 I'm Missy and I have bipolar anxiety and schizoaffective disorder. I cannot function normally without my meds but with them I can. I've been in a cell for six years. I spent my time in a cell as a kitty cat's breeder, selling my breeder bowls. It has helped me great deal to socialize at auctions in the kitty cat's community in our housewife from the United States. I'd like to introduce you to our next speaker, Meg Peters, who will be talking about challenging the conception that social media causes bad mental health. Miss Peters is a PhD student in the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her doctoral research looks at the narratives about mental health and social media spaces using interdisciplinary theory. The recent proliferation of studies linking social media use with bad mental health has caused panic in some marginalized groups in our society. Miss Peters believes that social media use does not correlate with bad mental health but rather with bad effect. The communities in some social media platforms push members of marginalized communities away. But at the same time, some marginalized communities find these spaces empowering. Ayes, remember that Miss Peters is new to second life? Please hold your questions and comment until she is done presenting. Now let's turn the floor over to Miss Peters to learn more about this interesting topic. Hello. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. I am so honored to be here and so excited to be invited to be here today. This is my first time giving a presentation in an online world on social media, as I would call it. And I'm really excited to continue doing this work. So I'm going to start out here and I'm going to get my transcription thing ready. Thank you so much for listening to me today. So let's see. So that's just my title. Community over, for example, has argued that there exists two separate narratives that follow the internet that have moral panic and moral imperative. So her argues that the early internet spaces of the 1990s involves both the fear of online predators and a state imperative to invest in online architecture. Social media has been studied in multiple different capacities, as media scholars struggle to define these complex spaces as they grow, change and interact with non-virtual societies. So while these discourses of internet use being somehow dangerous are not new, the focus on social media use as a cause for depression and anxiety raises new questions as to what makes these spaces particularly depressing. The recent proliferation of scholarship exacting the correlation between social media use and bad mental health has led to a similar increase in pop culture periodicals that uses scholarship as their basis. So slide two, I'm going to move to slide two here, being experienced on an individual and collective level. I'm just going to change my camera view here to see if I can look at the slide behind me. Maybe if I snap. Sorry, everyone. There we go. So slide three is a brief summary of my argument. In the archives that exist in online spaces for their effective registers and how these aspects circulate. However, like the queer objects that Spettivis examines, the study of social media is complicated by capitalist structures that contain them. Thinking of social media as archives cannot fully describe the ways that social media operate. Social media have been described as both archives and publics, but they're not just the found objects as they might be in Spettivis' study. They're also living, breathing objects. By examining social media and not only as archives or publics, but as both, I argue that the ways that affect circulates is not random, but rather dictated by the combination of the interface and the community. So the interface, the structure that contain the social media spaces themselves and the community, those impacting, interacting with and enjoying these spaces. By borrowing from archival theory and feminist affect theory, we can more fully examine the ways that affect functions on social media. This presentation will interrogate the narratives that are mobilized on the pop culture periodicals that I mentioned earlier. And I will argue that social media, calling social media bad for our mental health is problematic for two reasons. One, because it conflates depression and anxiety with a bad affect. And two, because it erases the radical potential of some counterpublics online. So when we argue that social media is particularly bad for marginalized communities, women of color, queer folks, or trans folks, for example, they're telling these groups that they do not belong on social media. I think in some ways, also, this extends to people with mental illnesses of many kinds. We say that social media exacerbates mental health issues, and what we're really saying is that there's no ways for those people to actually interact on any space. Saying that feeling bad is the same as depression is a problem because marginalized folks are already assumed to be in pain, in distress, or generally unhappy. So Sarah Ahmed gives a great example of this in her book, A Promise of Happiness, with the figure she calls the unhappy queer. If happiness is connected to marriage, children, monogamy, and heterosexuality, then all those who do not fit the perfect image will be automatically unhappy. Sorry, am I going a little bit too quickly? Okay, I'll continue. And indeed, this is the way that many of the studies around social media have framed