How Artificial Intelligence is Disrupting Cyberbanging

Have you heard of the social work professor and public interest technologist who is disrupting cyberbanging with Artificial Intelligence (AI)? If not, I can’t wait for you to learn about Dr. Desmond Upton Patton’s work! Dr. Patton is an Associate Professor of Social Work and Associate Dean of Curriculum Innovation and Academic Affairs at the Columbia School of Social Work. He is also the Founding Director of the SAFE Lab at Columbia University, a research initiative focused on examining the ways in which youth of color navigate violence on and offline.

I first met Dr. Patton in 2005 when we were both obtaining our Master’s in Social Work at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. After graduation, he went on to obtain his Ph.D. in social work and education and his research career took off. He was the first person to track and study how social media posts can lead to gang violence as seen in his TEDx Talk. In the early aughts he coined and defined the term cyberbanging and is currently pioneering novel interventions to disrupt the intersection of social media and gang violence through AI.

I recently went to visit him at his office to catch up and chat about his groundbreaking work. We discussed everything from his work, Twitter battles, obtaining tenure, his recent nuptials and why his black nail polish feels liberating. I learned so much from our conversation below and I hope you do too.

Where are you from and how has that influenced the work you do now? 

I’m from Gastonia, North Carolina, which is west of Charlotte. It’s very Southern. Church on Sundays, Friday night football games, barbeques and confederate flags. 

My family went from lower to middle class over my childhood which is really interesting. I grew up with my mom, little sister and stepfather, who I call my father. My biological father was never in my life as he was in prison for most of my life, but he was always this person who I knew was in the shadows of my life . . . 

Life was good overall, I had a pretty fine childhood. I think one of the biggest challenges was to negotiate my identities . . . my queer identity, being Black . . . But I didn’t confront being gay until I left Gastonia. Navigating that was probably the hardest part of my time there. 

It sounds like it was a process.

Yes! I came out to myself when I got to college and then I came out to other people when I got to Michigan actually. The University of Michigan School of Social Work (UofM SSW) was the first time that I felt people didn’t care that I was gay. That was cool. 

Where did you go to college?

During my freshman year, I went to Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. That was an amazing experience where I learned to write. It is an unknown liberal arts college, but very rigorous. We had to take a course called Narratives of the Self where we read all the Great Books and they killed you with your writing. They made sure you were a supreme writer. I learned a lot there and then I transferred to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro my Sophomore year where I majored in anthropology and political science. [College] was easy there because I had already learned how to write so well.

Do you regret transferring? 

It’s interesting. I did not like going to UNC at all and I don’t have a lot of friends from there.  I treated college like a job that I needed to have. I worked my butt off. I did really well in college and I didn’t have a lot of friends because of that. I just stayed in the library.

I had always felt like I wasn’t smart enough in high school because all the white kids were told that they were smart. I knew that I was smart and I wanted to confirm that so I went to college very much with a purpose in ways that I don’t think I really grappled with. But now that I’m older, I’m like yeah . . .  I was a little serious in college.

Does that childhood yearning to prove yourself still run with you to this day? 

Absolutely. I am constantly trying to prove to myself and other people that I’m worthy.

Why did you choose social work? 

During undergrad I had an experience at a summer program at Harvard where I got to teach youth of underrepresented groups who did not pass their state tests in Massachusetts. I had some really phenomenal experiences with young people which helped me realize that I wanted to do direct practice with them. That’s why I decided to do my MSW (Master’s in Social Work) as opposed to law school.

You made a good choice my friend!

(Laughing) So I went to UofM SSW and it had great professors. Actually, for the first time, I felt comfortable enough to make friends, probably because I could be myself. It was a great experience. And I’m still very much connected to my classmates from Michigan. I went back to Michigan as a faculty member and I’m on the Alumni Board of Governors now. So Michigan has really shaped my academic and social work identity. At Michigan, I realized I didn’t want to be a direct practice social worker but I deeply held social work values and wanted to engage in a social work informed approach. I had these deep burning questions around equity, education and youth development that kept me focused on wanting to know more. So I had this idea to get a Ph.d. 

OH, you just decided to get your Ph.d., Got it.

(Laughing) You know. Yeah. It was about me proving to myself that “I can do this”. I only applied to one social work program and applied to a lot of education programs because I was really interested in the Black-White achievement gap, which was the term back then. I chose the University of Chicago because it was the only social work Ph.D. program where social work professors were doing education research that was really changing education policy in the city.

