rladika21-blog

[rladika21-blog]

Response to Reddit Story

I thought that The New Yorker’s story about how Reddit’s CEO, Steve Huffman, went and deleted an entire community and then manipulated users’ comments back onto themselves was very interesting, but also scary, to a degree, and eye-opening. I understood Huffman’s motive for his actions; he saw the subreddit as another platform that could potentially become very dangerous because of the kinds of ideas being exchanged there. That doesn’t justify what he did, though. Silencing them like he did without telling them why or how could qualify as a violation of the users’ First Amendment rights. In the media law class I took last semester, I learned that most speech is protected by the First Amendment, even hate speech, as long as it doesn’t incite immediate violence or qualify as “fighting words.” The ideas being exchanged on the subreddit, while untrue, are protected by the First Amendment because they don’t fit that description, and the users had a right to be mad. It’s also scary because he was able to do this without anyone really knowing what was going on at the time, so that has to make you wonder what the owners of other social media platforms are able to do without our knowledge, and what they actually do. 

[rladika21-blog]

This article shows how nasty people can be on social media when there’s not really a way to truly hold people accountable for their words, and they can hide behind their computer screens. Hopefully we can eventually reach a point where this is a non-issue. 

[rladika21-blog]

Social media has, by design, fundamentally reshaped how we have conversations with each other, moving casual speech from the auditory ether to the realm of the written. And it has vastly expanded the audience for conversations that used to happen in small communities of relatively similar people, replacing them with one-to-many interactions with people who potentially have a wide array of views, and weak or even no direct personal ties.

Garance Franke-Ruta

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From Izzy Whittaker on Medium, I thought this illustration was interesting because it shows how times have changed the past few years regarding press conferences and how news is broken. Most people have a Twitter account now, and that platform works very well for people to get news instantaneously. 

Source: https://medium.com/jamieai/is-social-media-is-manipulating-you-57b5066c3fd2

[rladika21-blog]

Julia Ritchey, Rod Arquette and Glen Beeby discuss the implications that come with political figures like President Trump blocking people on social media.