depression as sort of people unable to do these, essentially, like assumed human, assumed human timeline things. Having children is one of those, getting married, buying a house, all those things. A bit too fast. Okay, I'll slow down a little bit. Sorry. So slide four. This is just one example. So basically, this is not necessarily a problem with social media in itself. It seems to be more a problem with neoliberalism or with capitalism. So all of us, we want to be on vacation because we hate the dull jobs that we have. We want, and when we see other people being on vacation, feel bad. So this connection between social media on the one side and mental health on the other seems to be less about depression and anxiety, really. And more about the structures that we tell, that tell us what feelings we're supposed to be having and when. And I think it's especially important to take notice of who is imagined to be impacted by the ills of social media. In many studies and many of the pop culture periodicals that follow them, young people are framed as particularly at risk. Young women, we are told, care too often about their image. Young women must safeguard themselves against the images that circulate on social media. And many periodicals imply that young women should distance themselves from these platforms and set, instead perhaps focusing on, quote, real relationship. Why? Well, young women are more likely to feel bad on social media. Slide five. Today, I'm just going to be looking at one part of that. That's a very long list. And in fact, affect theory has been imagined and has been theorized in many, many different ways. That list is perhaps not even all of the ways that it has been talked about. But today, I'm going to be looking at one particular kind of that. So this is slide six. My own work with affect, Lauren Berlant has challenged the individuality of affect arguing that sentimentality pain and pleasure are beyond the end beyond individual feelings. She argues that to imagine a marginalized subject without pain, or to attempt to reconcile this pain through legal processes, reinscribe privilege as desirable or the most desirable position. So negative affect is thus seemingly mobilized to help marginalized groups. We might think about this in the ways that black folks are often represented as in pain or in crisis. However, instead, this merely reifies the system that marginalized them to begin with. So it reinscribes them as a subject who is in pain. Berlant affect is political. And for me as well, it definitely is. Happiness is narrated as something that white straight middle class people can have. And pain is narrated as entirely negative so that everyone should want the white straight middle class existence. These properties are related through the concept. These properties are related through the concepts of positive or negative affect. Fedovic begins an archive of feelings, the book that I mentioned earlier, by admitting that the book did not begin with drama, but rather quote with depression or to use less political terms. She sends this conversation of feeling bad in depression of public feeling. She examines depression as a political and public feeling. Fedovic argues that neoliberal concepts of work ethic and corporate culture have resulted in a public feeling of depression or the inability to keep up. In other words, depression can be seen as a category that manages and medicalizes the affects associated with keeping up with corporate culture and the market economy or being completely neglected by it. Those are her words that I've just quoted. By using depression as a key word, Fedovic can conceptualize everyday negative affect and feeling and all of its tedium and monotony is powerful and important in itself. Rather than argue for recovery or overcoming these debilitating feelings and behaviors. She emphasizes the ways that depression can act as a spark for new ways of activism. A stuckness that can be translated into new ways of moving. So slide seven here. Okay. They had a note that says that these can you explain to the audience what you mean by the term affect as you are using the psychological psychological definition of it as an emotional state where these spots can you just define the term affect. Thank you. Definitely. Okay, so affect is really hard as a term to define, which is part of the reason why I tried to use that very broad definition earlier around what affect theory is. Affect is both a collective feeling that might sit in a room. Or it might be that. That we assume we're supposed to be having as of the culture of them. That's sort of the way that I view it. And it's not necessarily the same as emotion in the way that cognitive emotional theories have worked in philosophy. Those rather sort of a met imagined around this political or. But also a motion of bodily experience. So the way that we feel that, for instance, not just some of emotional feeling. It's also something that's felt in our body. And so that's sort of like the starting point around thinking about affect in this way. I also think that bad affect is not necessarily always bad. So, yeah, that's a huge term and I'm sorry that I couldn't give you a more sustained definition. Okay, I keep going. Just a second. Look, as being the example, the anti-depressive drugs made him present with granted affect. Is that an appropriate use? Yes, I think so. And I mentioned this before and I'm going to talk about the way that Sarah Ahmed uses affect as sort