I do not know where to begin after watching and reading all the material for this week. I thought it was trying to get at cyber bullying at first, but as I sat back and thought upon it longer I think something that was not so highlighted is the power technology and social media is giving people. One click of a button or tap of a screen and someones life could be ruined. Cyber bullying would have never been what it is today if we did not allow it to be so I just ask myself and everyone else who’s to blame?

Black Mirror’s episode “Hated in the Nation” is by far my favorite episode so far that we have watched. You could interpret it as cyber bullying, but I think it is aiming for a bigger picture than that. The power these people had just from a hashtag was outrageous. One post with the hashtag #DeathTo… and you were entered in almost some death lottery. This is very far fetched, but that is what Black Mirror does best. They leave it up to us to either get the message they are given or not. I think this could be a possible thing in the future if we do not recognize how much this resembles today. Social media can ruin someone’s entire life just with one picture or post just like that hashtag in the episode. We hear so many stories of people whose lives were ruined and could not go on because of the hands of social media and technology all because we gave social media that power in everyday life. Technology is not the only one to blame though people are also at fault. The episode shows people are just as bad as technology. The hashtag in the show and the things we post in real life are really not that different, but not as flat out as the show made it. If I could takeaway one thing from this episode it is that as a whole we need to do better.

The article on Harper’s Magazine “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” was also a very good read and struck very controversial topics. This ties into that recurring theme I stated earlier because it goes into depth on instead of us trying to get better and reform the problem at hand we are just looking to punish and if we keep this mentality we are just going to mess up the use of social media for everyone. Everyone runs to social media for their problems nowadays instead of resolving them. In the article it says social media was meant to give people a voice and express their freedom of speech, but how can we if people abuse this right and are making the things we are allowed to post limited. “If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.”(Harper’s Magazine, 2020)

Last but definitely not least the YouTube video “Bad Behavior Online: Bullying, Trolling & Free Speech” is what I gives us that first hand look on how this is going on today. People are saying whatever to whoever on social media. It could be a joke some of the time, but we fail to realize that one of the cons of saying jokes on social media is that we don’t know the tone of what is being said. One thing the video states that I do not agree with is that it is children and teens, but I feel it is everyone. Now after all of the material we had for the week I ask everyone who is at fault here social media and technology or us?

WEEKLY NEWS https://www.foxnews.com/us/suspect-louisville-cop-shooting-during-protests-pleads-not-guilty

The news article I chose for this week has to do with the tragic death or Breonna Taylor. She was killed because police officers had a no knock warrant and went into the wrong home and murdered her in cold blood. This upcoming week after months of protest only one of the three cops were accused for the shooting, but only for the damage to the neighbor’s walls. He pleaded not guilty and I feel justice is not being served at all. This was a bright and upcoming young black woman whose life was cut to short. All three officers should be charged and the proper evidence should be released.

I find it interesting that as someone who lives a good chunk of their life on social media and the Internet, I always find myself sort of bashing it. One of the reasons I think social media is bad for us is because of how people behave or express themselves. Having spent too much time online, I would say I’ve seen pretty much everything, picked up patterns, and noticed behaviors from people on these platforms just as i’m sure most of you have as well. It’s nothing shocking to see arguments/fights take place on social media and platforms from youtube to Facebook and anything in that nature. So then I ask myself, what is it that is making these people express themselves so angrily towards one another?

There’s an idea that I’m sure most are familiar with in one way or another and that is that people gain this testicular fortitude when they hop behind a screen and type away. I believe this in some way applies to everyone from internet trolls, who live to argue or “troll” others, to people who don’t care about arguments but might step in to get their quick one liner.

The internet has made it easy for anyone to express themselves online, so I ask myself, should we be expressing everything just because we can? Self awareness is something that I think rational people have. Self awareness to stop themselves from posting idiotic things or behaving poorly on the internet. But on the other hand the internet has become a playground for people who pick arguments and behave poorly toward others. I’ve always said this that the internet has both good uses and bad uses and it really depends on the person and how they choose to use this tool.How the internet created an age of rage is an article that can be found on The Guardians website and this article does well in explaining the behaviors of people who troll or leave unflattering comments. 

“The psychologists call it “deindividuation”. It’s what happens when social norms are withdrawn because identities are concealed.”

I believe that the line above is a solid definition of Deindividuation that also works in respects to the internet. One of the examples used in the article is one I’m sure we can relate to or at least have seen and is in road rage. Sometimes a person you wouldn’t expect to be confrontational can get upset and start shouting things at other drivers because they feel protected in a car and they’re safe. In this case it would be the internet trolls and people who like to argue and start up problems that find benefit in saying what they feel because they feel protected behind a screen. 

I personally don’t believe there is a solution to this except for trying to pay it no mind. People don’t really change and sometimes arguing back over a computer will not satisfy the mood you might find yourself in.  I may not have any solutions to offer but Imagine if someone else did. It would be even crazier if it were like the Black Mirror episode Hated in the Nation. Perhaps we shouldn’t take the internet so seriously?

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/25/politics/donald-trump-amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court/index.html

The first line of Vincent’s article ‘The ‘Spiral of Silence” is “how often do you really say what you feel online?” and I’ve got a story. My mom used to drill into my head about what not to put online and anytime she saw me on my iPod I would get a speech about not being stupid. I also had access to the internet too young, I had a computer in my room and a Facebook in 2010. I was born in 2000. The days I would lay on my ‘cool’ futon and go to Nick.com to watch Drake and Josh, I should not have had it, but relatively, besides grammar, I didn’t put anything too crazy on there. And then I grew up and it’s now a conscious decision to watch what I say, but… I may have slipped up a time or two. And very recently, well like 2 months ago. Long story short there were some rumors that went around my high school about an administrator, and more rumors that the school covered it up and nothing ever happened. Then not that long ago another worker from the school went viral and was victimized by the cancel culture, and I posted something about it along the lines of if good people are coming down, bad people should too and here’s where we ended up- a Facebook message from said administrator saying I’ll hear from her lawyer and let me tell you what that was my ‘what the fuck did I do’ moment. I was taught this, I knew this, and here I was being sued because I said some dumb shit. I immediately deleted it, freaked out, and told my mom. After a long night of disappointment and yelling, nothing ever happened, I expected cops at my door when I woke up but nope, she was bluffing. And now my facebook consists of octopus, and raccoons, and Grey’s Anatomy.

I’ve actually been thinking about how Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, and how they all work, and if they work differently. I hate the continuous swipe, the never ending and then the “oh shit” as I pass past someone worth it and not being able to go back. “If you’ve passed on someone, eventually, someone you’ve said “no” to is a much better option than someone who’s 1,000 or 10,000 people down the line.”(Tiffany) I’ve never thought about this like this, I’ve always pictured it as missed opportunities or someone that continuously swipes on me. A 6 is a 6 in a room full of 10s but a 6 is a 10 in a room full of 5s. I notice recycling all the time and it’s usually the hardcore no’s that stick out and just piss me off, but it’s to make everyone look better. Funny enough, my ex messaged me on Snapchat last night telling me he saw my tinder 5 times in about 30 minutes when I was playing solitaire not even on it. I wonder if I was getting better or worse.(lol)

“Hated in the Nation” is basically what happens when you say something wrong or that goes against the social majority. Cancel culture is so quick that literally in a matter of hours someone could lose it all, family, job, friends, everything. I brought up the first day of class that the top realtor at my cousins office in Florida posted someone on Facebook and was out of her multimillion dollar job by 9 am. Hoards of people simultaneously speak up and that’s it. The bees, the likes, swarm and capture people.

Life is complicated, you go through this process of fitting in and trying to please everyone. It really makes you think am I doing this because I want to or is it for someone else. We like to think we make a lot of our decisions based on our own viewpoints, but I believe that many of us don’t actually do this. Don’t worry I do this too, but it’s not so much our faults, but social media instead. On social media people have this free reign to really say what they want and if enough people agree with one person they can’t get in trouble for what they say. It’s so easy to not really care what you say to people online because what can they really do to you. The answer is nothing unfortunately, this makes navigating social media so much harder. Now this week we saw something similar to this idea in a Black Mirror episode called Hated in the Nation.

This was a very interesting episode it really makes you think about what technology can become and the affect media can have on a society. This episode revolves around these gruesome murders by little robot honey bee’s, that were created by a private tech company because of the extinction of honey bee’s. The UK government at there request asked the company to create a security hole, which ended up letting anybody able to hack the bee’s and rerouted to attack and kill specific people. How they decide who to kill is by using #DeathTo and this gives the people the power to decide who should die with a lottery in a sense. This gives way to public executions by mostly well known famous people. Although the people didn’t know that by them tweeting this hashtag they’d be actually killing people, it just goes to show that people don’t understand the consequences of their actions. Even if they weren’t actually killing these people it still doesn’t make it right to wish death on someone.

Let’s say we look away for second at the technology aspect of this, but instead look at the media part. One of the articles we had to read this week called “How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet” goes over how trolls are destroying the very reason we came to love media in the fist place, which is to spread ideas and to share aspects of our lives to others. Instead these trolls have turned it into a hostile and not very pleasant platform, making it hard for people to enjoy those aspects of spreading ideas and sharing parts of your life with others. Some examples the author used were how back in 2011 people went on the facebook memorial page of recently deceased people and made jokes about them being dead. Another one about Jessica Valenti who said she was leaving social media because she received a rape threat against her daughter who is five. Just like in Black mirror this shows how peoples actions on social media go unpunished regardless of the act done against others.

This article is about how President Trump has selected Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the favorite candidate of conservatives, to succeed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and will try to force Senate confirmation before Election Day in a move that would significantly change the makeup of the Supreme Court for years.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/25/politics/donald-trump-amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court/index.html

This week’s blog has revealed a new dark side of the technology and the social media. The episode of the Black Mirror: Hated in the Nation. The articles and other material all have given so much to think about.

Starting from the Black mirror episode, this episode brings forward the darkest face of the technology that cruel it can be. In the start of the episode Jo Power, a journalist was shown who was having so much negativity and death threats on the social media platforms right after publically lambasting a disability rights activist recent self-immolation. And then we have all seen how she killed herself. Then in the whole of the episode this hashtag game started and people without knowing the consequences about what they are voting for bring the lives of people to an end. Surprisingly, the device that is used for the killing purpose are the Autonomous Drone Insect (ADI), which are created to replace the extinct bee population. Later it turned out that they were locally hacked and all the deaths were made because of the voting people have made online. And in the end people who voted for #DeathTo all got killed and in this way more than 380,000 people were got killed because of the misuse of the social media platform.

Watching this episode made me feel like we are not far from this sort of future if we keep on going like this. I wanted to ask you all what are your thoughts about this episode? Do you see this coming in the near future?

After reading the article “How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet”, I again felt so bad that what people have started doing. Can’t they just see how badly they are behaving. Troll is the term used for fishing method online thieves used to find their victims. Many of the cases are mentioned there where many of the people who tried to do something different would end up getting the online threats of death, rape and doxing threats. It has been mentioned in the article that ““Trolls are portrayed as aberrational and antithetical to how normal people converse with each other. And that could not be further from the truth,”. Why people do not see that what their words can do to a person? Why we find it easy to make a comment on a person on any of the social media without thinking about the consequences?

In the next of the article, “How the Internet Created the Age of Rage”, again this article talked all about the people who comment ill while hiding themselves behind the screens. The article was full of examples where people through their comments are spreading the hate and psychologist says this is some sort of mental disorder that make people do stuff like this while hiding their own personalities. I think the excess use of technology have made people so involved in that they no longer know what humanity use to be like. People or should I say the social media people are left with no human feelings at all.

Again, I raise a question here that who is responsible for all of this at first place? What make people so upset and so full of hate that they can find no place but the internet to troll on? Is this every going to stop somewhere?

For this week’s news article, which I found very much authentic to the topic of how social media is spreading more hate than love and is covering the current scenario of the global pandemic we all are facing.

Link: https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/how-hatred-sells-more-than-love-on-social-media-11583778582160.html

With every passing week we are getting a lot of stuff to think about, make our opinions on the scenarios and then talk about it openly. This week’s articles and the Black Mirror episode made me feel so uncomfortable about the fact that how insane humans can be. How people behind the screen find it easy to talk insensitive and take a person up to the edge of depression.

I will start the blog with the articles i.e. “How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet” and “How the Internet Created the Age of Rage”. After reading these two articles, I feel so ashamed for the people who are involve in such activities and they find it amusing to talk so cruel about people online. Both of the articles have shown many examples where people not only get trolled but are also given threats of death, rape and more. I mean how would a person feel when he/she get the threat about his/her 5-year-old that she will be raped? People who use to do something different from the norms of society would end up getting threats like that and nobody can risk their families at any cost. This is the dilemma of our society that if we do not like a thing or we do not find a thing happening as per our requirement we start spreading the bad news about it or start mocking about the person who is doing this at first place. Then these mocking and bad news would start turning into hate and ultimately to the threats.

Now coming towards the episode of the Black Mirror: Hated in the Nation. I am so eager to talk about the stuff that happened in this episode. This was one of the most horrific yet an amazing episode. We all have seen in the start that two of the celebrities i.e. a journalist Jo Power and an American Rapper Tusk are shown who have made some steps that were not acceptable by the society and how they have shown hatred on the social media and then both of them killed themselves in a creepy way. In the investigation similar device found common in both of the deaths which was an Autonomous Drone Insect (ADI), which were designed in order to replace the extinct bees and are supposed to do the same job as the original bees do. Both of these deaths are found part of the game which was started on the internet, a website promoting the “game” where the users of twitter are supposed to vote in order to kill a public hate figure. The network of bees was got hacked and used for these mysterious deaths. And to my surprise people did vote there and this game continues till end and the end was the horrific part where all of the voters were also died in the same way they voted for the people.

What lesson we all get from this? The bees were originally made to replace the extinct of bees in order to fulfil their job. Which if we see positively is the positive use of the technology. But who used this in a wrong way? Certainly the hackers! The psychics who got this weird idea of death voting. So, again I will repeat that it is not technology that we have to hate but the people and the use of technology would be hated. These are the people who misuse the technology and then the whole of the community has to suffer from the after effects.

For this week’s news article, I have found this article helpful in order to understand that how we can avoid the misuse of the internet.

Link: https://www.thelegalpartners.com/avoid-social-media-misuse-protect-liability/#:~:text=manage%20employees%20use%20of%20email,networks%20without%20infringing%20their%20privacy

This week we had to watch another black mirror episode called “Hated in the Nation”. Although this episode was a bit loner than the rest, it had me on the edge of my seat the entire time. Im so into detective work and solving crimes and autopsies. This is like a huge investigation, except its so like in the future based with all sorts of amazing tech like the AI Bees that society added so that the pollination of flowers could still be done because the real bee population was dying out. Well little did everyone know that a terrorist would hack the bees and use them for his own personal murder game. Im not going to give every single detail of the episode but ill summarize it a little bit.

It starts when our main characters Karin and Blue who are both detectives are notified of a body of a famous journalist. Then they are notifies of another body of a famous person. Through a lot of detective work they find out that the only links between both bodies are that they had a single bee inside their head that was damaging their pain receptors inside the brain. This causes extreme pain and the victims will do anything to stop the pain…even kill themselves. Then the detectives fins out on more similarity between the victims. Both have had their names come up on twitter with it being the hashtag of #DEATHTO and then their names at the end.They find out if you have your name this list and are trending number one then you will die at a certain time. I won’t bore you guys with the details but it gets exciting when the detectives figure out that the system got hacked by a single terrorist. Eventually they figure out the terrorists plan, but there’s one flaw. When they turn the system to the bees off, The bees then target and kill every single person who tweeted out #DEATHTO. The episode ends in dramatic fashion as Blue faked her death and tracked the terrorist and on the day of the court case she catches him and sends Karin a text saying she got him. Im not sure if she killed him or brought him to justice, but that was one good episode.

My overall reaction to the episode is just WOW!!! It was so jam packed and right up my ally. It was so cool to see a very interesting investigation of a murder, but it was so like in the future based. It makes me think, well all of these episodes make me think about the technology of the future. But what if the bees did start dying out? What would be our solution for that? What substitute would we use. I was also curious as to hoe the bees died out in the episode, but I don’t think they ever mentioned it. This episode I\kind of gave me a criminal minds type of vibe which I absolutely love. The ending was honestly the best part though.

What substitute could we use if bees dies out in the future?

Weekly news: https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-latest-updates-092520-11601019557

This week in class we watched a great episode of Black Mirror: Hated in the Nation, we also take a look at how much one wrong story on the news can cause someone’s life to spiral out of control and how social media can affect those. As we saw while watching the “Aunt From Hell”.

This week’s Black Mirror episode we watched Hated in The Nation, it is about how a journalist posted article and received major backlash from the public. Because of that article she has been non stop receiving hate mail, harassment, and even death threats. The journalist dies in her house and her husband was badly wounded, while the man said that she had killed herself. After this happened there was also another man who received the same kind of messages and threats as long as the #deathto___ trend. The thread was created to pick someone that was the most hated and if that person has the most votes he or she will die. During the episode they found out that their were technology advanced bees in their brains, and the bees were somehow hacked by someone to target the number one person that was voted the most. After trying to save a victim, the hacker then targets the people who are using the thread to teach them a “moral lesson”. At the end of the episode we see the police closing in on where staying, and then the episode comes to end leaving a great cliffhanger. This makes us think about the possibilities that could have happen if the episode even played 5 more minutes. For example does the hacker, get away, get caught, or use the bees to kill all the cops and has to be on the run forever, or even if someone rehacks the bees to turn them back to normal.

During class this Wednesday, we watched how the news can twist a story to make it more appealing to the public eye. They do this without realizing how it can effect the people on the receiving end of it. Especially nowadays with social media, all it can take is one wrong and false story in the news to ruin someones life because of how much hate they can receive on the internet. A perfect example is from the multiple videos we watched from class talking about the “World’s Worst Aunt” or the “Auntie From Hell”. Even trusted news channels were quick to air this story without knowing all the facts, or maybe they ran it anyways because of the possible ratings they could get. The story was originally aired saying how the Aunt was suing her 8 year old nephew for her medical bills, and the news went onto bash her. After the public saw the story aired, it quickly blew upon social media and the had a field day, she received so much hate online that it made it difficult for her to find work. Even after going live on the news with her nephew to clear up any misconceptions about the story to maybe stop receiving such messages online. This did not really workout for her and now she had changed her hair color and her identity so that she may go on with her life. This goes to show us how fake news and social media is capable of doing anything and will go after anyone.

7 reasons why fake news goes viral, according to experts

https://www.independent.ie/world-news/and-finally/7-reasons-why-fake-news-goes-viral-according-to-experts-36283450.html

This Article shows and tells us why fake news can be so appealing, it gives multiple examples on why we are so drawn into it. I thought this article related well to the “Aunt From Hell” story because it was fake news because not the whole story was told and it forever ruined her life.

In this week’s class, we read six articles, watches three videos, and listened to one podcast. At the beginning of class this week we heard from Group 1, they presented the book, Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: Disruptive Innovation in the Age of the Internet. They did a very nice presentation and very in-depth. The main topic for this week was looking at cancel culture. “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.” While the internet is something we use to express ourselves and share our thoughts it is also a gateway to hate and bullying. If people see something they do not like they then speak out and share it hopes other people share their views and this can lead to public shaming. “This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation.” Social media can be used for good, but most times the good outways the bad as certain people who are facing this hatred can not take random people saying vulgar things. This has lead to the loss of life and the loss of families. People rarely think before they post and end up hurting others with their words. Have you posted something you wish you didn’t?

Now let’s take a look at the good side, what does it do and what does it accomplish? “Although the hubbub of comment threads and Twitter timelines might seem to contain a wide variety of opinion, the researchers suggest that internet users tend to clump together with like-minded individuals (a tendency that internet experts have previously suggested is reinforced by online search algorithms that cater to our views).” While we tend to look at the bad parts and what social media doesn’t do well, there are things we are lucky to have. Take communication, for example, years ago you had to write letters to people you wanted to stay in touch with now you can write a quick text and talk to your friends. Social media also offers us the chance to post photos and show people how you have changed or show have you have bettered yourself. Mean comments are everywhere on the internet, but people tend to focus on the bad things rather than the good people post. Social media groups people with like interests together so hate is not something we see, but more so something we look for. Instead of caring what good people may be posting, we look for the bad and what we can do about it. “Perhaps more alarmingly, the researchers found that social media use also had a knock-on effect on real-life conversations: frequent Facebook and Twitter users were less likely to share their opinions even in face-to-face discusions when they felt their online friends hadn’t agreed with their view point.” From the ‘Spiral of Silence’ we can see that even though people know their opinions are not well-viewed they still post about it as it is their right to freedom of speech. We have a right to let people know our opinions whether other people with finding them agreeable doesn’t matter, what matters is if it’s our true opinion and we personally believe it. Rather than focusing on hate we should not be afraid to share our views as everyone has a different view, this doesn’t mean our thoughts are more important, but that if people can’t share their thoughts without fear of hate than why are we on social media, to begin with? 

Have you been subjected to hate? Have you judged another person for sharing their viewpoint? Do you like social media?