I have worked on a social media design last year, called musiciansconnect. I took inspiration from already existing platforms, especially tiktok, Instagram, and LinkedIn in utilizing a feed that shows relevant trending topics and having a connect option. I wanted to make this platform different for musicians specifically, so that they could collaborate and share support with one another. The design implemented a mixture between LinkedIn and Instagram.

I was able to learn more about the specific details of social media platforms that companies utilize in order to boost their apps and stay relevant. Specifically, I would say that I was able to notice more of the ad targeting (tracking data to give ads similar) when I personally use social media like Instagram.

If social media companies were governed by the users rather than shareholders, it would be pretty chaotic as social media has so many trolls roaming. However, to have a very extreme comparison, this would be similar to tyranny (shareholders have power) and communism (everyone is equal). In a way, it may make the apps better as the community could come together to implement things that they want rather than having it decided by the shareholders. This is very unlikely though.

If social media sites weren't allowed to make money based on personal data and targeted advertisements, they would need to solely rely on sponsoring products that fit the social media trends so that the vast majority of users fit to the ad. It would be more of a shot in the dark, as nothing is targeted, but it would be more likely to still gain some sorts of revenues as the trending topics are the ones that most users interact with and would be prone to spending money on.

There have been countless incidents from social media where people were publicly shamed. An example of this would be a kpop star from TXT, soobin, publicly talking about how he enjoys an anime "Made in Abyss." He was quickly cancelled for this, as the anime was a controversial show, which I believe is extremely irresponsible from the people cancelling him. The anime is controversial for its depictions of torture, yet there are so many award winning shows that depict this sort of nature that people do not care about. In the KPOP industry, fans are too sensitive at times, and the idols usually need to force themselves to apologize for incidents like this.

I believe that it every human is capable of forgiving others. However, there are circumstances where reconciliation may not be an option for certain individuals when the act committed is far too cruel such as the Nazi Nuremberg trials.

Social media platforms can post about awareness on crowd harassment, yet I doubt any of that would make any change. The most effective ways would be to hire more moderators that delete harassment, which is not a super viable option. Social media already has features to avoid crowd harassment such as turning off comments so that users cannot engage in hateful comments. In any instance, harassment is never the correct answer to a solution even if it is "justified." Instead, awareness is the best option to create reason and educate users.

Social media makes harassment possible as there are minimal ways to verify a user's identity correctly. Because of this, users often create troll accounts and feel the freedom to be able to speak their minds online without feeling any repercussions, often times posting hate comments. Additionally, many reasons as to why social media is popular is due to memes, and dark humor, which often inspires trolls to comment hateful things in hopes of causing comedy, which could motivate harassment.

Social media is a platform designated for the community to share their lives and opinions. Therefore, I believe it has tremendous power in supporting good crowdsourcing as if it is really good and beneficial, more posts would be made about them in good manners. On the other hand, the community would post opposite for bad crowdsourcing, discouraging people from participating and cancelling them.

I've participated as I have written google reviews before for friends and family who have just opened up businesses. Additionally, I post my music on Spotify, and have sold beats online for others to buy my work.

I would feel that content moderators should be given more incentives to help clear harmful content off the internet. Methods could be by having higher pay or by creating more AI that can help them easily detect and remove inappropriate content. However, I believe that AI has already begun to help with that, and content moderators will slowly, if not completely disappear in a couple years.

I have had countless amounts of bots comment under my posts in which I needed to report as they were causing more harm than good posting inappropriate messages. Additionally, I have had to help friends by reporting accounts taking their identities and faking their personas.

I would say that social media can't really do much as the reason for mental health issues coming from them is not necessarily due to their applications motives, but the userbase. For instance, people that experience cyber bullying can only fix their issues by deleting social media because those cyber bullying already know it is wrong to do it but it will never go away with so many trolls. Additionally, those that get depressed from seeing others post about their happy lives or seeing unrealistic beauty standards cannot blame social media companies as the people posting them didn't necessarily do any direct harms or intentionally harm anybody. Those types of reasonings are stemmed from jealousy that is uncontrollable. The only ways could be to spread mental health awareness, but I feel as if that is already a very massive trend on social media, yet more and more people of the younger generations are experiencing depression.

Social media has been good for my mental health in being able to communicate with friends and family that I am unable to see at all times so that I feel connected with them even if we are apart from each other for longer times. On the other hand, it has made my attention span a lot shorter as I have definitely caught myself falling into the tiktok or instagram reels loopholes, and also it has set unrealistic standards on what my life should be like in some ways.

Social media platforms can spread more awareness upon mental health issues for their users. However, in a way this may seem pointless because the entire basis of social media is to expose a good side of an individual for others to see. This is one of the driving factors for social media causing mental health issues as people compare themselves to influencers that may look better/ have achieved more than them. Additionally, the addiction of scrolling through social media creates a trap where users are using their phones too much rather than experiencing life themselves that can also lead to a downgrade in mental health.

Social media was bad for my mental health in ways that it exposes me to content of others that have achieved more than I have, making me compare myself to them. On the contrary, this could also be seen as a benefit as it can teach me ways to better myself as I may look up to certain influencers and chase what they have, making me improve.

