bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Literacy and the Process of Becoming Home: Learnings from an Interactive Storytelling-Initiative
Authors: Weibert Anne , Oertel Ribeiro Nora , Krüger Max , Alkhatib Ahmad , Muntean Marcela , Aal Konstantin , Randall Dave
Published: April 2023

This study explores the global phenomenon of migration at the local, neighborhood level of a mid-sized city in Germany. Focusing on a long-term interactive storytelling-initiative, it studies the emergence of Arrival Literacy as a bi-directional skill-set. It describes the development of individual, local responses to global migration consequences, among both newcomers who migrated, as well as long-term citizens who never moved. The analytic lens of Arrival Literacy brings forward the complexity and difficulties of the arrival process, where the individual is navigating the consequences of political decisions that were made at a broader level. Digital storytelling as an element is a method to 1) creatively develop a skill of expression for one's own positionality, and 2) to connect with the positionalities of others, thus supporting the process of dealing with arrival at the local community level and beyond.
'Location, Location, Location': An Exploration of Different Workplace Contexts in Remote Teamwork during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Authors: Breideband Thomas , Moulder Robert Glenn , Martinez Gonzalo J. , Caruso Megan , Mark Gloria , Striegel Aaron D. , D'Mello Sidney
Published: April 2023

Much emphasis has been placed on how the affordances and layouts of an office setting can influence co-worker interactions and perceived team outcomes. Little is known, however, whether perceptions of teamwork and team conflict are affected when the location of work changes from the office to the home. To address this gap, we present findings from a ten-week,in situ study of 91 information workers from 27 US-based teams. We compare three distinct work locations---private and shared workspaces at home as well at the office---and explore how each location may impact individual perceptions of teamwork. While there was no significant association with participants' perceptions of teamwork, results revealed associations of work location with team conflict: participants who worked in a private room at home reported significantly lower team conflict compared to those working in the office. No difference was found for the office and the shared workspace. We further found that the influence of work location on team conflict interacted with job decision latitude and the level of task interdependence among co-workers. We discuss practical implications for full-time work from home (WFH) on teams. Our study adds an important environmental dimension to the literature on remote teaming, which in turn may help organizations as they consider, prepare, or implement more permanent WFH and/or hybrid work policies in the future.
Mediated Social Support for Distress Reduction: AI Chatbots vs. Human
Authors: Meng Jingbo , Rheu Minjin (MJ) , Zhang Yue , Dai Yue , Peng Wei
Published: April 2023

The emerging uptake of AI chatbots for social support entails systematic comparisons between human and non-human entities as sources of support. In a between-subject experimental study, a human and two types of ostensible chatbots (using a wizard of oz design) had supportive conversations with college students who were experiencing stressful situations during the pandemic. We found that when compared with a less ideal chatbot (i.e., low-contingent chatbot), (1) the human support provider was perceived with more warmth, which directly reduced emotional distress among participants; (2) the ideal chatbot (i.e., high-contingent chatbot) was perceived to be more competent, which activated participants' cognitive reappraisal of their stressful situations and subsequently reduced emotional distress. The human provider and the ideal chatbot did not differ in users' perceived competence or warmth, although the human provider was more effective at activating participants' cognitive reappraisal. This study integrates human communication theories into human-computer interaction work and contributes by positioning and theorizing user perceptions of chatbots in a larger process from support sources with varying communication competence to users' cognitive and emotional responses, and ultimately to the stress outcome. Theoretical and design implications are discussed.
Methodological Middle Spaces: Addressing the Need for Methodological Innovation to Achieve Simultaneous Realism, Control, and Scalability in Experimental Studies of AI-Mediated Communication
Authors: Aghajari Zhila , Baumer Eric P. S. , Hohenstein Jess , Jung Malte F. , DiFranzo Dominic
Published: April 2023

