27,481 research outputs found

    Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions

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    In online communities, antisocial behavior such as trolling disrupts constructive discussion. 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 simulating an online discussion, we find that both negative mood and seeing troll posts by others significantly increases the probability of a user trolling, and together double this probability. To support and extend these results, we study how these same mechanisms play out in the wild via a data-driven, longitudinal analysis of a large online news discussion community. This analysis reveals temporal mood effects, and explores long range patterns of repeated exposure to trolling. A predictive model of trolling behavior shows that mood and discussion context together can explain trolling behavior better than an individual's history of trolling. These results combine to suggest that ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, behave like trolls.Comment: Best Paper Award at CSCW 201

    Like trainer, like bot? Inheritance of bias in algorithmic content moderation

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    The internet has become a central medium through which `networked publics' express their opinions and engage in debate. Offensive comments and personal attacks can inhibit participation in these spaces. Automated content moderation aims to overcome this problem using machine learning classifiers trained on large corpora of texts manually annotated for offence. While such systems could help encourage more civil debate, they must navigate inherently normatively contestable boundaries, and are subject to the idiosyncratic norms of the human raters who provide the training data. An important objective for platforms implementing such measures might be to ensure that they are not unduly biased towards or against particular norms of offence. This paper provides some exploratory methods by which the normative biases of algorithmic content moderation systems can be measured, by way of a case study using an existing dataset of comments labelled for offence. We train classifiers on comments labelled by different demographic subsets (men and women) to understand how differences in conceptions of offence between these groups might affect the performance of the resulting models on various test sets. We conclude by discussing some of the ethical choices facing the implementers of algorithmic moderation systems, given various desired levels of diversity of viewpoints amongst discussion participants.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, 9th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2017), Oxford, UK, 13--15 September 2017 (forthcoming in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science

    Competing or aiming to be average?: Normification as a means of engaging digital volunteers

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    Engagement, motivation and active contribution by digital volunteers are key requirements for crowdsourcing and citizen science projects. Many systems use competitive elements, for example point scoring and leaderboards, to achieve these ends. However, while competition may motivate some people, it can have a neutral or demotivating effect on others. In this paper we explore theories of personal and social norms and investigate normification as an alternative approach to engagement, to be used alongside or instead of competitive strategies. We provide a systematic review of existing crowdsourcing and citizen science literature and categorise the ways that theories of norms have been incorporated to date. We then present qualitative interview data from a pro-environmental crowdsourcing study, Close the Door, which reveals normalising attitudes in certain participants. We assess how this links with competitive behaviour and participant performance. Based on our findings and analysis of norm theories, we consider the implications for designers wishing to use normification as an engagement strategy in crowdsourcing and citizen science systems

    Soil Governance: Accessing Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

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    Soil provides the foundation for agricultural and environmental systems, and are subject to a complex governance regime of property rights and secondary impacts from industry and domestic land use. Complex natural resource management issues require approaches to governance that acknowledge uncertainty and complexity. Theories of next generation environmental governance assume that inclusion of diverse perspectives will improve reform directions and encourage behaviour change. This paper reports on a qualitative survey of an international workshop that brought together cross-disciplinary perspectives to address the challenges of soil governance. Results reveal the challenges of communicating effectively across disciplines. The findings suggest that strategies for improved soils governance must focus on increasing communications with community stakeholders and engaging land managers in designing shared governance regimes. The need for more conscious articulation of the challenges of cross-disciplinary environments is discussed and strategies for increasing research collaboration in soils governance are suggested. The identified need for more systematic approaches to cross-disciplinary learning, including reporting back of cross-disciplinary initiatives to help practitioners learn from past experience, forms part of the rationale for this paper

    USER CONTRIBUTION IN ONLINE COMMUNITIES - THE INFLUENCE OF ADVERTISING ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SOCIAL NORMATIVE FEEDBACK

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    Online communities are common means to maintain and extend private social networks. In addition, they also offer new ways for enterprises to connect and collaborate with customers, employees, and business partners. However, key challenge for online communities is engaging community members thereby keeping the community successful and alive. This is especially true for communities, which leverage advertising as a source of revenue. A potential means to compensate negative participation effects and foster contribution is social normative feedback being known as one of the most powerful levers of behavioral change. However, we want to challenge the power of this instrument in the context of communities building upon advertising and propose a respective field experiment with 600 participants. Our findings will be important for the design of online communities considering or relying on advertising as a source of revenue

    Intellectual Property and Americana, or Why IP Gets the Blues

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    The Role of External Mechanisms and Transformational Leadership in Information Security Policy Effectiveness: A Managerial Perspective of Financial Industry in Vietnam

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    Information security policy (ISP) violations are one of the biggest concerns for all organisations around the world, resulting in billions of direct and indirect losses; especially in the financial industry. Senior managers and their leadership style play a crucial role in enforcing the employees’ compliance with ISP. However, previous research has been mostly conducted at individual level and has not fully investigated the effectiveness of ISP from managerial and organisational perspectives. Drawing on neo-institutional theory and transformational leadership model, this research investigates the impact of external mechanisms and transformational leadership on the effectiveness of ISP. The proposed research model will be tested using field survey data from professional managers in the financial sector. Partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) will be used to test the proposed hypotheses. The potential contribution of this study is to enhance our knowledge from a theoretical and practical perspective of the role of external and transformational leadership in the effectiveness of ISP

    Applying discursive approaches to health psychology

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    Objective: The aim of this paper is to outline the contribution of two strands of discursive research, glossed as ‘macro’ and ‘micro’, to the field of health psychology. A further goal is to highlight some contemporary debates in methodology associated with the use of interview data versus more naturalistic data in qualitative health research. Method: Discursive psychology is a way of analysing talk as a social practice which considers how descriptions are put together and what actions they achieve. Results: A selection of recent examples of discursive research from one applied area of health psychology, studies of diet and obesity, are drawn upon in order to illustrate the specifics of both strands. Whilst both approaches focus on accountability, ‘macro’ discourse work is most useful for identifying the cultural context of talk and can demonstrate how individuals are positioned within such discourses, and examine how such discourses are negotiated and resisted. ‘Micro’ discursive research pays closer attention to the sequential organisation of constructions and focuses on naturalistic settings which allow for the inclusion of an analysis of the health professional. Conclusion: Diets are typically depicted as an individual responsibility in mainstream health psychology but discursive research highlights how discourses are collectively produced and bound up with social practices

    The Pragmatic Populism of Justice Stevens\u27s Free Speech Jurisprudence

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    Effects of Communication Strategies on Organizational Performance: A Case Study of Kenya Ports Authority

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    Existing literature revealed a gap in the empirical knowledge in respect of communication strategies that impact perceived organization performance. The present research empirically evaluated four communication strategies that could have impacted organizational performance namely; open door policy, group effort, organization structure and formal channels of communication. The researcher carried out an investigation on the relationship between communication strategies and organizational performance. The research project’s main objective was to investigate the effects of communication strategies on organizational performance at Kenya Ports Authority. It also sought to find out how open door policy of communication influences organizational performance, to assess how group effort enhances organizational performance, to analyze how organizational structure can improve organizational performance and to identify the roles of formal communication channels on organizational performance. The main conclusion drawn from the research was communication strategies play a central role in high-performance. Keywords: communication strategies, organizational performance, Kenya Ports Authority (KPA
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