Social Media Governance Initiative
The Justice Collaboratory’s Social Media Governance Initiative aims to create an online environment that is good for society.
We envision an online environment in which communities can freely exchange information and ideas and engage in civil discourse in a manner that benefits society. To that end, we engage audiences including technology companies, policymakers and communities to conduct research and develop recommendations to ensure that our digital technologies foster healthy online interaction. We currently partner with practitioners from various social media platforms. We also recognize that many important online communities exist outside the bounds of social media platforms and are committed to supporting healthier online communities wherever they may exist.
Our Approach
Our approach is distinctive because of our engagement with the industry practitioners. We collaborate with several online platforms that are central to our initiative and exchange of scientific ideas across the boundaries of the academy and the corporation.
We believe it is critical to work as independent scholars but to also engage with the companies that benefit from applying scientific research.
Work With Us
If you are interested in working with SMGI, please get in touch:
Some issues we address with our technology partners, include:
Building infrastructure and incentives on platforms to promote civility and pro-social online behaviors
Building online neighborhood community vitality
Understanding how to allow individuals to more actively participate in community governance online
The impact of organizational structure and culture on tech corporations’ governance
Leveraging Procedural Justice theory to shift away from criminal justice and punitive models of platform governance
The Pro-Social Movement
We began the Social Media Governance Initiative because we recognized a parallel between the way government authorities regulate real life communities and the way social media platforms were beginning to build models for regulating online communities. We wanted to explore how we might translate our research from criminal justice theory, which primarily examines relations between police and the public, to relations between social media users and platform authorities.
We primarily use theories that are pro-social.
Pro-social is a key term for us. In using this term, we mean to contrast currently popular governance strategies rooted in identification and punishment of anti-social rule-breaking behavior and instead promote strategies that internalize rule-following based on the perception of the authority. We seek to turn the focus away from identifying rule-breaking behavior and focus on promoting pro-social behavior like increasing online civility or enhancing cooperation between online community members.
Platforms continue to use traditional punitive approaches when governing behavior, which our research shows is not effective at remediating offenses, acknowledging harm, or encouraging healthy participation. There is little concerted effort to govern social media users’ behavior through pro-social interventions. We aim to collaborate and enable tech corporations to focus more on designing products that have a pro-social approach, encouraging cooperation among their users and with authorities. We aim to shape a collective effort to study and promote approaches that social media platforms can use to encourage civility, cooperation, engagement and internalized rule following on the Internet.
Creating the Pro-Social Movement
To create a pro-social movement, we need to build a body of interdisciplinary research by collaborating with other universities and industry practitioners. The body of research applies pro-social theories to social media platforms, which include, but are not limited to: theories of legitimacy and rule-following, community vitality, community governance, and social capital.
To make the pro-social movement possible we aim to:
Undertake research experiments and design social media governance studies
Operate an interdisciplinary and pro-social research network
Train students and research assistants to become the next generation of social media governance scholars
Cultivate productive relations between researchers and technology companies to advance thought leadership, training, and scientific study
Provide interdisciplinary training for trust & safety professionals
Recent SMGI Projects
