21.3.1. As a Social Media User# 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. 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. 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.

21.2. Ethics in Tech# In the first chapter of our book we quoted actor Kumail Nanjiani on tech innovators’ lack of consideration of ethical implications of their work. Of course, concerns about the implications of technological advancement are nothing new. In Plato’s Phaedrus (~370BCE), Socrates tells (or makes up1) a story from Egypt critical of the invention of writing: Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt, […] [then] came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; […] [W]hen they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: […] this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. 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) Fig. 21.1 The start of an xkcd comic compiling a hundred years of complaints about how technology has speed up the pace of life. (full transcript of comic available at explainxkcd)# Inventors ignoring the ethical consequences of their creations is nothing new as well, and gets critiqued regularly: Fig. 21.2 A major theme of the movie Jurassic Park (1993) is scientists not thinking through the implications of their creations.# Fig. 21.3 Tweet parodying how tech innovator often do blatantly unethical things# Many people like to believe (or at least convince others) that they are doing something to make the world a better place, as in this parody clip from the Silicon Valley show (the one Kumail Nanjiani was on, though not in this clip): 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.

20.1. What is Colonialism?# As most social media platforms are headquartered in a very set of locations (e.g., Silicon Valley in the US, and Beijing China), but used all over the world, it is important for us to look at the concepts and history of colonialism to understand what it means for social media to be controlled in these few places. So let’s start by defining colonialism and some related concepts.

19.1.2. Socialism# Let’s contrast capitalism with socialism: Socialism, in contrast is a system where: A government owns the businesses (sometimes called “government services”) A government decides what to make and what the price is the price might be free, like with public schools, public streets and highways, public playgrounds, etc. A government then may hire wage laborers at predetermined rates for their work, and the excess business profits or losses are handled by the government For example, losses are covered by taxes, and excess may pay for other government services or go directly to the people (e.g., Alaska uses its oil profits to pay people to live there). As an example, there is one Seattle City Sewer system, which is run by the Seattle government. Having many competing sewer systems could actually make a big mess of the underground pipe system.

19.1. What is Capitalism?# Why do social media platforms make decisions that harm users? And why do social media platforms sometimes go down paths of self-destruction and alienating their users? Sometimes these questions can be answered by looking at the economic forces that drive decision-making on social media platforms, in particular with capitalism. So let’s start by defining capitalism.

While public criticism and shaming have always been a part of human culture, the Internet and social media have created new ways of doing so. We’ve seen examples of this before with Justine Sacco and with crowd harassment (particularly dogpiling). For an example of public shaming, we can look at late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel’s annual Halloween prank, where he has parents film their children as they tell the parents tell the children that the parents ate all the kids’ Halloween candy. Parents post these videos online, where viewers are intended to laugh at the distress, despair, and sense of betrayal the children express. I will not link to these videos which I find horrible, but instead link you to these articles: Jimmy Kimmel’s Halloween prank can scar children. Why are we laughing? (archived copy) Jimmy Kimmel’s Halloween Candy Prank: Harmful Parenting? We can also consider events in the #MeToo movement as at least in part public shaming of sexual harassers (but also of course solidarity and organizing of victims of sexual harassment, and pushes for larger political, organizational, and social changes).

18.1. Shame vs. Guilt in childhood development# Before we talk about public criticism and shaming and adults, let’s look at the role of shame in childhood. In at least some views about shame and childhood1, shame and guilt hold different roles in childhood development: 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. In this view, a good parent might see their child doing something bad or dangerous, and tell them to stop. The child may feel shame (they might not be developmentally able to separate their identity from the momentary rejection). The parent may then comfort the child to let the child know that they are not being rejected as a person, it was just their action that was a problem. The child’s relationship with the parent is repaired, and over time the child will learn to feel guilt instead of shame and seek to repair harm instead of hide.

17.4.1. Moderation and Violence# You might remember from Chapter 14 that social contracts, whether literal or metaphorical, involve groups of people all accepting limits to their freedoms. Because of this, some philosophers say that a state or nation is, fundamentally, violent. Violence in this case refers to the way that individual Natural Rights and freedoms are violated by external social constraints. This kind of violence is considered to be legitimated by the agreement to the social contract. This might be easier to understand if you imagine a medical scenario. Say you have broken a bone and you are in pain. A doctor might say that the bone needs to be set; this will be painful, and kind of a forceful, “violent” action in which someone is interfering with your body in a painful way. So the doctor asks if you agree to let her set the bone. You agree, and so the doctor’s action is construed as being a legitimate interference with your body and your freedom. If someone randomly just walked up to you and started pulling at the injured limb, this unagreed violence would not be considered legitimate. Likewise, when medical practitioners interfere with a patient’s body in a way that is non-consensual or not what the patient agreed to, then the violence is considered illegitimate, or morally bad. We tend to think of violence as being another “normatively loaded” word, like authenticity. But where authenticity is usually loaded with a positive connotation–on the whole, people often value authenticity as a good thing–violence is loaded with a negative connotation. Yes, the doctor setting the bone is violent and invasive, but we don’t usually call this “violence” because it is considered to be a legitimate exercise of violence. Instead, we reserve the term “violence” mostly for describing forms of interference that we consider to be morally bad.

