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.
I feel like this is the most important part of all of social media. It’s hard to stay on top of all the changes and new apps but it’s so important to be self aware because there is little chance that these big tech companies are going to stop creating problematic sites.
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):
This is so hard because tech is evolving so quickly and it’s so hard to get left behind fast. But there is so many consequences to creating tech and people really need to think about what they are creating. I also think people dont actually care about what the consequences are so even if they do think about what will happen when they create new tech they usually don’t actually care about the repercussions.
La La Land (where a white man is trying to save “real” Jazz music), etc.
I’ve watched La La Land a million times and never thought of it this way. It’s so easy to look over my privilege and not even notice when subtly racist things are happening.
CEOs of companies (like Mark Zuckerberg of Meta) are often both wage-laborers (they get a salary, Zuckerberg gets a tiny symbolic $1/year) and shareholders (they get a share of the profits, Zuckerberg owns 16.8%)
It’s insane how much money mark Zuckerberg has. The fact that he only owns 16.8% of meta and yet is still one of the richest men in the world is so crazy. His story is so interesting and really gives a glimpse into the behind the scenes of social media.
After the defeat of Nazi Germany, prominent Nazi figures were put on trial in the Nuremberg Trials. These trials were a way of gathering and presenting evidence of the great evils done by the Nazis, and as a way of publicly punishing them. We could consider this as, in part, a large-scale public shaming of these specific Nazis and the larger Nazi movement.
This is kinda crazy. I feel like there aren’t really very many cases of cancel culture that even come close to Nazi Germany. While I do think there are times where people should be permanently removed from social media I think it’s a little crazy to compare anything on the internet to Nazi Germany.
Also, Rebecca Jennings worries about how public shaming is used against “normal” people who are plucked out of obscurity to be shamed by huge crowds online:
I feel like I never really hear of normal people being cancelled but I do see them facing unnecessary criticism. TikTok has really normalized being rude and malicious on the internet and it’s also really easy to go viral on TikTok. Because of this I see a lot of hate on regular people for simple things that they don’t need the criticism on. That’s where I see problems with online criticism.
One phrase that became popular on Twitter in 2022, especially as Elon Musk was in the process of buying Twitter, was: “It is always morally correct to bully billionaires.” (Note: We could not find the exact origins of this phrase or its variations). This is related to the concept in comedy of “punching up,” that is, making fun of people in positions of relatively more power.
This makes me laugh because while I agree with this statement the last people who are going to be affected by harassment are billionaires. Overall though i do think there are times where online harassment are justified but I dont think harassment ever does what it is supposed to do.
In addition, fake crowds (e.g., bots or people paid to post) can participate in crowd harassment. For example:
This is crazy that people can be so obsessed with a social media situation that they create bots to attack somebody. I think this really shows a lot about the relationship people have with the internet and parasocial relationships. People get so invested in the internet to an unhealthy point and this is a good example.
In the case of Twitter tracks down mystery couple in viral proposal photos, the problem was “Who is the couple in the photo?” and the solution was again to basically dox them, though in the article they seemed ok with it.
This is interesting to me because I’ve never thought of it as doxing. This happens all over twitter and TikTok and I’ve always thought of it as sweet and a cool way to get information back to the people it belonged too. I understand though how this can be controversial.
Wikipedia: Is an online encyclopedia whose content is crowdsourced. Anyone can contribute, just go to an unlocked Wikipedia page and press the edit button. Institutions don’t get special permissions (e.g., it was a scandal when US congressional staff edited Wikipedia pages), and the expectation that editors do not have outside institutional support is intended to encourage more people to contribute.
It’s interesting to see how different people react to cloud sourcing particularly Wikipedia. All throughout elementary and middle school I was told to not use/ trust Wikipedia. The older i got into school the less teachers cared about using Wikipedia. I personally think that crowdsourcing websites like Wikipedia are important but it is interesting to see how different people care about crowdsourcing.
Do you think there are ways to moderate well that involve less traumatizing of moderators or taking advantage of poor people?
This is tricky, as a moderator your job is to look through possibly disturbing and upsetting content and you know that as you go into the job. Obviously though there is no need to be taking advantage of poor people and these companies that use content moderation have enough money to fairly pay and take care of moderators.
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.”
