Desmond Upton Patton
Biographic Data
| ID | 199295 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Desmond Upton Patton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Desmond Upton |
| FAMILY NAME | Patton |
| SIGNATURE | PATTON D U |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9518-1136 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 109 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
How Well Do Large Language Models Understand African American Language? Causes and Implications
We focus on studying large language models (LLMs) and their ability to successfully interpret African American Language (AAL) in ways that do not distort the communicative intent of the speakers or writers. We discuss research that quantifies the gap between how well LLMs interpret AAL and how well they interpret White Mainstream English as well as research identifying the causes of this difference. This difference has an impact both on users of …
Digital Ambiguous Loss and Incarceration: Multimodal Analysis of Image-Based Posts Among Gang-Affiliated Black Youth
Ambiguous loss, a profound sense of grief unrelated to death, is often overlooked in the context of incarceration, particularly among marginalized communities. Families of incarcerated individuals experience profound loss while also feeling disconnected due to systemic barriers and social stigma. This qualitative study explores how Black gang-affiliated youth in Chicago use multimodal posts, combined text, images, and emojis posts, to navigate in…
Towards just and equitable Web3: Social work recommendations for inclusive practice of AI policies
Re-Examining the Literature on Social Media and Gangs: Critical Race Theory as a Path for New Opportunities
Social media now shapes nearly every dimension of adolescents’ lives, including the experience of conflict. In the last decade, scholars with expertise in gangs and community violence have documented important trends in how social media shapes gang activity, including gun violence. Concurrently, a focus on individual-level behaviors and even group processes on social media obscure the root causes that create the conditions for community violence—…
Defending against social media: Structural disadvantages of social media in criminal court for public defenders and defendants of low socioeconomic status
Secondary data collection practices are often opaque to platform users and researchers but known to shape individuals’ life chances in significant and unequal ways. In this paper, we articulate a clear relationship between invisible, unwanted data collection and its adverse, downstream consequences for marginalized groups by examining instances in the criminal justice field where social media data function as criminal evidence. We show how social…
Digital mourning in tweets: Multimodal analysis of image-based grieving practices among gang-affiliated Black youth
In the 21st century, social media has been utilized to connect youth to peers who share their experiences and provide support. Research shows how gang-affiliated youth use social media to present bravado and express feelings of grief. However, the research focusing on how gang-affiliated youth utilize photos online to memorialize the deceased and convey feelings and experiences of grief and loss is sparse. This qualitative study utilizes a method…
ChatGPT for Social Work Science: Ethical Challenges and Opportunities
Small becomes big, fast: Adolescent perceptions of how social media features escalate online conflict to offline violence
Addressing the inappropriate use of force by police in the United States and beyond: A behavioral and social science perspective
Recent high‐profile incidents involving the deadly application of force in the United States sparked worldwide protests and renewed scrutiny of police practices as well as scrutiny of relations between police officers and minoritized communities. In this report, we consider the inappropriate use of force by police from the perspective of behavioral and social science inquiry related to aggression, violence, and intergroup relations. We examine th…
Avoiding fights on social media: Strategies youth leverage to navigate conflict in a digital era
AIMS: Emerging qualitative work documents that social media conflict sometimes results in violence in impoverished urban neighborhoods. Not all experiences of social media conflict lead to violence, however, and youth ostensibly use a variety of techniques to avoid violent outcomes. Little research has explored the daily violence prevention strategies youth use on social media, an important gap given the omnipresence of social media in youth cult…
Defending Against Social Media: How Public Criminal Defense Helps Us Address Social Media Governance
As justice-minded academics, we want to understand the role of social media in civil society with a vested interest in ensuring that social media serves a pluralistic society fairly and equitably. Gillespie (2018) has helped frame this task in terms of both governance of platforms and by platforms, but we also want to know what state governments do with social media (Gorwa, 2019). This paper focuses on how social media companies cooperate with st…
