In this website it showed that people may have good intentions which was to spread ways of doing side hustles but the actual impact was harmful because the variety of demographic shifted to a very specified audience which was the people who came from tik tok causing damage to the function and purpose of the website. Under a confucianist lens people would agree that the girl was only trying to be a benevolent person and helping her fellow peers and viewers and under a daoist lens the natural order was disrupted and she cause a major change that shouldn’t have happened.

I thought this kind of tied in with daoism and just going with the natural order of things and not interfering. Sometimes people believe they’re doing good and it’s great to have nice intentions but intentions and impact are very different. Impact is what lasts. In this case with the creation of the cotton gin the intention was good but because it made cotton production more efficient it called for even more slaves, and thus this led to a poor impact. I can imagine how this works in the tech industry, for instance the implementation of AI and how it was made to make life easier by addressing one problem, but it creates another. On a small scale an example could be siri, which is voice activated but sometimes activates at something that only sounds like it and it becomes just a nuisance.

I think this reflects how time may change but the functionality of society still lingers. Recalling that much of tech is dependent on exploiting cheap labor, in dangerous conditions, and in other countries, this is similar to Leopold and how he was “committing crimes against humanity” and abusing them for labor. This also reminds me of how tech companies prioritize profit and take an excessive amount of user data that could ultimately cause harm to users while the companies earn more and more profit.

This ties in with “doom-scrolling” and ethical frameworks. Companies will go beyond necessary data needed for optimal platform engagement, and they know it works well because things like doom scrolling exist which play into factors that can harm people’s well-being. For whatever it’s worth, these companies are following an egoist lens on which they prioritize the profits over the very thing that allows the profit to exist: the users.

I don’t think the idea of “Schadenfreude” puts good use to shame. Earlier it said that shame is a powerful tool because it can be scaled but guilt operates within individual psychology. I think what Schadenfreude does is just create problems when there doesn’t need to be any. Making celebrities feel shame just for the sake of it isn’t the best way to utilize shame.

I think the nuance in meaning of guilt and shame reflects the belief we hold as a society that ppl aren’t inherently bad or good. Moreover, the kind of behavior and action that you do don’t define your moral compass nor does it say anything directly about yourself as an individual. In my own experience I find it very hard to unascribe myself to the criticism that my actions receive. For instance, when I get peer reviews, I know that objectively the comments are directed toward my writing but it’s difficult not to also put yourself under that lens of criticism when you are the one who procured the work.

I thought this was a really good example of how crowdsourcing can bring about a lot of good to society. I think crowdsourcing can sometimes be viewed conventionally in a lens of just sourcing information and answers but gofundme shows how it can also be used to help causes and bring awareness to important things that can’t be solved without the help of others. It also shows that when government or organizations can’t help you, crowdsourcing can.

I was curious about the ethical ramifications of crowd sourcing for things such as chegg or course hero. It can be a very powerful tool in efficiency and getting things done, however I think it can pose some arguments about the ethical implications of apps that were made for crowdsourcing. For instance, specifically having others do the work that is meant for you to do as opposed to figuring it out or just finding previous work that has already been done on it. I think it can also be a misguiding source of information.

This article showed how the language deficit complicates Facebook's battle stop harmful content. It never occurred to me how things like security bots would be programmed to stop hate speech and things not aligned with user policies that are different languages. Especially languages that have a hyper-specific dialect. I was curious how that would be done such as implementing a language translator or something of that nature. And being someone who studies a different language, the word for word translation does not always mean what it says literally. There are layers and a lot of nuance/cultural context behind things that can be codified as harmful content. So that must also be accounted for. The harmful content won't always present itself in a way that is explicitly obvious.

I was surprised that toxic subreddits in their entirety are allowed. Its interesting that there are moderators for hateful subreddits because it sounds like everything being uploaded to it would probably not abide by user policies. I think instead of moderating the subreddits itself, they should also move towards moderating the app as a whole to find subreddits that sound like they are designated for collective hate speech and violence towards a targeted group.