As AI-mediated communication (AI-MC) becomes more prevalent in everyday interactions, it becomes increasingly important to develop a rigorous understanding of its effects on interpersonal relationships and on society at large. Controlled experimental studies offer a key means of developing such an understanding, but various complexities make it difficult for experimental AI-MC research to simultaneously achieve the criteria of experimental realism, experimental control, and scalability. After outlining these methodological challenges, this paper offers the concept of methodological middle spaces as a means to address these challenges. This concept suggests that the key to simultaneously achieving all three of these criteria is to abandon the perfect attainment of any single criterion. This concept's utility is demonstrated via its use to guide the design of a platform for conducting text-based AI-MC experiments. Through a series of three example studies, the paper illustrates how the concept of methodological middle spaces can inform the design of specific experimental methods. Doing so enabled these studies to examine research questions that would have been either difficult or impossible to investigate using existing approaches. The paper concludes by describing how future research could similarly apply the concept of methodological middle spaces to expand methodological possibilities for AI-MC research in ways that enable contributions not currently possible.
Mind and Body: The Complex Role of Social Resources in Understanding and Managing Depression in Older Adults
Authors: Yong Seraphina , Hung Min-Wei , Yuan Chien Wen (Tina) , Chiu Chih-Chiang , Huang Ming-Chyi , You Chuang-Wen
Published: April 2023

Depression is the most common mental health problem in older adults; however, a lack of understanding in the interaction between physical and social causes hinders effective treatment. Unique issues such as age-specific increases in comorbid physical problems and alienation from social contact can make it difficult for health providers to identify instances of depression. These also make it difficult for depressed older adults to communicate with their social resources, such as friends, family, and health providers. Integrating technology-assisted collaboration with members of patients' social network to observe and manage multi-dimensional factors in depressed older adults' states is a potential way to improve the quality of practitioners' treatment-planning around these multi-dimensional factors, as well as provide assistance for family and friends' involvement in managing the depression. We conducted an interview study on stakeholders' perceptions of depression and communication to understand the opportunities and challenges involved in implementing such collaborative design. Interviewees included 16 depressed older adult patients, 10 of their family members, and two psychiatrists. Our findings reveal new insights into 1) patients' and families' social values and understandings of patients' condition, as well as 2) how these values and understandings influenced decision-making on communicating with each other and acting on depression. These insights have implications for the consideration of information and communication systems to aid depressed older adults' recovery and engagement with social network members.
More Than a Property: Place-based Meaning Making and Mobilization on Social Media to Resist Gentrification
Authors: Lee Seolha , Le Dantec Christopher A.
Published: April 2023

In this study, we examined the successes and challenges in online framing activities specific to place-based activism resisting urban redevelopment and gentrification. We conducted a qualitative analysis of online discourse on Twitter around the redevelopment of an old manufacturing district in Seoul, South Korea, and investigated how the place-based nature of the contested situation complicated the process of public mobilization. We found that the collective meaning-making based on individuals' existing relationships to a contested place led the citizens who were neither the tenants nor property owners in the area to find the struggle relevant to their lives and to establish their agency in an effort to influence redevelopment policy. We argue that the capacity of online discourse that alters the social meaning of place and its ownership opens up an opportunity for technology to better support grassroots efforts to improve social justice in urban development and policy-making processes. Yet, the disputes we found from the online discussions revealed some limitations of online discourse in place-based activism, which led us to suggest research agendas for the CSCW community to address the limitations.
"My Culture, My People, My Hometown": Chinese Ethnic Minorities Seeking Cultural Sustainability by Video Blogging
Authors: Chen Si , Chen Xinyue , Lu Zhicong , Huang Yun
Published: April 2023

Ethnic minorities face challenges in sustaining their culture in regions dominated by ethnic majorities. With the growing popularity of video blogging (vlogging) in China, many ethnic minority vloggers are using vlogs to present and promote their ethnic culture online. In this study, we interviewed 16 vloggers onDouyin to understand why and how vlogs can be used to sustain ethnic culture. We found that both ethnic cultural experts and non-experts were involved in ethnic vlog making and sharing activities onDouyin, and cultural experts took more initiative in preserving and promoting ethnic culture while non-experts were more motivated by getting more traffic and income. Vloggers' imagined audiences included both intra-ethnic and mainstream viewers, impacting their vlog-making strategies, the utilized platform features, and the created vlog content. For example, vloggers taught ethnic language and built an identity for intra-ethnic viewers. Both ethnic minority vloggers and viewers protected their culture from misinterpretation by mainstream viewers. Our findings suggest the potential of using video blogging to address the challenges of cultural sustainability, providing design implications for future ICTs to support the cultural sustainability of ethnic minorities.
Navigating Information-Seeking in Conspiratorial Waters: Anti-Trafficking Advocacy and Education Post QAnon
Authors: Moran Rachel E. , Prochaska Stephen , Grasso Izzi , Schlegel Isabelle
Published: April 2023

Individuals seeking out information about human-trafficking and anti-trafficking efforts are increasingly turning to social media as an informational source. However, a lack of traditional informational gatekeeping online has allowed for the rapid proliferation of misinformation via social media. This has been clearly evidenced within the realm of human trafficking by the spread of conspiracy theories instigated by the QAnon-led campaign #SaveTheChildren. Through in-depth interviews with members of the public and professionals involved in anti-trafficking activism we explore how individuals find trustworthy information about human trafficking in light of the public spread of misinformation. Our findings highlight the centrality of distrust as a driving force behind information-seeking on social media. Further, we highlight the tensions that arise from using social media as a primary resource within anti-trafficking education and the limitations of interventions to slow the spread of trafficking-related misinformation. This work provides contextual knowledge for researchers looking to better understand the real-world impacts of misinformation and looking to design better interventions into digital information disorder.
Open Data Intermediaries: Motivations, Barriers and Facilitators to Engagement
Authors: Dove Graham , Shanley Jack , Matuk Camillia , Nov Oded
Published: April 2023

Open data programs have become increasingly established at national and local levels of government. While the degree of success these programs have had in achieving their objectives remains open to question, one factor that has been identified as important to any success is the role of open data intermediaries, individuals and organizations that help others to make use of open data. In this paper we investigate how people become engaged with open data, what their motivations are, and the barriers and facilitators program participants perceive with regard to using open data effectively. We interview participants from a variety of backgrounds with differing levels of experience and engagement with open data. Participants include students learning how to train others in open data techniques and tools; people who attend open data events and use open data for commercial or social benefit; and representatives from local government, municipal agencies and a civic tech non-profit. We identify pathways to successfully developing and nurturing a community of open data intermediaries, and make five recommendations for organizations planning and managing open data programs.
Organizing Oceanographic Infrastructure: The Work of Making a Software Pipeline Repurposable
Authors: Neang Andrew B. , Sutherland Will , Ribes David , Lee Charlotte P.
Published: April 2023

Drawing from a longitudinal case study, we inspect the activities of an expanding team of scientists and their collaborators as they sought to develop a novel software pipeline that worked both for themselves and for their wider community. We argue that these two tasks - making the software work for themselves and also for their wider scientific community - could not be differentiated from each other at the beginning of the software development process. Rather, this division of labor and software capacities emerged, articulated by the actors themselves as they went about their tasks. The activities of making the novel software "work" at all, and the "extra work" of making that software repurposable or reusable could not be distinguished until near the end of the development process - rather than defined or structured in advance. We discuss implications for the trajectory of software development, and the practical work of making software repurposable.
Participatory Writing as Activism: The Work of Organizing a Swedish MeToo Initiative Through Social Media
Authors: Larsen-Ledet Ida , Rossitto Chiara
Published: April 2023

This paper extends the literature on social media activism by foregrounding the invisible work of orchestrating it. We analyze the activities of a #MeToo group in a Northern European country and characterize the group's efforts to catalog incidents of gender-based harassment and discrimination as an activist, platform-mediated participatory writing project. Our analysis details the work of organizing this form of activism, particularly: 1) the editorial work that underlies publishing personal stories on social media, 2) the emotional labor that unfolds as part of this form of writing, and 3) the work of creating publics. By drawing attention to these efforts, the paper frames activism as effortfully driven, sometimes in tension with the platform or evolving value positions. We conclude with a discussion on the role of social networking sites in organizing activism where writing is central, and with a set of sensitivities that can support designers and activists alike in designing socio-technical practices concerned with social change.
Patchwork: The Hidden, Human Labor of AI Integration within Essential Work
Authors: Fox Sarah E. , Shorey Samantha , Kang Esther Y. , Montiel Valle Dominique , Rodriguez Estefania
Published: April 2023

