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.
I do hope we get warned, but I believe this was a future that was really useful in the past. If when everyone was joining the apps they would know the negatives, that would have been helpful. But I also understand it was not possible to know everything then.
Many people like to believe (or at least convince others) that they are doing something to make the world a better place, as in this parody clip from the Silicon Valley show (the one Kumail Nanjiani was on, though not in this clip):
Yeah in Silicon Valley every company believes they are making the world better. But generally this is not true, and the company sees its negative effects years later when it's too late to fix everything.
Then, much of tech is dependent on exploiting cheap labor, often in dangerous conditions, in other countries (thus extracting the resource of cheap labor, from places with “inferior” governments and economies). This labor might be physical labor, or dealing with dangerous chemicals, or the content moderators who deal with viewing horrific online content.
Like how apple makes their phones in China. To make sure that people know that the product is American they always say "designed in California" on their device.
So, what Meta does to make money (that is, how shareholders get profits), is that they collect data on their users to make predictions about them (e.g., demographics, interests, etc.).
They also sell this data to third parties. This is another source of revenue, but this can be considered unethical
What do you consider to be the most important factors in making an instance of public shaming bad?
The most important factor to look at is the degree of mistake the other person has made. There are certain mistakes that people can not come back from, but there are mistake that should not be shamed as much.
The term “cancel culture” can be used for public shaming and criticism, but is used in a variety of ways, and it doesn’t refer to just one thing.
Overall I am not a fan of cancel culture. I don't believe that we as a society need to stoop down to someones level just because they did a bad thing. That doesn't mean I think people should get away with what they did, but being harassed online does not help anyone.
Women of colour, (black, Asian, Latinx and mixed-race women) were 34% more likely to be mentioned in abusive or problematic tweets than white women. Black women were disproportionately targeted, being 84% more likely than white women to be mentioned in abusive or problematic tweets.
People tend find something different about a certain person and start attacking that. Marginalized groups are target more because they have something that is "strange" about them.
Dogpiling: When a crowd of people targets or harasses the same person.
It only takes one person to start a chain of harassment on a person. Someone can make up something awful about a certain person and next thing this person will be harassed
Crowdsourcing isn’t always pre-planned or designed for. Sometimes a crowd stumbles into crowd tasks in an unplanned, ad hoc manner.
Social media works this way. You can say one piece of information on your page, and the next thing you know everyone in the world knows about that thing.
You probably already have some ideas of how crowds can work together on things like editing articles on a site like Wikipedia or answer questions on a site like Quora, but let’s look at some other examples of how crowds can work together.
I think that crowd sourcing can be a nice thing. Pooling resources together to learn more about a topic.
After a company starts working on moderation, they might decide to invest in teams specifically dedicated to content moderation.
I think it's important to have people dedicated to working on moderation. Moderation is something that is very important to keeping our Internet safe, so having people dedicated helps.
Delete: Platforms can delete posts or comments.
I think this comes with good and bad. Sometimes comments can be taken as bad when they are not really bad. But also this can protect users from seeing unnecessary hate.
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:
There's a lot of trauma dumping on the internet, which usually is done in a harmful way. They will see someone being happy or doing something they want to do and then will say "Oh I can't do that because of xyzzy" and making the other person feel bad for no reason.
Now, they’re coming with edited selfies.
On tiktok there are also beauty filters that people could put on that hide blemishes. It creates unrealistic standards that only hurts others but thinking they should look like that when that's not true.
Through quote tweeting, a modified version of the original tweet (now with Lewinsky’s emoji response) spread as people liked, retweeted, replied, and put it in Buzzfeed lists
Quote tweeting can make tweets very funny. The original tweet can be interesting, but then with this added information the tweet can become a different type of funny.
When physical mail was dominant in the 1900s, one type of mail that spread around the US was a chain letter.
That's so interesting. It took so much more effort to take part in chain mail or any sort of trolling back then since they couldn't just easily copy and paste messages.
who has the power to change Twitters recommendation algorithm, blames the users for the results:
I don't think it's the users fault, but yes when you pay more attention to content you hate, you will get more of that. This has happened to me before and you just have to ignore the content you hate.
