Examining Violence and Black Grief on Social Media: An Interview with Desmond Upton Patton

As part of our “What Is Just Tech?” series, we invited several social researchers—scholars, practitioners, artists, and activists—to respond to a simple yet fundamental question: “What is just technology?” This interview was conducted by Just Tech program officer Catalina Vallejo, who spoke with Desmond Upton Patton, Professor of Social Work at Columbia University and Just Tech Advisory Board member. Patton (he/him) studies how gang-involved youth conceptualize threats on social media and the extent to which social media may shape or facilitate youth and gang violence. He is the founding director of SAFElab, which centers young people’s perspectives in computational and social work research on violence, trains future social work scholars, and actively engages in violence prevention and intervention. In their conversation, Vallejo and Patton spoke about social media as an amplifier of violence, the importance of lived experience informing computational research, and misunderstandings about Black grief.