4Chan has various image-sharing bulletin boards, where users post anonymously. Perhaps the most infamous board is the “/b/” board for “random” topics. This board emphasizes “free speech” and “no rules” (with exceptions for child pornography and some other illegal content). In these message boards, users attempt to troll each other and post the most shocking content they can come up with. They also have a history of collectively choosing a target website or community and doing a “raid” where they all try to join and troll and offend the people in that community.

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.

If we look at a data field like gender, there are different ways we might try to represent it. We might try to represent it as a binary field, but that would exclude people who don’t fit within a gender binary. So we might try a string that allows any values, but taking whatever text users end up typing might make data that is difficult to work with (what if they make a typo or use a different language?). So we might store gender using strings, but this time use a preset list of options for users to choose from, perhaps with a way of choosing “other,” and only then allow the users to type their own explanation if our categories didn’t work for them. Perhaps you question whether you want to store gender information at all.

Binary consisting of 0s and 1s make it easy to represent true and false values, where 1 often represents true and 0 represents false. Most programming languages have built-in ways of representing True and False values

Only in Oman has the occasional donkey…been used as a mobile billboard to express anti-regime sentiments. There is no way in which police can maintain dignity in seizing and destroying a donkey on whose flank a political message has been inscribed.”

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:

When we (the authors) were young, as internet-based social media was starting to become commonly used, a popular sentiment we often heard was: “The internet isn’t real life.” This was used as a way to devalue time spent on social media sites, and to dismiss harms that occurred on them. Versions of this phrase are still around, such as in this tweet from statistician Nate Silver:

Actions are judged on the sum total of their consequences (utility calculus) The ends justify the means. Utilitarianism: “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.”