of like if a black person walks into a room full of white feminists. And suddenly the feeling in the room has changed, right? That could be a representation of affect because of the ways that we are we are confronted with our difference in a room. Does that make sense as well? Thank you. That's helpful and please continue apologizing for interrupting. Oh, no worries at all. I'm happy to clarify. It's a huge term and it's something that I'm still grappling with myself. So that's perhaps why I'm struggling to find a succinct definition. All right, so going back to Sarah Ahmed, who is my favorite, I love her so much. So in contrast, this is work with depression reflects on happiness pointing to who we imagine to be happy and to whom we allow happiness to act happiness. So what she argues is structured around a particular kind of life, one that is racialized, white, heterosexual and middle class. There are particular happiness scripts. Ahmed argues that act as prescriptive assumptions of what kind of social dynamics will lead to good affect. So she says, and I'm quoting her here, rather than assuming happiness is simply found in happy persons, we can consider how claims to happiness make certain kinds of personhood valuable. Attributions of happiness might be how social norms and ideals become effective as a relational proximity to those norms and ideals creates happiness. These scripts functions as norms or goals for people to aim towards. I'm going back to my own words there. That was my own words. If we refuse these dynamics or unable to accomplish them, we're framed as causing unhappiness, or perhaps as willingly choosing that affect. According to Ahmed, affect is not individual or necessarily contained in the body, but it is shaped by wider understandings of goodness and badness and what we imagine to make up the good life. Sedevich, Ahmed and Berlant can help frame what I call normative affect as a divide between what is imagined to be proper or normal feelings and improper of normal feelings. My work is interested in tracing how feelings operate on social media and how communities interact with inevitable, negative and positive affects that surround network publics. In Emotion Online, Joanne Gard-Henson and Christine Gordon engage with the effective connections that take place online. They argue that all media is necessarily emotional media, and that all uses of social media are in the pursuit of community, togetherness, belonging, reassurance, comfort, and or emotional support from others. Examining affect online therefore means looking at community feelings or public feelings, as Sedevich would say. And also means resisting the urge to pathologize negative affect as Sedevich refuses to do throughout her work. So again, I'm here sort of highlighting the ways that I don't see all bad affect as necessarily bad, just in the same way that Sedevich is refusing to imagine depression as a bad thing all the time. By challenging normative affect, I hope to also challenge narratives that circulate around certain technologies being bad for us. Internec technologies have been framed as bad for our mental health since they began being used. However, the correlation between internet use and bad affect or bad mental health is more complicated. So slide eight. Here I'm quoting someone else. I think most of my slides as you'll find are the quotes so that you know the names of the people that I'm talking about. The effective engagements that take place on social media are largely due to have social media companies frame success in neoliberal ways. Later in this presentation, I will show how this framing of success can absolutely lead to bad feelings. However, I want to challenge the idea that all bad affect is necessarily bad. If, as some scholars have claimed, Facebook depression, which is a term that has been used in some studies, is correlated to Facebook envy, another term that they coined, or the desire to be as financially and socially successful as our peers, then this kind of depression is an extension of a shaky definition of mental health. These depression symptoms seem to be very connected to exactly what we imagine to be success. So Philip Rosenbaum and Heather Leibert argue that the term mental health is problematic because mental can mean anything involving a person's consciousness, including a person's thoughts, feelings, affects, emotions, beliefs, expectations, hopes, dreams, judgments, and ideas of who and how they became that way, so their history. Connecting mental with health, they argue, is dangerous because of the binary of healthy and unhealthy. If the medical system can define what is or is not a healthy mind, they can also define what thoughts, feelings, affects, emotions, beliefs, expectations, hopes, dreams, judgments, and health. This gives the medical system a very powerful ability. Of course, this is not to disregard the very real experiences of mental distress that take place because of what thoughts, feelings, affects, emotions, beliefs, expectations, hopes, dreams, judgments, and histories are already structurally framed as healthy or unhealthy. For example, if I am told as a woman that my body needs to be a certain size my entire life from many different sources, including my friends and family, it would make sense for me to be actively attempting to change my body and or feeling bad about my body. These bad feelings are real feelings and can lead to real bodily symptoms as well. However, treating my single body