One of the things mentioned in the article was that teens suffering from depression can use a lot of social media. And it causes social media to play an outsized role in their lives. I think that this ties in with doomscrolling. I can say I have been a victim to doomscrolling across multiple platforms it’s very instantaneous happiness and it makes u want to keep on scrolling. If you already suffer of depression I would imagine how this could make things worse because you try to feel something and emotions that make you want to live but it’s just mindless entertainment at the end of the day.

I think the whole idea of doom scrolling represents the idea of "fear of the unknown". Its for the same reason that people watch horror movies or sad movies despite the fact that these are codified as negative emotions or genres. People will nonetheless delve into these things because if something is not known, then people make up stories or theories to try and compensate for the lack of understanding of the situation. Doomscrolling can also be addicting because even if the information/news can be disheartening, it's interesting to read. There's mundanity in the norm, so to see things that we don't normally see can be interesting and intriguing to look at.

After reading this article I was reminded of assignment 3 where we did bot trolling and I thought of how difficult it would be to code to catch for people not obeying user policies. For instance the comments weren't blatantly explicit, commenting sexually inappropriate comments, but they would contain a string of sexually suggestive emoji or insinuate some form of sexual abuse. At this rate, making sure your platform is safe for children would be extremely difficult. The way we coded the automatic response in assignment 3, we had it recognize a specific sentence but harassment is a spectrum and it's intepreted a lot of the time (making it difficult to detect).

This resonated with me on the dangers of recommendation algorithms because it will propagate anything for viewer retention. Arising from this is the spread of misinformation which is dangerous because it can influence how we react to things. For instance, if the recommendation algorithm make the extent of the misinformation so vast, then people will learn to accept it and not challenge it. When they search for the truth it will be met with an unrivaled amount of results for the misinformation that is being recommended. Then it's hard to tell what you can and can't believe. It makes the line between truth and false, real and fake very vague.

One of the things mentioned in this reading was "The Social Model Of Disability" and how it assumes that a person is disabled by their environment. I think this is the kind of lens that ability-based design uses. It places more emphasis on what users are capable of and how they can create a computer program around that instead of what their users can't do and to accommodate for it.

I thought the idea of ability based design was really unique. I think it's a lot harder though to incorporate into practical use or to be more logical about it (as is with universal design). With universal design it's mostly physical disadvantages that are catered to and taken into account of. However, with computer programs the application is more difficult because instead of asking the question "what disabilities do we need to accommodate for" the nuance leans more towards "what can people do", focusing more on abilities as opposed to disabilities.

In the article it mentioned that many non facebook sites use JavaScript code that tells the mothership what kind of content you're looking at when you're not on Facebook's site and apps. Even if done legally, that doesn't make it the most ethical choice. I think there are better and more ethical ways to understand the target market of your audience. I think this is smart to engage and understand users better but it just doesn't feel right to be about in someone's own personal life when they don't know about it.

I am not well informed on how API works but it sounds like it has a lot of connection to the internet and other kind of information systems. Going back to the sources of social media data, one of the things that platforms could record are what users click on, when they log on or off, etc. What arises from this I think ties back in with the ethical frameworks we were talking about in chapter 2. The discussion becomes what course of action is correct because even if the platform records information on the behavior of user interaction, it boils down to the idea that even if it's to mazimize user experience, should platforms be allowed to record information that could be personal?

I thought the reviews for the banana slicer were a poor example of "troll". I think this would be on the very far end of the mild side of what is considered "trolling". The comments were just overzealous about the kind of excitement that they had over the product and making impractical jokes about it. However I thought the product in itself could've also been a funny example of "troll" because it mocks conventionality by making a tool that defies what most people say about cutting bananas.

I would disagree with this definition of trolling because it codifies "the way things are" as a universal understanding of what conventionality actually is. For instance at the beginning of the chapter it noted that hazing was an original form of trolling- but isn't hazing normal in the greek system? In this scenario if you applied the definition of trolling that was given, you would run into a problem of considering what is the convention or tradition being disrupted. I would say that trolling is a method of being a nuisance and disruptive (not necessarily to "the way things are".

