‘I Have a Folder in My Email Called Hate Mail’: Academic Public Engagement, Digital Hate and the Unequally Distributed Risks of Visibility

Jay Van Bavel, PhD on Twitter / X

I think it’s extremely unhealthy for any academic field to make it taboo to critique publications from senior or junior scholars or to critique certain popular methods. This makes the field worse or makes us look bad to people outside our field (including the public). It erodes…— Jay Van Bavel, PhD (@jayvanbavel) October 13, 2024

Shreya Shankar on Twitter / X

This problem has gotten significantly worse. As Twitter and other social media have become primary channels for sharing research, academics are now expected to make the same ideas legible and appealing to both the general public (to go "viral") and senior scholars (to get the… https://t.co/zPF3tKzbVa— Shreya Shankar (@sh_reya) July 25, 2026

I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day | Anonymous

Objectification, hate, rape threats: the politicians debating online abuse mean well, but to truly understand, they need to see what I see

Scholarly Communication Is a Research Problem. This Means You.

Scholarly Communication Is a Research Problem.

Banning anonymous social media accounts will do more harm than good | James Ball

Labour’s Angela Rayner wants to end online abuse, but she fails to understand the lives of those outside the political and media bubbles, says former Guardian special projects editor James Ball

Guide to Responsible, Strategic Reporting on Hate and Extremism

Recommendations for researchers, journalists and others on how to avoid unintentionally bolstering extremists and causing additional harm.

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.

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...

Social Media and Anti-Social Pluralism - Aaron Ross Powell

Communities are different online and off, and pluralism that thrives in the real world can turn toxic in the digital world.

Cas (Stephen Casper) on Twitter / X

It is hard to overstate how disappointing I think this new paper from Oxford, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google (et al) is. I can't take it seriously as academic work, just as propaganda. It also has some very bad scholarship and questionable adherence to research ethics. Having… pic.twitter.com/Z5fBx360ya— Cas (Stephen Casper) (@StephenLCasper) May 13, 2026

Xodus

...Building a movement away from toxic social media platforms, towards alternative open social media...

How Social Media Tricks our Brains — and Destroys our Politics - Aaron Ross Powell's Blog