Amy Bruckman

About

Amy Bruckman is Regents’ Professor and Senior Associate Chair in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on social computing with interests in online collaboration, understanding across differences, and content moderation. She received her Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in 1997 and a B.A. in physics from Harvard University in 1987. She is a Fellow of The ACM and a member of the SIGCHI Academy. She is also the author of the book “Should You Believe Wikipedia? Online Communities and the Construction of Knowledge” (2022).

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Economics
• Public relations
• Engineering
• Knowledge management
• Social psychology
• Law

Selected publications

• Evaluating the Effectiveness of Deplatforming as a Moderation Strategy on Twitter

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2021-10-13 · 164 citations

  articleSenior author

  Deplatforming refers to the permanent ban of controversial public figures with large followings on social media sites. In recent years, platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have deplatformed many influencers to curb the spread of offensive speech. We present a case study of three high-profile influencers who were deplatformed on Twitter---Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Owen Benjamin. Working with over 49M tweets, we found that deplatforming significantly reduced the number of convers…

  PublisherDOI

• Quarantined! Examining the Effects of a Community-Wide Moderation Intervention on Reddit

  ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction · 2022 · 128 citations

  Should social media platforms override a community’s self-policing when it repeatedly break rules? What actions can they consider? In light of this debate, platforms have begun experimenting with softer alternatives to outright bans. We examine one such intervention called quarantining, that impedes direct access to and promotion of controversial communities. Specifically, we present two case studies of what happened when Reddit quarantined the influential communities r/TheRedPill (TRP) and r/Th…

  PublisherDOI

• Will AI Console Me when I Lose my Pet? Understanding Perceptions of AI-Mediated Email Writing

  CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · 2022-04-28 · 80 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Large language models are increasingly mediating, modifying, and even generating messages for users, but the receivers of these messages may not be aware of the involvement of AI. To examine this emerging direction of AI-Mediated Communication (AI-MC), we investigate people’s perceptions of AI written messages. We analyze how such perceptions change in accordance with the interpersonal emphasis of a given message. We conducted both large-scale surveys and in-depth interviews to investigate how a…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Toward a Grassroots Culture of Technology Practice

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2020 · 55 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can support grassroots social movements toward greateroutreach and better day-to-day communication. In this paper, we present the results of action research with alarge-scale grassroots social movement, the Southern Movement Assembly (SMA), exploring their uses andperceptions of ICTs. We find that the ICTs chosen by the SMA are often at odds with their grassroots cultureof inclusion and participation-which results in inequitable sociotechnical re…

  PublisherDOI

• "Honestly, I Think TikTok has a Vendetta Against Black Creators": Understanding Black Content Creator Experiences on TikTok

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2023-09-28 · 35 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  As video-sharing social-media platforms have increased in popularity, a 'creator economy' has emerged in which platform users make online content to share with wide audiences, often for profit. As the creator economy has risen in popularity, so have concerns of racism and discrimination on social media. Black content creators across multiple platforms have identified challenges with racism and discrimination, perpetuated by platform users, companies that collaborate with creators for sponsored c…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• ITR Collaborative Research: Indexing, Retrieval, and Use of Large Motion Databases

  NSF · $206k · 2004–2009

• HCC: Small: Copyright and Online Communities: An Empirical Study of Social Norms and User Conceptions

  NSF · $389k · 2012–2016

• RAPID: Social Media during Rapid Transition

  NSF · $181k · 2016–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Casey Fiesler

  University of Colorado Boulder

  22 shared

• Andrea Forte

  Drexel University

  15 shared

• Kurt Luther

  Virginia Tech

  12 shared

• Sarita Yardi

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  11 shared

• José P. Zagal

  10 shared

• Shagun Jhaver

  10 shared

• Betsy DiSalvo

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  10 shared

• Éric Gilbert

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• Fellow of The ACM
• member of the SIGCHI Academy

Similar researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology

• Frank Dellaerth-65
• Mark Borodovskyh-64
• Irfan Essah-63