APPLICATION DEADLINE: JANUARY 1, 2017 Microsoft Research New England (MSRNE) is looking for advanced PhD students to join the Social Media Collective (SMC) for its 12-week Internship program. The Social Media Collective (in New England, we are Nancy Baym, Tarleton Gillespie, and Mary Gray, with current postdocs Dan Greene and Dylan Mulvin) bring together empirical and …
Continue reading Call for applications! MSR Social Media Collective PhD interns, for summer 2017
Registration open for: “Negotiating Identity in Social Media: Relational, emotional, and visual labor” with Nancy Baym, Annette Markham and Katrin Tiidenberg. REGISTRATION: https://auws.au.dk/negotiationofidentityinsocialmedia Time: Oct 11-14, 2016 (Just after the AoIR conference in Berlin) Place: Aarhus University and DOKK 1, Aarhus, Denmark Online: We'll post an online participation option soon. Check back! Instructors: Nancy Baym …
Continue reading Negotiating Identity in Social Media: Ph.D. course in Aarhus after AoIR
(or, "Hopefully 4chan Won't Hear About This Contest") The social-media-ification of everything continues. If you've got time for some late-summer procrastination, thanks to the Internet you can choose the design of my house. As you may have read here two weeks ago, I'm crowdsourcing it. The first competition is over and I received 16 entries -- …
(or, "The Social-Media-ification of Everything") The architecture crowdsourcing Web site Arcbazar has been called "The Worst Thing to Happen To Architecture Since the Internet Started." The site also got some press recently by running a parallel, unauthorized architecture competition for the "people's choice" for the design of the Obama Presidential Library. I've decided to use arcbazar.com …
Last week, the Daily Beast published an article by one of its editors who sought to report about how dating apps were facilitating sexual encounters in Rio’s Olympic Village. Instead, his story focused mainly on athletes using Grindr, an app for men seeking men, and included enough personal information about individuals to identify and out …
Continue reading Three flawed assumptions the Daily Beast made about dating apps
TLDR: It's easier to remove gender biases from machine learning algorithms than from people. In a recent paper, Saligrama, Bolukbasi, Chang, Zou, and I stumbled across some good and bad news about Word Embeddings. Word Embeddings are a wildly popular tool of the trade among AI researchers. They can be used to solve analogy puzzles. For instance, for …
Continue reading How machine learning can amplify or remove gender stereotypes
[This is an old post. SEE ALSO: The most recent blog post about this case.] Last month I joined other social media researchers and the ACLU to file a lawsuit against the US Government to protect the legal right to conduct online research. This is newly relevant today because a community of devs interested in public policy started …
(or: I write scripts, bots, and scrapers that collect online data) [This is an old post. SEE ALSO: The most recent blog post about this case.] I never thought that I would sue the government. The papers went in on Wednesday, but the whole situation still seems unreal. I’m a professor at the University of Michigan and a social …
I was delighted to give the Robert M. Pockrass Memorial Lecture at Penn State University this year, titled "Awakenings of the Filtered: Algorithmic Personalization in Social Media and Beyond." I used the opportunity to give a broad overview of recent work about social media filtering algorithms and personalization. Here it is: https://youtu.be/ZxS15iIK2JA I tried to argue that …
This piece is also published on medium.com In mid 2016, we confront another ethical crisis related to personal data, social media, the public internet, and social research. This time, it’s a release of some 70,0000 OKCupid users’ data, including some very intimate details about individuals. Responses from several communities of practice highlight the complications of …
Continue reading The OKCupid data release fiasco: It’s time to rethink ethics education
Social Media Collective 