Mobilizing the Trump Train: Understanding Collective Action in a Political Trolling Community

Political trolls initiate online discord not only for the lulz (laughs) but also for ideological reasons, such as promoting their desired political candidates. Political troll groups recently gained spotlight because they were considered central in helping Donald Trump win the 2016 US presidential election, which involved difficult mass mobilizations. Political trolls face unique challenges as they must build their own communities while simultaneously disrupting others. However, little is known about how political trolls mobilize sufficient participation to suddenly become problems for others. We performed a quantitative longitudinal analysis of more than 16 million comments from one of the most popular and disruptive political trolling communities, the subreddit /r/The\_Donald (T\D). We use T_D as a lens to understand participation and collective action within these deviant spaces. In specific, we first study the characteristics of the most active participants to uncover what might drive their sustained participation. Next, we investigate how these active individuals mobilize their community to action. Through our analysis, we uncover that the most active employed distinct discursive strategies to mobilize participation, and deployed technical tools like bots to create a shared identity and sustain engagement. We conclude by providing data-backed design implications for designers of civic media

Understanding and Engaging Online Audiences

Social media has turned all of us into potential authors of content. This phenomenon has further facilitated the formation of new dynamic audiences -- all of whom center on the data we share. Although there have been several related analyses, most research assumes that the online audience is only an observer. This has led to the design of platforms that are adaptations of traditional marketing tools wherein audiences are surveyed and categorized anonymously and content authors have minimal interaction with them. The types of collaborations produced by such tools are limited.This research recognizes that the internet has transformed how authors and audiences operate. The thesis explores the dynamics of this emerging ecosystem, from authors, who share personal content with friends and family, to citizen reporters who collaborate with audiences to oppose drug cartels. The thesis demonstrates how to incorporate the understanding of these dynamics into the design of novel platforms. The thesis does this via individual case stories of such systems, for instance the prototype system “Hax,” which dynamically allows people to visualize relevant audiences for sharing and collaborating, or the tool Botivist, which dynamically recruits and assembles collective efforts with online audiences. The thesis discusses how, together, we can create a future where platforms produce a true symbiosis between authors and audiences to facilitate collective efforts

The Challenges and Trends of Deploying Blockchain in the Real World for the Users' Need

Blockchain technology is a decentralized and open database maintained by a peer-to-peer network, offering a "trustless trust" for untrusted parties. Despite the fact that some researchers consider blockchain as a bubble, blockchain technology has the genuine potential to solve problems across industries. In this article, we provide an overview of the development that Blockchain technology has had in 2018 and point out the challenges of deploying blockchain-based applications in the real world from a Human-Computer Interaction view. We propose that blockchain practitioners should design blockchain applications from users’ perspective, think about who the users are, and what they need. Furthermore, we also lay out possible future trends for blockchain based systems