The Dark Side of Social Media

Today we have a critical response to When Online Shaming Spirals out of Control TED Talk , an academic blog post for #engl211.

In this TED Talk, Jon Ronson claims that Twitter was originally “a place of radical de-shaming” where the voiceless found a powerful voice. He argues that this was good, but it evolved into something terrible. A few tweets that picked up momentum could make a giant corporation realize that people are watching and they aren’t going to get away with being heartless or evil. From giving the voiceless a voice, Twitter evolved into a place where people didn’t just keep corporations from being evil, but also went after people who are perceived to have had and abused privilege.

Ronson supports his assertion with two examples. The first was pop science writer Jonah Lehrer. After being caught faking quotes, self-plagiarizing (re-using prior material without noting it was from prior work), and plagiarizing the work of others. Mr. Lehrer had a speaking engagement that would give him the opportunity to apologize for his intellectual misconduct. The foundation that he spoke before set up two screens with Twitter feeds, one that the audience could see and another that he could see while he was making his speech.

The people watching the live streamed event made comments to and about Mr. Lehrer on Twitter while he was speaking. Seeing a privileged white man make a speech about his poor decision making brought out some of the ugliness of the online world.  

With the help of a stapler and a conveniently placed down arrow key, I scrolled down in the #infoneeds feed to the day of the speech. The comments that are there now are mostly not that bad. I understand that people can delete tweets and a bunch of negative comments may have been deleted. However, the overall tone of it now is a bit of negativity with a lot of reasonable tweets and the occasional reminder to be civil.

I have to admit that although it is ugly to have a man apologizing for getting caught in a pattern of journalistic misconduct while surrounded by a Twitter feed that contains a number of negative comments, I find it hard to sympathize with him. His intellectual dishonesty benefited him and he was apologizing because he was caught. If he had to be uncomfortable while apologizing, I’m sure the $20K honorarium that he received for his speech was a comfort. I find it interesting that a Knight Foundation post the day after Mr. Lehrer’s speech says that they regret paying him a speaking fee.

While the story of Jonah Lehrer is indeed an example of online shaming, I think Ronson could have found many better examples to support his argument. That may be why he spent more time on the second example which is much stronger.

Justine Sacco, a PR professional with a small following on Twitter, made a stupid ugly tweet while traveling. One of her followers sent that tweet to a journalist with many followers and a massive Twitter storm ensued. Being a woman on the Internet is far more dangerous than being a man, and the kinds of responses she got for a moment of indiscretion were terrible. As Ronson says:

Women always have it worse than men. When a man gets shamed, it's, "I'm going to get you fired." When a woman gets shamed, it's, "I'm going to get you fired and raped and cut out your uterus."

I was on Twitter when the Justine Sacco Twitter storm hit. I remember seeing this woman’s name pop up in my feed and thinking that her tweet was terrible. I wondered if she was really that racist and ignorant or if it was somehow supposed to be a joke that just didn’t make sense to me. I remember being shocked that a PR professional could come up with such a tweet.

Having watched the Justine Sacco Twitter storm play out in real time, I can only agree with what Ronson says about mob behavior on Twitter. It starts out small with disbelief and shock that quickly turns to anger and personal threats. The more people talk about something like this, the more likely it is that someone will say something negative. Negative tweets bounce around the echo chamber and can lead to horrible threats.

This was a valuable talk on a difficult reality of social media. Ronson makes solid points and supports them well with real life examples. In the after talk he notes that it is important to stand up for people who are being shamed so that there’s a “babble of voices” instead of straight negativity. He suggests this, knowing that standing up for the target of a Twitter mob makes you a target too. He suggests this as a way to keep the Internet from turning into a place where fear silences us.

The Internet is an ugly place. If you make a mistake that goes viral, it can literally ruin your life. Both of the people Ronson used as examples were eventually able to start over, but the recovery process is long and difficult. Ronson ends his talk with a call to action. Don’t let the Internet turn into a place where we give up our voices to survive.

News and Social Media

And here we have another academic blog post for English 211G. The mission - write a critical response to The Facebook Effect on the News.

In this Atlantic Monthly article from February 2014, Derek Thompson argues that in 2013 claiming that Facebook and Twitter were the Internet’s new homepages might have been a nearly original observation, but in 2014, such a statement had become fact.

Thompson supports this argument by noting that traffic from homepages had dropped across many websites while traffic from social media dramatically increased. He includes a supporting graph showing that in December 2011, Google and Facebook sent near equal numbers of clicks to the Buzzfeed network. By December 2013, Facebook’s share of the traffic was more than three times that of Google's.

Do we want news or cat pictures?

From that foundation, he goes on to consider the question of what kinds of stories do people click on from Facebook. He notes that The Atlantic’s most successful Facebook stories ‘aren’t news-pegged’ but are “what journalists call ‘evergreen’ stories”. Evergreen stories aren’t about recent events. They are about subjects of ongoing interest such as happiness, dieting, and decision making. He notes that these are stories of the sort that Upworthy specializes in and that Upworthy was definitely enjoying an abundance of clicks from Facebook pages.

Thompson points out that Facebook’s News Feed isn’t really a news feed at all. As Thompson says it can be better described as an entertainment portal. He cites a 2013 Pew study that fewer that half of Facebook users ever even read news on Facebook and only 10 percent log into Facebook specifically to see news.

To support this observation Thompson supplies Top 20 lists of Twitter’s top stories in 2013, the Top 20 most searched stories for 2013, and Buzzfeed’s Top 20 most viral stories. The Buzzfeed stories being the ones most clicked on from Facebook. Based on those lists, Twitter seems to be a blend of news and evergreen stories, heavily skewed towards entertainment news. The most searched stories are much more strongly focused on news stories. The Facebook (Buzzfeed viral) stories are largely entertainment and evergreen stories.

Cats can be awfully cute.

He goes on to claim that the primary difference between Facebook and older forms of entertainment is that the Facebook News Feed is “entirely our creation”. This is the first statement in the article that I have to disagree with. I can’t actually recall how the News Feed was in 2014, but it currently is only somewhat based on your activity. Yes, we do choose our friends and how we interact with our friends’ posts, but that only gives us the illusion of creating our own News Feed.

I can think of at least one reported instances of Facebook manipulating News Feeds:

Facebook Tinkers With User’s Emotions in News Feed Experiment, Stirring Outcry

Even when not manipulating the New Feed actively, the Facebook algorithm exercises a great deal of control over what we are shown. Follow someone and interact with every single post that appears in your News Feed and Facebook still won’t show you all of their posts. Follow a page and it is even worse. Facebook wants page owners to pay for advertising and limits how many of their followers see each post organically.

Me? I prefer dog pictures.

While we can certainly influence what we see on Facebook, we do not create our own News Feeds. Although I disagree that the Facebook News Feed is “entirely our creation” I do agree that it does indicate users’ preferences.

All in all, Thompson’s article was worth reading and very appropriate to this class. He highlights one of the major differences between social media (Facebook and Twitter) and other means of getting information from the Web. I found it interesting that Twitter usage skewed more towards news seeking than Facebook usage. I would have thought that the shorter format of Twitter would not encourage that. It shouldn’t have surprised me though. Even though I follow mostly authors and publishing related people on Twitter, I still see a ton of news come through my feed.

What do you think? Do you know anyone who’s Facebook (or Twitter) feed is all news all the time?

Speculating on Ethical Behavior in the Founding of Facebook

Ethical behavior can be defined in many ways. For the purposes of this post, let’s keep it simple:

Ethical behavior - Behavior that is consistent with what society believes to be good morals.

There are several incidents on the road to Facebook where Mark Zuckerberg may have felt he was behaving ethically. These same incidents, when viewed from another person’s perspective may appear unethical.

The movie The Social Network portrays Zuckerberg largely as a socially awkward villain. Other sources of information about the founding of Facebook, including “The Accidental Billionaires” book offer slightly more balanced views.

Ethical behavior is understood in part based on what society is judging it.

Cultural Differences

As members of the Porcellian Club, the most exclusive final club on campus, the Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss lived in a very different world from Mark Zuckerberg. Even his friend, Eduardo Saverin lived in a different world from Mark Zuckerberg.

The primary difference between their worlds is that Saverin and the Winklevoss twins live in the world of business, although at different levels. Zuckerberg lives in the world of computers. Although some types of ethical behavior may be considered universal, the world of business and the world of computers do have different standards by which behavior can be judged to be ethical or unethical.

Hacker Culture

When Zuckerberg created www.facemash.com, he accessed information that was not open to the public. He hacked into the computer networks of various Harvard houses in order to obtain the pictures to be used in his “Hot or Not” style program. An article in The Harvard Crimson that is still available online - 

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creator-survives-ad-board-the/ 

discusses the results of the Administrative Board hearing he was called before after creating the site. He was charged with security, copyright, and privacy violations.

It is likely that Zuckerberg did not believe he was behaving unethically in creation of the site for several reasons. First, Zuckerberg states that he did not mean for the site to go to such a wide audience. He forwarded it only to a few friends, who then forwarded it on to others. The spread was viral rather than deliberate as implied in the movie. Second, Zuckerberg took the site down himself, having some understanding about the privacy violation it created. Third, he had created the site as an interesting programming problem, not a payback for being dumped as implied by the movie.

Breaking into the Harvard house networks may anger the authorities, but in the hacker community, angering authorities is a good thing. If security can be broken then it was too weak and information wants to be free. His actions (probably unintentionally) pointed out several security weaknesses of the campus network and likely led to them being fixed. Highlighting the weaknesses of a network without doing real harm might actually be considered ethical behavior in hacker culture. He also apparently documented what he was doing as he did it and posted it on the site itself. In researching this post, I couldn’t find anything that said whether or not he turned that information over to the folks responsible for IT security at Harvard after taking the site down. If he did turn it over, then he actually did provide a service. Although such a service, if it occurred was certainly not in a form they would have liked.

The fact that he sent the program out to only a few friends for feedback shows some awareness that it might not be something that should be shared with the wider world. He might genuinely have not known that it would go viral while he wasn’t looking. The movie shows him watching it explode across campus. Other sources indicate that he went off to class or a meeting and was away from his dorm while it was growing. This experience may also have led him to thinking more seriously about privacy options when the time came to create Facebook.

In hacker culture, computer geek society, solving interesting programing problems has intrinsic value. While the implementation might be sketchy ethically, the primary purpose of making a comparison algorithm work elegantly is not.

Business Culture

The Winklevoss twins saw what Zuckerberg did as a violation of ethics according to business culture. In their perception, the creation of his own social network while he was supposed to be working on theirs was a huge violation of their trust.

Various sources indicate that the one truly unethical thing that Zuckerberg did concerning the Winklevoss twins and Harvard Connection or ConnectU was lead them to believe that he was working on their site so that he could release his first. This gave him the ‘first mover’ advantage.

However, since they had no formal business agreements and hadn’t even discussed paying him anything for his work, Zuckerberg’s creation of his own site was not actually unethical in and of itself. There already were several social media sites out there and putting a new spin on one was not a unique idea by any stretch.

Money and Ethics

You can’t have an online presence without servers, and servers cost money. This means that TheFacebook would never have gotten off the ground at Harvard even without the help of investors. The first investor was Eduardo Saverin, a friend of Mark Zuckerberg. Later early funding was obtained from Peter Thiel. As FaceMash proved, using Zuckerberg’s personal computer as a server would not be sufficient to cover even the Harvard undergraduate population.

First some definitions:

Angel investor - Person who invests their own personal funds into a start-up business to help it grow. Angel investors usually get some sort of ownership equity in return for their investment. If the business fails, they get nothing. If it succeeds, the angel investor owns a chunk of a successful business.

Venture capitalist - A person or group who invests into small, growing businesses. Venture capital is generally sought by businesses that are small and growing rapidly. Venture capitalists often help the firm grow with business model and marketing strategy advice as well as providing funds. Venture capitalists make their profits when the company grows big enough to sell shares to the public through an initial public offering or when the business is sold to a larger company.

Eduardo Saverin’s initial investment into TheFacebook was an angel investment. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s initial investment into Facebook was also an angel investment. Although as a venture capitalist, and member of Facebook’s board of directors he seems to have provided significant assistance in developing Facebook’s business model and structure even if he was not involved in day-to-day decision making.

One of the ethical obligations of a business that accepts investments is to work hard to succeed. When Saverin froze the account that was keeping TheFacebook’s servers up and running, he created a major threat to the fledgling business. Downtime can kill a fledgling social network. After he does this, Zuckerberg takes steps to cut Saverin out of the business. Zuckerberg’s actions to cut Saverin off from having any sort of position or power with Facebook are ethical in the sense that he is protecting investors from a threat to their investment.

Gender Relationships

Although the other sources I’ve looked at in the process of researching this blog post rather strongly indicate that The Social Network movie is an extremely fictionalized account of the Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, his behavior towards as portrayed in the film is quite problematic. It starts with a scene where he is extremely rude to his girlfriend who then dumps him. In reaction he posts a demeaning blog about her personally. Then he goes to work creating Facemash which compares and ranks the attractiveness of Harvard undergrads. In the movie it shows the program only comparing women. He does at least refrain from comparing them to farm animals. The movie does not show him having any positive relationships with women at all, although towards the end he is at least polite to one of the women in the law firm.

Social Network Exclusivity

One of the goals in the creation of Facebook was to create an online social network where you actually knew the people you were connected with. This was the idea behind keeping it exclusive to Harvard at first and later exclusive to colleges and universities in general. Several of the design features show ethical decision making.

People are encouraged to sign up with their real names so that they may connect with their real friends. It is not a dating site so much as a site that builds connections. There are privacy options built in that the user has control over. Facebook users may share too much, but what they share is by their own choice. Even if the oversharing is sometimes through ignorance of how the system works there are privacy settings and instructions on how to use them readily available.

Earlier social network sites were more focused on meeting new people. Facebook focused on connecting with people you already knew to some degree. Zuckerberg wasn’t interested in creating another dating style social network.

Additional information about the founding of Facebook:

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-booted-his-co-founder-out-of-the-company-2012-5

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/09/08/mark-zuckerberg-at-harvard-the-truth-behind-the-social-network.html

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creator-survives-ad-board-the/

The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich is an account of the early history using information gathered from several sources. Mark Zuckerberg provided no information for this book. It is a fast fun read.

The Social Network (2010) is a movie loosely based on The Accidental Billionaires. 

The Myth of Unbiased Search Results

This week we have an assigned academic blog post. The assignment is to critique “The moral bias behind your search results”, a TED Talk given by Andreas Ekström.

Ekström’s primary point is that while Google search may be quite useful for isolated facts, it does not and in fact can not provide unbiased results for more complicated queries. He supports the first half of this point with a simple example and provides more extensive support for the second half.

The support for the first half of Ekström’s point is straightforward and relies on our common sense understanding of the world. He points out that when looking for an isolated fact, there is not much or any disagreement as to what the answer should be. He notes that there are no groups working on proving that London is the capital of France or that a water molecule is actual H30. I both agree with his point and find the way he makes it eloquent. For finding simple facts with no reasonable dispute, Google search is a great source.

The more important second portion of the point Ekström makes is also well supported although I do have one quibble. He starts out by pointing out that a more complicated search or a search for knowledge rather than isolated fact introduces value judgements. Value judgements are filtered through our own personal experience and the communities in which we participate. While I agree with this point and find his statement and description of it well said, the example he uses to drive it home fails in one area.

For an example, Ekström brings up a search of images of Michelle Obama, first lady of the United States, and then later a search for images of Anders Behring Breivik, a terrorist. He shows the audience the image searches for these two individuals while telling the two stories of how people manipulated Google images specifically for these people at different times in the past.

Michelle Obama’s Google images results were manipulated by racists who made modified images to distort her face so that it looked like a monkey’s face and used their knowledge of how Google image searches work to put those images at the top of any search for her images.

After his terrorist attack, Breivik had a similar campaign launched against him by a search engine optimization expert where pictures of dog poop were made to appear at the top of his image results on Google.

For Michelle Obama, Google did not wait for the corrective features of their algorithm to kick in. They wrote new code to fix the problem quickly. For the terrorist, they did not make the same fix. Ekström points out the value judgement inherent in these decisions. He notes that being able to make these decisions for how their search engine behaves is power.

I agree with his point. My quibble is with his demonstration. He pulls up the image searches for the two individuals in question. Since it is now years later, the image search results come up with good results of accurate pictures for each individual. This is not a good demonstration of his point.

Ekström concludes his talk with the important reminder that behind every computer algorithm is a human being. Search engines were created by people and it is important to identify and be aware of what bias you are working with when using one. I agree with Ekström that taking responsibility for understanding your bias and the bias of the information you work with is vital.

People have an unfortunate tendency to believe that the computer algorithms behind search engines will work in an unbiased fashion. Computer algorithms are created by human beings. They don't spontaneously spring into existence from a cloud of electrons. Even if they did, the electrons would probably have some sort of bias that we simple humans just don’t understand.