De-harming social media and digital platforms
We critically investigate how social media creates, amplifies, and redistributes harm across individuals, organizations, and the broader social fabric.
The rapid proliferation of social media has generated significant societal and organizational value. However, this progress is shadowed by an expanding spectrum of harms that remain insufficiently theorized, empirically examined, and governed. These harms encompass systemic, ethical, and societal consequences that emerge from the very design, deployment, and daily use of social media technologies.
This research theme critically investigates how social media creates, amplifies, and redistributes harm across individuals, organizations, and the broader social fabric. Within this framework, harms are defined as negative outcomes that undermine human agency, equity, trust, wellbeing, and institutional legitimacy. Such harms are rarely the result of isolated misunderstandings or technological faults; rather, they are emergent properties of complex socio-technical interactions, often manifesting unintentionally within the structures of modern digital life.
