Trolling democracy: anonymity doesn’t cause conflicts, bad site design does

‘Don’t feed the trolls’, people on social media are told. By forcing people to use their real names online, the managers of online forums hope to shame trolls into silence. But, J…

Cleaning Up the Streets: Understanding Motivations, Mental Models, and Concerns of Users Flagging Social Media Content

Social media platforms offer flagging, a technical feature that empowers users to report inappropriate posts or bad actors to reduce online harm. The deceptively simple flagging interfaces on nearly all major social media platforms disguise complex underlying interactions among users, algorithms, and moderators. Through interviewing 25 social media users with prior flagging experience, most of whom belong to marginalized groups, we examine end-users’ understanding of flagging procedures, explore the factors that motivate them to flag, and surface their cognitive and privacy concerns. We found that a lack of procedural transparency in flagging mechanisms creates gaps in users’ mental models, yet they strongly believe that platforms must provide flagging options. Our findings highlight how flags raise critical questions about distributing labor and responsibility between platforms and users for addressing online harm. We recommend innovations in the flagging design space that enhance user comprehension, ensure privacy, and reduce cognitive burdens.

Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer

In the wake of the tragic death of Sir David Amess, some politicians are calling for a law banning anonymous social media profiles. But it’s not the right way to tackle online abuse.

Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is not the answer

In the wake of the tragic death of Sir David Amess, some politicians are calling for a law banning anonymous social media profiles. But it’s not the right way to tackle online abuse.

An Attack on Tech Freedom, an Assault on Dissent

We live in a world of surveillance states, militarized police, and crackdowns on dissent. Meanwhile, corporate behemoths will often ally with the state to shut down dissident speech or aid and abet surveillance.  In this context, it’s important for independent groups to develop and maintain encrypted communications platforms and independent web hosting. But the Trump...

Empowering Users, Not Overlords: Overcoming Digital Helplessness

Disclosure: I’m on the board of Bluesky, so feel free to take as many grains of salt as you want in reading it, though all of it applies equally to other decentralized social media ecosys…

Harm Through the “#RizzCam”: Smart Glasses, Ambient Capture and Invisible Harassment

In online safety research, harassment is commonly understood as involving overt and unwanted acts that create a hostile environment for individuals or groups. Smart glasses, or wearable digital devices that are often indistinguishable from ordinary eyewear but can record video, audio and location data in real time, enable new forms of online harassment and gender-based harms that may not be recognised by current online safety or platform governance frameworks. Drawing on an interpretive content analysis of 350 point-of-view Instagram videos posted by individuals self-associated with the pick-up artistry (PUA) community, we examine how smart glasses can be used to harass women through what we call ambient capture. Ambient capture includes clandestine recording of people and social interactions within public, semi-private and private spaces. We argue this can constitute harassment when it is targeted at women and shared online without their consent. In our study, we found videos using ambient capture practices to harass women that had gone undetected by Instagram’s content moderation systems. These findings suggest online safety regimes and content moderation approaches should be assessed to ensure they account for the more invisible forms of harassment introduced by smart glasses and other wearable technologies.

“Anything you post on the internet will be there as long as it's embarrassing an... | Hacker News

What the heck happened with .org? | The Mozilla Blog

If you are following the tech news, you might have seen the announcement that ICANN withheld consent for the change of control of the Public Interest Regis

The politics of ‘platforms’

Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what they do and do not do, and how their place in the information landscape should be understood. One term in particular, ‘platform’, reveals the contours of this discursive work. The term has been deployed in both their populist appeals and their marketing pitches, sometimes as technical ‘platforms’, sometimes as ‘platforms’ from which to speak, sometimes as ‘platforms’ of opportunity. Whatever tensions exist in serving all of these constituencies are carefully elided. The term also fits their efforts to shape information policy, where they seek protection for facilitating user expression, yet also seek limited liability for what those users say. As these providers become the curators of public discourse, we must examine the roles they aim to play, and the terms by which they hope to be judged.

‘Now we don’t have a safe place’: sex workers’ social media site Switter shuts down amid legal fears

Platform says government changes to online safety and defamation laws in Australia, UK and US made it ‘impossible’ to comply