Twitter Shame

John Ronson's TedTalk When Online Shaming Spirals Out of Control helps to shed light on the true capabilities that Twitter offers. He has blogged and written books on the subject of group shaming. In this video, he reviews what happened during the reactions to Justine Sacco's actions on twitter and what these reactions mean for where the power is on social media.

He begins with the origin of twitter. He states that it was a place for people to come together to feel accepted. Someone could let out a secret and then others would accept them. A safe space for letting others in on your secrets without feeling shameful.

The nature of twitter takes a slight turn in his mind when this group of like minded people realized they could use their collective voice to shame. They could use Twitter as a weapon to bring justice to some entities that were previously out of reach such as newspaper or scholarly journalists. The people
had a voice to be able to combat power people who misused their privilege.

This being one of Ronson's reoccurring themes throughout his presentation. The people coming together to shame on anyone who misuses their privilege. This occurs during his talk about Jonah Lehrer's public apology, at which a live twitter board with many distraught and angry tweets was posted on the screen next to Jonah, and again during his discussion on Justine's AIDS tweet.

During the twitter events that Ronson talks about, he really makes his view of how people act during these times.

He looks at some of the tweets that were made during these events and breaks them down. Truly analyzes the components of the tweets. One said that Lehrer lacked to ability to understand shame, which he says must have been posted by the world's best psychiatrist since they could completely diagnose this tiny man on their tv screen. Another called Lehrer a psychopath.

A psychopath. Ronson explains that words like these are used to help dehumanize people so that we will not have to feel shame after we attack them and tear them apart.

Dehumanizing someone before you destroy them helps with how you feel afterward, but does it help them at all? Ronson talks to people who have been shamed like this on the internet and asks them how they are doing after all this time. He goes on to share how most of these people who have been shamed, never go on to lead the same normal life they used to. Now they wake up in the middle of the night forgetting who it is they are or stay in their house for years.

During the hours that Justine was asleep on the plane and could not defend her tweet, many different arcs of this story arose. There were many who were angry, offended or even looking to get some of their own publicity by weighing in on the matter. By the time that she awoke and checked her phone, there were people calling for her to be shamed, fired and even raped.

A person called out for Justine to be raped.

The main point that Ronson is trying to make during his presentation is that in this day and age we need to take caution in how we are using social media. It is no longer an opportunity to start a new democratic system but rather a new message board to destroy the lives of people we deem unworthy of freedom of speech. His caution is that if we continue to allow actions such as requesting someone be raped and beaten, go on without consequence, and sometimes even being rewarded with praise, that the social media boards will not be there for the people but rather be a weapon to destroy the people.

Overall I found this video and the articles that I've read over the last week to be very informative and quite an enjoyable subject to having to write about.

Facebook News

Derek Thomas writes about many fantastic points on the news that is shared on facebook. He tackles how the nation has rapidly made Facebook their go to for receiving news. 

He has a strong focus on BuzzFeed's news stories. He shows that out of the top 20 BuzzFeed stories, only 3 pertain to national news and even those are questionable on whether or not they should even qualify for true news. 

Facebook has surpassed google in referral traffic. While google still reigns in many many subjects, Facebook has taken over for link browsing.

Derek analyzes the top 20 searched Twitter stories of 2013 which include stories about the tragic bombings that took place during the Boston Marathon to famous actors passing on. He goes on to say that Twitter has the ability to contain actual news. Which makes it news.

Well, news-ish.

But he does the same search for the top 20 most searched stories on Facebook and compares the results. All of the searches were barely able to be classified as news. He shows how the majority of the stories are from sources such as BuzzFeed.

He also analyzes that while the news on Facebook is anything but hard news, this has been happening long before the creation of Facebook.

He talks about the fact that many of the stories and links that appear on an individual's facebook page appear there based on their friends. The Facebook newsfeed is completely comprised on what is trending and what is being shared by the pages and people that you follow. It is entirely made up of our own likes and dislikes. We can groom the stories that we see. 

