Reflection #1 – [8/27] – [Neelma Bhatti]

Although I started by reading Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community by Judith S. Donath, its date of publication made me drift towards reading and reviewing the other paper, 4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community first.  The crux of discussion in both papers was identity, or the lack thereof, can do to the content of a social community. Both papers also talked about Deception and Ephemerality of content, but I would first like discuss my thoughts about identity in the virtual world.

Although having an identity (whether in the form of real credentials or pseudonyms) plays a role in content formation, the driving force behind content creation by people is different in different domains. A blogger or content writer on LinkedIn will most likely prefer having his/her credentials against the publications since the motive behind posting them is to get more followers who know who they are, subsequently helping them in scoring better career opportunities.  People posting pictures of family vacation or graduation ceremony  on Facebook also choose to post with their real world identity so as to direct respect and awe gained by such postings to their real world persona. Whereas someone who is seeking advice on their personal problems, looking for a way to fix their broken or non functional appliances, or attempting to find someone who can help them with their code isn’t too keen to reveal their identity, or to go through the hassle of entering bona fides since they can get away with getting what they want without it.

This brings gamification into the picture, which uses elements of game playing such as point scoring to promote gratification in helping others while elevating one’s own online status. A good example of it is Stackoverflow, where users don’t necessarily have to use their real world identity, yet they have a status associated with their pseudonym that they thrive to maintain. The first paper defines this phenomenon as reputation building. After comparing the instances of choice between remaining anonymous or choosing identity in both papers, the question that I felt like discussing with someone is : “Can gamification become the middle ground between identity and anonymity by being an ulterior motive for content creation?”

Moving on, the other thing that particularly interested me was the mention of “signals” in both papers. While the first paper talks about the use of assessment and conventional  signals to authenticate the identity and prevent deception, there is also the use of signals in a seemingly anonymous platform (assuming the fact that majority of people persistently avoid the adoption of identity in 4chan) for maintaining status, status being the only level of identification for them. The use of signals (a.k.a triforcing) is more of a trolling or dejecting gesture. If one was to advocate for pseudonyms, it brings another question in mind: what other signals can be developed in order to promote healthy unification among users of an online community? 

Although the product of anonymity in 4chan seems to be more of a vicious nature, the question that needs to be answered is “does developing and sticking to identity prove to be a bugbear for real life introverts who find virtual world to be a better mode of communication, thereby limiting their interactions which constitute a large amount of content on the web?”

Lastly, the use of Ephemerality in 4chan seemed not only to promote active user engagement and the quest to produce posts with longer lifetimes, it also obstructed the deep rooted fear of ones digital footprints being on the web forever, which triggered the thought whether the surety of our posts being off the scene after a while help us get over the anxiety of them coming back into our face later in life. “Is this the thought behind the launch of Facebook, Snapchat and Whatapp stories, which are there for only a short while?”.  Or does that fact that they are short lived make them more in-demand?

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Reflection #1 – [08/28] – [Lindah Kotut]

  • Judith S. Donath. “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community.
  • Michael S. Bernstein, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Drew Harry, Paul André, Katrina Panovich, Greg Vargas. “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community.

The two papers approach identity in online communities with some diverging focus: Bernstein’s on ephemerality and Donath on reputation. The value in their contribution in our estimation, is in how much in common they have, and the implications their observations have (had) in present and future online communities. Thus, the summary and the reflection will cover both papers in an intertwining fashion.

Brief:
What currency is considered important in a given community? (Does this importance scale across other communities?)
Two major online communities are covered by these papers: Donath’s being an earlier paper considers Usenet, and Bernstein et al., 4Chan. Both these communities involve users starting threads for a given reason, and other members in the community are given leave to chime in with their views/support/comments – these comments subjectively given different weight as far as how useful they are. Community members (speaking of both the platform as a whole and considering specific groups), have different means of establishing and weighing identity and credibility to then make decisions on whether to trust the posts.

The papers diverge from this point: Donath proceeds to argue on the importance of a poster proving their identity overtly, and/or users determining the authority based on previous posts, while Bernstein et al. proceeds to consider how the /b/ forum continue to flourish with some sort of order while at the same time over 90% of the users preferring to remain anonymous.

