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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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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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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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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