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.

We also covered a number of topics in automation, such as: History of Programming Python Programming Language JupyterHub and JupyterNotebooks Variables Data types (e.g., numbers, strings) Reddit Praw library (posting, searching, etc.) Other code libraries (e.g., time) For Loops Conditionals (if/else) Lists Dictionaries Functions (calling, and writing our own) Sentiment Analysis Recursion (for printing tweets and replies) We hope that by the end of this course, you have a familiarity of what programming is and some of what you can do with it. We particularly hope you have a familiarity with basic Python programming concepts, and an ability to interact with Reddit using computer programs.

For example, the actor Stellan Skarsgård complained that in the film industry, it didn’t matter if a company was making good movies at a decent profit. If there is an opportunity for even more profit by making worse movies, then that is what business leaders are obligated to do: “When raw market forces come in, [movie] studios start being run by companies that don’t care if they’re dealing in films or toothpaste so long as they get their 10% [return]. When AT&T took over Time Warner, it immediately told HBO to become lighter and more commercial. They were always making money. But not enough for an investor.” Stellan Skarsgård

A government owns the businesses (sometimes called “government services”) A government decides what to make and what the price is the price might be free, like with public schools, public streets and highways, public playgrounds, etc.

For an example of public shaming, we can look at late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel’s annual Halloween prank, where he has parents film their children as they tell the parents tell the children that the parents ate all the kids’ Halloween candy. Parents post these videos online, where viewers are intended to laugh at the distress, despair, and sense of betrayal the children express. I will not link to these videos which I find horrible, but instead link you to these articles:

Shame is the feeling that “I am bad,” and the natural response to shame is for the individual to hide, or the community to ostracize the person. Guilt is the feeling that “This specific action I did was bad.” The natural response to feeling guilt is for the guilty person to want to repair the harm of their action.

Say you have broken a bone and you are in pain. A doctor might say that the bone needs to be set; this will be painful, and kind of a forceful, “violent” action in which someone is interfering with your body in a painful way. So the doctor asks if you agree to let her set the bone. You agree, and so the doctor’s action is construed as being a legitimate interference with your body and your freedom.

Dogpiling: When a crowd of people targets or harasses the same person.

Some ad hoc crowdsourcing can be part of a social or political movement. For example, Social media organizing played a role in the Arab Spring revolutions in the 2010s, and Social Media platforms were a large part of the #MeToo movement, where victims of sexual abuse/harassment spoke up and stood together.

Disinformation campaigns also make use of crowdsoucing. An academic research paper Disinformation as Collaborative Work (pdf) lays out a range of disinformation campaigns: Orchestrated: Entirely fake and astroturfed, no genuine users contributing. Cultivated: Intentionally created misinformation that is planted in a community. It is then spread by real users not aware they are part of a disinformation campaign. Emergent and self-sustaining: Communities creating and spreading their own rumors or own conspiracy narratives.

These teams of content moderators could be considered human computers hired to evaluate examples against the content moderation policy of the platform they are working for.

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 incentivized to help their users feel safe. So this often means moderation to stop trolling and harassment.

Trauma dumping can be bad for the mental health of those who have this trauma unexpectedly thrown at them, and it also often isn’t helpful for the person doing the trauma dumping either:

While taking a break from parts or all of social media can be good for someone’s mental health (e.g., doomscrolling is making them feel more anxious, or they are currently getting harassed online), viewing internet-based social media as inherently toxic and trying to return to an idyllic time from before the Internet is not a realistic or honest view of the matter.

The book Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years describes how, before the printing press, when someone wanted a book, they had to find someone who had a copy and have a scribe make a copy. So books that were popular spread through people having scribes copy each other’s books. And with all this copying, there might be different versions of the book spreading around, because of scribal copying errors, added notes, or even the original author making an updated copy. So we can look at the evolution of these books: which got copied, and how they changed over time.

The method of determining what is shown to users is called a recommendation algorithm, which is an algorithm (a series of steps or rules, such as in a computer program) that recommends posts for users to see, people for users to follow, ads for users to view, or reminders for users.

Other disabilities are invisible disabilities that other people cannot notice by observing the disabled person (e.g., chronic fatigue syndrome, contact lenses for a visual disability, or a prosthetic for a missing limb covered by clothing).

If a building only has staircases to get up to the second floor (it was built assuming everyone could walk up stairs), then someone who cannot get up stairs has a disability in that situation.

When Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he also was purchasing access to all Twitter Direct Messages

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):

Some data is directly provided to the platform by the users. Platforms may ask users for information like: email address name profile picture interests friends

RIP trolling is where trolls find a memorial page and then all work together to mock the dead person and the people mourning them. Here’s one example from 2013:

Amusement: Trolls often find the posts amusing, whether due to the disruption or emotional reaction. If the motivation is amusement at causing others’ pain, that is called doing it for the lulz.

Sockpuppet (or a “burner” account): Creating a fake profile in order to argue a position (sometimes intentionally argued poorly to make the position look bad)

In 2016, when Donald Trump was running a campaign to be the US President, one twitter user pointed out that you could see which of the Tweets on Donald Trump’s Twitter account were posted from an Android phone and which from an iPhone, and that the tone was very different.

When we think about how data is used online, the idea of a utility calculus can help remind us to check whether we’ve really got enough data about how all parties might be impacted by some actions. Even if you are not a utilitarian, it is good to remind ourselves to check that we’ve got all the data before doing our calculus.

which Twitter claimed was less than 5%

you combine pieces of the language together according to specific rules in order to create meaning.

Some bots are intended to be helpful, using automation to make tasks easier for others or to provide information, such as:

Imagine I am an English speaker who wants to communicate with someone else who speaks Arabic. Neither of us speaks the other one’s language. If we have access to people who speak multiple languages, it is possible for them to act as translators, taking what someone says and repeating it in another language, until we are able to get our messages back and forth.

Virtue is a group effort. Individuals can’t be virtuous on their own because “the earth is slippery, slick” (meaning it is easy for an individual to fall into bad actions, they need support and moderation)