CAREER: Tools for User and Community-Led Social Media Curation

This research will develop tools that can empower everyday users and communities to customize the algorithms and interfaces underpinning their online social environments. A large fraction of our society now engages in social activity online on a regular basis, but the current centralization and homogenization of social activity onto platforms that provide only a small number of possible configurations is counter to enabling an inclusive society. People who do not conform to the majority must struggle against configurations that were not built with them in mind. For instance, users from marginalized backgrounds must contend with platform-wide content filters that cannot discriminate between harassing and non-harassing content targeted at them, while neurodiverse users have trouble retaining control over their social media usage. This research will have a significant impact on the social computing industry, and consequently, it will benefit millions of users on these platforms. The education and outreach plan will help future computer scientists to realize the social ramifications of the applications they build and engage students and the public in imagining alternative social media designs that improve society. To achieve the goal of furthering inclusivity on these social platforms, this research will focus on learning from and designing for those who face the greatest challenges and barriers from current social media designs, such as journalists and content creators, neurodiverse users, and marginalized individuals who often face harassment. It will then develop new strategies to lower barriers for users to participate in social curation, so that anyone who does not have technical skills or lots of time to dedicate can still benefit. Empirically, this research will use a mixed-methods approach to gather a large dataset of curations that marginalized users would like to have for their social environment. It will make technical contributions through the building of novel techniques and collaborative systems that implement ways for users to perform desired curations using minimal effort or technical skills. In particular, it will investigate novel user affordances that embed small curation tasks into a user's everyday experience on social media, as well as collaborative models that allow groups of people to share or collectively build up custom configurations. Finally, it will build and release a flexible research toolkit that embeds the findings from the empirical work. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.