Davidson College Fall 2018
I am not very familiar with QAnon. From the little research I’ve done, it seems that QAnon is well known. However, this Washington Post article says otherwise. It claims that 42% of people polled don’t know enough about QAnon to rate their feelings about it, and of those who did rate it, the average score […]
The Qanon conspiracy centers around one individual, who goes by Q and who claims to have access to top-secret information about the government, especially about the Trump Administration. The first posts by “Q” started on the 4chan message board. Since then posts have included conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton, other Democratic politicians and anti-Trump people. In Ben Collins’ ABC News article “What is Qanon? A guide to the conspiracy theory taking hold amount Trump supporters,” Jared Holt, a research associate for Right Wing Watch, says that Qanon gives Trump supporters “a way to explain away any scandal or slip-up the president may face.” Followers of the conspiracy theory can use it to explain any typos or wrongdoings committed by the president. When Donald Trump tweeted about “17 angry democrats” the number 17 became a frequent point of conversation for Qanon followers on the internet. According to “How Donald Trump’s own words have helped fuel the Qanon fire” by Marcus Gilmer, This tweet led to theories about a deeper meaning and a connection or nod to Qanon, because the 17th letter in the alphabet is Q. Qanon has all the characteristics of all conspiracy theories: nothing is as it seems, nothing happens by accident, and everything is connected. Qanon truly tries to connect every seemingly unimportant detail into an elaborate story and becomes a very farfetched conspiracy theory, that is backed up with what seems like very persuasive evidence. At first, Qanon and all of the conspiracy that comes from it seems so farfetched and difficult to see how anyone would buy into the theories, but Collins’ and Gilmer’s articles show the ways in which Qanon could be considered beneficial to Trump supporters. Whether or not every Qanon follower believes every statement put out by “Q” I think that the main reason to buy into the conspiracy theory is that it is a way for them to support Trump, even though he makes ridiculous statements sometimes. Like most conspiracy theories the believers want to believe them for their own beneficial reasons. Qanon and the connection to Donal Trump is a great example of how conspiracy theories develop and why anyone would believe them. Sources: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/what-qanon-guide-conspiracy-theory-taking-hold-among-trump-supporters-n897271 https://mashable.com/article/qanon-trump-conspiracy-explainer/#NxsvqMFe4Oqf
One of the most interesting topics to me that we have been discussing this week, especially in the most recent case study is the term “Fake News”. As the reading shows, anonymous groups are even being formed off of information such as this. After becoming famous through President Trumps radical usage of it as blaming […]
After listening to Zeynep Tufecki’s TED talk, I thought deeply about her argument that artificial intelligence is no longer programming but has become a series of algorithms that we have grown and can no longer understand. She essentially describes this intelligence as a black box, where the algorithms take some information in, and then almost […]
In Zeynep Tufekci’s Ted Talk titled “We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads,” she discusses how algorithms that are used to help with advertising on social media and other places online can also be used to control us in ways not com…
As someone who has personally experienced watching YouTube videos until 3 a.m, I can attest that it is a weird place. But on the surface, it is rather unalarming. I do not remember what I started out watching, but now I am subscribed to about ten channels, some that fall under make-up and some that […]
The Amish of America are the last people you would think to see on Facebook, but in reality they have flourishing group on Facebook. Michael J. Coren, in a Quartz article, wrote about how the amish are making the choice to adopt new technologies into Amish culture. Facebook to the Amish is much a choice rather than […]
In James Bridle’s article “Something is wrong on the internet”, he discusses how artificial intelligence allows for the mass production of disturbing “kids” videos on YouTube with the intent of making a profit. He provides countless examples of automated videos, many almost exact replicas of others. While scrolling through the article and watching some of […]
Generating a truly random number may sound simple on paper. You pick a number within a certain range and voila. The question is how you mass produce those random numbers if let’s say you want to create a gambling website. To answer this question, many computer scientists have created computer programs, of which the sole …
The recent uprise of individuals avoiding restaurants because of the restaurant’s political views is something that should not be surprising. On basic moral premise, it makes sense that if a consumer disagrees with a restaurant’s public political stance, he or she would avoid going there. This situation happened when Chick-fil-A announced that they did not […]