This article talked about this account that had faked a death on Twitter in order to have a lot of prominent people join the MeTooSTEM movement. The account purported to be an Indigenous female scientist which made people angry. I thought this played into the idea of inauthenticity and how the people behind it are just aiming to scam people. This almost sounds like it could be an example of astroturfing but instead it was deceiving people instead of fabricating a following.

This idea of inauthenticity made me think of deep fakes. I was curious if deep fakes were related to cat-fishing and if they played into each other (where deep fakes materialize the "fake person" for the cat-fish account. I have also heard cat-fished used in the context of saying someone is not as attractive as they perceive themselves online. I also think sock puppets are a poor excuse for not believing in your own argument enough to put your own identity behind it.

In this scene one of the things they talked about was the advertisements because Saverin wanted to implement them where as Zuckerberg thought they shouldn't. I think this is the idea of user interface and friction. Parker said Facebook was a "cool" and putting ads would be like an interference with that. There would be more friction if there was ads and it would make things harder to navigate if there were things like pop ups or a portion of the screen is just covered with ads.

This reminded me of elderly in society today and their views on technology. Technology is advancing and is becoming a very useful tool for networking and communicating with colleagues, organizations, and the like. However, there are some elderly who don't believe in the convenience of technology or rather don't see it as something worth investing time and energy into understanding when other mediums of communication have been working for them for years. But if something like the bulletin board system was introduced, where you had to communicate in commands and navigate the threads that way- I wouldn't have a very good impression of technology and be skeptical to use it for various things in the future.

I thought this idea of simplifying reality made sense but there isn't really an efficient way to quantify data without simplification. For instance if you took demographic data from social media there are a myriad of people with different racial/ethnic mixes and an entire spectrum of gender and sexual orientation. So to quantify data in that situation would just be overly complex and too hard to grasp anything from it. So sometimes simplification is a good way to approach things even if you lose some of the details.

From d21 it demonstrates how harmful bots can be. After Elon musk dissolved the trust and safety council it made advertisers leave because the bots and misinformation wasn't really being combated. Twitter's revenue declined by 54 percent in 2023. However this is interesting because even though they are losing revenue the user-engagement is still relatively the same. So I feel like what has to be done is to find a better way to combat bots and spam because it appears that is what's causing the most damage to the company.

From d21 it demonstrates how harmful bots can be. After Elon musk dissolved the trust and safety council it made advertisers leave because the bots and misinformation wasn't really being combated. Twitter's revenue declined by 54 percent in 2023. However this is interesting because even though they are losing revenue the user-engagement is still relatively the same. So I feel like what has to be done is to find a better way to combat bots and spam because it appears that is what's causing the most damage to the company.

From source c8 I wondered if buying followers could serve any other function than that of social benefit and perhaps a boost of confidence or reputation.You can order up to half a million followers on instagram. I wondered if there was a way that instagram could remove those bot accounts or if that could skew any kind of data mining that is done within the app. And if anyone were to order that amount, how do the bots create variance between the accounts and the "personalities" they adapt.

From source c8 I wondered if buying followers could serve any other function than that of social benefit and perhaps a boost of confidence or reputation.You can order up to half a million followers on instagram. I wondered if there was a way that instagram could remove those bot accounts or if that could skew any kind of data mining that is done within the app. And if anyone were to order that amount, how do the bots create variance between the accounts and the "personalities" they adapt.

social media platforms allow bots to opperate because they can be beneficial. In one example some bots use automation to make tasks easier for others like Auto caption. I used to attend church but during COVID that was impossible so they began to livestream the mass and there would be auto caption available. This helps makes watching a lot easier (especially for people who are hard of hearing or deaf).

The responsibility of tech workers is that they are lawful in what they're creating. They should be creating tech to help supplement others' life instead of selfish reasons. This reminded me of Kant's formula of ends and treating people as an end in themselves as opposed to a means to an end. In this case the tech workers value others under the condition that they can give advantages to themselves.

Confucianism places it's emphasis on respect and having an understanding of innate sense of duty to elders, family, and the like. This stance on moral goodness also posits that people make moral judgments based on combined perspective of self and others. This led people to criticize Confucius as an atheist as opposed to a moral philosopher.