CAREER: Facilitating Audience Interaction in Real-time Social Media

This project's goal is to help communities better support the facilitation of audience engagement and information sharing in real-time social media. The real-time and ephemeral nature of livestreaming, social virtual reality, and other real-time platforms raises new concerns around community management relative to existing science on supporting online communities. Drawing parallels between real-time social media and best practices in conversational facilitation and conflict resolution, the project team will develop methods and tools to help community leaders identify behaviors that diverge from community norms and provide guidance (and when needed, warnings) interventions to encourage participants to engage in ways that serve the community's goals. Conducting this research will advance scientific knowledge around building strong online communities while providing many educational and outreach opportunities in computer science, interaction design, and real-time social media. The research plan is structured around two main aims. The first aim is to develop tools that support hosts of real-time social media in facilitating audience participation. This includes modeling audience behaviors and developing tools that allow community members to guide participants toward adhering to community norms. The second aim is to develop auditing mechanisms to identify potential biases in the facilitation decisions made by both community leaders and the tools they use, and to provide mechanisms and information that help community members to contest those decisions. Together the research will develop a deeper understanding of community behavior in real-time social media, along with practices and tools that operate transparently for both community leaders and participants. 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.