It was there that I learned how to be a researcher and learned about qualitative methodology and put it into practice. I was on a research team for three years where we worked with high schools for Black and Latinx youth. It became clear that violence and community level issues deeply impact how young people think about and perform in school. It was so pervasive. 

All violence? Or a particular type of violence? 

The experience of gun violence, specifically, which shocked me to my core. What kept young people away from school was the threat of gun violence and gangs. My interest in education became more refined and focused on community-level factors like community-based violence which affects how young people experience school. My dissertation was an ethnographic study of 20 high achieving Black boys at a high school in the West Side of Chicago, where I followed them around for one year. I wanted to understand how they maintained 4.0 GPAs while still staying connected and committed to their community life.

Was there a reason why you chose high achieving students? 

It was a specific choice to focus on high achieving young men because the literature only focuses on young men who people thought needed help.

Love it! Evidence-based strengths perspectives. That’s totally from our UofM SSW days.

(Laughing) Yes, yes! That’s exactly what I was going for. Come through for Michigan School of Social work!

What did you find?

I found that these young people utilized cognitive geocoding. This is the ability to identify safe and unsafe spaces that we may not name as such. It was how they navigated and mapped who they knew or talked to in the community. They could bring that strategy and ‘know how’ to the school setting and do the same thing. That was the focus of my dissertation. 

What happened with your dissertation? 

Well, after that I was so broke and burnt out from my University of Chicago experience. I was very grateful to get a lot of job offers and then I got an offer from Michigan. I was the first person in my cohort to graduate and I got the best job even though that was not my goal. That was another moment for me confirming that “I belong here”. But as you can see there is a thread in my life where I keep trying to prove to myself that I’m good enough. 

Yes, I am definitely noticing this thread of you thinking you are not good enough even though you achieve and achieve and achieve. 

Yes, that didn’t really click until I got tenure. I remember being in a meeting this past Spring where I told the faculty members about how I obtained tenure and I had this profound feeling. There was a lot of sacrifice I made to get to this point. And you wouldn’t even understand that sacrifice and I can’t even articulate it. But it’s something I do think about a lot and I need to figure it out.

So what was the focus of your research when you went back to teach at Michigan?

So, I went back to UofM SSW in 2012 as an Assistant Professor and I was interested in continuing the work from Chicago. I learned so much from young people in Chicago, they shared their lives with me. As I was interviewing young people they were talking about things that were happening on social media. 

Then there was a beef between Chief Keef and Lil Jojo on Twitter and it became a pivotal moment where I entered this space.

Can you explain who they are and why they were significant at the time?

Chief Keef is the king of drill music (a style of trap music) and Lil Jojo was a rapper from a rival gang in Chicago. They were going back and forth on Twitter until Lil Jojo got tired of it. He was like “You wanna do something about this? Let’s meet?” So he posted his location on Twitter and within 3 hours he was killed in that exact location. It was the first time I began to wrestle with the relationship between social media and gun violence. Then I went to the literature to learn more about this phenomenon.

I imagine not many academics and professors were doing this work. 

Yes and this is a function of my social work training. I kept thinking, ‘What are the young people telling me?’ They were the ones who brought me to this problem. I wasn’t coming to this as a colonizer. They were like, “Yo, this is what is happening in our world. If you wanna help us you need to understand that this is what’s happening.” That is the power of a social work education. I owe it to the young people. I owe it to my social work education. 

So, I wrote the first paper that defined cyberbanging or internet banging with some colleagues. That was our first entree into the space. From that point, I did some qualitative work in Chicago around this phenomenon. I interviewed 40 Latinx boys and men about social media and gun and gang violence. I also interviewed outreach workers to discuss how social media affects them. To summarize: Context is extremely important. Language is behavior. What is communicated online via social media can drive or facilitate future physical reactions that go offline. 

Where and when did Artificial Intelligence (AI) become involved? 

Outreach workers clearly knew social media is a driver of gun and gang violence but they didn’t have tools to deal with it. They just monitored it on their own. Social media is quick and fast and full of data. That was the impetus behind the next level of my work. I thought, ‘How do we use artificial intelligence, machine learning and computer vision to create tools to support outreach workers in this space?’ As I moved into that space I encountered a woman who changed my life. Her name was Gakirah Barnes. 

How did she change your life?

