My task was to make a social media account and get 20 strangers to follow me, friend me, or whatever that social media site may refer to it as. Unfortunately, I fell short of my goal.
I approached my task by choosing a social media site and then creating an account. I knew if I put a picture up of an attractive person I would probably get some bites, but I did not want to take the cat-phishing approach here. What I did instead was just picked a fictional character and attempted to make it a funny page with some memes and other funny posts. I'm sure if I had been a bit more active on my account, I may have gotten more people, but I fell just short.
Anyone can make a social media page, but it depends on the type of page you want to create that matters. I geared mine towards comedy for I had no intention to use the page for a data mining or ill intentions kind of thing. People that make accounts with other intentions and get people to connect with them on the social media site have a lot of information that can be collected. Pictures, political views, interests, and even personal information can be collected using social media. I could do a quick Google search of anyone's name, add some keywords to the search, click on, say, their Linkedin profile, and may see a picture of them, and some of their work history and current place of employment.
Ethical issues raised by my tasks depends on how someone uses the account they create. Is the person looking to collect information? Are they looking to impersonate others? Are they getting into online relationships with a real person and just toying with them? Cyber-bullying? These are morally wrong (the information collection may be arguable, though). On the other hand, someone can just start a cat appreciation page. Nothing morally wrong with that.
No comments:
Post a Comment