In how we’ve been talking about accessible design, the way we’ve been phrasing things has implied a separation between designers who make things, and the disabled people who things are made for. And unfortunately, as researcher Dr. Cynthia Bennett points out, disabled people are often excluded from designing for themselves, or even when they do participate in the design, they aren’t considered to be the “real designers.” You can see Dr. Bennet’s research talk on this in the following Youtube Video:

Social engineering, where they try to gain access to information or locations by tricking people. For example:

Datasets can be poisoned unintentionally. For example, many scientists posted online surveys that people can get paid to take. Getting useful results depended on a wide range of people taking them. But when one TikToker’s video about taking them went viral, the surveys got filled out with mostly one narrow demographic, preventing many of the datasets from being used as intended.

Social media sites then make their money by selling targeted advertising, meaning selling ads to specific groups of people with specific interests. So, for example, if you are selling spider stuffed animal toys, most people might not be interested, but if you could find the people who want those toys and only show your ads to them, your advertising campaign might be successful, and those users might be happy to find out about your stuffed animal toys. But targeting advertising can be used in less ethical ways, such as targeting gambling ads at children, or at users who are addicted to gambling, or the 2016 Trump campaign ‘target[ing] 3.5m black Americans to deter them from voting’ { requestKernel: true, binderOptions: { repo: "binder-examples/jupyter-stacks-datascience", ref: "master", }, codeMirrorConfig: { theme: "abcdef", mode: "python" }, kernelOptions: { kernelName: "python3", path: "./ch08_data_mining" }, predefinedOutput: true } kernelName = 'python3'

In 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.

Where do you see parasocial relationships on social media?

Inauthentic interaction can even be valuable. We might outright lie to someone to cover our tracks when planning them a surprise party. Once the surprise is revealed, the inauthentic interactions can be retrospectively reinterpreted, and offense is not taken.

Below are some summaries of a selection ethics frameworks. There are many more ethics frameworks which we haven’t included here, and these explanations are all way oversimplified. We hope that this gives you a start to understanding each framework, and a range of options for how to think through ethics in social media and programming.

Kumail Nanjiani was a star of the Silicon Valley TV Show, which was about the tech industry. He posted these reflections on ethics in tech on Twitter (@kumailn) on November 1, 2017:

This means that how you gather your data will affect what data you come up with. If you have really comprehensive data about potential outcomes, then your utility calculus will be more complicated, but will also be more realistic. On the other hand, if you have only partial data, the results of your utility calculus may become skewed. If you think about the potential impact of a set of actions on all the people you know and like, but fail to consider the impact on people you do not happen to know, then you might think those actions would lead to a huge gain in utility, or happiness

As you can see in the apple example, any time we turn something into data, we are making a simplification.1 If we are counting the number of something, like apples, we are deciding that each one is equivalent. If we are writing down what someone said, we are losing their tone of voice, accent, etc. If we are taking a photograph, it is only from one perspective, etc.

While mainstream social media platforms grew in popularity, there was a parallel growth of social media platforms that were based on having “no rules”, and were sources for many memes and pieces of internet culture, as well as hubs of much anti-social behavior (e.g., trolling, harassment, hate-groups, murders, etc.).

Before this centralization of media in the 1900s, newspapers and pamphlets were full of rumors and conspiracy theories

Before this centralization of media in the 1900s, newspapers and pamphlets were full of rumors and conspiracy theories.