Individual harassment (one individual harassing another individual) has always been part of human cultures, bur social media provides new methods of doing so. There are many methods by which through social media. This can be done privately through things like: Bullying: like sending mean messages through DMs Cyberstalking: Continually finding the account of someone, and creating new accounts to continue following them. Or possibly researching the person’s physical location. Hacking: Hacking into an account or device to discover secrets, or make threats. Tracking: An abuser might track the social media use of their partner or child to prevent them from making outside friends. They may even install spy software on their victim’s phone. Death threats / rape threats Etc. Individual harassment can also be done publicly before an audience (such as classmates or family). For example: Bullying: like posting public mean messages Impersonation: Making an account that appears to be from someone and having that account say things to embarrass or endanger the victim. Doxing: Publicly posting identifying information about someone (e.g., full name, address, phone number, etc.). Revenge porn / deep-fake porn Etc.

16.1.1. Different Ways of Collaborating and Communicating# There have been many efforts to use computers to replicate the experience of communicating with someone in person, through things like video chats, or even telepresence robots]. But there are ways that attempts to recreate in-person interactions inevitably fall short and don’t feel the same. Instead though, we can look at different characteristics that computer systems can provide, and find places where computer-based communication works better, and is Beyond Being There (pdf here). Some of the different characteristics that means of communication can have include (but are not limited to): 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. Because of these (and other) differences, different forms of communication might be preferable for different tasks. For example, you might send an email to the person sitting next at work to you if you want to keep an archive of the communication (which is also conveniently grouped into email threads). Or you might send a text message to the person sitting next to you if you are criticizing the teacher, but want to do so discretely, so the teacher doesn’t notice. These different forms of communication can then support different methods of crowdsourcing.

16.1. Crowdsourcing Definition# 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. When a crowd is providing financial contributions, that is called crowdfunding (e.g., patreon, kickstarter, gofundme). Humans have always collaborated on tasks, and crowds have been enlisted in performing tasks long before the internet existed. What social media (and other internet systems) have done is expand the options for how people can collaborate on tasks.

15.1.1. No Moderators# Some systems have no moderators. For example, a personal website that can only be edited by the owner of the website doesn’t need any moderator set up (besides the person who makes their website). If a website does let others contribute in some way, and is small, no one may be checking and moderating it. But as soon as the wrong people (or spam bots) discover it, it can get flooded with spam, or have illegal content put up (which could put the owner of the site in legal jeopardy).

14.1.4. Potentially Offensive# Another category is content that users or advertisers might find offensive. If users see things that offend them too often, they might leave the site, and if advertisers see their ads next to too much offensive content, they might stop paying for ads on the site. So platforms might put limits on language (e.g., racial slurs), violence, sex, and nudity. Sometimes different users or advertisers have different opinions on what should be allowed or not. For example, “The porn ban of 2018 was a defining event for Tumblr that led to a 30 percent drop in traffic and a mass exodus of users that blindsided the company.”

14.1.1. Quality Control# In order to make social media sites usable and interesting to users, they may ban different types of content such as advertisements, disinformation, or off-topic posts. Almost all social media sites (even the ones that claim “free speech”) block spam, mass-produced unsolicited messages, generally advertisements, scams, or trolling. Without quality control moderation, the social media site will likely fill up with content that the target users of the site don’t want, and those users will leave. What content is considered “quality” content will vary by site, with 4chan considering a lot of offensive and trolling content to be “quality” but still banning spam (because it would make the site repetitive in a boring way), while most sites would ban some offensive content.

13.1.1. Digital Detox?# 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. While taking a break from parts or all of social media can be good for someone’s mental health (e.g., doomscrolling is making them feel more anxious, or they are currently getting harassed online), viewing internet-based social media as inherently toxic and trying to return to an idyllic time from before the Internet is not a realistic or honest view of the matter. In her essay “The Great Offline,” Lauren Collee argues that this is just a repeat of earlier views of city living and the “wilderness.” As white Americans were colonizing the American continent, they began idealizing “wilderness” as being uninhabited land (ignoring the Indigenous people who already lived there, or kicking them out or killing them). In the 19th century, as wilderness tourism was taking off as an industry, natural landscapes were figured as an antidote to the social pressures of urban living, offering truth in place of artifice, interiority in place of exteriority, solitude in place of small talk. Similarly, advocates for digital detox build an idealized “offline” separate from the complications of modern life: Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together, characterizes the offline world as a physical place, a kind of Edenic paradise. “Not too long ago,” she writes, “people walked with their heads up, looking at the water, the sky, the sand” — now, “they often walk with their heads down, typing.” […] Gone are the happy days when families would gather around a weekly televised program like our ancestors around the campfire! 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’m no stranger to apps that help me curb my screen time, and I’ll admit I’ve often felt better for using them. But on a more communal level, I suspect that cultures of digital detox — in suggesting that the online world is inherently corrupting and cannot be improved — discourage us from seeking alternative models for what the internet could look like. I don’t want to be trapped in cycles of connection and disconnection, deleting my social media profiles for weeks at a time, feeling calmer but isolated, re-downloading them, feeling worse but connected again. For as long as we keep dumping our hopes into the conceptual pit of “the offline world,” those hopes will cease to exist as forces that might generate change in the worlds we actually live in together. So in this chapter, we will not consider internet-based social media as inherently toxic or beneficial for mental health. We will be looking for more nuance and where things go well, where they do not, and why.

13.1. Social Media Influence on Mental Health# In 2019 the company Facebook (now called Meta) presented an internal study that found that Instagram was bad for the mental health of teenage girls, and yet they still allowed teenage girls to use Instagram. So, what does social media do to the mental health of teenage girls, and to all its other users? The answer is of course complicated and varies. Some have argued that Facebook’s own data is not as conclusive as you think about teens and mental health. 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: People historically came to cosmetic surgeons with photos of celebrities whose features they hoped to emulate. Now, they’re coming with edited selfies. They want to bring to life the version of themselves that they curate through apps like FaceTune and Snapchat. Selfies, Filters, and Snapchat Dysmorphia: How Photo-Editing Harms Body Image Comedian and director Bo Burnham has his own observations about how social media is influencing mental health: “If [social media] was just bad, I’d just tell all the kids to throw their phone in the ocean, and it’d be really easy. The problem is it - we are hyper-connected, and we’re lonely. We’re overstimulated, and we’re numb. We’re expressing our self, and we’re objectifying ourselves. So I think it just sort of widens and deepens the experiences of what kids are going through. But in regards to social anxiety, social anxiety - there’s a part of social anxiety I think that feels like you’re a little bit disassociated from yourself. And it’s sort of like you’re in a situation, but you’re also floating above yourself, watching yourself in that situation, judging it. And social media literally is that. You know, it forces kids to not just live their experience but be nostalgic for their experience while they’re living it, watch people watch them, watch people watch them watch them. My sort of impulse is like when the 13 year olds of today grow up to be social scientists, I’ll be very curious to hear what they have to say about it. But until then, it just feels like we just need to gather the data.” Director Bo Burnham On Growing Up With Anxiety — And An Audience - NPR Fresh Air (10:15-11:20) It can be difficult to measure the effects of social media on mental health since there are so many types of social media, and it permeates our cultures even of people who don’t use it directly. Some researchers have found that people using social media may enter a dissociation state, where they lose track of time (like what happens when someone is reading a good book). Researchers at Facebook decided to try to measure how their recommendation algorithm was influencing people’s mental health. So they changed their recommendation algorithm to show some people more negative posts and some people more positive posts. They found that people who were given more negative posts tended to post more negatively themselves. Now, this experiment was done without informing users that they were part of an experiment, and when people found out that they might be part of a secret mood manipulation experiment, they were upset.

11.3.1. How recommendations can go well or poorly# Friends or Follows:# Recommendations for friends or people to follow can go well when the algorithm finds you people you want to connect with. Recommendations can go poorly when they do something like recommend an ex or an abuser because they share many connections with you. Reminders:# Automated reminders can go well in a situation such as when a user enjoys the nostalgia of seeing something from their past. Automated reminders can go poorly when they give users unwanted or painful reminders, such as for miscarriages, funerals, or break-ups Ads:# 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). Advertisements can go poorly if they become part of discrimination (like only showing housing ads to certain demographics of people), or reveal private information (like revealing to a family that someone is pregnant) Content (posts, photos, articles, etc.)# Content recommendations can go well when users find content they are interested in. Sometimes algorithms do a good job of it and users are appreciative. TikTok has been mentioned in particular as providing surprisingly accurate recommendations, though Professor Arvind Narayanan argues that TikTok’s success with its recommendations relies less on advanced recommendation algorithms, and more on the design of the site making it very easy to skip the bad recommendations and get to the good ones. Content recommendations can go poorly when it sends people down problematic chains of content, like by grouping videos of children in a convenient way for pedophiles, or Amazon recommending groups of materials for suicide.

