This article talks about how Tumblr was mismanaged by the many different acquisitions it went through. Many of the employees didn't feel like their voices were being heard about the user experience and where they thought the platform should go, and many decisions were made by the leadership that was only interested in Tumblr as a business rather than understanding Tumblr in context. It talks about Tumblr's irrelevancy and how it got there through bad leadership.

I think with the development of AI, moderation could be automated and not require people at all. Traumatizing jobs like moderation could then be done with AI, and people wouldn't have to do those jobs anymore. I think it then poses an issue that some things could get past automated or AI moderation, and it wouldn't be as good at catching everything, but I think if the AI is well trained enough it wouldn't be a problem.

This short podcast talks about sharing mental health issues on the internet, and poses questions how memes about mental health can trivialize it, and how posting about mental health can affect your opportunities down the line. It also talks about how you can find support from peers when you post online. One thing I think the story fails to include is the comments you are inviting when you post about your personal mental health online. While you can find support for mental health online, your peers are not professionals, and many are not kind. When you post about your personal mental health online, you invite all sorts of comments, including ones that are hurtful and might make things worse. I personally feel like social media, while it could be helpful for finding support in different communities, shouldn't be used as a reliable outlet for your struggles. People should go to their friends, families, and therapists, and find support in real life first and foremost.

If they're saying that social media detoxes don't work, then what does? I personally feel like I am less connected to others when I am on social media because when I am with other people in real life I am on my phone more, and connecting with others who are in my life less. I think it's pretty disagreeable to say that being on social media means connection and not being on social media means isolation because I think the opposite is true considering that doomscrolling could take up the majority of someone's day.

I think this a perfect example of when virality can be a terrible thing, and a perfect example of why parents shouldn't be posting their young children on the internet. With all the news stories about kids being exploited or abused on the internet, I think it's important to take safety precautions for children and the internet, and a responsible parent would take down videos like the mom in this article did, or not post them at all.

I never knew the origins of chain mail, and it's interesting to see that it dates back so far. When I was a youngin I sent and received chain mail just like this to and from all my elementary school friends on iMessage and Instagram. They all said something along the lines of "this message is good luck, send it to 20 people within the next 24 hours or else your luck will be gone!" I never understood the real purpose of it, but I always thought it was just silly fun.

I found this source super cool. It talks about a small percentage of women who can see four base colors instead of three. It's super interesting and reminds me of the Psych 101 class I took in the fall where one of the topics we looked at were how do we know if everyone sees the same colors.

Diversity should be important in both who the product is designed for and who is designing those products. I feel recently big companies prioritize diversity and accessibility in a way that seems performative and just to please their consumers criticisms about diversity and accessibility. Able-bodied people are still designing things for disabled people, and it doesn't work because they don't have the perspective and experience of disability to create solutions for them. Designers should be diverse so they can create based on experience rather than assumption.

It's extremely unethical for Facebook to withhold this kind of information from its users. The article states that scammers only need the tiniest bit of information to do their work, so Facebook doing this seems like they don't care about their users privacy or security at all, and only want to save face and not admit their faults.

This makes sense, but I am wondering how message encryption would play into that. If messages are encrypted, does that mean they are private and those social media companies would not be able to do anything about those kinds of threatening messages?

The source shares the Facebook personalized ad data for several people, and they say that it is weirdly personal and specific, yet inaccurate. I wonder why companies need to collect data like that when it ends up being inaccurate anyway. Wouldn't random ads be more effective at that point rather than personalized ones to a personality you don't have?

I don't have personalized ads on for the reason that I am very uncomfortable with google knowing that kind of information about me. It's extremely personal and scary that some big corporation has that information on me. It always freaks me out when my instagram feed seems a little too targeted and personal. It feels like some strangers are invading my privacy and personal life and knowing things about me only my friends and family should know.

The best way to deal with trolling is probably to walk away from it. Being on the internet is optional, and you could honestly just ignore it, don't look at it, and go do something else. You could block or report the troll too. Just don't get rage-baited because you really don't have to.

This reminds me of what I learned in my linguistics class last quarter about style shifting and code switching. Everyone does it to some extent to show belonging, community, and connection to a certain group. We switch the way we speak to project a specific image of ourselves, or we switch according to who's listening to be more like them or more different than them to establish connection or disconnect.

Yes, it absolutely matters which human typed the Tweet because all these Tweets are presumed by the public to be coming from Trump himself, seeing that it is his Twitter account. Especially coming from the POTUS, I think honesty and authenticity to the public is important so that the people know who they are voting for and aren't misled in anyway when it comes to choosing who will lead their country. The emotional expression of the Tweet definitely changes my view of authenticity because an emotional Tweet signifies unfiltered thoughts and words coming straight from the man himself, and it shows realness and truthfulness.

I am surprised to see someone who invented such a big money making feature be apologetic for the ethical consequences of what he made. I feel like big tech companies never take responsibility for stuff like that, so it's refreshing to see this.

Social media is a powerful tool that can bring like minded individuals together, but it's disgusting that a neutral and useful tool like social media can be commandeered so easily by the evil people in our world to spread hate, violence, and other unspeakable things. It genuinely stirs disgust and anguish in my heart hearing about the terrible things that these types of people share into the world.

This reminds of of 1984 by George Orwell, where the government brainwashed everyone into believing that 2+2=5 and that is the objective truth. But this article makes me think that 2+2=4 may be the false objective truth that we were all brain washed to believe and that we aren't opening our minds to the subjective truth of reality.

I think this is a reason to be skeptical of all statistics that we see or hear. This actually reminds me of all the statistics about how much water AI actually uses, and many of those statistics and numbers are fudged and different because people are measuring things in different ways, like what counts as water usage etc. So I think that its important to take statistics like that with a grain of salt because we never know what is being simplified, and we don't know the truth of the data for ourselves.

I really wonder about how many other instances of botting are actually just real human beings who are doing the tedious work that can easily be done by a bot. Seeing that she may be working in bad work conditions also, it makes me feel upset that this may be an actual job that people do day to day. I also dislike how dishonest the whole thing is. Manipulating app store rankings this way seems unethical all the way around.

I think people expect bots to not have any free will or thoughtful intent behind its actions, while a human user clearly has both of those things. They might expect a bot to be straight forward and not able to be held accountable for its actions, because it does what it is coded to do, while human users are expected to have accountability and responsibility for what it posts because of their free thinking and ability to have intentions.

I don't agree that morality is objective. Absolute moral rules do not take into account context, and morality in practice is ultimately subjective to situation. Like the lying is wrong example, lying may be wrong in general, but in a situation where lying might save someone's life for example, lying is actually the morally correct thing to do. So morality is subject to change based on situational context rather than a concrete rule.

I absolutely believe that tech workers should be responsible for thinking through ethical implications of their creations. For example, deep fake technology can easily be weaponized for many terrible things, and I think that the people who create this technology know that, but simply choose to turn a blind eye to it for the sake of their own profits. I can't think of any ways to use that kind of technology ethically or in a way that benefits the world, and in knowing that, the creators are being hugely irresponsible by still releasing that kind of technology to the public.