specific content. Understanding how information is changed and distorted by people and how errors are introduced as information is propagated is a key theoretical challenge for disinformation engineering. Developing this theory would facilitate more effective design of informational content and structure, such that the information propagated through the network has our desired outcomes as it achieves its critical mass and most impactful state.

CONCLUSION

As we stated earlier, and must reemphasize: We are not advocating the use of social computing for criminal, abusive, or antisocial purposes. In fact, all of us want social computing to be leveraged to achieve individual and societal good.

However, this exercise does
reveal interesting aspects of social
computing, and through the articulated
research challenges we can see some
things we might not otherwise have
appreciated. There are facets in all
of our research challenges that are
very similar to existing streams of
research. Researchers are actively
studying how to model individualized
aspects of human personality, taste,
and interaction style. There is clearly
also foundational theory and practice
upon which to build disinformation
engineering and make disinformation
propagation a reality.

The concerns we raise go beyond our basic design exploration. Our working assumption was that our design and research would be a set of techniques and systems that would be external to the existing social computing systems we might want to change or influence. We did not explore the specific user risks or technical advantages that are provided to the entity that manages, runs, or owns a social computing platform. An owner or manager could more simply use interface design techniques to suppress or highlight specific information or to manipulate the social networks of users. These risks can be more profound when social computing systems have cross-platform federation through a common owner.

SOCIAL COMPUTING, BOTH GOOD AND BAD

This is Peking University in
China, a place of those dreams
of freedom and democracy.
However, a young, 21-year-old
student has become very sick and is
dying. The illness is very rare. Though
they have tried, doctors at the best
hospitals in Beijing cannot cure her;
many do not even know what illness it is.
So now we are asking the world — can
somebody help u

Excerpt from Usenet news post,

April 1995

We need more MAN then
feds so Everyone run wild, all
of london and others are invited!

Pure terror and havoc & Free stuff.... just smash shop windows and cart out da stuff u want! Oxford Circus!!!!! 9pm

Excerpt from BlackBerry Messenger IM

8 August 2011

Via the worldwide computer
Internet and other means of
communication, physicians from
coast to coast in the United States and
at least 17 other countries have helped
their mainland China colleagues treat
a university student with a challenging
array of signs and symptoms.

Journal of the American Medical Association

13 Dec 1995

Over the weekend parts of
London descended into chaos
as riots and looting spread after
a protest organised around the yet
unexplained shooting of a man by Police.

[...] But while Twitter has largely been the venue of spectators to violence and is a handy public venue for journalists to observe, it would appear the non-public BlackBerry BBM messaging network has been the method of choice for organising it.

Techcrunch.com

8 August 2011

The risks for crowdsourcing, user-generated content, citizen science, citizen journalism, and the wider range of social computing systems are real. It’s time for us as designers of these systems to think more carefully about how those systems might put users at risk. Further, it’s time to understand these systems might put communities and society at risk and we should take care to design systems that mitigate those risks.

 

David W. McDonald is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. His research spans areas of social computing from analysis of user activity through the design and evaluation of tools to facilitate mass interaction in social computing systems.

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David H. Ackley is an associate professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico. His prior research has involved neural networks and machine learning, evolutionary algorithms and artificial life, and biological approaches to security, architecture, and models of computation.

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Randal Bryant is dean and university professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His research has covered a range of computing theory. Currently he focuses on how existing networks of computers can be repurposed to solve large-scale computing problems.

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Melissa Gedney is currently an associate at Digital Promise, and contributed to this article while working at the Wilson Center Science and Technology Innovation Program. She holds a B. A. in political science from the George Washington University.

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Haym Hirsh is dean and professor of computing and information science at Cornell University. He previously served as director of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. His research has focused on machine learning, classification, and prediction techniques.

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Lea Shanley founded the Commons Lab within the Wilson Center's Science and Technology Innovation Program. She has also served as a fellow on the Mapping Science Committee of the National Academy of Sciences. Her research focused on community-based action research in geographic information science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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