Archive

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. 

The Algorithmic Spiral of Silence

A cou­ple of major plat­forms like Facebook and Twitter, YouTube, have become in many places around the world a de fac­to pub­lic sphere. Especially in coun­tries that have less than free Internet, less than free mass media. And these coun­tries have tran­si­tioned from a very con­trolled pub­lic sphere to a commercially-run one like Facebook.

Online Platforms as Human Rights Arbiters

What does it mean for human rights pro­tec­tion that we have large cor­po­rate interests—the Googles, the Facebooks of our time—that con­trol and gov­ern a large part of the online infrastructure?