This paper examines the rapid introduction of AI and automation technologies within essential industries amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on participant observation and interviews within two sites of waste labor in the United States, we consider the substantial effort performed by frontline workers who smooth the relationship between robotics and their social and material environment. Over the course of the research, we found workers engaged in continuous acts of calibration, troubleshooting, and repair required to support AI technologies over time. In interrogating these sites, we develop the concept of "patchwork": human labor that occurs in the space between what AI purports to do and what it actually accomplishes. We argue that it is necessary to consider the often-undervalued frontline work that makes up for AI's shortcomings during implementation, particularly as CSCW increasingly turns to discussions of Human-AI collaboration.
Privacy Legislation as Business Risks: How GDPR and CCPA are Represented in Technology Companies' Investment Risk Disclosures
Authors: Wong Richmond Y. , Chong Andrew , Aspegren R. Cooper
Published: April 2023

Power exercised by large technology companies has led to concerns over privacy and data protection, evidenced by the passage of legislation including the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). While much privacy research has focused on how users perceive privacy and interact with companies, we focus on how privacy legislation is discussed among a different set of relationships-those between companies and investors. This paper investigates how companies translate the GDPR and CCPA into business risks in documents created for investors. We conduct a qualitative document analysis of annual regulatory filings (Form 10-K) from nine major technology companies. We outline five ways that technology companies consider GDPR and CCPA as business risks, describing both direct and indirect ways that the legislation may affect their businesses. We highlight how these findings are relevant for the broader CSCW and privacy research communities in research, design, and practice. Creating meaningful privacy changes within existing institutional structures requires some understanding of the dynamics of these companies' decision-making processes and the role of capital.
Pronouns in the Workplace: Developing Sociotechnical Systems for Digitally Mediated Gender Expression
Authors: Ale-Ebrahim Benjamin , Gohring Tristan , Fetterolf Elizabeth , Gray Mary L.
Published: April 2023

Sharing personal pronouns (such as they/them, she/her, or he/him) in the workplace helps colleagues respectfully address each other. Many companies currently seek to design and implement new software tools to facilitate pronoun-sharing among employees. This paper analyzes the social processes of communication about pronouns in the workplace and identifies best practices for creating and using workplace pronoun-sharing software. We conducted 78 semi-structured qualitative interviews with various stakeholders involved in the launch of pronoun-sharing tools in workplace collaboration software, including transgender and queer people, HR and IT professionals, and LGBTQ advocacy organizations. We used an anthropological approach to qualitatively analyze interview materials and notes from interactions with research participants. We find that sharing personal pronouns is an ongoing communication process rather than a single act of information provision. Pronoun sharing tools encapsulate the tension between dynamic social processes of self-expression and technical systems of classification and information retrieval. People communicate their pronouns differently as they navigate identity expression across social contexts. Sharing pronouns is therefore both an individual expression of self-presentation and a complex act of social communication. Developers must create new methods for building pronoun-sharing tools that equip people to control ongoing social processes of self-expression instead of using an information retrieval approach that treats pronouns merely as stable, unchanging data.
Queer Identities, Normative Databases: Challenges to Capturing Queerness On Wikidata
Authors: Weathington Katy , Brubaker Jed R.
Published: April 2023

The collection, organization, and retrieval of data about queer individuals and their identities challenge the creators and curators of highly structured database systems. While prior research in archival studies and demographics has examined processes of collecting and storing queer identities, they do not examine the complexities of highly democratized platforms that lack top-down mandates that often structure archival schemas. To examine the representation of queer people on open-platform databases, we performed a trace ethnography and thematic analysis of Wikidata, an open collaboration, highly structured database. We specifically examined the creation of, changes to, discussions around, and impacts of properties that encode queer identities, such assexual orientation andsex or gender. We found that changes often have unexpected impacts, that contributors struggled to determine vocabulary for queer identities which were accurate across the diverse cultural contexts of the Wikidata community, that the recording of queer identities could cause a stigmatizing effect for LGBTQ+ individuals, with further concerns of spreading rumors or outing closeted people, and that contributors proposing changes which would cause biased representations of queer people. Our analysis demonstrates inherent and unaddressed frictions when translating queer identities to the confines of a structured database. We conclude by discussing ways that the highly bottom-up, collaborative nature of platforms such as Wikidata, often seen as a major strength, can be vulnerable to individuals or small groups derailing and filibustering changes they disagree with on politically charged topics such as queer identities.
Racial Capitalism Online: Navigating Race Among Creative Professionals of Color
Authors: Turner Jaleesa Rosario , Hui Julie
Published: April 2023

