Summary

In “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community,” Judith Donath describes how identity is established in virtual communities, and how identity can be ambiguous due to deception. Donath uses a study on Usenet, a newsgroup in which users can post about specified topics. Key indications of identification include account name, email domain, identity in writing style (voice/language), and signature. Although users are assumed to be who they say they are, these forms of identification can easily be easily faked and used to deceive other users. Categories of deception include trolls, impersonation, and identity concealment. Additionally, the balance between privacy, credibility, and self-expression has still not been “perfected,” such that a community can feel secure about the information they post (or read).

“4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community” details the effects of anonymity and ephemerality in online communities, in particular 4chan’s /b/ discussion board. On 4chan, posts get pushed off the first page by newer posts, and remain on the top of the first page if the post is popular (has users actively replying). It was found that most posts have short lifespans – 3.9 minutes on average – which displays the fast pace of the /b/ board. 90% of users on /b/ were found to be anonymous, which is suggested to be because it allows for more intimate and open conversation, and new ideas.

Reflection

In the first paper, I found it particularly interesting that email domain was an indication of credibility. Since I typically don’t use websites that rely on the email domain for a user account, I never considered that it would be something that users look at to determine if someone is a reliable source of information. This reminded me of checking top-level domains of websites (.org, .com, .net) when checking sources for research or essays, which is something I and many other students do more often. In this section, Donath uses various examples of prejudice based on email domain – being a “loser” for having an AOL domain, not having “BIG $$$” because of a specific neighborhood/location – which made me think about social media sites that are popular today and why they don’t have usernames based on email.

In “4chan” it was intriguing to me how ephemerality is even a concept because, like email domain, it wasn’t something I ever considered even though it is apparent in social media that I use often (Snapchat, Twitter, etc.). It was interesting especially how ephemerality is affected by time of day, and that threads lasted the longest between 9-10am EST and lasted the shortest between 5-7pm EST due to activity by North American users after work/school. This reminded me of a discussion I had with a friend a year (more or less) ago about when the best time to post a photo on Instagram. This was when Instagram still displayed posts chronologically, and the best time apparently also was around 5-8pm EST since users were getting off from work/school.

Questions

• Will there ever be a balance between privacy, credibility, and self-expression?
• What do people think they gain from harmful forms of deception (catfishing/impersonation, trolling)?
• Why do recent/popular social media sites use username rather than email?
• Does using email as a form of identification on Usenet have more benefits (e.g. allows for credibility) than disadvantages (e.g. bullying)?
• Can current writing styles be categorized to determine reliability?
• Why do websites like Tumblr/Ask.fm still allow anonymity when asking questions?
• Do people enjoy the ephemerality of 4chan and other sites? Why?

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Reading Response September 5th                                                                            James Brothers

Summary

The paper “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community” begins by waxing very philosophical, mostly on whether or not you are you, or if by having multiple online personas you can become something different. The paper is primarily a study into ‘Usenets’ and why or how people use them, and specifically how identify plays a role in their use or communities. The paper then dives into just how you can use various clues to help identify people based on what they say online, and to see if it lends them a measure of credibility. A user who has an obviously free email may be suspect, while someone who has a domain belonging to their business is much more likely to be asking questions or qualified to be answering questions related to their business. Other ways to identify someone can also be their style of writing, the words they use, or the content of their message. Someone talking about their fish hobby, who writes both well and eloquently, is probably not a 9-year-old who got his parent’s computer to mess with people on the internet. However, deception is rife on the internet, as many of us know. The paper talks about various forms of online deception and its uses, many of which are a part of our common knowledge or vernacular today (Trolling for example).

 

Reflection

It is interesting that Identity plays an inherent role in whether or not we believe things people say or write. The article mentions that articles from the Wall Street Journal are seen as inherently more believable than a tabloid. That said, its something we don’t often give much thought to. How many pictures of “facts” online have you seen and believed? How many “quotes” do you see or hear on a regular basis? We give incredible scrutiny to these aspects in some cases, but not in others. It is perhaps telling that I already recognize and understand a fair amount of what the paper is talking about, as these issues have become a regular part of much of what we do on computers. Trolling, the assumption that I should take everything online with a grain of salt, etc. These are all things I understand and unconsciously do on a daily basis. There are extremely few things I look at online and assume they’re true, I suppose mostly online profiles which involve detailed storied pasts and a large number of pictures. Even so, people have been faking things like Facebook profiles for quite some time. Some form of easy identification (such as Twitter’s verified accounts) is important these days.

 

Questions

-What “signals” (assessment or conventional) do you see or use in everyday social media?

-What information could we glean from an analysis of various social medias’s writing styles? Moreover, what does your say about you?

-Have new forms of deception arisen since this paper was written, or what new forms of online identity deception exist now?

