About Extreme Groups Online: How People Arrive with Real Problems, Find Support, and Internalize Toxic Ideas

Why do people join online groups that promote extreme views? What draws people in, and what value do they find in their participation? In this talk, I will draw connections between our results from mixed-methods studies of groups on Reddit focused on men’s rights, gun politics, and the chemtrails conspiracy. In all three, social approval serves as a reward for expressing more extreme views, reinforcing a strong and supportive sense of membership in a community. However, we find that many members privately articulate more moderate views than they would be comfortable expressing online. I’ll review the social and political science literature showing that the same person may express different views in different contexts. One possible solution is to create a context that validates moderate views and civil discussion across difference. To explore this, we launched the subreddit r/guninsights in 2022. I will review our results to date and suggest broader implications for understanding online extremism.

About The Speaker

Amy Bruckman is Regents’ Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on social computing, with interests in online communities, the nature of knowledge construction online, content moderation, CSCW, and technology ethics. Bruckman received her Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in 1997, and a B.A. in physics from Harvard University in 1987. She is a Fellow of The ACM and a member of the SIGCHI Academy. She is the author of the book Should You Believe Wikipedia? Online Communities and the Construction of Knowledge (2022).

About Antisocial Media: How Users, Creators & Designers Respond to an Adversarial Internet

The early days of social media were filled with optimism about its democratizing potential and ability to bring people together. But more recently the focus has shifted to problems, ranging from doom scrolling to threats to national security. What has gone wrong? How can we fix it? This lecture series will explore many controversial facets of social media, from misinformation to radicalization, along with the strategies and systems that users, creators, and designers have developed to respond to them.