Using Twitter Bots to Fight Harassment Online

Special Event organized by ITP Student Anastasis Germanidis

Join us at ITP in welcoming Kevin Munger to discuss researcher-controller social media to combat online harassment. See bio below:

I am a 5th year PhD Candidate in the Department of Politics at NYU and a member of the Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) lab. My dissertation studies the political implications of new forms of communication enabled by the internet and social media. This work involves developing innovative methods for performing online behavioral experiments and creating new ways to use text as data.

My research project introduces a new experimental paradigm: using researcher-controlled social media accounts to perform "field" experiments on important populations of social media users. There are clear measurement and verisimilitude advantages of this approach, thought it also presents challenges and ethical considerations. I present results from three separate implementations of this paradigm: combating online harassment, promoting civility in political discussions, and providing information.