Let's think about the typical usage of either Facebook or Instagram. When logging in, you are bombarded by various photos and videos from your followers or friends. You engage with the content by either liking, commmenting or spreading it by sharing it to your timeline. Then the inevitable occurs, you spot a meme and it causes you to laugh so much you decide your to share it. What happenes when you select the "Share Button"? Does it simply share to your friends and it ends there? The effects can be astounding as it will reach all of your friends timeline, and if one of your friends share the content it creates an enormous domino effect. One of the most popular content to share today has become a meme, a self-replicating unit of information and as of now the most popular meme is of 13-year old, Danielle Peskoqitz Bregoli, but you may know her as the "Cash me outside,how bow dah?" girl from Dr.Phil. In September 15th,2016 Danielle appeared on Dr.Phil show as her mother attempted to get her int a straight path. Things took a turn when Danielle began referring to the audience members as, "a bunch of hos" and followed by, "Cash me outside, how bow dah" which quickly become into the hottest meme on the internet. Despite the purpose of Danielle being on Dr.Phil was to change her rebellious ways, she has been catapulted into internet fame as she appeared in Kodak Black music video, has 6.8 million followers on Instagram and her now famous meme. But being put into internet fame is not what is seems, Danielle has continued her ways and recently got into an Spirit aAirlines altercation and have been a target of threats and bullying. It seems as if the internet has only fueled her attitude and mentality as she has not changed. Yet not all stories are the same, take for example Ghyslian Raza or better known as the Star Wars kid. Raza is famous for recording himself wielding a lightsaber from Star Wars. His film unfortunately fell into the wrong hands and received over one billion views. Despite the video being funny, Raza was a target of bullying to the point he , "felt worthless, like my life wasnt worth living." Raza would later become deeply depressed and dropped out of high school. He would later redeem himself by becoming a lawyer. Out of all the meme stories I found, there was one that was the most heartbreaking. Hedi Yeh, a model from Taiwan says, " losing control of the image has ruined her career and her personal life". Yeh, posed for a photo for an advertising agency who promised to only use the image. However, the company allowed a plastic surgery provider to use the image with the title, "The only thing you'll ever have to worry about is how to explain it to the kids". Within the photo Yeh poses with a family of children who were digitally altered to have their eyes look small and their noses flat. The internet quickly created it into a meme with the caption "PLASTIC SURGERY, You can't hide it forver". Fake news began spreading of a fake story involving a man who became suspicious about his wife's looks after she gave birth to "ugly" children. He would then discover she had cosmetic surgery before thet met and decided to sue her. The news quickly spread and would lead to her family believing the story and her boyfriend breaking up with her. Yeh quotes, "The biggest loss for me is I don't want ot be a model anymore". It is very easy for me to overlook what I could possiblly be contributing to when I share a post. How could anyone forget, "The fall of edgar" on Youtube ? Facebooks main mission is to connect people around the world, yet when connecting everyone there is also a downfall. Life's could be ruined when sharing a post.
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As I am completing my homework assignment, a ring is heard within from my headphone. I let my fingers stop typing and glide over to the track pad where I search for what list of tab made that noise. My eyes scroll from right to left to find I have a new message on Facebook. The message is from a classmate which quickly answer. My Facebook timeline begins to refresh and I see recent content from my friends. Some content is their status updates while others are posts they have shared, I begin scrolling down and watch several clips of funny videos but cease when I read the headlines, “Trump Offering Free One Way Tickets to Africa & Mexico For Those Who Want to Leave America”. My immediate reaction is, “Wow the president must really want to only have a specific group of people in the US or he is granting their wishes”. I open up and begin reading the article but stop reading when the source is from TMZ as I never considered them a credible source of information. Yet, when reading and viewing the article, it was well written and structured, giving no indication that it could possibly be “fake news”. At the time, I had not been keeping close attention to the political election, so I assumed it could be something Trump would say as he is known for saying some outrageous material. In the next coming days, I would see the repeated pattern in my timeline, clickbait and fake news. Scrolling down I would read unbelieveable titles such as, “Florida man dies in meth-lab explosion after lighting farts on fire” or even “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement” titles like these were obviously fake news as they included typos and other giveaways. At the time, I did not understand the magnitude that fake news could potentially have on the presidential election or even the beliefs of a person, until my Software Engineering in Residence professor who worked at Facebook admitted that Facebook does contain and spread fake news. Perhaps, the source of fake news appearing on our timelines is not simply because our friends are sharing it but because of how believable it appears. There has been a vast amount of audio and technology advancements over the course of the years that may widen the gap of what is real or fake news. At Stanford university technologist created technology that can alter the facial expressions of a person in a video in real time. Furthermore, these alterations are not cartoonish but high quality and believable. In this clip, a video of former president, George Bush is shown while at the side is a man making face expressions. At the side by side comparison, George Bush is performing the same facial expressions the man is performing almost as if he did them himself. It made me think of some of the clips I have seen online and wondered if they were altered. In addition to this, a product nicknamed, “Photoshop for audio” was demoed at the annual Adobe developer conference. According to the website, “The product allows users to feed about ten minutes of someone's voice into the application and then allows them to type words that are expressed in that exact voice”. In the original recording a man is recorded saying, “In the morning I kissed my dog and my my wife”, which is later turned into, “In the morning I kissed Jordan three times” and it sounded exactly like the voice of the person! What if someone altered the audio of the president when he is speaking to a foreign country? Technology such as these have the potential to influence the mentality in which people view and think of their country and of the president and in the future I hope there is a clear line of what is real and fake news.
