This Wikipedia article defines a meme as an idea or behavior that imitates other people within a culture.

This chapter stood out to me because memes have changed so much in the past decade. When I was growing up we would use social media apps like vine that had much more creative humor, and was clearly a lot more thought out. I think that memes have gotten a lot more simple and less creative, which could potentially match the humor that the younger generations enjoy, such as the 6-7 meme.

This source is about how facebook users will have to use their phone number to sign up for the account, and then facebook will publicly post the users phone number for everyone to see. This is something we have seen a lot in this class where users private information will be posted publicly without them knowing.

Individual analysis is something I didn't consider before and is super surprising to me. I did not know how tech companies will focus on the behavior of users and use it to keep people hooked on the app.

This talks a lot about about the power structures involved in making these apps, and how that is a lot of the reason for why apps don't take into account people with disabilities.

This makes me think a lot about how people with trauma will react very differently to things they see online, and the people making these platforms won't always do a good job in making it safe for these kinds of people.

This source explains private messaging and the different kinds. What surprised me the most was learning about the demand for private information. It is really interesting to think about why private messaging is so popular now then in the past.

I have never realized that direct messages on instagram can be stored in the computers of companies. I always just assumed that those messages were private but now that I think about signing up for apps like instagram and snapchat, I never filled anything out or signed any agreements to keep that information private. It's pretty crazy to think about what companies know about people and the information they have.

This source is about web tracking and what the purpose of it is. How it is used to by companies to collect and share information about users and also by law enforcenment agencies to spy on people. It is really crazy to learn about the extent that people use data.

Wow, this is so interesting and I never would have thought that data would be used to infer information, also information that is this niche and specific. I think this is super cool and I wonder what other people are using it for.

On [g3]: One detail from this source is that the FBI's letter to Martin Luther King Jr. was sent anonymously in 1964 and made to look like it came from a disillusioned Black supporter, not the government. It was mailed along with a tape of recordings from bugged hotel rooms, about a month before King was set to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. Hiding behind a fake identity to harass and destabilize a target is very similar to the trolling tactics in this chapter, which suggests these tactics existed long before social media.

I find this take on trolling very interesting because it doesn't take trolling seriously, which I think is kind of the point. Trolling is something that I don't think people should ever take personally because it's not real. That's because when the point of something is to just promote a reaction then there is no point to it.

One detail the chapter leaves out is that Robinson found the two devices also differed in when and how they tweeted, not just in tone. Most Android tweets were posted early in the morning. The iPhone tweets came mostly in the afternoon and evening, and were far more likely to include links, pictures, and campaign hashtags like #trump2016. That pattern supports the idea that the iPhone account was run by staff doing scheduled promotion, while the Android tweets were Trump posting on his own.

This is really interesting because I have never thought about how we value authenticity because of its connections to how humans use social connections to manage our vulnerability. When I relate this to my personal experiences it makes sense though, how humans are more likely to be venerable when they are being authentic.

Cheathem shows that conspiracy theories were everywhere in Jacksonian-era politics, like the "corrupt bargain" claim that John Quincy Adams secretly traded Henry Clay a cabinet post for the 1824 presidency, and the Anti-Masonic movement's fear of a secret society controlling the government. What struck me is that these spread without social media, through partisan newspapers. It makes me think social media didn't invent conspiracy thinking; it just made it faster and cheaper to spread.

This is so interesting to me because I thought meme pages and trolls were really only a common thing in the past ten years. It's so interesting to learn that it has been going on since the beggining of the internet.

This article describes how one teenager's TikTok video recommending Prolific, a paid research survey site, sent thousands of new participants to the platform overnight. Most were young women, which suddenly skewed the demographics of many studies running at the time. As someone working on clinical trial participant recruitment, this hits close to home: one viral post can quietly change who your "sample" actually is, and researchers might not notice until the data is already biased.

The "less than 5%" figure depends entirely on definitions. Twitter measured bots against monetizable daily active users, not all accounts, so Twitter and Musk could both be "right" while counting different things. I saw this while scouting startups: a founder's "50,000 users" could mean signups, monthly actives, or paying customers. Shouldn't a number that decided a $44 billion deal come with a public definition of what a "bot" is?