Reflection
We presently have the advantage of back-sight that the authors of the pair of papers did not have at the time, and thus can judge the papers based on both prescience and longevity. While Usenet has been usurped by other — more efficient groups, the cultural behaviors remain prescient. 4chan and /b/ are alive and ever active, and we can also use recent events as a lens by which to reflect on Bernstein’s work.

Q1: Anonymity == Deception?
According to both papers, no.
But it’s not quite that straightforward: Oh to be a fly on the wall when both /b/ and Usenet was born! Both papers presented the cultures expected of users in both communities as a given. A new user is expected to first observe, learn and then participate in adherence to the communities’ culture. Watching the birth and evolution would’ve been invaluable. Thus giving rise to interesting questions:

  • But how did the consensus on how to behave come to be?
  • Does this convergence to a consensus scale to other social media?
  • What does this tell us about how we self-organize on the web?

The early days of Twitter for example, was filled with exquisitely minute descriptions of users’ daily lives, which evolved as the platform gained popularity, and the users adjusted their behaviors to match. The blue check-mark for example a more recent addition to the service Twitter offers, serves as an identity verification. In contrast to Donath’s work, this Twitter’s mark of authenticity serves to decouple authority from identity. Just because you say you are who you are, does not mean that you are then to be trusted. Yet, there is still space for anonymity with reputation established as Donath described: by users concluding based on previous posts, that the given user is to be trusted: Case in point: @NYCSouthPaw, whose reputation with providing a legal view on politics can be considered trusted (the user revealed his identity very recently). 4Chan, according to Bernstein’s view, necessitates a much faster means of establishing “credibility” (given how fast posts expire). This serves to narrow the focus towards using in-culture lingo – not as a measure of reputation, but rather as a measure of belonging — this being of a higher importance over identity and outright reputation measures .

The question on credibility on 4chan has also been prescient – given the rise of QAnon, and how tripcodes are used to prove that the poster is indeed 4chan and not an usurper, which while granting an irrefutable identity to the poster, also allows (an illusion of) credibility, and expansion to other online communities.

Q2: Ephemerality vs Archiving: Which is best?
This is touched upon by Donath, who importantly notes the fact that ephemerality matches the real-world right of forgiving and forgetting, and where the move towards “internet is forever” is an anti-thesis to this. The larger question, beyond remembering data is attribution, the fact that a verified (identified) user is attributed to a certain content that would live perpetually online raises the question on both the usefulness of enforcing identification and the rise of the “Right to be Forgotten” movement.

Both 4chan and Usenet members have/had an archival tool available to store information they consider important in some ways. Beyond how they store and re-incarnate favorite/popular posts:

  • What considerations goes (beyond popularity) into making the decisions to archive a post?
  • How often did the archived content got requested/re-upped?
  • Does this have a larger implication on how users curate information?

Q3: What are the implication of online behavior on the real world?
The use of Facebook and Twitter as organizing platforms is widely known, and so is the overflow of ideas from one online community to the world at large. Considering more recent phenomnea: QAnon (a 4Chan creation) was a rallying point and a major point of discussion at a real-world venue.

The more things change…
Considering more recent online communities: Facebook, Twitter and StackOverflow, reputation is important for all of these platforms, and an explicit measure and action is provided: by likes, by follows, or by vote. These measures  have a factor on trust, and leads users by default to act towards establishing reputation — without necessarily establishing identity.

Apart from Facebook and Twitter – when considering blue check marks, identity is not as important: privacy and anonymity is more understood and appreciated.

Ephemerality has been adopted – at least in the social context as a means of offering a choice: Snapchat as a platform allows posts to expire and deleted forever (there are apps that offer a mitigation from this feature) and in Instagram and Facebook on stories. But also archiving is provided by default, accommodating both the need to be forgotten and the need to remember on demand.

How about the use of multiple online aliases, the motivation behind their creation, and the effect they have, as presented by Donath? this is still an open and very interesting question.

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Reflection #1 – [8/28] – [Deepika Rama Subramanian]

Judith S. Donath, “Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community

Michael S. Bernstein et al., “4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community

Both the aforementioned papers both look closely into identity in social media platforms. The second paper also deals with ephemerality, a discussion the first paper doesn’t go into. While both these papers are dealing with similar topics they are both presenting wildly different views. As I read Donath’s work, I was convinced that in a virtual community, trust is a huge issue. Despite being given some information about the identity of someone on social media, we still cannot be sure. Donath goes on to classify signals that we receive from users on platforms into conventional and assessment signals. I was able to tie this beautifully with several instances in an online community called ‘Adopt a Pet’ on Facebook. In India, there are very few pedigree dogs (abandoned/require rehoming) up for adoption. They are also very much in demand. Whenever a pedigree dog is up for adoption, we have to go through a very stringent vetting process. This is because many members of our group are backyard breeders impersonating animal rescuers or pet parents. Their conventional signals are on point as they’ve watched us discuss and argue on our page. We are finding it difficult to find any assessment signals to verify their identity online. For now, we have resorted to doing physical house-checks. However, logistics become an issue if an offer of adoption comes from a different town. Is there an assessment signal that could help our group rehome dogs safely with no hassles?

Donath’s paper is quite dated but the issues that she has outlined is very much our reality as well. We may have come leaps and bounds in improving the quality of our social media systems, but does impersonation now have more adverse effects than it ever has in the past? People we don’t know, pages we cannot verify are prescribing cures to stubborn diseases, superfoods, and whole lifestyle changes that other users in a social media platform are willing to subscribe to. Many times for a cost.

The second paper tackles the culture of 4chan’s /b/ discussion board and the effect of anonymity and ephemerality on it. When I paid this discussion board a visit, I was taken aback at the nature of the posts. Granted, I did enjoy some of the dark jokes that I came across but I wasn’t comfortable thinking a child could come across this website. Ofcourse, the vile and insensitive nature of the discussion board can be attributed to the complete anonymity of posts. As I progressed through the paper, it is pretty clear that 4chan has been the origin of some of the internet’s most viral content. However, I am inclined to argue that Reddit (more identity based, less anonymous platform) has also been the origin of some pretty popular memes. This is backed up by this research paper ‘On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities’ by Zannettou, S et al. This further raises two questions –

  1. If Reddit and 4chan can both produce this kind of creative content, what more does the complete anonymity of 4chan bring to the table? Is it only the degree of darkness of the content created here?
  2. Is the trade-off between safe and accurate exchange of useful information versus the ‘creative’ (read dark) content worth it? Is this ‘creativity’ essential?

I also noticed that in 4chan, the user is given the illusion of an identity. I could be posting under a certain pseudonym that could very easily be poached from me and misused by another person. It seems like one would rather move to a different platform than go through these elaborate measures that users have to take in order to establish identity (like pictures of themselves with timestamps) on 4chan. Using Reddit when you wish for your post to be attributed to you and 4chan when you are posting things you don’t really care for seems to be an option.

When it comes to a choice between purely anonymous posts versus posts with some form of identity, the purpose of the social media platform would play a major role.  For instance, on a platform like StackOverflow, it is useful to keep yourself identifiable so that your contributions can stand testimony to your qualifications in maybe a job interview. In the case of a discussion board where most of the discussions are inconsequential and ephemeral, does it really matter who is posting?

While I am inclined to be against the anonymity of 4chan, its ephemerality is wonderfully refreshing. Only posts that the community deems truly engaging stays on top and other posts simply die away. In a world where Facebook reminds me of that incredibly embarrassing post from 5 years ago, the ephemerality is welcome. However, the lack of persistence of their data renders anything that you post onto their platform inconsequential in the long run. I find it difficult to comprehend why someone would go through the trouble of posting things on a platform that it will almost immediately disappear from. Is any useful discussion going to ever transpire on such a platform?

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Reflection #1 – [8/28] – [Shruti Phadke]

The two papers by Donath et. al. and Bernstein et. al. study the implications of anonymity in online communities.The first paper studies how user anonymity and deception can lead to antisocial behavior and loss of credibility. In contrast, the later displays how some communities thrive despite extreme anonymity and ephemerality.

