Projects

Community Notes as Participatory Consumer Protection

• X — then Twitter — launched Community Notes in 2021, allowing users to attach “notes” that contextualize, contest, or clarify posts on the platform.  While Community Notes engages in conventional fact-checking tasks of verifying news and political discourse, it also plays an important role drawing attention to spam, scams, fraud, and other consumer protection issues. Through a combination of qualitative and computational text analysis of consumer protection-oriented Community Notes, we identify the types of consumer protection issues that the program flags, the sources of evidence participants use, and the relationship between the presence of community notes and other top-down content moderation responses. We reflect on the potential and limitations of participatory approaches for addressing consumer harms on social media.

Transactional Orders: How Platforms Structure Payments Between Creators and Fans

• Subscription platforms like Patreon or OnlyFans, fundraising platforms like Kickstarter, and donation tools built into video platforms like Twitch or Stripchat reconfigure the relationship between creators, audiences, and platforms. While research has highlighted the impact of new monetization opportunities for creators and fans, the role of the platform has received comparatively less attention and is hindered by a lack of shared terminology, comparative research, and the bracketing off of adult content platforms. We present an integrative framework for conceptualizing monetization on digital platforms, connecting anthropology’s veteran concept of transactional orders to more recent work on platformization. Our framework consists of payment paths, or mechanisms that facilitate the transmission of value between users, and measures of value, or commensurable representations of worth on the platform. We identified three primary payment paths (donations, subscriptions, and purchases) and three primary measures of value (tokens, social metrics, and rankings).

The TikTok Caliphate: How Jihadist Supporters Exploit Algorithmic Recommendations and Evade Content Moderation

• This study investigates how supporters of ISIS and Al-Qaeda employ TikTok’s features to exploit algorithmic recommendations and evade content moderation, increasing their visibility within a hostile platform environment. We strategically enrolled the platform’s recommendation system to surface terrorist propaganda and inductively developed a typology of five communicative techniques: Audio Camouflage (manipulating recorded audio and metadata), Meme Infiltration (embedding extremist content within pop culture references), Blurred Intent (distorting sensitive visuals), Emoji Codes (using coded language and symbols), and Bait-and-Switch (deferring the reveal of extremist messaging). Together, these tactics express a form of everyday extremism that is embedded in TikTok’s vernacular practices, aesthetics, and pop culture references, exposing the limitations of TikTok's moderation and state regulations. 

Metafandom as Platform Governance: Fans and the  Informal Establishment of Copyright Norms on YouTube

• Since YouTube’s launch in 2005, copyright has been at the center of conflict between creators, regulators, the platform, and mass media corporations. The rise of social media has expanded copyright’s public relevance, especially for content creators and platforms. Yet often left out of examinations into how copyright is negotiated on platforms is the role of fans in tracking and reporting on controversies and establishing normative standards about the role of copyright in creative disputes, forms of metafandom practices. We turn to Wikitubia, a fan-made wiki dedicated to the platform, as an alternative “Transparency Report” that offers fan perspectives on the enforcement of copyright on YouTube. In doing so, we map the role of fans as an overlooked stakeholder in reinforcing norms around copyright enforcement on YouTube.

Value Alignment Practices: The Negotiation of Generative AI on Chinese Art Commission Platforms

• This study examines the value alignment practices—actions that attribute and attempt to shape the values of sociotechnical systems—of the Chinese “original character” (OC) community regarding generative AI on art commission platforms. Through our analysis of policies, social media discourse, and interviews, we map stakeholder responses. While platforms deploy strategic ambiguity to balance political pressure to promote AI with the risk of user backlash, artists’ responses vary by market position, and consumers oppose AI-generated art as an ethical violation of OCs’ existence as digital beings. The study reveals how socio-political contexts and subcultural affective attachments shape our understandings of ethical AI.

Coordinated Reporting and the Question of Harm

• The problem of online harm is particularly thorny because harm is essentially contested and inescapably political; people, platforms, and regulators disagree, sometimes profoundly, over what counts as harm. To investigate community responses to harmful content, we focused on the use of social media among Jewish Israelis following 7 October 2023. We conducted 30 semi-structured, in-depth interviews, focused on participants’ involvement in coordinated actions aimed at eliciting platform responses (taking down content, banning an account, etc.). On the one hand, interviewees joined coordinated reporting campaigns as part of a social media turf war. On the other hand, interviewees included the atrocity videos within their definition of harmful content, and described intense psychological reactions to watching them, but felt that more people should be exposed to them, and that they served both an important political role and contributed to Jewish-Israeli unity. Not only do we see that notions of harm are contextual, but in some contexts, harmful content can be seen as good, or even as serving a noble cause.