You aren’t likely to end up in a situation as dramatic as this. If you find yourself making a stand for ethical tech work, it would probably look more like arguing about what restrictions to put on a name field (e.g., minimum length), prioritizing accessibility, or arguing that a small piece of data about users is not really needed and shouldn’t be tracked. But regardless, if you end up in a position to have an influence in tech, we want you to be able to think through the ethical implications of what you are asked to do and how you choose to respond.

But even people who thought they were doing something good regretted the consequences of their creations, such as Eli Whitney who hoped his invention of the cotton gin would reduce slavery in the United States, but only made it worse, or Alfred Nobel who invented dynamite (which could be used in construction or in war) and decided to create the Nobel prizes, or Albert Einstein regretting his role in convincing the US government to invent nuclear weapons, or Aza Raskin regretting his invention infinite scroll.

The reason few non-English programming languages exist is due to the network effect, which we mentioned last chapter. Once English became the standard language for programming, people who learn programming learn English (or enough to program with it). Attempts to create a non-English programming language face an uphill battle, since even those that know that language would still have to re-learn all their programming terms in the non-English language.

The way that Meta can fulfill their fiduciary duty in maximizing profits is to try to get: More users: If Meta has more users, it can offer advertisers more people to advertise to. More user time: If Meta’s users spend more time on Meta, then it has more opportunities to show ads to each user, so it can sell more ads. More personal data: The more personal data Meta collects, the more predictions about users it can make. It can get more data by getting more users, and more user time, as well as finding more things to track about users. Reduce competition: If Meta can become the only social media company that people use, then they will have cornered the market on access to those users. This means advertisers won’t have any alternative to reach those users, and Meta can increase the prices of their ads.

When we think about repair and reconciliation, many of us might wonder where there are limits. Are there wounds too big to be repaired? Are there evils too great to be forgiven? Is anyone ever totally beyond the pale of possible reconciliation? Is there a point of no return?

Reintegration “Public shaming must aim at, and make possible, the reintegration of the norm violator back into the community, rather than permanently stigmatizing them.”

Metadata: Sometimes the metadata that comes with content might violate someone’s privacy. For example, in 2012, former tech CEO John McAfee was a suspect in a murder in Belize, John McAfee hid out in secret. But when Vice magazine wrote an article about him, the photos in the story contained metadata with the exact location in Guatemala.

But while that is the proper security for storing passwords. So for example, Facebook stored millions of Instagram passwords in plain text, meaning the passwords weren’t encrypted and anyone with access to the database could simply read everyone’s passwords. And Adobe encrypted their passwords improperly and then hackers leaked their password database of 153 million users.

Authenticity is a concept we use to talk about connections and interactions when the way the connection is presented matches the reality of how it functions. An authentic connection can be trusted because we know where we stand. An inauthentic connection offers a surprise because what is offered is not what we get. An inauthentic connection could be a good surprise, but usually, when people use the term ‘inauthentic’, they are indicating that the surprise was in some way problematic: someone was duped.

Many users were upset that what they had been watching wasn’t authentic. That is, users believed the channel was presenting itself as true events about a real girl, and it wasn’t that at all. Though, even after users discovered it was fictional, the channel continued to grow in popularity.

But one 4Chan user found 4chan to be too authoritarian and restrictive and set out to create a new “free-speech-friendly” image-sharing bulletin board, which he called 8chan.

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.

Can you think of an example of pernicious ignorance in social media interaction? What’s something that we might often prefer to overlook when deciding what is important?

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. This means we can analyze the ethics of the action of the bot, as well as the intentions of the various people involved, though those all might be disconnected.

Bots might have significant limits on how helpful they are, such as tech support bots you might have had frustrating experiences with on various websites.

There is no clear single definition for what counts as social media. John Hartley points out that you could consider almost all of culture as “social media.”

There are many more ethics frameworks that we haven’t mentioned here. You can look up some more here.