Reminder: Call for Papers GTFO – Empowered Users, Objective Violence and the Governance of Participatory Media SWARM 2015 Symposium on Everyday Social Media Friday 4th September 2015 University of Sydney, Australia Deadline for proposals: July 3rd Notification of acceptance: July 30th Increasing online participation is now a political, cultural and economic goal for government, health, education and creative industries. Yet the everyday violence and exclusion that plays out on social media and other participatory online forums deters many from self-expression and interaction. It casts doubt on the capacity of institutions to facilitate effective public dialogue, and raises doubts about the utility of speech codes and moderation frameworks. As part of the SWARM 2015 conference on online community management <http://swarmconference.com.au/> and Sydney Social Media Week, this one day symposium brings together academics and online media professionals working on innovative, systematic strategies to better govern social media participation, to tackle the abuse of speech rights online and support more inclusive user communities. The symposium has a critical cultural concern with exploring factors in the design, conduct, management and regulation of participatory media environments that enable unruly and anti-social behaviours. In this it investigates not only visible hate speech, but also what Žižek calls objective violence – symbolic aggression and the systemic, hidden relations of dominance and exploitation that underpin it. The symposium keynote will be Whitney Phillips, author of This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (MIT Press) and co-author, with Ryan M. Milner of Between Play and Hate: Antagonism, Mischief, and Humor Online (forthcoming 2017, Polity Press). We are seeking papers that raise new challenges for social media and online community governance and regulation, and propose new means of addressing them, but would welcome specific contributions that address: · Responses to cyberhate, doxxing and digilantism · The impact of pseudonymity and impersonation on self-expression · Abuse reporting · Critiques of Terms of Service, codes of conduct and online speech regulation · Computational moderation and the economics of participatory control · Verified users and other behavioural incentives · Co-creating standards for community governance · Tactical and proactive moderation · Porting or closing communities · User profiling and identity management · Platform design for self-moderating communities The symposium will be hosted by the Department of Media and Communications and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences’ Everyday Social Media research group. Papers will be considered for a themed journal edition. Abstracts of 150-200 words should be submitted to Dr Fiona Martin fiona.martin@sydney.edu.au<mailto:fiona.martin@sydney.edu.au> and Dr Jonathon Hutchinson Jonathon.hutchinson@sydney.edu.au<mailto:Jonathon.hutchinson@sydney.edu.au> by 3rd July 2015 for consideration for inclusion in the symposium.