A Better Auth Experience; The Rise and Power of Social Media Censorship

Introduction
I want to start off by disclaiming that my technical topic has no direct
relationship to my STS topic. My technical project examines my summer
internship at Amazon. I give a detailed analysis of my thinking process and my
contributions during my time there. I worked by myself and with my mentor to
create a dashboard that helped AWS IAM aggregate and disseminate IAM
findings to assist in the auditing and monitoring of progress. My STS paper on the
other hand dives deep into the evils of social media that many people today are not
talking about.

Technical Topic
Millions of people use AWS services and billions of APIs for services are
used daily. As each API for a service is called, the user must be verified first and
be assigned sufficient permissions to call the API. Most users can adjust
permissions once and move on with their life worrying about bigger problems.
This is made possible because of the AWS IAM team. Making authentication and
authorization seamless to the user. It's one of the things that you don’t notice unless
something is wrong. Then it becomes very noticeable and frustrating.

My role as a part of the AWS IAM Auth team was to create a dashboard to
display and identify these calls that were not working properly. Our team tested
every possible call every day to identify which services were not working as
expected. Creating this dashboard expedited the process of finding failures and helped management identify the progress that my team was making towards our goal of 100% consistent auth experience for the user.

STS Topic
All good things must come to an end. As technology has advanced and made
leaps and jumps in the past decade it has left behind many regulations and ethical
practices. In particular, social media as a technology has been on a rising surge of
user activity and influence. This influence has gone unchecked and can cause many
problems in the future if nothing is done.

My research looks into previous incidents of social media going un-checked
and the consequences that a country and population could face. There are many
hidden agendas that social media giants hold that are private, my research tries to
identify these. Along with this, I also identify a couple of solutions to this social
media pandemic.

Conclusion
Although my technical topic and STS research topic are vastly different,
they both involve the newest and most innovative technology. As technology
evolves so does the world. It is important that we as a society are able to keep up
with this fast pace environment.

School of Engineering and Applied Science
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Technical Advisor: Rosanne Vrugtman
STS Advisor: Richard Jacques