Social Platform Trust & Safety

If we want to protect the rights of real people, it should be much harder to take away someone’s account and online property. But that only works if we have a way to know which accounts belong to a real and specific human with an authentic connection to the community. That implies more stringent validation requirements to get and keep an account.

If this is all downstream of a small and relatively well-off group of high frequency posters (some of our elected officials among them), that would suggest what we might call an ‘elite radicalization’ theory of online politics. The idea is that social media has empowered a (relatively) small group of political influencers who, in response to the... See more

But how do you monitor or take responsibility for what everyone says anywhere all the time? Well, you don’t. You can’t. Providing everyone with bandwidth and software keeps expense growth arithmetic. But if you try to exert any control over how it’s used then expenses become exponential too. It’s impossible to do within the business model.... See more

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

For example, you can send anonymous messages. You can anonymously DM somebody and you can send an anonymous message in a group. This is a format that has historically been really fun and people really like, but it inevitably falls apart because somebody gets bullied and kills themselves. For Daze, you'll be able to send anonymous messages, but... See more

“The boundary between public and private is part of the conflict between public spheres. For example, until recently, only feminists though domestic violence was a public concern, rather than a private matter. Democratic publicity therefore requires positive guarantees of opportunities for minorities to convince others of what qualifies as common

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