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.