Britney Nguyen. Ex-Twitter engineer says he quit years ago after refusing to help sell identifiable user data, worries Elon Musk will 'do far worse things with data'. November 2022. URL: https://www.businessinsider.com/former-twitter-engineer-worried-how-elon-musk-treat-user-data-2022-11 (visited on 2023-12-10).

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.

8] White Man's Burden. URL: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhiteMansBurden (visited on 2023-12-10).

So, looking back at Meta’s goal (getting the most users possible to use Meta, and only Meta for social media), let’s look at some obstacles and how Meta tries to overcome these obstacles: Obstacle: Users don’t want ads on Facebook Solution: No ads until Facebook has attracted enough users (network power) so that users won’t leave when ads are introduced (Facebook introduced ads in 2007) Obstacle: People speak different languages Solution: Increase language support of Facebook so more people can use the site Obstacle: Not everyone has the internet Solution: Give them free internet [s46], but push them to Facebook while doing so (called Free Basic [s47]) Obstacle: A competing company social media company has a user base (e.g., Instagram, Snapchat [s48]) Solution: Try to purchase the company, or copy their features

Seth Meyers. Jimmy Kimmel's Halloween Candy Prank: Harmful Parenting? Psychology Today, October 2017. URL: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-is-2020/201710/jimmy-kimmels-halloween-candy-prank-harmful-parenting (visited on 2023-12-10).

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.

Ellie Hall. Twitter Data Has Revealed A Coordinated Campaign Of Hate Against Meghan Markle. BuzzFeed News, October 2021. URL: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ellievhall/bot-sentinel-meghan-markle-prince-harry-twitter (visited on 2023-12-10).

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.

WIRED. How to Not Embarrass Yourself in Front of the Robot at Work. September 2015. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho1RDiZ5Xew (visited on 2023-12-08).

For example, in the immediate aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, FBI released a security photo of one of the bombers and asked for tips. A group of Reddit users decided to try to identify the bomber(s) themselves. They quickly settled on a missing man (Sunil Tripathi) as the culprit (it turned out had died by suicide and was in no way related to the case), and flooded the Facebook page set up to search for Sunil Tripathi, causing his family unnecessary pain and difficulty. The person who set up the “Find Boston Bomber” Reddit board said “It Was a Disaster” but “Incredible” [p26], and Reddit apologized for online Boston ‘witch hunt’ [p27].

Wikipedia:Paid-contribution disclosure. November 2023. Page Version ID: 1184161032. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Paid-contribution_disclosure&oldid=1184161032 (visited on 2023-12-08).

Governments might also have rules about content moderation and censorship, such as laws in the US against CSAM. China additionally censors various news stories in their country, like stories about protests. In addition to banning news on their platforms, in late 2022 China took advantage of Elon Musk having fired almost all Twitter content moderators to hide news of protests by flooding Twitter with spam and porn [n10].

Zack Whittaker. Facebook won't let you opt out of its phone number 'look up' setting. TechCrunch, March 2019. URL: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/03/facebook-phone-number-look-up/ (visited on 2023-12-07).

There are concerns that echo chambers increase polarization, where groups lose common ground and ability to communicate with each other. In some ways echo chambers are the opposite of context collapse, where contexts are created and prevented from collapsing. Though others have argued [k16] that people do interact across these echo chambers, but the contentious nature of their interactions increases polarization.

Kurt Wagner. This is how Facebook collects data on you even if you don’t have an account. Vox, April 2018. URL: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17254312/facebook-shadow-profiles-data-collection-non-users-mark-zuckerberg (visited on 2023-12-05).

Datasets can be poisoned unintentionally. For example, many scientists posted online surveys that people can get paid to take. Getting useful results depended on a wide range of people taking them. But when one TikToker’s video about taking them went viral, the surveys got filled out with mostly one narrow demographic, preventing many of the datasets from being used as intended.

Mia Jankowicz. A TikToker said he wrote code to flood Kellogg with bogus job applications after the company announced it would permanently replace striking workers. Business Insider, December 2021. URL: https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktoker-wrote-code-spam-kellogg-strike-busting-job-ad-site-2021-12 (visited on 2023-12-05).

There is a reason why stereotypes are so tenacious: they work… sort of. Humans are brilliant at finding patterns, and we use pattern recognition to increase the efficiency of our cognitive processing. We also respond to patterns and absorb patterns of speech production and style of dress from the people around us. We do have a tendency to display elements of our history and identity, even if we have never thought about it before. This creates an issue, however, when the stereotype is not apt in some way. This might be because we diverge in some way from the categories that mark us, so the stereotype is inaccurate. Or this might be because the stereotype also encodes value judgments that are unwarranted, and which lead to problems with implicit bias. Some people do not need to think loads about how they present in order to come across to people in ways that are accurate and supportive of who they really are. Some people think very carefully about how they curate a set of signals that enable them to accurately let people know who they are or to conceal who they are from people outside their squad.

Text analysis of Trump's tweets confirms he writes only theAndroid half was published on. Text analysis of Trump's tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half. August 2016. URL: http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/ (visited on 2023-11-24).

Since we have different personas and ways of behaving in different groups of people, what happens if different groups of people are observing you at the same time? For example, someone might not know how to behave if they were at a restaurant with their friends and they noticed that their parents were seated at the table next to them. This is phenomenon is called “context collapse [f31].”

Julia Evans. Examples of floating point problems. January 2023. URL: https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/01/13/examples-of-floating-point-problems/ (visited on 2023-11-24).

“Design justice is a framework for analysis of how design distributes benefits and burdens between various groups of people. Design justice focuses explicitly on the ways that design reproduces and/or challenges the matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, settler colonialism, and other forms of structural inequality).” It’s also about which groups get to be part of the design process itself.

Steven Tweedie. This disturbing image of a Chinese worker with close to 100 iPhones reveals how App Store rankings can be manipulated. February 2015. URL: https://www.businessinsider.com/photo-shows-how-fake-app-store-rankings-are-made-2015-2 (visited on 2024-03-07).

Bots, on the other hand, will do actions through social media accounts and can appear to be like any other user. The bot might be the only thing posting to the account, or human users might sometimes use a bot to post for them. 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:

Natural Rights

Confucius, Analects 15.23 [b9] (~500 BCE China) “There is nothing dearer to man than himself; therefore, as it is the same thing that is dear to you and to others, hurt not others with what pains yourself.”

“We’re not making it for that reason but the way ppl choose to use it isn’t our fault. Safeguard will develop.” But tech is moving so fast. That there is no way humanity or laws can keep up. We don’t even know how to deal with open death threats online. Only “Can we do this?” Never “should we do this? We’ve seen that same blasé attitude in how Twitter or Facebook deal w abuse/fake news.