You can also look at how you can organize with other workers, through things like the Alphabet Workers Union (Alphabet is the parent company at Google).
With the recent news of an entire team of workers being laid off during negotiations through the AWU, I'm even more wary of this issue. Many tech companies are increasingly unethical in their decisions, and increasing tech ethics education is extremely important.
More personal data: The more personal data Meta collects, the more predictions about users it can make. It can get more data by getting more users, and more user time, as well as finding more things to track about users.
This is especially nefarious if used for the purposes of political gain. An example of this is the 2020 election Cambridge Analytica scanal.
Meta’s way of making profits fits in a category called Surveillance Capitalism.
This model is something that can lead to the formation of an alt-right pipeline. I researched this heavily during iNFO 200. and found Meta and YouTube to be the biggest offenders.
Surveillance capitalism began when internet companies started tracking user behavior data to make their sites more personally tailored to users.
This model is something that often leads to the formation of an alt-right pipeline. This is something I researched heavily during INFO 200, and Met and YouTube are the biggest offenders.
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.” 18.3.5. Reflection questions
Sometimes, public shaming is done for the wrong reasons and is morally reproachable. In these instances, I wonder what social media sites themselves can do to protect their users, whether it be through content moderation or other means.
In this situation, they outline the following constraints that must be considered when publicly shaming someone in this way:
Sometimes, public shaming does not follow these conventions and causes more moral harm than good. In these instances, I wonder how social media sites themselves can protect users against public shaming, whether it be through content moderation or other means.
“[This] celebrity pressure I had experienced on stage has now been democratized and given to everybody [through social media]. And everyone is feeling this pressure of having an audience, of having to perform, of having a sort of, like, proper noun version of your own name and then the self in your heart.” (NPR Fresh Air Interview)
I definitely agree and see the effects of this statement. With social media comes the pressure to share our life, which compounds into the pressure to live a perfect one.
“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.”
This is especially interesting to me. Public accounts such as those on twitter, in tandem with the platform's 'trending' page and recommendation algorithms, have a huge effect on public opinion and can have real-world consequences.
Doxing: Publicly posting identifying information about someone (e.g., full name, address, phone number, etc.).
This is something I have seen often, and has almost become a meme. Since it is so mainstream, I wonder how accessible software to track IP addreses is and whether or not this should be regulated.
When social media users work together, we can consider what problem they are solving. For example, for some of the Tiktok Duet videos from the virality chapter, the “problem” would be something like “how do we create music out of this source video” and the different musicians contribute their own piece to the solution. For some other examples:
An interesting ethical dilemma to consider - many AI models are trained off of 'crowdsourced' data. For example, image creation models often are trained through actual artists' work. this raises the question of whether or not AI models are theft, since without others' intellectual property, they'd have no training source data.
Upwork: A site that lets people find and contract work with freelancers (generally larger and more specialized tasks than Amazon Mechanical Turk
Another example could be GoFundMe, or Kickstarter. These are sites designed for crowdsourcing funding.
While Facebook groups and individual pages can be moderated by users, for the platform as a while, Facebook has paid moderation teams to make moderation decisions (whether on content flagged by bots, or content flagged by users).
It's important to note that some content moderation teams at Instagram and facebook are made up of underpaid and overworked employees from developing countries, who are subjected to hours of inappropriate and potentially upsetting content. This raises an ethical question for content moderation.
Without quality control moderation, the social media site will likely fill up with content that the target users of the site don’t want, and those users will leave. What content is considered “quality” content will vary by site, with 4chan considering a lot of offensive and trolling content to be “quality” but still banning spam (because it would make the site repetitive in a boring way), while most sites would ban some offensive content.
One thing that came to mind with this paragraph is AI-generated content. Many sites, especially Facebook and Twitter, would benefit from having effective Ai-generated content moderation, as there are many fake users on these sites.
The seeking out of bad news, or trying to get news even though it might be bad, has existed as long as people have kept watch to see if a family member will return home safely. But of course, new mediums can provide more information to sift through and more quickly, such as with the advent of the 24-hour news cycle in the 1990s, or, now social media.
Another reason for doomscrolling ma be that since we are so overstimulated by everything we see on social media, we are inherently more numb to information. As a result, we seek out more and more emotionally rousing news and information, something which recommendation algorithms are happy to facilitate.
If [social media] was just bad, I’d just tell all the kids to throw their phone in the ocean, and it’d be really easy. The problem is it - we are hyper-connected, and we’re lonely. We’re overstimulated, and we’re numb. We’re expressing our self, and we’re objectifying ourselves. So I think it just sort of widens and deepens the experiences of what kids are going through.
This concept that social media enhances real-world loneliness is especially interesting. An extreme version of this may be the incel community on sites like 4chan, who are fundamentally isolated and disillusioned by society.
When content (and modified copies of content) is in a position to be replicated, there are factors that determine whether it gets selected for replicated or not. As humans look at the content they see on social media they decide whether they want to replicate it for some reason, such as:
It's interesting to consider how the popularity of meme culture might interact with advertising efforts. For example, there was widespread speculation that the 2019 'AirPods meme', which dpeitced AIrPods as a immense, meme-ified excess and luxury, was in fact created by Apple to enhance Airpods sales. At that time, the product was close to failing in the market, but since then they've become almost ubiquitious.
Chain letters were letters that instructed the recipient to make their own copies of the letter and send them to people they knew.
I remember reading about chain mail in emails and intenret forums in the early days of the internet, and then experiencing somethingng similar on Instagram in the early 2010s. It's interesting to see how such phenomena can transcend time and medium.
Therefore, when these guidelines were followed, they had have racially biased (that is, racist) outcomes regardless of intent or bias of the individual judges. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act).
This reminds me of Microsoft's AI resume sequencing adn analysis bots. They were trained in a similar way to recommendation systems, and were proven to be consistently racist in their recomendations.
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.
This reminds me of services like Amazon Alex and Siri (especially the 'Hey Siri' function). Since they use voice recognition to activate, they physically have to be listening all the time, so it's feasible for companies to actually do this.
Assistive technologies give tools to disabled people to help them become more “normal.” So the disabled person becomes able to move through a world that was not designed for them. But there is still an expectation that disabled people must become more “normal,” and often these assistive technologies are very expensive.
This is a very interesting and important assertion. A disables person's experience may vary widely depending on their income and what they have access to.
And trichromats’ relative reduction in seeing color doesn’t cause them difficulty, so being a trichromat isn’t considered to be a disability.
Designing mobile apps and websites for those who are colorblind, which involves high-contrast colors and intentional choices about text placement, is an interesting field.
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
This is especially dangerous for social media sites like Instagram and Twitter. Many people utilize these sites' messaging platforms as if they are equivalent to SMS messaging, but fail to realize that their information may be available to third parties.
Metadata: Sometimes the metadata that comes with content might violate someone’s privacy. For example, in 2012, former tech CEO John McAfee was a suspect in a murder in Belize, John McAfee hid out in secret. But when Vice magazine wrote an article about him, the photos in the story contained metadata with the exact location in Guatemala.
This is something I have had come to my attention fairly recently. I noticed that Apple included a new feature when exporting images that allows the user to toggle whether or not to include location metadata.
(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.
This is another very interesting example of ethical trolling, or trolling for the social good. It highlights the power that we, as computer scientists and users of the internet, hold.
But targeting advertising can be used in less ethical ways, such as targeting gambling ads at children, or at users who are addicted to gambling, or the 2016 Trump campaign ‘target[ing] 3.5m black Americans to deter them from voting’
A presidential campaign using this data, and a platform allowing it to do so, is especially insidious when you consider how much the average person's view of the world is influenced by what we see online. The power of these systems is noted in many different phenomena, such as the alt-right pipeline
In support of the protesters, K-pop fans swarmed the app and uploaded as many K-pop videos as they could eventually leading to the app crashing and becoming unusable, and thus protecting the protesters from this attempt at Police surveillance.
This is an interesting anecdote, as you don't often see the positive aspect of this issue. trolling can be an incredibly valuable and important way of protecting people on the internet, especially as more and more things are connected to computers and the Internet.
Advance and argument / make a point: Trolling is sometimes done in order to advance an argument or make a point. For example, proving that supposedly reliable news sources are gullible by getting them to repeat an absurd gross story.
In my opinion, this is the most interesting motive for trolling. It definitely catches people's attention and makes them laugh in a way other social justice message spreading methodologies don't, and I believe it's an effective way of furthering your cause. The FBI MLK tweet is a great example of this.
Dr. McLaughlin, through the @Sciencing_Bi account, pretended to have an illness she didn’t have (COVID). She made false accusations against Arizona State University’s role in the (fake) person getting sick, and she was able to get attention and sympathy through the fake illness and fake death of the fake @Sciencing_Bi.
I find it interesting psychologically when people like this individual consturct these elaborate lies, but do not try to directly profit off of them. It's remarkable how deep somoene's need for attention can go.
As long as we know where we stand, and the kind of connection being offered roughly matches the sort of connection we’re getting, things go okay.
It's interesting how our expectation and the notion we enter an interaction with determine how it goes for us. this is especially true online, where you can't physically see someone to make judgements.
Many memes, groups, and forms of internet slang come from 4Chan, such as:
I have often heard of hateful and dangerous content being spread on 'no-rules' social media sites like 4chan. It makes me wonder what, psychologically, is the draw of posting this content and whether or not users can be legally persecuted.
Some social media sites don’t have any formal connections. Like two users who happen to be on the same bulletin board.
This is an interesting site architecture. I can't think of any current relevant social media platforms that use this.
The location where the image/sound/video was taken
This is especially interesting to me, as it brings up some privacy concerns when sharing photos online. I have noticed that Apple recently introduced a feature that allows you to hide Location metadata in pictures.
Text can be stored with extra formatting information, such as fonts and colors, in different document file formats like Word Documents, PDF files, html website files, etc.
It's interesting to see that strings can have more design attributes than what is organically allowed on Twitter. For example, I have often seen people using downloaded keyboards to change the font of their tweets.
Vice How to Make a Bot That Isn’t Racist
This was a highly interesting article. I found it to be even more pertinent today, as training language models without bias is becoming increasingly important to our digital landscape.
ots might have significant limits on how helpful they are, such as tech support bots you might have had frustrating experiences with on various websites.
Another example of useful and desired bots were the hourly song lyric bots on Twitter. When Twitter removed free support of such bots, many people were upset, showing the significance bots may have to an online community.
US Army LDRSHP: Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, Personal Courage
The U.S. Army's Leadership Values, encapsulated in the acronym LDRSHIP (Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage), align with various moral frameworks. These values exhibit compatibility with virtue ethics through the cultivation of virtuous character traits, resonate with deontological principles through a focus on duty, and demonstrate connections to consequentialism and utilitarianism, particularly in the promotion of positive outcomes and selfless service. Additionally, the values align with Kantian ethics by emphasizing respect for individuals, and they embrace care ethics by highlighting relationships and commitment to others. Overall, the Army's values encompass a diverse ethical perspective, incorporating duty, virtue, consequences, individual worth, and community well-being within the context of military ethics.