Racial capitalism, which describes how people in power extract value from the racial identity of others, has been a constant driver in the creative industries. As social media becomes the widespread avenue for sharing creative works and building professional reputation, the effects of racial capitalism become further amplified online. In fact, many creative professionals of color find that the biases they face offline are only replicated, and sometimes magnified, on digital platforms. In this study, we interview creative professionals of color who heavily rely on digital platforms to promote their work in order to understand how racial capitalism shapes their experience and performance of race online. Creative professionals describe seeing their work appropriated and shared for little to no recognition, while at the same time, feeling pressured to present themselves in a palatable way in order to meet the expectations of a dominant consumer audience. Creatives also worked within these capitalistic expectations by building communities with similar others in order to exchange advice, serve as role models, and share resources. Our data uncover how expectations on social media, fueled by racial biases, burden creative professionals of color, thus informing alternative futures that could compensate their work more equitably and build more inclusive spaces for creative professional growth.
Reimagining Open Data during Disaster Response: Applying a Feminist Lens to Three Open Data Projects in Post-Earthquake Nepal
Authors: Paudel Shreyasha , Soden Robert
Published: April 2023

Open Data has become a prominent ideal in humanitarian information work and is increasingly promoted for crisis situations to increase effectiveness, accountability, and empower citizens. However, like all socio-technical systems, open data platforms for disasters make implicit and explicit assumptions about data, data users, disasters, and the context of use. In this paper, we turn to feminist theory to examine three open data projects rolled out in the aftermath of the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. We used the seven principles of Data Feminism introduced by D'Ignazio and Klein to design an evaluative framework for the three projects. We use this framework to highlight and link the socio-political nature of both disasters and open data platforms. In our results, we highlight significant gaps in how these projects made labor (in)visible, engaged with affective aspects of disaster, addressed context, and challenged power. We argue that these gaps are reflective of dominant practices in open data for disasters and serve as opportunities for designers and crisis informatics researchers to reimagine the potential of such projects. We propose four ways of doing so based on feminist principles and values.
Reviewing Interventions to Address Misinformation: The Need to Expand Our Vision Beyond an Individualistic Focus
Authors: Aghajari Zhila , Baumer Eric P. S. , DiFranzo Dominic
Published: April 2023

Prior work has identified a variety of factors that drive the way people identify and respond to misinformation. Such factors include confirmation bias, perceived credibility of the information source, individual media literacy, social norms, and others. This paper reviews the interventions designed to address misinformation and examines how various underlying mechanisms of response to misinformation are operationalized and implemented in the reviewed interventions. Key findings show that most prior work to address misinformation heavily focuses on individual pieces of misinformation and the actions individuals take in response to those individual pieces. These individualistic approaches, we argue, overlook the other drivers of responses to misinformation, such as individuals' prior beliefs and the social contexts in which misinformation is encountered. Additionally, the analysis shows that an individualistic focus on misinformation draws attention away from the systemic nature and consequences of misinformation. This paper argues that to overcome the limitation of individualistic approaches to addressing misinformation, future interventions need to expand their scope beyond individualistic approaches. As one way to do so, it discusses leveraging the impacts of community factors that impact the spread and impacts of misinformation. The paper concludes by using social norms as an example to illustrate how a focus on community factors might work in practice.
Sending News Back Home: Misinformation Lost in Transnational Social Networks
Authors: Moran Rachel , Nguyễn Sarah , Bui Linh
Published: April 2023

