As an example of what someone in this position might do, let’s consider this story from Steve Krenzel, who was a software engineer at Twitter from 2015-2017. With Twitter’s change in ownership last week, I’m probably in the clear to talk about the most unethical thing I was asked to build while working at Twitter. […] Twitter was on its death bed and was desperate for money. A large telco wanted to pay us to log signal strength data in N. America and send it to them. My plan was to aggregate signal strength by carrier / by location. I worked with Data Science to find a granularity – minimum area size and minimum distinct users per area – that would preserve anonymity even when combined with other sources of data (differential privacy).

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.

Most importantly, they can prevent a competitor from taking hold. If these people got Internet access through a non-Facebook option, they might join a new or competing social media network, and through the network effect, that competing Network might take off. And that would be a threat to Meta trying to corner the market on Social Media. A particularly telling example of this is the story of WhatsApp: Though WhatsApp was founded in the US (in 2009), it became very popular outside the US, becoming much more commonly used than Facebook Messenger. Facebook was terrified of losing out on the non-US market, since they wanted to control everything, so in 2014 Facebook spent $19 billion dollars to purchase WhatsApp:

More users: If Meta has more users, it can offer advertisers more people to advertise to. More user time: If Meta’s users spend more time on Meta, then it has more opportunities to show ads to each user, so it can sell more ads. 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. Reduce competition: If Meta can become the only social media company that people use, then they will have cornered the market on access to those users. This means advertisers won’t have any alternative to reach those users, and Meta can increase the prices of their ads.

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 consequences for being “canceled” can range from simply the experience of being criticized, to loss of job or criminal charges. Given the huge range of things “cancel culture” can be referring to, we’ll mostly stick to talking here about “public shaming,”

When we think about repair and reconciliation, many of us might wonder where there are limits. Are there wounds too big to be repaired? Are there evils too great to be forgiven? Is anyone ever totally beyond the pale of possible reconciliation? Is there a point of no return? One way to approach questions of this kind is to start from limit cases. That is, go to the farthest limit and see what we find there by way of a template, then work our way back toward the everyday. Let’s look at two contrasting limit cases: one where philosophers and cultural leaders declared that repairs were possible even after extreme wrongdoing, and one where the wrongdoers were declared unforgivable.1

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. There are also other tools to help individuals that are getting harassment from a crowd. For example, the Twitter app “block-party” supports mass blocking and other advanced features.

Say you have broken a bone and you are in pain. A doctor might say that the bone needs to be set; this will be painful, and kind of a forceful, “violent” action in which someone is interfering with your body in a painful way. So the doctor asks if you agree to let her set the bone. You agree, and so the doctor’s action is construed as being a legitimate interference with your body and your freedom. If someone randomly just walked up to you and started pulling at the injured limb, this unagreed violence would not be considered legitimate. Likewise, when medical practitioners interfere with a patient’s body in a way that is non-consensual or not what the patient agreed to, then the violence is considered illegitimate, or morally bad.

This small percentage of people doing most of the work in some areas is not a new phenomenon. In many aspects of our lives, some tasks have been done by a small group of people with specialization or resources. Their work is then shared with others. This goes back many thousands of years with activities such as collecting obsidian and making jewelry, to more modern activities like writing books, building cars, reporting on news, and making movies.

After a company starts working on moderation, they might decide to invest in teams specifically dedicated to content moderation. These teams of content moderators could be considered human computers hired to evaluate examples against the content moderation policy of the platform they are working for.

Governments might also have rules about content moderation and censorship, such as laws in the US against Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). China additionally censors various news stories in their country, like stories about protests. In addition to banning news on their platforms, in late 2022 China took advantage of Elon Musk having fired almost all Twitter content moderators to hide news of protests by flooding Twitter with spam and porn.

Since social media platforms can gather so much data on their users, they can try to use data mining to figure out information about their users’ moods, mental health problems, or neurotypes (e.g., ADHD, Autism). For example, Facebook has a suicide detection algorithm, where they try to intervene if they think a user is suicidal (Inside Facebook’s suicide algorithm: Here’s how the company uses artificial intelligence to predict your mental state from your posts). As social media companies have tried to detect talk of suicide and sometimes remove content that mentions it, users have found ways of getting around this by inventing new word uses, like “unalive.”

“Tendency to continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening, or depressing. Many people are finding themselves reading continuously bad news about COVID-19 without the ability to stop or step back.”

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.

When content is replicated on social media, it may be modified. The Social media system might have built-in ways to do this, like a quote tweet or reply adding some sort of comment to the original post, effectively making a new version of the post that can spread around.

Ads:# Advertisements shown to users can go well for users when the users find products they are genuinely interested in, and for making the social media site free to use (since the site makes its money from ads). Advertisements can go poorly if they become part of discrimination (like only showing housing ads to certain demographics of people), or reveal private information (like revealing to a family that someone is pregnant) Content (posts, photos, articles, etc.)

When social media platforms show users a series of posts, updates, friend suggestions, ads, or anything really, they have to use some method of determining which things to show users. The method of determining what is shown to users is called a recommendation algorithm, which is an algorithm (a series of steps or rules, such as in a computer program) that recommends posts for users to see, people for users to follow, ads for users to view, or reminders for users.

