# Sam Platzman's Reading Responses (Set 1)

## 9/24 Fake News
Craig Silverman’s article analyzing the performance of fake election news stories in comparison to reliable news outlet posts exposes a different side of online interaction. The approach he took to contrasting online interactions between sources like New York Times and pro-Trump media out of Macedonia is fascinating: Silverman drew out trends from interactions found in the most interacted upon election content, which ultimately supports the notion that ‘fake news’ could become influential at the foundation of a political election, even if the most interacted-upon media comes from large media outlets. It's a horrifying fact of reality that people are so easily influenced by the boundless tides of fake media on Facebook, Twitter and other social media resources, to the point that an entire country can be quantitatively influenced by 5 eye-catching headlines.

When sites like Ending the Fed suddenly emerge on Facebook as a media resource that competes with the likes of CBS News and other credible sources, spewing out fake stories that spin and warp people’s perceptions of political and public figures, it becomes impossible to gauge (as an average Facebook user) what is real and what is fake. Going into the next decade, it should be a constant and continual effort to push towards the eradication of ‘fake news’ so that the press people read at their leisure, or the stories we find on Facebook are sourced only from credible, reliable sources that can back a true understanding of the modern world.

## 10/8 Social Networks

The modern world has become defined by connectivity, interactibility without the hindrances of physical limitations, the Internet; inevitably all that is seen are the connections forged, rather than how they are forged. The fifth chapter of Rheingold's "Social Has a Shape" begins by discussing the algorithmic determination of how these invisible connections are weaved. Rheingold presents three different philosophies: Sarnoff's Law (an arithmetic growth in accordance to the addition of nodes), Metcalfe's Law (which describes the growth as the square of the number of nodes) and Reed's Law (which describes the growth of interconnectivity as exponential with the addition of nodes).

Metcalfe's Law, out of the three, relates most to the idea of the Internet being 'the Web', in that each node is capable of connecting to every other one that can access it. Reed's Law, alternatively, relates to the idea of *network contagion*, a modern phenomenon depicting the increasing rate of growth of the world's interconnectivity as a result of the propogation of different ways people recieve and send data.

Beyond the connections devices form in relaying and recieving information, there are the connections people form by clicking a single button to send a friend request on different social medias; trillions of connections made daily with a plethora of data being collected and analyzed by larger corporations with access to what people share. In both the business and phychology of social networks, there is a measurable degree of connectedness spanning across the entire human population. In business, such connections make marketing a much simpler task in being able to relate one person minutely to those they are connected to. All someone could ever futilly hope for is that they do not eventually connect to someone who would completely skew the groups already associated with that individual.

## 10/11 Exam Review

### Mulitple Choice Questions:

1. According to the text, the echo chamber effect implies the:
a. profiling of customers based on commercial interests and targetted advertisement.
b. amplification, polarization, and increased extremism as a result of differing beliefs being filtered out of view.
c. algorithmic manipulation of visible opinions to make it seem as though a larger majority have similar beliefs to one's own.

Answer: B

2. In considering how people cooperate, why do people choose to go out of their way to punish defectors?
a. Mainly as an act of spite as a means of ensuring people follow social norms within a crowd.
b. People always desire at least an even individual share of what they are offered as a group.
c. As a measure of ensuring proper reciprocity, people use it more as an act to say what is done unto one will be done onto the other.

Answer: C

### Open Ended Questions:

1. How do Sarnoff's, Metcalfe's, and Reed's Laws differ in representing the value of a network?

Answer: Sarnoff's dictates that the value is directly proportional to the amount of nodes (N). Metcalfe's includes that each node is able to connect to one another, implying the amount of connections is N squared. Reed's Law values such a network as 2 to the power of N.

2. What is the final step in ensuring one party's public key is truthfully their own when trying to securely interact with a webpage?

Answer: A certificate can be provided from a legitimate, widely trusted source as a dictation of the key's validity in the interaction.

## 10/18 Contribution and Gender

Gender bias is the one part of every workplace, every classroom, and every study that is highly avoided, but never fully eradicated; in the field of technology, biases have led seemingly to the attrition of modern efforts to balance and stabilize the gender gap within the field of technology. Sarah Jeong and Rachel Becker’s updated article on The Verge indicates how implicit aspects of human nature that have been retained, noting the struggles women face to carve their own name against the insurmountable pressures of “good old boy culture”, which tends to either slow their career trajectory or worse, in favor for a male of equal qualifications. Women used to proudly hold stake in a vast and ever-growing technological field: programming. Their capabilities and sheer dedication allowed for the rapid decryption of encrypted messages sent out by opposing forces during World War II, but the programming paradigm has shifted from that of ENIAC programming and interpreting women to computer science graduates estranged from the foundations of their education following in the wake of the titans of the industry (eg. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, etc.) as acolytes in the procession of success. Women have been forced to the shadows in the technological field when the foundation of its modern application was cemented by the coalescence of both men and women in the field; the time has assuredly come for the gender gap in tech to finally close in order to allow for the industry to boom economically, but more importantly, socially.

## 10/25 Ads and Social Graph Background

Every action one has online, every click, like, post, scroll and swipe is tracked by a plethora of organizations determined to provide the most apt advertisements to the user. Ad servers, which are responsible for collecting, storing, and tracking users across a multitude of websites using their IP address and/or cookies, offer advertisers unprecedented levels of personal information regarding the person in front of their black mirror. Methods range from geo-targeting, to contextual targeting, and even behavioral targeting; each advertising technique diverting attention to a different facet of the user's online presence, but similarly trying to gather as much information about them in order to provide the most apt advertisement.
As discussed in class before, there is no proof in the code that companies like Facebook or Google are necessarily listening to their users through their phones in order to place targeted advertisements in their feed. This implies the eery capability of such entities to predict what may come up in conversation based upon our interactions in the day, or worse, an algorithmic patternization of our desires and interest (which can be used maliciously outside of just advertisements).
I have always found the idea of targeted advertisements to be a horrifying concept, and try to avoid being 'typed' by the likes of Facebook and DoubleClick by turning off relevant advertisements in their respective settings. It is appalling that companies that have access to ad servers and the information on them have the potential to know a person better than their closest of friends.