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. 20.1.1. Colonialism Defined# Colonialism is when one group or country subjugates another group, often imposing laws, religion, culture, and languages on that group, and taking resources from them. Colonialism is often justified by belief that the subjugated people are inferior (e.g., barbaric, savage, godless, backwards), and the superiority of the group doing the subjugation (e.g., civilized, advanced).

Meta’s way of making profits fits in a category called Surveillance Capitalism. Surveillance capitalism began when internet companies started tracking user behavior data to make their sites more personally tailored to users. These companies realized that this data was something that they could profit from, so they began to collect more data than strictly necessary (“behavioral surplus”) and see what more they could predict about users. Companies could then sell this data about users directly, or (more commonly), they could keep their data hidden, but use it to sell targeted advertisements. So, for example, Meta might let an advertiser say they want an ad to only go to people likely to be pregnant. Or they might let advertizes make ads go only to “Jew Haters” (which is ethically very bad, and something Meta allowed).

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. 17.4.2. A Bit of History# In much of mainstream Western thought, the individual’s right to freedom is taken as a supreme moral good, and so anything that is viewed as an illegitimate interference with that individual freedom is considered violence or violation. In the founding of the United States, one thing on people’s minds was the way that in a Britain riddled with factions and disagreement, people of one subgroup could not speak freely when another subgroup was in power. This case was unusual because instead of one group being consistently dominant, the Catholic and Protestant communities alternated between being dominant and being oppressed, based on who was king or queen. So the United States wanted to reinforce what they saw as the value of individual freedoms by writing it into the formal, explicit part of our social contract. Thus, we got the famous First Amendment to the Constitution, saying that individuals’ right to freely express themselves in speech, in their religion, in their gatherings, and so on could not legally be interfered with. As a principle, the concept is pretty clear: let people do their thing. But we do still live in a society which does not permit total freedom to do whatever one wants, with no consequences. Some actions do too much damage, and would undermine the society of freedom, so those actions are written into the law (that is, proscribed) as a basis for reprisals. This happens a few ways: Some are proscribed as crimes that lead to arrest, trial, and possibly incarceration. Some are proscribed as concepts or categories of thing, which a person could use to take someone else to court. For example, copyright infringement doesn’t usually result in someone showing up to arrest and imprison in the States. But if someone believes their copyrights have been violated, they can sue the offending party for damages pay, etc. The concept of copyright is proscribed in law, so it forms the basis for such lawsuits. Beyond what is proscribed by law, there are plenty of other actions and behaviors we don’t want people to be doing in our society, but they are not such as should be written into law. I don’t want my friends to lie to me, generally speaking, but this is not against the law. It would be weird if it was! Plain old lying isn’t proscribed, but perjury is (lying under oath in a court of law). The protections of freedom in the First Amendment were designed to help articulate a separation between what we might not like (e.g., someone having a different faith, or someone lying) and what is actually damaging enough to warrant formal legal mechanisms for reprisal (e.g. perjury). The Catholics and the Protestants don’t need to like each other, but they have the right to coexist in this society regardless of which group currently has a monarch on the throne. 17.4.3. So what is harassment?# One useful way to think about harassment is that it is often a pattern of behavior that exploits the distinction between things that are legally proscribed and things that are hurtful, but not so harmful as to be explicitly prohibit by law given the protection of freedoms. Let’s use an example to clarify. Suppose it’s been raining all day, and as I walk down the sidewalk, a car drives by, spraying me with water from the road. This does not make me happy. It makes me uncomfortable, since my clothes are wet, and it could hurt me if wet clothes means I get so cold I become ill. Or it could hurt me if I were on my way to an important interview, for which I will now show up looking sloppy. But the car has done nothing wrong, from a legal standpoint. There is no legal basis for reprisals, and indeed it would seem quite ridiculous if I tried to prosecute someone for having splashed me by driving near me. In a shared world, we sometimes wind up in each others’ splash zones. Now, suppose it was more dramatic than that. Suppose the car had to really veer to spray me with the puddle, such that they could be described as driving recklessly, if anyone happened to be describing it. This is not the splash zone of regular living; it’s malice. But it’s still not illegal, nor the basis for legal action. Finally, suppose it’s not just one car. There is a whole caravan of cars. I recognize the drivers as classmates whom I don’t get along with. They have planned a coordinated strike, each driving through the puddles so fast I can’t hardly catch a breath between splashes. My bag is soaked; my laptop and phone permanently damaged. Since damaging someone else’s private property is proscribed, I could try to prosecute the drivers. I have no idea if this hypothetical case would get anywhere in a real court, but if I could get a judge onside, they might issue a fine, to be paid by the drivers, to answer for my damages (that is, to pay for the replacement of my private property which was destroyed, specifically my laptop and phone). At a guess, I would suspect that it would be very difficult to get anywhere with such a suit in court. Puddle-based harassment isn’t something that is recognized by law. This is what harassment does: it uses a pattern of minorly hurtful actions, so that the harasser can maintain plausible deniability about intent to harm, or at least, failing that, can avoid formal consequences. When harassment concepts get proscribed, this situation shifts. Think about employment law in the States. Depending on what State you’re in and what sector, employment law does not permit racial harassment in the workplace. This means that if you can show a pattern of repeating behavior which is hurtful and based on racially coded comments, then you might have a viable case for a racial harassment suit. (Practically, this probably doesn’t mean suing. It means notifying HR that you have evidence of the pattern and request that they take disciplinary action. What the law does is say that if the harassing party subsequently sues for something like wrongful termination, the company has a legal basis for construing your evidence as showing a pattern of harassment.) If there were a rise in, or a new recognition of, widespread and harmful puddle-based harassment, we might gather with activists and fight to get puddle-based harassment recognized by law, in order to reduce its occurrence. Not that this would be easy, but it would give us the legal basis for pressing charges when coordinated puddle-attacks occur. Getting the action proscribed by the law doesn’t stop people from taking that action. They are still free to puddle-splash at will. But there would be a possibility of consequences, should their pedestrian victims seek reprisal. Harassment is behavior which uses a pattern of actions which are permissible by law, but still hurtful. Variations: Where a relevant harassment definition exists in law, there can be legal consequences. Other institutions can also make their own harassment policies. The consequences would not arise at the legal level, but at the social level. Many universities have policies about sexual harassment which are much richer and more detailed than statutory law. If behavior is reported which is defined by the university policy as harassment, then they can issue consequences such as suspension of the student. Implicit policies can be implemented as well. I don’t have a formal harassment policy that I require my houseguests to sign before entering my home; but it is my home, and if they start behaving in ways that I consider problematic, I do have the right to kick them out of my house. Harassment in social media contexts can be difficult to define, especially when the harassment pattern is created by a collective of seemingly unconnected people. Maybe each individual action can be read as unpleasant but technically okay. But taken together, all the instances of the pattern lead up to a level of harm done to the victim which can do real damage. Because social media spaces are to some extent private spaces, the moderators of those spaces can ask someone to leave if they wish. A Facebook group may have a ‘policy’ listed in the group info, which spells out the conditions under which a person might be blocked from the group. As a Facebook user, I could decide that I don’t like the way someone is posting on my wall; I could block them, with or without warning, much as if I were asking a guest to leave my house. In the next section, we will look in more detail about when harassment tactics get used; how they get justified, and what all this means in the context of social media.

