alice e. marwick (@alicetiara) Thread:
🚨New paper:🚨 Morally motivated networked harassment as normative reinforcement. This is the result of 8 yrs of work on harassment & I feel like it's my magnum opus. In this thread I explain this model and credit the scholars who contributed to it.
The model: A member of one community/social network (far-right, fat activists, a fandom) accuses a "target" of violating that network's moral norms ("the accusation"). This triggers moral outrage & justifies harassment by framing the target as deserving it.
Frequently a high-profile person/account amplifies the accusation and their networked audience harasses the target. This reinforces the moral norm and signals network membership. (Eg I reinforce my feminist identity and values by sending nasty messages to a misogynist jerk.)
This is frequently due to context collapse: different communities with widely disparate moral norms are visible to each other on social media.
My research finds that networked harassment is done by all types of communities and people. The left, the right, and communities that aren't partisan (like fandoms or infighting in a community with shared values)
BUT: Individual attributes like race, gender identity, sexuality, religion, etc. function as "attack vectors." (tx T&S participants for that term!) So if I'm Muslim, regardless of what I'm harassed about, I face a bunch of Islamophobic bullshit.
This means that it's /more likely/ that ppl w minoritized/marginalized identities will face harassment, & this is intersectional (e.g. misogynoir)
The impact: people withdraw from public sphere, feel depressed/bad/guilty, moral norm is reinforced and harassers "win"
The key point is that networked harassment is motivated by *moral accusations*. Harassment is virtually always reframed as justified because the target did something immoral.
E.g. I'm not against Anita Sarkeesian because I'm a misogynist/anti-feminist, but because she's a scammer/liar. (She gave a great talk at XOXO festival about this) https://youtu.be/ah8mhDW6Shs
Or I'm not against the 1619 project/Nikole Hannah Jones b/c I'm racist/my white ID is threatened but because she's a liar who hates white people and white children.
B/c moral outrage is really sticky (drawing on MAD model of social contagion by @mollycrockett @william__brady @jayvanbavel) these accusations get people ANGRY and likely to act. https://vanbavellab.hosting.nyu.edu/documents/Brady.etal.2020.PoPS.pdf
Also makes them think their harassment is justified, as we see in this paper on KotakuInAction by @shagunjhaver @asbruckman & larry chan https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/8232/6644 and this paper by @linguangst Tianying Chen @syardi @clifflampe https://www.cybersmile.org/wp-content/uploads/When-Online-Harassment-is-Perceived-as-Justified-ICWSM18.pdf
I worked out some of the ideas in this paper with @robyncaplan, where we analyzed how male supremacist communities constructed "misandry" to reframe "feminism" as a movement to hurt men and boys (and justify harassment) http://www.tiara.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Marwick_Caplan_Drinking-male-tears-language-the-manosphere-and-networked-harassment.pdf
And this paper w/ @beccalew @william_partin about how anti-SJW "response videos" create "blueprints for harassment" by positioning progressive YouTubers as committing moral violations https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764221989781 [preprint: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/veqyj]
I hope this model resonates with scholars and people find it useful!
Also the paper is open access!!! Thank you to @zizip for helping me find such a fitting home for it at Social Media & Society.
