Join us in congratulating Senior Principal Researcher and Social Media Collective member Mary Gray, for two achievements this week! Yesterday, the Digital Future Society released a report this week called “The Future of Work in the Digital Era: The Rise of Labour Platforms.” Mary co-authored the report with the other members of the Equitable Growth …
Continue reading Mary Gray, new report on the future of work
(or: Research Online Should Not Be Illegal) I’m a college professor. But on Friday morning I won't be in the classroom, I'll be in courtroom 30 in the US District Courthouse on Constitution Avenue in Washington DC. The occasion? Oral arguments on the first motion in Sandvig v. Sessions. You may recall that the ACLU, …
Continue reading Heading to the Courthouse for Sandvig v. Sessions
[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 …
What factors lead users in an online platform to join together in mass collective action to influence those who run the platform? Today, I'm excited to share that my CHI paper on the reddit blackout has received a Best Paper Honorable Mention! (Read the pre-print version of my paper here) When users of online platforms complain, we're often …
Continue reading How Do Users Take Collective Action Against Online Platforms? CHI Honorable Mention
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, …
Continue reading Facebook’s improved “Community Standards” still can’t resolve the central paradox
After Yahoo's high-profile purchase of Tumblr, when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said that she would "promise not to screw it up," this is probably not what she had in mind. Devoted users of Tumblr have been watching closely, worried that the cool, web 2.0 image blogging tool would be tamed by the nearly two-decade-old search giant. One population of Tumblr …
Continue reading Tumblr, NSFW porn blogging, and the challenge of checkpoints
(or, Unfortunately, Algorithms Sound Boring.) Finally, a video game where you get to act like a database! This morning, the print version of the New York Times profiled the Kickstarter-funded game "Data Dealer." The game is a browser-based single-player farming-style clicker with a premise that the player "turns data into cash" by playing the role of …
Since I supported the blacking out of the MSR Social Media Collective blog to which I sometimes contribute, and the blacking out of Culture Digitally, which I co-organize, in order to join the SOPA protest led by the "Stop American Censorship" effort, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reddit, and Wikipedia, I though I should weigh in …
Continue reading SOPA and the strategy of forced invisibility
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