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Phishing

  Phishing When we covered phishing and catfishing, I did not have to imagine any of it. I run a sports social media company, EverythingU, and I deal with this kind of thing constantly. Managing a network of campus pages with a large following makes me an obvious target. People try to sell me things I never asked for, and others message me pretending to be someone I know when it is clear they are not. What the readings helped me see is why these attempts work on other people even when they look obvious to me. Phishing relies on borrowed trust. The message looks like it comes from a person, a brand, or a company you already recognize, so your guard comes down before you have a chance to think. Catfishing does the same thing with a personality. It builds a friendly, believable identity that people want to trust. My job gives me an advantage. I see so many of these messages that I notice the patterns they follow. Their tone will be slightly off, the request comes too fast, and the ...
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Millerites

Millerite The Millerite story sounds almost impossible. In the mid-1800s, hundreds of thousands of people believed the world would end on a specific, prophesied date.  It's easy to read that and assume it could never happen today, because we have more information and more education. After thinking about it, I believe the opposite today. What worries me is how easily people get persuaded without noticing. Social media algorithms do a lot of that work. TikTok is the worst example I can think of. As we talked about in class, it reinforces the beliefs you already have. Reinforcement bias has never been more prevalent in our history.  The more you watch one kind of content, the more of it you get, until your feed feels like proof that you are right and everyone else is wrong. It also divides people. Girls are often shown one version of a story while guys are shown a completely different one, and the result is that we end up angry at each other. I believe that this is intentional...
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Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels I presented on Dirty Rotten Scoundrels , and I'll be honest: I did not expect to like it. It's an older comedy, and I went in expecting to sit through it for the assignment. Instead, I got hooked. The movie did its job, and that is the part I keep thinking about. The two con men are charming, funny, and confident, and somewhere in the first stretch of the film I realized I wanted them to succeed. In the context of the movie, I ended up calling them heroes. The film makes you comfortable with deception by making the deceivers likeable and the targets easy to laugh at. That is strange when you think about it, because these characters lie to people and take their money, and I (plus the rest of the class) was cheering for them anyway. That connects directly to what we've been studying. Con artists succeed because people trust them, and people trust them because they are charming. The movie used the same tool on me. I was never conned out of money, but...
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Salem's relation to today

Salem When we studied Salem, the part that stuck with me was not the courtroom. It was how quickly a community decided what it believed. Nineteen people were executed, and hundreds more were accused, and much of the damage came from the pressure to pick a side. Once an accusation had momentum, doubting it became risky. I won't share my opinion on the cases I'm about to mention, but the pattern reminded me of the way people are reacting to two current stories: the Lindsay Clancy case and the Cornell 7 case. Both involve extremely serious allegations, and both have been argued out online faster than they have moved through the legal system. In the Cornell case, none of the seven men had been criminally charged, and people are making strong opinions and judgments without even reading the full case. In the Clancy case, people were debating whether or not she committed the murder of her kids, which was not even what the trial was about.  In both cases, people form an opinion or ju...
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Deepfake

The deepfake unit is probably the biggest thing we will cover all year due to the rapid advancement of AI. I used to fall for those black-and-white Ring camera clips where an animal walks up and rings the doorbell. They look like security footage, the grainy quality feels authentic, and the idea is just funny enough that you want it to be real. I watched them, shared them, and never questioned where they came from. What I didn't understand then is that the format itself does a lot of the persuading. Low-quality video feels honest. We associate grainy footage with a real camera and a real moment, so we lower our guard. A fake that borrows that look gets a free pass from our brains. Today, I'm much better at catching these. Working in social media on Instagram has trained my eye. I see an enormous amount of content every day, and over time I started noticing the small things that give a fake away: movement that looks slightly off, details that don't hold up on a second look, ...
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Truth Confirmation Bias and Propaganda

Before this class, I would have told you I was pretty good at spotting bias in other people. The confirmation bias videos made me realize the person I should have been watching was me. Somewhere in the middle of those clips, I caught myself doing exactly what they described: gravitating toward information that already agreed with what I believed and brushing past everything else. I know it can sound egotistical to say this, but I am much more aware of it now. I haven't fixed it completely, and I doubt anyone does. What has changed is that I notice the pull. When I feel that quick satisfaction of seeing something that confirms my opinion, I now treat it as a signal to slow down, not a reason to keep scrolling. For the most part, I have learned not to only listen to the content that tells me what I want to hear. The propaganda material changed how I read the world around me, especially in three areas. Politics is the obvious one, since so much of it is built to trigger a reaction bef...
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Werewolves in Sheep's Clothing Blog

After reading both articles, I realized that b oth articles show that the werewolf became a real terror in the sixteenth century because people needed a way to explain things they were afraid of. Europe was dealing with harsh conditions, religious and political conflict, and the witch panic, so the werewolf trials gave people someone to blame. Specifically, many of the accused were beggars, hermits, or newcomers, and a lot of them confessed only after being tortured. Cases like Peter Stubbe, Pierre Burgot, Michel Verdun, and Giles Garnier also show that real killings were being blamed on a monster. The numbers are an issue too. One source says 30,000 people were executed in France alone, but de Blécourt traced that number back to a prosecutor who counted everyone in a whole region, and he estimates the total across Europe was probably only several hundred. I think this is why the werewolf sits between man and beast. The wolf in sheep's clothing idiom is about a predator hiding behi...
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