We kicked off our spring speaker series yesterday with a talk by Elizabeth Dubois on the hate and harassment journalists and health communicators face online in their day-to-day work. Drawing from interviews, surveys, and content analyses of tweets, Dubois demonstrated how facing negativity every day can make it harder for these public figures to do their jobs.
One key takeaway? “Intensity and type of negativity help us understand differences based on identity.” Negative feedback doesn’t fit neatly into a binary measure of hateful or not hateful, but instead runs along a spectrum from responses that range from critical of the work to profanity-laced and rooted in stereotype to outright threats. For example, one journalist participant, who is a Muslim woman, said:
“When it veers towards hateful rhetoric, that’s when I start getting concerned and that’s when my life starts becoming difficult.”
Given that these different degrees of negativity affect recipients differently, we also need better methods to understand it.
Watch the full talk:
On and Off of TikTok
In her latest New York Times piece, Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote about the aesthetics and power of blondness and getting swarmed off TikTok after engaging with a TikTok about blondes:
“I wear the banning proudly, but I contest my humiliating defeat at the hands of angry blondes. I don’t protest out of pride but from intellectual seriousness… When people have outsize emotional reactions to benign inquiries about their self-evident beliefs, it is often an indicator that status is doing invisible work. That makes the culture, economics and politics of blondness great ways to think about how status derives its power and how we use that power in our own lives.”
And here in North Carolina, the state recently banned accessing TikTok from state-owned devices. Deen Freelon discussed as a research challenge with Graham Webster of the DigiChina Project:
“I do think these kinds of bans will effectively prohibit certain kinds of research on TikTok [TT] at public universities. I'd think they would affect anything except for survey and interview-based research that asks participants about TT—so i.e. all research that uses TT content as data.”
He also noted that he’s working to limit the impact of North Carolina’s ban on the Pyktok tool as much as possible.
Publications and appearances
“Developing training resources for librarians is an immediate instructional need that has potential to reach a wide audience. If provided with high-quality training opportunities, librarians would then be well positioned to effectively disseminate tools to patrons, because librarians have intimate knowledge.” Francesca Tripodi and colleagues released a new publication on libraries combating disinformation.
Nanditha Narayanamoorthy and co-authors have a new paper on the effects of remote communication and collaboration practices on game developers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Coming soon
January 25 at 12:30pm: The Center on Tech Policy will be hosting a fireside chat with Cherie Givens, NC Department of Information Technology Chief Privacy Officer. The event will take place at UNC’s Toy Lounge, 450 Dey Hall.
January 31: The Center on Tech Policy will be hosting a webinar panel discussion on the state of state platform regulation. Zoom registration.
February 10: The spring speaker series continues with a panel on Digital Governance in the Global South. Details and RSVP to follow.
February 14-17: The frank gathering. Francesca Tripodi will be participating alongside other amazing speakers. Event information and registration.
March 9 & 10: The virtual QAnon Research Conference. Event information and registration.
May 30, 2023: Release date for Alice Marwick’s The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media.
Rest of Web
📃 Check out Data & Society’s reading list on labor, race, and tech! It includes Tressie McMillan Cottom alongside some other excellent thinkers.
As we sign off for the week, I’d like to inform our readers that this will be my last newsletter. I’ve enjoyed connecting with you all these past months and I hope 2023 is full of wins for everyone!
Thank you,
Andrea Lopez