-Have any of you ever had issues with deception in online media? What did you do after you realized this? What could you do again in the future to combat it?

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Summary

The article “Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community” constructs and analyzes ideas about anonymity and ephemerality on social networks such as 4chan to see what type of community develops with these characteristics. 4chan is a website that threads expire after being at the bottom of the 15th page, and item is moved up when someone replies or comments on it to the first page keeping employing the survival of the fittest strategy to social media. There are no user accounts, but there are mechanisms in place to verify an identity if necessary such as tripcode, but they find that most users do not use any of these mechanisms. Most users stay anonymous but they have found ways to acknowledge their ranking within their system. The main conclusion from this study were that when given the opportunity to be anonymous most users take the options, and more participating due to removal of fear of being rejected by a community.

 

The next article, “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community” also analyzes the identity within a similar virtual community, however, this article goes into depth on how exactly identify is formed and how identity deception plays out in an online community. This article covers concepts of identity such as shown in account name/id, signatures authors provide for themselves and credentials. These forms of identity are how members find trolls and user’s who have the purpose in mind to deceive others. An interesting topic this article brings up is about voice and language, something I wouldn’t have initially thought of when I think about online identity. This is about verbiage usage in the community, which can be an indicator to individuals if a user is being deceptive. For example, if a user claims to be an “expert at construction”, but then doesn’t seem to know the difference between a nut and a bolt, this is how identity can be challenged by voice and language in an online community.

 

Reflection

Both of these articles brings up the topic about identity in a different way. The first is about how identities are handled in an online community without constructive identities and the second is about identity within a community that does encourage constructive identities. I found it particularly interesting that within the community 4chan there was a way to identify yourself and your ranking within the community to gain credibility. To me this shows an interesting trait of humans, the need for an identity, to be credibly, and our inherent mistrust of others or trust in others. Additionally, they mentioned interesting trends in how a user acts when anonymous. It seemed to lend it self that users are more willing to post when they don’t have an identity associated with it because there is less fear of rejection. I find this interesting because personally if I had posted anonymously and everyone hated my post, it would still hurt my feelings, but I would still be more willing to post it. Additionally, the article mentioned that even when given a way to verify their identity, users’ did user this as creating an identity, but they had other forms of credibility that the site designers did not create for them, but the community did.

 

The second article about deception, I found a bit less intriguing, however the main topic I found interesting was what exactly how members found other members that were being deceptive.

 

Questions

Do online communities that ensure verification of identities including skill set lead users to trust other users more?

 

How does an individual’s language change when they are responsible for the answers?

 

How does an individual’s creativity and participation change when they are anonymous vs when they are not?

 

What indicators do members in a community notice of a fraudulent user and which indicators to they tend to miss more often?

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Summary

In the paper “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community”, researchers take a look at Usenet newsgroups and how the users interact with one another. Since the newsgroups are in a virtual world, it can be more difficult to assess how competent a user is and if they are being honest or even correct in their responses. They discuss the implications of assessment signals vs conventional signals and how they relate to a virtual space. There are many ways to establish who a person is such as through their “voice”, the language they use in their messages, the signatures, the email address they use etc. However, even with these indicators some people, known as “trolls”, can still deceive people. They incite arguments and controversy. Some people ignore the trolls, others argue with them. On Usenet, users are able to block certain users’ posts to prevent seeing material from trolls using a killfile and in some groups moderators can remove a troll.

 

In the paper “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community”, they looked at the 4chan. 4chan is a website where users post images and other users can reply to the posts. The catch is that depending on the amount of posts and the popularity of a post, the posts can be deleted in a short amount of time. The researchers found that posts rarely last longer than 4 minutes before they are deleted forever. Users also have the option of having a username or being anonymous however 90% of users chose to be anonymous.

 

Reflection

The study done on Usenet is pretty outdated given that it’s about 20 years old. It would be interesting to see a similar study done on Reddit which sounds somewhat similar to Usenet to see if anything has changed since the late 1990s. It’s amazing how much power anonymity gives to a user since there are few to no repercussions for what is said. The lack of rejection and the ability to be whoever you want to be is an interesting social concept brought about by the anonymity found online. It’s also quite dangerous as some people take what is said online for face value and don’t fact check. People can be taken advantage of or do ill-advised things as a result of trolling. When it gets to that point, I start to wonder if there should be a more severe punishment when the intent is to do harm to someone.

 

Questions

• How do trolls impact someone’s social interactions outside of the web? Do they become more cynical?
• What motivates a troll to post inflammatory things when it only brings them negative attention?
• Do people fact check people online the same way they do people in real life?
• Should there be more severe consequences for “trolling” in order to help prevent it? Where do we draw the line?

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