The Truman Platform is a fake social network for real results. This fake social network application allows researchers to create interesting and believable scenarios in a social network environment. Since the interactions that take place in a social setting and influence the outcome of an experiment, all content, users, interactions and notifications are “fake” and created by a set of digital actors. Each participant sees the same interactions and conversations, believe these to be unique to them.
This allows any experiment to be completely replicated, and the tools can be repurposed for other studies.
This current iteration is testing the bystander effect on cyberbullying. Future studies could be done on a number of other topics and issues.
This project and software development was supported by the National Science Foundation through IIS-1405634. Special thanks to everyone at Cornell Social Media Lab in the Department of Communication.
Also special thanks to Sahat Yalkabov and his Hackathon Starter project, which provided the basic organization for this project.
According to research done by Dr. Pamela Wisniewski based at the Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab (STIR) at the University of Central Florida (UCF) there have been no formal studies done on applying and evaluating real time interventions where teens were coached about identifying and responding to potentially unsafe online interactions.
The senior design team at UCF on behalf of the STIR lab was tasked to implement a chat UI into Truman that will allow researchers to interact with teens on the platform and to add real time interventions known as nudges in the chat UI when specific risky content is sent.
Researchers will then be able to evaluate the effectiveness of online safety nudges with teens by acting as fellow teen users in the platform and injecting low level risks to evaluate the nudges.
Detailed documentation of the implementation of the chat UI done by the UCF senior design team and their contact information can be found here: