It Is All About Criticism: Exploring the Credibility of Legal Crowdfunding Campaigns through Social Media Discourse
This article summarizes the paper “It Is All About Criticism: Understanding the Effect of Social Media Discourse on Legal Crowdfunding Campaigns” about the prospect of establishing the credibility of legal crowdfunding campaigns through social media discourse. This paper will be presented at the 26th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, a top venue for social computing scholarship. It will also be published in the journal Proceedings of the ACM (PACM).
A functioning justice system is the cornerstone of a democratic society. While international standards recognize access to justice as a fundamental human right, proper legal services are often not affordable to a vast majority of the population, even in the United States. The digital revolution happening through legal crowdfunding offers a possibility to bridge this gap by arranging court fees and potentially making the justice system accessible to those who could not otherwise afford the cost of legal representation.
To make sure that these legal campaigns receive necessary donations from the crowd, it is imperative to verify the credibility and quality of legal campaigns because, unlike any other crowdfunding campaign, legal campaigns can potentially affect social behavior and promote broader social change in several ways. For high-profile legal cases, verifying credibility is not a problem because mainstream news media covers each minute detail of those cases. However, civil rights and social justice cases that focus on local issues often do not attract national media attention. Potential donors without any previous experience in legal procedures and without any contextual knowledge may find these campaigns overwhelmingly complex to process.
We explored how donors of legal crowdfunding campaigns may access additional supporting information beyond what they might see on the campaigns’ page to better examine the campaigns before making an informed decision to donate. To this end, we focused on social media platforms. Social media can be one of the most prominent resources for gathering additional information for legal campaigns because although local cases do not receive mainstream press coverage, the followers (supporters and opponents) of these cases still closely monitor the status of these cases. We found that the followers frequently discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these cases on social media. Unlike crowdfunding platforms that only allow backers to post comments, social media do not impose restrictions on non-backers and allow everyone to express their opinions on these campaigns. We aimed to examine the intricacies of Facebook conversations related to crowdfunding and, more specifically, how they relate to legal campaigns’ perceived quality and credibility.
We conducted multiple rounds of qualitative coding on social media discussions on legal crowdfunding campaigns and discovered three main themes associated with the attitude of the contributors on legal campaigns on social media: 1) Supporters-Complimenting (i.e., campaign supporters posting appreciative and admiring comments to campaign owners), 2) Supporters-Criticizing (i.e., supporters posting critical and disapproving comments to criticize opponents of the campaigns), and 3) Opponents-Criticizing (i.e., opponents posting critical and disapproving comments to campaigns’ primary objectives). Further analysis of psycholinguistic cues and thematic structures of these three themes revealed that Supporters-Criticizing group frequently use offensive and swearing words. In contrast, the Opponents-Criticizing group delivered a more coherent and thoughtful narrative to present their arguments.
These findings led us to explore how these themes (identified from existing social media discourse on legal crowdfunding campaigns) might influence the opinions of prospective donors of these campaigns. One way to present diverse themes is to label them based on various perspectives of the contributors of these discourses. Enhancing exposure to diverse opinions, specifically labeled presentation of social-media discourse, is found to help gain a better insight into the topic of interest. We noticed a design opportunity by highlighting the difference in the opinions of the supporters and opponents of the legal crowdfunding campaigns to prospective donors. Thus, we conducted an online survey study by recruiting 458 workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Our study showed that critical and opposing posts had more impact on people than complimentary comments. When critical discourse was presented with the corresponding labels, prospective donors paid more attention since critical comments revealed new information not only about the campaigns but also about the owners and their attitude toward the campaigns. They focused on the two-sided arguments (where campaign supporters tried to address the allegations made by opponents on social media) to understand how passionate and dedicated campaign owners were about their campaigns. This shows that two-sided arguments are more persuasive than one-sided arguments. When such arguments are presented for non-sensitive and low-profile issues and present point-of-views from all possible groups, they do not necessarily polarize people’s opinions on any topic. Instead, it can educate people more about the topic and, thus, can allow them to make more informed decisions to donate.
