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Developing Effective Citizen Responses to Discrimination and Harassment Online

Developing Effective Citizen Responses to Discrimination and Harassment Online

with Berkman Fellow, Nathan Matias

Tuesday, February 23, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Harvard Law School Campus
Wasserstein Hall, Room B010 Singer Classroom

Discrimination and harassment have been persistent problems since the earliest days of the social web. As platforms and legislators continue to debate and engineer responses, most of the burden of dealing with online discrimination and harassment has been borne by the online citizens who experience and respond to these problems. 

How can everyday Internet citizens make sense of social problems online, including our own racist and sexist behavior? How can we support each other and cooperate towards change in meaningful, effective ways? And how can we know that our interventions are making a difference?

 MIT PhD candidate Nathan Matias shares four years of research and design interventions aimed at expanding the power of citizens to understand and develop effective responses to discrimination and harassment online.

 

About Nathan

Nathan Matias (blog, Twitter) is a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab Center for Civic Media with Ethan Zuckerman and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. His research interests focus on social computing, collective action, and citizen-led social science. Nathan has collaborated with a wide range of social media companies, news organizations, and advocates to better understand issues of gender discrimination, harassment, and social movements online. His PhD explores methods for digital citizens to conduct data science and field experiments to monitor problems and evaluate their responses to social problems online.


Before MIT, Nathan worked in tech startups that have reached over a billion users, helped start a series of education and journalistic charities, and studied postcolonial literature at the University of Cambridge and Elizabethtown College. He has published data journalism and in The Atlantic, PBS, the Guardian, and other international media.

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Past Event
Feb 23, 2016
Time
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM