Series on Justice and Content Governance Panel #1: Constructions of Justice and “Ethical Tech”

AFOG’s Justice and Content Governance Panel Series opens with a panel focusing on the problems, potentials, and pitfalls of emphasizing justice in content governance systems. The panel will feature Professors Anna Lauren Hoffman and Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg.

Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg: ‘Post-trauma and Post: How Do Sexual Assault Survivors Perceive the Potential Capacity of Facebook vis-à-vis the Criminal Justice System to Address Their Needs?’

This study is part of a large empirical project about the role of social media as a mechanism for seeking informal justice for sexual assault survivors. Based on 499 responses to an online survey and on 20 in-depth interviews with sexual assault survivors who shared their stories of victimization on Facebook (interviews were conducted with the same interviewees in two waves—before and after the #MeToo), the study explores how sexual assault survivors perceive the potential capacity of Facebook to address their needs, compared to the potential capacity of the criminal justice system.  Findings reveal the greater over-all appreciation that survivors have for social media compare to their appreciation for the criminal justice system, thus demonstrate the power of informal justice, but at the same time they also shed light on the limitations of social media to address some of the victims’ needs and on the risks involved in turning to social media to seek alternative justice.

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