After the defeat of Nazi Germany, prominent Nazi figures were put on trial in the Nuremberg Trials. These trials were a way of gathering and presenting evidence of the great evils done by the Nazis, and as a way of publicly punishing them. We could consider this as, in part, a large-scale public shaming of these specific Nazis and the larger Nazi movement. Some argued that there was no type of reconciliation or forgiveness possible given the crimes committed by the Nazis. Hannah Arendt argued that no possible punishment could ever be sufficient:

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:

When harassment concepts get proscribed, this situation shifts. Think about employment law in the States. Depending on what State you’re in and what sector, employment law does not permit racial harassment in the workplace. This means that if you can show a pattern of repeating behavior which is hurtful and based on racially coded comments, then you might have a viable case for a racial harassment suit. (Practically, this probably doesn’t mean suing. It means notifying HR that you have evidence of the pattern and request that they take disciplinary action. What the law does is say that if the harassing party subsequently sues for something like wrongful termination, the company has a legal basis for construing your evidence as showing a pattern of harassment.)

When creating the Twitter-like social media protocol Mastodon, its creator, Eugen Rochko, decided not to allow quote-tweet like posts: I’ve made a deliberate choice against a quoting feature because it inevitably adds toxicity to people’s behaviours. You are tempted to quote when you should be replying, and so you speak at your audience instead of with the person you are talking to. It becomes performative. Even when doing it for “good” like ridiculing awful comments, you are giving awful comments more eyeballs that way. No quote toots. Thank’s Eugen in 2018

While many people on social media post in hopes of getting attention and even going viral, those who have actually had their content go viral often have mixed feelings about it. For example, author Roxane Gay has said, “Content going viral is overwhelming, intimidating, exciting, and downright scary..” The Washington Post wrote a series of articles on the experience of going viral, first On TikTok, instant fame often comes with a price: Sleepless nights, shadowbans and viral cruelty, and then Sorry you went viral. TikTok’s explosive stardom has created a new kind of celebrity. But nothing goes viral like rage.. Researcher Dr. Casey Fiesler was interviewed for these articles and talks more about it in this TikTok video:

Similarly, recommendation algorithms are rules set in place that might produce biased, unfair, or unethical outcomes. This can happen whether or not the creators of the algorithm intended these outcomes. Once these algorithms are in place though, the have an influence on what happens on a social media site. Individuals still have responsibility with how they behave, but the system itself may be set up so that individual efforts cannot not be overcome the problems in the system.

When creating computer programs, programmers can do things that aren’t possible with architecture (where Universal Design came out of), that is: programs can change how they work for each individual user. All people (including disabled people) have different abilities, and making a system that can modify how it runs to match the abilities a user has is called Ability based design. For example, a phone might detect that the user has gone from a dark to a light environment, and might automatically change the phone brightness or color scheme to be easier to read. Or a computer program might detect that a user’s hands tremble when they are trying to select something on the screen, and the computer might change the text size, or try to guess the intended selection. In this way of managing disabilities, the burden is put on the computer programmers and designers to detect and adapt to the disabled person.

Some disabilities are visible disabilities that other people can notice by observing the disabled person (e.g., wearing glasses is an indication of a visual disability, or a missing limb might be noticeable). Other disabilities are invisible disabilities that other people cannot notice by observing the disabled person (e.g., chronic fatigue syndrome, contact lenses for a visual disability, or a prosthetic for a missing limb covered by clothing). Sometimes people with invisible disabilities get unfairly accused of “faking” or “making up” their disability (e.g., someone who can walk short distances but needs to use a wheelchair when going long distances).

For example, a social media application might offer us a way of “Private Messaging” (also called Direct Messaging) with another user. But in most cases those “private” messages are stored in the computers at those companies, and the company might have computer programs that automatically search through the messages, and people with the right permissions might be able to view them directly. In some cases we might want a social media company to be able to see our “private” messages, such as if someone was sending us death threats. We might want to report that user to the social media company for a ban, or to law enforcement (though many people have found law enforcement to be not helpful), and we want to open access to those “private” messages to prove that they were sent.

For example, the proper security practice for storing user passwords is to use a special individual encryption process for each individual password. This way the database can only confirm that a password was the right one, but it can’t independently look up what the password is or even tell if two people used the same password. Therefore if someone had access to the database, the only way to figure out the right password is to use “brute force,” that is, keep guessing passwords until they guess the right one (and each guess takes a lot of time). 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.

Ask anyone who has dealt with persistent harassment online, especially women: [trolls stopping because they are ignored] is not usually what happens. Instead, the harasser keeps pushing and pushing to get the reaction they want with even more tenacity and intensity. It’s the same pattern on display in the litany of abusers and stalkers, both online and off, who escalate to more dangerous and threatening behavior when they feel like they are being ignored.

In 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. These message boards are where the word “troll” with this meaning comes from.

In this example, some clever protesters have made a donkey perform the act of protest: walking through the streets displaying a political message. But, since the donkey does not understand the act of protest it is performing, it can’t be rightly punished for protesting. The protesters have managed to separate the intention of protest (the political message inscribed on the donkey) and the act of protest (the donkey wandering through the streets). This allows the protesters to remain anonymous and the donkey unaware of it’s political mission.

