31 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2023
    1. Inventors ignoring the ethical consequences of their creations is nothing new as well, and gets critiqued regularly:

      The ignorant may due to the huge lure of money, or in other words, they pretend didn't realize the ethical consequence. The fame and pride may be another reason behind the ignorance.

    1. We also hope you are able to recognize how trends on internet-based social media tie to the whole of human history of being social and can apply lessons from that history to our current situations.

      By saying connecting social media with the current trend of human history, social media enlarged so many aspects and details in people's life. It may enlarge the convenience but also expand the negative influence.

    1. In the early 1980s, a number of things changed which ended up with programming seen as a male profession, and a highly profitable and respected one. One of the changes was that some men in the computer business figured out how to make money selling software. This was particularly the case for Bill Gates who convinced companies like IBM to license his software, so he could continue making money as more people used it. Another change was that as computers became small enough for people to buy them for their homes, they became seen as toys for boys and not girls. The same transition is seen in video game consoles from being for the whole family to being for boys only (e.g., the Nintendo Game Boy). In the end, computer programming became profitable and male-dominated. As many are trying to get women into programming, so that they aren’t cut out of profitable and important fields, Amy Nguyen warns that men might just decide that programming is low status again (as has happened before in many fields): The history of women in the workplace always tells the same story: women enter a male-dominated profession, only to find that it’s no longer a respectable field. Because they’re a part of it, so men leave in droves. Because women do it, and therefore it must not be important. Because society would rather discredit an entire profession than acknowledge that a female-dominated field might be doing something that actually matters.

      It has became a close loop that the industry will be man lead forever, even though Microsoft claimed that they will hire more women software engineer... But it is still understandable at 1980s that the society is still man-dominated.

    1. More users: If Meta has more users, it can offer advertisers more people to advertise to. More user time: If Meta’s users spend more time on Meta, then it has more opportunities to show ads to each user, so it can sell more ads. More personal data: The more personal data Meta collects, the more predictions about users it can make. It can get more data by getting more users, and more user time, as well as finding more things to track about users. Reduce competition: If Meta can become the only social media company that people use, then they will have cornered the market on access to those users. This means advertisers won’t have any alternative to reach those users, and Meta can increase the prices of their ads.

      I believe they did a really good job in more user time and more personal data part. As a social media platform/company, people use product under meta as a more picture sharing and friends making platform, which allow them makes more money.

    1. Another way of considering public shaming is as schadenfreude, meaning the enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others. A 2009 satirical article from the parody news site The Onion satirizes public shaming as being for objectifying celebrities and being entertained by their misfortune: Media experts have been warning for months that American consumers will face starvation if Hollywood does not provide someone for them to put on a pedestal, worship, envy, download sex tapes of, and then topple and completely destroy. Nation Demands Fresh Celebrity Meat - The Onion

      This theory reflected a small group of the society as "sickness". It is not that rare to see people being happy based on other people's toughness.

    1. 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.

      The main issue of shaming and guilting is that some parents and some adults can't even tell the difference between shaming and guilting. They are raised in the wrong way, maybe full of shaming, and they will spread the wrong point of view when they raise their offspring.

    1. They might also try to use the legal system, but online harassment is often not taken seriously, and harassers often use tactics that avoid being illegal. The platform itself sometimes can be helpful. Reporting harassment might result in the user being banned, or the platform might decide to take out entire problematic sections, such as when Reddit banned its most toxic subreddits, and found it reduced toxic behavior on the site overall.

      Well this paragraph appears to me that there is not a lot you can do to protect yourself because the harassers are huge population. Even though reporting through the platform will ban these accounts, they still can create more and come back.

    1. While anyone is vulnerable to harassment online (and offline as well), some people and groups are much more prone to harassment, particularly marginalized and oppressed people in a society.

      Just like bullying happened in the real life, people get "bullied" online. In real life, people who is not popular or exist as the margin of a society get bullied easily. In the digital world, the same group get harassed... kind of feel sorry about that.

  2. Nov 2023
    1. Facebook also discovered in internal research that, “the more likely a post is to violate Facebook’s community standards, the more user engagement it receives, because the algorithms that maximize engagement reward inflammatory content.”

      I find it so true that people always got attracted by things are not "normal" in a traditional sense. Especially Facebook is a huge social platform which will make people easily fall into unusual content, which could be violative content at the same time.

    1. It can be difficult to measure the effects of social media on mental health since there are so many types of social media, and it permeates our cultures even of people who don’t use it directly.

      The emphasis of it is hard to measure the effects of social media on mental health should not be the type of social media is too much. Mental health problem normally is hard to detect and measure, especially when people has mental health issue, they usually not open to share.

    2. In 2019 the company Facebook (now called Meta) presented an internal study that found that Instagram was bad for the mental health of teenage girls, and yet they still allowed teenage girls to use Instagram.

      I study abroad when I was 15 and that is also the time I first know instagram. It became a huge mental disaster to me since everyone is posting their attractive picture and has thousands of followers. Instagram did create a negative competition among teenager girls.

    1. Given the community activities on social media of copying, remixing, cultural appropriate, and cultural exchange: How do you think attribution should work when copying and reusing content on social media (like if you post a meme or gif on social media)? When is it ok to not cite sources for content? When should sources be cited, and how should they be cited? How can you participate in cultural exchange without harmful cultural appropriation?

      well copying is kind unethical, that's probably why people care about credits more, just in case for misunderstanding of authenticity. Every single time a source being used should be cited.

    1. 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:

      More and more people use meme in a trolling aspect recent years. As a piece of culture, we can see the evolutionary forces of meme. HAHA still remember the time I called meme like "me me"

    1. 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

      Also, for most of time, instead of being unclear, people just don't read rules at all. It creates trouble for developers when problems come up.

    1. For example, the proper security practice for storing user passwords is to use a special individual encryption process for each individual password. This way the database can only confirm that a password was the right one, but it can’t independently look up what the password is or even tell if two people used the same password. Therefore if someone had access to the database, the only way to figure out the right password is to use “brute force,” that is, keep guessing passwords until they guess the right one (and each guess takes a lot of time).

      This is a well designed security practice to protect user's privacy from hacking. However, it has been annoying for me, as a person who can never memorize their passwords.

    1. Time since posting (e.g., show newer posts, or remind me of posts that were made 5 years ago today) Whether the post was made or liked by my friends or people I’m following How much this post has been liked, interacted with, or hovered over Which other posts I’ve been liking, interacting with, or hovering over What people connected to me or similar to me have been liking, interacting with, or hovering over What people near you have been liking, interacting with, or hovering over (they can find your approximate location, like your city, from your internet IP address, and they may know even more precisely) 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. Phone numbers or email addresses (sometimes collected deceptively) can be used to suggest friends or contacts. And probably many more factors as well!

      People always say that our phone is spying our life everyday since they can always recommend stuff we had talked about. After reading this, it clearly shows how it works and the fact that the algorithms benefit of precise targeting.

    1. 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.

      FIlter bubble assign people go to groups with common interest to discuss freely. It could be good or bad but it will always create possibility on social media

  3. Oct 2023
    1. We mentioned Design Justice earlier, but it is worth reiterating again here that design justice includes considering which groups get to be part of the design process itself.

      It is fascinating that the more I read this book, the more knowledge and info relate to the topic of the book----ethics. The design justice is a good example that ethic should be apply to, not only the user aspect but also designer aspect.

    1. Which abilities are expected of people, and therefore what things are considered disabilities, are socially defined. Different societies and groups of people make different assumptions about what people can do, and so what is considered a disability in one group, might just be “normal” in another.

      It reminded me of the video I have watched before about an Indian software engineer. He worked for Microsoft and talked about the experience to code as someone with disability.

    1. Social media sites then make their money by selling targeted advertising, meaning selling ads to specific groups of people with specific interests. So, for example, if you are selling spider stuffed animal toys, most people might not be interested, but if you could find the people who want those toys and only show your ads to them, your advertising campaign might be successful, and those users might be happy to find out about your stuffed animal toys. But targeting advertising can be used in less ethical ways, such as targeting gambling ads at children, or at users who are addicted to gambling, or the 2016 Trump campaign ‘target[ing] 3.5m black Americans to deter them from voting’

      Social media sites make money by promoting ads but their profit does not link to the sale but just link to targeting. It explains why social media as a platform for people to social can make so much money!