Most of these stories are simply that. 

Stories. 

Quizzes.

Videos of dogs catching treats in air.

Just stories of things that hardly qualify as news, but this is what is on the rise.

While this article was not quite hard hitting news either, I found it a good read with good content. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/the-facebook-effect-on-the-news/283746/

Ethics of Facebook

Global giants such as Facebook always leave a trail of monumental building blocks. The origins of such large companies often leave damages in their quake. Some of the building blocks of Facebook left some rather large devastation as it came to be.

Today, I analyze the ethical value of the actions that brought Facebook into existence. The good, the bad and the ugly. Everything from what sparked the idea of Facebook to the lawsuits filed against the creator, Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg's initial website that brought him fame was called Facemash, which by all means was unethical. He created it in a fit of passion after his girlfriend left him. She was fed up with his egocentric personality.

He set up a system to where people could view two images of girls and decide who was "hot" and who was "not". Zuckerberg gathered all the photographs that he used by manually hacking into different colleges online databases and stealing the photos. Not only was this unethical, it was illegal and got him suspended from his enrollment at Harvard.

All of this started over the passion felt after being dumped. He gets drunk and in one night creates a website that hinges on an unethical decision that every wants to make. People get a rush when they can choose such things. All of this because of a girl. Mind you throughout the film, The Social Network, women never had an important role in the foundation of Facebook. They are displayed as objects, which is not ethical in a sense that I am sure that there were many women who helped get the company to where it is, but also ethical in the sense that it helped to show the personality of some of the founders of Facebook.

During his suspension, Zuckerberg was approached by the Winklevoss twins. They had an idea to create a Harvard-only website to allow Harvard collegiates to connect online. Shortly thereafter Zuckerberg comes up with the idea for the Facebook. A new social media platform exclusive to Harvard students to socialize online.Eventually, this led to a large lawsuit from the Winklevoss twins against Zuckerberg for intellectual property infringement. While it is unclear whether or not Zuckerberg was to be creating the Harvard connection site for the Winklevoss twins at the same time he was creating the Facebook, during the lawsuit a judge found Zuckerberg's actions to be unethical and rewarded the Winklevoss twins a substantial amount of monetary reciprocity.

It was not unethical to create the Facebook but the conditions surrounding the circumstances on where the initial idea came from makes it a little more unclear as to whether or not it was completely ethical. But here, I am going on the basis that the actual creation of a site for people to connect with each other, is not unethical.

There is another element I have not addressed the ethics on during the initial creation of Facebook.

Exclusivity.

It has always been a question as to whether or not it is ethical to exclude others from a particular group. Exclusion is a tricky subject due to the fact that it is not always fair to everyone. While Facebook eventually opens up to anyone over 13 years of age with a valid email address, its origins were based on an exclusive entry. A harvard edu. Exclusivity played a rather important role in Facebook's timeline. It was a savvy way for west coast college students to connect with each other. 

As it grew in popularity, Zuckerberg opened the doors for more students at other colleges.

There was an initial investment by one of Zuckerberg's close friends, Eduardo Saverin. He made some ethical strides to help the company get started. His monetary contributions provided all the initial funding to help Facebook have the equipment needed to continue to prosper. 

Saverin and Zuckerberg made Facebook exactly what the students who used it wanted. Together they made the company into a success, but Saverin was ready to get money out of it. Zuckerberg feared that advertisements would kill their creation.

This fundamental difference began the very unethical double cross between Zuckerberg and Saverin.

Zuckerberg continued the growth of the company in California while Saverin finished school and searched for advertisers in New York. 

While the two were apart, Zuckerberg partnered with another website entrepreneur, Sean Parker. He had similar views at Zuckerberg but also felt as though the company had the potential to outgrow anything they had previously envisioned.

Zuckerberg using his newfound connections with Parker to gain access to rather deep and wealthy pockets for funding was an ethical and smart move. 

