Designing Cyber-Spaces & Promoting Cyber-Cultures to Reduce SPEC-Inspired Hacktivism

ABSTRACT

In this poster we will present what we know and, more importantly, what we would like to know (and how we plan to find out) about hacktivism (i.e., hacker activist behavior) that is motivated by social, political, economic, cultural (SPEC) factors. Our long-term goal is to determine guidelines for the design and implementation of effective, empirically-based, theoretically-grounded, online systems for thoughtful democratic public participation and effective non-violent resolutions of social conflicts. We will describe our research plan for taking the next step toward that goal by integrating social psychological theory and technological innovation in an experimental investigation of the role of trust/distrust in stopping unauthorized online behaviors. Specifically, evidence suggests that "unauthorized online behavior" motivated by SPEC conflicts is increasing. Research on stemming cyber-attacks has tended to focus on the targets of the attacks and mechanisms and processes of defense, while ignoring the sources of the attacks - that is, what determines and prevents the conditions that foster cyber-attacks in the first place. Our central hypothesis is that relationships between distrust and unauthorized online behaviors (or acceptance of such behaviors) depend on the specific bases of distrust, and require different remedies. We hypothesize that distrust is an important fostering condition for hacktavist attacks because distrust is highly characteristic of cyber-attackers, and is indeed an explicit part of a hacktivist code of ethics. In addition, understanding distrust and its effects is important when creating secure and trustworthy cyberspaces, because the trust/distrust literature suggests that the motivation for "unauthorized online behavior" might be reduced (or increased) through interventions aimed at dealing with different forms of distrust. By tracking and modeling user online behaviors (including their use or abuse of the interface and their interactions with other users) in the context of discussions of divisive social issues like climate change, we will investigate the motivations of hacktivists and those who implicitly or explicitly support them, as well as develop methods for automatically identifying hacktivism behaviors and facilitating conditions.

Award ID: 1228937