Online spaces can offer a powerful sense of safety and belonging, especially for people who feel unable to express certain parts of themselves in public. Anonymity can create room for exploration, honesty, and connection that might not otherwise be possible offline. At the same time, social media can also serve as an entry point to self-understanding, as people encounter language and experiences that help them recognize patterns in their own lives. Support groups and online communities show how digital platforms, despite their flaws, can meaningfully reduce isolation and encourage people to seek help.

This issue became especially severe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Large-scale prevention and control measures intensified people’s sense of uncertainty and anxiety, which in turn led many to lose trust in governments and other perceived “authorities,” weakening public credibility overall. At the same time, heightened stress seemed to push people toward more extreme positions, fostering a kind of defensive aggression in public discourse. As a result, hostility and resentment became more visible in everyday interactions.

The way accessible design is often discussed creates an artificial divide between “designers” and “disabled users,” which reinforces exclusion rather than inclusion. Dr. Cynthia Bennett’s research highlights how disabled people are frequently treated as consultants or test subjects instead of being recognized as designers in their own right. This framing ignores lived experience as a form of expertise and limits what accessibility can become. If disabled people are not seen as real designers, then accessibility will always be partial and shaped by outsiders’ assumptions rather than real needs.

Universal Design shifts responsibility from individuals to systems, which feels fair on the surface, but fairness is not always the same as justice. In social media, treating everyone the same may still disadvantage people who start from very different positions. True justice may require platforms to offer different tools, protections, or visibility to different users based on their needs. So the goal should not only be “fairness,” but a more thoughtful form of equity that actively reduces harm rather than assuming equal access works for everyone.

Universal Design shifts responsibility from individuals to systems, which feels fair on the surface, but fairness is not always the same as justice. In social media, treating everyone the same may still disadvantage people who start from very different positions. True justice may require platforms to offer different tools, protections, or visibility to different users based on their needs. So the goal should not only be “fairness,” but a more thoughtful form of equity that actively reduces harm rather than assuming equal access works for everyone.

Universal Design shifts responsibility from individuals to systems, which feels fair on the surface, but fairness is not always the same as justice. In social media, treating everyone the same may still disadvantage people who start from very different positions. True justice may require platforms to offer different tools, protections, or visibility to different users based on their needs. So the goal should not only be “fairness,” but a more thoughtful form of equity that actively reduces harm rather than assuming equal access works for everyone.

I have always been skeptical about whether privacy on social media is truly “private.” In many cases, so-called private messages are still accessible to platform developers or automated systems, which means users are trusting companies to protect their privacy rather than actually controlling it themselves. While this access can be helpful in situations like reporting threats or harassment, it also raises questions about who ultimately benefits from this arrangement. If only social media companies are able to see and manage my private data, I am not sure that this kind of “privacy” genuinely serves users’ interests rather than the platforms’ own priorities.

It is interesting that using symbols, uppercase letters, and numbers does not significantly increase the difficulty of brute-force attacks, while increasing the length of a password dramatically raises the cost of cracking it. However, many social media platforms still emphasize “complex” password rules rather than encouraging longer passwords. This can create a false sense of security for users, who may believe their passwords are strong when they are not. Ironically, these complexity requirements can even make passwords harder to remember, leading users to reuse them or choose predictable patterns, which ultimately gives attackers more opportunities.

This example shows how datasets can be unintentionally poisoned by social dynamics rather than malicious intent. When a single TikTok video goes viral, it can dramatically change who participates in a survey, skewing the data toward one narrow demographic. Even though the data may look large and complete, it no longer represents the population the researchers originally intended to study. This highlights how data collection is shaped by platforms and visibility, and why researchers must think carefully about how and where their data is gathered.

When working with large data sets, it becomes clear how easy it is to find patterns that are misleading. Two variables may appear to move together, but this relationship can be caused by chance or by other hidden factors. Psychology has a similar idea captured by the phrase “correlation does not imply causation.” This reminds me that seeing a pattern in data is not the same as understanding why it exists, and that conclusions should be made carefully rather than based on surface-level relationships.

This reading helped me see that trolling in spaces like 4chan isn’t just about “free speech” or joking, but about a lack of care for truth and harm. The idea that arguments are made without concern for whether they are true explains why these communities drift toward extreme misogyny and racism. While trolls may claim a nihilistic or egoist stance, this feels less like a genuine ethical position and more like a shield to avoid responsibility. Under almost any serious moral framework, the deliberate disruption and harm caused by trolling is ethically wrong, especially when it consistently targets marginalized groups.

