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Mutual Shaping and social norms

Technical implementations need to come AFTER social shaping is understood, otherwise they WILL exacerbate them.

Social norms shape users

Users shape social norms

Platform architecture shapes user behaviour

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Norm pluralism in the fediverse

One person’s harassment (‘reply guy’) can be another person’s social norm correction ⇒ morally motivated networked harassment (Marwick)

Defederation can both be a form of norm correction and a protective measure against harassment: “if you do not enforce the same norms as us, we sever ties”.

Fediverse architecture allows plurality of norms due to federation/defederation and portability. Pitfalls:

Prioritising federation leading to (white, heteronormative) norm domination
Excessive fragmentation leading to toxic polarisation

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Tension field federation – safe spaces: between polarisation and norm domination

Is federation core tenet of Fediverse? Mastodon covenant; prefer no servers running in limited-federation mode. prioritising Federation can lead to centralisation of norms with the dominant norm in society (white, heteronormative) enforced
Blocklists can help to create comfortable space to avoid norms conflict with dominant norm. Preferably there is consensus and we change the dominant norm, but for those who refuse to change, the potential to create distance is important.
Plurality of norms with 1 commonality: us HUMANS who care about the Fediverse.
Agonism (Mouffe): it is healthy to let arguments happen with people who have different points of view without the need for consensus. Danger of it becoming ‘antagonistic’ where the opponent needs to be dominated and it becomes US vs THEM ⇒ toxic polarisation

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Polarisation dynamics (Brandsma)

Pushers are the engines of democracy BUT needs to remain a dialogue where everyone LISTENS to each other’s concerns and there is space for both disagreement, forgiveness and holding your own space
Without those conditions, dialogue can turn sour and fuel US vs THEM thinking, where more and more ‘silent’ are forced to pick a side
Middle can act as bridging ground.

eg: remain federated with ‘free speech’ but not allow norm of free speech in own instance; become safe buffer for instances with marginalised people.

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Moderator responsibilities

Depolarisation: be ‘the mayor’ that goes beyond us-them thinking
Make norms clear and either defend them (and live with possible defederation consequences and emigrating users) or adapt them to be on same page as those you value (and correct those on your instance who breaks them or enforce emigration)

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Academic research

Mansoux, A., & Roscam Abbing, R. (2020). Seven Theses on the Fediverse and the Becoming of FLOSS (pp. 124–140). Institute for Network Cultures and Transmediale. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-55221

Zulli, D., Liu, M., & Gehl, R. (2020). Rethinking the “social” in “social media”: Insights into topology, abstraction, and scale on the Mastodon social network. New Media & Society, 22(7), 1188–1205. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820912533

Gehl, R. W., & Zulli, D. (2022). The Digital Covenant: Non-Centralized Platform Governance on the Mastodon Social Network. Information, Communication & Society. https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:49433/

Rozenshtein, A. Z. (2022). Moderating the Fediverse: Content Moderation on Distributed Social Media. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://www.journaloffreespeechlaw.org/rozenshtein2.pdf

Van Raemdonck, N. & Pierson, J. (2022) A conceptual framework for the mutual shaping of platform features, affordances and norms on social media Tijdschrift voor Communicatiewetenschap vol. 50 nr.4 pp.358-383 https://cris.vub.be/ws/portalfiles/portal/92575001/TRANSLATION_Conceptual_framework_for_interaction_of_platform_features_FINAL.pdf