Successful online communities embody an internal contradiction. They facilitate “anonymous” social interactions, helping users make friends, find jobs, date potential mates and conduct transactions. Such facilitation, however, creates ideal conditions for abuse. Online communities have difficulty reining in this dark side as the factor making Web 2.0 useful also makes it dangerous. Thus, sexual predators are prowling the social networks, while bigots troll the forums and con artists haunt the marketplaces.
I explore this problem in this post. My next post will focus on a solution.
Why is online trust important? Without trust, online interactions could not occur. For example, I joined eHarmony (doesn’t everyone nowadays?), and started communicating with women on the site. I found someone who seemed to have a great personality -- and had movie-star looks. We ended up going on an off-line date. For this to happen, she and I needed to take a leap of faith -- that we were pretty much the people we purported to be on our eHarmony profiles.
Trust made this interaction possible. Such leaps of faith underlie all online interactions. E-commerce buyers trust sellers to deliver a product as advertised, and sellers trust buyers to deliver payment. TripAdvisor users trust each other to post correct information. These and other communities work as most users do not betray each other.
The Internet has had a culture of unconditional trust since its origins. Offline, people distrust strangers, preferring to deal with reputable acquaintances. Yet, the same people routinely trust online strangers. This is especially puzzling as face-to-face interactions provide far more signals about trustworthiness than online interactions: body language and tones of voice (Kollock 1999). Why is this? The answer is a longstanding Internet culture characterized by mutual trust. Fichter (2006) suggests that the Internet was founded by a close-knit elite community that knew each other by reputation. Even though the Internet is now populated by individuals with unknown reputations, a culture of unconditional trust still remains. Online communities nurture this tendency.
Although unconditional online trust has wonderful consequences, it also creates the conditions for its own abuse. If community members trust each other to behave according to established norms, unscrupulous wolves amongst the sheep can surreptitiously violate these norms for personal gain. For instance, my eHarmony date turned out to be going through a divorce, even though she had said she was single. It mattered not that she seemed to be a nice person that I might have normally befriended -- a breach of trust had occurred. I could not see myself spending more time with this person. In fact, the incident soured my feelings on online dating in general. My female friends have complained about similar online dates with “single” men on the prowl.
Although my experience was little more than an annoyance, other encounters have had more serious consequences. For instance, Katherine Ann Olson answered a babysitting ad on Craigslist, and paid with her life. Although the 23-year old valedictorian noticed something strange about the ad, she trusted the poster enough to show up at his house—alone. Jones (2007) suggests that: “Answering an ad for babysitting may not have seemed like a high-risk move to an adventurous and open person with plenty of positive experiences and online interactions through sites like Facebook and Craigslist.” Even more disturbing is 13-year old Megan Meier’s death via MySpace hoax. When her daughter had a falling-out with Megan, Lori Drew created a fake MySpace account as a 16-year old boy, and initiated an online relationship with Megan. Eventually, she terminated the relationship, writing: “The world would be a better place without you.” Megan, struggling with depression, took her life that day.
These cases share a basic similarity; both victims placed trust in online community users, who proved untrustworthy. They show that trust creates the conditions for its own abuse. For an interaction to occur, at least one of the two parties must take a leap of faith, trusting that his partner will honor promises. However, this makes the first mover highly vulnerable to malfeasance (Kollock 1999).
People deal with this kind of problem on a daily basis, across all sorts of communities:
User-Generated Content: Collaborative filtering sites and message boards assume that content users can trust content providers to post accurate information. Yet, many people have an incentive to provide misleading information. For instance, finance message boards are reputed to be flooded with hedge fund employees that spread false rumors.
Online Dating: Online dating sites also depend on users to provide accurate information. However, many online daters have incentives to lie about important details (e.g. marital status, age or appearance). Thus, they post misleading information about themselves.
Social Networking: Facebook, MySpace and other social networks also depend on their users to post accurate profiles. However, some people (like Lori Drew) sometimes disguise themselves for illegitimate purposes.
Economic Transactions: Online transactions are only possible if sellers trust buyers to pay, and buyers trust sellers to deliver. However, both sellers and buyers face strong incentives to cheat. Although online marketplaces (notably eBay) have instituted countermeasures designed to punish cheaters, some types of abuse have nevertheless become commonplace. Shill bidders register fake bids on their own item to push buyers into submitting higher bids. Likewise, people sell high-reputation accounts on the black market, for purchase by fraudsters looking to make a quick hit with an expensive product.
Online communities are a wonderful thing. They bring people together for activities ranging from social networking to online dating. However, the social web can be dangerous, because we are asked to trust strangers that we know nothing about. Although most people are trustworthy, a few weeds in the lawn present problems. Since most people are trustworthy themselves, they expect the same of others. This opens them up to abuse.
My next post will begin outlining a solution to this problem.
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