research-article

Public Access

Characterizations of Online Harassment: Comparing Policies Across Social Media Platforms

Authors:

Jessica A. Pater,

Elizabeth D. Mynatt,

Casey FieslerAuthors Info & Claims

GROUP '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work

Pages 369 - 374

https://doi.org/10.1145/2957276.2957297

Published: 13 November 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Harassment in online spaces is increasingly part of public debate and concern. Pervasive problems like cyberbullying, hate speech, and the glorification of self-harm have highlighted the breadth and depth of harassment taking place online. In this study we conduct a content analysis of the governing policies for fifteen social media platforms as they relate to harassment (of oneself and/or of community members) and other associated behaviors. We find that there is a striking inconsistency in how platform-specific policies depict harassment. Additionally, how these policies prescribe responses to harassment vary from mild censuring to the involvement of law enforcement. Finally, based on our analysis and findings, we discuss the potential for harnessing the power of the online communities to create norms around problematic behaviors.

References

[1]

Ashktorab, Z. and Vitak, J. 2016. Designing Cyberbullying Mitigation and Prevention Solutions through Participatory Design With Teenagers. Proc. of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 3895--3905.

Digital Library

[2]

Brown, K. et al. 2006. Cyber-Bullying: Developing Policy to Direct Responses that are Equitable and Effective in Addressing this Special Form of Bullying. Journal of Educational Administration. 57, 1--36.

[3]

Chancellor, S. et al. 2016. #thygapp: Instagram Content Moderation and Lexical Variation in Pro-Eating Disorder Communities. Proc. of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

Digital Library

[4]

Dadvar, M. and Jong, F. De. 2012. Cyberbullying detection: a step toward a safer Internet yard. Proc. of the 21st International Conference Companion on World Wide Web, 121--125.

Digital Library

[5]

DeNardis, L. and Hackl, A.M. 2015. Internet Governance by Socia Media Platforms. Telecommunications Policy. 39, 9, 761--770.

Digital Library

[6]

Djuric, N. et al. 2014. Hate Speech Detection with Commen Embeddings. Proc. of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion, 29--30.

Digital Library

[7]

Fiesler, C. et al. 2016. An Archive of Their Own: A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design. Proc. of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2574--2585.

Digital Library

[8]

Fiesler, C. et al. 2016. Reality and Perception of Copyright Terms for Online Content Creation. Proc. of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer Supported and Cooperative Work & Social Computing.

Digital Library

[9]

Fiesler, C. et al. 2015. Understanding Copyright Law in Online Creative Communities. Proc. of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, 116--129.

Digital Library

[10]

Gilbert, P. and Irons, C. 2005. Focused therapies and compassionate mind training for shame and self-attacking. Compassion: Conceptualisations, research and use in psychotherapy. 263--325.

[11]

Good, N.S. et al. 2007. Noticing notice: a large-scale experiment on the timing of software license agreements. Proc. of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, 607.

Digital Library

[12]

Jackson, S. et al. 2014. The policy knot: reintegrating policy, practice and desgin in CSCW studies of social computing. Proc. of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperateive Work & Social Computing, 588--602.

Digital Library

[13]

Jackson, S. et al. 2014. The Policy Knot: Re-integrating Policy, Practice and Design in CSCW Studies of Social Computing. Proc. of the Conf. on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, 588--602.

Digital Library

[14]

Jensen, C. and Potts, C. 2014. Privacy Policies as Decision-Making Tools: An Evaluation of Online Privacy Notices. Proc. of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 471--478.

Digital Library

[15]

Lewis, S.P. et al. 2011. The scope of nonsuicidal self-injury on YouTube. Pediatrics. 127, 3 (2011), e552--e557.

[16]

Luger, E. et al. 2013. Consent for All: Revealing the Hidde Complexity of Terms and Conditions. Proc. of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2687--2696.

Digital Library

[17]

Massanari, A. 2015. #Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit's algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. New Media & Society.

[18]

Meredith, J.P. 2011. Combating Cyberbullying Emphasizing Education over Criminalization.pdf. Federal Comm. Law Journal. 63, 1 (2011), 311--340.

[19]

Morgan, J.T. et al. 2013. Tea & Sympathy: Crafting Positive New User Experiences on Wikipedia. Proc. of the 2013 conference on Computer supported co operative Work and Social Computing, 839--848.

Digital Library

[20]

Ostrom, E. 2015. Governing the Commons. Cambridge Univeristy Press.

[21]

Panko, R.R. and Beh, H.G. 2002. Monitoring for pornography and sexual harassment. Comm. of the ACM. 45, 1 (2002), 84--87.

Digital Library

[22]

Pater, J. et al. 2016. "Hunger Hurts but Starving Works:" Characterzing the Presentation of Eating Disorders Online. Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

Digital Library

[23]

Wolak, J. et al. 2007. Does Online Harassment Constitute Bullying? An Exploration of Online Harassment by Known Peers and Online-Only Contacts. Journal of Adolescent Health. 41, 6 SUPPL. (2007).

[24]

Yin, D. et al. 2009. Detection of Harassment on Web 2.0. In Proc. of the Content Analysis in the WEB 2.0 Workshop at WWW

Cited By

Nova FPfafman RLogan Delaney CPater J(2024)Unveiling the "Toxic" World of #Meanspo: Understanding Users' Emerging Online Eating Disorder Practices in X/TwitterProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870618:CSCW2(1-27)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687061
Rivera VWilkinson DAugusta ALi SRedmiles EStrohmayer A(2024)Safer Algorithmically-Mediated Offline Introductions: Harms and Protective BehaviorsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869488:CSCW2(1-43)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686948
Foriest JMittal SBray KTran ADe Choudhury M(2024)A Cross Community Comparison of Muting in Conversations of Gendered Violence on RedditProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869408:CSCW2(1-29)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686940
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Characterizations of Online Harassment: Comparing Policies Across Social Media Platforms
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing and business

Recommendations

Online sexual harassment over anonymous social media in Bangladesh
ICTD '19: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development

Prior research on anonymous social media (ASM) has studied the issue of sexual harassment and has revealed its connections to stereotyping, aggression, interpersonal relationships, and mental health among others [16, 24, 60]. However, the ...
Factors associated with distressing electronic harassment and cyberbullying

Electronic harassment and cyberbullying can take various forms and involve a range of perpetrators. This study utilised survey results from 1673 New Zealand students aged 12-19years to explore electronic harassment on the internet and mobile phones and ...
Factors associated with young people's successful resolution of distressing electronic harassment

Electronic harassment is a pervasive phenomenon among young people, however relatively little is known about actions that targets of harassment may undertake to manage such abuse, and whether particular actions and personal characteristics are ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

GROUP '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work

November 2016

534 pages

ISBN:9781450342766

DOI:10.1145/2957276

General Chairs:
Stephan Lukosch
Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
,
Aleksandra Sarcevic
Drexel University, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Myriam Lewkowicz
Troyes University of Technology, France
,
Michael Muller
IBM Research, USA

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 November 2016

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

National Science Foundation

Conference

GROUP '16

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

GROUP '16: 2016 ACM Conference on Supporting Groupwork

November 13 - 16, 2016

Florida, Sanibel Island, USA

Acceptance Rates

GROUP '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 36 of 111 submissions, 32%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 125 of 405 submissions, 31%

Upcoming Conference

GROUP '25

Sponsor:
sigchi

The 2025 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work

January 12 - 15, 2025

Hilton Head , SC , USA

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

98
Total Citations
View Citations
6,046
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)1,389
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)144

Reflects downloads up to 23 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Nova FPfafman RLogan Delaney CPater J(2024)Unveiling the "Toxic" World of #Meanspo: Understanding Users' Emerging Online Eating Disorder Practices in X/TwitterProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870618:CSCW2(1-27)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687061
Rivera VWilkinson DAugusta ALi SRedmiles EStrohmayer A(2024)Safer Algorithmically-Mediated Offline Introductions: Harms and Protective BehaviorsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869488:CSCW2(1-43)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686948
Foriest JMittal SBray KTran ADe Choudhury M(2024)A Cross Community Comparison of Muting in Conversations of Gendered Violence on RedditProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869408:CSCW2(1-29)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686940
Wang XWang ZZhang MYu KHui PFan M(2024)Avatar Appearance and Behavior of Potential Harassers Affect Users' Perceptions and Response Strategies in Social Virtual Reality (VR): A Mixed-Methods StudyProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869348:CSCW2(1-27)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686934
Ma RZhang ZGui XKou Y(2024)Labeling in the Dark: Exploring Content Creators’ and Consumers’ Experiences with Content Classification for Child Safety on YouTubeProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661565(1518-1532)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643834.3661565
Obajemu OAgha ZChowdhury FWisniewski P(2024)Towards Enforcing Good Digital Citizenship: Identifying Opportunities for Adolescent Online Safety NudgesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36374138:CSCW1(1-37)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637413
Kim HLee JJang JKim J(2024)ReSPect: Enabling Active and Scalable Responses to Networked Online HarassmentProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373948:CSCW1(1-30)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637394
Cai JPatel ANaderi AWohn D(2024)Content Moderation Justice and Fairness on Social Media: Comparisons Across Different Contexts and PlatformsExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650882(1-9)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613905.3650882
Armin ATrybala JYoung JRazi A(2024)Support in Short Form: Investigating TikTok Comments on Videos with #HarassmentExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650849(1-8)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613905.3650849
Chakraborti MBonagiri SVirgüez-Ruiz SFrey S(2024)NLP4Gov: A Comprehensive Library for Computational Policy AnalysisExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650810(1-8)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613905.3650810
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents