The Social Contract Theory

 The general idea of the theory is that the society should strive to develop a set of rules that make sense to everyone (making people follow them voluntarily). This directly ties to the field of IT, because the online society often deems what deserves its place in the Internet and what does not. However, in some cases it can be a double-edged sword. 

The content that gets posted online can be categorized as acceptable, controversial and unacceptable. Just like the traffic example that was brought up in the weekly topic forum. In a country where it is said that cars must be driven in the right lane. It is seen as acceptable if a person follows the rules and drives in the right lane, it can be controversial if people use the left lane to overtake others and it is downright unacceptable for people to be only driving in the left lane. In most cases the rules of what is right and what is wrong are taught to us from the day that we are born. However, everyone has different moral principles that they instill into their child, and that is where our problems can begin. The online society plays a large role in deeming what is acceptable to post online, but since the online culture is intertwined a lot of misinformation can be spread. This gets us into the topic of deepfakes.

Deepfakes are artificially generated voice clips, videos or images that are designed to mimic a person. Consider the following cases: a gag deepfake video gets posted online(this comes to mind: youtu.be/f2YbT5SGmGA), a video of a deepfake impersonating the president(https://youtu.be/HN-qlGf2mZw) and a video of "Mark Zuckerberg" spreading false information about Facebook(https://www.instagram.com/p/BypkGIvFfGZ/). In the first case society deems that video as acceptable, as it is not directly hurting anyone and to be fair it is quite humorous. The second case is trotting into the controversial zone already, because you are impersonating POTUS and that can come off as rather offensive. And in the third case complete misinformation is being spread that is designed to hurt a company. The third case is especially dangerous, because it is hard for an untrained eye to spot that the video is not genuine. This can mislead people and communities form online that can cause a great deal of harm to the company itself. This is why people should adhere to the set rules, as deviating from them can and will cause harm.

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