does little to change the larger structure of control that exists around my body. So slide nine. I'm going to take a sip of water here. Sarah Ommard writes, also writes about a helpful figure in our discussions about good and bad feeling. She writes about the feminist killjoy fills the joy of oppressive moments. When we refuse to adhere to oppressive logic or cannot live up to their high standards, we will kill the joy of oppression. To return to my early example, the simple act of accepting my body with all those imperfections is a feminist killjoy act. Similarly, the act of romantically loving a woman as a woman is a killjoy act in a heteronormative society. Refusing to feel good can also be a killjoy act. So negative affect is not always something to be fixed. Rather, it can be a gateway to realizing how oppressive the system you exist in really is. So slide 10, now we're talking about social media. Now that we've talked about mental health and how affect affects it, that's a funny term, affect affects it. I want to turn to definitions of social media. Media scholars have criticized the term social media for being redundant as all media is social in some way. Social networking might be a more accurate term, but it does not seem to necessitate the use of internet technology. That is, you can attend a physical social networking event, for example, without the use of an internet connection. For those who do use the term social media to refer to internet spaces where you can connect with others. There's often a differentiation made between spaces that use real identities and spaces that use anonymous ones. I would argue that there's also an unspoken distinction between social media and video games, for example, even if they are massively multiplayer online role playing games and involve real conversations with other users. So a space like Second Life, for example, might not be seen as social media, which I find interesting. Similarly, discussion forums and blogs are not seen as social media, as they are not necessarily hosted by a single domain. While users can interact with one another on these spaces, they are not necessarily contained by a single HTML code. These distinctions are perhaps necessary in studying the process of developing these spaces, but it seems semantically strange when discussing how we use each internet space. I use the term social media to refer to all forms of internet spaces that contain some kind of sign up or sign in page and allow users to see information about other users. So for me, Second Life is absolutely social media. This includes like the massively multiplayer online games, online role playing games that I mentioned earlier, some online forums, some kinds of websites, some kind of email communication, blogs, and websites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, and YouTube that are organized around the principle that you might stalk others online. The broad definition, this broad definition that I've created is to recognize the ways that while the development of social media spaces might differ widely, for example, a video game is much more visually complex than Facebook. The ways that users engage in social interactions is similar across the board. If I'm playing a video game and building a team to attack a virtual boss, I'm effectively engaging with the video game itself and those within my team. If I'm responding to a blog post comment, I'm also effectively engaging with the blog and those who are interacting with my blog post. Each of these spaces contains a public that I'm engaging with. So slide 11, when I point to social media as a public, I'm referring to Dana Boy's term networked publics. It's important to note that when Boy discusses network public, she is not referring to an entire social media space. The pointing to, that's cut off of my transcripts here, but it's pointing towards the particular space that I have when I'm connecting with others on that space. So in other words, if I make network connections through Twitter, for example, my network public is limited in part to those who I follow and those who follow me. Twitter, the Twitter that is available to someone else who is making a different community for themselves is not the same Twitter that is available to me. While we might share a set of terms and conditions and interface, we do not necessarily share community. In earlier work, Boy argues that all social networking sites involve four properties that are not typically present in face to face public life. She lists some persistence, searchability, exact copyability and invisible audiences. These are largely in line with viewing social media as containing publics. As users construct or demonstrate their identities on these social media spaces, their feelings of excitement, disgust, joy and anger reverberate through the network publics to the gain largely of the social media companies themselves and not necessarily to their communities. As Kylie Jarrett argues in the Digital Housewife, the affective labor that takes place on social media is to the benefit largely of companies while individuals create connections that seemingly erase their UNA in state. I can explain that a little bit more in question period, but that is when we engage effectively online, we're both creating connections and laboring freely for advertisers and for social media companies themselves. As users construct or demonstrate their identities on these social media spaces, their feelings are shared. Thinking of online effective engagement as unpaid labor implies that this engagement is only for the companies that host the social media spaces, and not for those communities. But indeed, if we think of social media spaces as only their interface, it would be easy to make such an argument. However, many people freely engage in affective connections and social media spaces without imagining it to be work, and many people who engage in affective connections and attachments are actually paid for this labor. These realities are also not random, as particular bodies are welcomed and paid to toil in social media spaces while others are not. So slide 12. Boyd argues that network publics exist because social media can allow people to gather and connect, hang out and joke around. Describing them as a combination of the interface and the community, both the spatial sense and a sense of imagined community. Boyd thus distinguishes between the interface as the spatial sense of social media and those who use these spaces as the imagined community. By Ron explains this categorization well when he describes and logging on YouTube as an effective counter public. So those are trans who video blog on YouTube make up a counter public. He describes them as a loosely self organized entity that uses edge to a certain extent is framed by the tools and framework provided by YouTube. As Ron alludes to the tools and framework provided by YouTube and other social media sites do affect how publics encounter publics are formed online. While users have some control over who populates their publics, the social media company who sells their walls to advertisers and manages the ways these publics are structured. As users construct or demonstrate their identities on the social media spaces. Oh, and I've said this like three times so I'm not going to say that again. It is the gain of social media companies. Let's see slide 13. So there's a difference between the users that are connected through social media and the space itself so the community and the interface. Many social media spaces are constructed for a very particular kind of user. This creates affect aliens to use Sarah Ahmed's term as those who find themselves out of place in the social media spaces that are made as those who find themselves out of place in social media spaces are made to feel bad. So Ron and McLean give a good example of why we should be aware of how social media spaces can create conflict with affective normativity for particularly racialized and gendered bodies. They argue their study includes eight young women of color who identify as queer and have used Facebook to communicate with their friends. They found that there was a particular kind of stress involved when the network publics of the subjects included both their families and their friends. While they may have shared their queerness with their friends, many did not share this part of their identity with their families for various reasons. The subjects discussed the conflicts and stress that arises because of having multiple identities online and because of both being a woman of color and a queer woman on a space that was particularly white and straight. Indeed, if we notice the ways that Facebook has and was constructed as a middle class white straight space, it makes sense that these young queer women of color were uncomfortable using it. The queerness and being of color is made to be abnormal through a social media interface. A straight and white community will follow. So slide 14, and we're going to be looking at Facebook here now. And I give a screwing shot here of the gender customization that you can have as a Facebook user. Facebook is a good example of multiple kinds of alienating interface aspects. For example, trans lives are limited on Facebook. In what Rena Bivens calls an insincere yet highly marketable regulatory regime. Facebook claims to have 58 genders within its digital walls. So female, male and 56 custom. But actually still subsumes genders outside the binary into the binary. Gender non conforming people therefore interpret themselves as being included on this SNS, but are actually unknowingly conforming just by using it. The way that gender has become a mandatory field on Facebook makes it so that all users must conform to some part of the binary. The database is actually programmed to read genders through pronoun, not the gender choice. When a user chooses them and they have three choices, she, her, he, him, and they, them. They choose them, they then their gender turns to zero in the database rather than one, which would be female, or two, which would be male. So she and her would be one in him would be two. For marketing purposes, these zeros, ones and twos act as the binary as marketers do not receive access to the zeros. Vivins argues that the point of code points of code are never neutral as they are formed by people with social connection. And slide 15 here. I'm going to add some bits to talking about Facebook. I would also add that while there are 58 dinners on Facebook, there are only two boxes with four options for desire. Users can be looking for men or women, both or neither. It is therefore possible to be looking for an intersex person, for example, or for a gender fluid person, even if those are part of the options for gender identity. So what exactly is the thing about desire? Who is desirable and who can be desired, right? Facebook is also primarily a white space. They'll class markers of