Prior research into misinformation has overwhelmingly concentrated on English-speaking communities. As a result, misinformation has proliferated, almost unchecked, in non-English contexts resulting in a dearth of understanding the structures and impact of misinformation among marginalized and immigrant communities. Through qualitative coding of social media data and a thematic inductive analysis inspired approach, we investigate how misinformation has proliferated through social media sites, such as Facebook, and the types of informational content, and specific misinformation narratives, that spread across the Vietnamese diasporic community during the 2020 U.S. Informed by the work of organizations such as Viet Fact Check, The Interpreter, and other community-led initiatives working to provide fact-checking and online media analysis in Vietnamese and English, we present and discuss salient misinformation narratives that spread throughout Vietnamese diasporic Facebook posts, fact-checking and misleading information patterns, and inter-platform networking activities. This work contributes contextual knowledge to researchers seeking to understand how to represent and include immigrant diasporic communities and their sociocultural contexts, within research on transnational misinformation around sociotechnical systems.
Sliding into My DMs: Detecting Uncomfortable or Unsafe Sexual Risk Experiences within Instagram Direct Messages Grounded in the Perspective of Youth
Authors: Razi Afsaneh , Alsoubai Ashwaq , Kim Seunghyun , Ali Shiza , Stringhini Gianluca , De Choudhury Munmun , Wisniewski Pamela J.
Published: April 2023

We collected Instagram data from 150 adolescents (ages 13-21) that included 15,547 private message conversations of which 326 conversations were flagged as sexually risky by participants. Based on this data, we leveraged a human-centered machine learning approach to create sexual risk detection classifiers for youth social media conversations. Our Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Random Forest models outperformed in identifying sexual risks at the conversation-level (AUC=0.88), and CNN outperformed at the message-level (AUC=0.85). We also trained classifiers to detect the severity risk level (i.e., safe, low, medium-high) of a given message with CNN outperforming other models (AUC=0.88). A feature analysis yielded deeper insights into patterns found within sexually safe versus unsafe conversations. We found that contextual features (e.g., age, gender, and relationship type) and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) contributed the most for accurately detecting sexual conversations that made youth feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Our analysis provides insights into the important factors and contextual features that enhance automated detection of sexual risks within youths' private conversations. As such, we make valuable contributions to the computational risk detection and adolescent online safety literature through our human-centered approach of collecting and ground truth coding private social media conversations of youth for the purpose of risk classification.
Slowing it Down: Towards Facilitating Interpersonal Mindfulness in Online Polarizing Conversations Over Social Media
Authors: Masrani Teale W. , Jamieson Jack , Yamashita Naomi , He Helen Ai
Published: April 2023

Discussions about polarizing topics are essential to have, yet they can easily become hostile, aggressive, or distressing on current social media platforms. Content moderation interventions aim to mitigate this issue, though such approaches are reactionary, removing harmful content only after it has been posted. We conducted a mixed-methods experiment with 40 participants to investigate how a design friction that manipulates the temporal flow during a contentious conversation can foster interpersonal mindfulness, a trait critical for productive communication. Dyads were randomly assigned into the Control Group which received no intervention, and the Experiment Group where participants were limited to sending one message per two-minute interval. Triangulating quantitative and qualitative data from conversation logs, questionnaires, interviews, and computational text analysis, our findings revealed a two-fold effect: Experiment Group participants felt simultaneously frustrated by the intervention as it disrupted the pacing of their conversation and interfered with rapport-building, and appreciative of the intervention as it nudged them towards writing thoughtful and task-focused messages. We discuss implications of these findings for future investigation into the design of temporal interventions to influence interpersonal mindfulness during polarizing online conversations.
Speculating on Risks of AI Clones to Selfhood and Relationships: Doppelganger-phobia, Identity Fragmentation, and Living Memories
Authors: Lee Patrick Yung Kang , Ma Ning F. , Kim Ig-Jae , Yoon Dongwook
Published: April 2023