After graduating from high school, there is only a handful of friends I continue to speak and keep in contact with. One of those friends is named Fabian. The San Fransisco 49ers were playing Arizona Cardinals and I had invited him over to watch the game with me along with another group of friends. The game started and we began debating which teams would make it on into the Super Bowl. At halftime, we started catching up and each person started talking about which classes they were taking or how their life after high school has been. When the conversation focused on Fabian, he spoke about pursuing a career as a correctional officer within the local Soledad prison. Furthermore, he talked about how challenging the process has been as he has had to purchase his equiptment and pass training and exams. But out of all of those exams, he spoke highly of his most recent one. The exam was a mixture of a background check and a lie detecor test and it involved asking specific personal questions such as , "Have you ever smoked marijuana?", "Are you an alchoholic?" and the most perplexing, "What comes to mind when I say the word, 'child pornography'?" Fabain went into details of his exam such as being instructed to intially tell a lie such as, "The floor is green" when it was brown in order for the machine to register when he spoke a lie. Each time a question was answered, his brainwaves and other factors were displayed at a screen, the system offered a suggestion if the intervee was lying or telling the truth but at the end it was up the the interviewer. Given that he was nervous and the result of the questions would indicate if he would be moving forward with the training process plently was at stake. If the interviewer thought you were lying on such a question you would automatically fail and be forced to wait six months for a retake.
Question and after question, he would answer them bluntly and when the time came to answer the last question, "What comes to mind when I say the word, 'child pornography?'" he responded, "I believe it is an awful thing people would force children to do and I cannot imagine viewing or being a part of". To which the interviewer concluded was the truth and was then proceeded to a room for his fingerprints to be taken; a sign of him successfully passing the exam. Fabian emphaized how no matter whether his response was the truth or a lie at the end of the day, it was up to the machine to classify your response as the truth or a lie which influenced the decision of the interviewer. "What if the intervewer was having a bad day?", or "What if I was speaking the truth but the system read it as a lie?", Fabian asked. Forunately for Fabian, his answers passed but for another they did not. Carlos just like Fabian was seeking a career as a correctional officer and went to take the exam. When the time came for the final question, he answered truthfully but was not allowed to continue with the process since his interviewer did not believe his response. It was then, Fabian asked, "What if the results were rigged?" As I think of this now, I was able to connect it with "The Code I am still ashamed of" and other machines that may or may not be hard coded with predetermined results. Machines such as slots and claw machines right now can be programmed to select a winner after a certain amount of tries and money. I do not believe the machine was rigged but it did bring up the question what other machines could possible be hardcoded when we believe they are speaking the truth? On superbowl sunday, I spent the morning to late afternoon working on my capstone project proposal with my team. Come noon, we went to the Noodle bar and ate a great meal. The ride back to CSUMB campus was filled with rap music and several conversations. As we approached campus, the topic of robots became the center of attention and we each gave our insight of how great and helpful robots would become to humanity. Personally, the conversation become the most interesting as my team memeber spoke of how Twitter bots had a strong influence in the recent election. Given that it was my first time voting and participating in an election, I made great effort to become as informed as I possibly could. I read online news articles from various resources, watched online news and spoke with several friends to build and create my own opinion of who would be the best candidate to lead the nation. Little did I know that, I may have been a victim of a Twitter bot. According to Nanette Byrnes from MIT Technology Review, there was an estimated 400,000 Twitter bots active on the day before the election and "accounted for nearly 20 percent of all election-related messages. Since I had never heard of such a thing I was completely amazed at the statistics. Immediately, I began checking and scrolling through my Twitter timeline to try and identify a Twitter bot that I may either be following or being followed by. It was tricky attempting to identify one and I wasn't alone since the bots have now begun to imitate human behavior. In the article it is stated, "It had been easier to identify earlier bots, but now it’s incredibly difficult for a human to make a determination", the days of easily spotting a bot through a clearly too good to be true profile photo, incredible amount of tweets are over. Twitter bot acitvity can go from tweeting five times in a row to 15 and then none for the rest of the day just like a human would. As I could predict, it turned out that these bots had an influence in online Twitter debates and the election. These bots can become highly influencal with their constant retweeting of spreading misinformation, rumors and conspiracy theories. Since the bots retweet constantly, the are the reason for why, "#CrookedClinton" was trending on Twitter. This made me think, how many other Trending topics have been produced by bots when this whole time I thought it was the tweets from humans producing the trends. For Donald Trump nearly 75 pecent of the bots were found to be very supportive of his tweets. Furthermore the same bots were producing an incredible amount of positive support tweets for Donald Trump while HIlary Clinton bots tweeted neutral tweets. Before superbowl sunday, I had never heard of artifical intelligence influencing the first election I could legally participate in. One fact that I was unable to find was who is responsbible for the creation of these bots, is it a team, or a single person ? Did each presedential candidate have a team/person spawning each Twitter bots to support themselves and to shun their oppponents? In the times were every word a politician utters is being triple fact checked, these bots are making it even more difficult to distinct what is fact from fiction. Sources: Byrnes, Nanette. "How the Bot-y Politic Influenced This Election." MIT Technology Review. MIT Technology Review, 09 Nov. 2016. Web. 07 Feb. 2017. |
AuthorFirst generation computer scientist that loves football. Archives
May 2017
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