variety of ways, and it doesn’t refer to just one thing.
I dislike the idea of cancel culture because it usually comes from a place of superiority rather than criticizing. If someone who gets canceled does not have the money or power to get passed it, they would be the most affected, which can lead to a drastic reaction.
Do you believe crowd harassment is ever justified?
I do not really believe that any type of harassment is ever really justified. I see that in the moment it can feel alright to go dogpile on someone, but it can mess up information and can make a bad situation worse, where the wrong person can be target and cause dangerous actions because of it.
Doxing: Publicly posting identifying information about someone (e.g., full name, address, phone number, etc.).
It is very interesting that just even a small amount of information can have some get a general or even specific gist of where you are. I have seen many people on the internet dox someone just because of an online argument. Some even go as far as calling and emailing schools top get a person in trouble.
16.3.1. “Solving” a “Problem”
I have seen tiktoks where people see a person and want to get info about that person (like their tiktok account's name). This type of comments encourage others to try and seek out their information, thus solving the "problem."
When tasks are done through large groups of people making relatively small contributions, this is called crowdsourcing. The people making the contributions generally come from a crowd of people that aren’t necessarily tied to the task (e.g., all internet users can edit Wikipedia), but then people from the crowd either get chosen to participate, or volunteer themselves.
One example of crowdsourcing can be kickstarter, where anyone can help donate to a cause. That cause can be anything for funding for a game or helping a person in need.
What do you think Facebook should do about this?
Facebook should seek out those who speak that language and reach other qualifications. They should also be responsible so that they can be trusted to see what needs to be moderator. They can also help in programming a bot to detect things in that language.
So most social media sites will often have rules about content moderation, and at least put on the appearance of trying to stop illegal content
This type of moderation can be complicated, one example being YouTube. There can be bots that detect if you post a full movie online, so it gets reported. However videos can get false flagged and cause serious damage to a channel that did not deserve it.
“Tendency to continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening, or depressing. Many people are finding themselves reading continuously bad news about COVID-19 without the ability to stop or step back.”
I rarely doomscroll, but I understand the reason why other people do it. On social media, it is easy to continue scrolling on something that captures your interest, even when it is sad. The design is very easy to get addicted, which can take a toll on someone mentally.
Some people view internet-based social media (and other online activities) as inherently toxic and therefore encourage a digital detox, where people take some form of a break from social media platforms and digital devices.
I have never heard of the specific term digital detox, but I have heard of taking breaks for mental health. I have done it a few times with some benefits, yet I always redownload the apps anyway.
Finally, social media platforms use algorithms and design layouts which determine what posts people see. There are various rules and designs social media sites can use, and they can amplify natural selection and unnatural selection in various ways. They can do this through recommendation algorithms as we saw last chapter, as well as choosing what actions are allowed and what amount of friction is given to those actions, as well as what data is collected and displayed.
Memes can sort themselves on the internet with how long they last. Many things can factor into the lifespan, with how funny is the meme, how many ways can you push a meme, how long until a meme becomes repetitive and annoying. This all plays with how fast the internet moves, where one joke can go from incredibly funny in one minute to outright annoying the next..
In the 1976 book The Selfish Gene, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins1 said rather than looking at the evolution of organisms, it made even more sense to look at the evolution of the genes of those organisms (sections of DNA that perform some functions and are inherited). For example, if a bee protects its nest by stinging an attacking animal and dying, then it can’t reproduce and it might look like a failure of evolution. But if the gene that told the bee to die protecting the nest was shared by the other bees in the nest, then that one bee dying allows the gene to keep being replicated, so the gene is successful evolutionarily.
I have heard of the origin of the word "meme," yet it is interesting to hear more from the original source. It is ironic how a word that is about the nature of evolution would go through an evolution in of itself to how the word is used today.
Clickbait: trying to give you a mystery you have to click to find the answer to (e.g., “You won’t believe what happened when this person tried to eat a stapler!”). They do this to boost clicks on their link, which they hope boosts them in the recommendation algorithm, and gets their ads more views Trolling: by provoking reactions, they hope to boost their content more Coordinated actions: have many accounts (possibly including bots) like a post, or many people use a hashtag, or have people trade positive reviews
Many of these I have seen on YouTube throughout the years. Trolling in video games was a big one, since the reactions were most of the time genuine yet enjoyable because of no actual harm being done. There was also a time where YouTube would give more ad revenue and get your video more recommended to others if it reached 10 minutes, so many youtubers tried their best to stretch the watch time to reach it.
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.
I have witnessed this type of algorithm in many types of social medias. Websites such as tiktok, twitter, instagram, reddit, and many websites use this to target a specific person (the current user), to get them to stay on the website, or spend money on products.
When creating computer programs, programmers can do things that aren’t possible with architecture (where Universal Design came out of), that is: programs can change how they work for each individual user. All people (including disabled people) have different abilities, and making a system that can modify how it runs to match the abilities a user has is called Ability based design. For example, a phone might detect that the user has gone from a dark to a light environment, and might automatically change the phone brightness or color scheme to be easier to read. Or a computer program might detect that a user’s hands tremble when they are trying to select something on the screen, and the computer might change the text size, or try to guess the intended selection.