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:

One question many people have about using ethical reasoning as a tool for analysis is: what about cultural disagreements? What about the idea that there is no absolute truth, that a moral claim is only true for me or you, or for my culture or your culture? In an increasingly globalized world, there is an opportunity to learn to respect and accommodate the differences between cultures and values, and this is a good thing! It means that we have even more tools at our disposal for thinking through the ethical considerations packed into a situation, as we learn from those who see things differently.

Because humans have pretty much always been interested in these kinds of questions, we already have several different ‘systems’ of ethical thought available to us as tools for thinking through how to guide ourselves in a course of action. These ethical systems vary in many ways, such as whether they focus on individuals or communities, or focus on rights or relationships.

Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt, […] [then] came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; […] [W]hen they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: […] this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

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.

Then, much of tech is dependent on exploiting cheap labor, often in dangerous conditions, in other countries (thus extracting the resource of cheap labor, from places with “inferior” governments and economies). This labor might be physical labor, or dealing with dangerous chemicals, or the content moderators who deal with viewing horrific online content.

So, what Meta does to make money (that is, how shareholders get profits), is that they collect data on their users to make predictions about them (e.g., demographics, interests, etc.). Then they sell advertisements, giving advertisers a large list of categories that they can target for their ads.

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. They quickly settled on a missing man (Sunil Tripathi) as the culprit (it turned out had died by suicide and was in no way related to the case), and flooded the Facebook page set up to search for Sunil Tripathi, causing his family unnecessary pain and difficulty. The person who set up the “Find Boston Bomber” Reddit board said “It Was a Disaster” but “Incredible”, and Reddit apologized for online Boston ‘witch hunt’.

When looking at who contributes in crowdsourcing systems, or with social media in generally, we almost always find that we can split the users into a small group of power users who do the majority of the contributions, and a very large group of lurkers who contribute little to nothing. For example, Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written By Just 1 Percent of Its Editors, and on StackOverflow “A 2013 study has found that 75% of users only ask one question, 65% only answer one question, and only 8% of users answer more than 5 questions..” We see the same phenomenon on Twitter:

After a company starts working on moderation, they might decide to invest in teams specifically dedicated to content moderation. These teams of content moderators could be considered human computers hired to evaluate examples against the content moderation policy of the platform they are working for.

One concept that comes up in a lot of different ethical frameworks is moderation. Famously, Confucian thinkers prized moderation as a sound principle for living, or as a virtue, and taught the value of the ‘golden mean’, or finding a balanced, moderate state between extremes. This golden mean idea got picked up by Aristotle—we might even say ripped off by Aristotle—as he framed each virtue as a medial state between two extremes. You could be cowardly at one extreme, or brash and reckless at the other; in the golden middle is courage. You could be miserly and penny-pinching, or you could be a reckless spender, but the aim is to find a healthy balance between those two. Moderation, or being moderate, is something that is valued in many ethical frameworks, not because it comes naturally to us, per se, but because it is an important part of how we form groups and come to trust each other for our shared survival and flourishing.

So you might find a safe space online to explore part of yourself that isn’t safe in public (e.g., Trans Twitter and the beauty of online anonymity). Or you might find places to share or learn about mental health (in fact, from seeing social media posts, Kyle realized that ADHD was causing many more problems in his life than just having trouble sitting still, and he sought diagnosis and treatment). There are also support groups for various issues people might be struggling with, like ADHD, or having been raised by narcissistic parents.

By looking at enough data in enough different ways, you can find evidence for pretty much any conclusion you want. This is because sometimes different pieces of data line up coincidentally (coincidences happen), and if you try enough combinations, you can find the coincidence that lines up with your conclusion.

People working with data sets always have to deal with problems in their data, stemming from things like mistyped data entries, missing data, and the general problem of all data being a simplification of reality. Sometimes a dataset has so many problems that it is effectively poisoned or not feasible to work with.

Separately, in 2018 during the MeToo movement, one of @Sciencing_Bi’s friends, Dr. BethAnn McLaughlin (a white woman), co-founded the MeTooSTEM non-profit organization, to gather stories of sexual harassment in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math). Kyle also followed her on Twitter until word later spread of Dr. McLaughlin’s toxic leadership and bullying in the MeTooSTEM organization (Kyle may have unfollowed @Sciencing_Bi at the same time for defending Dr. McLaughlin, but doesn’t remember clearly).

Parasocial relationships are not a new phenomenon, but social media has increased our ability to form both sides of these bonds. As comedian Bo Burnham put it: “This awful D-list celebrity pressure I had experienced onstage has now been democratized.”

The user interface of a computer system (like a social media site), is the part that you view and interact with. It’s what you see on your screen and what you press or type or scroll over. Designers of social media sites have to decide how to layout information for users to navigate and decide how the user performs various actions (like, retweet, post, look up user, etc.). Some information and actions will be made larger and easier to access while others will be smaller or hidden in menus or settings. As we look at these interfaces, there are two key terms we want you to know: Affordances are what a user interface lets you do. In particular, it’s what a user interface makes feel natural to do. So for example, an interface might have something that looks like it should be pressed, or an interface might open by scrolling a little so it is clear that if you touch it you can make it scroll more (see a more nuanced explanation here) Friction 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:

It depends on if we mean how many accounts have been registered vs. how many people are logged into Twitter on a given day. And it also depends on how we count situations where one person has many accounts, or many people share a corporate account.

” Twitter has repeatedly said that spam bots represent less than 5% of its total user base. [Elon] Musk, meanwhile, has complained that the number is much higher, and has threatened to walk away from his agreement to buy the company.