This article talks about how Jimmy Kimmel's prank is mean spirited as the children may not be developed enough to understand or enjoy the joke. However it draws the line at calling it abuse or traumatic as some people have. I think that is important because I have seen a lot of examples of the internet of people taking a maybe mean or bad thing and treating it like its a true horrific act of malice. This leads to a lot of overreaction in the shaming response.

I think often on the internet there are examples where the extent of the shaming crosses the line into harassment and abuse. Online, this can often lead to cases where I think the shaming and response to an action are worse than the actual action itself. It seems very easy for the internet to mobilize against someone without real second thought which can turn misunderstandings and miscommunication into life changing events.

Foldit is a game where players fold protein structures as best as possible, and the answers they create are checked against real world proteins as it's not possible to automatically create solutions. This allowed solutions to protein structures to be crowd sourced, and many proteins were actually solved through this. Its a great example of crowdsourcing scientific knowledge in a way that makes use of things humans can do that computers couldn't.. Now I believe that there is AI that can fold protein structures.

It's easy for groups on the internet to be riled up behind a common goal and often that can lead to mistakes being made. Random people on the internet don't have the skills to correctly identify a criminal, but people will sure think they do and will be confident about their answers even when they're wrong. I think this problem also can lead to harassment for the same exact reasons if people think they are justified for some reason but their reason is wrong.

I think Facebook and other companies need to have a better system than this because its clearly not ethical and built on the exploitation of these moderators. They are not getting the pay, benefits, or support, that should come with such grueling work as manually sifting through the worst content on the internet..

Yes, when I see a post on a social media site that is horribly racist or an account with an offensive name I always try to report it. Some video games have a feature that you will get a popup later that says something along the lines of "A user you reported was banned" to show you that your reports do something. I don't know how effective my reports have been on social media so maybe they could use that feature.

In this case with Elon Musk stealing memes from his fans, you could see it as an example of just one of the thousands of people on the internet that is taking a meme and reposting. There is a huge difference here because Elon Musk already has a huge following and reach (especially with him owning X) and so he is using the masses to generate content while claiming it as his own because most people will have never seen the original.

I think with how the internet currently function's it would be impossible for everything to be properly credited as it should be. The way it works now with essentially no credit is not great and leads to a lot of stealing content and credit. Much of the internet and social media however is built on the back of reusing and copying posts. If there was some sort of linking system that allowed people to proliferate memes and posts while sending credit back to the original creator that could work but it would have to be very easy to use or no one would bother.

I liked this article a lot because it broke down popular ideas about autistic people and explained how they we're necessarily disabilities. It also shows how much of the issue is interlinked with issues of super standardized schooling and standardized testing being overvalued. It's seen as anything being different than the expected academic path is negative, so many autistic people who don't do the best in the American schooling system are seen as examples of disabled people not being smart, instead of them not fitting well into the system not made for them.

This idea of disabled people having to become "normal" to fit in is a prime example of nuerodiversty not being understood by a lot of people. Some of these tools are obviously really helpful, wheelchairs, walkers, glasses, medications, all of these are vital to helping people with certain disabilities participate in society. There is an extent to this though, many people will try to do anything they can to force disabled people into the the specific box of abilities that "normal" people had, with things like ABA and conversion therapy it comes at the cost of what defines these people as themselves for the sake of making them more like a "normal" person.

This situation is very interesting as an example of these sock puppet accounts being used to push hateful rhetoric. Reading into the specifics of the issue it seems to me at least to be fairly obvious that Dean Browning just completely screwed up and had to do a lot of desperate back peddling and face saving that didn't hold up under scrutiny. It challenges the idea of what you can trust on the internet from just any person if even that account's personal opinion is valid for who they are saying they are.

Code switching and changing how you express yourself in different situations I feel is fully natural to a degree. As a white male I don't have to deal with code switching in the same way it's talked about for AAVE but I still speak a different way at work than I do when I'm hanging out with my close friends. Everyone interacts with different people differently, and though one could argue I am less authentic to myself at work, I still can express myself as who I am without the exact same vocabulary.

I like this phrase a lot because it brings attention to the idea that many people think of data or statistics as a rock hard absolute truth when there's a lot more that can go into it in both collection and analysis. Obviously, as the saying points out, some of these models are very useful at describing real world things, but they are still not 100% accurate, just accurate enough to help describe what it should be enough to make decisions.

This feels to me like another example of likely white developers not thinking about who will be using their product. There could be some deep technical reason as to why there's a limit on long names but it seems like they made it long enough for all the last names that they thought about (likely standard Anglo-Saxon names).

This article goes into click farms or shadowy operations that use large amounts of phones to boost the likes and engagement on certain posts to make it more likely to be picked up by the algorithm. One thing that sort of disturbed me about this situation was how easy it seemed to do. Like sure, you need the resources to have a lot of phones, but ones you have that and can hook them all together they gain the ability to boost and post and get tons of eyes on it. Within the article they brought up things that it's often used on including political speech and conspiracy videos.

We have talked about many examples of bots that are informative like the one that calls out companies for being hypocritical about women's wages or just entertaining like the one that posts images of red pandas. Users clearly like these posts and accounts judging by their popularity. These companies only function through providing the means of sharing content between users, so if some users want to use bots to create content in a way not possible by a real human, it seems to be in the platforms' best interests to let it happen.

Now I could be wrong here, but my understanding of Nihilism nothing matters but it's less that "there is no right or wrong" and more that there is no fundamental meaning to the universe. What is "right" or "wrong" is not defined by some higher meaning it's defined by the people in the world. Nihilists can still gather their own meanings and have moral beliefs but it's all rooted in that nothing truly matters in a cosmic sense and we're all here on this rock doing our thing until we go extinct, but to us the choice we make can affect us and others and there can be moral right and wrong.

Twitter makes money off of advertisements which play based on being on the site. This means more people spending more time on twitter directly translates to more money for the company. Features that lead to controversy or a lot of people talking about a topic (whether positive or negative) lead to more money for the company. This could include things like retweets and the later quote-tweet.