Social work thinking for UX and AI design
Interactions' new UX Meets AI forum provides a space to engage with the challenges of designing for intelligent algorithmic experiences. We invite articles that tackle the tensions between research and practice when integrating AI and UX design. We welcome interdisciplinary debate, artful critique, forward-looking research, case studies of AI in practice, and speculative design explorations. --- Juho Kim and Henriette Cramer, Editors
Vatas: An Open-Source Web Platform for Visual and Textual Analysis of Social Media
Social media have created a new environmental context for the study of social and human behavior and services. Although social work researchers have become increasingly interested in the use of social media to address social problems, they have been slow to adapt tools that are flexible and convenient for analyzing social media data. They have also given inadequate attention to bias and representation inherent in many multimedia data sets. This a…
You Set Me Up: Gendered Perceptions of Twitter Communication Among Black Chicago Youth
We sought to identify the key dynamics in the relationship between social media and violence by identifying new mechanisms that elucidate how Internet banging becomes offline violence through the perceptions of the Black and Latino boys and men. We conducted 33 interviews with Black and Latino boys and men aged 14-24 who live in Chicago, have experience with gang violence, and are social media users. In our investigation of the use of social medi…
Social Media Representations of Law Enforcement within Four Diverse Chicago Neighborhoods
The perception of excessive use of force by law enforcement towards minorities has become an increasing focus of attention in the national media and public consciousness. With greater ability to record conflicts using smartphones and dissemination of videos via social media, the public may more readily judge the circumstances of law enforcement interactions. The purpose of this study was (a) to understand the general sentiment about law enforceme…
What's a Threat on Social Media? How Black and Latino Chicago Young Men Define and Navigate Threats Online
Youth living in violent urban neighborhoods increasingly post messages online from urban street corners. The decline of the digital divide and the proliferation of social media platforms connect youth to peer communities who may share experiences with neighborhood stress and trauma. Social media can also be used for targeted retribution when threats and insults are directed at individuals or groups. Recent research suggests that gang-involved you…
Does the Role of Student Factors with Adolescent Substance Use Vary by Geography
This study assesses the association of 12th-grade student factors (e.g., grades, classroom misbehaviors) with substance use (i.e., binge drinking, cigarette smoking, marijuana) across large, medium-sized, and nonmetropolitan areas. Based on a sample of 2,189 students from the 2013 Monitoring the Future data set, logistic regression analyses showed that poor student academic and behavioral factors were associated with higher substance use after co…
Artificial Intelligence and Inclusion: Formerly Gang-Involved Youth as Domain Experts for Analyzing Unstructured Twitter Data
Mining social media data for studying the human condition has created new and unique challenges. When analyzing social media data from marginalized communities, algorithms lack the ability to accurately interpret off-line context, which may lead to dangerous assumptions about and implications for marginalized communities. To combat this challenge, we hired formerly gang-involved young people as domain experts for contextualizing social media data…
Racial microaggressions in social work education: Black students’ encounters in a predominantly White institution
Research findings have substantiated encounters with racial microaggressions by Black students in predominantly White institutions. Yet no studies focus on students in social work programs. This is important since racial microaggressions can affect students’ academic, social, and emotional experiences, as well as career preparation of counseling students. In this study we examined encounters reported by 10 Black Master of Social Work students. We…
Parenting in a digital age: A review of parents' role in preventing adolescent cyberbullying
A Systematic Review of Research Strategies Used in Qualitative Studies on School Bullying and Victimization
School bullying and victimization are serious social problems in schools. Most empirical studies on bullying and peer victimization are quantitative and examine the prevalence of bullying, associated risk and protective factors, and negative outcomes. Conversely, there is limited qualitative research on the experiences of children and adolescents related to school bullying and victimization. We review qualitative research on school bullying and v…
Stop and Frisk Online: Theorizing Everyday Racism in Digital Policing in the Use of Social Media for Identification of Criminal Conduct and Associations
