The Internet is Good for You. The Internet is Bad for You.

Abstract: Hardly a week passes without a new ethical controversy centering on our lives online: privacy violations, trolling and harassment, misinformation, negative impacts on mental health. Discussions around these topics often come with calls for drastic technical or policy solutions, like age gating social media or even wholesale platform bans. However, though instigating incidents make splashy headlines, the perceived underlying problems are rarely so straightforward. Anonymity online allows harassment to flourish, but also provides access to important support spaces, especially for stigmatized topics. Social media recommendation algorithms can “know” us so well that it feels simultaneously invasive and validating. Platforms can also help us find community—or push our content to the people who would hate it most. Social media is bad for us, and social media is good for us; both of these things can be true at the same time, and both tend to be amplified in the case of marginalized groups. This talk takes a journey through the good and bad of people’s online experiences, from queer fan fiction writers to Black Twitter to professional content creators to health support communities, and poses the ethical question: How can we get less of the bad without sacrificing the good?

Bio: Casey Fiesler is an Associate Professor and Founding Faculty in Information Science at University of Colorado Boulder. She also holds a courtesy appointment in Computer Science and an affiliation with the University of Colorado Law School through the Silicon Flatirons Institute for Law, Technology and Entrepreneurship. Her primary research communities are social computing, technology ethics and policy, and computing education. She has been the recipient of paper awards at a number of ACM conferences including CHI, CSCW, FAccT, DIS, and SIGCSE, and she is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award. Her research has also been covered everywhere from The New York Times to Teen Vogue, and she has written for venues like WIRED and Slate, but you’ve probably seen her on TikTok or Instagram. She holds a law degree from Vanderbilt Law School and a PhD in Human-Centered Computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology.