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.

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.

The Social Media Governance Initiative is hosting a one day workshop entitled “Community Driven Governance Online: Past, Present, and Future”. The forum will discuss approaches to online governance which put communities at the center of governance structures, providing community members tools, training, and systems to build communities and self-govern.

Our aim for this special issue is to bring a few novel approaches to platform governance which can be applicable to social media and other online platforms.

Facebook’s Data Transparency Advisory Group (DTAG) assessed Facebook’s methods of measuring and reporting on its Community Standards enforcement policies. DTAG was chaired by Tracey L. Meares and Tom R. Tyler, who are the faculty directors of the Justice Collaboratory.

Yale Law School’s Justice Collaboratory has launched a new research network within their Social Media Governance Initiative. The Research Network is a consortium of scholars working together to examine the sociocultural impacts of digital technologies on contemporary social life.

Twitter launched a project called Birdwatch which allows some form of community governance. Using this data we want to examine the success of Birdwatch.

We have partnered with Nextdoor to test alternatives to punitive governance mechanisms.