Dear all, I'm pleased to announce that our new article has just been published in the latest issue of the Revue Française de Sociologie: --- How to build consensus in a health-oriented online community: modelling a “pro-ana” forum. Antonio A. Casilli, Juliette Rouchier & Paola Tubaro. Revue Française de Sociologie, vol. 55, n. 4, 2014, pp. 731-764. [in English, see links at the end of this email] --- The article presents the outcomes of our research project ANAMIA (http://www.anamia.fr/en/). By combining semi-structured interviews with computer simulations, it provides an answer to the question: Do online communities where controversial opinions are discussed tend to radicalize individuals and to spread dangerous behaviors? This topic has significant implications for fields such as politics, culture, and economics. We decided to focus on health – more precisely on eating disorders. There is a lesson for policy-makers in so-called "pro-ana forums", where paradoxical attitudes towards anorexia, bulimia and related disorders can lead to polarizing stances. Under which conditions do people living with eating disorders accept or refuse medical mediation, leading either to ‘pro-recovery’ or ‘pro-pathology’ orientations? After conducting a 3-year fieldwork and several in silico experiments via a specifically designed multi-agent model (ANAMIA_F), we come to some interesting conclusions. Our main outcome is that radicalization is not a fatality: it only happens under very specific circumstances. In determining such circumstances, initial attitudes (users being inherently more destructive or more moderate) matter less than actual online participation dynamics (participation rate and community turnover, both influenced negatively by censorship). These results can actually inform policies that are both efficient in promoting health behaviours and respectful of online freedom of speech. The pdf (preprint version) is downloadable here (please refer to the published article for citation purposes): http://www.anamia.fr/en/research-areas/modelling-proana-forum/ Bonus: If you are interested in our computer simulation and want to run experiments yourself, you can download the software on our Github repository (available under GPL license): https://github.com/Bodyspacesociety/ANAMIA_F Cheers, Antonio -- Antonio A. Casilli Associate Professor, Telecom ParisTech Research Fellow Edgar-Morin Center (EHESS)