When I was first beginning my music TikTok, I tried to gain traction by doing trends that tend to get many views in order to grow a following. A way I did this was to use a very popular audio that music-related TikToks include, and muting it so that people don't notice that I used that audio. The use of the audio was purely so that the algorithm pushes my post under that audio, when in reality nothing changed because I muted it. I have also experimented by having my friends spam many comments so that it boosts the TikTok algorithm, but I concluded that it all comes down to luck, because some of my lower quality posts blew up whereas my higher effort, higher quality posts flopped sometimes.

I have shared content that I thought was meaningful to me to people that follow me. For instance, TikTok has a repost feature where you can show people that follow you another post that you think your followers might like. As I post music content and most of my followers follow me for that, I reposted one of my brother's music TikToks and it ended up going viral as the algorithm tends to blow up posts that gain lots of views early on.

Social media platforms should work to block out any trends that cause harm to people in ways that could be emotional and physical. There have been far too many trends that have led to depression, harm, and even deaths in many cases. Social media could help avoid such incidents by spreading more education on positive trends, combatting misinformation, and voiding out sensitive content.

I think social media platforms should ensure that their recommendation algorithms block out harmful content such as promoting false information, hate speech, and violence. Social media platforms would improve if they all add more fact checkers, and tools that can detect if content is no suitable for spreading such as violence, and other sensitive content. However, for the most part, social media already has these tools implemented.

Design justice is a framework that targets the issues of inequality, exclusion, and oppression when a team designs something. In history, certain groups such as disabled groups are marginalized from being designers, and design justice attempts to figure out issues like this. It considers the ethics behind the social, political, and cultural implications within the design processes.

Universal Designs are designed purposely so that everybody can have the option of utilizing the designs whether they have a disability or not. Often times, they are built with flexibility in mind as a main attribute, and whether or not the designs are for the basic necessities in communal areas.

Social media companies must make money through ad revenues and other methods. These other methods could include selling user data to third parties, and data mining in order to push out user-specific ads. Because social media is often free to install and create accounts, these are methods that they could easily make billions of dollars.

My biggest concerns around privacy on social media is how companies are able to track my personal data. This data is confidential, but in many cases, I've heard about big social media companies such as Twitter selling user data for money to third party sources that users did not authorize their data to be sent to.

I am not particularly scared of how Google tracks my ad profile, but in a way I feel as if cyber security is an ongoing issue. I am always aware of when services may be tracking my online activities, which is why I make sure to hide my important information for the most part.

spurious correlations are a phenomenon where two variables seem to have a relationship with one another, when there is no causation between them. For instance, a chart may show a pattern that may seem as if the variables correlate with one another, when in reality it is just a mere coincidence that the causation is occuring.

The potential benefits for trolling are that it can bring people together if the troll comments are funny and not disrespectful in a serious post. However, there are countless harms in trolling that can impact a sensitive being. For example, if someone who was depressed posted about their depression and received troll comments, they might actually harm themselves deeply.

I've been on social media for many years where I see a barrage of troll comments on pretty much any viral post nowadays. I've noticed that when responded back to in an angry attitude, the trolls are fed more firepower to create more troll comments, which is why the best way to do deal with trolls, is to just let them comment and talk to themselves.

I've noticed that I behave slightly differently depending on occasions. For instance, when I am off social media platforms and meeting people in real life, I may behave differently to how I act online. I manage a music tik-tok page where I post a lot of musical creations. To an extent, this page is slightly inauthentic as I stay as filtered and heavily geared towards audiences that I would want to attract. Despite it being a slight change to my overall persona, I wouldn't say it is fully inauthentic, as aside from being more hidden about my personal self, I am posting a large part of my life (making music) which is an authentic expression.

Trump's tweets that come from himself were extremely authentic. It is a great thing for a presidential leader to be genuine, yet I believe that his mannerisms on Twitter were a bit childish and rude at times which exemplifies negative aspects of authenticity, especially when being a leader of a country.

Dictionaries in python are extremely useful as they allow the association of a value to a unique key. Dictionaries differ from lists as they are unordered, and will be much more efficient and easier to access keys once a dataset contains upwards amounts of elements.

It's very interesting to see how social media has evolved throughout the days. The IRC seems to look more like VScode rather than an actual platform where people would comfortably chat. The IRC reminds me of video game chats such as Minecraft and other older games, where there were commands that you could input into the chat.

Each image is created from pixels, represented by a binary value. This could also be known as "bit-plane." There are different pixel values as well to encode different shades. 0 is white, whereas 255 is black.

Booleans are essential when writing codes in many different languages such as python. There are other operators in Booleans such as >=, <=, ==, !=, &&, ||, !, and ~. Booleans are intricate in returning equivalency, true, and false data.

This tactic is extremely devious, yet smart. I find it interesting how people utilize different things in order to spread their messages; in this case it seems to be very unethical.

Astroturfing is an unsolicited marketing tactic, to appear as if it is organized by sponsors that it really is not apart of. I view this method as a more advanced way of spreading propaganda which is unethical and potentially harmful to many causes.

More about the framework of Taoism is that people in this structure live in "the tao (way)" meaning that they embrace the natural flow of life, promoting the "wu wei," a term that means effortless action, or a spontaneous way of living with the natural course of life. Taoism incorporates the yin and yang, a balance between darkness and lightness for a balance and harmony in life. One could infer that Taoism is almost an opposite to Confucianism, as Taoism infers an intuitive and natural way of living rather than a rigid system. Overall, it is a framework that a lot of society has departed from, as we emerge into a very technologically and AI-driven society.