Social media companies make important decisions about what counts as “problematic” content and how they will remove it. Some choose to moderate hashtags, blocking the results for certain tag searches and issuing public service announcements (PSAs) when users search for troubling terms. The hashtag has thus become an indicator of where problematic content can be found, but this has produced limited understandings of how such content actually circulates. Using pro-eating disorder (pro-ED) communities as a case study, this article explores the practices of circumventing hashtag moderation in online pro-ED communities. It shows how (1) untagged pro-ED content can be found without using the hashtag as a search mechanism; (2) users are evading hashtag and other forms of platform policing, devising signals to identify themselves as “pro-ED”; and (3) platforms’ recommendation systems recirculate pro-ED content, revealing the limitations of hashtag logics in social media content moderation.
Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media
When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms.
How Instagram's moderation rules are made
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.
Morally Motivated Networked Harassment as Normative Reinforcement
While online harassment is recognized as a significant problem, most scholarship focuses on descriptions of harassment and its effects. We lack explanations of why people engage in online harassment beyond simple bias or dislike. This article puts forth an explanatory model where networked harassment on social media functions as a mechanism to enforce social order. Drawing from examples of networked harassment taken from qualitative interviews with people who have experienced harassment ( n = 28) and Trust & Safety workers at social platforms ( n = 9), the article builds on Brady, Crockett, and Bavel’s model of moral contagion to explore how moral outrage is used to justify networked harassment on social media. In morally motivated networked harassment, a member of a social network or online community accuses a target of violating their network’s norms, triggering moral outrage. Network members send harassing messages to the target, reinforcing their adherence to the norm and signaling network membership. Frequently, harassment results in the accused self-censoring and thus regulates speech on social media. Neither platforms nor legal regulations protect against this form of harassment. This model explains why people participate in networked harassment and suggests possible interventions to decrease its prevalence.
Digital Social Norm Enforcement: Online Firestorms in Social Media
Actors of public interest today have to fear the adverse impact that stems from social media platforms. Any controversial behavior may promptly trigger temporal, but potentially devastating storms of emotional and aggressive outrage, so called online firestorms. Popular targets of online firestorms are companies, politicians, celebrities, media, academics and many more. This article introduces social norm theory to understand online aggression in a social-political online setting, challenging the popular assumption that online anonymity is one of the principle factors that promotes aggression. We underpin this social norm view by analyzing a major social media platform concerned with public affairs over a period of three years entailing 532,197 comments on 1,612 online petitions. Results show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals. This effect is reinforced if selective incentives are present and if aggressors are intrinsically motivated.
Digital Social Norm Enforcement: Online Firestorms in Social Media
Actors of public interest today have to fear the adverse impact that stems from social media platforms. Any controversial behavior may promptly trigger temporal, but potentially devastating storms of emotional and aggressive outrage, so called online firestorms. Popular targets of online firestorms are companies, politicians, celebrities, media, academics and many more. This article introduces social norm theory to understand online aggression in a social-political online setting, challenging the popular assumption that online anonymity is one of the principle factors that promotes aggression. We underpin this social norm view by analyzing a major social media platform concerned with public affairs over a period of three years entailing 532,197 comments on 1,612 online petitions. Results show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals. This effect is reinforced if selective incentives are present and if aggressors are intrinsically motivated.
Building A Prosocial Media Ecosystem | NOEMA
There’s never been a better time to make social media what it always should have been: a tool to strengthen rather than strip-mine the social fabric.
RIP social media. What comes next is messy.
As social media splinters, how can we keep the new online spaces from devolving into toxic pits of despair?
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.
Facebook content management controversies
Facebook and Meta Platforms have been criticized for their management of various content on posts, photos and entire groups and profiles. This includes but is not limited to allowing violent content, including content related to war crimes, and not limiting the spread of fake news and COVID-19 misinformation on their platform, as well as allowing incitement of violence against multiple groups.
Custodians of the Internet
A revealing and gripping investigation into how social media platforms police what we post online—and the large societal impact of these decisions Most use...