What experiences do you have of social media sites making particularly good recommendations for you?
This site that I feel does the best job with recommendations is TikTok. There are times when it can be off, but generally it's shows me what I like.
The following tweet has a video of a soap dispenser that apparently was only designed to work for people with light-colored skin.
Oh wow, I had never thought of it like this. Yeah every tech company at least needs to test their products on all types of people so they can stop blatantly racists problems.
For example, a phone might detect that the user has gone from a dark to a light environment, and might automatically change the phone brightness or color scheme to be easier to read.
The iPhone does this. At night time it turns down brightness. Sometimes the automatic dimness or brightness can be annoying as there are time you will want a certain brightness based on the situation you are in, not the lighting.
Privacy tracking settings
This reminds me of how Snapchat AI claims that it does not track its user, even though it does. The AI will tell you about something near you but then say they do not have your location.
Unclear Privacy Rules
This reminds of how people believe that the photos they take on snapchat are just gonna disappear. The photos don't do that, they live on forever. But people are not notified about this.
One of the main goals of social media sites is to increase the time users are spending on their social media sites.
Which obviously is the goal of all companies, but with social media companies it really comes with negatives. More time on social media really leads to more and more horrible effects.
Additionally, groups keep trying to re-invent old debunked pseudo-scientific (and racist) methods of judging people based on facial features (size of nose, chin, forehead, etc.), but now using artificial intelligence.
Social Media taking data just uses horrible practices that are human are trying to move away. Making assumptions about people is exactly what these programs do, which what society is trying to not do.
Do not argue with trolls - it means that they win
I totally agree with this statement. Feeding the trolls just adds to the bit as a whole. Obviously if something super absurd is occurring, it might make sense to step in. But besides that just taking a step back might be the best option to deal with this situation.
If the immediate goal of the action of trolling is to cause disruption or provoke emotional reactions, what is it that makes people want to do this disruption or provoking of emotional reactions?
As with everything trolling comes with its positive and negatives. As long as the trolling is not made purely from harm, it can be quite amusing. Now I believe that twitter, and more specifically Elon Musk, is trying to get rid of the impersonation part on twitter. Trolling can be used to make a strong point, but generally is not positive.
This professor was being accused of sexual harassment by multiple real women, and these real women were very upset to find out that @Sciencing_Bi, who was trying to join them, was not a real person.
This whole situation is not okay. Especially to go this far in length to say you were sexually harassed by someone, when you were not. Also to hold a service for a FAKE person is crazy!
Many users were upset that what they had been watching wasn’t authentic.
I find this story quite intriguing, because it is not as if the girl was lying to her audience. But at the same time I can see why the audience is upset as they thought she was someone who she is not.
ne famous example of reducing friction was the invention of infinite scroll. When trying to view results from a search, or look through social media posts, you could only view a few at a time, and to see more you had to press a button to see the next “page” of results.
A lot of the techies who created this platforms seem to regret what they've created. If they would think about the repercussion once in a while, we would have less issues. Although I understand it is hard to think about this things when creating these features.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Bulletin board system (BBS) provided more communal ways of communicating and sharing messages. In these systems, someone would start a “thread” by posting an initial message. Others could reply to the previous set of messages in the thread.
It is very interesting how there was no way to directly communicate with a person on the internet at this time. You had to talk with everyone if you wanted to communicate online.
Sounds are represented as the electric current needed to move a speaker’s diaphragm back and forth over time to make the specific sound waves. The electric current is saved as a number, and those electric current numbers are saved at each time point, so the sound information is saved as a list of numbers.
This is really interesting! I had not thought about how sound would be represented in this type of situation.
These characters are then stored in order and called strings (that is a bunch of characters strung together, like in Fig. 4.6 below).
It's interesting how words are always broken up into characters. The fact that they are stored in order makes sense, but being broken apart is interesting.
As a final example, we wanted to tell you about Microsoft Tay a bot that got corrupted.
This is the problem with bots, they get corrupted so easily that it is hard to like bots. They can be helpful, but also so easily go wrong.
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These types of bots are very helpful and useful. I hope that they continue to improve and stay friendly over the years