success built into this environment. And so I have a screenshot here of the boxes of men and women. And I also have a screenshot on the slide of the event function on Facebook. So some of these events life events on the timeline function include weight loss, for example, but you're not included weight gain. We also have overcoming illness being on this list as well, which I always find interesting. So it's no wonder why Facebook admitted recently that social media is bad for mental health. As Facebook itself is unwelcoming to trans folks, to queer folks, to poor folks, and to fat folks. And in some ways you could argue it's also unwelcoming to disabled folks. So slide 16. Facebook's creator argues that the current format of sharing allows for friction. Sorry, the corporate format of Facebook allows for frictionless sharing. Robert Paine argues that how sharing on the internet, sharing on the internet reinscribes intimacy in new ways and translates sociology through mediated and capitalist processes. In other words, Facebook's frictionless sharing depends on the friction of its interface, a space that is made for very particular bodies of cis, straight, white, middle class bodies. Calling sharing frictionless also erases the work of the sharing itself, as Paine also argues. So he says, and I'm quoting here, Zuckerberg's narrative of Facebook's evolution over several years, carefully avoided naming how users have labored to build the applications unrivaled network coverage for the practices of friending and sharing. Facebook effectively does two things when it imagines itself, a space of frictionless sharing. It portrays itself as welcome to all, despite an interface that is built for a particular kind of community, and it erases the work and personal material that takes place on its platform. Slide 17. Reena Bidins and Oliver Hansen argue that the ways a gender is categorized on social media is largely because of the marketing and advertising. And we can see that already with gender on Facebook, but we're going a little bit further here. These platforms, this is them, they're quoting this, I'm quoting them again here. These platforms often position themselves as neutral or open online spaces designed specifically for users, but their primary goals actually involve generating, capturing and controlling user data for platforms great power over users. The marketing companies place us under constant surveillance, recalibrating categories in response to data collected from our online activities that make up our digital fingerprints. The result is archives that ignore the privacy issues involved in intersectional identities. Even for the platforms that do not have gender on their initial sign-up pages, gender is still sold to advertisers and other data collection methods. For example, despite maintaining genderless platforms, Twitter and LinkedIn can still offer gender targeting to advertising clients by algorithmically inferring gender in the background. As a Twitter for business page notes, gender is determined via public signals that users share Twitter, such as the user names or accounts followed. My voice has stopped. Oh, no. Is it better now? Can you hear me? Okay. Okay, great. Sorry. Because this information is generated for the advertisers, it is not necessarily available for the users themselves. In other words, while Twitter might discern that I'm a woman based on who I follow as a Twitter user, I might never have this information from Twitter itself. Oh, no. It stopped now for everyone. Back now. Okay. I'm so sorry about that, everyone. I was worried that something like this would happen. Okay. Slide 18. So now we're going to look at back to Tobias Ron who talks about trans bloggers on YouTube. Gender is also absolutely relevant on YouTube. Tobias Ron's study about trans bloggers exemplifies this. Ron writes, bloggers are continuously revising, retelling and recontextualizing online life stories that serve as an ever changing personal and collective archive within YouTube. However, the tools of YouTube have changed over time, making it more difficult for trans bloggers to use the space. Ron writes that when YouTube began in 2005, its mandate was for anyone to upload their own videos. YouTube's slogan was at the time, broadcast yourself, a slogan that encouraged individuals to connect with others. After YouTube was rebranded in 2012, user generated content has been decreasing over time, with more commercial content growing in its place. More recently, I would add that trans bloggers have been affected by YouTube's decision in 2017 to flag trans material as mature content walking any user under 18 accessing trans blogs. The growth and accessibility of the archive material is directly impacted by the interface itself. In this final example of trans blogs on YouTube, the community cannot grow when trans lives are framed as automatically contentious. Of course, in this example, trans bloggers spoke comfortable as they thought was discrimination. The community here challenged the interface to remove their restrictions on trans blogs. So, slide 19. Okay. In trans media moments, okay, there's someone shooting at me now. In trans media moments, Tumblr 2011 to 2013, Marie Fink and Quinn Miller explored a vibrant queer archive that can be found on Tumblr before it was sold to YouTube and so to Yahoo in 2013. In this conversation, they admit that they were afraid of losing the space to big business as Yahoo as a corporate entity might completely change the space. The Tumblr that they know and love is a particularly queer space that encourages the merging of identities rather than causing a complicated anxiety. They see Tumblr as a kind of archive that encourages the maintenance of copyright and challenges away supremacist culture. So, this is what they say. Tumblr has facilitated the online emergence of call out culture where people of color can draw awareness to and effectively critique daily practices of racism and cultural appropriation that often go unchecked. We are trans women of color use Tumblr as a space to facilitate collective departures from cis and trans norms in ways that illuminate the range of possibilities online. I've also personally experienced Tumblr before and after 2014, this purchase by Yahoo. I remember posting my own intentionally blurry pictures from a vigil for Mike Brown in November 2014. I'm being told that Black activists on Tumblr to remove them, which I immediately did. Tumblr is a space where users are encouraged to think before they post and always reblog and therefore maintain the reference to the author's user teams rather than steal another's work. When thinking Miller worried that Tumblr would become a more capitalist space after Yahoo purchase, Tumblr remains a relatively radical space. So, let's look at slide 20. Tumblr's queer and radical space can be contrasted with Reddit, another microblogging social media space. In participatory culture, community and play, Adrian Massinari examines the website and online community of Reddit, arguing that certain specific aspects of culture, community and play are being performed online. Massinari argues that the negative aspects of Reddit community, namely the misogynistic white supremacist and trans and homophobic side, is not just a small niche but ingrained in the very interface of Reddit itself. The average redditor is perceived as a white male and college educated, or in the midst of college education, she argues, making anyone who is not white or male, a trans, black woman, for example, would be perceived as unwelcome or intruding on Reddit space. By looking specifically at one subreddit, there are many subreddits within Reddit site that separate Reddit into themes or sections based on particular communities, but she looks at what Reddit says. Massinari shows that when Reddit interface is changed or flipped, the community itself also changes. Unlike the rest of the site that bases its most likely to be seen post on upvotes, SNS, SRS does not have any upvote button, upvote button at all, instead only categorizing posts based on downvotes. This subreddit encourages users to post the most homophobic misogynists or otherwise problematic materials elsewhere on Reddit in order to literally downvote it. SRS therefore becomes a space where users can, as Sarah Ahmed says, play the feminist killjoy much in secret of other users. Massinari describes the frustration of other Reddit users that SRS exists, pointing to how most users choose to instead believe that the moments of racism, homophobia, transphobia, or racism are only in good fun or are isolated events. Instead, the existence of SRS shows that most other spaces on Reddit in fact enforce these behaviors and making them invisible in the opposite way. Massinari argues that SRS represents a counter performance and a true regression of Reddit's normal rules of play. I would argue that it shows that there exists an alternative community on Reddit, one that is not necessarily wiped male and college educated. It also shows how much interface is absolutely linked to community. That is, a community that refuses to address its ongoing white supremacist heteropatriarchal basis is reinforced when bad comments are hidden under a seed of downvotes. Reddit, as Massinari shows, is largely unsafe for many intersections of marginalized identities. Rather than calling Reddit bad for our mental health, it is more productive to critique the space for its interface that is allowed for white supremacists and masculine community to become the majority. The effect of labor it would take to challenge this community does indeed cause mental distress from particularly marginalized people. As SRS shows, when we challenge the interface, however, when we change the interface, we also change the community. It is possible to challenge an interface that is unwelcoming towards particular groups of people as long as the social media companies are willing to listen to the distress of these people. I'm going to skip this part, I think, because we're running low on time, but basically to sort of summarize it, in a book called The Mental Health and a Digital Age, we have this argument that online hate speech is related to negative affect mental stress and mental distress. And I think that I'm not sure how to keep continuing using my speakeasy now because I'm going to be skipping a couple of slides. If you really want to do that, you can go into your speakeasy and delete everything above the part you want to start at. Okay. Have you ever had it edited? I don't know how to edit it. Let me. Don't worry about it, just talk. Okay, I won't worry about it, I'll just talk. So basically, I want to argue here. Oh shoot, now I'm stuck doing something. Okay, now we're back. I'm so sorry. So basically, I want to skip that one too. I argue that throughout this paper, that calling social media bad for our mental health is problematic because it conflates depression and anxiety with bad affect.