Week5Discussion-table4

Donald Trump on Social Media

This rather long Wikipedia article meticulously documents and highlights the president’s twitter journey, noting huge spikes in his twitter activity and the fact that a majority of his tweets are fallacies, and many tweets that personally attack people. A lot of Trump’s attacks on people have been false information but lead to chain reactions and death threats to those parties involved, even on random innocent citizens. Although President Obama began this concept of social media president, Donald Trump has used his influence to extremes that have never been seen in human history. His personal twitter account (because he doesn’t typically use the @POTUS account) has become a huge influence on the economy, interpersonal affairs, national affairs, and international relations.

Reddit and the God-Emperor of the Internet

The God-Emperor is a euphemism that Reddit users of the subreddit r/the_donald use to refer to Donald Trump, and the members of the subreddit refer to themselves as the Centipedes. The subreddit has established its own culture and uses language in ways that outside members would typically find difficult to understand. The community is known to be incredibly toxic, is known to overthrow moderators, and violently discuss their opposition. It is similar in qualities to a cult.

Silicon Execs Raising Their Kids Tech-Free

Google and Apple outwardly advertise their products as being safe for children and families to use however employees are outwardly expressing that they minimize the use or eliminate the use of these products entirely in their day to day home lives. One woman even reports that she can’t even talk on the phone in front of her children and is diligently working to raise her children tech-free. This implies that even employees in silicon valley realize that the tech they are creating is actually incredibly harmful to familiar development. One study finds that damages from social media and technology did to children were reversible and not permanent when children participate in tech-free retreats that involve hiking and archery and other outdoor activities. In the group of children that went to the retreat empathy levels increased amongst the children. Schools have begun to accommodate anti-tech movements.  Some technologies can be used however in more productive ways to teach children like reverse-engineering activities. Overall, children who live with less technology before the age of 13 perform better in school, and with creating emotional connections with others.

Our Minds Can Be Hacked

This article reviews multiple stories of people who left tech giant companies to lead more tech reduced lives. Rosenstein created the like button in 2009 and later called out Facebook on this so he led a team to research the negative effects of social media. He eventually left Facebook with a man named Harris to research this further. Rosenstein found that although Facebook has the means to change how negatively it is affecting users, it will not since a majority of its income from ads. Facebook now has behavioral scientists to ensure that the technology is inherently addictive and takes advantage of “triggering” emotions. Rosenstein admits that getting user attention is not inherently evil, just capitalism. Facebook was not created with malicious intent but nowadays it certainly seems like they are taking advantage of their power to keep people’s attention.

Should we Build a Publicly funded Social Media App?

//We did not get to discussing this article in time//