There are similar options in video games as well, such as a game called The last of us 2, a zombie survival game where the whole game can be played with sound only, where blind people can also play the game. In many type of games there is also a color blind mode, where you can change some colors in the game so that it is easier to see and read.
If you can’t see the video, it shows someone with light skin putting their hand under a soap dispenser, and soap comes out. Then a person with dark skin puts their hand under a soap dispenser, and nothing happens. The person with dark skin then puts a white paper towel on their hand and then when they put their hand under the soap dispenser, soap comes out. When the person with dark skin takes off the white paper towel, the soap dispenser won’t work for them anymore.
It is interesting to think how these design flaws go by unnoticed. Because it can range from just being malicious to having a huge oversight of such a simple device like a soap dispenser. This type of view can cause greater errors in bigger devices like cameras and such.
But social media companies often fail at keeping our information secure.
There have been cases with websites like NordVPN, Facebook, Twitter and many other websites. Passwords and other important details can get revealed to the world, and you may get unlucky and get it all swept before you can act. Companies have to fix the situation fast before all this data spreads out since their reputation gets tarnished.
We might want to discuss something privately, avoiding embarrassment that might happen if it were shared publicly
You have to be careful with what you say in private messages, since there is always a way for a company to track what has already been said. There are even some websites that track when you were last on the website.
Are you surprised by any of the things that can be done with data mining?
I am surprised by the assumptions that can be made from just a bit of data taken. I am however not surprised with how much data can be taken from a person. Whenever you use the internet, you are leaving a trail, a "digital footprint," where many companies can take whatever they want and do whatever they want with it, which I always assumed is unavoidable.
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):
That example truly highlights just how much small bits of info can reveal about someone. With how much the average person interacts with something like the internet, I can see how suggestions and ads can be targeted to a person.
Here are some examples of parody reviews of the banana slicer:
The reviews of this product use humor to highlight the use for this product. The product is very specific to a point where you ask "why not use a knife?" which the reviews point out its impracticality in a funny manor, getting more people to see the review due to people finding the review helpful.
Practical jokes / pranks
It is interesting to think that pranks were common in a time without internet, since a lot of pranks are made to show an audience now. i wonder if during this time, would there be more or less people would try to pull pranks on strangers if they could not record it.
Catfishing: Create a fake profile that doesn’t match the actual user, usually in an attempt to trick or scam someone
Anyone who has had at least a little bit of time on the internet has probably ran into a catfish. They are very common, from impersonating youtubers to make you press a link, to Instagram or tinder profiles trying to impersonate someone else to scam you. They are the most common bot/method that people on the internet use.
Why We Care About Authenticity
Authenticity is very important, especially when the scope is the internet. Anyone from any sort of background can post whatever they want about any topic that they can come up with. Any post has a chance of blowing up and have other people see a post and believe its message without any backing, which can have many different consequences.
In the mid-1990s, some internet users started manually adding regular updates to the top of their personal websites (leaving the old posts below), using their sites as an online diary, or a (web) log of their thoughts.
I believe that blogs were a big step for the advancement of social media. Having people personalize their profile and have people be able to follow your specific posts are what a lot of social media services became primarily about.
The 1980s and 1990s also saw an emergence of more instant forms of communication with chat applications.
I have always heard of people using these rooms to talk about all sorts of media like games and movies. So I find it fascinating on how these rooms actually looked like back in the day. Especially since we have many apps that use this same premise with a more updated interface.
Can you think of an example of pernicious ignorance in social media interaction? What’s something that we might often prefer to overlook when deciding what is important?
One example I can think of was during prime corvid times, a bunch of celebrities came together to sing "imagine" by John Lennon. The celebrities involved thought that they were spreading some positivity while the rest of the world believed the video to be in poor taste and lack of awareness with the lyrics.
See also, this saying in statistics: All models are wrong, but some are useful
I have never heard of this saying before, but just the phrase itself helps me understand what it's trying to say. There are many precautions that go into collecting data so that the data can be as precise as possible, yet there are many variables that can vary the data, thus making a model imperfect. Yet there are models that implement methods to limit these imperfections using the knowledge they have at the moment to make the best model possible in the moment.
How are people’s expectations different for a bot and a “normal” user?
A person is responsible for their actions, and in a online atmosphere, would have to face consequences of what they post on the internet. However with a bot, their can be a lot of outside influence where it might not be obvious as to who is at fault, through an accident or on purpose.
On the other hand, some bots are made with the intention of harming, countering, or deceiving others.
I have seen many type of harmful bots on the internet. A common one I find for example is bots intimidating a youtuber in their own comment section where they copy their username as well as their profile pic. They would state that they have a gift and require you to click a link.
What things about the design of Twitter enabled these events to happen?
I believe that by having trending hashtags be available on the same page to search things up helped spread this tweet as rapidly as it did. Twitter thrives off of interactions, whether its from likes, retweets, and comments, all of this helps get a hashtag moving across the platform. By displaying how many people are using the hashtag, it peaks more peoples interest as to why so many people are talking about it.
Altruism is bad.
While I do see the benefits that Egoism can bring, I disagree with this approach because having no sense of Altruism can lead to a dangerous mindset depending on ones goals. The people that surround us gives many a realization that some actions can have consequences that affect more than yourself. When you have no altruism, there are no brakes for you or those around you.