Words can hurt: The casualties of social media

The news of late has included the very sad tale of a 12 year Florida girl who committed suicide, apparently at the behest of cyberbullies.  This article from The Verge speaks of other suicides and the lessons that could have been learned from the cautionary tale of Formspring.me, a (now defunct) Q&A site.

E. Nicole Thornton and I wrote about Formspring.me in an article entitled, "Governance within social media websites: Ruling new frontiers," which appeared in Telecommunications Policy in July 2012. Here, in standard academic jargon, is the abstract of that article:

Governance within social media websites can be evaluated in terms of conformity to or transgression of external legal requirements, social mores, and economic incentives. By examining social media websites as frontiers and heterotopias in which rule is indeterminate, this paper explores the way rule is established and changed. The authors illustrate this approach using the case of changing governance within Formspring.

The conclusion that we drew was that there's a kind of contestation between the owner of social media site, who sets rules through the terms of service and other statements, and the actual users, who create rules through their practices.  If something (i.e., cyberbullying) is done often and if those who do this are not (or are rarely) disciplined, then the implicit and meaningful rule becomes: Doing that is OK.  On Formspring and apparently on many other forms of social media, this translates as: Cyberbullying is an accepted practice.  Formspring's owners tried iteratively, but ultimately unsuccessfully to change that rule and to enforce a "no cyberbullying" rule.

Sadly -- and this story is nothing but sad -- the most recent news of more suicides further highlights the limits of the social media as a tool for engineering a better (more democratic, more peaceful, more connected) world.  The mainly false promise of social media as a tool for democratization was the subject of another fairly recent publication of mine: "I hear America Tweeting." 

(By the way, that article was submitted to the journal prior to the Arab Spring and was published well before the brittleness of democratic changes in the Arab world became apparent.)

In short, our social media are a reflection of the imperfections of our social life -- and sometimes also an intensification of those imperfections.



Thanks to EB for passing along the Verge article.