One of the main goals of social media sites is to increase the time users are spending on their social media sites. The more time users spend, the more money the site can get from ads, and also the more power and influence those social media sites have over those users. So social media sites use the data they collect to try and figure out what keeps people using their site, and what can they do to convince those users they need to open it again later.

Online advertisers can see what pages their ads are being requested on, and track users across those sites. So, if an advertiser sees their ad is being displayed on an Amazon page for shoes, then the advertiser can start showing shoe ads to that same user when they go to another website.

n the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020, Dallas Police made an app where they asked people to upload videos of protesters doing anything illegal. In support of the protesters, K-pop fans swarmed the app and uploaded as many K-pop videos as they could eventually leading to the app crashing and becoming unusable, and thus protecting the protesters from this attempt at Police surveillance.

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. When the goal is disruption, it might be attempting to derail a conversation (e.g., concern trolling), or make a space no longer useful for its original purpose (e.g., joke product reviews), or try to get people to take absurd fake stories seriously.

How do you think about the authenticity of the Tweets that come from Trump himself? Do you think it matters which human typed the Tweet? Does the emotional expression (e.g., anger) of the Tweet change your view of authenticity?

These reactions make sense. Try to imagine the early days of human social life, before we started attaching our welfare to the land in terms of planting crops and building structures designed for permanence. Our nomadic forebears functioned in groups who coordinated in highly specialized ways to ensure the survival of the whole. Although such communities are often pictured as being prehistoric, primitive, and obsolete, we now know that such societies were and are highly sophisticated, often developing and depending on highly specified legal codes, some of which are still in use today in Bedouin communities in North Africa. Other nomadic groups, such as Roma people (which you may have heard derogatorily called ‘gypsies’), live within and around land-based nations and their various borders and laws. To ensure the survival of their ethnicity, cultures, and languages, they depend on being able to trust each other. The nations whose land we are living and studying on here also knew the importance of being able to know who can be trusted.

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.

Binary consisting of 0s and 1s make it easy to represent true and false values, where 1 often represents true and 0 represents false. Most programming languages have built-in ways of representing True and False values.

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).

Bots present a similar disconnect between intentions and actions. Bot programs are written by one or more people, potentially all with different intentions, and they are run by others people, or sometimes scheduled by people to be run by computers.

Bots, on the other hand, will do actions through social media accounts and can appear to be like any other user. The bot might be the only thing posting to the account, or human users might sometimes use a bot to post for them.