Individual analysis focuses on the behavior, bias, and responsibility an individual has, while systemic analysis focuses on the how organizations and rules may have their own behaviors, biases, and responsibility that aren’t necessarily connected to what any individual inside intends. For example, there were differences in US criminal sentencing guidelines between crack cocaine vs. powder cocaine in the 90s. The guidelines suggested harsher sentences on the version of cocaine more commonly used by Black people, and lighter sentences on the version of cocaine more commonly used by white people. Therefore, when these guidelines were followed, they had have racially biased (that is, racist) outcomes regardless of intent or bias of the individual judges. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act).

When social media platforms show users a series of posts, updates, friend suggestions, ads, or anything really, they have to use some method of determining which things to show users. 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. Some recommendation algorithms can be simple such as reverse chronological order, meaning it shows users the latest posts (like how blogs work, or Twitter’s “See latest tweets” option). They can also be very complicated taking into account many factors, such as: 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. And probably many more factors as well! Now, how these algorithms precisely work is hard to know, because social media sites keep these algorithms secret, probably for multiple reasons: They don’t want another social media site copying their hard work in coming up with an algorithm They don’t want users to see the algorithm and then be able to complain about specific details They don’t want malicious users to see the algorithm and figure out how to best make their content go viral

Those with disabilities often find ways to cope with their disability, that is, find ways to work around difficulties they encounter and seek out places and strategies that work for them (whether realizing they have a disability or not). 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. For example, kids who are nearsighted and don’t realize their ability to see is different from other kids will often seek out seats at the front of classrooms where they can see better. As for us two authors, we both have ADHD and were drawn to PhD programs where our tendency to hyperfocus on following our curiosity was rewarded (though executive dysfunction with finishing projects created challenges)1. This way of managing disabilities puts the burden fully on disabled people to manage their disability in a world that was not designed for them, trying to fit in with “normal” people.

A disability is an ability that a person doesn’t have, but that their society expects them to have.1 For example: If a building only has staircases to get up to the second floor (it was built assuming everyone could walk up stairs), then someone who cannot get up stairs has a disability in that situation. If a physical picture book was made with the assumption that people would be able to see the pictures, then someone who cannot see has a disability in that situation. If tall grocery store shelves were made with the assumption that people would be able to reach them, then people who are short, or who can’t lift their arms up, or who can’t stand up, all would have a disability in that situation. If an airplane seat was designed with little leg room, assuming people’s legs wouldn’t be too long, then someone who is very tall, or who has difficulty bending their legs would have a disability in that situation. Which abilities are expected of people, and therefore what things are considered disabilities, are socially defined. Different societies and groups of people make different assumptions about what people can do, and so what is considered a disability in one group, might just be “normal” in another. There are many things we might not be able to do that won’t be considered disabilities because our social groups don’t expect us to be able to do them. For example, none of us have wings that we can fly with, but that is not considered a disability, because our social groups didn’t assume we would be able to. Or, for a more practical example, let’s look at color vision: Most humans are trichromats, meaning they can see three base colors (red, green, and blue), along with all combinations of those three colors. Human societies often assume that people will be trichromats. So people who can’t see as many colors are considered to be color blind, a disability. But there are also a small number of people who are tetrachromats and can see four base colors2 and all combinations of those four colors. In comparison to tetrachromats, trichromats (the majority of people), lack the ability to see some colors. But our society doesn’t build things for tetrachromats, so their extra ability to see color doesn’t help them much. And trichromats’ relative reduction in seeing color doesn’t cause them difficulty, so being a trichromat isn’t considered to be a disability. Some disabilities are visible disabilities that other people can notice by observing the disabled person (e.g., wearing glasses is an indication of a visual disability, or a missing limb might be noticeable). Other disabilities are invisible disabilities that other people cannot notice by observing the disabled person (e.g., chronic fatigue syndrome, contact lenses for a visual disability, or a prosthetic for a missing limb covered by clothing). Sometimes people with invisible disabilities get unfairly accused of “faking” or “making up” their disability (e.g., someone who can walk short distances but needs to use a wheelchair when going long distances). Disabilities can be accepted as socially normal, like is sometimes the case for wearing glasses or contacts, or it can be stigmatized as socially unacceptable, inconvenient, or blamed on the disabled person. Some people (like many with chronic pain) would welcome a cure that got rid of their disability. Others (like many autistic people), are insulted by the suggestion that there is something wrong with them that needs to be “cured,” and think the only reason autism is considered a “disability” at all is because society doesn’t make reasonable accommodations for them the way it does for neurotypical people. Many of the disabilities we mentioned above were permanent disabilities, that is, disabilities that won’t go away. But disabilities can also be temporary disabilities, like a broken leg in a cast, which may eventually get better. Disabilities can also vary over time (e.g., “Today is a bad day for my back pain”). Disabilities can even be situational disabilities, like the loss of fine motor skills when wearing thick gloves in the cold, or trying to watch a video on your phone in class with the sound off, or trying to type on a computer while holding a baby. As you look through all these types of disabilities, you might discover ways you have experienced disability in your life. Though please keep in mind that different disabilities can be very different, and everyone’s experience with their own disability can vary. So having some experience with disability does not make someone an expert in any other experience of disability.

While we have our concerns about the privacy of our information, we often share it with social media platforms under the understanding that they will hold that information securely. But social media companies often fail at keeping our information secure. For example, the proper security practice for storing user passwords is to use a special individual encryption process for each individual password. This way the database can only confirm that a password was the right one, but it can’t independently look up what the password is or even tell if two people used the same password. Therefore if someone had access to the database, the only way to figure out the right password is to use “brute force,” that is, keep guessing passwords until they guess the right one (and each guess takes a lot of time). 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. From a security perspective there are many risks that a company faces, such as: Employees at the company misusing their access, like Facebook employees using their database permissions to stalk women Hackers finding a vulnerability and inserting, modifying, or downloading information. For example: hackers stealing the names, Social Security numbers, and birthdates of 143 million Americans from Equifax hackers posting publicly the phone numbers, names, locations, and some email addresses of 530 million Facebook users, or about 7% of all people on Earth Hacking attempts can be made on individuals, whether because the individual is the goal target, or because the individual works at a company which is the target. Hackers can target individuals with attacks like: Password reuse attacks, where if they find out your password from one site, they try that password on many other sites Hackers tricking a computer into thinking they are another site, for example: the US NSA impersonated Google Social engineering, where they try to gain access to information or locations by tricking people. For example: 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. Some people have made malicious QR codes to take you to a phishing site. Many of the actions done by the con-man Frank Abagnale, which were portrayed in the movie Catch Me If You Can One of the things you can do as an individual to better protect yourself against hacking is to enable 2-factor authentication on your accounts.

9.1. Privacy# There are many reasons, both good and bad, that we might want to keep information private. There might be some things that we just feel like aren’t for public sharing (like how most people wear clothes in public, hiding portions of their bodies) We might want to discuss something privately, avoiding embarrassment that might happen if it were shared publicly We might want a conversation or action that happens in one context not to be shared in another (context collapse) We might want to avoid the consequences of something we’ve done (whether ethically good or bad), so we keep the action or our identity private We might have done or said something we want to be forgotten or make at least made less prominent We might want to prevent people from stealing our identities or accounts, so we keep information (like passwords) private We might want to avoid physical danger from a stalker, so we might keep our location private We might not want to be surveilled by a company or government that could use our actions or words against us (whether what we did was ethically good or bad) When we use social media platforms though, we at least partially give up some of our privacy. 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. In some cases we might want a social media company to be able to see our “private” messages, such as if someone was sending us death threats. We might want to report that user to the social media company for a ban, or to law enforcement (though many people have found law enforcement to be not helpful), and we want to open access to those “private” messages to prove that they were sent.

8.2. Data From the Reddit API# When we’ve been accessing Reddit through Python and the “PRAW” code library. The praw code library works by sending requests across the internet to Reddit, using what is called an “application programming interface” or API for short. APIs have a set of rules for what requests you can make, what happens when you make the request, and what information you can get back. If you are interested in learning more about what you can do with praw and what information you can get back, you can look at the official documentation for those. But be warned they are not organized in a friendly way for newcomers and take some getting used to to figure out what these documentation pages are talking about. So, if you are interested, you can look at the praw library documentation to find out what the library can do (again, not organized in a beginner-friendly way). You can learn a little more by clicking on the praw models and finding a list of the types of data for each of the models, and a list of functions (i.e., actions) you can do with them. You can also look up information on the data that you can get from the Reddit API by looking at the Reddit API Documentation. The Reddit API lets you access just some of the data that Reddit tracks, but Reddit and other social media platforms track much more than they let you have access to.

Social media platforms collect various types of data on their users. Some data is directly provided to the platform by the users. Platforms may ask users for information like: email address name profile picture interests friends Platforms also collect information on how users interact with the site. They might collect information like (they don’t necessarily collect all this, but they might): when users are logged on and logged off who users interact with What users click on what posts users pause over where users are located what users send in direct messages to each other Online advertisers can see what pages their ads are being requested on, and track users across those sites. So, if an advertiser sees their ad is being displayed on an Amazon page for shoes, then the advertiser can start showing shoe ads to that same user when they go to another website. 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 (Facebook does this). Social media platforms then use “data mining” to search through all this data to try to learn more about their users, find patterns of behavior, and in the end, make more money.

7.1.2. Why troll?# If the immediate goal of the action of trolling is to cause disruption or provoke emotional reactions, what is it that makes people want to do this disruption or provoking of emotional reactions? Some reasons people engage in trolling behavior include: Amusement: Trolls often find the posts amusing, whether due to the disruption or emotional reaction. If the motivation is amusement at causing others’ pain, that is called doing it for the lulz. Gatekeeping: Some trolling is done in a community to separate out an ingroup from outgroup (sometimes called newbies or normies). The ingroup knows that a post is just trolling, but the outgroup is not aware and will engage earnestly. This is sometimes known as trolling the newbies. Feeling Smart: Going with the gatekeeping role above, trolling can make a troll or observer feel smarter than others, since they are able to see that it is trolling while others don’t realize it. Feeling Powerful: Trolling sometimes gives trolls a feeling of empowerment when they successfully cause disruption or cause pain.** Advance and argument / make a point: Trolling is sometimes done in order to advance an argument or make a point. For example, proving that supposedly reliable news sources are gullible by getting them to repeat an absurd gross story. Punish or stop: Some trolling is in service of some view of justice, where a person, group or organization is viewed as doing something “bad” or “deserving” of punishment, and trolling is a way of fighting back.

Fig. 7.1 On Martin Luther King Day Jr. Day 2020, comedian Jaboukie Young-White, used his verified identity blue checkmark (before Elon Musk made blue checkmarks purchasable) to impersonate the official FBI account. He then made a trolling Tweet, pretending to be the FBI and referring to the theory that the FBI was behind the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (note: while this theory is not confirmed, the FBI definitely tried to get MLK to kill himself). Twitter quickly suspended Jaboukie’s account after this post, but many viewed his Tweet as a heroic (and funny) act of protest.

As a rule, humans do not like to be duped. We like to know which kinds of signals to trust, and which to distrust. Being lulled into trusting a signal only to then have it revealed that the signal was untrustworthy is a shock to the system, unnerving and upsetting. People get angry when they find they have been duped. These reactions are even more heightened when we find we have been duped simply for someone else’s amusement at having done so. Fig. 6.1 A Cylinder Seal from ~3100 BCE, used to make a repeating pattern which would be used to indicate the authenticity.# These reactions make sense. Try to imagine the early days of human social life, before we started attaching our welfare to the land in terms of planting crops and building structures designed for permanence. Our nomadic forebears functioned in groups who coordinated in highly specialized ways to ensure the survival of the whole. Although such communities are often pictured as being prehistoric, primitive, and obsolete, we now know that such societies were and are highly sophisticated, often developing and depending on highly specified legal codes, some of which are still in use today in Bedouin communities in North Africa. Other nomadic groups, such as Roma people (which you may have heard derogatorily called ‘gypsies’), live within and around land-based nations and their various borders and laws. To ensure the survival of their ethnicity, cultures, and languages, they depend on being able to trust each other. The nations whose land we are living and studying on here also knew the importance of being able to know who can be trusted. These needs may not always be as obvious in highly individualized societies, like Post-Enlightenment Europe and the United States. The possibility for self-reliance has been created in part by making certain things dependable and institutionalized. You can go get yourself food without feeling like you have to trust anyone because you can just go to the store (which has to adhere to corporate legal requirements) and buy food (the supply of which is made stable by complex networks of growing, manufacturing, and transportation, covered by the assurances of FDA-compliant labeling) from people who work there (and are subject to labor laws and HR regulations, which, if they are not followed, means the staff person does not get paid, so their wellbeing depends on them doing their job). The need to trust other people is obscured by the many institutions that we have created. Institutions have ways, sometimes, of getting around human whims and surprises. But at the end of the day, it is still hugely important to us that we feel clear about who can be trusted, and for what.

Early in the days of YouTube, one YouTube channel (lonelygirl15) started to release vlogs (video web logs) consisting of a girl in her room giving updates on the mundane dramas of her life. But as the channel continued posting videos and gaining popularity, viewers started to question if the events being told in the vlogs were true stories, or if they were fictional. Eventually, users discovered that it was a fictional show, and the girl giving the updates was an actress. Many users were upset that what they had been watching wasn’t authentic. That is, users believed the channel was presenting itself as true events about a real girl, and it wasn’t that at all. Though, even after users discovered it was fictional, the channel continued to grow in popularity.

Lists# Many types of data on social media platforms are organized as lists, such as lists of friends or followers lists of posts lists of photos in a post lists of people who liked a post etc. The way to create a list in Python is to make a list of values, separated by commas, inside of square brackets, like this: book_authors = ["Kyle Thayer", "Susan Notess"] display(book_authors) Copy to clipboard ['Kyle Thayer', 'Susan Notess'] Copy to clipboard If we are making a list and it gets too long, Python will let us use several lines to do this: some_book_chapters = ["Intro", "Definitions", "Bots", "Data", "History of Social Media", "Authenticity"] display(some_book_chapters) Copy to clipboard ['Intro', 'Definitions', 'Bots', 'Data', 'History of Social Media', 'Authenticity'] Copy to clipboard Lists are in order, so Python let’s us use the “index” to ask for a specific entry, like the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. As we stated in the Data chapter, many programming languages, for historical reasons, make a list’s first entry have index 0, it’s 2nd entry have index 1, it’s 3rd entry have index 2, etc. So if we want to see the first chapter in my some_book_chapters list, I select it by putting the index number inside square brackets ([, ]) after the variable name: first_chapter = some_book_chapters[0] display(first_chapter) Copy to clipboard 'Intro' Copy to clipboard And if I want the 4th chapter, I’d select it like this fourth_chapter = some_book_chapters[3] display(fourth_chapter) Copy to clipboard 'Data' Copy to clipboard Now, let’s say we have a list of users who liked our latest social media post: users_who_liked_our_post = ["@pretend_user_1", "@pretend_user_2", "@pretend_user_3"] Copy to clipboard What if we wanted to follow all of them? If our list was long, it would take a lot of code to pull out each one and try to follow them. But Python gives us an easy way to perform actions on all the items in a list, by using for loops. for Loops# for loops let us perform an action or a set of actions for all of the items in a list. So, if we wanted to go through all the the users that liked our tweet and display a message for each one, we could do this: for user in users_who_liked_our_post: display("Yay! " + user + " liked our post!") Copy to clipboard 'Yay! @pretend_user_1 liked our post!' Copy to clipboard 'Yay! @pretend_user_2 liked our post!' Copy to clipboard 'Yay! @pretend_user_3 liked our post!' Copy to clipboard Now, there are several things that went into making that for loop code above: Start the line with a for Make up a new variable name that will be a temporary variable to hold whichever item from the list we are doing our actions on. In this case each item in the list will be a user, so we call our variable user Then we write the word in Then we put the list that we want to go through, in this case `users_who_liked_our_post’ Then put a colon (:). In Python, a colon like this means that what comes next is a block of statements that goes together. This block of statements is indented over to indicate that it is part of the block. Then, on the next line and indented over, we have our display function that uses the user variable. This is the line of code that is repeated for each item in the list. If we want to do several actions in our loop, all we need to do is add more lines of code spaced over the same amount, like this (note: We’ll use print instead of display, which mostly work the same, but we think print happens to look a little better in this situation): for user in users_who_liked_our_post: print("Yay! " + user + " liked our post!") print("Perhaps we should follow " + user) print("We could put code here to do that!") print() Copy to clipboard Yay! @pretend_user_1 liked our post! Perhaps we should follow @pretend_user_1 We could put code here to do that! Yay! @pretend_user_2 liked our post! Perhaps we should follow @pretend_user_2 We could put code here to do that! Yay! @pretend_user_3 liked our post! Perhaps we should follow @pretend_user_3 We could put code here to do that! Copy to clipboard In the above code our for loop runs a block of code that has four statements, each doing a print. You’ll notice we added an extra blank print which makes a blank line and helps us see in the output what each loop did.

