I found this article very interesting. I wouldn't have thought that someone would dedicate their study to trolls, but I guess there is an expert on everything out there somewhere. I would like to hear more about the in person interactions with trolls because it said that she met and conversed with 30. I want to know how these conversations go, does she pretend that she is also really into trolling and then at the end tell them that she is investigating them and almost troll them herself. I would watch a show that was along the lines of that.

I think the best way to deal with trolls is to ignore them. I know it says in the text that ignoring doesn't work because they just come back stronger and more hostile. Even if they do continue I think it is still the best option because it doesn't satisfy them, when they get no reaction at all to their trolling they are left unsatisfied. From here you can block them, report them, or restrict them in some way so that you don't have to keep hearing from them.

This wikipedia entry caught my eye because I have a personal interest in scrolling, specifically scrolling on social media. This wikipedia page starts by explaining what scrolling is. I think everyone in this day and age knows what scrolling is, but it was interesting to read about it in the most basic, kindergarten level way of thinking. That scrolling is sliding text, images, or video across a screen vertically or horizontally. It gives the example of movie credits, which is interesting to me because all I think about when I hear the word scrolling is physically scrolling on social media. There was also section dedicated to infinite scrolling which is what I really wanted to read about. I learned that Aza Raskin is the person who created this feature in 2006. And that he regrets creating it because he thinks it contributes to smartphone and social media addictions. I agree with him on that.

The use case I thought of was learning a new skill. And I thought YouTube would be the best social media platform to do this on. It would be relatively easy to do on almost every social media though too. The user would have to have created an account, provided age, email, and make a password. Then they would need to navigate to the search bar and look up a how to on the skill they want to learn. I think that success would look like finding a video that explains the skill in a way that the user can understand and implement. If I wanted to do this I would use YouTube because there are the most in depth videos on YouTube, but I could probably find something on instagram or tik tok that has a short video explaining the skill as well.

This source talks about bots on X, formerly known as twitter. Specifically it talks about bots activity during the Super Bowl in 2024. Elon Musk claimed that there had been billions of views and activity during Super Bowl Sunday, but it was uncovered that more than 70% of this and been bots. What interests me the most is advertising revenue, the more views a social media site like X gets, the more they can charge advertisers. So what happens if those views are by bots and they would never actually buy the thing being advertised. It takes away the platforms credibility completely and it makes me wonder what kind of consequences there are for it.

I think that age would be relatively simple to store. I would constrain it to whole numbers from 1 to 110. I think its fair to put the cutoff at 110, there no-one that is going to be signing up for a social media that is older than 110. Applying this constraint to the response makes it so that there are no false submissions. For something like address the user would be given an open string to type what they want. There could also be the option of typing street address but giving a set of options for country, city, and zip code.

I can think of a couple reasons that user may want to be able to make bots. One reason is that bots could boost their engagement. If a person wants more views, wants more likes, wants to feel famous or portray themself as so. This person will be inclined to use bots, there are websites that sell fake followers or the person could try and make them on their own. Not all bots have to be cynical though, another reason for wanting bots is advertising or sponsorships. If someone gets paid to promote a brand and they are getting paid to post a certain number of posts over a certain amount of time. A bot could help them out greatly in pre planning these posts and posting it for them. A tweet would be the easiest, but they could prerecord videos to be posted by a bot as well. A third reason for wanting bots is another more cynical one. And that is to push their own agenda, whether it involves politics or not. You could make it appear that a lot of people agree with a certain view when in reality it is just bots.

This was the first source that I clicked on and it was not what I was expecting. I was expecting an article or something of that sort, but this was a website trying to sell me something. It is a site that is advertising that you can buy social media followers and likes there. It has the option for Tik Tok, Instagram, and all the rest. This really shocked me because I didn't think that someone could legally advertise that they make bots. They even say in the description for the site that the bots they make have profile pictures and photos posted so "there is no risk that someone would figure out that you’re using our service." I don't understand how they do this and I think this is a very strange website.

I think that people that make such advanced tech just do not think about the consequences it can have because all they are trying to do is push the limits of technology. in the cases of social media companies like Twitter or Facebook I think money is a big factor. They don't really care about fake news or abuse that happens on their sites because it just makes for more engagement. They want to maximize the amount of time that every single person spends on the site.

Another ethical framework that I learned about was the common good approach. The common good approach is just what it sounds like in the title, it prioritizes the common good of a community. With the common good approach people are expected to contribute to the community in some way to benefit the whole. The well-being of the community is what's most important. The common good approach was not created by one individual person. It is a product of centuries of development and contributions from multiple people. Plato and Aristotle contributed way back in the 4th century BC, with more recent contributions from Jean-Jacques Rosseau and John Rawls in the late 20th century.