Is It Funny or Offensive? Comedian Impersonates FBI on Twitter, Makes MLK Assassination Joke. January 2020. URL: https://isitfunnyoroffensive.com/comedian-impersonates-fbi-on-twitter-makes-mlk-assassination-joke/ (visited on 2023-12-05).

One set of the early Internet-based video games were Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs [g14]), where you were given a text description of where you were and could say where to go (North, South, East, West) and text would tell you where you were next. In these games, you would come across other players and could type messages or commands to attack them. These were the precursors to more modern Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGS [g15]). In these MUDs, players developed activities that we now consider trolling, such as “Griefing” where one player intentionally causes another player “grief” or distress (such as a powerful player finding a weak player and repeatedly killing the weak player the instant they respawn), and “Flaming” where a player intentionally starts a hostile or offensive conversation. In the 2000s, trolling went from an activity done in some communities to the creation of communities that centered around trolling such as 4chan [g16] (2003), Encyclopedia Dramatica [g17] (2004), and some forums on Reddit [g18] (2005).

Text analysis of Trump's tweets confirms he writes only theAndroid half was published on. Text analysis of Trump's tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half. August 2016. URL: http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/ (visited on 2023-11-24).

Many people were upset at being deceived, and at the many levels of inauthenticity of Dr. McLaughlin’s actions, such as: Dr. McLaughlin pretended to be a person (@Sciencing_Bi) who didn’t exist. Dr. McLaughlin, as a white woman, created an account where she pretended to be a Native American (see more on “pretendians” [f11]). Dr. Mclaughlin put herself at the center of the MeToo movement as it related to STEM, but then Dr. Mclaughlin turned out to be a bully herself. Dr. McLaughlin used the fake @Sciencing_Bi to shield herself from critizism. From the NYTimes article [f10]: “‘The fact that @Sci-Bi was saying all these things about BethAnn, saying that BethAnn had helped her, it didn’t make me trust BethAnn — but it made me less willing to publicly criticize her because I thought that public criticism would be felt by the people she was helping,’ he said. ‘Who turned out to be fake.’” Though Dr. McLaughlin claimed a personal experience as a witness in a Title IX sexual harassment case, through the fake @Sciencing_Bi, she invented an experience of sexual harassment from a Harvard professor. 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. Dr. McLaughlin, through the @Sciencing_Bi account, pretended to have an illness she didn’t have (COVID). She made false accusations against Arizona State University’s role in the (fake) person getting sick, and she was able to get attention and sympathy through the fake illness and fake death of the fake @Sciencing_Bi.

Social networking service. November 2023. Page Version ID: 1186603996. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Social_networking_service&oldid=1186603996#History (visited on 2023-11-24).

Friction [e30] is anything that gets in the way of a user performing an action. For example, if you have to open and navigate through several menus to find the privacy settings, that is significant friction. Or if one of the buttons has a bug and doesn’t work when you press it, so you have to find another way of performing that action, which is significant friction. Designers sometimes talk about trying to make their user interfaces frictionless, meaning the user can use the site without feeling anything slowing them down. Sometimes designers add friction to sites intentionally. For example, ads in mobile games make the “x” you need to press incredibly small and hard to press to make it harder to leave their ad: Fig. 5.6 An ad on a mobile device, which has an incredibly small, hard to press “x” button. You need to press that button to close the ad. If you miss the “x”, it takes you to more advertising.

Thus, when designers of social media systems make decisions about how data will be saved and what constraints will be put on the data, they are making decisions about who will get a better experience. Based on these decisions, some people will fit naturally into the data system, while others will have to put in extra work to make themselves fit, and others will have to modify themselves or misrepresent themselves to fit into the system.

Anna Lauren Hoffmann. Data Violence and How Bad Engineering Choices Can Damage Society. Medium, April 2018. URL: {https://medium.com/@annaeveryday/data-violence-and-how-bad-engineering-choices-can-damage-society-39e44150e1d4} (visited on 2023-11-24).

Steven Tweedie. This disturbing image of a Chinese worker with close to 100 iPhones reveals how App Store rankings can be manipulated. February 2015. URL: https://www.businessinsider.com/photo-shows-how-fake-app-store-rankings-are-made-2015-2 (visited on 2024-03-07).

There are several ways computer programs are involved with social media. One of them is a “bot,” a computer program that acts through a social media account. There are other ways of programming with social media that we won’t consider a bot (and we will cover these at various points as well): The social media platform itself is run with computer programs, such as recommendation algorithms (chapter 12). Various groups want to gather data from social media, such as advertisers and scientists. This data is gathered and analyzed with computer programs, which we will not consider bots, but will cover later, such as in Chapter 8: Data Mining. Bots, on the other hand, will do actions through social media accounts and can appear to be like any other user. The bot might be the only thing posting to the account, or human users might sometimes use a bot to post for them. 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. We will not consider those to be bots, since they aren’t run by a computer. Though we might consider these to be run by “human computers” who are following the instructions given to them, such as in a click farm:

2.1.1. What is Social Media?

Consequentialism# Sources [b46] [b47] Actions are judged on the sum total of their consequences (utility calculus) The ends justify the means. Utilitarianism: “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” That is, What is moral is to do what makes the most people the most happy. Key figures: Jeremy Bentham [b48] 1700’s England John Stuart Mill [b49], 1800’s England