Decentralized social media protocols enable users to join independently-hosted servers that can interact with one another while they each self-govern. The ensuing community-based model of governance can improve user agency, safety, and privacy by opening up opportunities for tailored decision-making about how information flows on social media (e.g., what user data is shared to whom and when). This talk begins by complicating this narrative, asking: How do differences in social and technical decisions across communities impact one another? How should they be coordinated?
To ground these inquiries, the talk presents empirical work investigating the role of community governance in shaping privacy expectations on the Fediverse, a decentralized social media network that has seen growing interest as an alternative to Twitter/X. Drawing from 23 interviews with Fediverse users, this work draws attention to the idea of “governance frictions:” incompatible governance decisions between communities that advance the goals of one community while undermining the goals of another. It identifies key incompatibilities that lead to privacy-related governance frictions and describes how communities are currently attempting to address challenges that arise. The talk ends with implications for the robust sociotechnical design of governance on decentralized social media.
Bio:
Sohyeon Hwang studies how users shape the governance of digital technologies. Her work focuses on online communities as a valuable point of collective decision-making and organizing to anticipate and respond to potential platform harms. In her projects, she leverages mixed methods to understand how community governance can be better supported so that everyday people have greater autonomy in addressing pressing issues such as those around online safety, information integrity, and algorithmic bias.
Hwang holds a Ph.D. from the School of Communication at Northwestern University, where she was a member of the Community Data Science Collective and supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program. She received a B.A. from Cornell University double majoring in government and information science, focusing on revolutions and ideology in the former and data science/ethics in the latter.
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