We hope you are then able to advocate for ways of improving how social media operates in society. That might be through voting, pressuring government officials, spreading ideas and information, or organizing coordinated actions or protests.

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.

Colonialism [t1] is when one group or country subjugates another group, often imposing laws, religion, culture, and languages on that group, and taking resources from them. Colonialism is often justified by belief that the subjugated people are inferior (e.g., barbaric, savage, godless, backwards), and the superiority of the group doing the subjugation (e.g., civilized, advanced).

In other words, capitalism is a system where: Individuals or corporations own businesses These business owners make what they want and set their own prices. They compete with other businesses to convince customers to buy their products. These business owners then hire wage laborers [s2] at predetermined rates for their work, while the owners get the excess business profits or losses.

Paul Billingham and Tom Parr. Enforcing social norms: The morality of public shaming. European J of Philosophy, 28(4):997–1016, December 2020. URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ejop.12543 (visited on 2023-12-10), doi:10.1111/ejop.12543.

In the philosophy paper Enforcing Social Norms: The Morality of Public Shaming [r12], Paul Billingham and Tom Parr discuss under what conditions public shaming would be morally permissible. They are concerned not with actions primarily intended to induce shame in the target, but rather actions that may cause a person to shame, but are motivated by “seeking to draw attention to a social norm violation, and to rally others to their cause.”

In particular, Mastodon was built mostly by white tech enthusiast men (though there were some white queer groups that had a large role) [q38]. The whiteness of Mastodon’s developers and users made for an environment that was hostile to people of color (e.g., they got direct harassment and white people complaining that people of color mentioned racism without using content warnings).

We tend to think of violence as being another “normatively loaded” word, like authenticity. But where authenticity is usually loaded with a positive connotation–on the whole, people often value authenticity as a good thing–violence is loaded with a negative connotation. Yes, the doctor setting the bone is violent and invasive, but we don’t usually call this “violence” because it is considered to be a legitimate exercise of violence. Instead, we reserve the term “violence” mostly for describing forms of interference that we consider to be morally bad.

Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta. Beyond being there. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '92, 119–125. New York, NY, USA, June 1992. Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/142750.142769 (visited on 2023-12-08), doi:10.1145/142750.142769

For example, in the immediate aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, FBI released a security photo of one of the bombers and asked for tips. A group of Reddit users decided to try to identify the bomber(s) themselves. They quickly settled on a missing man (Sunil Tripathi) as the culprit (it turned out had died by suicide and was in no way related to the case), and flooded the Facebook page set up to search for Sunil Tripathi, causing his family unnecessary pain and difficulty. The person who set up the “Find Boston Bomber” Reddit board said “It Was a Disaster” but “Incredible” [p26], and Reddit apologized for online Boston ‘witch hunt’ [p27]

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, CSAM, videos of murder, etc.), this can be traumatizing for the moderators:

One concept that comes up in a lot of different ethical frameworks is moderation. Famously, Confucian thinkers prized moderation as a sound principle for living, or as a virtue, and taught the value of the ‘golden mean’, or finding a balanced, moderate state between extremes. This golden mean idea got picked up by Aristotle—we might even say ripped off by Aristotle—as he framed each virtue as a medial state between two extremes. You could be cowardly at one extreme, or brash and reckless at the other; in the golden middle is courage. You could be miserly and penny-pinching, or you could be a reckless spender, but the aim is to find a healthy balance between those two. Moderation, or being moderate, is something that is valued in many ethical frameworks, not because it comes naturally to us, per se, but because it is an important part of how we form groups and come to trust each other for our shared survival and flourishing

Much of the internet has developed a culture of copying without necessarily giving attribution to where it came from. Often, unlike with Elon Musk, this copying also involves modifying the content, recontextualizing the content to give it new meaning, or combining it with other content.

The online community activity of copying and remixing can be a means of cultural appropriation [l45], which is when one cultural group adopts something from another culture in an unfair or disrespectful way (as opposed to a fair, respectful cultural exchange [l46]). For example, many phrases from Black American culture have been appropriated by white Americans [l47] and had their meanings changed or altered (like “woke”, “cancel”, “shade”, “sip/spill the tea”, etc.).

Evolution occurs when three conditions are present: Replication (with Inheritance) An organism can make a new copy of itself, which inherits its characteristics Variations / Mutations The characteristics of an organism are sometimes changed, in a way that can be inherited by future copies Natural Selection Some characteristics make it more or less likely for an organism to compete for resources, survive, and make copies of itself

Social media platforms have some ability to influence what goes viral and how (e.g., recommendation algorithms, what actions are available, what data is displayed, etc.), though they only have partial control, since human interaction and organization also play a large role. Still, regardless of whether we can force any particular outcome, we can still consider of what you think would be best for what content should go viral, how much, and in what ways.

There are concerns that echo chambers increase polarization, where groups lose common ground and ability to communicate with each other. In some ways echo chambers are the opposite of context collapse, where contexts are created and prevented from collapsing. Though others have argued [k16] that people do interact across these echo chambers, but the contentious nature of their interactions increases polarization.

Individual analysis focuses on the behavior, bias, and responsibility an individual has, while systemic analysis focuses on the how organizations and rules may have their own behaviors, biases, and responsibility that aren’t necessarily connected to what any individual inside intends.

Mayo Clinic Staff. Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) - Symptoms and causes. 2023. URL: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chronic-fatigue-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20360490 (visited on 2023-12-07).

There are many things we might not be able to do that won’t be considered disabilities because our social groups don’t expect us to be able to do them. For example, none of us have wings that we can fly with, but that is not considered a disability, because our social groups didn’t assume we would be able to. Or, for a more practical example, let’s look at color vision:

Making functions also can help us organize our code. It lets us give a name to a block of code, and when we use it, those function names can help make the code more understandable. Making code as functions also helps in letting us put those pieces of code in other files or in code libraries, so the file we are working on is smaller and easier to manage.

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 [i24].

Kurt Wagner. This is how Facebook collects data on you even if you don’t have an account. Vox, April 2018. URL: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17254312/facebook-shadow-profiles-data-collection-non-users-mark-zuckerberg (visited on 2023-12-05).

Datasets can be poisoned unintentionally. For example, many scientists posted online surveys that people can get paid to take. Getting useful results depended on a wide range of people taking them. But when one TikToker’s video about taking them went viral, the surveys got filled out with mostly one narrow demographic, preventing many of the datasets from being used as intended.

There is a reason why stereotypes are so tenacious: they work… sort of. Humans are brilliant at finding patterns, and we use pattern recognition to increase the efficiency of our cognitive processing. We also respond to patterns and absorb patterns of speech production and style of dress from the people around us. We do have a tendency to display elements of our history and identity, even if we have never thought about it before. This creates an issue, however, when the stereotype is not apt in some way. This might be because we diverge in some way from the categories that mark us, so the stereotype is inaccurate. Or this might be because the stereotype also encodes value judgments that are unwarranted, and which lead to problems with implicit bias.

In the early Internet message boards that were centered around different subjects, experienced users would “troll for newbies” by posting naive questions that all the experienced users were already familiar with. The “newbies” who didn’t realize this was a troll would try to engage and answer, and experienced users would feel superior and more part of the group knowing they didn’t fall for the troll like the “newbies” did. These message boards are where the word “troll” with this meaning comes from.

Parasocial relationships are when a viewer or follower of a public figure (that is, a celebrity) feel like they know the public figure, and may even feel a sort of friendship with them, but the public figure doesn’t know the viewer at all.

Authenticity is a rich concept, loaded with several connotations. 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.

One difference you may notice with different social media sites is in how you form connections with others. Some social media sites don’t have any formal connections. Like two users who happen to be on the same bulletin board. Some social media sites only allow reciprocal connections, like being “friends” on Facebook Some social media sites offer one-way connections, like following someone on Twitter or subscribing to a YouTube channel. There are, of course, many variations and nuances besides what we mentioned above, but we wanted to get you started thinking about some different options.

The 1980s and 1990s also saw an emergence of more instant forms of communication with chat applications. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) [e7] lets people create “rooms” for different topics, and people could join those rooms and participate in real-time text conversations with the others in the room.

Twitter. November 2023. Page Version ID: 1187856185. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter (visited on 2023-12-01).

Open a social media interface (not the one you’ve been working with) and choose a view (e.g., a list of posts, an individual post, an author page etc.). First identify as many pieces of information you can see the screen (without doing anything). For each piece of information: What data types might be used to represent that data on a computer? How is this data a simplification of reality? That is, what does it not capture? Who does it work best for, and who does it not work well for? Did the user(s) directly provide that data, or was it collected automatically by the social media site? Next, start listing what additional pieces of information are available through one action (e.g., clicking on user profile picture, clicking on comments link, etc.).

Gender Pay Gap Bot [@PayGapApp]. In this organisation, women's median hourly pay is 31.3% lower than men's. The pay gap is 8.1 percentage points wider than the previous year. March 2023. URL: https://twitter.com/PayGapApp/status/1633538112373784581 (visited on 2023-12-02).

Bots present a similar disconnect between intentions and actions. Bot programs are written by one or more people, potentially all with different intentions, and they are run by others people, or sometimes scheduled by people to be run by computers.

Act with unforced actions in harmony with the natural cycles of the universe. Trying to force something to happen will likely backfire. Rejects Confucian focus on ceremonies/rituals. Prefers spontaneity and play. Like how water (soft and yielding), can, over time, cut through rock.