With the new partnership and continual growth of the company,  Facebook got a $500,000 initial investment. A fantastic initial investment for advertising. Advertising is completely ethical to a point. If you are going to use a free service, and that free service can stay afloat or profit by using advertisements, then that is fine. 

Arguably great. 

 I believe it to be a little more of a fine line between ethical and unethical when the advertisements are catered to individual users. Much of the current advertisement tactics that are employed by Facebook, use programs that analyze the recent search history of individual users to change advertising to match each user on a personal level.

After the company got 1,000,000 users, they held a party and invited everyone, including Saverin from New York. When he got to the party, there was a legal team awaiting him to let him sign some new papers. These papers dwindled the shares that Saverin held down to .03%. 

Everyone else retained their shares completely, while Zuckerberg and Parker had Saverin's were diluted to .03.

The man who single-handedly funded to start of the empire known as Facebook received nothing more than what he invested. It was a very unethical move. 

Saverin responded by suing Zuckerberg and Facebook to restore his shares. 

Yet again, Zuckerberg went to court to defend his actions and yet again a judge decided that the actions were indeed unethical. Saverin received an undisclosed amount and had his name restored to the Facebook mast. 

Speaking of which, the fact that Zuckerberg had his name on every page was ethical. It is absolutely fine to leave your name on your creations, so long as due diligence is given in making sure everyone has an equal opportunity to have their names on the front page.

While Facebook has had some very unethical moves that have been widely publicized, it has also had some ethical movements that have allowed to company to grow to a point that it truly integrated in billions of individual lives.

Every move that we make can get categorized into ethical or unethical but ultimately they are just actions. Good bad or ugly. They are actions we make that cause reactions that are simply good bad or ugly. 

The Personal Bias

Andreas Ekstrom presents his dreams and beliefs on the unbiased clean search result. The idea that when you search something on the world wide web, you will get an unfiltered unbiased answer.

I've personally used google my entire life and have never given my search results a second thought. If I do not get the answer I'm looking for, I simply revise my search and try again. I never knew that google may be changing my results.

Andreas presentation was not about whether or not google almighty strength should be quelled or not, but rather just the fact that their influence exists means that our searches can be manipulated for the better or worse.

We are told not to judge or show bias towards anyone. But how do we put our own judgement aside, to let others form their own opinion.

He goes on to show how the personal bias of the google coders influenced the results of the search results during large public events. He google searches images for Michelle Obama and Andres Behring Breivik. In 2009 people attempted to make a mockery of the new first lady of America. They twisted an image of her and made her into a monkey. Google reacted and removed every trace of the image. They rewrote code and erased it. In 2011, again people made a mockery of someone by twisting the image results of them on google. Google did nothing this time. This time, it was the image of a terrorist who massacred children. His image was replaced by dog poop on a sidewalk. There was no mass rewrite of code to remove the images.

Here is the example of a personal bias. Googles personal bias.

Should google treat the two incidents the same? Should they have to give the same services to everyone? Whether or not the person is honorable and deserves such privilege?

No matter your answer to these questions, the point that Andreas is attempting to make is that in this day and age it is difficult to take our personal opinion and separate it from fact. He starts by talking about how we can google facts that are typically universally accepted, such as the capital of France or the chemical make-up of water. If we search these things we will get a factual answer. He says that the problem comes when we search things that are not necessarily factual, rather subjects that have many answers.

When we search these types of questions, we are typically greeted by many different answers, many of which are based on personal opinions. As we have found out from other parts of his video, sometimes these results are altered and controlled by someone else based on what they want someone to see when they search that question.

Andreas thoughts drift to whether or not we will ever be able to separate our personal bias and opinion. Such as thing would allow us to have an unaltered result. He ponders this and then presents the question to us. His audience. For us to form our own opinion on.

You can watch his TED talk here, https://www.ted.com/talks/andreas_ekstrom_the_moral_bias_behind_your_search_results#t-316937