4Chan has various image-sharing bulletin boards, where users post anonymously. Perhaps the most infamous board is the “/b/” board for “random” topics. This board emphasizes “free speech” and “no rules” (with exceptions for child pornography and some other illegal content). In these message boards, users attempt to troll each other and post the most shocking content they can come up with. They also have a history of collectively choosing a target website or community and doing a “raid” where they all try to join and troll and offend the people in that community. Many memes, groups, and forms of internet slang come from 4Chan, such as: lolcats Rickroll ragefaces “Anonymous” the hacker group Bronies (male My Little Pony fans) much of trolling culture (we will talk more about in Chapter 7: Trolling) But one 4Chan user found 4chan to be too authoritarian and restrictive and set out to create a new “free-speech-friendly” image-sharing bulletin board, which he called 8chan. 5.5.3. 8Chan (now 8Kun)# 8Chan (now called 8Kun) is an image-sharing bulletin board site that was started in 2013. It has been host to white-supremacist, neo-nazi and other hate content. 8Chan has had trouble finding companies to host its servers and internet registration due to the presence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and for being the place where various mass shooters spread their hateful manifestos. 8Chan is also the source and home of the false conspiracy theory QAnon

Graffiti and other notes left on walls were used for sharing updates, spreading rumors, and tracking accounts

One classic example is the tendency to overlook the interests of children and/or people abroad when we post about travels, especially when fundraising for ‘charity tourism’. One could go abroad, and take a picture of a cute kid running through a field, or a selfie with kids one had traveled to help out. It was easy, in such situations, to decide the likely utility of posting the photo on social media based on the interest it would generate for us, without thinking about the ethics of using photos of minors without their consent. This was called out by The Onion in a parody article, titled “6-Day Visit To Rural African Village Completely Changes Woman’s Facebook Profile Picture”.

Data points often give the appearance of being concrete and reliable, especially if they are numerical. So when Twitter initially came out with a claim that less than 5% of users are spam bots, it may have been accepted by most people who heard it. Elon Musk then questioned that figure and attempted to back out of buying Twitter, and Twitter is accusing Musk’s complaint of being an invented excuse to back out of the deal, and the case is now in court.

Fig. 3.1 A photo that is likely from a click-farm, where a human computer is paid to do actions through multiple accounts, such as like a post or rate an app. For our purposes here, we consider this a type of automation, but we are not considering this a “bot,” since it is not using (electrical) computer programming.

In this example, some clever protesters have made a donkey perform the act of protest: walking through the streets displaying a political message. But, since the donkey does not understand the act of protest it is performing, it can’t be rightly punished for protesting. The protesters have managed to separate the intention of protest (the political message inscribed on the donkey) and the act of protest (the donkey wandering through the streets). This allows the protesters to remain anonymous and the donkey unaware of it’s political mission.

We also see this phrase used to say that things seen on social media are not authentic, but are manipulated, such as people only posting their good news and not bad news, or people using photo manipulation software to change how they look.

“Rational Selfishness”: It is rational to seek your own self-interest above all else. Great feats of engineering happen when brilliant people ruthlessly follow their ambition.