Some users might not be able to see images on websites for a variety of reasons. The user might be blind or low-vision. Their device or internet connection might not support images. Or perhaps all the images got deleted (like what happened to The Onion). In order for these users to still get the information intended from the images, the image can come with alt-text. You can read more about alt-text in this New York Times feature Reddit unfortunately doesn’t allow alt-text for their images. So while we were going to have a programming demo here to look up the alt-text, there is no alt-text on images uploaded to Reddit to look up, meaning this site is unfriendly to blind or low-vision users.

When designers and programmers don’t think to take into account different groups of people, then they might make designs that don’t work for everyone. This problem often shows up in how designs do or do not work for people with disabilities. But it also shows up in other areas as well.

But while that is the proper security for storing passwords. So for example, Facebook stored millions of Instagram passwords in plain text, meaning the passwords weren’t encrypted and anyone with access to the database could simply read everyone’s passwords. And Adobe encrypted their passwords improperly and then hackers leaked their password database of 153 million users.

Reusing code instead of repeating code: When we find ourselves repeating a set of actions in our program, we end up writing (or copying) the same code multiple times. If we put that repeated code in a function, then we only have to write it once and then use that function in all the places we were repeating the code.

Now that we have the “Sentiment Intensity Analyzer” we can try it out on different sentences to have the computer guess how positive or negative they are. Let’s start with a really positive sentance:

Fig. 8.4 The Data & Privacy settings have a place where you can find the ad personalization settings.# Then you can hopefully see a really long list of who Google thinks you are and what Google thinks you might be interested in, like this:

Trolling is a method of disrupting the way things are, including group structure and practices. Like these group-forming practices, disruptive trolling can be deployed in just or unjust ways. (We will come back to that.) These disruptive tactics can also be engaged with different moods, ranging from playful (like some flashmobs), to demonstrative (like activism and protests), to hostile, to warring, to genocidal. You may have heard people say that the difference between a coup and a revolution is whether it succeeds and gets to later tell the story, or gets quashed. You may have als

If the immediate goal of the action of trolling is to cause disruption or provoke emotional reactions, what is it that makes people want to do this disruption or provoking of emotional reactions?

6.8.3. Design (3-5 minutes, by yourself):# Brainstorm ways to change Facebook’s name policy to avoid the scenario you wrote above. List as many different kinds of potential solutions you can think of – aim for ten or more (bullet points encouraged).

6.3.1. Inauthentic Behaviors# Inauthentic behavior is when the reality doesn’t match what is being presented. Inauthenticity has, of course, existed throughout human history, from Ea-nasir complaining in 1750 BCE that the copper he ordered was not the high quality he had been promised, to 1917 CE in England when Arthur Conan Doyle (the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories) was fooled by photographs that appeared to be of a child next to fairies.

Later, sometime after the printing press, Stondage highlights how there was an unusual period in American history that roughly took up the 1900s where, in America, news sources were centralized in certain newspapers and then the big 3 TV networks. In this period of time, these sources were roughly in agreement and broadcast news out to the country, making a more unified, consistent news environment (though, of course, we can point out how they were biased in ways like being almost exclusively white men). Before this centralization of media in the 1900s, newspapers and pamphlets were full of rumors and conspiracy theories. And now as the internet and social media have taken off in the early 2000s, we are again in a world full of rumors and conspiracy theories.

The 1980s and 1990s also saw an emergence of more instant forms of communication with chat applications. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) 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.

As you can see in the apple example, any time we turn something into data, we are making a simplification.1 If we are counting the number of something, like apples, we are deciding that each one is equivalent. If we are writing down what someone said, we are losing their tone of voice, accent, etc. If we are taking a photograph, it is only from one perspective, etc. Different simplifications are useful for different tasks. Any given simplification will be helpful for some tasks and be unhelpful for others. See also, this saying in statistics: All models are wrong, but some are useful 4.2.4. More examples of simplifications# So all data that you might find is a simplification. There are many seemingly simple questions that in some situations or for some people, have no simple answers, questions like: What country are you from? What if you were born in one country, but moved to another shortly after? What if you are from a country that no longer exists like Czechoslovakia? Or from an occupied territory? How many people live in this house? Does a college student returning home for the summer count as living in that house? How many words are in this chapter? Different programs use different rules for what counts as a “word” E.g., this page has “2 + 2 = 4”, which Microsoft Word counts as 5 words, and Google Docs counts as 3 words.

Metadata# In addition to the main components of the images, sound, and video data, this information is often stored with metadata, such as: The time the image/sound/video was created The location where the image/sound/video was taken The type of camera or recording device used to create the image/sound/video etc.

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. This means we can analyze the ethics of the action of the bot, as well as the intentions of the various people involved, though those all might be disconnected.

Some platforms are used for sharing text and pictures (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WeChat, Weibo, QQ), some for sharing video (e.g., Youtube, TickTock), some for sharing audio (e.g., Clubhouse), some for sharing fanfiction (e.g., Fanfiction.net, AO3), some for gathering and sharing knowledge (e.g., Wikipedia, Quora, StackOverflow), some for sharing erotic content (e.g, OnlyFans).

Focuses on responsibilities and relational issues in the relationships you are invested in. Balancing your needs and the needs of those you care for, and sometimes strangers too. Rejects frameworks that focus on scenarios of competing for resources (justice, fairness).