Dolan et. al. describe with examples, how identity deception and anonymity cause biases and anti-social behavior on Usenet newsgroups. They argue that identity plays a valuable role when people are looking for credible information and advice. The paper goes on the discuss the effect of various assessment and conventional signals such as email domain, language, signature which will be discussed in the last paragraph of this review as comparison points with the second paper. The second half of the first paper addresses anti-social behavior on Usenet. Although the examples provide a detailed explanation of different behaviors such as trolling, concealment, impersonation the examples seem highly case/user specific. For example, there is no quantifiable way to determine whether the question asked by the college junior in “Rec.motorcycles” is actually a troll or not. How would you measure impersonation, trolling or category deception? Further, what is perceived as anti-social by one group of users, might not be considered as that by a different group. One important research direction would be to just analyze the sensitivity of different communities towards anti-social behavior based on user profile distribution such as gender, location, age group, lifespan, and expertise.

Bernstein’s work studies how the design elements of rapid content deletion and complete anonymity drive the user behavior on 4chan. Regarding ephemerality, the authors argue that the fast-moving board /b encourages users to rapidly generate creative content and increase community participation. It retains “fresh” content on the front board /b. This prompts the question: whether such temporality works only because of the anti-social, meme-oriented nature of /b board and whether it might be discouraging in forums with higher community standards. This question persists when analyzing the anonymity implications. Authors claim to observe increased dis-inhibition, more intimate and open communication and masking of failure. Again, in this case, the success of the anonymity feature appears highly content driven. Taking examples from other communities like Quora, responders rarely stay anonymous while answering intellectual, philosophical or non-personal content while they prefer to answer anonymously while recounting a personal, embarrassing, or alarming content. As a further research contribution, it would be interesting to observe how anonymity and ephemerality influence different types of virtual communities serving various purposes.

Coming back to what I found as the most interesting concept in the first paper (assessment and conventional signals) there are some parallels between Usenet and 4chan even with the extreme perception of anonymity. For this, it is important to understand the difference between  “anonymity” and “identity”. While anonymity is discouraged on Usenet and highly valued on 4chan (due to the content), they both use same assessment signals for establishing identity, either group or individual. Usenet users are observed to use specific language and signature cues similar to the use of slang and “triforcing” on 4chan. Both sets of users practice posting identifying photos (time stamped on 4chan) to establish credibility. Does that indicate that users value identity more than anonymity? How would the community react to an anonymous and a non-anonymous user with different community status or identity? 

In summary, I believe that to observe the complete effect of anonymity and deception,  across social network study needs to be performed considering the context(content) of communication and signaling behavior.

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Reflection #1 – [8/28] – [Prerna Juneja]

Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community

Summary:

In the article, Donath studies how identity is established in online social platforms, effects of identity deception, concealment & impersonation and conditions giving rise to these phenomena by performing an ethnographic study on Usenet newsgroups. She suggests that an individual’s identity cues are spread all over Usenet’s letter in the form of email address (especially the domain name), user’s signature (name, age, sexual orientation, title etc), language and writing style. She argues that these cues are not always reliable and can be faked by trolls. They can impersonate full identities or engage in category deception (like age and gender deception). She talks about how trolling can negatively influence the dynamics of the group by undermining the feeling of trust in a community by giving several examples. The author concludes by saying that design of the online platform plays a key role in identity establishment and deception.

 Reflections:

Identity does play a very important role in social media. What the author suggested in this 1944 article still holds today. Our identity cues are spread over social media platforms including but not limited to our name, display picture, online friend network, educational information, phone number, the language we use, the images we share. Online platforms allow users to create multiple accounts each exhibiting same or different persona. So, can a fake account be linked to a real account? Can a user be linked to all his social media accounts? Does a user’s accounts, fake or real exhibit some similar features and characteristics? I believe a lot of research is already happening to answer these questions. Similarly identifying fake social media accounts is also a hot topic these days. The author suggests that design of a system can influence the identity and identity cues. Several in-domain models have been proposed to detect a fake account but is it possible to have a generic model that can work effectively on several social media platforms together? Also, what steps can social media platforms take to ensure authenticity of a user’s profile? E.g. In India, several matrimonial websites have started Aadhar verification to validate a user.