Digitally replicating the appearance and behaviour of individuals is becoming feasible with recent advancements in deep-learning technologies such as interactive deepfake applications, voice conversion, and virtual actors. Interactive applications of such agents, termed AI clones, pose risks related to impression management, identity abuse, and unhealthy dependencies. Identifying concerns AI clones will generate is a prerequisite to establishing the basis of discourse around how this technology will impact a source individual's selfhood and interpersonal relationships. We presented 20 participants of diverse ages and backgrounds with 8 speculative scenarios to explore their perception towards the concept of AI clones. We found that (1. doppelganger-phobia) the abusive potential of AI clones to exploit and displace the identity of an individual elicits negative emotional reactions; (2. identity fragmentation) creating replicas of a living individual threatens their cohesive self-perception and unique individuality; and (3. living memories) interacting with a clone of someone with whom the user has an existing relationship poses risks of misrepresenting the individual or developing over-attachment to the clone. These findings provide an avenue to discuss preliminary ethical implications, respect for identity and authenticity, and design recommendations for creating AI clones.
Supporters First: Understanding Online Social Support on Mental Health from a Supporter Perspective
Authors: Kim Meeyun , Saha Koustuv , De Choudhury Munmun , Choi Daejin
Published: April 2023

Social support or peer support in mental health has successfully settled down in online spaces by reducing the potential risk of critical mental illness (e.g., suicidal thoughts) of support-seekers. While the prior work has mostly focused on support-seekers, particularly investigating their behavioral characteristics and the effects of online social supports to support-seekers, this paper seeks to understand online social support from supporters' perspectives, who have informational or emotional resources that may affect support-seekers either positively or negatively. To this end, we collect and analyze a large-scale of dataset consisting of the supporting comments and their target posts from 55 mental health communities in Reddit. We also develop a deep-learning-based model that scores informational and emotional support to the supporting comments. Based on the collected and scored dataset, we measure the characteristics of the supporters from the behavioral and content perspectives, which reveals that the supporters tend to give emotional support than informational support and the atmosphere of social support communities tend also to be emotional. We also understand the relations between the supporters and the support-seekers by giving a notion of "social supporting network'', whose nodes and edges are the sets of the users and the supporting comments. Our analysis on top users by out-degrees and in-degrees in social supporting network demonstrates that heavily-supportive users are more likely to give informational support with diverse content while the users who attract much support exhibit continuous support-seeking behaviors by uploading multiple posts with similar content. Lastly, we identified structural communities in social supporting network to explore whether and how the supporters and the support-seeking users are grouped. By conducting topic analysis on both the support-seeking posts and the supporting comments of individual communities, we revealed that small communities deal with a specific topic such as hair-pulling disorder. We believe that the methodologies, dataset, and findings can not only expose more research questions on online social supports in mental health, but also provide insight on improving social support in online platforms.
Sustained Harm Over Time and Space Limits the External Function of Online Counterpublics for American Muslims
Authors: Salehi Niloufar , Pakzad Roya , Lajevardi Nazita , Asad Mariam
Published: April 2023

Social media platforms are celebrated for their capacity to empower those with marginalized or disenfranchised identities and support them to create counterpublics. We focus on one such group, Muslim Americans, and ask how visible Muslim Americans, such as journalists, activists, and aspiring politicians, use social media to craft counter-narratives, reclaim control of their stories, and mitigate the harm directed at them. Through a series of 19 interviews, we found that visible Muslim Americans' ability to craft and sustain counter narratives is largely hampered by sustained online harm (e.g. harassment). We found that these public figures were harmed repeatedly over long periods of time and through the weaponization of platform affordances such as replying, tagging, and hashtag takeovers, as well as the weaponization of their gender and identity. Our findings shed light on the serious limitations of social media to provide a safe platform for counterpublics to engage externally with wider publics. Finally, we discuss the limitations of content moderation as the dominant framework for addressing harm online and suggest alternative paths forward based on restorative and transformative justice.
Systemic Gender Inequities in Who Reviews Code
Authors: Murphy-Hill Emerson , Dicker Jillian , Horvath Amber , Hodges Maggie Morrow , Egelman Carolyn D. , Weingart Laurie R. , Jaspan Ciera , Green Collin , Chen Nina
Published: April 2023

