Online harassment isn’t a new plight or issue within social media, but what is new is the study and focus on online harassment. New verbiage, vocabulary, and offline initiatives have been created to focus on and provide support for online harassment victims. But what can be used to stymie harassment in digital spaces? Is harassment facilitated, not because of language, but because of the infrastructural design of a system? Can systems design and UI design encourage and dissuade specific social interactions in digital spaces? How does design affect users within the system?

In this Databite, Caroline Sinders explores how design effects online conversational spaces and how harassment is affected by the design of social media. Does conversational consent exist in online spaces or do systems consent on our behalf?

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Caroline Sinders is a user researcher with IBM Watson, interaction designer, and speculative designer. Her work focuses on linguistics, conversations, harassment, and fandoms in digital spaces.

About Databites
Data & Society’s “Databites” speaker series presents timely conversations about the purpose and power of technology, bridging our interdisciplinary research with broader public conversations about the societal implications of data and automation.