Misogyny on the internet seems to be more severe than in real life—especially in the realm of online gaming. At first, I thought this was because gaming is a space that glorifies skill and power, where authority is tied almost exclusively to “game performance,” and stereotypes about women being worse at games lead to a loss of discursive power. However, if misogyny was already pervasive in the early internet, then I think there must be other contributing factors and explanations as well.

Anonymity can encourage people to act in ways they normally would not if their real identity were known. When there are no clear consequences, it becomes easier to pretend to be someone else or to say and do things that might cause trouble in real life. This lack of accountability often lowers people’s sense of responsibility toward others. Over time, anonymity can make online spaces feel less honest and more hostile, even though it can sometimes protect users as well.

In fact, many young people today are already used to this situation. We are accustomed to showing different sides of ourselves in different contexts, and we strongly hope that these contexts do not interfere with one another. For example, we might act “cool” or relaxed around friends in order to fit in, while presenting ourselves as serious and hardworking in front of parents, teachers, or in school settings. When these different contexts merge or collide, people often feel a strong sense of discomfort, betrayal, or even resentment. This is not strange or abnormal—just as most people would not want their parents to closely observe their behavior at a party with friends. Because of this, people usually do not see themselves as fake or feel guilty for behaving differently across contexts; instead, it feels like a normal and necessary way of managing social life.

Although bulletin board systems originated decades ago, many websites today still use this forum-style structure. For example, the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) community relies heavily on well-known bulletin board forums where players share discussions, homebrew rules, and game resources. Similarly, the fighting game MUGEN, which comes from the arcade era, has dedicated forums where users upload character models, stages, and other custom assets. These modern bulletin board systems show how this format continues to support niche communities by organizing discussions and resources in a clear, thread-based way.

Although blogs are often seen as a product of the early internet, many middle-aged and older users still use them as an important way to communicate and share ideas. I once followed a professor from one of my classes who regularly posted his personal observations and reflections on his blog. For example, he noticed that people in the cafeteria were less likely to choose orange trays than brown ones, and he speculated that there might be a scientific or psychological explanation behind this preference. What stood out to me was that many commenters—who appeared to be from the same age group based on their usernames and profile pictures—actively engaged with his posts, showing that blogs still function as a thoughtful and community-oriented space for discussion.

In fact, I have always been puzzled about the collection of information such as "region" and "age". Is it really "necessary" for companies to collect such information? These pieces of information do not guarantee that the account is used by a real person - fake accounts can also randomly generate combinations of these pieces of information, but it will increase the risk of user information leakage

As an international student, I have experience with this. Many social media platforms display the posting time based on the time zone of the viewer, i.e. the device time zone, when the publisher posts. That is to say, if you view the release time of the same tweet in different time zones, you will find that their release time has changed

I dislike bot armies that are used to manipulate opinions or flood comment sections. In situations where people are supposed to think critically and make their own judgments, these bots create a lot of noise and confusion. They make it harder to tell what real people actually believe. Overall, they turn online discussions into a messy and unhealthy environment instead of a meaningful conversation.

Many bots on today’s video platforms are designed to recognize background music in videos and help users download audio or video clips. Even though these bots sometimes go against the rules of the platforms, they can be very useful for people who want to find songs or save content for personal use. I find these bots surprising because they can quickly identify music with high accuracy. I also like them because they make it much easier to explore and reuse media that would otherwise be hard to access.

I think this phenomenon is even more common on today’s internet, where almost everything—including suffering—is turned into entertainment. For example, in Sex Education, there is a storyline in which a school bully is revealed to be closeted and secretly in love with the gay student he targets. One scene, in which the bully publicly exposes his own physical insecurity as a form of “confession,” is played for humor and often provokes laughter. While the scene may be entertaining, I find it problematic because it turns school bullying into spectacle, overlooking the lasting psychological trauma experienced by the victim. The victim’s suffering cannot simply be erased or healed by understanding the bully’s motivations, even when those motivations are framed romantically.

Kumail Nanjiani reflects on his experiences visiting tech companies and expresses concern that many developers give little to no thought to the ethical consequences of their innovations. He highlights how powerful technologies—such as privacy-invasive tools or manipulated media—are often created with a “can we do this?” mindset rather than “should we do this?”. The lack of prepared responses to ethical questions suggests that these issues are rarely discussed within tech culture. Nanjiani ultimately warns that once technology is released, its harms cannot easily be undone, making ethical responsibility crucial.