Information is a gun: Recognising information-facilitated interpersonal harms

Presented by Yimin Chen (PhD'22, LIS), School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University as part of the FIMS Seminar Series 2025/26.

Attend in person: FNB 4130
Attend online: Zoom Webinar

Abstract: With the growing popularity of smart technologies, sensitive and personal information has never been more abundant or accessible. While there are legitimate uses and benefits to all this access, such information can also be readily abused to perpetrate interpersonal harms such as invasions of privacy and technology-facilitated sexual violence. Despite these very real threats, discussion of the role of information in these harms is largely absent from the Library and Information Science (LIS) literature. In this talk, I argue that our disciplinary belief that “information wants to be free,” when taken as dogma, is comparable to the interpretation that the American Second Amendment codifies a nigh-unlimited natural right to gun ownership. That is, a belief in the free access to information as an unalloyed good has created blind spots in LIS research about the ways in which information can be weaponised to facilitate interpersonal harm.

While other disciplines from criminology to cybersecurity have begun grappling with the problem of information-facilitated interpersonal harms in recent years, this topic has been largely absent from the LIS literature. The LIS community could contribute vital expertise to addressing this problem, but we must first recognise the myriad ways in which information in the wrong hands is, indeed, a gun.

Bio: Dr Yimin Chen is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Interaction, Technology & Information in the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University, Australia. His research focuses on the prevention of online gender-based violence through technological and social interventions. His other interests include information behaviour, human-computer interaction, mis/disinformation, online trolling, and internet culture and communication. Yimin is a FIMS alumnus and completed both his MLIS and PhD at Western.