Governance — Internet Rules Lab

Online Governance

Here in the Internet Rules Lab, much of our work involves various components of governance and interaction in online communities - including the role of policy, community rules and content moderation, and social norms. Specific platforms we have examined include Reddit, Facebook, and Discord. This work spans from Fiesler’s dissertation on copyright norms in online communities and research on DMCA 1201 and 512 to work led by recent PhD graduate Aaron Jiang (co-advised by Jed Brubaker) on a multi-stakeholder approach to content moderation.
Find out about projects-in-progress on our research page.
**Researchers:** Professor Casey Fiesler, Professor Jed Brubaker; PhD alumnus Aaron Jiang; undergraduate research assistant Skylar Middler; and collaborators Peipei Nie and Corian Zacher

Most Recent

Publication: Jiang, Jialun “Aaron”, Morgn Klaus Scheuerman, Casey Fiesler, and Jed Brubaker. Understanding international perceptions of the severity of harmful content online. PLoS ONE, 2021.

Press Coverage: Burnout, splinter factions and deleted posts: Unpaid online moderators struggle to maintain divided communities, The Washington Post, 25 August 2020.

Public Writing: The Missing Stakeholder of DMCA 512: Non-Infringing Users. Authors Alliance, 30 June 2020. (with Corian Zacher)

Publication: Casey Fiesler, Joshua Paup, Corian Zacher. Chilling Tales: Understanding the Impact of Copyright Takedowns on Transformative Content Creators. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, CSCW 2023.

Bibliography

Dym, Brianna, Namita Pasupuleti, and Casey Fiesler. Building a Pillowfort: Political Tensions in Platform Design and Policy. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, GROUP, 2022.

Jiang, Jialun “Aaron”, Morgn Klaus Scheuerman, Casey Fiesler, and Jed Brubaker. Understanding international perceptions of the severity of harmful content online. PLoS ONE, 2021.

Jiang, Jialun “Aaron”, Skylar Middler, Jed Brubaker, and Casey Fiesler. Characterizing Community Guidelines on Social Media Platforms. CSCW 2020 Extended Abstracts.

Dym, Brianna and Casey Fiesler. Social Norm Vulnerability and Its Consequences for Privacy and Safety in an Online Community. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, CSCW, 2020.

Casey Fiesler. Lawful Users: Copyright Circumvention and Legal Constraints on Technology Use. Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2020.

Fiesler, Casey, Nathan Beard, and Brian Keegan. No robots, spiders, or scrapers: Legal and ethical regulation of data collection methods in social media terms of service. Proceedings of the AAAI ICWSM International Conference on Web and Social Media, 2020.

Jiang, Jialun “Aaron”, Charlie Kiene, Skylar Middler, Jed Brubaker, and Casey Fiesler. Moderation Challenges in Voice-based Online Communities on Discord. Proceedings of the ACM Human-Computer Interaction, CSCW. 2019.

Fiesler, Casey and Amy Bruckman. Creativity, Copyright, and Close-Knit Communities: A Case Study of Social Norm Formation and Enforcement Online. roceedings of the ACM Human-Computer Interaction, GROUP. 2019.

Fiesler, Casey, Jialun “Aaron” Jiang, Joshua McCann, Kyle Frye, Jed Brubaker. Reddit Rules! Characterizing an Ecosystem of Governance. Proceedings of the AAAI ICWSM International Conference on Web and Social Media, 2018.

Dym, Brianna, and Casey Fiesler. Vulnerable and Online: Fandom’s Case for Stronger Privacy Norms and Tools. Companion of the 2018 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, 2018.

Keegan, Brian and Casey Fiesler. The Evolution and Consequences of Peer Producing Wikipedia’s Rules. Proceedings of the AAAI ICWSM International Conference on Web and Social Media, 2017.

Gach, Katie, Casey Fiesler, Jed R. Brubaker. “Control Your Emotions, Potter”: An Analysis of Grief Policing on Facebook in Response to Celebrity Death. Proceedings of the ACM Human-Computer Interaction, CSCW. 2017.

Pater, Jessica, Moon Kim, Elizabeth Mynatt, Casey Fiesler. Characterizations of Online Harassment: Comparing Policies Across Social Media Platforms. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2016.

Fiesler, Casey, Cliff Lampe, and Amy S. Bruckman. Reality and perception of copyright terms of service for online content creation. In Proceedings of the ACM CSCW Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, 2016.

Fiesler, Casey, Jessica L. Feuston, and Amy S. Bruckman. Understanding copyright law in online creative communities. In Proceedings of the ACM CSCW Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, 2015.

Fiesler, Casey, and Amy S. Bruckman. Remixers’ understandings of fair use online. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing, pp. 1023-1032. ACM, 2014.

Fiesler, Casey. The chilling tale of copyright law in online creative communities. XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students 19, no. 4 (2013): 26-29.

Fiesler, Casey. Pretending Without a License: Intellectual Property and Gender Implications in Online Games. Buff. Intell. Prop. LJ 9 (2013): 1.

Fiesler, Casey. Everything I need to know I learned from fandom: How existing social norms can help shape the next generation of user-generated content. Vand. J. Ent. & Tech. L. 10 (2007): 729.