The Effects of Identity Characteristics in Online Social Systems
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Appling, Darren Scott
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Abstract
The ways in which individuals make meaningful personal decisions affecting their beliefs about the world, participating in online social systems, are conditioned on individuals' identity and group memberships. This work aims to answer questions surrounding how contextual factors of identity (characteristics and relations between them) affect individuals' various kinds of interactions and outcomes in online spaces.
In my first study, I conducted interviews and mixed-methods analyses across two different kinds of identity characteristics: (1) epistemic-derived: individuals engaging in political discussions and, (2) experience-derived: those engaged in discussion of post traumatic stress disorder. Using epistemically-related identity characteristics, I generated personas from interviews with individuals regarding the sharing of primarily politically oriented misinformation according to a mainstream fact-checking entity. I found that interventions in the misinformation context could benefit from personalization to social identities by leveraging these personas.
% an explicitly guided structuring mechanism for intersectional analysis,
In my second study, I use an experience-derived characteristic of online identity, self-disclosure of diagnosis for PTSD sufferers, to examine members of an online support community for post traumatic stress disorder, to understand and analyze the effects of identity disclosure on behavior by individual members and other members they interacted with. Mixed-methods analysis revealed that there are in fact unique characteristics to those who self-disclose a diagnosis and those who do not.
In my third study I present a new methodology to construct, evaluate, and apply a novel computational intersectional identity framework (CIIF). CIIF provides a new scalable capability to detect identity disclosures of individuals in online social communities. The methodology enables future researchers to maintain it alongside changes in natural language related to identity disclosure.
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Date
2023-12-12
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Text
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Dissertation