I've noticed a common trend that these large tech companies do. When they feel they need to hire cheap work for controversial tasks, they outsource that work to separate their name from the controversy. We saw this with how big tech treats social media content moderators, and now we see this with how AI companies treat data workers and AI trainers. I see it as a way these companies are trying to manage their liability by hiring through a separate company.

I have read before about how horrible it is to work in content moderation at big tech. These employees are shown truly horrific things and need to determine what happens to the post. I imagine this job is very similar to certain AI Trainer jobs that exist today on platforms like Handshake. I have heard similar bad things about them. I wonder if content moderators and their decisions while moderating were used to train an AI to do it without potentially traumatizing employees. If so, I see that as a positive use of AI.

This is such a relevant The Onion article, due to an experience I just had about an hour ago outside of Odegaard library. A group of young men walked up to me, holding clip-on DJI microphones. One of them asked me if he could ask me a few trivia questions about the United States. Immediately, I asked if I was on camera, to which he said no, but that I could be. He then proceeded to say they were asking US trivia questions for the United States 250th birthday. I said I wasn't interested, as it felt like my video was probably going to be used for some form of political propaganda. As I reflected on this after the interaction, It seems that this was probably a part of TPUSA's "Campus Patriotism Project" which has a huge focus on the 250th anniversary of the USAs independence from Britain. It also calls to mind viral videos Ive seen in the past of Americans failing to correctly answer basic geography questions. I wanted no part in it.

This reminds me of chain mail I received in the early 2010s via SMS, when I still had a flip phone. Usually there wasn't a monetary aspect of the message. It didn't request that you send money to the sender. Instead it said something like "Send this message to 10 friends for good luck, ignore and receive 10 years of bad luck". I'm really curious what motivated people to create chain mail such as this. It has the make up of a social experiment, but I imagine it would be really difficult to track the movement of the message over time.

This is a really interesting article, and it has applications to what I plan to do my writing assignment about. The theory is that by allowing opposing groups to interact with each other through social media, hard lines are able to drawn. Where once people may have had opposing views on some things and agreed on others, opposing parties are increasingly homogenous. Social media gives us a magnifying glass to judge others for their beliefs and opinions, it literally polarizes us and separates beliefs into silos. Why should I learn to love those that disagree with me, or practice tolerance, when I have thousands of like-minded friends that agree with me and hate the opposition?

This topic seems even more relevant today, where it seems like most social media platforms are recommending more hateful and controversial content to users that may not even agree with it. They do this because virality of a post is driven by interaction, and if people share or comment on a post in disagreement, it still pushes that post to more people. Personally I think this is morally wrong, and it drives division and misunderstanding in an already divided world.

Most people can relate to feeling like they have short attention span or the feeling of being hyperactive. But can most people relate to experiencing a state of hyperfixation? It seems like one of the more unique and less talked about symptoms of ADHD. It is something that I feel I can absolutely relate to, despite not being diagnosed. I could list numerous short-term hobbies Ive had over the years. For example in high school I became interested in building lamps. Another time, baking bread. Most recently, astronomy- I bought a Celestron Star-Hopper 8in Dobsonian telescope on facebook marketplace and have been using it to look at the moon every chance I get. It weighs nearly 100 pounds and is 4ft long. It seems like theres constantly something I am intently researching or obsessing over. But if someone asked me what I enjoy doing? Im not sure if I would have a good answer.

I had no idea that tetrachromacy was a condition some people live with. Throughout my life Ive often questioned whether everyone experiences color the same way, or if we all have a unique perception of how the different colors appear. For example, could a blue book appear blue to one person, and yellow to another? I would reason about it, and come to the conclusion that even if a color appears different to different people, it doesn't matter, as the quantifiable characteristics of that color are the same between people. Light colors appear light and dark colors appear dark. Colors mix with each other in predictable ways. This excerpt seems to have in some ways answered that original question for me, and proven me wrong. In the past I failed to consider changes in human anatomy. Some people simply cant see all the colors, or colors appear washed out. Evidently, some people can even see more colors than me.

John McAfee is such an interesting figure to me. He was the founder of McAfee anti-virus software, which at one time was a useful and powerful tool for protecting your personal computer. McAfee himself only ran the company for about 7 years until he resigned in the early 90s. After this point he seemed to sort of lose control. Ive listened to podcasts and interviews with John before his passing in 2021, and he seemed to be living a wild lifestyle of synthesizing and experimenting with research chemicals, committing tax evasion, murder (allegedly), island hopping in the Caribbean, and running from international police. He also ran for president in 2016 and 2020. I can only hope that some day a movie is made about his life.

This makes me think of the popular social media platform at many universities, including UW, YikYak. YikYak is an anonymous message board for college students. Enrollment at the school is verified using a third party service in order to post on the platform. Is generally used for to spread gossip, personal musings, and informal information about events happening on and around campus. Years ago this app had a controversy where when using the apps API, posts had location data accurate to about 15 feet attched to them. This is no longer the case, but as a user of the app I had a thought that given enough data on student writing, posts could be deanonymized using a technique called forensic stylometry. Forensic stylometry uses NLP to compare the writing style of a piece of text to a bulk of sample text, and it determines a likelihood that the text was written by the same author. Of course, many of the ethical frameworks discussed in this course would discourage this, but its a risk that many users may not realize they are subjected to.