A perspective on friction interventions to curb the spread of misinformation
Social media has enabled the spread of information at unprecedented speeds and scales, and with it the proliferation of high-engagement, low-quality content. Friction—behavioral design measures that make the sharing of content more cumbersome—might be a way to raise the quality of what is spread online. In this perspective, we propose a scalable field experiment to study the effects of friction with a learning component to educate users on the platform’s community standards. Preliminary simulations from an agent-based model suggest that while friction alone may decrease the number of posts without improving their quality, it could significantly increase the average quality of posts when combined with learning. The model also suggests that too much friction could be counterproductive. Experimental interventions inspired by these findings would be minimally invasive.
Your Body, Your Feed – Creating a bridge between consent and self-expression - What’s Happening on My Feed?
Recently, we’ve seen an increase in discussion around how adult content currently shows up on our platform. By adult content, we mean content that is usually labeled as pornography, non-sexual nudity, or sexually suggestive content. Labeling adult content (both text- and image-based) is an example of how we empower community members to share more of themselves with folks, without creating a non-consensual experience for other members that do not wish to engage with adult content. To solve this, we want to present you with options and invite you, as a member of our community, to decide how adult content shows up on Blacksky.
Debate: Social media in children and young people – time for a ban? Weighing up the implications and limitations of age-based social media restrictions
Recent legislation in Australia banning social media accounts for children under 16, alongside similar proposals worldwide, has ignited debate about whether age-based restrictions are an effective way to protect young people's mental health. While the intent of such bans is to reduce exposure to harmful content, their feasibility and effectiveness remain unclear. Enforcement requires robust age verification, often relying on sensitive data such as government-issued identification or facial scans, which raises privacy concerns and can be circumvented through the use of VPNs. Moreover, social media use is diverse. Although it can intensify harms such as bullying, it also provides vital opportunities for connection and support, particularly for marginalised adolescents. Removing access to accounts may limit risks within platforms, but does not prevent exposure to harmful content elsewhere, nor does it guarantee increased offline engagement. Importantly, blanket bans fail to address unsafe design features embedded within social media or to equip adolescents with the skills needed to navigate online environments. More targeted, evidence-based regulation that promotes safer platform design and accountability may provide a more effective pathway to protecting young people's well-being.
The echo chamber effect on social media
Significance We explore the key differences between the main social media platforms and how they are likely to influence information spreading and the formation of echo chambers. To assess the different dynamics, we perform a comparative analysis on more than 100 million pieces of content concerning controversial topics (e.g., gun control, vaccination, abortion) from Gab, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. The analysis focuses on two main dimensions: 1) homophily in the interaction networks and 2) bias in the information diffusion toward like-minded peers. Our results show that the aggregation in homophilic clusters of users dominates online dynamics. However, a direct comparison of news consumption on Facebook and Reddit shows higher segregation on Facebook. , Social media may limit the exposure to diverse perspectives and favor the formation of groups of like-minded users framing and reinforcing a shared narrative, that is, echo chambers. However, the interaction paradigms among users and feed algorithms greatly vary across social media platforms. This paper explores the key differences between the main social media platforms and how they are likely to influence information spreading and echo chambers’ formation. We perform a comparative analysis of more than 100 million pieces of content concerning several controversial topics (e.g., gun control, vaccination, abortion) from Gab, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. We quantify echo chambers over social media by two main ingredients: 1) homophily in the interaction networks and 2) bias in the information diffusion toward like-minded peers. Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter. We conclude the paper by directly comparing news consumption on Facebook and Reddit, finding higher segregation on Facebook.
Models of collaborative tagging
Collaborative tagging, also known as social tagging or folksonomy, allows users to apply public tags to online items, typically to make those items easier for themselves or others to find later. It has been argued that these tagging systems can provide navigational cues or "way-finders" for other users to explore information.[1][2] The notion is that given that social tags are labels users create to represent topics extracted from online documents, the interpretation of these tags should allow other users to predict the contents of different documents efficiently. Social tags are arguably more important in exploratory search, in which the users may engage in iterative cycles of goal refinement and exploration of new information (as opposed to simple fact-retrievals), and interpretation of information contents by others will provide useful cues for people to discover topics that are relevant.