{"id":22341,"date":"2024-03-12T20:04:09","date_gmt":"2024-03-12T20:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/?p=22341"},"modified":"2024-03-12T21:11:56","modified_gmt":"2024-03-12T21:11:56","slug":"conference-proceeding-just-being-a-bit-bitchy-the-gendered-valences-of-online-anti-social-behaviour-on-tattle-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/2024\/03\/12\/conference-proceeding-just-being-a-bit-bitchy-the-gendered-valences-of-online-anti-social-behaviour-on-tattle-life\/","title":{"rendered":"[New Paper Alert] Just being a bit bitchy: The gendered valences of online anti-social behaviour on Tattle Life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Billed as a “gossip forum” that harkens back to the mid-aughts heyday of Perez Hilton and Gawker, Tattle Life is a UK-based influencer gossip forum with a rabid fanbase. Contributors to the site, known as “Tattlers,” gather online to “speculate about influencers’ lives, spout rumours, make hateful comments about them, and judge their life decisions.<\/a>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Collectively, users of this website generated over 14 million posts in 2023. Some of the posts featured on the site are inspirational. However, in between the supportive and aspirational comments are posts that can easily be classified as anti-social, if not downright cruel and toxic. According to the Guardian<\/a>, Tattle Life is hands-down “one of the most-visited \u2013 and hate-filled \u2013 websites in the UK … a troll paradise”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With its well-established reputation as a “nasty corner” of the internet and an army of detractors wanting to shut the site down, it’s a bit of a mystery why people are still coming to the site and staying. To shed light on this mystery, researchers Victoria O’Meara, Jaigris Hodson, Jenna Jacobson & Anatoliy Gruzd set out to examine how Tattle Life participants legitimize their behaviour in the context of external criticism from media outlets, influencers, and the public more broadly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They recently published the results in a new paper entitled, “Just being a bit bitchy: The gendered valences of online anti-social behaviour on Tattle Life<\/em>.” In the paper, the researchers examined and iteratively coded 920 posts from the \u201cTattle in the Press\u201d forum, a unique space on the website where community members share and discuss negative publicity about Tattle Life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The results of their analysis revealed how this online community legitimizes itself and minimizes allegations of anti-social, bullying behaviour by weaponizing and deploying a feminine gender identity in three overlapping and internally contradictory ways to:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. minimize the power of their community to do harm,<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. provide moral justification for their actions, and <\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. to claim the status of persecuted victims. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    For more details about the findings and a discussion of the implications behind the perpetration of online anti-social behaviour, you can download the full paper<\/a> which is now published in the Proceedings of the HICSS 57 conference,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Citation: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    O\u2019Meara, V., Hodson, J., Jacobson, J. & Gruzd, A. (2024, Jan. 3). Just being a bit bitchy: The gendered valences of online anti-social behavior on Tattle Life.\u00a0Proceedings of the 57th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences<\/em>. Honolulu, HI, USA. https:\/\/hdl.handle.net\/10125\/107233<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Billed as a “gossip forum” that harkens back to the mid-aughts heyday of Perez Hilton and Gawker, Tattle Life is a UK-based influencer gossip forum with a rabid fanbase. Contributors to the site, known as “Tattlers,” gather online to “speculate about influencers’ lives, spout rumours, make hateful comments about them, and judge their life decisions.“ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":22462,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[264],"tags":[636,635,410],"class_list":["post-22341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-web-apps","tag-antisocial","tag-tattle-life","tag-trolls"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22341"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22486,"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22341\/revisions\/22486"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialmedialab.ca\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}