Project Lead / Student Investigator: Erika Melder, Alyssa Smith, and Emma Vonbuelow
Principal Investigator: Dr. Michael Ann DeVito
Co-Investigator: Dr. Ada Lerner
Background
Marginalized people commonly rely on social media as a critical tool for connecting with one another. One key category of marginalized people is transfeminine users, broadly defined as those who were assigned the gender identity of “male” at birth, but who now hold a different gender identity. Transfeminine users face uniquely elevated levels of harassment and attacks on social media, including from other marginalized people and even other trans people.
Critically, these attacks use techniques endemic to social media platforms and environments to inflict harm, such as: taking speakers’ words out of context by sharing screenshots from a closed transfeminine group; using moderation systems to silence the victim; or erasing facets of the victim’s identity that they cannot refute without revealing sensitive information on the internet. Moreover, these attacks isolate their transfeminine targets from their online communities, relying on social media and algorithmically‐driven decontextualization to rapidly turn entire groups of people against a single target. We refer to the phenomenon of transfeminine people often being the victims of these kinds of uniquely isolating attacks on social media as transfeminine disposability.
Project Description
Transfeminine people are broadly defined as those who were assigned the gender identity of “male” at birth, but who now hold a different gender identity. Transfeminine disposability is the phenomenon of transfeminine people commonly being the targets of attacks on social media that serve to isolate them by turning online communities against them. These attacks often use technical features of social media, such as taking screenshots, in harmful ways. The result is that the victim is cut off from critical support networks and is often pushed out of one of the few communities open to them. We seek to understand why transfeminine disposability occurs, and the ways that social media enables and facilitates it.
Research Questions
- How do technological affordances contribute to the phenomenon of transfeminine disposability on social media?
- How do individual and collective behaviors relating to community norms, privacy, and security interact with transfeminine disposability?
- What kinds of technical safeguards or defensive strategies might help mitigate the intracommunity attacks that transfeminine disposability foments?
Expected Outcomes
Our goal is to develop design guidance for social media platforms to help mitigate transfeminine disposability, as well as to produce guidance for communities and victims of how to minimize their personal risk and how best to navigate situations involving these styles of attacks.