I read about her in a bunch of news media articles. She was murdered in Chicago just a few blocks from where she lived. It was the Woodlawn neighborhood on the South Side, just south of the University of Chicago. What was interesting about her life was that she was a female gang member who was known as a shooter or hitter. She was the enforcer of her gang. By the time she was 17 years old, she had allegedly shot or killed 17-20 people. There was this mythology around her which was similar to the character Lil Snoop on The Wire where she was known as one of the toughest women in the streets. Gakirah had a large Twitter following and she expressed an immense amount of emotion on Twitter. It helps us to understand her life and her involvement in gangs and the pool of the streets. 

What’s important to note about Gakirah Barnes is that through her social media accounts, we could see, for the first time, to what extent we can use AI to understand pathways to violence. 

Is this the new focus of your research?

NO. That was years ago. That’s where we started but a lot changed.

What we learned from Gakirah was that starting with trying to understand violence is the wrong place to start. Young people are human. Young people are not inherently violent. Instead, they are using social media to seek help and process complex trauma. In our initial work, we weren’t seeing her as a human being. But she forced us to. Through her language, her Twitter posts, her images . . . She allowed us to see her and who she is. A young Black girl who is like everybody else. She did that through her social media. That changed everything about how we approach this work. 

It sounds like Twitter gave her a platform where she demanded to be heard.

Yes, exactly. The reality was that we had to push ourselves beyond our biases to understand language, culture and nuance in her communication. To not just see it as, “Oh that’s just how young Black kids talk”. Instead, this is how a young person is expressing her lived reality. 

She changed us. 

From that point on we have created a set of algorithmic systems. They are really good at detecting loss in trauma, aggression and substance use. The biggest finding from our lab is that young people typically post about trauma and grief before those posts become aggressive. 

In Chicago, there was a two-day window between expressions of grief and loss and expressions of aggression.

In Chicago, there was a two-day window between expressions of grief and loss and expressions of aggression. This tells us, young people are looking for help, are not inherently violent and there is something we can do about it. 

Technology and machines are not perfect. How do you account for that?

The hardest thing about my work is that we are wrestling with two very real issues. We know young people can use text and images to incite beefs and arguments that can lead to gun violence. We know that to be true. And, that same language which can be over identified as aggressive and threatening can be another tool for state violence which over incarcerates Black youth. So we are caught in these very real tensions… that’s why we keep studying the problem. 

It sounds like tensions around “terrorism”.

It’s the same thing. Yeah. We studied the difference between radicalism and gang violence. It was clear that gang-involved folks were discussing lived experience whereas radicalized folks were communicating propaganda. 

Where are you now with AI and disrupting gang violence?

What I’m excited about now is that we have turned towards bias. We are creating AI systems that look at bias in our own thinking. This is incorporated in how we train data and it affects how well these systems perform. 

Because of what we’ve learned, I’ve created a new education sector in my lab called simulation education. We use virtual reality to help young people practice different ways of being online. We also use it to counter bias in social meaning interpretations for educators, social workers, attorneys, judges and law enforcement. 

Wow. This is the future and you are one of the first people grappling with it and saying it’s here. 

Yeah. Thank you. We’ve created 3 sets of applications of immersive technologies.

1. Virtual reality experience that walks you through the experience of a young Black man who was arrested because of his social media presence. His name is Jarrell Daniels and he works here at Columbia. He was in prison for six years and he has been out for a year. In that year, this young man has radically changed his life. He’s going to be a student at Columbia, he has a TED talk with millions of views and he’s just beginning. In the VR experience, you are Jarrell and you play around with how he plays with social media. He was a young person involved with bad shit that changed his life. Social media haunted him. Police only held him in the rough part of his life and that is often the case with young Black men. 

2. We have partnered with MIT Center for Advanced Virtual Reality to create a simulation for youth to practice different ways to be online. To give them an informed decision on how they want to show up. We don’t all understand the consequences. The goal is to move beyond good and bad. You get to choose and you should know. That’s all. We have a prototype for that called the Blue Room. All of these simulations were created with youth from Brownsville, Brooklyn, through the Community Justice Center. Those young people co-wrote the narratives and named the scenarios. 

3. Interpret Me is a simulation for people like you! It is a practice tool to look at various social media posts and restorative ways to respond based on your job. For an attorney, you may have a variety of options regarding how to respond to such posts. The tool provides real-time feedback, gives us meaning and helps us to flag implicit biases and gives us different options. It’s less punitive and turning us towards a world of restorative justice.

What’s next?

There is so much. But I’ll tell you some things I’m excited about. 

AI for All: It’s a summer fellowship that brings young underrepresented Black and Brown youth to Columbia to understand coding, AI and social work approaches to issues. This is the only joint social work/computer science program out there right now and I co-direct it. The 20 young people this year were brilliant, diverse, POC from NY and NJ.

Social Engineering Fellowship: This is a fellowship to help bring returning citizens into AI. We know AI and automation are the workforce of the future. So many people are going to be left out of jobs. Particularly those coming home from prison. So my objective is to create a skill space where they can get involved in jobs. This is not a coding program. This is about jobs in AI that power it and make it run. I want to train blind spotters. These are people who adjudicate algorithms to fool them so they can consider different ways of being deployed in communities that may raise awareness of blind spots. 

I’m working to build partnerships with organizations to create tasks. The goal is to have returning citizens trained in order for these organizations to hire them as part/full-time employees.

Let’s shift gears. Who shaped you? How did you get here? 

Definitely Black women. They save everybody’s life. They definitely saved mine. I’ll start with Black women I’m close to from home who have always accepted me. We were all from similar middle class Black families . . . We were in AP classes together . . . They were the first people I came out to when I was in college. I’m sure they always knew, they just accepted me. They radically accepted me. I never felt like I couldn’t be myself with them. I’ve been lucky that they have always been there as I’ve navigated relationships and my career. 

My social work identity was rooted in my mom, aunt and grandmother. I saw this radical love for people. My mom was never a social worker but her degrees were in social work. I always appreciated her heart for giving. She always wanted people to feel included and make sure people had what they needed. My aunt was a special education teacher. She has the biggest heart of anyone I know. Though sometimes, how much she gives to others is not good for her. My grandmother is the matriarch of our family, church and community back home. She was a leader that lead with confidence. She is a big Black woman. A six foot tall woman who no one messed with and who provided a sense of security. I didn’t have a lot of men that I got that from. It was always Black women and the same has been true throughout my life. As an adult and as a faculty member. Daphne Watkins at Michigan, my colleague Courtney Cogburn. These women give me examples of how to be confident and have a set of values that matter. They provide examples of how to navigate this space and stay sane. Also, Carmela Alcantara. That’s my squad. 

Dr. Erika Edwards similarly discussed the importance of her colleagues in academia. How integral has this support system been for you?

I wouldn’t be here without their support. I was in a very abusive domestic violence situation when I got to NYC. It ended seven months after I arrived. But, for a period of time he kept our apartment keys and I didn’t know if he would come back. These women came with me to my apartment and helped me to pack my shit. These small-statured women. Courtney had her baby and stroller and was helping me tag boxes.

I came to NYC with a very different life and relationship. I was in an emotional and violent relationship for 6 years. The point is that these women helped me find my strength and have been there ever since. 

I know love heals. Tell us about your hubby and recent nuptials.

(Huge grin) We met online . . . we were just hanging out. He was just out of a 12 year relationship and I was getting out of a 6.5 year relationship. So we were not serious. But within 3-4 months we were like, “You’re kinda cool.. You’re  emotionally healthy”. I learned from my bad relationship. He is the first White person that I ever dated. His heart is beautiful and what I appreciated about him is that I didn’t diversify his life. He was friends with people of color. He is still very much White (laughing). We have very different cultures, music tastes. It reminded me of why I love being in NYC. Even though it’s not perfect, we are more likely to find people with diverse experiences and lives. He had Black friends. Listened to Black music. He is a creative, an actor and playwright. He is the Associate Director of Student Affairs at Columbia School of the Arts. He has a NYT bestselling book with James Patterson called Killer Chef. That’s right, my baby  is famous! 

You are just lighting up with so much joy talking about him

It’s just a much easier life. He is easygoing. You can have a life where you are not fighting every day. He makes me a better person. I can be bitchy but he makes me check that. When I feel those feelings, I don’t want to treat him like that.

What’s your sun sign?

I’m an Aquarius and he’s an Aries. I love psychics and tarot cards!

Where did you get your nails done? I’m assuming this is part of your self-care regimen. 

Up the street. I just got them done. I never do things like this. I was sitting at the table and the technician was like, “Do you want clear polish?” I was like “NO, I want them to be black”. It felt extremely liberating. Yeah I’m gay but like I’ve had a pretty straight-laced life. Went to undergrad, Master’s, Ph.D., never been involved with the criminal justice system, I have never done drugs . . . I find myself, at 37, looking for moments where I can be myself and also a self that people may not know. I’m more comfortable now to do those things that I wouldn’t have done before. 

Dr. Patton is currently on research leave at Microsoft Research New England and is working on his first book. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter.