Why do people share online? Online disinhibition effect in the context of the virtual community of Reddit

For the past two decades, the growth of Internet has been truly exponential. Although there is nothing deterministic about the effects of this technological revolution, it is evident that the Internet is changing our behavior in fundamental ways. One recent expression of the Internet culture is the website reddit.com, which describes itself as "the front page of Internet". In their personal stories the users of Reddit share everything from their financial problems to their illegal venture. And to every touching story about struggling with depression there is a startlingly rude joke about the said depression. What motivates people to share their stories in Reddit even though not necessarily a single user will remember their username? One of the biggest influencers on how we behave online is the online disinhibition effect. To unerstand the site and its communications in a fundamental way, I decided to study the online disinhibition effect in the virtual community of Reddit through netnography. For a period of one year, I participated in the community, aiming to document the experiences of others and myself on the site. According to my research the characteristics typical to Reddit communications: anonymity, lack of cues, and text-basedness affect change the way we communicate on the site, compared to how we communicate face-to-face. When communicating on the site, redditors are able to dissociate themselves from their daily life and identity and assume instead communications' culture, values and morals associated with the virtual community of Reddit. Thus, online disinhibition effect in Reddit means not abandoning all norms but conforming to new ones. All of this is meaningful for the community members because disinhibited behavior gives redditors feelings of empowerment or perceived capabilities in coping with various challenges and overcoming obstacles. Online disinhibition can create empowering experiences through venting, finding similar others, and heightened feelings of self-efficacy as well as receiving emotional support. Thus, people behave disinhibitedly online to feel more powerful and capable. My research contributes to the field of consumer research, although I borrow concepts and ideas vastly from the fields of social psychology and communications studies. Through understanding the phenomena of online disinhibition better, I hope to contribute to the discourse on virtual communities and brand communitie

Comment sections and their role in a democratic society

Kommentarfelt lar lesere uttrykke seg offentlig innen en rekke temaer, gjør det mulig med direkte tilbakemelding til journalister og redaktører, og de kan potensielt legge til rette for en demokratisk verdifull offentlig debatt. Til tross for dette er kommentarfelt blitt kritisert på grunn av uhemmet atferd, usiviliserte og uhøflige kommentarer, samt politisk polariserende innhold. I den offentlige debatten blir kommentarfelt ofte beskrevet som problematiske, og det meste av forskning relatert til kommentarfelt setter søkelys på slik uhemmet atferd. Denne avhandlingen utforsker rollen kommentarfelt har i et demokratisk samfunn. Når man ser på kommentarfelt gjennom rammeverk basert på demokratiske teorier kan det virke som at kommentarfelt ikke lever opp til demokratiske standarder. Kommentarfelt har en tendens til å bli dømt basert på standardene til deliberative demokratiske teorier. Slike teorier legger vekt på åpen deltakelse og verdsetter beslutningstaking basert på rimelig argumentasjon. Å benytte slike teorier kan derimot være problematisk. Det vanskelig å bruke deliberative teorier som et rammeverk fordi kommentarfelt ikke har et spesifikt punkt der en beslutning blir tatt på bakgrunn av den foregående diskusjonen. En diskusjon i et kommentarfelt tar slutt når alle deltakere har sagt det de skulle si, slik at debatten dør på egen hånd uten at noen beslutninger har blitt tatt. Et annet sett med demokratiske teorier som kanskje passer kommentarfelt bedre, som for eksempel participatory liberal theory og agonistic democracy, fokuserer mer på deltakelse som viktig for demokratier. Kommentarfelt gjør i første øyekast deltakelse i offentlige debatter enklere. Men slike teorier fokuserer også på gjensidig respekt som et grunnlag for offentlig debatt, noe kommentarfelt er kritisert for å mangle. Det kan være at den beste teorien for å forstå kommentarfelts rolle i et demokratisk samfunn er ideen om post-demokrati, der kommentarfelt kan ha en rolle som et anti-establishment, ikke-profesjonelt forum på profesjonelle nyhetsnettsteder. I denne avhandlingen er tre interessefelt blitt forsket på gjennom tre artikler: effekten av anonymitet på antisosial atferd, anklagelser av trolling, og mediekritikk i kommentarfelt. Avhandlingen presenterer disse forskningsprosjektene og diskuterer kommentarfelts rolle I et demokratisk samfunn, samt de metodologiske utfordringene som følger med når man forsker på kommentarfelt. Siden antisosial atferd blir diskutert mye og anonymitet ofte blir brukt for å forklare slik atferd, ble en studie gjennomført der anonyme og ikke-anonyme kommentarer fra samme plattformer ble analysert. Anonymitet hadde en liten, men statistisk signifikant effekt på antisosial atferd. Avhandlingen har også funnet at anklagelser av trolling ofte var politisk motivert og brukt for å se bort fra andres argumenter man ikke var enige i, og at disse anklagelsene stort sett ble ignorert av andre deltakere og de som ble anklaget. Til slutt utforsker og kategoriserer avhandlingen kritikk av media i kommentarfelt. Tre typer kritikker blitt identifisert: kritikk av fokus, kvalitet og integritet. En andre dimensjon, målet for kritikk, ble også identifisert: journalister, nyhetsorganisasjoner, og media. Denne avhandlingen konkluderer med at kommentarfelts rolle i et demokratisk samfunn er utfordrende, og at det største hinderet for at kommentarfelt skal spille ne viktig positiv rolle er antisosial atferd. Men kommentarfelt har stort potensial til å kunne bli en demokratisk verdifull form for offentlige ytringer som får folk til å besøke nyhetsnettsteder, det er en plattform der folks meninger blir utfordret, og en plattform for konstruktiv kritikk av media.Newspaper comment sections provide readers with a public platform to voice their opinion on a wide range of topics, provide a direct line of feedback for journalists and editors, and have the potential of facilitating a democratically valuable public debate. However, comment sections have come under scrutiny for the prevalence of disinhibited behavior, uncivil and impolite comments, as well as politically polarizing content. In the public debate, comment sections are often described as problematic, and most research that relates to comment sections, tend to focus on incivility and impoliteness. This thesis explores the role of comment sections in a democratic society. When considering comment sections through frameworks based on democratic theories, comment sections appear to fail to live up to democratically valuable standards. Comment sections tend to be judged by the standards of theories such as deliberative democracy and discursive, which emphasize open participation and places high value on making decisions based on reasonable argumentation. Using these theories, however, might be problematic. It is difficult to use these theories as a framework for discussing comment sections, because comment sections do not have a set point when a decision is made based on a preceding discussion. A discussion in a comment section only ends when all commenters have said what they wanted to say, at which point the debate dies down on its own without any decision having been made. Comment sections might be more suited within democratic frameworks that focus more on participation, such as participatory liberal theory and agonistic democracy. Participatory theories focus more on the participation aspect of democracy, and comment sections do, at least on first glance, make participation in the public debate easier. However, these theories also emphasize mutual respect as a basis for public discussion, something that comment sections are criticized for lacking. In the end, it might be that the best theory to understand the role of comment sections in a democratic society is the idea of the post-democracy, in which comment sections may serve a role as an anti-establishment, non-professional forum on professional, establishment news sites. For this thesis, three topics of interest have been investigated in three papers: the effect of anonymity on toxicity, accusations of trolling, and media criticism in comment sections. This thesis presents these research projects and discusses the role of comment sections in a democratic society, as well as the methodological challenges when researching comment sections. As toxicity is a much-debated topic, and anonymity is often used to explain such behavior, a study was devised where anonymous and non-anonymous comments from the same platform were analyzed, showing that anonymity has a small, but statistically significant effect on toxicity. This thesis also found that accusations of trolling are often politically motivated and used to dismiss opposing arguments and that these accusations were mostly ignored by other debaters and the accused. Finally, this thesis explores and categorizes criticism of the media found in comment sections. Three kinds of media criticism were identified: criticism of focus, quality and of integrity. A second dimension, target of criticism, was also identified: journalists, news organizations, and the media. The thesis concludes that the role of comment sections in a democratic society is challenging and that the greatest obstacle for comment sections playing an important, positive role is the prevalence of toxic disinhibition. There is, however, great potential for comment sections being a democratically valuable forum for public expression that incentivizes people to engage with the news media, where people have their opinions challenged and a platform for constructive criticism of the media.Doktorgradsavhandlin

Online Comment Moderation Policies for Deliberative Discussion–Seed Comments and Identifiability

Due to the development of media information technologies and the proliferation of mobile devices, the Internet has rapidly moved to the center of news readership. In contrast to traditional media, Internet news is often coupled with commenting platforms that can accommodate readers’ immediate feedback to news stories. However, a side-effect of this feature—malicious comments—is becoming an increasingly serious social problem. To alleviate this problem and increase the likelihood of comments functioning as deliberative discussion, we suggest two moderation policies—a policy of providing high-quality seed comments and a policy of increased identifiability through social networking service accounts—and examine their effects through a longitudinal online experiment. We designed experimental groups according to a 2 x 2 between-subjects factorial design. For our experiment, a total of 137 subjects read news stories and commented on them over 15 days by using a mobile Android application developed specifically for the experiment. We found the following relationships. First, both seed quality and identifiability improve the quality of user comments in terms of deliberative discussion. Second, these effects are comparable in magnitude. Third, there are no significant interaction effects between seeds and identifiability. Fourth, the effects of high-quality seeds disappear early with anonymous users but persist when users are identified by social media accounts. Fifth, the negative effects of low-quality seeds are present and persistent only when combined with anonymity. Otherwise, the negative effects of low-quality seed comments are canceled out by the positive effects of identifiability. Finally, anonymous males are easily provoked to respond to low-quality seed comments, but most females do not respond to such comments even in anonymous situations

Trolling the trolls: Online Forum Users Constructions of the Nature and Properties of Trolling

‘Trolling’ refers to a specific type of malicious online behaviour, intended to disrupt interactions, aggravate interactional partners and lure them into fruitless argumentation. However, as with other categories, both ‘troll’ and ‘trolling’ may have multiple, inconsistent and incompatible meanings, depending upon the context in which the term is used and the aims of the person using the term. Drawing data from 14 online fora and newspaper comment threads, this paper explores how online users mobilise and make use of the term ‘troll’. Data was analysed from a discursive psychological perspective. Four repertoires describing trolls were identified in posters' online messages: 1) that trolls are easily identifiable; 2) nostalgia; 3) vigilantism; 4) that trolls are nasty. A final theme follows these repertoires – that of identifying trolls. Analysis also revealed that despite repertoire 01, identifying trolls is not a simple and straight-forward task. Similarly to any other rhetorical category, there are tensions inherent in posters' accounts of nature and acceptability of trolling. Neither the category ‘troll’ nor the action of ‘trolling’ has a single, fixed meaning. Either action may be presented as desirable or undesirable, depending upon the aims of the poster at the time of posting

Networked Publics, Networked Politics: Resisting Gender-Based Violent Speech in Digital Media

This dissertation is a qualitative study of digital media that identifies and analyzes feminist responses to violent speech in networked environments across Canada and the United States between 2011 and 2015. Exploring how verbal violence is constitutive of and constituted by power relations in the feminist blogosphere, I ask the following set of research questions: How do feminist bloggers politicize and problematize instances of violent speech on digital media? In what ways are their networked interactions and self-representations reconfigured as a result of having to face hostile audiences? What modes of agency appear within feminist blogging cultures? This work engages with feminist theory (hooks, 2014; McRobbie, 2009; Stringer 2014), media studies (boyd, 2014; Lovink, 2011; Marwick 2013) and their intersections in the field of feminist media studies (Jane 2014; Keller, 2012). Drawing on interviews with the key players in the feminist blogosphere and providing a discursive reading of selected digital texts, I identify networked resistive strategies including digital archiving, public shaming, strategic silence and institutional transformations. I argue that feminist responses to violent speech are varied and reflect not only long-standing concerns with community building and womens voices in public context, but also emerging anxieties around self-branding, professional identity and a control over one's digital presence. This research underscores the importance of transformative capacities of networked feminist politics and contextualizes agentic modes of participation in response to problematic communication

Content Providers’ Secondary Liability: A Social Network Perspective

Recent technological developments allow Internet users to disseminate ideas to a large audience. These technological advances empower individuals and promote important social objectives. However, they also create a setting for speech-related torts, harm, and abuse. One legal path to deal with online defamation turns to the liability of online content providers who facilitate the harmful exchanges. The possibility of bringing them to remove defamatory content and collecting damages from them attracted a great deal of attention in scholarly work, court decisions, and regulations. Different countries established different legal regimes. The United States allows an extensive shield—an overall immunity, as it exempts the liability of content providers in speech torts. This policy is not adopted worldwide. The E.U. directive outlines a “notice-and-takedown” safe haven. Other countries, such as Canada, use common tort law practices. This Article criticizes all of these policy models for being either over or under inclusive. This Article makes the case for a context-specific regulatory regime. It identifies specific characteristics of different content providers with their own unique settings, which call for nuanced legal rules that shall provide an optimal liability regime. To that end, the Article sets forth an innovative taxonomy: it relies on sociological studies premised on network theory and analysis, which is neutral to technological advances. This framework distinguishes between different technological settings based on the strength of social ties formed in each context. The Article explains that the strength of such ties influences the social context of online interactions and flow of information. The strength of ties is the best tool for designing different liability regimes; such ties serve as a proxy for the severity of harm that defamatory online speech might cause, and the social norms that might mitigate or exacerbate speech-related harm. The proposed taxonomy makes it possible to apply a sociological analysis to legal policy and to outline modular rules for content providers’ liability at every juncture. This Article does so while taking into account basic principles of tort law, as well as freedom of speech, reputation, fairness, efficiency, and the importance of promoting innovation

Content Providers’ Secondary Liability: A Social Network Perspective

Recent technological developments allow Internet users to disseminate ideas to a large audience. These technological advances empower individuals and promote important social objectives. However, they also create a setting for speech-related torts, harm, and abuse. One legal path to deal with online defamation turns to the liability of online content providers who facilitate the harmful exchanges. The possibility of bringing them to remove defamatory content and collecting damages from them attracted a great deal of attention in scholarly work, court decisions, and regulations. Different countries established different legal regimes. The United States allows an extensive shield—an overall immunity, as it exempts the liability of content providers in speech torts. This policy is not adopted worldwide. The E.U. directive outlines a “notice-and-takedown” safe haven. Other countries, such as Canada, use common tort law practices. This Article criticizes all of these policy models for being either over or under inclusive. This Article makes the case for a context-specific regulatory regime. It identifies specific characteristics of different content providers with their own unique settings, which call for nuanced legal rules that shall provide an optimal liability regime. To that end, the Article sets forth an innovative taxonomy: it relies on sociological studies premised on network theory and analysis, which is neutral to technological advances. This framework distinguishes between different technological settings based on the strength of social ties formed in each context. The Article explains that the strength of such ties influences the social context of online interactions and flow of information. The strength of ties is the best tool for designing different liability regimes; such ties serve as a proxy for the severity of harm that defamatory online speech might cause, and the social norms that might mitigate or exacerbate speech-related harm. The proposed taxonomy makes it possible to apply a sociological analysis to legal policy and to outline modular rules for content providers’ liability at every juncture. This Article does so while taking into account basic principles of tort law, as well as freedom of speech, reputation, fairness, efficiency, and the importance of promoting innovation

Political participation in the age of the internet : an analysis of the online forum as legitimation mechanism

Abstract unavailable please refer to PD