Inventors ignoring the ethical consequences of their creations is nothing new as well, and gets critiqued regularly:

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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?

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:

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

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).

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!

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.

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.

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.

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’

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

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.

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

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

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.