Police are increasingly monitoring social media to build evidence for criminal indictments. In 2014, 103 alleged gang members residing in public housing in Harlem, New York, were arrested in what has been called 'the largest gang bust in history.' The arrests came after the New York Police Department (NYPD) spent 4 years monitoring the social media communication of these suspected gang members. In this article, we explore the implications of usin…
Gang violence on the digital street: Case study of a South Side Chicago gang member’s Twitter communication
Social media connects youth to peers who share shared experiences and support; however, urban gang-involved youth navigate ‘the digital street’ following a script that may incite violence. Urban gang-involved youth use SNS to brag and insult and make threats a concept known as Internet banging. Recent research suggests Internet banging has resulted in serious injury and homicide. We argue violence may be disseminated in Chicago through social med…
Introduction to the Special Issue on the Intersections of Race, Gender, and Class in the Wake of a National Crisis: The State of Black Boys and Men Post-Ferguson
This introduction to the special issue will ground our understanding of the current state of Black boys and men in America, nearly 2 years after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Each of these articles represents the voices of scholars whose influences add clarity to the experiences and aftermath of traumatic events that threaten the safety and well-being of Black boys and men. Collectively, these articles showcase various resea…
Good kids with ties to “deviant” peers: Network strategies used by African American and Latino young men in violent neighborhoods
Gang violence on the digital street: Case study of a South Side Chicago gang member’s Twitter communication
Social media connects youth to peers who share shared experiences and support; however, urban gang-involved youth navigate ‘the digital street’ following a script that may incite violence. Urban gang-involved youth use SNS to brag and insult and make threats a concept known as Internet banging. Recent research suggests Internet banging has resulted in serious injury and homicide. We argue violence may be disseminated in Chicago through social med…
Exposure to violence, student fear, and low academic achievement: African American males in the critical transition to high school
Racial microaggressions in social work education: Black students’ encounters in a predominantly White institution
Research findings have substantiated encounters with racial microaggressions by Black students in predominantly White institutions. Yet no studies focus on students in social work programs. This is important since racial microaggressions can affect students’ academic, social, and emotional experiences, as well as career preparation of counseling students. In this study we examined encounters reported by 10 Black Master of Social Work students. We…
Police took my homie I dedicate my life 2 his revenge: Twitter tensions between gang-involved youth and police in Chicago
The hostile and adversarial relationship between youth and police in urban settings has remained pervasive and persistent for centuries. This is a tension historically rooted in the miasma of lack of trust; racial, ethnic, and cultural differences; and fear, anger, and hostility from racialized surveillance and policing. Indeed, most Black youth have little contact with police unless it involves harsh profiling and/or criminalization. In this art…
Artificial Intelligence and Inclusion: Formerly Gang-Involved Youth as Domain Experts for Analyzing Unstructured Twitter Data
Mining social media data for studying the human condition has created new and unique challenges. When analyzing social media data from marginalized communities, algorithms lack the ability to accurately interpret off-line context, which may lead to dangerous assumptions about and implications for marginalized communities. To combat this challenge, we hired formerly gang-involved young people as domain experts for contextualizing social media data…
Stop and Frisk Online: Theorizing Everyday Racism in Digital Policing in the Use of Social Media for Identification of Criminal Conduct and Associations
Police are increasingly monitoring social media to build evidence for criminal indictments. In 2014, 103 alleged gang members residing in public housing in Harlem, New York, were arrested in what has been called 'the largest gang bust in history.' The arrests came after the New York Police Department (NYPD) spent 4 years monitoring the social media communication of these suspected gang members. In this article, we explore the implications of usin…
Digital mourning in tweets: Multimodal analysis of image-based grieving practices among gang-affiliated Black youth
In the 21st century, social media has been utilized to connect youth to peers who share their experiences and provide support. Research shows how gang-affiliated youth use social media to present bravado and express feelings of grief. However, the research focusing on how gang-affiliated youth utilize photos online to memorialize the deceased and convey feelings and experiences of grief and loss is sparse. This qualitative study utilizes a method…
