This source discusses one of the earliest moments of trolling. The BBC broadcast an April Fool's video showing spaghetti growing on trees. This surprisingly worked because the people of Britain were not yet familiar with spaghetti, convincing many that spaghetti actually grew on trees. This is considered one of the most significant instances of trolling by an official broadcasting network. However, this being such a big event, it is still considered harmless, especially in comparison to the trolling that goes on today.

When looking at the example of the person mispronouncing Hors d'oeuvres, it is an act of a harmless troll. If someone does mispronounce this, the worst thing that would happen is someone correcting them. I think this type of trolling is both amusing and harmless. However, that is not the case for a lot of trolls who have harmful intent behind their messages on the internet.

One of the things that I noticed in this source was the inauthenticity that was discussed about the COVID-19 death rates, showing that the true number of deaths was actually much higher than official reports said. Things like this can cause mistrust among societies, which can ultimately lead to their downfall.

I think that it is super interesting that we can take artifacts that prove that being honest and being authentic is something that societies have relied on to stay successful for thousands of years.

A detail from the source that I found interesting is that the first radio signals were being sent in the 1970s at the University of Hawaii, but it took until 20 years later in 1992, in Germany for the first actual text message to be sent.

My question is, why did Facebook put all of its competitors out of business so quickly? What did they do so much better that the others could not compete? Social media platforms like Myspace were dominating the industry, and for one social media platform to just completely dominate over the ones that were also leading in the industry.

The Wikipedia article " All models are wrong" explores the famous saying of George Box, " All models are wrong but some are useful." This is said because it emphasizes that every model is a simplification of reality and therefore cannot be completely accurate. However, they still prove to be of value to us as they help us understand things about complex systems

This point I can relate to as well. I personally am a dual citizen and when asked what country I am from I have trouble answering. I was born in Germany, but I only lived there for a year before moving to the United States. So I ask myself, am I German or am I American? I've spent my entire life growing up in the United States and have a US citizenship, which just further convinces me that I am more American than I am German. Despite this, I still think that my German heritage is very strong as I speak, read, and write in German. However this still does not make me think that i am more german than American

This source displays the controversies that surround bots that make either racist or negative comments and how to prevent such things from happening. This article discusses one bot in particular, a Microsoft bot that went rogue and started posting racist comments. The article discusses how this can be easily prevented by creating a blacklist of racist words that the bot is not allowed to use or post. It also discusses how the bots should be restricted from imitating humans too closely, and can do so by creating restrictions from the start that the bots should not do.

Using bots to sway the public's opinion is something that I have also personally experienced. My high school's ASB Instagram page created a like contest between the grades, and depending on which class got the most amount of likes on each respective post, that class would be granted 20 class points. This motivation of class points provoked people to use sites that would make bot accounts like the posts. This ended up getting out of hand, with one of the class posts ending up with almost 1 million likes, which were all bot-generated.

This phrase highlights how the internet fabricates false representations of the people who post on it. Whether the posts are from friends, celebrities, or just bots, one can not determine how someone's life is just based on the things that they post on social media. A person could just post the good things in their lives on social media, which just shadows the worst things going on in their lives. The same thing applies to celebrities. Posts made by celebrities can often just give people a false image of the person that they really are.

As someone who uses multiple social media sites to communicate information between people, one must understand that communication is portrayed differently across platforms. For example, the social media platform Snapchat communicates much differently than a social media platform like X/twitter. Snapchat uses the approach of communication between individuals and private groups while X/twitter takes a more public approach to communication where an individual creates a post where everyone can see depending on thier accounts privacy status. Therefore creating different ways of communication amongst social media platforms.