The online community activity of copying and remixing can be a means of cultural appropriation, 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). For example, many phrases from Black American culture have been appropriated by white Americans and had their meanings changed or altered (like “woke”, “cancel”, “shade”, “sip/spill the tea”, etc.).

A meme is a piece of culture that might reproduce in an evolutionary fashion, like a hummable tune that someone hears and starts humming to themselves, perhaps changing it, and then others overhearing next. In this view, any piece of human culture can be considered a meme that is spreading (or failing to spread) according to evolutionary forces. So we can use an evolutionary perspective to consider the spread of:

Now, how these algorithms precisely work is hard to know, because social media sites keep these algorithms secret, probably for multiple reasons:

What responsibility do you think social media platforms have for the mental health of their users?

In what ways have you found social media bad for your mental health and good for your mental health?

Do you think there are ways to moderate well that involve less traumatizing of moderators or taking advantage of poor people? { requestKernel: true, binderOptions: { repo: "binder-examples/jupyter-stacks-datascience", ref: "master", }, codeMirrorConfig: { theme: "abcdef", mode: "python" }, kernelOptions: { kernelName: "python3", path: "./ch15_moderators" }, predefinedOutput: true } kernelName = 'python3'

What support should content moderators have from social media companies and from governments?

Crowds on social media can also share rumors, and can be an essential (if unreliable) way of spreading information during a crises.

Social media crowdsoucing can also be used for harassment, which we’ll look at more in the next couple chapters. But for some examples: the case of Justine Sacco involved