I Know God’s Got a Day 4 Me: Violence, Trauma, and Coping Among Gang-Involved Twitter Users
Trauma-based interventions are common in mental health practice, and yet there is a gap in services because social media has created new ways of managing trauma. Practitioners identify treatments for traumatic experiences and are trained to implement evidence-based practices, but there is limited research that uses social media as a data source. We use a case study to explore over 400 Twitter communications of a gang member in Chicago’s Southside…
Addressing the inappropriate use of force by police in the United States and beyond: A behavioral and social science perspective
Recent high‐profile incidents involving the deadly application of force in the United States sparked worldwide protests and renewed scrutiny of police practices as well as scrutiny of relations between police officers and minoritized communities. In this report, we consider the inappropriate use of force by police from the perspective of behavioral and social science inquiry related to aggression, violence, and intergroup relations. We examine th…
You Set Me Up: Gendered Perceptions of Twitter Communication Among Black Chicago Youth
We sought to identify the key dynamics in the relationship between social media and violence by identifying new mechanisms that elucidate how Internet banging becomes offline violence through the perceptions of the Black and Latino boys and men. We conducted 33 interviews with Black and Latino boys and men aged 14-24 who live in Chicago, have experience with gang violence, and are social media users. In our investigation of the use of social medi…
ChatGPT for Social Work Science: Ethical Challenges and Opportunities
Small becomes big, fast: Adolescent perceptions of how social media features escalate online conflict to offline violence
What's a Threat on Social Media? How Black and Latino Chicago Young Men Define and Navigate Threats Online
Youth living in violent urban neighborhoods increasingly post messages online from urban street corners. The decline of the digital divide and the proliferation of social media platforms connect youth to peer communities who may share experiences with neighborhood stress and trauma. Social media can also be used for targeted retribution when threats and insults are directed at individuals or groups. Recent research suggests that gang-involved you…
Hardiness Scripts: High‐achieving African American Boys in a Chicago Charter School Navigating Community Violence and School
Youth exposure to violence, criminal activities and deviant peer affiliation may impact overall development and the transition into adulthood. Low income African American youth are disproportionately exposed to chronic stressors, but little is known about how they conceptualize challenges and success once they enter adulthood. We examine how low incomes African Americans reflect on exposure to chronic stressors during adolescence that impact thei…
Baldwin’s Mill: Race, Punishment, and the Pedagogy of Repression, 1965–2015
Written in the 50th anniversary of the historic debate between author and social critic James Baldwin and the “father of American conservatism” William F. Buckley, we extract from the corpus of Baldwin’s social critique a method to grasp emergent forms of marginality in the contemporary age. Described as a mill, Baldwin shows how everyday interactions shaped the behaviors and meaning making of black Americans during the civil rights era, teaching…
Vatas: An Open-Source Web Platform for Visual and Textual Analysis of Social Media
Social media have created a new environmental context for the study of social and human behavior and services. Although social work researchers have become increasingly interested in the use of social media to address social problems, they have been slow to adapt tools that are flexible and convenient for analyzing social media data. They have also given inadequate attention to bias and representation inherent in many multimedia data sets. This a…
Good kids with ties to “deviant” peers: Network strategies used by African American and Latino young men in violent neighborhoods
Exposure to violence, student fear, and low academic achievement: African American males in the critical transition to high school
Internet banging: New trends in social media, gang violence, masculinity and hip hop
Social media as a vector for youth violence: A review of the literature
I Know God’s Got a Day 4 Me: Violence, Trauma, and Coping Among Gang-Involved Twitter Users
Trauma-based interventions are common in mental health practice, and yet there is a gap in services because social media has created new ways of managing trauma. Practitioners identify treatments for traumatic experiences and are trained to implement evidence-based practices, but there is limited research that uses social media as a data source. We use a case study to explore over 400 Twitter communications of a gang member in Chicago’s Southside…
Baldwin’s Mill: Race, Punishment, and the Pedagogy of Repression, 1965–2015
