As a potential worker in the tech industry, you might someday find yourself in a position where you have influence over how social media platforms are designed, programmed, or operated (e.g., you could be a programmer, or designer, or content moderator).

As a social media user, we hope you are informed about things like: how social media works, how they influence your emotions and mental state, how your data gets used or abused, strategies in how people use social media, and how harassment and spam bots operate.

More users: If Meta has more users, it can offer advertisers more people to advertise to. More user time: If Meta’s users spend more time on Meta, then it has more opportunities to show ads to each user, so it can sell more ads

Surveillance capitalism began when internet companies started tracking user behavior data to make their sites more personally tailored to users.

The term “cancel culture” can be used for public shaming and criticism, but is used in a variety of ways, and it doesn’t refer to just one thing.

criticism and shaming have always been a part of human culture, the Internet and social media have created new ways of doing so.

Another concern is for the safety of the users on the social media platform (or at least the users that the platform cares about). Users who don’t feel safe will leave the platform, so social media companies are incentivize to help their users feel safe. So this often means moderation to stop trolling and harassment.

In order to make social media sites usable and interesting to users, they may ban different types of content such as advertisements, disinformation, or off topic posts. Almost all social media sites (even the ones that claim “free speech”) block spam, mass produced unsolicited messages, generally advertisement, scams, or trolling.

Some people view internet-based social media (and other online activities) as inherently toxic and therefore encourage a digital detox, where people take some form of a break from social media platforms and digital devices

Many have anecdotal experiences with their own mental health and those they talk to. For example, cosmetic surgeons have seen how photo manipulation on social media has influenced people’s views of their appearance:

When someone creates content that goes viral, they didn’t necessarily intend it to go viral, or viral in the way that it does.

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).

Content recommendations can go well when users find content they are interested in. Sometimes algorithms do a good job of it and users are appreciative. TikTok has been mentioned in particular as providing surprisingly accurate recommendations, though Professor Arvind Narayanan argues that TikTok’s success with its recommendations relies less on advanced recommendation algorithms, and more on the design of the site making it very easy to skip the bad recommendations and get to the good ones.

This perhaps explains why sometimes when you talk about something out loud it gets recommended to you (because someone around you then searched for it). Or maybe they are actually recording what you are saying and recommending based on that.

Additionally, people with disabilities might change their behavior (whether intentionally or not) to hide the fact that they have a disability, which is called masking and may take a mental or physical toll on the person masking, which others around them won’t realize.

If tall grocery store shelves were made with the assumption that people would be able to reach them, then people who are short, or who can’t lift their arms up, or who can’t stand up, all would have a disability in that situation.

social media companies often fail at keeping our information secure.

When we use social media platforms though, we at least partially give up some of our privacy. For example, a social media application might offer us a way of “Private Messaging” (also called Direct Messaging) with another user. But in most cases those “private” messages are stored in the computers at those companies, and the company might have computer programs that automatically search through the messages, and people with the right permissions might be able to view them directly.

One particularly striking example of an attempt to infer information from seemingly unconnected data was someone noticing that the number of people sick with COVID-19 correlated with how many people were leaving bad reviews of Yankee Candles saying “they don’t have any scent” (note: COVID-19 can cause a loss of the ability to smell):

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)

In these MUDs, players developed activities that we now consider trolling, such as “Griefing” where one player intentionally causes another player “grief” or distress (such as a powerful player finding a weak player and repeatedly killing the weak player the instant they respawn), and “Flaming” where a player intentionally starts a hostile or offensive conversation.

Trolling is when an Internet user posts inauthentically (often false, upsetting, or strange) with the goal of causing disruption or provoking an emotional reaction. When the goal is provoking an emotional reaction, it is often for a negative emotion, such as anger or emotional pain.

Authenticity in connection requires honesty about who we are and what we’re doing; it also requires that there be some sort of reality to the connection that is supposedly being made between parties.

Many users were upset that what they had been watching wasn’t authentic. That is, users believed the channel was presenting itself as true events about a real girl, and it wasn’t that at all. Though, even after users discovered it was fictional, the channel continued to grow in popularity.

One of the early ways of social communication across the internet was with Email, which originated in the 1960s and 1970s. These allowed people to send messages to each other, and look up if any new messages had been sent to them.

Before this centralization of media in the 1900s, newspapers and pamphlets were full of rumors and conspiracy theories. And now as the internet and social media have taken off in the early 2000s, we are again in a world full of rumors and conspiracy theories.

These characters are then stored in order and called strings (that is a bunch of characters strung together, like in Fig. 4.6 below).

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).

On the other hand, some bots are made with the intention of harming, countering, or deceiving others. For example, people use bots to spam advertisements at people. You can use bots as a way of buying fake followers, or making fake crowds that appear to support a cause (called Astroturfing).

We also would like to point out that there are fake bots as well, that is real people pretending their work is the result of a Bot. For example, TikTok user Curt Skelton posted a video claiming that he was actually an AI-generated / deepfake character:

There are also platforms built around activities like gaming (Discord), and dating and hookups (e.g. Bumble, Tinder, OKCupid, etc.).