What if government regulations said that social media sites weren’t allowed to make money based on personal data / targeted advertising? What other business models could they use? How would social media sites be different?
This would make it a way to keep the apps safe. For example, all politicians want to ban TikTok because it sells user data to China. They could stop doing this but they make so much money that they don't want to.
Why do social media platforms make decisions that harm users? And why do social media platforms sometimes go down paths of self-destruction and alienating their users? Sometimes these questions can be answered by looking at the economic forces that drive decision-making on social media platforms, in particular with capitalism.
Many consider the impact of capitalism and how profit becomes more important than user welfare. Money consumes the company and makes it so that the decisions that these companies make is all about profit and nothing about the user.
While public criticism and shaming have always been a part of human culture, the Internet and social media have created new ways of doing so.
Yes, of course public criticism and shaming have always been around but with the internet it is different. With being able to talk to anyone around the world, you would kind of just assume that it would be on a whole other level.
Shame is the feeling that “I am bad,” and the natural response to shame is for the individual to hide, or the community to ostracize the person.
Shame and guilt are ways to control kids a lot of the time when they are raised. Some parents use it in good ways, like shaming a kid for doing something really bad, but some use it all the time with a kid which turns to abuse.
Quora: An crowdsourced question and answer site.
I've used Quora many times and have found positive and negative results in what it offers. Anyone can make comments and edit it, which can lead to a lot of misinformation. But at the same time it is able to offer information that can be used but its never garunteed.
When tasks are done through large groups of people making relatively small contributions, this is called crowdsourcing. The people making the contributions generally come from a crowd of people that aren’t necessarily tied to the task (e.g., all internet users can edit Wikipedia), but then people from the crowd either get chosen to participate, or volunteer themselves.
This is a very interesting way to look at things like Wikepedia. Crowdsourcing uses many different perspectives to create one large thing, and sometimes it can be less reliable because so many people can edit it.
For social media content, replication means that the content (or a copy or modified version) gets seen by more people. Additionally, when a modified version gets distributed, future replications of that version will include the modification (a.k.a., inheritance).
When things are shared on the internet, they often can be replicated making the original less valued. They do this and add onto the original and replicating it with add ons.
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:
Memes are something that took over the entire internet across the globe as they can be universal in meaning. They can target so many different audiences at once making them so viral.
Individual analysis focuses on the behavior, bias, and responsibility an individual has, while systemic analysis focuses on the how organizations and rules may have their own behaviors, biases, and responsibility that aren’t necessarily connected to what any individual inside intends.
This can create biases and also can create one sided perspectives. If a person on a news app only recieves one sided information, they wont be as well versed on both sides of the news.
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.
There are ups and downs to using recommendation algorithms. While in some ways it can be great to get the user hooked, but it also takes away opposite perspectives.
sign
This is a really important section because it discusses the importance of detail. We should always try to think about every type of person that we are coding for.
Those with disabilities often find ways to cope with their disability, that is, find ways to work around difficulties they encounter and seek out places and strategies that work for them
While this is super amazing and is so cool for people to overcome their disability, we should try to create jobs specifically for people with disabilities. Also when we are writing a code we should always take into account that there are people that have disabilities.
For example, the proper security practice for storing user passwords is to use a special individual encryption process for each individual password.
This is just very shocking that the proper security practice is so weak and people can easily get into peoples passwords. The fact that such a huge company like Facebook used such a weak security is extremely shocking.
When we use social media platforms though, we at least partially give up some of our privacy.
This is a great example of why private messages are never actually private. While yes they do get stored in a server, usually you don't have people looking through your messages 24/7.
One of the main goals of social media sites is to increase the time users are spending on their social media sites.
This is extremely interesting to consider, shaping ads to a persons personality when it comes to social media. I can see how this might work, but also you have to consider the fact that people still don't like ads.
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: Race Political leanings Interests Susceptibility to financial scams Being prone to addiction (e.g., gambling)
This is a very interesting fact because it is so intriguing about how a bot is able to figure out what your gender or race is. It is a little intruding and can be seen as an ethical problem.
Here are some examples of parody reviews of the banana slicer:
This is a really good example of trolling where it doesn't come at any harm to others. While yes, they are making fun of the slicer because it is very easy to just cut a banana with you hands, they aren't doing any harm to the product, and are just making a joke about it at nobody's cost.
Gatekeeping: Some trolling is done in a community to separate out an ingroup from outgroup (sometimes called newbies or normies). The ingroup knows that a post is just trolling, but the outgroup is not aware and will engage earnestly. This is sometimes known as trolling the newbies.
Gatekeeping is a very common form of trolling on the web, and also in real life. People like to use it as a way to seem cooler to others and make them feel superior for knowing something others don't. It is easily seen as the person being insecure and wanting to be special in their own trolling way.
Catfishing: Create a fake profile that doesn’t match the actual user, usually in an attempt to trick or scam someone
This is the most common kind of scam bot that I have come across from my time on the internet. Ads that will say that they offer great things or impersonate a famous person just so that you will click on the link.
Many people were upset at being deceived, and at the many levels of inauthenticity of Dr. McLaughlin’s actions, such as:
As social media has become more and more prevalent in the lives of many, it is easy for people to use it in good, but also bad ways to spread false information. People have started to believe everything that the read on social media, making it so easy for one false informative post to completely miseducate a mass of users.
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. Thus, when designers of social media systems make decisions about how data will be saved and what constraints will be put on the data, they are making decisions about who will get a better experience. Based on these decisions, some people will fit naturally into the data system, while others will have to put in extra work to make themselves fit, and others will have to modify themselves or misrepresent themselves to fit into the system.
I believe that this highlights a flaw in using data in the simplification of reality. Some times it works for some, and doesn't for others, and that makes you consider if it hurts some, than why use it at all.
Think for a minute about consequentialism. On this view, we should do whatever results in the best outcomes for the most people. One of the classic forms of this approach is utilitarianism, which says we should do whatever maximizes ‘utility’ for most people. Confusingly, ‘utility’ in this case does not refer to usefulness, but to a sort of combo of happiness and wellbeing. When a utilitarian tries to decide how to act, they take stock of all the probable outcomes, and what sort of ‘utility’ or happiness will be brought about for all parties involved. This process is sometimes referred to by philosophers as ‘utility calculus’. When I am trying to calculate the expected net utility gain from a projected set of actions, I am engaging in ‘utility calculus’ (or, in normal words, utility calculations).
While it seems that these are basically the same thing, it is clear that utilitarianism is more of an add on to consequentialism. It is a more precise and pin point form of consequentialism using the word utility to mean different things.
In 2016, Microsft launched a Twitter bot that was intended to learn to speak from other Twitter users and have conversations. Twitter users quickly started tweeting racist comments at Tay, which Tay learned from and started tweeting out within one day.
This is quite interesting to think about, makes you just think about how you cant really have nice things on the internet. It just shows how flawed the creators were, not even considering how the public may take advantage of the bot.
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.
This goes without saying that the bot personally can't have ethics as it is just 0's and 1's. The bot technically has ethics just that are given by the creators and displays what the creators ethics are.
“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.
"Rational Selffishness" expresses the idea that putting your own self-interests above all is quite important for engineers to be successful.