doctor who exposed coronavirus earliest is now dead

The coronavirus has now infected 34664 people and caused 724 people dead. The Hubei province in China, which has 60 million people, is entirely locked down. Why the virus spread so quickly? This case might help.

Doctor Li, who exposed the existence of coronavirus at first in December, passed away because of virus. When he first published the information about coronavirus, the police locked him up and let him sign an official confession form.

The government immediately hold a press conference and said that "the coronavirus is totally fake news and people who spread the rumors will get punished". This happened in late December and the outbreak of virus came afterward. This is a severe information ethics issue that the government misled its people heavily and tried to block the truth. What is information ethics? According to Floridi, "it's described as the study of moral issues arising from availability, accessibility, and accuracy of information resources, independently of their format, kind and physical support". This is information-as-a-product ethics and morality comes how people decide to publicize their "product". Doctor Li realized the significant negative influence of virus and decided to publish the information due to the responsibility as a doctor and the action of the government came from long-term bureaucracy. They have the same product -- information of coronavirus and the difference in handling information caused a profound sequence to the society and entire humankind.

Kant's analysis shows the immortality of lying and we can see how ineffective management of information product can have tragic consequences. Admittedly, sometimes the lying is inevitable. However, it depends on the product we are facing with. A piece of good news is China has sent a special investigation team to get more details about doctor's death and the leaders of government made the decision to improve the management system of information products. Improvements are always good but the price is sometimes too high to be affordable.

The Value of Nature in a Technological World

Thinking about nature brings thoughts of beautiful natural patterns, stillness coupled with wilderness, and even a breath of fresh air. However, when I think about nature through a screen… It’s just… different.

In the 2012 movie Cloud Atlas, there is a timeline/storyline about New Seoul (fictional), which takes place in the year 2144. The movie depicts bleak, gray apartments-almost reminiscent of a cement cage. There is little furnishings and amenities shown in the space. However, a few seconds into entering the depressing emptiness of the character’s apartment a technological wall is turned on which emerges the room into an image of naturalistic views. The wall transforms from depressing to peaceful and beautiful. There are vivid colors and romantic nature depictions. The images take up every inch of the walls to portray a vastly larger, outdoor themed, apartment. When shown the city of “New Seoul”, there doesn’t appear to be nature in sight but rather like every available outdoor surface is either gray or equipped with electronics (screens, lights, etc.).

Friedman, Kahn Jr, and Borning in the article titled “Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems” reviewed information suggesting that interaction with real nature can garners physiological and psychological benefits.

Nature on a screen is just different. When you’re in nature your senses are all used, while on a screen it is just visually appealing. The Friedman, Kahn Jr., and Borning article studied and collected data on the participants who could see a real natural view versus one displayed on the screen. They measured physiological data (heart rate), performance data, video data which studied eye movement, immediate physiological equipment analysis (to study effects), and social-cognitive data (50 minute interviews). This study showed negative effects when viewing nature through a screen.

New Seoul’s dystopian future view brings up a ringing issue: we are using natural resources and becoming heavily dependent on technology. When thinking of this type of dystopian future, it brings to light the ethics of saving natural resources and wilderness areas for our future generations. If we continue down this linear progression, will our only option to look at screens of nature?

The Friedman, Kahn Jr., and Borning article showed that looking at nature on a screen negatively affects psyche. Without any of these resources left, will we maintain a healthy psyche? Our values should align with creating better technology, but still maintaining the serene beauty of nature, which have been shown to have positive effects on psyche.

I believe that although technology is amazing, we need to be weary of our actions, and decrease our use of natural resources while preserving wild life. We need to gift future generations with not only amazing technology, but a place to escape and be free- within nature.

Coronavirus know since 2015? Perception Of Truth, Lies, and Bullshit

BREAKING: The Coronavirus was known and patented by the US government since 2015 and is listed on the back of Lysol bottles. STAY WOKE.

This is just one of the more recent false news stories that have been circulating on social media websites like Facebook and sent to family and friends via WhatsApp.

People see stories like this and simply hit the “like” and “share” and don’t do any further research because “a friend wouldn’t lie to me” or that they think it is just funny. However, a simple Google search of the patent number or what the Coronavirus is will inform them that it is a family of viruses and the new Coronavirus spreading is just a different strain.

Even moreover is that there are multiple fake news and satirical pages across Facebook that are spewing stories like this across many different topics, like the Facebook page America’s Last Line of Defense mentioned in Eli Saslow’s Washington Post article “‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in Online America”, which are up to the reader to determine if the article is true, a lie, or just plain bullshit.

And in order to tell the difference, Harry Frankfurt lays out a clear line between someone who bullshits and someone who lies: "[The bullshitter] does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose herself to it. She pays no attention to it at all.”

It is clear that in Saslow’s article Christopher Blair is a liar who is trying to deceive people from his page, however, not everyone who shares the posts may be aware of this. Apart from people like Shirley who share it because it aligns with their beliefs, there are people who share stories solely on the basis that it is so absurd that they don’t really care if it's real or not, they share it just for others to laugh. But, then this affect chains onto their friends where some will think the story is true because “a friend wouldn’t lie to me” and others who share it just because it's bullshit.

In the end, after all the shares and circulation of the false stories, in online world or photoshop and deep fakes, and with

61 percent [of people] read[ing] articles on social media sites [being more] likely to like, share, or comment on content shared by a friend

it will become increasingly hard to tell if a circulating story, like on Blair’s page or the Coronavirus patent/Lysol story, is shared based on the person believing in it and opposing the truth or if it is complete bullshit.

How’d that age? A review of Gelernter’s “A Second Coming - A Manifesto”

1999. Ricky Martin. Brittany Spears. Sugar Ray. David Gelernter. “Wait. Do you mean Dave Matthews?” I do not.

Best known for developing the “Linda” programming language and surviving a unabomber attack, Gelernter is a computer science professor who wrote his manifesto in 1999 about the current and future state of computing. Fast forwarding 20 years, let’s see how things actually played out.

The piece starts out interesting enough, but it quickly feels as if half the read is him complaining about computers. For example, when he states, “The …”desktop” interface...is obsolete” or the mouse “...is a bad design.”. My favorite is his assessment that computer file directories are awful because they are, “...designed by programmers for programmers”.

“A file should be allowed to be in no directory, one directory, or many directories.” Reading that didn’t make sense until I thought maybe by “no directory” this guy means just have it laying around. Is he a super well-organized person? The opposite?

“Many files should be allowed to share one directory.” It’s called Excel. It’s been around since 1985.

“You shouldn't have to put files in directories. The directories should reach out and take them.” I think I know just the guy he can talk to about that!

Moving on. There are a few statements he makes that actually turned out mostly true. The one he hammered right on the head was regarding how people don’t want to be connected to computers, but rather the information we can access from computers. He also describes the future as computers everywhere that can be personally accessed by all with unique “calling cards”. While we’re not exactly carrying around “calling cards” computers are everywhere, and we do access them uniquely.

Gelernter might be a genius of sorts. I’ll give him credit for his computer language and predicting the modern day smartphone. He also seems a little screwy. He had this idea of a shadow butterfly (a real butterfly is ‘scanned’ into interactive cyberspace), and believes files shouldn’t need names. How do you find that which has no name? Here's Gelernter, by the way.

Tinder Embedded Values

Those of us who haven't been living underneath a rock know what Tinder is. For those of you that are a bit out of the loop, it is a modern location based social media that allows for people in similar areas to chat with each other and potentially meet up. This was all that Tinder was originally intended for, but has transformed into an online platform used to find people to hook up with. This transformation is a result of embedded values in the programming, or tendencies in the programming to promote moral value or norms.

Tinder Gender Interest Prompt

One of the first questions Tinder asks you when signing up, is what gender you are interested in matching with. This is the bit of programming that turns this app from a location based social media site to a dating site. This promotes people seeking out other people on this platform on the basis of becoming romantically or sexually involved with each other rather than interacting with others on the basis of friendship. I am not saying that social media should not allow for interaction between people who are attracted to each other, but eliminating interactions with people you are not attracted to creates a platform more similar to a dating site.

Although this changes what tinder is, I don't believe it is the embedded value that is most concerning about Tinder -- this would be the focus on appearance to match users. As you can see on the picture on the right of a tinder profile, what you initially see is the user's picture with their name and less than a sentence about them. Although you can view more details about them, the app programming encourages users to swipe left (not match) or swipe right (match) based off of the picture provided. This is what turned Tinder into a hookup app. The app went from the initial idea of being able to match up with people in your area with similar interest to matching up with attractive people in your area and often times not knowing much about them.

Some may not see this as a big issue -- so what if people want to hook up with attractive people close by? That may be true, but Tinder has become so big that it could have an effect on the very culture of our society. What it means to be in a relationship with someone may drastically change and what we want in our relationships may as well. If we no longer care about intimate connection and love for another person based on personality and what we want out of our relationships is simply sex, then this may not be an issue. If these are values we wish to uphold, Tinder's programming may be something that we have to rethink or refrain from.

Why Facebook’s Political Ad Policy is not Morally Neutral

Social media is relatively new technology that has quickly shaped the landscape of political discourse, business, and social interaction. Despite such influence on society, social media giants such as Facebook are left to regulate their own activities with very little oversight.

Between the 2016 Presidential Election and the subsequent investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, people have begun to understand the profound influence social media has and how easily it can be abused.

