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The Principles of Citizen Behavioral Science

In a series of short talks we’re going to share exam­ples of some of our past and upcom­ing work, along­side exam­ples from our par­ent orga­ni­za­tion Global Voices. But I want to start by say­ing some­thing about how we go about our work.

Understanding Systems and Creating Change

One of the things I found inter­est­ing about both of your con­ver­sa­tions is that as we start to see code becom­ing a pow­er­ful force in soci­ety, we’re no longer just try­ing to change laws but we find ourselves—just as we’re cit­i­zens try­ing to encour­age the gov­ern­ment or con­gress­peo­ple to change laws—we’re now stand­ing out­side of com­pa­nies say­ing well, there’s code that affects our lives.

Managing Online Partisan Conflict in r/politics with CivilServant

Liberal users com­prise a larg­er per­cent­age of these r/politics users, while con­ser­v­a­tives will com­prise a small­er per­cent­age. Through those users and through their vot­ing, they can con­trol what is seen and what is not seen. So a lib­er­al user, as a block, will down­vote more often than not some­thing they don’t agree with necessarily. 

Preventing Online Harassment in r/science

r/science is real­ly the largest sci­ence forum on the Internet. We say that we have more than 18 mil­lion sub­scribed users. For a point of ref­er­ence, the total com­bined sub­scriber base of the top ten news­pa­pers in the United States is around ten million.

Public Accountability in Research Ethics

Experimentation is so com­mon­place on the Internet now that if you use a plat­form like Facebook you’re prob­a­bly part of many exper­i­ments all the time.

Reducing Side-Effects of Copyright Bots on Twitter

Underlying this project is a pret­ty sim­ple and we think pow­er­ful idea that pro­vides a solu­tion to a com­plex chal­lenge that’s fac­ing online com­mu­ni­ties like Twitter, like Reddit, with­in the CivilServant uni­verse. That chal­lenge is the increas­ing automa­tion of the enforce­ment of legal rules and norms online.

Public Lab & DIY Environmental Science

Public Lab is a com­mu­ni­ty and a non­prof­it, and we do envi­ron­men­tal work with peo­ple all over the world. And we real­ly try to address envi­ron­men­tal issues that affect peo­ple. What we do we call com­mu­ni­ty science.

Four Myths of Women and Online Gaming

I’m a pro­fes­sor here in com­par­a­tive media stud­ies and I’m codi­rec­tor of an orga­ni­za­tion called AnyKey which I’ll tell you a lit­tle bit about today. We launched 2016 with the help of Intel and ESL. We’re an orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to fair­ness, equi­ty, and inclu­siv­i­ty in gam­ing and in par­tic­u­lar esports.

Auditing Algorithms

I con­sid­er myself to be an algo­rithm audi­tor. So what does that mean? Well, I’m inher­ent­ly a sus­pi­cious per­son. When I start inter­act­ing with a new ser­vice, or a new app, and it appears to be doing some­thing dynam­ic, I imme­di­ate­ly been begin to ques­tion what is going on inside the black box, right? What is pow­er­ing these dynam­ics? And ulti­mate­ly what is the impact of this?

HeartMob: Community Support for Online Harassment Targets

When I talk about online harass­ment I’m refer­ring to a very broad spec­trum of abu­sive behav­iors that are enabled by tech­nol­o­gy plat­forms and used to tar­get a user or a group of users. So this can be any­thing from a flam­ing or the use of per­son­al insults or inflam­ma­to­ry lan­guage, to things like dox­ing or reveal­ing or broad­cast­ing per­son­al infor­ma­tion about some­one such as a phone num­ber or address, to things like stalk­ing and imper­son­ation and things of that nature. 

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