Collaborative Research: NSF-DFG: SaTC: CORE: Small: Requirements, Metrics, and Tools for Effective User Transparency

Social media users sometimes encounter harmful content, such as sexual abuse, that they report to the social media platform. However, social media platforms sometimes fail to communicate with users about how these reports are handled. Information on how well social media platforms communicate with their users about the content they report is scarce. To address this problem, the research team is conducting interviews to understand what information people want to receive from social media platforms about the harmful content they report, developing systems to collect data about what information social media platforms share with their users about their reports, and comparing these data with reports published by social media platforms. Overall, this project aims to advance user welfare by shedding light on how social media platforms communicate with people about content they report. Transparency in platforms' decisions about user-reported harmful content not only helps users understand how and why their content is being handled but also lets researchers, community groups, and regulators quantify shortcomings in regulatory enforcement and hold platforms accountable. To ensure that the project is grounded in specific user needs, the investigators focus in particular on reporting of Image-Based Sexual Abuse (IBSA): technology-facilitated violence in which someone’s intimate images are shared without their consent. This project takes a data-driven approach to evaluating how effective existing platform transparency approaches are and to improving those approaches. The investigators are examining existing platform transparency efforts to understand their strengths and weaknesses from the perspectives of end users and researchers; developing methodologies to generate new transparency data through user-facing systems and novel use of platform APIs; and making use of new legal data access rights for researchers to obtain new types of transparency data from platforms. 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.