This article describes an engineer at twitter (now X) who quit after voicing concerns of unethical data collection. I wanted to see if there was any ethics principles that would support data collection in unethical ways, and I couldn't find any that would except maybe Kantian, but even then I found that they would at best be neutral.

In another Informatics class I took, I encountered the question "Do social media and chatbots have an overall net positive effect on children?", and I felt like applying ethics principles such as consequentialism and taoism were useful in taking a stance on this question.

Doxing is when someone posts or exposes crucial personal information of someone else online. Some forms of doxing include exposing addresses, or in some cases, swatting, where people send swat teams to your house.

With the rise of new AI generation software such as SoraAI or google Veo3, I wonder how these forms of harassment will be amplified, as I have already seen AI videos of celebrities, especially right when Sora was launched. I know there is watermarks, but surely there will be software that can edit that out.

Patreon is a platform that is mainly used to support/give funding to creators, usually either in the form of paid products or a subscription service. It also provides certain rewards or perks to its users.

This is interesting because it makes me think about how these forms of communication may have evolved throughout history, or remained the same. For example, the action of passing a note in secrecy has been mainly replaced by texting.

Wikipedia editors are moderators who are mainly responsible for keeping order on the site and ensuring that the information present is both reliable and accurate. They have the power to block and unblock users, delete, recover, and rename pages, along with many other abilities.

Is it ever possible for systems with no moderators to succeed? Wouldn't the absence of any moderation make it much easier for errors, bugs, and other negative impacts on the system to be present?

This article details how YouTube has aggressive and frequent copyright strikes, and how some of them are incorrect. This limits the power that many creators have.

When I'm on Tik Tok, I see lots of content that is essentially re-uploads of movies/shows. It is interesting to see how many of them have tactics to avoid copyright, such as adding someone reacting to it so that it is technically a reaction video rather than the show itself.

The "Star Wars Kid", aka Ghyslain Raza was a child featured in a viral video of a mock lightsaber battle. The video is estimated to have amassed over a billion views, and the internet was struck by the hilarity of the video. However, Raza was psychologically damaged and suffered emotionally from the video, even finishing school in a psych ward. This example demonstrates the dangers of the internet and how someone can suffer greatly from going viral.

It's interesting to see this as I remember in the early days of the internet when digital chain mail would go around with a negative or scary incentive to repost the image or thread.

It is neat to see how algorithms work and how some times they can have unintentional errors such as this. While it may seem like a good idea to keep showing users content that they don't agree with, would it eventually make the user not want to use the platform as they are bombarded with content they don't like?

In another class I am taking this quarter, we are learning about biases that make their way, whether intentional or unintentional, into algorithms and social media systems. It is interesting to see the connection between the two.