All social media platforms are fighting these problems with no full proof solution yet. A news article[1] stated that Facebook deleted 583 million fake accounts in the first quarter of this year using it’s AI tools. Google released Perspective, a tool that detects online abuse in 2017. I believe it’s very important for the social media platforms to reveal the algorithms they deploy so that researchers can study and improve them.

Anonymity has given birth to trolls and cyber bullies. How are their profiles and daily activity different than other users? Do their posts have linguistic markers that differentiate them from the rest? It would be interesting to study the research methods that exist to detect troll profiles, cyberbullies and their posts. What has been accomplished and what more needs to be done. The paper suggests use of high costs on deception. Some punishments like banning a user exist. But these don’t stop the user to create another account. What other punishments can be introduced? What will be the implications of these punishments?

Links: [1] https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/facebook-fake-accounts/

4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community

Summary:

In the paper, authors investigate the effects of concepts: anonymity and ephemerality in online communities. They do so by performing two large scale studies [consisting of 5,576,096 posts in 482,559 threads collected over a period of two weeks] on 4chan’s most popular board, ‘random’ or /b/ board. They provide examples of 4chan’s popularity [~7 million users] and influence on Internet culture [origination of several popular memes like LOLcats] and several highly-visible, off-site activities where 4chan members participated [hacktivist group Anonymous]. The authors state that although offensive content [nudity, racism, homophobia] is the part of 4chan’s identity, the platform is also a source of several funny and creative memes. They start by analyzing the content posted on /b/ by collecting 598 posts over ten days and come up with nine high level categories that reflect the themes of the posts that start threads on /b/. ‘Themed’ and ‘Sharing Content’ were the most popular categories which revolved around sharing images and web content in keeping up with /b/’s identity as the image bulletin board. They next quantify ephemerality by collecting a large dataset of activities comprising 5 million threads. In the first study, the author finds that most threads spend 5 sec on the first page and are short lived, having a lifetime of less than 5 min. Users use two phenomena: Bumping and Saging to influence ephemerality. Next the authors study identity signals and anonymity. /b/ allows users to posts in three ways: ‘Anonymous’ly, any random name or tripcode. Majority of the posts were found to be anonymous and a negligible amount were using tripcodes to guarantee identity. Instead people post their pictures with timestamps while others use slang specific to the platform to claim high status and identity in the community.

Reflections:

The paper studies two important design phenomenon ‘anonymity’ and’ ephemerality’ in large online communities. Ephemeral content seems to be one of the emerging social media trends which is quite prevalent in the increasing popularity of snapchat video that also inspired other social media platforms to mimic this feature, e.g Whatsapp Status feature, Facebook & Instagram stories. Authors suggests that ephemeral platforms lead to fresh content every time but whether that is always a quality content needs to be thought about. Also, an interesting research would be to find out if people get addicted more to the ephemeral platforms than the ones where data is kept permanently. I feel as the content on such platforms is temporary, a user might feel a need to visit these platforms more often.

The paper suggests that some threads lasted for as long as 6 hours and some posts have 519 replies. We can study what all factors make a post stay for a longer duration on this platform and make it popular. Is it only content? Originality? or the language? Also, the dataset under observation had few instances of bumping and sagging. Extended study can be performed on larger data spreading over a larger window to actually know their impact on ephemerality.

A question that comes to my mind is if the content on social media really ephemeral? Like the paper itself mentions that there are several websites like 4chanarchive.org that archive the website’s posts and threads. Also, content of a user’s interest can always be saved locally in his computer. It would be interesting to see how many old posts/memes get reposted on the platform.

Also are we really anonymous online? Most of the times an anonymous user can be traced using the IP Address of the device or the geolocation data.

An interesting study would be to collect data posted anonymously on various similar websites and study what type of content usually gets posted anonymously. How is that tied to the culture of the online community? Is the anonymous content linguistically different from the one posted with identity?

It was interesting to see how users of 4chan adopted practices to signal identity. What motivates users to claim partial identity? Does it only happen when their posts start receiving attention? One factor that the paper mentions is to communicate high status. One can study what other visual, textual or linguistic cues are given by anonymous users intentionally or unintentionally on other similar social media platforms. Considering the ephemeral nature of posts are there any users who were able to persist their identity on the platform?

The paper gives rise to a debate: Identity or Anonymity? While anonymity can encourage intimate conversations, people can also use it to cyberbully which can cause unimaginable harm to victims. E.g. anonymity empowers users to ask personal questions on mediums like quora without the fear of being judged. While Sarahah was banned after accusations against the app breeding haters and bullies. I personally advocate neither and believe that people should always have the option to choose either of the two.

Reflections on data used in the paper:

The authors in the paper have introduced nine high level categories to depict the theme of posts on /b/. Having fine grained categories could have provided a richer view of the content. Also, the relative frequency of the appearance of these categories was done on a small window. The authors could have used the same two-week window that they used to analyze ephemerality and anonymity.

I am not sure how do the authors conclude that demographics of /b/ are mostly North Americans? Why was EST considered? Is figure three plotted only using activity of users in North America?

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Reflection #1 – [08/28] – [Vibhav Nanda]

Readings:

[1] Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community

Summary:

In this paper author shreds lights on peoples identity in the virtual world and physical world by highlighting their behavior, motivation, gains, etc. The author goes on to talk about trust circles, deception, identification of signals, and physical cues and also expresses how the absence of physical cues is going against human instincts and is giving rise to new problems that need immediate understanding. The author uses Usenet newsgroup as her muse to explain various concepts such as deception, honesty, trust, identity concealment, trolls, etc. The author elucidates various psychological and sociological derivations that the humans make via physical interaction, that are not possible to derive in the virtual world — resulting in negative consequences.

Reflection:

This paper sprouted a lot of issues regarding identity, trust, and deception that really got me thinking about societal impact of social media, and how it has changed the way we interact with others in real world, and also perceive the events that occur in real world. It also got me thinking about how social media has resulted in elimination of loneliness for elderly people but also given birth to the problem for younger generation. The paper also got me thinking about motivating factors for online deception, other than monetary gain, personal vendetta, political gain, and political/international/corporate espionage.

Questions:

  • How does creating multiple fake social media accounts(assuming all social media accounts have different personas) impact the progenitors self identity? Does it lead to identity crisis? Does it lead to other behavioral changes in the progenitor in the real world ?
  • How quickly do the AI tools need to find and delete fake accounts ? Is it possible to stop the creation of fake accounts?
  • As pointed out by the author, interacting in the virtual world requires some degree of trust, how does this impact people’s behavior in real world ? Do people become more or less skeptical of each other?
  • Extended interaction in virtual world leads to physical isolation causing more serious underlying behavioral and psychological problems. What can internet giants do to tackle this problem?
  • What are the harmful consequences of deception in the online world and how does it effect peoples psychology if they find out they have been deceived ?
  • Why do people make adjustments in self-presentation in real life ? If we are adjusting our behavior according to the receiver, is it still us ?

[2] 4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community

Summary:

The author of this paper makes ephemerality and anonymity the focal-point of the paper. The author dives deep into understanding the design of ephemeral and anonymous community — 4chan. To back its point of view, the author performed content analysis on threads on /b/. The author also elaborated on how anonymity effects online communities, in addition to their users. The author goes on to talk about how the design of a lot online communities goes against evolution.  The author argues that anonymity and ephemerality increases equity in the community, fosters stronger communal identity as opposed to “bond-based attachment with individuals.”

Reflection:

Whilst reading the paper I gained perspective into how ephemerality in online communities mimics real life situations, and social media platforms with more cemented content go against the social norms in our physical world. I think in order to perfectly emulate our physical world, a social media platform/ virtual community needs combination of identity and ephemerality. The author says that anonymity can result in stronger sense of community, but I would like to argue that anonymity proliferates herd-mentality and puts into questions the basis of our physical community — ethics, morals, and mutual trust of individuals. Trusting anonymous individuals would could also result in self-doubt, according to me.

Questions:

  • What drives people towards anonymous forums ? In forums where anonymity is optional, why do people chose to being anonymous over being self-identified ?
  • How does anonymity strengthen communal identity ?
  • Does identity based reputation lead to pro-social behavior or sets up the stage for cyber bullying ?

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Reflection #1 – [08/28] – [Subil Abraham]

1. Donath, Judith S. “Identity and deception in the virtual community.” Communities in cyberspace. Routledge, 2002. 37-68.
2. Bernstein, Michael S., et al. “4chan and/b: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community.” ICWSM. 2011.

The two papers examine how identity is used (and abused) in the online world, but at opposite ends of the spectrum.

“Identity and Deception” talks about the dynamics of the users in the Usenet newsgroups, where every post has an associated account name that ties that post to a particular identity. This has benefits in that users can grow reputation and gain trust in their particular groups overtime, but also has the disadvantages that it makes it easier to impersonate someone and also that anonymous posts tend to be looked down upon.

On the flip side, “4chan and /b/” examines how the imageboard 4chan thrives despite the fact that over 90% of its posts are anonymous (which is encouraged by the userbase) and that posts tend to be deleted very quickly as new posts come in (unlike most other places where data is stored permanently). Even if it is anonymous, other ways of identifying yourself as being ‘in with the crowd’ have sprung up, through particular language use and tricks (like the so called ‘triforcing’) to identify yourself as a true member.

One thing that stood out to me in “Identity and Deception” was the parallels between the identity dynamics in Usenet and today’s websites. The act of sticking to a single identity to build reputation mirrors what we see today with Reddit and Stack Overflow, but with the explicit addition of a real point system that other users can vote with. This turns the act of gaining reputation from this invisible social practice to a visible, tangible thing provided by the website itself. Category deception when a point system is involved could include not just pretending to be something more than the user actually is, but also vote manipulation (by hacking or vote bots) to inflate the user’s virtual reputation in order to give them an air of legitimacy. The widespread use of Linkedin today seems to be today’s analogue of having a personal webpage which you would link to from your signature, especially for someone who identifies as a professional, with both serving the function of providing a curated view of said professional. Perhaps all this is evidence that humans behave in the same ways even when technologies change and shift over time. Also I guess this means that trolls will never die off. Oh well!

“4chan and /b/” provides an interesting study of posting behavior in the face of ephemerality and anonymity. But one shouldn’t read this and assume that /b/ alone is representative of 4chan as a whole. /b/ is the most popular, sure, but it is only one board among many. I believe that it is likely that different conclusions could be drawn if the authors had performed similar analyses on the other boards. Maybe posts on other boards last comparatively longer or shorter (after normalizing for relative posting activity compared to /b/, so we are not looking at a skewed comparison).  For example, the /r9k/ board does not allow reposts (while reposts form a not insignificant chunk of /b/’s activity). “How will things differ on other boards?” is always an important question to ask.

Having read both the given papers, what could potentially be done in the future is to do a study of the identity dynamics and interactions in 4chan, similar to how “Identity and Deception” did for Usenet. I think that it could be a fascinating case to see how things change (or don’t change) in 4chan compared to Usenet. “4chan and /b/” touches upon this a little bit in the later part of the paper but their main focus seems to be on the data analysis of ephemerality and identity and didn’t really go deeply examine the dynamics of the interaction of the users.

 

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Guidelines for Reading Reflections

These are intended to facilitate and assess understanding of the reading materials. Reading reflections should be within one page (roughly within 600 words if you are using 12pt font). You won’t be penalized if you write more, but being succinct is another great writing skill which you should aim to cultivate in this course.

You do not need to summarize the full paper, but you need to reflect on what additional questions the work enables. Does this help you think about your next big project? What will that be? Does it help you think about new ideas, new ways of thinking about your daily online life? What other questions the paper makes you think? What else the paper is not answering or is concerning or is just intriguing?

Most importantly, a reader while glancing at your reflection should be able to easily spot these questions. So use bold, italics, bullet points or other means of highlighting them. NOTE the stress on REFLECTION. If you simply summarize the paper without any reflection, you will be automatically scored zero.

This is an individual assignment and work submitted should be written solely by you. Here is a great example of a reflection written by my colleague, Prof. Kurt Luther. Here are few other examples from students in my class in prior semesters (example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, example 5).

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