As a social media user, we hope you are informed about things like: how social media works, how they influence your emotions and mental state, how your data gets used or abused, strategies in how people use social media, and how harassment and spam bots operate. We hope with this you can be a more informed user of social media, better able to participate, protect yourself, and make it a valuable experience for you and others you interact with. For example, you can hopefully recognize when someone is intentionally posting something bad or offensive (like the bad cooking videos we mentioned in the Virality chapter, or an intentionally offensive statement) in an attempt to get people to respond and spread their content. Then you can decide how you want to engage (if at all) given how they are trying to spread their content.

But even people who thought they were doing something good regretted the consequences of their creations, such as Eli Whitney who hoped his invention of the cotton gin would reduce slavery in the United States, but only made it worse, or Alfred Nobel who invented dynamite (which could be used in construction or in war) and decided to create the Nobel prizes, or Albert Einstein regretting his role in convincing the US government to invent nuclear weapons, or Aza Raskin regretting his invention infinite scroll.

I used to think that if we just gave people a voice and helped them connect, that would make the world better by itself. In many ways it has. But our society is still divided. Now I believe we have a responsibility to do even more. It’s not enough to simply connect the world, we must also work to bring the world closer together.

While we’ve been talking about capitalism and social media platforms, we also want to look at the world of programming as well. In particular, we want to highlight how the profession of programming went from being a disrespected, low-pay job for women, to being a highly respected and high paying job for men.

In this situation, they outline the following constraints that must be considered when publicly shaming someone in this way: Proportionality: The negative consequences of shaming someone should not be worse than the positive consequences Necessity: There must not be another more effective method of achieving the goal Respect for Privacy: There must not be unnecessary violations of privacy Non-Abusiveness: The shaming must not use abusive tactics. Reintegration “Public shaming must aim at, and make possible, the reintegration of the norm violator back into the community, rather than permanently stigmatizing them.”

The term “cancel culture” can be used for public shaming and criticism, but is used in a variety of ways, and it doesn’t refer to just one thing. The offense that someone is being canceled for can range from sexual assault of minors (e.g., R. Kelly, Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey), to minor offenses or even misinterpretations.

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.

When creating the Twitter-like social media protocol Mastodon, its creator, Eugen Rochko, decided not to allow quote-tweet like posts: I’ve made a deliberate choice against a quoting feature because it inevitably adds toxicity to people’s behaviours. You are tempted to quote when you should be replying, and so you speak at your audience instead of with the person you are talking to. It becomes performative. Even when doing it for “good” like ridiculing awful comments, you are giving awful comments more eyeballs that way. No quote toots. Thank’s

When tasks are done through large groups of people making relatively small contributions, this is called crowdsourcing. The people making the contributions generally come from a crowd of people that aren’t necessarily tied to the task (e.g., all internet users can edit Wikipedia), but then people from the crowd either get chosen to participate, or volunteer themselves.

Stack Overflow: A crowdsourced question-and-answer site specifically for programming questions.

When social media companies like Facebook hire moderators, they often hire teams in countries where they can pay workers less. The moderators then are given sets of content to moderate and have to make quick decisions about each item before looking at the next one. They have to get through many posts during their time, and given the nature of the content (e.g., hateful content, child porn, videos of murder, etc.), this can be traumatizing for the moderators:

14.3.1. 4chan/8chan (minimal moderation)

ndividual users are often given a set of moderation tools they can use themselves, such as: Block an account: a user can block an account from interacting with them or seeing their content Mute an account: a user can allow an account to try interacting with them, but the user will never see what that account did. Mute a phrase or topic: some platforms let users block content by phrases or topics (e.g., they are tired of hearing about cryptocurrencies, or they don’t want spoilers for the latest TV show). Delete: Some social media platforms let users delete content that was directed at them (e.g., replies to their post, posts on their wall, etc.) Report: Most social media sites allow users to report or flag content as needing moderation.

One of the ways social media can be beneficial to mental health is in finding community (at least if it is a healthy one, and not toxic like in the last section). For example, if you are bullied at school (and by classmates on some social media platform), you might find a different online community online that supports you. Or take the example of Professor Casey Fiesler finding a community that shared her interests (see also her article):

Some people view internet-based social media (and other online activities) as inherently toxic and therefore encourage a digital detox, where people take some form of a break from social media platforms and digital devices.

12.4.1. Building on the original intention# Content is sometimes shared without modification fitting the original intention, but let’s look at ones where there is some sort of modification that aligns with the original intention. We’ll include several examples on this page from the TikTok Duet feature, which allows people to build off the original video by recording a video of themselves to play at the same time next to the original. So for example, This tweet thread of TikTok videos (cross-posted to Twitter) starts with one Tiktok user singing a short parody musical of an argument in a grocery store. The subsequent tweets in the thread build on the prior versions, first where someone adds themselves singing the other half of the argument, then where someone adds themselves singing the part of their child, then where someone adds themselves singing the part of an employee working at the store

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: Technology (languages, weapons, medicine, writing, math, computers, etc.), religions philosophies political ideas (democracy, authoritarianism, etc.) art organizations etc.

The filter bubbles can be good or bad, such as forming bubbles for: Hate groups, where people’s hate and fear of others gets reinforced and never challenged Fan communities, where people’s appreciation of an artist, work of art, or something is assumed, and then reinforced and never challenged Marginalized communities can find safe spaces where they aren’t constantly challenged or harassed (e.g., a safe space)

Some recommendation algorithms can be simple such as reverse chronological order, meaning it shows users the latest posts (like how blogs work, or Twitter’s “See latest tweets” option). They can also be very complicated taking into account many factors, such as: 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!

The following tweet has a video of a soap dispenser that apparently was only designed to work for people with light-colored skin.

This way of managing disabilities puts the burden fully on disabled people to manage their disability in a world that was not designed for them, trying to fit in with “normal” people.

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

Hackers finding a vulnerability and inserting, modifying, or downloading information. For example: hackers stealing the names, Social Security numbers, and birthdates of 143 million Americans from Equifax

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).

Feeling Powerful: T

What are the potential benefits of this example (e.g., it’s funny, in-group identifying)? And who would get the benefits?