Social Platform Trust & Safety

While prior work suggests that trolling behavior is confined to a vocal and antisocial minority, we demonstrate that ordinary people can engage in such behavior as well. We propose two primary trigger mechanisms: the individual's mood, and the surrounding context of a discussion (e.g., exposure to prior trolling behavior). Through an experiment... See more

Examples of truth queries include “How do you know this is true?” “Where did you learn this?” and “Do you have an example?” These questions may alert other users to pay more attention to the accuracy of the false information and communicate that the information is not universally accepted. In a series of three studies, we showed participants Tweets... See more

With a few exceptions, by far the most important component of successful speech communities is that its moderators have faces . A core feature of bulletin boards, comment threads on blogs, and publications is that the boundaries of acceptable speech are enforced not by tech executives, the farcical Facebook Supreme Court,[xii] or distant buildings... See more

But I don’t think platform companies should—or can—act as the governance layer of our online lives. In this, I share tech journalist and Bluesky board member Mike Masnick’s informed belief that global centralized moderation is a dead end. And if centralized moderation isn’t a plausible way forward, then experimentation toward genuinely... See more

For Tech Companies

Close anonymity loopholes . Facebook Groups and Pages can be created without linking to a specific Facebook user; only an email address is necessary. Admins can post to their groups under the Group or Page name, effectively allowing anonymous, or at least, pseudonymous, posts. Ending anonymity will not end harassment; in some... See more

Some users may not want to see any potentially abusive content at all, while others may, for example, need to sift through banal personal attacks in order to track credible death threats. The point, however, is that users themselves should be able to exercise significantly more agency over their own social media experience.