While I do see why social media sites block some potentially offensive material I also think that sometimes it beneficial for them not to do this. Take twitter for example, for years it has regulated close to nothing. You can see any array of possibly offensive material and that is part of the draw to the site. People like that they don’t have to censor their content.
In what ways have you found social media bad for your mental health and good for your mental health?
Honestly I feel like I dont even notice when social media is negatively impacting my mental health. There is so much content out there that has subtle jabs to other people that its hard to notice that something in affecting your body image, self esteem, or mental health overall. I do think that when I really think about it I do find that social media makes me more self conscious
Another form of digital self-harm is through joining toxic negative communities built around tearing each other down and reinforcing a hopeless worldview. (Content warning: sex and self-harm)
There are large pro anorexia communities on the internet that are easy to find and use. These forums can be super detrimental to peoples mental health and yet people still choose to join and interact with them. This is another example of negative communities online.
When physical mail was dominant in the 1900s, one type of mail that spread around the US was a chain letter. Chain letters were letters that instructed the recipient to make their own copies of the letter and send them to people they knew. Some letters gave the reason for people to make copies might be as part of a pyramid scheme where you were supposed to send money to the people you got the letter from, but then the people you send the letter to would give you money. Other letters gave the reason for people to make copies that if they made copies, good things would happen to them, and if not bad things would, like this:
This is so funny that chain mail has been going on for so long and this is a super cool piece of history. Texts exactly like that circulated around my middle school friend group and on short form video platforms there are videos that make you interact with the post for something to happen to you.
A meme is a piece of culture that might reproduce in an evolutionary fashion, like a hummable tune that someone hears and starts humming to themselves, perhaps changing it, and then others overhearing next. In this view, any piece of human culture can be considered a meme that is spreading (or failing to spread) according to evolutionary forces. So we can use an evolutionary perspective to consider the spread of:
It’s funny to think of memes is this scientific way but it is true that memes are pieces of culture. It’s a common joke on the internet that memes will be in history textbooks. While this is a joke it’s not entirely false memes capture a certain part of history that evolve and change overtime.
What responsibilities do you think social media platforms should have in what their recommendation algorithms recommend?
Honestly l feel like the only responsibility they have is to allow people to turn it off or even just let people know that a recommendation algorithm is in place. People can hate on recommendation algorithms all they want but honestly they do improve social media.
What experiences do you have of social media sites making particularly bad recommendations for you?
Sometimes I will see a post that I’m only mildly interested in and like it or watch all of it and then for the next couple days I see a million related videos. This always annoys me because they aren’t videos I actually like or really care about and they become all i see.
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.
I guess this makes sense but honestly I don’t totally buy it. I really truly believe that our phones are listening to us. Beyond this i feel like our recommendations algorithms take information from other apps.
And unfortunately, as researcher Dr. Cynthia Bennett points out, disabled people are often excluded from designing for themselves, or even when they do participate in the design, they aren’t considered to be the “real designers.” You can see Dr. Bennet’s research talk on this in the following Youtube Video:
It’s crazy that disabled people are left out of almost all career choices. Even in situation like design where their perspective is so important and necessary to creating a useful online space they are excluded.
Reddit unfortunately doesn’t allow alt-text for their images.
This is really interesting to me and I wonder why they don’t use alt text. The wording “doesn’t allow” makes it sound like there is cons to using alt text and I don’t really understand what those would be. I wonder if they really don’t allow alt text or if that’s the wording in the text book and they actually just dont have alt text.
What incentives do social media companies have to protect privacy?
There can be a lot of backlash when companies aren’t careful with protecting privacy. By sharing personal information companies can easily lose their fans and user base.
Unclear Privacy Rules: Sometimes privacy rules aren’t made clear to the people using a system
This is something that is really scary to me. I feel like so many people including myself don’t know what’s really happening when it comes to social media. I know so many people who have had their information shared solely because they didn’t know enough about media literacy and how to protect themselves on the internet.
How comfortable are you with Google knowing (whether correctly or not) those things about you?
This is another thing that really scares me so I turned my ad personalization off. When I go on websites I only allow the cookies that are needed. I’ve seen how ad personalization has affected my social media and its something that really influences the amount of time I spend online so when I can block websites from stealing info i dont like I try to do it!
