Unfortunately, the social media industry is increasingly moving away from using human fact-checkers. Many are rolling out AI and Community Notes-type programs, which come with their own set of challenges. For example, 89% of Community Notes on X never see daylight. notetracker.socialmediadata.org

Algorithmic audits have become a fashionable remedy in academic and policy debates, but this overlooks a fundamental point: like domestic pets 🐕, every algorithm has an owner. Accountability lies not with the code, but with those who design, deploy, and profit from it.

Like the gun debate in America, where money and identity override reason, the tech industry’s fixation on profit and polarization will make their stated goal of fostering healthy online conversation the Silicon Valley version of “thoughts and prayers.” #emptymantra

In that paper, we showed how an online community legitimizes itself and minimizes allegations of anti-social, bullying behaviour by weaponizing and deploying a feminine gender identity in three overlapping and internally contradictory ways to: socialmedialab.ca/2024/03/12/c...

This new study is a follow-up to a study we released last year, "Just being a bit bitchy: The gendered valences of online anti-social behaviour on Tattle Life". socialmedialab.ca/2024/03/12/c...

PS... To be clear, we are not advocating for toxic speech online, what we are trying to do with this study to understand how toxic speech is used by people to construct and maintain in- and out-group boundaries in online communities.

The Civility Analyzer calculates toxicity scores (such as Toxicity, Insult, & Threat) & prosocial scores (like Compassion, Curiosity, and Respect) for each post.

To put it another way, social media is good at showing what people are talking about (the trending direction of public attention or sentiment), but it doesn’t reliably convey how many people feel that way (intensity) or how strongly they feel it (speed/force of change).

In some way, social media is like a weather vane in a storm: it spins quickly to show where the wind’s blowing, but you can’t tell how fierce the storm really is.