A framework of severity of harmful content online
Typology of harm:
- Physical – bodily injury, including slef-injury, sexual abuse or death
- Emotional – from annoyance to traumatic emotional response
- Relational – damage to one’ reputation or relationships (personal, professional or community)
- Financial – material or financial loss (scams, extortion, account loss, blackmail, etc)
Typology of severity
- Punitive approach: Judicial perspective – degrees of harm a person caused
- Time-based approach: law environment (police) perspective – prioritizing “severity” and danger to victim
- Persistence approach: mental health professional perspective – focus on the symptoms and physical threat posed to the victim and others.
Coping with online hate
- Technical coping (Block the offender, screenshot evidence)
- Assertiveness (tell the offender to stop it)
- Close support (talk to friends about it)
- Helplessness / self - blame (not know what to do)
- Retaliation (get back against the offender)
Distal advice (call the police)
Health consequences
- Fear
- Spiral of silence
- Professional consequences
Groups spreading online harm
Far right extremists
conspiracy theorists
Terrorists
Misogynistic groups aka incels
Dark personalities
- Narcissism – High sense of entitlement, uniqueness and self-importance
- Psychopathy – disregard for and violation of others well-being, deceitful, “cold-hearted’
- Machiavellianism – cynical, cunning manipulators, exploitive of others
- Sadism – motivated and enjoyed to cause harm to others
Social cognitive theory of morality by Albert Bandura
Cognitive processes in reducing guilt and remorse
- Rationalization to justify harm:
- Victim blame: “it’s their fault”
- Dehumanization – “They deserve it”
- Minimization – “it happened, what can you do?”
- Diffusion of responsibility – “not my problem”
For pseudonymous: reasons for pseudonymous:
- Internet culture – Twitch streamers
- Potential threat to live, risk political or economic retaliation
- Risk to discrimination – deadname
- Risk of violence
Approaches of moderation:
- Artisanal:
Small-scale platforms - Community-reliant: Wikipedia, Reddit, “Federal system” governance
- Industrial: Large-scale moderation: Facebook, google, twitter
3 principles components of Trump’s digital campaign operation:
- Marketing agency Giles-parscale
- Microtargeting firm - Cambridge analytica –> psychological profiling.
- Republican party’s digital team
5 big personality traits model
- Openness
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion / introversion
- Agreeableness
- Natural reactions
Dark participation
negative, trolling, cyberbullying and misinformation.
1. Actors; such as trolling
2. Reasons and motives: individuals evil attack and controlled and planned actors.
3. Objects and targets
4. Audiences: participation strategic actors
Systems of problematic behavior theory:
- personality system: belief and attitudes
- environment system: parents or peers
- perceived environment: norms within that system
2 ways of content moderation:
- Automated content moderation –> remove problematic content from sm, no human intervention.
- Flagging and human review –> commercial content moderation –> mental health dangers.
Rise fake news:
fake news as…
- Satire
- For profit
- Political propaganda
