Research & Policy

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.

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.

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.

In partnership with the Policing Project at New York University School of Law, The Justice Collaboratory organized the convening of two working groups of some of the country’s leading advocates and experts to discuss what a reimagined public safety system would look like.

The Justice Collaboratory conducted a study of perspectives of individuals working at the frontline of six key institutions in New York City’s criminal justice system: prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, correction officers, probation officers and Criminal Justice Agency interviewers.

In partnership with the Connecticut State Department of Correction and LaGratta Consulting, The Justice Collaboratory designed and evaluated an intervention focused on increasing procedural justice inside correctional facilities.

This National Institutes of Health (NIH) program aims to better understand COVID-19 testing patterns among underserved and vulnerable populations disproportionately affected by the pandemic; strengthen the data on disparities in infection rates, disease progression and morbidity and mortality; and develop strategies to reduce the disparities in COVID-19 testing, rates of infection, and outcomes.

This study qualitatively examined Project Longevity, Connecticut’s largest GVI initiative, to contribute to the limited literature on implementation of gun violence reduction strategies.

Despite the transformation of policing and rising prevalence of encounters with the justice system, current research is ill-suited to help us understand how the Michael Browns of America come to experience the police and state authority more broadly. This important work requires a better way to measure these dynamics across communities. And it requires that we center the voices of the unfree. That we listen. The Portals Policing Project aims to do just that.

The Policing, Law, and Policy Clinic offers current Yale Law School students the opportunity to translate cutting-edge empirical research on policing reform into real-world policies

The Justice Collaboratory and members of the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice have designed intervention programs that aim to improve police-community relations in six pilot cities around the country.

Freedom Reads harnesses the power of literature to counter what prison does to the spirit. In the recognition that reading affirms our dignity, strengthens our sense of self and lets us access our authentic interests, Freedom Reads is placing 500-book Freedom Libraries in prisons across the country.

Through a series of public events, a new course offering, cutting-edge scholarship, and a special issue of The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, the Justice Collaboratory in conjunction with the Solomon Center for Health, Law & Policy is placing a special focus on addressing the epidemic of gun violence in America.

This project involves a qualitative evaluation of gun violence prevention services in New Haven, utilizing a community-based participatory action research (CBPAR) model. Its goal is to explore: (1) How do individuals and communities impacted by gun violence understand its underlying causes and experience its effects? (2) How do individuals and communities experience gun violence prevention work?

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

The Community Vitality Study (CVS) is a series of research surveys of police officers and the residents of US cities. The primary goal of the CVS is to better understand the views that both residents and police officers have on police-community relations and other local public policy issues.

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

The Justice Collaboratory explored the influence of school-based policing on adolescent safety and wellbeing, as well as on juvenile perceptions of the criminal justice system.

The Justice Collaboratory conducted a community study on behalf of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOCJ), looking into New Yorker’s engagement with the city government.

With the support of the William T. Grant Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we are working with several large district attorney’s offices to understand the causal impacts of misdemeanor prosecution. Misdemeanor cases make up over 80 percent of the cases processed by the U.S. criminal justice system, yet we know little about the causal impacts of misdemeanor prosecution.

This convening, sponsored by the Justice Collaboratory, explores how policing in the United States will and/or should be affected by the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent nationwide protests.