How have your views on social media changed (or been reinforced)?
Not necessarily because of this class, but I guess in combination. I have slowly learned to not engage with trolls or politics online because there is literally no point. No one goes into an argument online to actually change their position (at least most people don't.)
this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories;
I love looking at old comments like this. We really do just recycle the same old stuff in politics. What once was writing became television, which became video games, which then became phones.
Most programming languages are based in English, and there are very few non-English programming languages, and those that exist are rarely used.
I guess I never thought of this, but I guess that surprises me regardless. In a way, it makes sense, but obviously that isn't necessarily a good thing. It definitely makes coding somewhat inequitable if english isn't a language you speak.
But even if a CEO decides to reduce profits for a good reason (e.g., it may be unethical to overwork the employees), then they are still violating their fiduciary duty, and the board of directors might fire them or pressure them into prioritizing profits above all else.
This is why businesses are just so ethical (please note the heavy sarcasm). We literally just put business (profit) above people's actual lives.
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.
Honestly, maybe a controversial opinion but I do not feel like "cancel culture" is a real thing, but has instead become a buzzword for people who are being publicly criticized (usually for sexual assault/harassment, racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc etc). It's a good way to deflect these valid criticisms and instead make it into a culture war, because everybody knows politics like this are a great way to distract people from the real problems.
In cases where people don't "deserve" it, I would say thats just public shaming/harassment, not "cancel culture" ... cancel culture is not a real phenomenon, it's a buzz word. And actually, most people who are "targeted" by cancel culture are never actually canceled, they end up staying the same or growing in popularity. Those who are effectively canceled often are members of minority groups, regardless of whether they did right or wrong, most often queer or disabled "creators"
For an example of public shaming, we can look at late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel’s annual Halloween prank, where he has parents film their children as they tell the parents tell the children that the parents ate all the kids’ Halloween candy. Parents post these videos online, where viewers are intended to laugh at the distress, despair, and sense of betrayal the children express. I will not link to these videos which I find horrible, but instead link you to these articles:
I 100% agree with this. Yeah, it might not be that serious in every case, but I hate this new phenomenon of purposely upsetting kids for tiktok/youtube/etc ... especially because the type of parents to do this likely do it more than just once. Once, it may be funny. Repetitively? It's just kind of bullying. I think posting it online is especially harmful because it publicizes it, and honestly, for the parent, it probably reinforces the behavior. There is a reason a lot of family channels these days get exposed for being abusive, horrible people.
“The majority of the hate and misinformation about [Meghan Markle and Prince Henry] originated from a small group of accounts whose primary, if not sole, purpose appears to be to tweet negatively about them. […] 83 accounts are responsible for 70% of the negative hate content targeting the couple on Twitter.”
That is actually so weird. I am not a fan of the monarchy but literally just who has the time for that? I mean that's very obsessive and, quite frankly, if you dislike someone that much, I feel like you probably need some therapy. All the time and effort put into that is so unhealthy.
Have you experienced or witnessed harassment on social media (that you are willing to share about)?
I think most people have had some sort of experience with harassment on social media, just some have had more experience with it than others. I've unfortunately dealt with some online harassment from former classmates, and some general online harassment from strangers but luckily nothing too severe.
For example, in the immediate aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, FBI released a security photo of one of the bombers and asked for tips. A group of Reddit users decided to try to identify the bomber(s) themselves.
Yeahhh, this can never go well. This happened recently with the Idaho murders & Brian Kohberger.
Though sometimes there are rather interesting cases from these, like when redditors identified a car in a hit and run of a bicyclist and then police were able to arrest a guy for it. I guess it really depends on how extreme it is. In this case, they never found someone to harass online, they just found a car (and then someone called the police when they saw it). This story was local, as well. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-45194123
Amazon Mechanical Turk: A site where you can pay for crowdsourcing small tasks (e.g., pay a small amount for each task, and then let a crowd of people choose to do the tasks and get paid).
