hackers stealing the names, Social Security numbers, and birthdates of 143 million Americans from Equifax
The social security breach that happened recently was incredibly unwarranted, especially since there was a huge responsibility on the protection of social security information. It climaxed to the point where everyone was informed online to shut down their credit cards immediately, as having your Social Security stolen leaves you in an extremely vulnerable position.
There might be some things that we just feel like aren’t for public sharing (like how most people wear clothes in public, hiding portions of their bodies)
I think that a less obvious reason for privacy on social media is the fear of garnering an online presence that isn't true to who you actually are as a person. More specifically, if someone were to post certain aspects like their body, expensive clothes, or expensive food for example, a false narrative that the user is uber-rich may be fostered and ultimately may affect the user's relationships with others in real life.
People Are Spamming Kellogg’s Job Applications in Solidarity with Striking Workers – Vice MotherBoard
Data poisoning seems unethical by default, but I think that it could also be beneficial by shedding light on an unseen issue. Another example of this I can think of is when TikTokers make videos about how an organization did them dirty, and so their Yelp and Google reviews go significantly lower after users spam bad ratings.
For example, social media data about who you are friends with might be used to infer your sexual orientation. Social media data might also be used to infer people’s:
These days, my friends talk about the inferences that could be made based on the types of accounts that they follow. Sexual orientation is one that frequently pops up along with what kind of personality they have or what hobbies they enjoy. An easy giveaway is if they are following certain brands or locations.
In the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020, Dallas Police made an app where they asked people to upload videos of protesters doing anything illegal. In support of the protesters, K-pop fans swarmed the app and uploaded as many K-pop videos as they could eventually leading to the app crashing and becoming unusable, and thus protecting the protesters from this attempt at Police surveillance.
This is a very interesting example of how much power the internet itself holds. The fact that K-pop fans managed to crash an entire software is quite amazing. Similar to the fact that 4chan users arranged a whole rendezvous for single men just to laugh at them, but for a greater cause. K-pop has only grown since 2020, which may very well eventually raise the question of what other tricks they have up their sleeve.
Here are some examples of parody reviews of the banana slicer:
Another funny instance of this I thought of were the sugarfree Haribo Gummy Bears. The sweetener used in the bears were actually laxatives, and so online users went ahead and posted all types of wild parody stories of them eating the bears and suffering immense digestive pain from destroying the toilet to going to the hospital. While parody reviews definitely have a humor factor, I also think that they have the potential to make or break a product based on the overall perceived notion of the parody reviews collective.
Parasocial relationships are when a viewer or follower of a public figure (that is, a celebrity) feel like they know the public figure, and may even feel a sort of friendship with them, but the public figure doesn’t know the viewer at all.
This happens so often even with creators that don't have a big following, and I personally find this quite concerning. There are even individuals going as far as getting cosmetic surgery to look like a person or even finding their address.
Schrodinger’s asshole: the guy who says awful shit, and decides if he was “only kidding” depending on your reaction.
I have had a Schrodinger's asshole account harass me as an Asian individual during Covid one time and he pulled this move after I took matters into my own hands. I don't see too many of these types of accounts anymore, but there were a lot of them back in 2020.
8Chan (now called 8Kun) is an image-sharing bulletin board site that was started in 2013. It has been host to white-supremacist, neo-nazi and other hate content. 8Chan has had trouble finding companies to host its servers and internet registration due to the presence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and for being the place where various mass shooters spread their hateful manifestos. 8Chan is also the source and home of the false conspiracy theory QAnon
Whenever I think of the dark web, I see 8Chan to be a platform amongst the most accessible. The concept of it is absolutely unhinged and it is wild how they were able to manage to keep the site up and running. It is quite alarming to think that if a community of problematic incels could create such a toxic website, imagine what they could do next.
pretty much anything can count as social media, and the things we will see in internet-based social media show up in many other places as well.
I find this to be very interesting because history classes don't really mention or bring up this topic too often when it comes to making connections between the past and present when it comes to social media and the development of communication mediums.
Metadata is information about some data. So we often think about a dataset as consisting of the main pieces of data (whatever those are in a specific situation), and whatever other information we have about that data (metadata).
I have never heard of the term Metadata previously, but I can see how it makes data interpretation much more simplified. It is important to know the context behind the data that is being collected.
Because all data is a simplification of reality, those simplifications work well for some people and some situations but can cause problems for other people and other situations.
I think this is a great way to describe data and the benefits it has on simplifying the findings of our reality. It is also important to note that there are benefits and drawbacks to the collection of data as it may help us collect intel for future development, but also can cause a breach in privacy.
But Kurt Skelton was an actual human (in spite of the well done video claiming he was fake). He was just trolling his audience. Professor Casey Fiesler talked about it on her TikTok channel:
This to me is one of the big concerns rasied for me in regards to deepfaking. AI generated content is developing to a point where authenticity on content generation is not guranteed nor is it discernable. This is why regulations need to be enforced, otherwise large amounts of identity fraud will be committed, and potentially cause a global invasion of privacy.
Fig. 3.1 A photo that is likely from a click-farm, where a human computer is paid to do actions through multiple accounts, such as like a post or rate an app. For our purposes here, we consider this a type of automation, but we are not considering this a “bot,” since it is not using (electrical) computer programming.
I have never seen a click-farm before, but I would imagine that this would be a function of an actual bot. This method was probably used to avoid bot-scanning software from the platform they were automating a function on. This is definitely a clever, but unethical practice to execute certain actions on the internet
“Rational Selfishness”: It is rational to seek your own self-interest above all else. Great feats of engineering happen when brilliant people ruthlessly follow their ambition.
I think that in some cases, egoism can be beneficial when you are called to prioritize yourself in more dire situations, especially if pure success is the one ambition that drives you. One could argue that being altruistic will make you sacrifice more than you should. However, egoism also comes with the sacrifice of human connection, which is something that stays constant in everyone's lifetime.