The Social Media Collective is thrilled to announce that Tarleton Gillespie has joined Microsoft Research New England as a Principal Researcher. He joins Nancy Baym and Mary Gray in New England and danah boyd and Kate Crawford in New York City in forming the permanent core of the SMC. Tarleton is known for his influential work …
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Facebook’s improved “Community Standards” still can’t resolve the central paradox
On March 16, Facebook updated its "Community Standards,” in ways that were both cosmetic and substantive. The version it replaced, though it had enjoyed minor updates, had been largely the same since at least 2011. The change comes on the heels of several other sites making similar adjustments to their own policies, including Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, …
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Update on the 2015 SMC PhD Internship season
Hello! We wanted to post a quick update on the status of the 2015 SMC PhD Internship Program. The application season closed January 31 and we ended up with more than 240 stellar candidates to the program. Thank you for your patience with our application process and please forgive the delays in sending an update. The …
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Congress and 20 Organizations Urge FCC to End Discriminatory Blocking of Online LGBT Resources
Members of Congress and 20 LGBT and ally organizations, led by Congressman Mike Honda, Founder and Chair of the Congressional Anti-Bullying Caucus, are calling on the FCC to stop the indiscrimate blocking of online LGBT Resources. And, guess what? They used a report that Jessie Daniels and I wrote this summer to make the case and urge others to join the cause. …
New special issue of JOBEM: “Old Against New, or a Coming of Age? Rethinking Broadcasting in an Era of Electronic Media”
A little over a year ago, JOBEM editor Zizi Papacharissi approached me, R. Stuart Geiger (UC Berkeley) and Stacy Blasiola (University of Illinois at Chicago) with the idea of a JOBEM special issue hat would be edited and authored by graduate students. We were excited to accept the invitation and set out for the adventure. The …
MSR Faculty Summit 2014 Ethics Panel Recap
[Cross-posted to http://www.maryLgray.org] When the Facebook Emotions Study first made international news, I felt strongly (still do) that researchers, from those honing algorithms to people like me studying the social impact of media and technologies, need to come together. There are no easy answers or obvious courses of action. But we all have a stake in understanding the ethical …
Spatial metaphors of the internet: Resources
As someone who does work on online communities and spatial informatics, I’m very much aware of the extent to which we tend to use spatial metaphors to talk about web-based technologies. I asked around the Social Media Collective (including our mighty network of esteemed colleagues) for favorite critiques of the intertwining of space and the …
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Must-reads for how to study people’s online behavior (and navigate the ethical challenges that entails!)
I realized after posting my thoughts on how to think about social media as a site of human interaction (and all the ethical and methodological implications of doing so) that I forgot to leave links to what are, bar none, the best resources on the planet for policy makers, researchers, and the general public thinking through all …
Social Media Collective weigh in on the debates about the Facebook emotions study
I have the privilege of spending the year as a visiting researcher with the social media researchers at Microsoft Research New England. And for the last two weeks or so, its been a particularly stimulating time to be among them. Spurred by the controversial Facebook emotions study and the vigorous debate surrounding it, there's been a …
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A system designer’s take on the Facebook study – a response to danah boyd’s blog post
Last week I sent an email reply to danah boyd in response to her thoughtful post about the Facebook study. She encouraged me to post it publicly, but I was a bit scared by the viciousness and panic of the reactions. At the same time, I worried that the silence of people who do research …
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