Archive

The True Costs of Misinformation
Producing Moral and Technical Order in a Time of Pandemonium

Of course we’re avid, avid watch­ers of Tucker Carlson. But inso­far as he’s like the shit fil­ter, which is that if things make it as far as Tucker Carlson, then they prob­a­bly have much more like…stuff that we can look at online. And so some­times he’ll start talk­ing about some­thing and we don’t real­ly under­stand where it came from and then when we go back online we can find that there’s quite a bit of dis­course about would­n’t it be fun­ny if peo­ple believed this about antifa.”

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. 

Beyond Legal Talismans

Once we under­stand that legal tal­is­mans are pro­tec­tive invo­ca­tions, we have to be crit­i­cal of them. Even the ones we like. The short­hand is not com­pre­hen­si­ble to users. And the short­hand is not com­pre­hen­si­ble to peo­ple more generally. 

The Courage of Compassion: Transforming Your Experience With Criticism

People will ask me, How do you deal with this feed­back? Does it hurt you?” And my response is yes, it does. Because if it did­n’t hurt me, then I think I would lose the capac­i­ty that I have to write sto­ries that con­nect with peo­ple. If I become immune to the hurt and to the pain, then I can’t write some­thing that moves someone.

When Algorithms Fail in Our Personal Lives

I won­der with all these vary­ing lev­els of needs that we have as users, and as we live more and more of our lives dig­i­tal­ly and on social media, what would it look like to design a semi-private space in a pub­lic network?

Eleanor Saitta at The Conference 2015

What I’m talk­ing about here is not what we need to do cul­tur­al­ly or polit­i­cal­ly, it’s not the roots of online harass­ment. It’s the design tools that we can use to shape the envi­ron­ments that peo­ple inter­act in to reduce the impact.

Katherine Cross at The Conference 2015

Simply put, anonymi­ty does not cause harass­ment. It does play a role, but it’s much much more com­pli­cat­ed than most peo­ple have made it out to be. The rea­son that this is impor­tant to under­stand is because it’s hav­ing a prac­ti­cal impact on the world right now.