Archive

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.

Managing the Internet’s Dumpster Fires: CivilServant Community Summit 2018

I want you to know that in this slide there is more than just a dump­ster fire. There are also peo­ple in suits who are train­ing and ded­i­cat­ed to man­age that fire.

FollowBias: Supporting Behavior Change Toward Gender Equality on Social Media

In 2011, the cul­tur­al crit­ic Emily Nussbaum reflect­ed on the flow­er­ing of online fem­i­nism through new pub­li­ca­tions, social media con­ver­sa­tions, and dig­i­tal orga­niz­ing. But Nussbaum wor­ried, even if you can expand the sup­ply of who’s writ­ing, will that actu­al­ly change the influ­ence of wom­en’s voic­es in soci­ety? What if online fem­i­nism was just an echo chamber?

Forbidden Research: Why We Can’t Do That

Quite often when we’re ask­ing these dif­fi­cult ques­tions we’re ask­ing about ques­tions where we might not even know how to ask where the line is. But in oth­er cas­es, when researchers work to advance pub­lic knowl­edge, even on uncon­tro­ver­sial top­ics, we can still find our­selves for­bid­den from doing the research or dis­sem­i­nat­ing the research.