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I'm Emily van der Nagel, social media researcher
Hi Imzy! I'm Emily van der Nagel, a social media researcher from Melbourne, Australia. I'm 27, I like TV, tea, knitting, yoga, the theatre, my city, feminism, and I'm on social media all day long (especially Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram), for work and play.
I've been studying social media pseudonymity for over four years as I write my PhD thesis about it. I've focused on pseudonymity history, the 2011 nymwars, pseudonymous identities on Reddit Gonewild, and doxing.
I'm really excited that on Imzy, you can choose who you want to be on each post. I think it's an important step towards acknowledging that we have context-dependent identities that shift as we communicate with different audiences.
I wrote about anonymous social media last year for Gizmodo: http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/10/anonymity-on-social-media-is-under-threat/.
I tweet at https://twitter.com/emvdn, and you can see a lot of my writing at https://swinburne.academia.edu/EmilyvanderNagel.




Hello Emily!
Welcome to Imzy. I hope you like it here.
Hi Emily! We've got something pretty special started here, glad you're now a part of it!
Hi Emily, I'm greenie! I'm a community manager here and I also love talking about and reading about these sorts of subjects.
I dig that gizmodo piece you wrote!
One thing that (I believe) Citron talks about in Hate Crimes in Cyberspace is the concept of accountability. A lot of people automatically see the word "accountability" and go "oh that requires a real names policy because if you tie your 'real name' to something, clearly you won't yell racial slurs or harass people on the internet!"
Which just like... doesn't match up with what we actually see people do on facebook and other platforms. And even if it did, it ends up throwing a ton of people under the bus in the process, and it makes more vulnerable folks even more vulnerable- often to the point where they just don't feel they can safely participate in conversations.
So what ends up much more interesting to me is how to have accountability (whether cultural or rules-based, though the former is more interesting) in a pseudonymous space. And this is shit that absolutely can be done, it's just that most of the time platforms are too lazy to do it properly, so they punt the issue with a real name policy or they just let it devolve into chaos, throwing up their hands and saying "that's just how people are on the internet!", and both of those answers end up being rather asinine.
Anyway uhh I'll stop rambling now. You should check out /nicecuppatea and /full_of_craft if you're into tea and knitting. Welcome!
Yep, I agree - moderation has a long way to go before it gives people the kinds of spaces they want. Anil Dash says, "we are accountable for the communities we create": https://medium.com/humane-tech/the-immortal-myths-about-online-abuse-a156e3370aee#.p9hzjjc7s.
Real-name policies shift responsibility away from platforms by giving them an escape clause: "but we told people to be accountable for their comments!" You can't just make people care about something, you have to give them a reason to.
Yes! Totally a (false) escape clause. And I dig the stuff that Anil Dash has written about online community stuff. :)
Looking forward to seeing you around the site!
Hello Emily,
Welcome to Imzy. I especially liked your specialization on researching social media. Thanks for the link to your articles. Will be reading them as soon as possible.
What do you think of internet trolls btw? Do you think we can create a methodological framework which might result in decreasing that kind of behavior?
Hugs and kittens!
Some really interesting work on trolling comes from Whitney Phillips, who argues that trolling is really just an exaggeration of things the news media does that we're all familiar with - putting up shocking images and stories to attract attention (and therefore get people to buy their newspaper/watch their broadcast).
Trolling can be playful (like Rickrolling people), but it can also become abusive. Curbing harassment on social media is up to good platform design, and hands-on moderation: as Anil Dash argues, "We are accountable for the communities we create". https://medium.com/humane-tech/the-immortal-myths-about-online-abuse-a156e3370aee#.t236eus37
Welcome Emily!
Hi and welcome to Imzy! c:
Fun fact, Nagel in swedish is Nail. : D
Nagel in Dutch is nail too! My surname means 'family of the nails' :)
Oho! Guess your family fights tooth for nails? xD
Hi Emili, welcome to Imzy, I feel like a test subject :3