Written in the 50th anniversary of the historic debate between author and social critic James Baldwin and the “father of American conservatism” William F. Buckley, we extract from the corpus of Baldwin’s social critique a method to grasp emergent forms of marginality in the contemporary age. Described as a mill, Baldwin shows how everyday interactions shaped the behaviors and meaning making of black Americans during the civil rights era, teaching…
Gang violence on the digital street: Case study of a South Side Chicago gang member’s Twitter communication
Social media connects youth to peers who share shared experiences and support; however, urban gang-involved youth navigate ‘the digital street’ following a script that may incite violence. Urban gang-involved youth use SNS to brag and insult and make threats a concept known as Internet banging. Recent research suggests Internet banging has resulted in serious injury and homicide. We argue violence may be disseminated in Chicago through social med…
Introduction to the Special Issue on the Intersections of Race, Gender, and Class in the Wake of a National Crisis: The State of Black Boys and Men Post-Ferguson
This introduction to the special issue will ground our understanding of the current state of Black boys and men in America, nearly 2 years after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Each of these articles represents the voices of scholars whose influences add clarity to the experiences and aftermath of traumatic events that threaten the safety and well-being of Black boys and men. Collectively, these articles showcase various resea…
Good kids with ties to “deviant” peers: Network strategies used by African American and Latino young men in violent neighborhoods
Hardiness Scripts: High‐achieving African American Boys in a Chicago Charter School Navigating Community Violence and School
Youth exposure to violence, criminal activities and deviant peer affiliation may impact overall development and the transition into adulthood. Low income African American youth are disproportionately exposed to chronic stressors, but little is known about how they conceptualize challenges and success once they enter adulthood. We examine how low incomes African Americans reflect on exposure to chronic stressors during adolescence that impact thei…
Posttraumatic stress symptoms in context: Examining trauma responses to violent exposures and homicide death among Black males in urban neighborhoods
Concentrated disadvantage in urban communities places young Black men at disproportionate risk for exposure to violence and trauma. Homicide, a health disparity, positions Black males vulnerable to premature violent death and traumatic loss, particularly when peers are murdered. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been demonstrated as a health consequence for middle-income and White homicide survivors; however, understandings of traumatic st…
Police took my homie I dedicate my life 2 his revenge: Twitter tensions between gang-involved youth and police in Chicago
The hostile and adversarial relationship between youth and police in urban settings has remained pervasive and persistent for centuries. This is a tension historically rooted in the miasma of lack of trust; racial, ethnic, and cultural differences; and fear, anger, and hostility from racialized surveillance and policing. Indeed, most Black youth have little contact with police unless it involves harsh profiling and/or criminalization. In this art…
Parenting in a digital age: A review of parents' role in preventing adolescent cyberbullying
A Systematic Review of Research Strategies Used in Qualitative Studies on School Bullying and Victimization
School bullying and victimization are serious social problems in schools. Most empirical studies on bullying and peer victimization are quantitative and examine the prevalence of bullying, associated risk and protective factors, and negative outcomes. Conversely, there is limited qualitative research on the experiences of children and adolescents related to school bullying and victimization. We review qualitative research on school bullying and v…
Stop and Frisk Online: Theorizing Everyday Racism in Digital Policing in the Use of Social Media for Identification of Criminal Conduct and Associations
Police are increasingly monitoring social media to build evidence for criminal indictments. In 2014, 103 alleged gang members residing in public housing in Harlem, New York, were arrested in what has been called 'the largest gang bust in history.' The arrests came after the New York Police Department (NYPD) spent 4 years monitoring the social media communication of these suspected gang members. In this article, we explore the implications of usin…
Does the Role of Student Factors with Adolescent Substance Use Vary by Geography
This study assesses the association of 12th-grade student factors (e.g., grades, classroom misbehaviors) with substance use (i.e., binge drinking, cigarette smoking, marijuana) across large, medium-sized, and nonmetropolitan areas. Based on a sample of 2,189 students from the 2013 Monitoring the Future data set, logistic regression analyses showed that poor student academic and behavioral factors were associated with higher substance use after co…
