Work of the Justice Collaboratory

The SMGI's Spring '23 lab partnered with New_ Public to develop case studies looking at two specific design features of online platforms - reputation management systems and jury/tribunal systems. Over the course of the semester, students in our lab read through related research, collated examples of how these systems are used across different platforms, and interviewed practitioners who have developed these systems on major platforms resulting in these case study reports.

As the T&S field matures, policymakers, regulators, and industry practitioners are increasingly hungry for empirical evidence to guide their work. As part of the Social Media Governance Initiative, we downloaded an archive of 20 years of over 1,200 research articles written on various online Trust and Safety topics. Our postbaccalaureate fellow, Michael Bochkur Dratver, then began a systematic coding of all articles in the archive using a codebook that was developed collaboratively among those in our lab and feedback from others interested in the project.

The SMGI/JC hosted a two-day in person conference on Thursday and Friday March 30th and 31st, 2023 at Yale Law School. This two-day conference included presentations from a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and industry practitioners discussing their work exploring a range of issues of online governance.

The Community Moderation Project (CMP) is a qualitative study of how community moderation facilitates online discourse and how such moderation might be used in the future.

Yale Law School’s Justice Collaboratory has partnered with the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys and LaGratta Consulting to develop the Elevating Trust and Legitimacy for Prosecutors Project. Through a multi-phase site selection process, project partners chose the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office, Saint Paul City Attorney’s Office and Columbus City Attorney’s Office as the project pilot sites to engage in a year-long collaborative assessment, planning, and implementation process of procedural justice practices.

Sponsored by the Justice Collaboratory’s Social Media Governance Initiative, this course on Trust, Safety, and Governance helps prepare participants to be effective practitioners of governance and leaders within Trust & Safety teams. The three-day intensive workshop provides state of the art training on ways to use digital technologies to create and maintain prosocial environments.