Y'know, this does not feel very ethical. I hope this is a side-gig for most people rather than an actual job.
when you text on the phone, you are in charge of blocking numbers if you want to (though the phone company might warn you of potential spam or scams)
Actually, my phone autoblocks certain numbers now if they're certain the number is a spam number. My Dad somehow got caught in this filter because it was too strong, and we had to send an email to their moderation team to say "hey, why am i listed as a spam number?" and I had to turn it off for a while. It's actually really interesting - and helpful. Spam calls are now immediately blocked instead of showing "potential spam" ... they've also worked on identifying actual healthcare numbers, which is helpful.
As moderation is a very complicated and tricky thing to do effectively, untrained moderators are likely to make decisions they (or other users) regret.
I feel like even trained moderators struggle to do things correctly. I notice there is a lack of consistency in a lot of the moderation on sites like twitter, facebook, instagram or discord. I think part of that is probably because the site is so big (and that each moderator has some implicit biases)
Delete: Some social media platforms let users delete content that was directed at them (e.g., replies to their post, posts on their wall, etc.)
I think twitter did an absolutely horrible job attempting to do this with "hidden replies" - now they end up being kind of pinned because people are curious to see what is in there, that it unintentionally platforms those replies. So much so that there's accounts dedicated to checking the content of the hidden replies if people are too scared to open it (for fear of seeing something like gore, porn, etc.)
If users see things that offend them too often, they might leave the site, and if advertisers see their ads next to too much offensive content, they might stop paying for ads on the site.
This is what caused the "adpocalypse" on YouTube - too much attention was brought to the site having child porn and pro-terrorist content that a lot of advertisers pulled out. It was a big deal at the time, but honestly now that time has passed, it feels like not much has changed, but maybe that's because we adapted to it.
And with context collapse, where audiences are combined, how would you share your trauma with an appropriate audience and not an inappropriate one
I feel like this has unfortunately become so common in daily life, and it's... kind of difficult when you trauma. You might be on social media or walking down the street, and you're at risk to hearing people, often casually, talking about their trauma - and while I don't think people should hide it, there are appropriate places to share it, and a public space where anyone can overhear you isn't necessarily one of them.
I think the dark "humor" of today is the same, people casually joking about messed up stuff, like wanting to "end it" ... there is a time and place for that stuff, you don't know what people are going through and if they're okay hearing that.
But Lauren Collee argues that by placing the blame on the use of technology itself and making not using technology (a digital detox) the solution, we lose our ability to deal with the nuances of how we use technology and how it is designed:
I fully agree with this. A detox might be necessary every once in a while, but I think it's important to learn how to use social media in a way that is good for our health, because ultimately there are good things about social media, too.
Saying and doing provocative, shocking, and offensive things can also be an effective political strategy, and getting viral attention through others’ negative reactions has been seen as a key component of Donald Trump’s political successes.
See, I understand how this happens on the internet, people are anonymous, and people can view it as "less harmful" (which may or may not be true depending on the circumstances) but how this happened in real live does baffle me a bit. Of course there are other factors, like voter turnout, a bit of voter fraud and ad manipulation, but sometimes the 2016 seems like a prank that has gone on way too long.
When physical mail was dominant in the 1900s, one type of mail that spread around the US was a chain letter.
Reading this and the Wikipedia article is interesting to me - I didn't think this was a phenomenon before the internet. I wonder what the real purpose of these letters are, is it the satisfaction of the "virality?"
I find a lot of these chain mail type posts pray on the vulnerable - especially people with anxiety, OCD, or psychosis - and I hate seeing people spread them like they don't have a real consequence for some people, as "silly" as that sounds.
Recommendations can go poorly when they do something like recommend an ex or an abuser because they share many connections with you.
Also, I think it depends on context: sometimes I don't want my friends or contacts to see my social media account. A big part of social media is the anonymity, and even when you don't allow access to contacts, it still recommends your contacts to you, whether based on proximity or otherwise.
Elon Musk’s view expressed in that tweet is different than some of the ideas of the previous owners, who at least tried to figure out how to make Twitter’s algorithm support healthier conversation.
I'll have to read the article in a bit but I wonder how they would go about accomplishing it. I hate Musk, but I also know that, realistically speaking, that is how algorithms tend to work. They want your engagement, so they pay attention to how long you look at something, what you like, qrts/rts. and comments.