This article specifically mentions a browser extension, AdNauseam, which obfuscates your ad personalization by 'clicking' on every ad it blocks. The idea is to basically poison the well of ad personalization. Most big tech companies sell their ads on a 'cost per click' basis, so by clicking every ad you are effectively charging advertisers as you browse. Personally, I'm not entirely sold on this idea. It seems like this would be good for companies like Google, that profit when you click an ad. Additionally, writing filters to identify when someone uses an extension such as this would be trivial for a company like Google. Instead, you are providing your IP address to countless advertisers as you browse and 'click' their ads automatically. This allows them to track you across the web.

Something I found especially interesting about viewing my ad profile was that there is an option to turn off personalized ads. This may appear to be a good option for privacy focused individuals, however Im not so sure after carefully reading the page. There is a notable lack of language stating google wont collect this data on you if you have personalized ads turned off. So Google will collect this data on you regardless, you only have the option to allow them to use it to target you with ads. This makes me question whether its still a better choice to turn off personalization. Google claims that they don't share personal information with advertisers. So by turning off personalization, what is the actual effect, does it make Google's advertising platform less effective for advertisers? Do they charge slightly less for their ads if they aren't targeting me?

This article from the verge pushes back on the common internet adage, "Don't Feed the Trolls". It suggests that trolls will stop at nothing to get a reaction from their target, getting more persistent if they are ignored. Something that came to mind that was not brought up in the article, was that trolling is not always obvious. A troll's goal may not be to provoke a reaction from their victim, but instead to deceive their victim. How can we avoid feeding the trolls, when we can't always identify what is a troll and what isnt? For victims of this type of trolling, the only answer may appear to be to avoid playing the game in the first place. But should individuals and groups allow themselves to be pushed out of interacting with their communities online to avoid being a victim of Trolling? I think the answer lies in situational awareness. Understand if there are people or groups adversarial to your online communities. Understand their motivations and where they come from, and train yourself to identify Trolling even when its less obvious.

I recently read The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by UW Linguistics Professor Emily Bender. At one point in the book, Bender discusses how we as individuals can combat excessive unneccessary Generative AI use on social media and in society. One of her recommendations was surprising to me, "Troll the hell" out of purveyors of synthetic content. Trolling in this context is not about amusement, gatekeeping, or feeling smart or powerful. It is about putting social pressure on people, to change public narratives on certain behaviors.

This source reminds me of an experience I had over winter break while visiting family out of state. My parents and I had dinner with a family we hadn't seen since high school; their son had been one of my close friends, but I had not seen them in nearly seven years. I now relate very differently to my parents than I did as a teenager, and both my friend and I have changed significantly since graduation. The interaction felt extremely uncomfortable and difficult to navigate. I felt caught between the version of myself I present around my parents and the version tied to that older friendship, which makes the experience feel like a really good example of context collapse.

I actually think that the tweets coming from Trump himself in this context are MORE authentic than the ones coming from his campaign team. As users of the platform and people living in this country, we expect a certain flavor of content out of Trump's tweets. Seeing posts from his campaign next to posts from Trump in some ways acts to muddy the waters. If the public face of a presidential candidate was always angry and negative, many voters may be turned away from that candidate. But by intermixing calm, structured posts, it makes the candidate appear able to switch their anger and negativity on and off. Which may be more appealing to voters.

I love when IRC gets brought up, because its an "old internet" system that I actually have experience using. I am 25 now, but around 2011-2013 I became interested in some online gaming communities that used IRC. In this context, it was used with a game mod or server plug-in that connected the game chat to an IRC server. Anyone on the IRC server could chat with in-game players, and in-game players could chat with the IRC users. I believe this was used so that community administrators would be able to monitor their server while on the go or working.

This excerpt instantly brought to mind a behavior I recently noticed in the YouTube app. When I launch the app, YouTube Shorts immediately begin playing. I am not taken to see popular, recommended, or subscribed video feeds, a short plays instantly. I believe this feature is intended to lock users into infinite short form content scrolling upon opening the app. Personally, due to the addictiveness of short form content, I see this practice as unethical.

This source is an article discussing voluntourist photos published to social media. It explains that photos of Western tourists in extremely poor villages perpetuate negative generalizations about Africa as a continent. It also mentions a satirical article from The Onion, making commentary on the same topic, which is also cited in this chapter. This article made me consider the irony in posting these photos as a voluntourist. As a volunteer, you have good intentions, but by posting these very normalized photos, you are in some ways damaging the communities you wish to help.

I had a previous career as a geospatial analyst, and sometimes I would work on spatio-temporal data sets that had a time and a space component. There were many times that I had to fuss with time and date fields in my tables to get the date formats to match, since there are so many valid ways to write date and time.

One detail that I found interesting was how easy it is for social media algorithms to be manipulated by bots. A relatively small number of bots can have a huge impact on a post's virality. This makes me question what information we see as legitimate online due to its virality is actually misinformation promoted by a bot farm.

While researching different types of bots, I was reminded of a time that I made use of a bot on Instagram. In 2017 I built an Instagram page with a couple of friends, which grew to a following of a few thousand. We would regularly use a bot that we could send posts to that would respond via a DM with the video or photo file itself. This allowed us to easily download posts from any public account.

I can only imagine the type of pressure that these women were under, with the weight of the US Government pressuring them to contribute to the development of weapons of mass destruction. I am curious what sorts of Ethical Frameworks they must have employed in order to feeling justified in contributing to the project. Perhaps Existentialism or Consequentialism.

Utilitarianism appears to be the opposite of the ethics prescribed by Egoism, which values self-interest over the good of others. Personally, I disagree with Egoism, but consequentialism can be critiqued as well. I think prioritizing others' happiness is good in theory, but sometimes what is best for a person isn't what would make them happy.