Artificial Intelligence and Inclusion: Formerly Gang-Involved Youth as Domain Experts for Analyzing Unstructured Twitter Data
Mining social media data for studying the human condition has created new and unique challenges. When analyzing social media data from marginalized communities, algorithms lack the ability to accurately interpret off-line context, which may lead to dangerous assumptions about and implications for marginalized communities. To combat this challenge, we hired formerly gang-involved young people as domain experts for contextualizing social media data…
Racial microaggressions in social work education: Black students’ encounters in a predominantly White institution
Research findings have substantiated encounters with racial microaggressions by Black students in predominantly White institutions. Yet no studies focus on students in social work programs. This is important since racial microaggressions can affect students’ academic, social, and emotional experiences, as well as career preparation of counseling students. In this study we examined encounters reported by 10 Black Master of Social Work students. We…
What's a Threat on Social Media? How Black and Latino Chicago Young Men Define and Navigate Threats Online
Youth living in violent urban neighborhoods increasingly post messages online from urban street corners. The decline of the digital divide and the proliferation of social media platforms connect youth to peer communities who may share experiences with neighborhood stress and trauma. Social media can also be used for targeted retribution when threats and insults are directed at individuals or groups. Recent research suggests that gang-involved you…
Defending Against Social Media: How Public Criminal Defense Helps Us Address Social Media Governance
As justice-minded academics, we want to understand the role of social media in civil society with a vested interest in ensuring that social media serves a pluralistic society fairly and equitably. Gillespie (2018) has helped frame this task in terms of both governance of platforms and by platforms, but we also want to know what state governments do with social media (Gorwa, 2019). This paper focuses on how social media companies cooperate with st…
Social work thinking for UX and AI design
Interactions' new UX Meets AI forum provides a space to engage with the challenges of designing for intelligent algorithmic experiences. We invite articles that tackle the tensions between research and practice when integrating AI and UX design. We welcome interdisciplinary debate, artful critique, forward-looking research, case studies of AI in practice, and speculative design explorations. --- Juho Kim and Henriette Cramer, Editors
Vatas: An Open-Source Web Platform for Visual and Textual Analysis of Social Media
Social media have created a new environmental context for the study of social and human behavior and services. Although social work researchers have become increasingly interested in the use of social media to address social problems, they have been slow to adapt tools that are flexible and convenient for analyzing social media data. They have also given inadequate attention to bias and representation inherent in many multimedia data sets. This a…
You Set Me Up: Gendered Perceptions of Twitter Communication Among Black Chicago Youth
We sought to identify the key dynamics in the relationship between social media and violence by identifying new mechanisms that elucidate how Internet banging becomes offline violence through the perceptions of the Black and Latino boys and men. We conducted 33 interviews with Black and Latino boys and men aged 14-24 who live in Chicago, have experience with gang violence, and are social media users. In our investigation of the use of social medi…
Social Media Representations of Law Enforcement within Four Diverse Chicago Neighborhoods
The perception of excessive use of force by law enforcement towards minorities has become an increasing focus of attention in the national media and public consciousness. With greater ability to record conflicts using smartphones and dissemination of videos via social media, the public may more readily judge the circumstances of law enforcement interactions. The purpose of this study was (a) to understand the general sentiment about law enforceme…
Small becomes big, fast: Adolescent perceptions of how social media features escalate online conflict to offline violence
Addressing the inappropriate use of force by police in the United States and beyond: A behavioral and social science perspective
Recent high‐profile incidents involving the deadly application of force in the United States sparked worldwide protests and renewed scrutiny of police practices as well as scrutiny of relations between police officers and minoritized communities. In this report, we consider the inappropriate use of force by police from the perspective of behavioral and social science inquiry related to aggression, violence, and intergroup relations. We examine th…
Sociology (23 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Political science (17 works) · Social media (16 works) · Criminology (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · World Wide Web (9 works) · Internet privacy (8 works)