As we talked about previously in a section of Chapter 2 (What is Social Media?), pretty much anything can count as social media, and the things we will see in internet-based social media show up in many other places as well. The book Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years by Tom Standage outlines some of the history of social media before internet-based social media platforms such as in times before the printing press: Graffiti and other notes left on walls were used for sharing updates, spreading rumors, and tracking accounts Books and news write-ups had to be copied by hand, so that only the most desired books went “viral” and spread Later, sometime after the printing press, Stondage highlights how there was an unusual period in American history that roughly took up the 1900s where, in America, news sources were centralized in certain newspapers and then the big 3 TV networks. In this period of time, these sources were roughly in agreement and broadcast news out to the country, making a more unified, consistent news environment (though, of course, we can point out how they were biased in ways like being almost exclusively white men). Before this centralization of media in the 1900s, newspapers and pamphlets were full of rumors and conspiracy theories. And now as the internet and social media have taken off in the early 2000s, we are again in a world full of rumors and conspiracy theories.

There are a wide variety of social media platforms with different aims and ways of engaging with them. We can’t give every example, but here is a range of different things social media platforms do (though this is all an oversimplification). Some platforms are used for sharing text and pictures (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WeChat, Weibo, QQ), some for sharing video (e.g., Youtube, TickTock), some for sharing audio (e.g., Clubhouse), some for sharing fanfiction (e.g., Fanfiction.net, AO3), some for gathering and sharing knowledge (e.g., Wikipedia, Quora, StackOverflow), some for sharing erotic content (e.g, OnlyFans). Some platforms are primarily intended for forming connections and building networks, like Facebook for friends and family, and LinkedIn for business connections. There are also platforms built around activities like gaming (Discord), and dating and hookups (e.g. Bumble, Tinder, OKCupid, etc.).

There is no clear single definition for what counts as social media. John Hartley points out that you could consider almost all of culture as “social media.” “All media are social. All society is mediated.” John Hartley, The Sage Handbook of Social Media This means that media, which includes painting, movies, books, speech, songs, dance, etc., all communicates in some way, and thus are social. And every social thing humans do is done through various mediums. So, for example, a war is enacted through the mediums of speech (e.g., threats, treaties, battle plans), coordinated movements, clothing (uniforms), and, of course, the mediums of weapons and violence.

“public expressions of discontent in the form of occasional student demonstrations, anonymous leaflets, and other rather creative forms of public communication. Only in Oman has the occasional donkey…been used as a mobile billboard to express anti-regime sentiments. There is no way in which police can maintain dignity in seizing and destroying a donkey on whose flank a political message has been inscribed.” From Kings and People: Information and Authority in Oman, Qatar, and the Persian Gulf by Dale F. Eickelman1 In this example, some clever protesters have made a donkey perform the act of protest: walking through the streets displaying a political message. But, since the donkey does not understand the act of protest it is performing, it can’t be rightly punished for protesting. The protesters have managed to separate the intention of protest (the political message inscribed on the donkey) and the act of protest (the donkey wandering through the streets). This allows the protesters to remain anonymous and the donkey unaware of it’s political mission.

There are several ways computer programs are involved with social media. One of them is a “bot,” a computer program that acts through a social media account. There are other ways of programming with social media that we won’t consider a bot (and we will cover these at various points as well): The social media platform itself is run with computer programs, such as recommendation algorithms (chapter 12). Various groups want to gather data from social media, such as advertisers and scientists. This data is gathered and analyzed with computer programs, which we will not consider bots, but will cover later, such as in Chapter 8: Data Mining.

American Indigenous Ethics# Like Ubuntu, American Indigenous ethics is actually a wide family of differing views. But there are some particularly common ideas that show up again and again in American Indigenous thought, and which philosophers from those traditions have identified as being reasonably central to the ethical theories espoused by the nations of this continent. Distrust of abstract propositional claims, focus on experiential / lived knowledge. Including distrust of abstract includes grand abstract claims about ethics as opposed to the lived knowledge of practicing ethics. This would include community experiences of ethics shared through stories. Still, we can list some common commitments in the form of principles, below. Anti-hierarchy. No one should be fully dependent or independent. Learn to perceive the needs of others in order to help the group and maintain equality. Equality for people, but also air, water, plants, etc. (everything is part of one process). (Based on book American Indian Thought. You can also search google scholar)

Ubuntu# “A person is a person through other people.” The concept of Ubuntu is traditional in Sub-Saharan Africa, but this summary of Ubuntu is more modern and was popularized globally by Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. There are also other different definitions of Ubuntu. “Actions are right roughly insofar as they are a matter of living harmoniously with others or honouring communal relationships.” (source) (alternate interpretation) Key figures: Nelson Mandela 1990s South Africa Desmond Tutu 1990s South Africa Joseph Balatedi Radinkudikae Gaie, present, Botswana Augustine Shutte, 1900s-2000s, South Africa Sabelo Mhlambi, present, USA (More on African Ethics here)