Location
Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolulu, Hawaii
Event Website
https://hicss.hawaii.edu/
Start Date
3-1-2024 12:00 AM
End Date
6-1-2024 12:00 AM
Description
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; Mai, Philip; and Gruzd, Anatoliy, "Social Media as Fragile State" (2024). Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2024 (HICSS-57). 6.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-57/dsm/culture/6
Social Media as Fragile State
Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolulu, Hawaii
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.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-57/dsm/culture/6