Google and Twitter have since overhauled their political advertisement policies to prevent microtargeting and dramatically limited the presence of political advertising. However, Facebook has refused to change their political advertisement policy and claims that to do would be censorship. Furthermore, they refuse to ban politicians from lying in their ads.

A common misconception people have is the idea that computer systems and software are morally neutral. This is addressed by Philip Brey in The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics. Brey refers to the embedded values approach to claim the design of computer systems have moral consequences. Computer systems and software are not morally neutral and through their development application designers are encoding embedded moral values and norms. For example, computer programs can support or be against privacy or freedom of information.

By allowing politicians to lie in Facebook ads, the social media giant is providing algorithmic infrastructures for the spread of disinformation. Facebook has a responsibility to address this issue as the current design of their platform embodies undemocratic values.

Mask Off: Fake Names and Problematic Profiles

Social media has earned its place as one of the most impactful technologies of the new millennium. Public usage of this technology has seen a meteoric rise, and as of June 2019, 72% of Americans have created an account on at least one social media platform . Additionally, the average American spends 144 minutes of their day on social networking apps. This deep and broad usage of social media throughout society has changed how we interact with the world around us and also how we interact with ourselves. One aspect that has seen the most change is our sense of identity. On some social media platforms, we are able to represent ourselves as we please, separated from reality’s limitations. This has made these platforms a haven for society’s most marginalized individuals who face scrutiny offline for being who they are. However, loose identity verification has also enabled certain users to abuse this freedom for problematic purposes.

In “Constructing and enforcing ‘authentic’ identity online”, authors Oliver Haimson and Ann Hoffman document how the policies of social media websites limit marginalized individuals from representing themselves in the way they please. Facebook, for example, requires users represent themselves with their real, government issued identity. This creates problems for certain users like transgender individuals, who face account shutdowns because of ID verification issues stemming from name changes. One platform which remedies this issue is Twitter, which as former CEO Dick Costello states, “does not care about real names”. On Twitter, there is no system for verification, which allows users to represent themselves as they please. For marginalized individuals, this is great and allows for beautiful self expression, but this system is abused by a good amount of Twitter users for harmful purposes. An example of this is prominent Twitter user @ogmaxb, who masquerades as a black man and uses the n-word despite being caucasian. This false representation serves to reinforce negative stereotypes about African Americans that society is working hard to reverse. Additionally, this account and others like it reap benefits from a community they do not represent or contribute to.

Left: Image of Twitter user @ogmaxb,  Right: Tweets showing @ogmaxb freely using the n-word

Though Twitter’s lack of real name policy has allowed for some users to represent themselves authentically, it has also given way to harmful and inauthentic representation which needs to be regulated. A happy medium must be discovered which allows for free expression, but discourages harmful misrepresentation moving forward. 

#CANCELLED

There are certain rules we are all raised with: treat others how you want to be treated, be honest, don't lie. These rules stay with us our entire life and serve as a guideline on how to live and interact with others. In the modern world, these rules can also regulate how we interact with others through technology.

Shannon Valor, author of Social Networking Technology and the Virtues, gives an argument for how basic virtues can be transcended into social media. In her paper, she quotes Aristotle's idea that virtues don't come from nature or choice, rather they emerge from social and physical conditions.

Cancel culture is a great example of this idea. Every week, there seems to be a trending hashtag in the form of #[insert celebrity name]iscancelled. They could be getting "cancelled" for something that they said, something that was said about them, or even something as small as what they wore. People go to the lengths of looking at celebrity tweets from over 10 years ago in an attempt to "cancel" them. Once the first #cancelled gets out, the tweets multiply until everyone is determining this person to be "cancelled."

But why is cancel culture a thing?

Each #cancelled phenomena probably starts with good intentions. Someone sees something that they find to be offensive, and they tweet about it. Then, a few hundred people catch on. In little to no time, there are millions of people tweeting #cancelled, but the majority of them are doing it for reasons different from how the phenomena started. They tweet because other people are doing it, and they want to bandwagon. The hashtag is trending now, so if they use it, there is the possibility that they will get more followers and attention from it.

These people did not meaningfully cause harm by joining the cancel phenomena, but they were rather aided by the social conditions that came along with it.

  

Lying, Deception & Suppression: Application of Thomas Carson's Ideologies

From the start of our lives, we’re instructed not to lie. We’re berated when we do, and constantly reminded of the trust and integrity compromised when we decide to have a change of heart. As time goes on, we more or less become accustomed to this loss of integrity, trading in the values we’ve grown to cherish in exchange for what Thomas Carson, in his piece “Lying, Deception and Related Concepts” defines as lying. Lying, as Carson describes, is delivering a statement that the speaker knows to be false, but wishes (and persuades the listener to believe) is true. Many believe the morality of intentionally lying to be clearly in the wrong except in cases such as preventing embarrassment or detriment to the recipient. However, lying is common enough that the listeners have started to catch on, and have growingly decided to flip the script on the speakers. 

Rather than being duped on the receiving end of fibs, the listeners have decided to lie before the speakers can, immediately discrediting the thoughts of the speaker which they know are true. This may seem unorthodox, but with growing surveillance and heightened pressures to maintain the appearance of stability, the Chinese government has embodied this notion to prevent dissidence and civil unrest. By denying the validity of potentially damaging statements made by whistleblowers and political critics, they don't have to worry about the impact of these claims, because they're simply not true. This hand-waving philosophy was brought into the spotlight with the recent silencing of Li Wenliang (top right), a prominent doctor in the Wuhan province stuck in the epicenter of the feared Coronavirus outbreak1. Shocked by the emergence of a virus similar to the SARS epidemic that ravaged the country more than a decade prior, Wenliang alerted hospital workers in the area to be on the lookout for carriers, much to the dismay of the government, who subsequently reprimanded Wenliang and worked to discredit this observation from one of their own doctors, while the virus continued to spread without proper preventative measures in place. With the spread of the virus comes a new victim - the death of traditional lying and the subsequent ushering of the deception era by those who do not want these thoughts to be heard. With Carlson absent from the scene, it’s up to us to reevaluate the fate of the most common sin.

Is social media making us grow further apart?

You may have hundreds of Facebook friends, or thousands of Instagram followers. You religiously send out Snapchat pictures and tell everyone about your day on Twitter. But how many of those people would you say you have a genuine human connection to?

You may have countless Facebook friends and social media followers, but in the end what does that really mean? Source

In The Fourth Revolution, Floridi argues that technology has shifted our social interactions as there has been an erosion of the “right to ignore”, and what is deemed “common knowledge” is much greater than before due to the widespread availability of information online. When you unavoidably see a picture show up in your feed of a high school classmate that you haven’t talked to in years at a party, this scene enters your mind even though you did not specifically consent to wanting this information in the first place.

With this shift, there is also an increased amount of responsibility that comes if you want to maintain a relationship. If a friend posts that something good has happened to them, it is expected that you should “like” that message. If someone posts that they feel like they have been wronged, it is only natural to post a comment expressing how angered you are on their behalf. It is no longer acceptable to simply catch up in person when meeting an old friend again by making the excuse that you had no way of knowing what was going on in their life, and this increased burden means that it may be easier to let certain relationships fall to the wayside in order to conserve energy.

Imagine someone you haven’t talked to in a while sending you a “happy birthday” message. In the past, there might have been some sense of awe and newfound appreciation for that person (“wow, this person remembered my birthday!”). But now, with all that personal information readily accessible online, such gestures become far less personal.

With all the clutter that social media adds to our lives, it has become more important than ever before to savor the genuine human connections that we have and be able to distinguish them properly. After all, our friends list and followers list do not accurately represent the connections that we have in reality.

Facebook and Access to Fake News

When I was in first grade, I had a teacher who always told her students that everything has a good use and a bad use. If we ever doodled on our desks, she would tell us that that was an example of a “bad use” for a pencil. If us students ever fought and yelled at each other, she would tell us that yelling was not the right use of our voices. I remember feeling very annoyed and asking myself why we were even given pencils in the first place if we weren’t supposed to write on desks.

Even though it might seem trivial, this is an important aspect of information and technology ethics. We are clearly still adapting to the moral dilemmas that new technologies have posed, one of these being the regulation placed on these new technologies. Many everyday platforms and devices we use can be employed with objectively wrong intentions: Facebook can be a platform for fake news, Tinder can be used to facilitate stalking, and Snapchat can be used for bullying.

In “Values in technology and disclosive computer ethics”, Philip Brey introduces the idea of embedded values in tech. Through embedded values, Grey discusses that certain devices or platforms “have built-in tendencies to promote or demote particular values”. This idea is particularly relevant in the controversial debate on Facebook’s responsibility to stop the spread of fake information on its platform.

Facebook has been criticized for not doing enough to filter through false information posted on the web. As a result, Facebook has already stated that it will implement measures to limit fake and misleading information. Although vaguely explained, these measures are mostly targeted at sites covered by ads which post fake headlines for clicks.

Although it is positive for Facebook to want to create a better platform for its users, this initiative poses a dangerous issue: the company will now have the authority to determine the meaning of “fake news”. This means that Facebook will be shaping our perceptions of what is happening around us. Is it really worth it to limit information? We should all be given access to all information on the web, but also educated to distinguish between fake news and facts.

In first grade, I eventually learned what the best use of a pencil is because I was given the opportunity to find its benefits. Shouldn’t we do the same with Facebook?