This source made me think of the Citizens United Supreme Court case that basically ruled that your money is an extension of your free speech. This ruling has put value to voices that are higher in monetary value. they can spread their message as they please while poorer people can't have the same reach a rich person can.

Content is moderated by the company that owns the social media platform. Which means there is an intrinsic bias within the algorithm. With censorship and misinformation rampant, it is hard to know what you're looking at on social media is truly accurate. I think there would be alot less open racisim online if everyone had power to change the algorithm and how people interact on social media.

I totally agree with her in this article. I think that the digital and real worlds are too interconnected now that it isn't possible to have a clean break between the two. She talks about how the real world and nature are overglamorized, by calling it pure and unihabited eden. This is a historical perspective that I honestly think is true. We live off the earth, and we rely on the ecosystems that it has in place to create a competitive advantage for humans. Now I believe we are fighting agaist our selves, and not survival. Which means we have turned into digital warfare.

I agree with this. I do believe that social media is making people more antisocial and causing more social anxiety to the people who are really on it. Like using it as their many source of friendship, I think is bad. I think you need to have friends in real life that you can interact with face to face. What he describes in the later part of the quote seems to me like depersonalization and not social anxiety, though. I haved dealt with some form of depersonalization, and it isn't fun at all.

Monica is a shocking example of virality; overnight, her life changed forever. I think it's because the affair was so public. But just like internet memes, they have consequences as well, but these things come in cycles. There is always going to be new drama, a new meme, or something freshly viral. That is just the nature of the internet.

Yes, I've talked about this before in comments, but I think this is why the magnitude of virality is so much higher. It's because of how many people clip and make memes of the original post. This all adds up and becomes something like a cultural phenomenon.

This is just a little crazy to me. Shouldn't the job of a CEO of a company be to listen to what people like and don't like about the platform that you run, so that overall satisfaction with the product is higher? Driving sales and revenue. If you can say yes, this system is corrupt, and you have the power to change it, and you don't do anything, that is your fault.

I think this right here is the exact reason that social media algorithms are making people lose their minds. The more you hate a comment, the more the account that you hate will be recommended to you. This doesn't repair the relationship; I believe it makes them more parasocial, because of the fringe gets pushed to the top. That's what the majority of people see on social media, more specifically X through.

This Mayo Clinic article is about major depressive disorder. It highlights emotional and physical signs, such as prolonged sadness, tiredness, and changes in appetite. Then it takes you through causes, complications, and risks. Then finally, the prevention and support that it offers you strategies for managing stress and strains the importance of getting treatment.

I found this example to be very interesting in the broadening of the classical term disability. So, because someone is uncomfortable in a situation, that can be considered a disability. For example, a tall person on a long car ride is that still considered? I think that these situations are part of life, and are intrinsic characteristics; they are features, not bugs. A shorter person might deal with different problems compared to a tall person. So by that definition, is everyone disabled in their own right?

As hardware continues to advance with more powerful GPUs and specialized ASICs, does the work factor the cost parameter in bcrypt provide enough of a future-proof shield, or will we eventually reach a point where even the maximum slowness we can tolerate for a legitimate user login is no longer enough to deter a massive parallel attack?

What do you think? is there a limit to how much we can keep slowing things down before it breaks the user experience

I think that this the be common practice is really outlandish. To have non-encrypted passwords for anyone with database access to have is crazy to me. There has to be a better way for personal information to be stored, correct?

This source refers to the Wikipedia page for the film Everything Everywhere All at Once as it appeared on December 5, 2023. Given its place in a bibliography about data mining, the movie likely serves as a metaphor for the overwhelming and fragmented nature of modern digital surveillance. It highlights how our personal lives exist across a sprawling multiverse of datasets that companies constantly try to map and unify.

This is another reason why this whole surge of lookism is so destructive for society and young people's mental health. Now it is "looksmaxing." The fringe gets pushed to the top of the algorithm and slowly moves the overtin window. This means that it becomes more and more ok to say and do outlandish things that people deem to be right or ok.

I believe that this is why we can't have nice things, mapping the relationship between online trolling and mainstream culture by MIT Press, in 2015. The book explores the blurred lines between trolling for the lulz and the ethical implications of how mainstream media amplifies that behavior, fitting perfectly with the book's focus on the intersection of automation and ethics. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262529877/this-is-why-we-cant-have-nice-things/

I believe that it mostly has to do with isolation. If a clip of a troller goes viral because it is disruptive by its nature. This means that the person who probably spends a lot of time in isolation gets to be seen, heard, and recognized by others in the community, thus refeeding into the cycle of troll.

This analysis highlights how metadata can serve as an empirical measure of authenticity, effectively unmasking the dual-persona strategy used by public figures. By identifying the stark contrast between the polished, staff-driven iPhone posts and the more aggressive, personal Android updates, the study reveals how accounts often act as sockpuppets for multiple voices. This discrepancy can lead to a significant loss of trust, as it exposes the curation behind a supposedly authentic brand and shows how tone can be weaponized to manipulate public sentiment.

This case illustrates the profound ethical dangers of inauthentic behavior on social media, specifically through the creation of a sockpuppet account by Dr. BethAnn McLaughlin. By fabricating Sciencing_Bi, McLaughlin engaged in a form of "digital blackface" that exploited marginalized identities to gain clout and shield herself from accountability. The ultimate deception, faking the character’s death during the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrates how easily emotional trust can be weaponized, leaving a lasting impact on the very communities the MeTooSTEM movement sought to protect.

This source provides a foundational summary of HyperText Markup Language (HTML), explaining that it is the standard markup language for creating web pages by describing the structure of a webpage through a series of elements. A key detail from the source is that HTML elements tell the browser how to display content, using tags like

for headings and

for paragraphs to label pieces of content.

On Instagram, a single post distills complex human experiences into a structured collection of Strings (usernames and captions), Integers (like counts), DateTimes (relative post age), and Binary/Blob data (the image or video itself). These digital artifacts act as a significant simplification of reality by flattening three-dimensional, multi-sensory moments into a 2D frame that lacks the physical context, emotional depth, or the "unfiltered" events occurring just outside the camera's view. This system works exceptionally well for "influencers" and brands who benefit from highly curated, aesthetic-first storytelling that drives rapid engagement.

Several surprising bots focus on transparency, such as NYPDedits, which monitors Wikipedia for anonymous edits coming from police department IP addresses to ensure institutional accountability. Among the bots users often like are helpful utility tools, such as Musico Bot on Discord for shared listening experiences, or customer service bots that provide 24-hour support. Conversely, many dislike antagonistic bots that are designed for deception, such as those used for spamming or artificially manipulating public opinion. Ultimately, because these bots lack human intent, their actions are viewed as technical functions of their programming rather than personal choices, which shifts the moral weight of their behavior onto the developers who run them.

Expectations for bots focus on efficiency, speed, and rigid adherence to code, whereas normal users are expected to possess empathy, social nuance, and accountability for their "intent." For example, a unit conversion bot can scan thousands of posts to provide instant metric offsets that a task a human could not perform at that scale without extreme fatigue. These bots are typically managed by independent developers who use APIs to automate actions. Because a bot lacks personal will, we often view its errors as technical bugs rather than moral failings, shifting the ethical responsibility back to the person who created or ran the program.

How often do I hear someonthing along the lines of "social media isn't real life." Actually very often. It was a running joke in my friend group so much so that one of my friends made his bio "Instagram isn't real life." On some levels, I agree to this statement, and on others, I totally disagree. The things that people do and say on social media have adverse effects on their real-life circumstances. For example, the lady who lost her job because of a racist tweet. That had a real-world effect. On another level, the things people post sometimes just aren't reality. The unrealistic beauty standards for teens and young people are so far beyond what reality is that it tarnishes people's self-image and can lead to depression and alienation.

I believe that the reason so many people saw the tweet was that it was fringe in nature. Social media doesn't push out the most sensible takes. It shows the ones that get a reaction out of people. Then there was a snowball effect on the tweet, as it got more traction, it reached a wider and wider audience. I bet most people didn't even see the original tweet first. They saw someone who tweeted about the tweet. That's how the virality of social media works.