This is why I'm such a huge fan of blocking & muting on social media. Some people complain "Ohhh, you're making an echo chamber!!!" Okay? I'm here for fun, I'm not obligated to listen or pay attention to anything. Why would I sit here and purposely make myself angry, stressed, upset, etc.? Sounds miserable.
The following tweet has a video of a soap dispenser that apparently was only designed to work for people with light-colored skin.1
That's actually so shocking to me - like how does that happen? Obviously there is a LOT of racism in tech, but I never would've thought of this being an issue. Generally, I've assumed that these work based on motion sensors (and many of them probably do) but wow... that is a huge oversight.
These include the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which includes a “right to be forgotten”, and the United State’s Supreme Court has at times inferred a constitutional right to privacy.
I feel like the EU's regulations for privacy have been so much more helpful than any regulation in the U.S. - and I'm glad the internet is universal so I have access to these privacy options as well. The U.S. lacks so much regulation for the "rights" of companies and "freedom" that people don't have the freedom to be protected or private, which makes our "freedoms" a bit... lacking.
We might want to discuss something privately, avoiding embarrassment that might happen if it were shared publicly
Ironically I feel like the internet has made "private discussions" way less private. People are way more likely to share things that are embarrassing or even emotional than they were before, partially due to the anonymity of the internet. Myself included, really. I share a lot of "embarrassing" things online that I probably wouldn't say in person unless we were really close. Part of it, I think, is connection, and another part of it, for me at least, is humor.
In the above code, we ran a polarity_scores function on the sentence and pulled out the compound result. In this case it came back as 0.941, which is close to 1 and indicates a positive statement.
I'm struggling to understand how this works - primarily how the number is generated. I understand that it's using the word "love" and "hate" but what determines how powerful they are and... quite frankly no one talks like they do in the examples. It'll probably make more sense reading further but it does seem kind of silly to me.
Try this yourself and see what Google thinks of you!
Oddly enough, my google account still has my ad personalization turned off because I'm "under 18" - though my birthday was 2 months ago now. I have generally been turning off ad personalization & as much data collection / cookie information lately.
To go in a different direction for our last example, let’s look at an example of trolling as a form of protest.
In another example, people did this with an abortion "tip site" set up in, I believe, Texas. They sent copypastas, random images, just blatantly false tips, in order to flood the site, crash it, and make it difficult to find real tips.
n the early Internet message boards that were centered around different subjects, experienced users would “troll for newbies” by posting naive questions that all the experienced users were already familiar with. The “newbies” who didn’t realize this was a troll would try to engage and answer, and experienced users would feel superior and more part of the group knowing they didn’t fall for the troll like the “newbies” did.
That's such a different type of "trolling" from today, and honestly - it's a bit stupid. Like wow, haha, they responded to your question trying to be helpful! You are so much better for happening to know things! It's so weird. Today, you'll kinda see similar behavior in adults making fun of kids for not knowing things (often their own kids) and it's so dumb considering... people don't automatically know things! You didn't know how to do that thing, once!
Additionally, something that was shared within one context (like a private message), might get reposted in another context (publicly posted elsewhere).
While it's not exactly right to have your private messages leaked, I have always thought it's best to speak like they may be. Because they might be. Even if it doesn't get posted publicly, the other person might show it to a mutual friend, or someone else, for a variety of reasons, some good. some bad.
The need to trust other people is obscured by the many institutions that we have created. Institutions have ways, sometimes, of getting around human whims and surprises.
Not to be a conspiracy theorist here, but... the way people blindly trust institutions is bizarre. You shouldn't trust a company to do something just because "it's illegal not to" especially when there may be incentives to not follow said standards.
While the Something Awful forums had edgy content, one 15-year-old member of the Something Awful forum called “Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse” was frustrated by content restrictions on Something Awful, and created his own new site with less restrictions: 4Chan.
Oh no. Well now I guess we know why 4chan is like... that
Fig. 5.3 An irc chat application, where you can join a room, and watch and participate in the live conversation.
I guess I just realized this is an early form of sites like "Omegle" and that's really interesting because a lot of sites like this are definitely viewed in a negative light because of sexual predators. Some of it has to do with bots, too. It's interesting how our view of things like chatrooms have changed.
Fig. 5.2 An newer bulletin board system. In this one you can click on the thread you want to view, and threads can include things like images.
