ORCID
Caroline Haythornthwaite: 0000-0002-7311-3140
Anatoliy Gruzd: 0000-0003-2366-5163
Philip Mai: 0000-0002-6950-1220
Document Type
Conference Document
Date
1-3-2024
Keywords
social media, platform governance, content moderation, human rights, fragile state
Language
English
Funder(s)
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Acknowledgements
This research was funded in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (PI: Gruzd).
Disciplines
Civic and Community Engagement | Inequality and Stratification | Library and Information Science | Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation | Social Justice | Sociology of Culture
Description/Abstract
Social media platforms are grappling with how to respond to hate speech, misinformation, and political manipulation in ways that address human rights, free speech, and equality. As independent ‘states’, they are enacting their own rules of conduct, deriving their own ‘laws’, convening their own extrajudicial self regulatory institutions, and making their own interpretations and enactments of human rights. With the rise of social states such as Facebook, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit, how fragile are they in their ability to achieve outcomes of fair, equitable and consistent application of their own laws? Could an assessment of the fragility of these social states help identify areas of focus for stability in design, use and operation of social media platforms? What indicators would measure such fragility? This paper draws on the Fund For Peace Fragility State Index for parallels in social media to detail, measure and understand issues of platform precariousness, governance, and support of human rights.
Recommended Citation
Haythornthwaite, Caroline A.; Mai, Philip; and Gruzd, Anatoliy, "Social Media as Fragile State" (2024). School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship. 200.
https://surface.syr.edu/istpub/200
Source
submission
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Included in
Civic and Community Engagement Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Library and Information Science Commons, Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation Commons, Social Justice Commons, Sociology of Culture Commons