Harassment can also be done through crowds. Crowd harassment has also always been a part of culture, such as riots, mob violence, revolts, revolution, government persecution, etc. Social media then allows new ways for crowd harassment to occur. Crowd harassment includes all the forms of individual harassment we already mentioned (like bullying, stalking, etc.), but done by a group of people. Additionally, we can consider the following forms of crowd harassment: Dogpiling: When a crowd of people targets or harasses the same person. Public Shaming (this will be our next chapter) Cross-platform raids (e.g., 4chan group planning harassment on another platform) Stochastic terrorism The use of mass public communication, usually against a particular individual or group, which incites or inspires acts of terrorism which are statistically probable but happen seemingly at random. See also: An atmosphere of violence: Stochastic terror in American politics In addition, fake crowds (e.g., bots or people paid to post) can participate in crowd harassment. For example: “The majority of the hate and misinformation about [Meghan Markle and Prince Henry] originated from a small group of accounts whose primary, if not sole, purpose appears to be to tweet negatively about them. […] 83 accounts are responsible for 70% of the negative hate content targeting the couple on Twitter.”

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.

15.1. Types of Content Moderator Set-Ups# There are a number of different types of content moderators and ways of organizing them, such as: 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). 15.1.2. Untrained Staff# If you are running your own site and suddenly realize you have a moderation problem you might have some of your current staff (possibly just yourself) start handling moderation. As moderation is a very complicated and tricky thing to do effectively, untrained moderators are likely to make decisions they (or other users) regret. 15.1.3. Dedicated Moderation Teams# After a company starts working on moderation, they might decide to invest in teams specifically dedicated to content moderation. These teams of content moderators could be considered human computers hired to evaluate examples against the content moderation policy of the platform they are working for. 15.1.4. Individuals moderating their own spaces# You can also have people moderate their own spaces. For example: when you text on the phone, you are in charge of blocking numbers if you want to (though the phone company might warn you of potential spam or scams) When you make posts on Facebook or upload videos to YouTube, you can delete comments and replies Also in some of these systems, you can allow friends access to your spaces to let them help you moderate them. 15.1.5. Volunteer Moderation# Letting individuals moderate their own spaces is expecting individuals to put in their own time and labor. You can do the same thing with larger groups and have volunteers moderate them. Reddit does something similar where subreddits are moderated by volunteers, and Wikipedia moderators (and editors) are also volunteers. 15.1.6. Automated Moderators (bots)# Another strategy for content moderation is using bots, that is computer programs that look through posts or other content and try to automatically detect problems. These bots might remove content, or they might flag things for human moderators to review.