I think this is still a "layout" used now. Like you could easily make a forum look the exact same way - not just including the general layout, but like as a "Template" for someone making forums. Though, I think many prominent forums try and make their own layouts now.
One of the early ways of social communication across the internet was with Email, which originated in the 1960s and 1970s.
I know that the dominant company for email has changed, people have cycled though net 0, yahoo, and gmail, for example, but it's interesting to know that email has lasted for such a long time. I wonder what has allowed it to exist for so long. Clearly it's useful, but I would think maybe the "network" would change, yet there is still compatibility between all/most email accounts.
Stondage highlights how there was an unusual period in American history that roughly took up the 1900s where, in America, news sources were centralized in certain newspapers and then the big 3 TV networks. In this period of time, these sources were roughly in agreement and broadcast news out to the country, making a more unified, consistent news environment (though, of course, we can point out how they were biased in ways like being almost exclusively white men).
I actually found this "banned" animation (not really - it just wasn't supposed to air in the first place) that aired on SNL last minute in 1998 called "Media-opoly" about how all the news companies were owned by the same 3 companies. It felt really dystopian to watch, but interesting as someone who wasn't alive then.
One classic example is the tendency to overlook the interests of children and/or people abroad when we post about travels, especially when fundraising for ‘charity tourism’.
I always think about this when I watch the news in times of some global crisis - war, natural disasters, etc. Most people likely won't know who that specific person is, so maybe it's not a physical safety issue, but we are quite literally taking a photo (or video) of them at their worst moment to be preserved forever, and possibly shown to the public. I certainly wouldn't be okay with that, but there also isn't any protection for you if you're in public (at least in the United States).
The Bloomberg article we quoted mentions “spam bots” as what is being measured, but Elon Musk has used phrases like “fake or spam” accounts and “fake/spam/duplicates,” which might lead to different numbers.
This is why you always have to be specific in defining terminology whenever you do a study. Words mean different things to different people, and like this example, some people may consider a term to mean one thing, and another person might assume it doesn't fit that word.
Why do you think social media platforms allow bots to operate?
While some bots can be bad, I think there are plenty of useful or fun bots that increase engagement and time spent on the app. For example, when twitter had the "bot" that tweeted where Elon's private jet was, it increased the engagement for the day as people continued to share it and talk about it - although it did eventually get taken down, it still helped twitter profit... just at the expense of Elon Musk, who had just become the CEO.
Note that sometimes people use “bots” to mean inauthentically run accounts, such as those run by actual humans, but are paid to post things like advertisements or political content.
I've seen this used online and was kinda confused by this use of the term, but that actually helps explain it a bit. I had the same thought - "well, they're not bots, this account is clearly run by a person" - even if the account seemed to be clearly run by a troll. I also kinda notice the word seems to be used to discredit others online (especially in politics) that they disagree with, which is why the term confused me a bit, like I'm not a bot just because you disagree with me.
Like nihilism, existentialism starts with a claim that there is no fundamental meaning or morality. But in existentialism, people must create their own meaning and morality.
I see existentialism as a branch of nihilism, and I think in modern times the two have become somewhat intertwined, many using them somewhat interchangeably. Existentialism seems to be an extension of nihilism, as stated in the text, where it begins with the fundamental idea that morality is not a set definition.
I personally find Existentialism to be the most "scientific" or "realistic" perspective (though, again, it is perspective) as we know morality is a human construct, and a social construct, which varies based on where you grew up.
Writing this, I now wonder if Existentialism should be a prefix (or suffix) because you may believe in Existentialism but end up practicing a specific moral principle (ie natural rights or virtue ethics)
Why do you think the people who Kumail talked with didn’t have answers to his questions?
I think they probably didn't even think about it - like he wrote, it's "only 'can we do this?' never 'should we do this' ..." The people who he talks to present their tech, likely excited about the new innovation, rather than thinking about the things that could go wrong.
It's also possible that they DID see what could go wrong - but when you're trying to sell something, are you going to highlight those factors? The dismissive response given really seems to add to this - they're trying to sell you a product, and while they aren't going to openly tell people to use the product for something bad, chances are they don't really care as long as it doesn't backfire on them, because it means more money for them