Designing Restorative Approaches to Moderating Adversarial Online Interactions

Restorative justice is the idea that remediating a “crime” should focus on supporting the victim, restoring the community, and returning the perpetrator to good community standing. In the U.S. justice system, restorative approaches have been used in parallel with more common retributive approaches and have had strong outcomes in terms of reduced recidivism. The concept of “crime” in online space is more generally referred to as harassment, bullying, trolling or a variety of other terms related to adversarial interactions. Content moderation that uses retributive approaches is constrained in its effectiveness, so our project is looking to design content moderation approaches that use restorative justice.

The project I will describe is in the early stages of applying restorative approaches to moderating adversarial online moderation. I will address theories of retributive and restorative justice, and show how those have been connected to different moderation mechanisms. I will present research we’ve done on “retributive harassment” and connect that to an upcoming research agenda related to restorative justice.

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Speaker Details

Cliff Lampe is a Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. His work on social media and online communities has been widely cited over the past 15 years. Cliff’s general interest is how interaction in social computing platforms leads to positive outcomes, and how to overcome barriers to those positive outcomes. His work touches on social capital development via social media interactions, the benefits of anonymity, civic technology, alt right organization in online spaces, and similar topics. Dr. Lampe is also the Director of the Citizen Interaction Design Program at the University of Michigan, which works closely with city governments to improve citizenship opportunities through the targeted application of information technology. He is a Distinguished Member of The ACM, and has various service roles in the HCI research community.

Date:
Speakers:
Cliff Lampe
Affiliation:
University of Michigan