This article basically summarizes how posting children online could be putting them in jeopardy for unwanted attention. One example it talks about is a mother who is also a Tik Tok creator. After having a video of her child go viral, she noticed a lot of predatory comments towards her kid, and now wish she hadn't posted the video at all. The article also discusses family vlogging channels and child actors, and how these kids can't really consent to being featured publicly. Many of these children often have the deal with the consequences of being perceived so young, and as they grow up may feel the need to constantly be performing.

I think Monica Lewinsky is a great example of virality. Before her scandal of being rumored to have had an affair with U.S. president Bill Clinton, no one really knew her. She was just a white house intern. But after news broke out and theories started to spread, her life changed drastically to constantly being ridiculed by the press and public. Although many years have passed, and she's now an activist for women's rights, people still reference the meme of her "being under the desk" to this day.

I think going viral can honestly be a double end sword. There are many cases where people have gained huge financial success and reputation from going viral weather intentionally or unintendedly. For example, many Youtubers and Tik Tokers have created huge brands for themselves from simply going viral off their respected app. But going viral can also bring harassment, and even ruin people's lives. For example, I remember watching a interview where a woman talks about how an ad she modeled for became a massive meme online, causing people to mock, harass, and even send death threats over her looks. This just goes to show although something may sound good in retrospect, there are many downsides that may also come with it.

This is a very interesting algorithm choice by Elon Musk, as I find it strange that he made it so interacting with accounts you dislike will cause you too see more of them. The basic concept of it makes any normal person assume that this would deter people from his app "X", but it actually makes sense when you think about how much drama, controversies, and hate is prevalent within that app. I think he is using this strategy to basically "rage bait" people to engaging more with the app by causing them to try to win internet battles, etc.

This article talks about systematic bias, which is basically a tendency to operate in ways which result in certain social groups being favored and others being devalued. This is something I had studied in history class, as we had learned about historic examples such as when the U.S. criminal sentencing guidelines created a harsher sentence on cheaper cocaine more common with black communities and people of color, compared to more expensive cocaine which was used in white populations, in order to criminalize POC greater. This is also something which I have seen being used on social media, as recently I have seen a lot of media of illegal immigrants committing crimes on the news and social media platforms, compared to crimes committed by white people.

Recommendation algorithms have always been sort of a mystery to me. I'm always seeing people on TikTok posting videos such as "How to beat the algorithm", and "how to go viral", so this really shows that it can often be a strategic thing to have the algorithm recommend your content. However one thing I do find it a lot of these algorithm primarily rely on engagement, and how often users are searching for that content, in order to further recommend it to others.

This website explains that assistive technology is basically any technology that can help individuals who have disabilities, or need extra assistance. This can range from physical objects such as hearing aids, to even software such has a feature to increase text size for people with poor vision. I never really thought out this feature before, but now I've realized that it is incredibly important that we have inclusive features like this, because so many people often struggle with everyday objects!

This website explains color blindness, it's causes and effects, and the different types of color blindness's there are. Color blindness is basically the decreased ability to see color or differences in color. As suspected, this can make life for these individuals incredibly harder when it comes to technology such as traffic lights and digital screens. However, one way to help with this that the website talks about is by incorporating things like significant contrast between colors, and distinguishable shapes, so although the person cannot see color they can still tell the difference between what they see.

Reading this section personally hit very close to home for me. I also have ADHD, and have a tendency to hyperfocus when it comes to art as I can spend hours on a single painting, but then struggle to focus for more than 30 minutes on a homework assignment. I find it very true that people tend to "mask" their disabilities, as almost everyone I know has something they hide in order to fit in. I as well often hide that fact that homework often takes longer for me due to my ADHD. Knowing this, this is why I strongly think it's important we as a society work to becoming more inclusive in all aspects of life!

After reading this article, I think its very important to be aware about scams, and not to click on anything shady. Here, the article discusses about how hackers were even able to manipulate QR codes in order to steal data from victims. This can be done with other methods too, as recently, I have seen a lot of text messages about "lost packages", or "vehicle fines", so its important to also double check before clicking on external sources and websites.

This article talks about the data breaching that happened to Facebook sometime before 2019. The personal information of about 530 million users were stolen, however Facebook decided not to notify users about this. Something like this could put enormous amounts of people in danger. Our data within apps like Facebook include things like phone numbers, personal information, and even our connections. This data leaking could put people in risk to scammers, blackmail, etc. For example, there have been numerous cases were celebrities have had their data/personal photos to the public which caused major controversies. I think it was very immature for Facebook not to share this to users in order to not cause major backlash for the company.

This makes me really think about how even things we think are "private", like our privates messages, really aren't. These social media companies have accesses to pretty much all our activity online/on their apps. For example, when you allow apps like Instagram and Tiktok to access your photos and videos, they pretty much can see everything in your camera roll. This also makes me wonder if these social media companies can use this as black mail to important people like celebrities and politicians. People who influence our world.

This article by researchers at UW discuss the mass wave of misinformation in regards to the coronavirus. In this article, one of the researchers reveals that often, misinformation during massive events such as the Covid 19 out break are due to people's growing fear and anxiety. Because of the uncertainty, people are often seeking solutions, which therefore help exhilarate information they may find shocking or comforting. This is why its important to always fact check data before fully believing what you see online.

This article talks about how even if profiles may not share much information about themselves, their sexual orientation can still be deduced by their contact list, or "friends" list online. This that simple things like your network of who you know can reveal about yourself. It was revealed in the article that researches were also able to build bots which can collect information just like this to keep tabs on people. This goes for show that although you may think you are protected, you're online data can reveal things you may not want to share.

This type of tracking has always been something I've been curious about. I often notice that when I search something into google, or look for specific things on TikTok/Instagram, I soon will get ads, or posts about that thing I searched recommended to me. While I know that this is the apps taking my data and pumping out content related to it in order to get me more hooked to the app, I find this type of tracking invasive and weird. I also notice that I've been getting a lot of UW related content on my social media apps recently. So this makes me think that these apps track more then your searches, but things like your location, etc. as well.

This article gives some pretty good insight on the history behind the word "Troll". While it's self explanatory that the word troll is in relation the dwarf troll characters, it's also informs us how there are many different aspects to trolling, such as "flaming"-- (posting harmful insults online), and "deindividuation" -- (loss of self identity within a group).

This article describes a certain incident where comedian Jaboukie Young-White made an offensive tweet while impressing the FBI's official account. The tweet was in relating to MLK's assassination, implying that the FBI was who organized his death. While further reading the article, I learned Jaboukie has imitated notorious figures beforehand -- such as pretending to be Kaetlin Bennet (a controversial guns right activist). So I find it interesting that this specific incident was what would inevitably get his account deleted by twitter considering is history.

Not feeding the trolls is something I see very often within celebrity culture. For individuals with huge followings, its a no brainer that they often receive waves of trolling, especially on social media. These acts of trolling can range from nasty comments, to even edited photos and videos. Despite how much this may irritate these celebs in secret, replying to these trolls would only "amuse" they, and often can even lead to more trolling. For example, Chrissy Teigen, known for often clapping back at trolls in a sarcastic and humorous way, found her replies backfiring when people resurfaced old offensive tweets of hers, which she latter had to apologize for. So while responding to trolls sometimes may work in people's favor, most of the time it just results in more trolling.

I think this video on Jennifer Lawrence is a perfect example of online personas, and people's parasocial relationships with celebrities. Jennifer Lawrence in the video is said the be the ultimate cool girl. Doing things like hanging out her her male co stars, casually eating junk food while maintaining a slim figure, and being unfiltered. A stark contrast from her often serious and tough roles-- such as Katniss Everdeen. This left a lot of people speculating if her "cool girl" personality was even real, or just something she contrived to seem more relatable. So as this shows, no matter how Jennifer Lawrence acts, she will always have people questioning the authenticity of what she choose to display to the public, despite them not even knowing her in person.

Lonleygirl15 is a great example of authenticity when it comes to online personas. What was an online web series following 16 year old Bree's mundane life which soon spiraled into a mystery revolving around her parent's religion, viewers were drawn to her simple, home recording type videos with a dark twist. However after people became skeptical about Bree, and if her whole story itself was real, people were quick to point out video inconsistencies, and create theories about the whole ordeal. And while the bad press garnered some temporary publicity, the show eventually died off after it was revealed to be scripted with hired actors. Overall, it was that belief that the events and characters were real which drew people to the series in the first place. So of course audiences finding out they were hoaxed inevitably led to the series infamous reputation within online history.

This chapter about authenticity really make me reflect on the current "performative" male trend. As you may know, the stereotype for these performative males goes along the lines of things like drinking matcha, wearing tote bags, listening to indie music like Clario... etc. In hindsight, you can chop this up as just ones interests, regardless of their gender. But the reason it's such a big trend is because people can sense when a guy is doing it purely for validation. More specifically- female validation, since these interests are more stereotypically women's interests. So like the text reads, "humans do not like to be duped", and when people can tell something is inauthentic, they're not going to take it seriously.

For me, My Little Pony always relates back to a place of nostalgia, but it's fandom of grown men called "Bronies" display a great example of strange internet subcultures within social media history. Social media has always been a place for people to find their niches, even if they are "weird" or socially unacceptable. That's why sites like 4chan have existed to allow for the posting of unregulated content. However, one thing I will say about subcultures within social media is they usually always find a way to get political at some point. From furries being tied with leftist views, Taylor Swift fans now being called MAGA with the release of her new album, and even bronies having a Nazi problem, it seems the internet and politics have always been intertwined within history.

4chan has undeniably been one of those social media sites I had herd about, but never really used. When I recently decided to visit the site, I was shocked by it's retro user interface, and confusing layout. People on 4chan seem to post in their own niche subcategories, and reply in threads like reddit. The whole site itself feels like lost media, but people post regularly, and even talk about current events. Overall, I think the site is a great example of how despite the site looking rather out dated, and confusing to use, it still has a loyal fan base which values un-regulated speech over flashy and newer designs.