If you want to explore the difficulty of inferring trends from data, the website fivethirtyeight.com has an interactive feature called “Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory” where, by changing how you measure the US economy and how you measure what political party is in power in the US, you can “prove” that either Democrats or Republicans are better for the economy. Fivethirtyeight has a longer article on this called “Science Isn’t Broken: It’s just a hell of a lot harder than we give it credit for.”
This is something that really scares me. I feel like my generation gets swayed very easily and it’s hard not to jump on a bandwagon or listen to evidence from social media. I often forget how easily information and data can get skewed and still be “scientific”.
What do you think is the best way to deal with trolling?
I agree with Crit Hulk that it shouldn’t have to be the victims responsibility to keep the trolls in place but unfortunately I think that is the best response. Trolls are looking for attention and followers. By not interacting with them it’s more likely their actions will stop.
Some reasons people engage in trolling behavior include:
I feel like the main reason that I see trolling used these days is to gain an audience. There seems to be a never ending amount of influences who are known for trolling and base their whole Internet personality on trolling. They always gain a lot of subscribers, followers, and views.
Where do you see parasocial relationships on social media?
Recently there was a lot of drama surrounding the music artist Doja Cat because she was insisting that she did not love her fans. She said that she did not know her fans and therefore did not love them. Fans were really upset because without their support, Doja Cat wouldn’t be where she is today. I think it’s interesting to see how people and celebrities react to parasocial relationships and how much the said relationship matters to fans.
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 honestly don’t think it matters. I feel like it can readily be assumed that famous people don’t write their own tweets. I generally assume that for most celebrities and politicans, there is somebody else producing at least some of their online content.
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.
I love the idea of social media dating back all years before the internet, it’s easy to forget that social media is a way larger concept that what we currently think of social media as. I think that it would be really beneficial to teach about social media and its past and the current day affects more widely.
In 2006, Aza Raskin invented infinite scroll, where you can scroll to the bottom of the current results, and new results will get automatically filled in below. Most social media sites now use this, so you can then scroll forever and never hit an obstacle or friction as you endlessly look at social media posts. Aza Raskin regrets what infinite scroll has done to make it harder for users to break away from looking at social media sites.
I forget how many small differences like this play into our addiction. It’s crazy how the action of pushing one button to show more content actually decreases the want to look at more content. It makes me wonder what other small changes could be made to social media to drastically increase or decrease our addiction
“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. Sasha Costanza-Chock, present USA
While I was unfamiliar with the term ‘design justice’, it’s an idea that I’m familiar with. I watch a lot of content that talks about ableism within design and how so much design is nearly impossible for disabled people to use. This is really the only context I’ve seen this idea talked about on the internet so it’s interesting to see what other marganilized groups are burdened by design. E
f we are writing down what someone said, we are losing their tone of voice, accent, etc. If we are taking a photograph, it is only from one perspective, etc.
This reminds me of the statement we were talking about last week, “social media isn’t real.” With this simplifying we can only see some of what is real and not the whole picture which I think plays into the conception that social media isn’t real because content can be “real” for some people and fake for other people.
For example, TikTok user Curt Skelton posted a video claiming that he was actually an AI-generated / deepfake character:
This is crazy, when this video originally came out I saw it and was shocked at how far AI had come. To learn that all along there was a whole other trick being played is crazy. It’s scary to see how bots and AI progress and how easy it is for the average person to be tricked by technology.
In 2016, Microsft launched a Twitter bot that was intended to learn to speak from other Twitter users and have conversations. Twitter users quickly started tweeting racist comments at Tay, which Tay learned from and started tweeting out within one day.
This is a funny story that digs into the problems that social media and bots create. For one social media creates a “safe” place for people to share unethical and racist ideas without people knowing who it is. Another issues is that bots are not fool proof and can be easily manipulated by outside sources.
One widespread ethical principle is what English speakers sometimes call the “Golden Rule”:
I find it interesting that the golden rule is included in the ethic frameworks. I feel like it is so simple and well known that it would be overlooked. But because it is the basis for lots of ethical ideas and frameworks I do understand the importance of adding it.
This was used as a way to devalue time spent on social media sites, and to dismiss harms that occurred on them.
I disagree that this statement is trying to dismiss harm that occurred on social media. I believe that this statement is used to devalue time spent on social media and I’ve never once heard it try to dismiss harm that is caused by social media. I personally believe that most people are aware of the harms.