If you could magically change anything about how social media sites are designed, what would it be?
If I could magically change the way social media sites are designed, I would pay more attention to user privacy. With my design, users would have more control over their data and privacy settings while reducing the spread of false information.
If you could magically change anything about how people behave on social media, what would it be?
If I could magically change the way people behave on social media, I would work to create a more positive and congenial online environment. I would encourage users to respectfully disagree and post meaningful comments; discourage personal attacks or the spread of harmful information.
How would users participate in decision-making?
Survey users frequently to get their opinions on the platform's features and user experience, among other things. Examine these comments and take them into consideration while making decisions. Concurrently, involve diverse user groups in the surveys to guarantee that input is obtained from a range of backgrounds and usage habits.
What if social media sites were governed by their users instead of by shareholders (e.g., governed by the subjugated instead of the colonialists)
I think this might make advertising less intrusive and users more likely to think about their experience, so advertiser onboarding becomes difficult. So the platform will focus on serving users rather than advertisers.
How would that retracted tweet look when viewed?
Viewers will only see the updated version of a tweet if the original is removed and replaced. Certain platforms might have a little "Edited" tab or offer an edit history.
How would a user do the retraction?
The easiest method is for the user to remove the incorrect message and send a new one with the corrections included, provided that the platform allows message deletion. Users can easily fix errors in their initial messages by editing them if editing is permitted.
How do you think social media platforms should handle crowd harassment? Are there things they should do to reduce it? Should the consider whether harassment is justified in some instances?
Work together with educational institutions, community organizations, and schools to integrate cybercivility and digital literacy training into curricula. Discuss real-world examples of internet harassment and strategies for victims and survivors to overcome it. Working with educational institutions allows for a wider outreach to the younger generation.
How do social media platforms make harassment possible?
Many social media platforms allow users to remain anonymous. This allows harassers to hide their true identities on social media, and anonymity makes it easier for them to avoid legal liability when they engage in offensive speech, spread false information, and commit other offenses.
What do you think a social media company’s responsibility is for the crowd actions taken by users on its platform?
Platforms ought to be accountable for safeguarding user information and privacy. For a social media business to be successful, user trust is essential. Users may lose faith in the platform and ultimately cause it to lose users if personal data is not protected by the platform.
In what ways do you think you’ve participated in any crowdsourcing online?
I have participated in online crowdsourcing by taking part in research. By participating in online surveys, and providing feedback on purchased products and service questions, companies can gather feedback and opinions from users.
What would be the goals of doing content moderation?
The goal of content moderation is to ensure that posted content complies with laws and regulations, and that some content may include harmful or dangerous information or even encourage criminal behavior. Therefore, content moderation can prevent the public dissemination of illegal information.
What would be considered bad actions that need to be moderated?
Bad behaviors that might be seen as in need of moderation in an egoistic framework are: posting misleading posts such as rumors and uncertain information to gain individual benefits such as money and fame through traffic. Such behavior ignores people who have been negatively affected by misleading information.
One of the ways social media can be beneficial to mental health is in finding community (at least if it is a healthy one, and not toxic like in the last section). For example, if you are bullied at school (and by classmates on some social media platform), you might find a different online community online that supports you. Or take the example of Professor Casey Fiesler finding a community that shared her interests (see also her article):
Online communities can be a place for individuals to find support and understanding. For those facing difficulties and bullying, these communities can provide comfort and assistance, helping to relieve psychological stress. I have a similar example, I once felt angry and unappreciated because of a fight with my parents, I shared my story in a help-seeking thread and gained encouragement and understanding from my online friends.
Venting, by contrast, is a healthy form of expressing negative emotion, such as anger and frustration, in order to move past it and find solutions. Venting is done with the permission of the listener and is a one-shot deal, not a recurring retelling or rumination of negativity. A good vent allows the venter to get a new perspective and relieve pent-up stress and emotion.
Venting in in an accepting environment relieves repressed emotions by making one feel understood and supported. A one-time venting session is ideal as it facilitates emotional release and mood management, but an unending cycle of negative feelings may worsen psychological stress.
For social media content, replication means that the content (or a copy or modified version) gets seen by more people. Additionally, when a modified version gets distributed, future replications of that version will include the modification (a.k.a., inheritance). There are ways of duplicating that are built into social media platforms: Actions such as: liking, reposting, replying, and paid promotion get the original posting to show up for users more Actions like quote tweeting, or the TikTok Duet feature let people see the original content, but modified with new context. Social media sites also provide ways of embedding posts in other places, like in news articles
It serves as a reminder of the ways in which user activity influences the spread and development of content. Interactions between external replication techniques and platform-provided replication can arise in a number of ways.
In this way, as people split and share their starters, sourdough starters are spread, multiply and evolve (including the microorganisms evolving biologically). One sourdough starter even dates back to at least 1847.
I consider sourdough baking not only a culinary method but also a cultural and biological phenomenon. By sharing yeast leavening agents, and different baking techniques from each region, people build connections and cultural legacies within their communities.
What strategies do you think might work to improve how social media platforms use recommendations?
I think there should be a higher code of ethics for social media platforms. This includes avoiding discriminatory messages and practices and emphasizing the importance of avoiding discriminatory practices in algorithms. This includes detecting and correcting biases related to differences such as race, gender, etc.
One concern with how recommendation algorithms is that they can create filter bubbles (or “epistemic bubbles” or “echo chambers”), where people get filtered into groups and the recommendation algorithm only gives people content that reinforces and doesn’t challenge their interests or beliefs. These echo chambers allow people in the groups to freely have conversations among themselves without external challenge.
Algorithms have the benefit of facilitating the connection of individuals who have similar interests and viewpoints online, creating a supportive community that can enrich the experience in its entirety. This is crucial for disadvantaged groups as well, since these groups often look for secure places to communicate without having to deal with harassment or frequent difficulties, such as nasty remarks, threatening messages, and misleading information on social media.
Reddit unfortunately doesn’t allow alt-text for their images. So while we were going to have a programming demo here to look up the alt-text, there is no alt-text on images uploaded to Reddit to look up, meaning this site is unfriendly to blind or low-vision users.
Enhancing website accessibility—which includes giving users the option to add alt-text—is a necessary step toward making the Internet more inclusive.Promoting these features and bringing accessibility concerns to light helps bring about good changes on the web platform.
which is called masking and may take a mental or physical toll on the person masking, which others around them won’t realize.
Masking like this happens all the time in our lives. Students in group activities may also cover up their lack of knowledge about a topic for fear of appearing ignorant. They may choose to remain silent and avoid asking questions so as not to draw attention to themselves. This can affect their overall development and teamwork.
We can also re-define our functions by doing a new def statement. It will just replace the old functions definition with the new one:
Using a for loop to run a defined function makes it easy for me. I don't need to repeatedly type a large paragraph for it to be paraphrased. At the same time, the def function allows me to be more efficient. By doing this, I can reuse it when I need to, making changes to the code easier as well.
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.
The balance between the fact that sometimes we need the Internet to automatically extract useful information from our privacy to achieve convenience and the desire for privacy to be protected deserves to be considered. It's hard to give up the convenience that social media platforms offer, which means users should make informed decisions about how the internet can extract private information from the posts they share.
But targeting advertising can be used in less ethical ways, such as targeting gambling ads at children,
There are ethical issues involved. Targeting children or users addicted to gambling with relevant advertisements can lead to undesirable effects, such as getting children addicted to gambling at a stage where they lack self-control and cognition, which can have a profoundly negative impact on the future of children.
something appears to be correlated, doesn’t mean that it is connected in the way it looks like
Yes, I think correlation does not mean causation exists for various reasons. For example, the observed correlations may be coincidental and there is no real relationship between the variables, or there may be a lack of consideration of the effect that redundant variables would have on the results.
RIP trolling is where trolls find a memorial page and then all work together to mock the dead person and the people mourning them. Here’s one example from 2013: Here’s one example from 2013: Here’s one example from 2013: A Facebook memorial page dedicated to Matthew Kocher, who drowned July 27 in Lake Michigan, had attracted a group of Internet vandals who mocked the Tinley Park couple’s only child, posting photos of people drowning with taunting comments superimposed over the images. One photo showed a submerged person’s hand breaking through the water with text reading “LOL u drowned you fail at being a fish,” according to a screen grab of the page shared with the Tribune after the post was removed. Cruel online posts known as RIP trolling add to Tinley Park family’s grief from the Chicago Tribune
It's hard for me to imagine the damage such cruelty can do to families who have just lost their child. Behavior like this can lead to a broader, more damaging problem of online harassment because no one knows what scary people who seem ordinary in reality look like online, and these people can take advantage of the anonymity of the Internet to do verbal harm without facing immediate consequences.
Hazing: Causing difficulty or suffering for people who are new to a group
I know some background about hazing; it's used in some group orientation programs to test newcomers' loyalty and tolerance. The rituals are usually shameful, such as forcing newcomers to strip naked and dance, and lick water off the floor.
How do you think about the authenticity of the Tweets that come from Trump himself? Do you think it matters which human typed the Tweet? Does the emotional expression (e.g., anger) of the Tweet change your view of authenticity?
I think if the input content truly expresses Trump's emotions, opinions, and his true views, it doesn't matter which person inputs the content, because the content truly reflects Trump's thoughts, they can be Trump Common real output. The emotional expression of a tweet changes my perception of authenticity. Because such emotions do not originate from Trump, the difference in true emotional output would challenge the authenticity and transparency of the tweets.
Over time, that persona has come to be read differently, with some suggesting that this open-styled persona is in itself also a performance. Does this mean that her performance of vulnerability was inauthentic?
It makes us think about whether such an exposed reality is also playable. Because in one "successful" case, by falling on the red carpet and becoming famous on the Internet, countless people will imitate it, and when countless similar situations happen, people will get tired of it and then wonder whether the star's continuous management of the public image has introduced the performance element, which is inevitable.
4Chan has various image-sharing bulletin boards, where users post anonymously. Perhaps the most infamous board is the “/b/” board for “random” topics. This board emphasizes “free speech” and “no rules” (with exceptions for child pornography and some other illegal content). In these message boards, users attempt to troll each other and post the most shocking content they can come up with. They also have a history of collectively choosing a target website or community and doing a “raid” where they all try to join and troll and offend the people in that community.
This is linked to the internet as a public social platform. Due to the open nature of the Internet, online social networking platforms can sometimes be used to convey illegal information. Being an environment with no clear rules, this allows users to discuss almost any topic there, but this also represents its chaotic nature.
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:
I took CSE 121 last semester. the presence of for loops in python seems similar to programming in java. But python seems to be easier, traversing the stored information without going through indexes.
There are several options for how to save dates and times. Some options include a series of numbers (year, month, day, hour, minute, and second), or a string that with all of those pieces of information written out. Sometimes only the date is saved, with no time information, and sometimes the time information will include the timezone.
Since different time zones exist around the globe, the complexity of comparing time information due to geographic location can make dealing with dates in programming extremely difficult. Therefore, I believe that when posting tweets with date and time information, it is helpful to include the time zone information after the post. This helps to avoid ambiguity.
You can think of this as like a language dictionary where there is a word and a definition for each word. Then you can look up any name or word and find the value or definition.
I think this is a very efficient way to group data. In this data grouping approach, each term is a store, and its definition is the corresponding value. So one can get the value by directly searching the storage method without retrieving it one by one, which makes the access to the data more efficient and convenient.
We also would like to point out that there are fake bots as well, that is real people pretending their work is the result of a Bot. For example, TikTok user Curt Skelton posted a video claiming that he was actually an AI-generated / deepfake character:
This is very interesting to me. In an era of rapid technological development, people cannot even tell whether they are talking to a real person or a bot. This may become a problem in the future, as excessive authenticity may cause trouble, such as fraud.
Note that sometimes people use “bots” to mean inauthentically run accounts, such as those run by actual humans, but are paid to post things like advertisements or political content. We will not consider those to be bots, since they aren’t run by a computer. Though we might consider these to be run by “human computers” who are following the instructions given to them, such as in a click farm:
This has happened to me too. In order to attract real customers, merchants may hire real people to fill in product reviews. As positive reviews accumulate, inflated metrics may attract real, interested users to the site.
But we can also see this with other frameworks, such as egoism,
In my opinion, the moral dimension of egoism is good or bad, depending on whether it negatively affects society and others. Most think it is wrong because part of egoism goes against moral principles, such as spreading rumors about competitors for a promotion. However, egoism can also be interpreted in another way, such as the pursuit of improving one's skills and knowledge in order to perform better in the workplace for the purpose of promotion.
Also, many of these ethics frameworks overlap and different ones can be considered versions of another.
Different ethical theories and frameworks can be seen as interrelated and as different perspectives for addressing similar ethical issues. They may have different emphases, but can complement each other. But two complementary moral frameworks are not identical, and it is unrealistic to define one by understanding the other, and non-overlapping parts may conflict.