User interfaces, may seem like such a small aspect of an app's design, but in reality contribute tremendously to it's success. For example, TikTok's scrolling algorithm is what makes us addicted to it. The basically endless push of new content is what has personally made me "doom scroll" for hours. Same with tinder, as the swipe right on a person's profile to show interest, or swipe left to indicate you are not interested, dramatically simplifies it's usability to where you could be swiping non stop, compared to if it were a menu with a "next" button. So in total, under interfaces are not only good for creating those annoying little "x"s on ads, but also making an app become successful in the long run.

This article is a great example of the downsides when it comes to the simplification of data. To briefly summarize, it basically explains that during the 2024 Superbowl, 75.85% of traffic from X's advertising was fake. Advertising companies learned that while their viewership seemed high, their website clicks/content engagement was staggeringly low in comparison. This revealed that X had a huge bot problem. A real example talked about in the article was how a small business owner, despite having 29,000 views on his ad posted to X, Google Analytics reported that X wasn't the source of any of the traffic during that time. This shows that simplifying certain data, such as social media traffic, can blur the line between what is human vs. bot. However, bots cannot be entirely to blame, as the article talks about how this could be an Elon Musk problem as well. The 2023 Superbowl was only a few months after Musk had acquired twitter and had 72% less fake traffic. So, it’s possible that money hungry billionaires like him could be purposely exploiting data simplification, and allowing more bots onto his site in order to increase profits made from advertisers.

The image from this tweet shows the gender selection options from what is assumed to be an online tax form. Hilariously though, besides "Male" and "Female", it also displays the options "N/A", "Unknown", and "Tax Entity". Aside from this being a funny yet really bad mistake on the website's part, it also ironically displays the difficulties people within the LGBTQ community may face when it comes to data collection. Since gender can be considered a spectrum, it can become extremely complicated to accurately create a way to gather data on ALL the genders, besides the main two (male and female).

My friends and I often love taking photos, and I've noticed that when we try sending photos to each other on apps such as Instagram..etc., the image quality does become fuzzy. Sending images through iMessage/email on the other hand, often doesn't distort the photo too much, or can even keep the same quality. Now relating back to our reading, this I found is because for such a big app like Instagram, compressing the photo makes it much faster to upload and download images. IMessage however keeps the quality because it is sent between apple servers (mainly relating to iPhones), and email just attaches the full file, which often takes longer to download but will retain much of it's resolution.

Although I'm not a Star Wars expert, reading this made me feel a bit bad for the film and it's crew/cast. The article pretty much summarizes how although Star Wars: The Last Jedi has received a lot of hate over the years, it would found that about half of the backlash was politically motivated or wasn't even human (bot generated). This makes me wonder, when it come's to criticism online, whether reviews, comments, and analytics, how much of it can we truly trust as genuine?

This article talks on how app ranking can be manipulated, with a photo of a Chinese worker with about 100 phones as the main focus. The worker is assumed to be manually uninstalling and re-installing these apps to boost it's ranking in the app store. One detail mentioned in the article that I personally found shocking was the fact the worker had to wear a heavy coat and use a hand warmer, suggesting that her working environment must be very cold. Despite app boosting services costing $65,000 a week, these workers are most likely underpaid, and made to preform in poor working conditions.

Since bots are automated social media accounts, mainly made by lines of code, one thing they will struggle with is replicating authentic human responses. For example, Someone who buys follower bots on Instagram will often display unequal follower to engagement ratios. So whilst their follower count may be in the millions, their likes and comments often underperform since these bots were not programed to interact with content as well. In addition, responses from AI bots like Chatgpt are basically an accumulation of data from the web/ fed to it. So it's answers cannot be considered authentic human based knowledge.

Reading this, I was shocked at the apathy these tech owners showed to concerns from people like Kumail. Personally, I've seen plenty of horrible, and even criminal things on the internet. From cyber bullying, nudity, gore, etc... not only are these things out there, but often unregulated and easily accessible. As a tech owner, ethically, it's you're responsibility that you go to extreme measures to stop things like this from being shared/spread on your platform. Being tech owners, these people are defiantly smart enough to be aware that things like this could happen. So I think them being "shocked" is all an act, as they know any publicity, even bad publicity, still helps push the popularity of their platforms.

Like the text discusses, Nihilism can branch out to its own subcategories as well. For example, existential nihilism refers to the idea that life has no meaning/purpose. This in turn can lead to depression and apathy. Active nihilists, on the other hand see life’s meaninglessness as a freeing condition and will instead take this as a sign to do whatever they want. Political nihilism on the other hand associates with our political system, and believes that current political systems are flawed and must be destroyed. So yes, while these different types of Nihilism skim down to ethics having no inherent meaning, what makes them differ is what they choose to focus on, and how they inevitably cope with this idea of thinking.