How have your views on social media changed (or been reinforced)?

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.

“The majority of the hate and misinformation about [Meghan Markle and Prince Henry] originated from a small group of accounts whose primary, if not sole, purpose appears to be to tweet negatively about them. […] 83 accounts are responsible for 70% of the negative hate content targeting the couple on Twitter.”

In what ways do you think you’ve participated in any crowdsourcing online?

. Instead though, we can look at different characteristics that computer systems can provide, and find places where computer-based communication works better, and is Beyond Being There (pdf here).

Letting individuals moderate their own spaces is expecting individuals to put in their own time and labor. You can do the same thing with larger groups and have volunteers moderate them. Reddit does something similar where subreddits are moderated by volunteers, and Wikipedia moderators (and editors) are also volunteers.

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.”

For example, Facebook has a suicide detection algorithm, where they try to intervene if they think a user is suicidal (Inside Facebook’s suicide algorithm: Here’s how the company uses artificial intelligence to predict your mental state from your posts). As social media companies have tried to detect talk of suicide and sometimes remove content that mentions it, users have found ways of getting around this by inventing new word uses, like “unalive.”

Some disabilities are visible disabilities that other people can notice by observing the disabled person (e.g., wearing glasses is an indication of a visual disability, or a missing limb might be noticeable). Other disabilities are invisible disabilities that other people cannot notice by observing the disabled person (e.g., chronic fatigue syndrome, contact lenses for a visual disability, or a prosthetic for a missing limb covered by clothing). Sometimes people with invisible disabilities get unfairly accused of “faking” or “making up” their disability (e.g., someone who can walk short distances but needs to use a wheelchair when going long distances).

Some disabilities are visible disabilities that other people can notice by observing the disabled person (e.g., wearing glasses is an indication of a visual disability, or a missing limb might be noticeable). Other disabilities are invisible disabilities that other people cannot notice by observing the disabled person (e.g., chronic fatigue syndrome, contact lenses for a visual disability, or a prosthetic for a missing limb covered by clothing). Sometimes people with invisible disabilities get unfairly accused of “faking” or “making up” their disability (e.g., someone who can walk short distances but needs to use a wheelchair when going long distances).

Some disabilities are visible disabilities that other people can notice by observing the disabled person (e.g., wearing glasses is an indication of a visual disability, or a missing limb might be noticeable). Other disabilities are invisible disabilities that other people cannot notice by observing the disabled person (e.g., chronic fatigue syndrome, contact lenses for a visual disability, or a prosthetic for a missing limb covered by clothing). Sometimes people with invisible disabilities get unfairly accused of “faking” or “making up” their disability (e.g., someone who can walk short distances but needs to use a wheelchair when going long distances).

For example, a social media application might offer us a way of “Private Messaging” (also called Direct Messaging) with another user. But in most cases those “private” messages are stored in the computers at those companies, and the company might have computer programs that automatically search through the messages, and people with the right permissions might be able to view them directly.

For example, a social media application might offer us a way of “Private Messaging” (also called Direct Messaging) with another user. But in most cases those “private” messages are stored in the computers at those companies, and the company might have computer programs that automatically search through the messages, and people with the right permissions might be able to view them directly.

Deanonymizing Data: Sometimes companies or researchers release datasets that have been “anonymized,” meaning that things like names have been removed, so you can’t directly see who the data is about. But sometimes people can still deduce who the anonymized data is about. This happened when Netflix released anonymized movie ratings data sets, but at least some users’ data could be traced back to them.

So those Redditors suggested they spam the site with fake applications, poisoning the job application data, so Kellogg’s wouldn’t be able to figure out which applications were legitimate or not (we could consider this a form of trolling). Then Kellogg’s wouldn’t be able to replace the striking workers, and they would have to agree to better working conditions.

In 2011, a group on 4chan started spreading a plan for making a “Forever Along Involuntary Flashmob.” You can see their instructions below:

If the immediate goal of the action of trolling is to cause disruption or provoke emotional reactions, what is it that makes people want to do this disruption or provoking of emotional reactions?

Anonymity can also encourage authentic behavior. If there are aspects of yourself that you don’t feel free to share in your normal life (thus making your normal life inauthentic), then anonymity might help you share them without facing negative consequences from people you know.

To describe something as authentic, we are often talking about honesty, in that the thing is what it claims to be. But we also describe something as authentic when we want to say that it offers a certain kind of connection.

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.”