    1. When we’ve been accessing Reddit through Python and the “PRAW” code library. The praw code library works by sending requests across the internet to Reddit, using what is called an “application programming interface” or API for short. APIs have a set of rules for what requests you can make, what happens when you make t

      So based on my understanding, the code of import draw is basically function like calling a house keeper to tell him to do something. The whole draw thing is just a bridge or transformer.

    1. In the early Internet message boards that were centered around different subjects, experienced users would “troll for newbies” by posting naive questions that all the experienced users were already familiar with. The “newbies” who didn’t realize this was a troll would try to engage and answer, and experienced users would feel superior and more part of the group knowing they didn’t fall for the troll like the “newbies” did. These message boards are where the word “troll” with this meaning comes from.

      Based on this scenario, it reflects the deeper evilness of human-being, under the circumstance that people doesn't need to be responsible for their saying back then. That's probably a good reason that ethical framework is especially important in social media.

    1. Twitter quickly suspended Jaboukie’s account after this post, but many viewed his Tweet as a heroic (and funny) act of protest.

      For post like this, being sarcastic to the authority or being rude to people who deserved to be dedicated, I only see it as trolling. Just can't relate to people who think it is heroic act of protest.

    1. How do you think about the authenticity of the Tweets that come from Trump himself?

      I actually trust the authenticity for majority of the tweets since it really represents his attitude. But for some tweets with clear perspective, I don't think it is from him.

    2. In 2016, when Donald Trump was running a campaign to be the US President, one twitter user pointed out that you could see which of the Tweets on Donald Trump’s Twitter account were posted from an Android phone and which from an iPhone, and that the tone was very different. A data scientist decided to look into it more and found:

      So it basically talked about the difference between tone and devices for Donald's Trump's tweet. It is fascinating that among all these aggressive post on his social media account, there is still someone behind the screen, also post from his perspective even though it is not actually him posting on his own account.

    1. As we’ve looked through the history of social media platforms, we’ve seen different ways of making them work, such as: How you can send messages to other people? Will these messages be public or private? Does the user have to refresh the site to check for messages, or does the message automatically appear, or perhaps even make their phone buzz? What restrictions are there on the content of messages sent? What information can a user provide about themselves in a profile? etc.

      this part talked about what to think when create a social media. It reminded me of class activity that I believe it will be a good idea to create a social media about zodiac sign and its operation up to date to predict the future.

    1. As we talked about previously in a section of Chapter 2 (What is Social Media?), pretty much anything can count as social media, and the things we will see in internet-based social media show up in many other places as well.

      Since it mentioned that basically everything counted as social media and talked about social media at its earliest history. It is fascinating that even though back then these social media didn't create too much social opportunity to people but still be counted.

    1. Think for a minute about consequentialism. On this view, we should do whatever results in the best outcomes for the most people. One of the classic forms of this approach is utilitarianism, which says we should do whatever maximizes ‘utility’ for most people. Confusingly, ‘utility’ in this case does not refer to usefulness, but to a sort of combo of happiness and wellbeing. When a utilitarian tries to decide how to act, they take stock of all the probable outcomes, and what sort of ‘utility’ or happiness will be brought about for all parties involved.

      It is interesting to see the comparison between consequentialism and utilitarianism, in which sense that they aim for the same outcome - best / maximum utility or consequence. I also thinking beside combo of happiness and wellbeing, economical outcome would be a good factor of utility as well

    1. If we think of a tweet’s contents (text and photos) as the main data of a tweet, then additional information such as the user, time, and responses would be considered metadata.

      If the main pieces of data is the data set and the other information is the metadata, it is quite subjective to say what is the main pieces what is not. Is there ant criteria to determine between these two.

    1. Does the fact that it is a bot change how you feel about its actions?

      Actually no, because bot is programmed and designed by human-being as well. Hence, bot made action is basically human made action. It will be really ridiculous if people use "the action is made by bot" as a excuse

    2. This means we can analyze the ethics of the action of the bot, as well as the intentions of the various people involved, though those all might be disconnected.

      So basically the responsibility we talked about here is due to some negative influence, but how about when the bot did extraordinary job? It is interesting people only talked about split through responsibility but not rewards.