14.1. What Content Gets Moderated# Social media platforms moderate (that is ban, delete, or hide) different kinds of content. There are a number of categories that they might ban things: 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. 14.1.2. Legal Concerns# Social media sites also might run into legal concerns with allowing some content to be left up on their sites, such as copyrighted material (like movie clips) or child pornography. 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 (though a few will try to move to countries that won’t get them in trouble, like 8kun is getting hosted in Russia). With copyrighted content, the platform YouTube is very aggressive in allowing movie studios to get videos taken down, so many content creators on YouTube have had their videos taken down erroneously. 14.1.3. Safety# Another concern is for the safety of the users on the social media platform (or at least the users that the platform cares about). Users who don’t feel safe will leave the platform, so social media companies are incentivized to help their users feel safe. So this often means moderation to stop trolling and harassment. 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.”

Trauma Dumping# While there are healthy ways of sharing difficult emotions and experiences (see the next section), when these difficult emotions and experiences are thrown at unsuspecting and unwilling audiences, that is called trauma dumping. Social media can make trauma dumping easier. For example, with parasocial relationships, you might feel like the celebrity is your friend who wants to hear your trauma. And with context collapse, where audiences are combined, how would you share your trauma with an appropriate audience and not an inappropriate one (e.g., if you re-post something and talk about how it reminds you of your trauma, are you dumping it on the original poster?). Trauma dumping can be bad for the mental health of those who have this trauma unexpectedly thrown at them, and it also often isn’t helpful for the person doing the trauma dumping either: 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. While there are benefits to venting, there are no benefits to trauma dumping. In trauma dumping, the person oversharing doesn’t take responsibility or show self-reflection. Trauma dumping is delivered on the unsuspecting. The purpose is to generate sympathy and attention not to process negative emotion. The dumper doesn’t want to overcome their trauma; if they did, they would be deprived of the ability to trauma dump.

Doomscrolling is: “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.” Merriam-Webster Dictionary Fig. 13.1 Tweet on doomscrolling the day after insurrectionists stormed the US Capital (while still in the middle of the COVID pandemic).# The seeking out of bad news, or trying to get news even though it might be bad, has existed as long as people have kept watch to see if a family member will return home safely. But of course, new mediums can provide more information to sift through and more quickly, such as with the advent of the 24-hour news cycle in the 1990s, or, now social media.

Virality and Intention# When someone creates content that goes viral, they didn’t necessarily intend it to go viral, or viral in the way that it does. If a user posts a joke, and people share it because they think it is funny, then their intention and the way the content goes viral is at least somewhat aligned. If a user tries to say something serious, but it goes viral for being funny, then their intention and the virality are not aligned. Let’s look at some examples of the relationship between virality and intent.

Additionally, content can be copied by being screenshotted, or photoshopped. Text and images can be copied and reposted with modifications (like a poem about plums). And content in one form can be used to make new content in completely new forms, like this “Internet Drama” song whose lyrics are from messages sent back and forth between two people in a Facebook Marketplace:

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).

Privacy Violations# Besides hacking, there are other forms of privacy violations, such as: Unclear Privacy Rules: Sometimes privacy rules aren’t made clear to the people using a system. For example: If you send “private” messages on a work system, your boss might be able to read them. When Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he also was purchasing access to all Twitter Direct Messages Others Posting Without Permission: Someone may post something about another person without their permission. See in particular: The perils of ‘sharenting’: The parents who share too much Metadata: Sometimes the metadata that comes with content might violate someone’s privacy. For example, in 2012, former tech CEO John McAfee was a suspect in a murder in Belize, John McAfee hid out in secret. But when Vice magazine wrote an article about him, the photos in the story contained metadata with the exact location in Guatemala. Deanonymizing Data: Sometimes companies or researchers release datasets that have been “anonymized,” meaning that things like names have been removed, so you can’t directly see who the data is about. But sometimes people can still deduce who the anonymized data is about. This happened when Netflix released anonymized movie ratings data sets, but at least some users’ data could be traced back to them. Inferred Data: Sometimes information that doesn’t directly exist can be inferred through data mining (as we saw last chapter), and the creation of that new information could be a privacy violation. This includes the creation of Shadow Profiles, which are information about the user that the user didn’t provide or consent to Non-User Information: Social Media sites might collect information about people who don’t have accounts, like how Facebook does { requestKernel: true, binderOptions: { repo: "binder-examples/jupyter-stacks-datascience", ref: "master", }, codeMirrorConfig: { theme: "abcdef", mode: "python" }, kernelOptions: { kernelName: "python3", path: "./ch09_privacy" }, predefinedOutput: true } kernelName = 'python3'

“Private Messaging

Trolling

Inauthenticity