Social Media, Ethics, and Automation# Automation drives our experience of social media platforms, from timeline feeds to disinformation bots. This book examines social media phenomena, like viral memes, parasocial relationships, and harassment campaigns. This book then explores the ethics of automation on social media platforms by experimenting with computer programs that automate social media actions. We assume no prior programming experience.

What we hope you gain from this book: As a social media user, we hope you learn how social media sites influence you, from how your data gets used or abused, to how harassment and spam bots operate, to how platforms manipulate your emotions and mental state. We hope you could then be a more knowledgeable consumer and participant on social media sites. As a member of a society that is influenced by social media, we hope you learn about the societal impact of automated social media systems, and how those systems are designed under different economic, social, and governmental pressures. We hope you could then be more knowledgeable in what you might advocate for or vote for in how social media sites operate. As a potential tech worker that might work for a social media site, we hope you learn how to analyze the ethical tradeoffs made in designing automated systems. We hope you could then bring those concerns into how you design and implement automated systems for social media sites.

repository open issue .md .pdf Data From the Reddit API 8.2. Data From the Reddit API# 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 the request, and what information you can get back. If you are interested in learning more about what you can do with praw and what information you can get back, you can look at the official documentation for those. But be warned they are not organized in a friendly way for newcomers and take some getting used to to figure out what these documentation pages are talking about. So, if you are interested, you can look at the praw library documentation to find out what the library can do (again, not organized in a beginner-friendly way). You can learn a little more by clicking on the praw models and finding a list of the types of data for each of the models, and a list of functions (i.e., actions) you can do with them. You can also look up information on the data that you can get from the Reddit API by looking at the Reddit API Documentation. The Reddit API lets you access just some of the data that Reddit tracks, but Reddit and other social media platforms track much more than they let you have access to.

8.3.1. Spurious Correlations# One thing to note in the above case of candle reviews and COVID is that just because something appears to be correlated, doesn’t mean that it is connected in the way it looks like. In the above, the correlation might be due mostly to people buying and reviewing candles in the fall, and diseases, like COVID, spreading most during the fall. It turns out that if you look at a lot of data, it is easy to discover spurious correlations where two things look like they are related, but actually aren’t. Instead, the appearance of being related may be due to chance or some other cause. For example:

7.2. Origins of trolling# While the term “trolling” in the sense we are talking about in this chapter comes out of internet culture, the type of actions that we now call trolling have been happening as far back as we have historical records.

Ethics Frameworks Don’t Guarantee Moral Goodness# One final note we’d like to make here is that, as we said before, we can use ethics frameworks as tools to help us see into situations. But just because we use an ethics framework to look at a situation doesn’t mean that we will come out with a morally good conclusion. This is perhaps most obvious with something like nihilism, which rejects the very existence of a morally good conclusion. But we can also see this with other frameworks, such as egoism, which we (the authors) believe often gives morally wrong results, or with consequentialist/utilitarianist reasoning reasoning, which has been challenged at many points in history (e.g., A Modest Proposal [b102] from 1729, the character Ivan arguing with his brother [b103] in Brothers Karamazov [b104] fromn 1880, and the two articles Effective Altruism Is Pushing a Dangerous Brand of ‘AI Safety’ [b105] [archived here] and Effective altruism’s most controversial idea [b106] from 2022). Still, we hope that in using different frameworks (even ones you often disagree with) you are able to understand situations better and with more nuance.

Automation drives our experience of social media platforms, from timeline feeds to disinformation bots. This book examines social media phenomena, like viral memes, parasocial relationships, and harassment campaigns. This book then explores the ethics of automation on social media platforms by experimenting with computer programs that automate social media actions. This book assume no prior programming experience.