Code review is an essential task for modern software engineers, where the author of a code change assigns other engineers the task of providing feedback on the author's code. In this paper, we investigate the task of code review through the lens of equity, the proposition that engineers should share reviewing responsibilities fairly. Through this lens, we quantitatively examine gender inequities in code review load at Google. We found that, on average, women perform about 25% fewer reviews than men, an inequity with multiple systemic antecedents, including authors' tendency to choose men as reviewers, a recommender system's amplification of human biases, and gender differences in how reviewer credentials are assigned and earned. Although substantial work remains to close the review load gap, we show how one small change has begun to do so.
Automated Emotion Recognition in the Workplace: How Proposed Technologies Reveal Potential Futures of Work
Authors: Boyd Karen L. , Andalibi Nazanin
Published: April 2023

Emotion recognition technologies, while critiqued for bias, validity, and privacy invasion, continue to be developed and applied in a range of domains including in high-stakes settings like the workplace. We set out to examine emotion recognition technologies proposed for use in the workplace, describing the input data and training, outputs, and actions that these systems take or prompt. We use these design features to reflect on these technologies' implications using the ethical speculation lens. We analyzed patent applications that developed emotion recognition technologies to be used in the workplace (N=86). We found that these technologies scope data collection broadly; claim to reveal not only targets' emotional expressions, but also their internal states; and take or prompt a wide range of actions, many of which impact workers' employment and livelihoods. Technologies described in patent applications frequently violated existing guidelines for ethical automated emotion recognition technology. We demonstrate the utility of using patent applications for ethical speculation. In doing so, we suggest that 1) increasing the visibility of claimed emotional states has the potential to create additional emotional labor for workers (a burden that is disproportionately distributed to low-power and marginalized workers) and contribute to a larger pattern of blurring boundaries between expectations of the workplace and a worker's autonomy, and more broadly to the data colonialism regime; 2) Emotion recognition technology's failures can be invisible, may inappropriately influence high-stakes workplace decisions and can exacerbate inequity. We discuss the implications of making emotions and emotional data visible in the workplace and submit for consideration implications for designers of emotion recognition, employers who use them, and policymakers.
The Stage and the Theatre: AltspaceVR and its Relationship to Discord
Authors: Alcala Katrina , D'Achille Anthony , Bruckman Amy
Published: April 2023

Immersive virtual reality (VR) has seen growth in usage over the last few years and that growth is expected to accelerate. Correspondingly, many VR-based online communities have begun to emerge, and several social VR applications such as AltspaceVR have gained significant popularity. However, virtual reality can be isolating. Users can meet and connect with people in VR, but inevitably, when a user removes their headset, their friends are no longer there. In this paper, we look at how communities in AltspaceVR, a popular social VR application, handle this challenge. We conduct fourteen interviews and over 70 hours of participant observation and find that AltspaceVR users and communities have turned to Discord to solve many of their needs, such as facilitating more ubiquitous communication, planning community activities and AltspaceVR Events, and hosting casual social discussion. By using the communicative ecology model for our analysis, we find that AltspaceVR, Discord, and the communities that intersect the two have formed a tightly-coupled communicative ecology, which we call the "stage" and "theater". Discord acts as the "theater," where actors and crew collaborate and communicate to prepare for the main event, all the while building important social bonds. AltspaceVR acts as the "stage," where those efforts manifest in ephemeral but high-value experiences that bring the community together. Finally, we compare the communities we studied with those found in massively-multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and provide insights regarding the design of social VR applications and online communities.
The Unsung Heroes of Facebook Groups Moderation: A Case Study of Moderation Practices and Tools
Authors: Kuo Tina , Hernani Alicia , Grossklags Jens
Published: April 2023

Volunteer moderators have the power to shape society through their influence on online discourse. However, the growing scale of online interactions increasingly presents significant hurdles for meaningful moderation. Furthermore, there are only limited tools available to assist volunteers with their work. Our work aims to meaningfully explore the potential of AI-driven, automated moderation tools for social media to assist volunteer moderators. One key aspect is to investigate the degree to which tools must become personalizable and context-sensitive in order to not just delete unsavory content and ban trolls, but to adapt to the millions of online communities on social media mega-platforms that rely on volunteer moderation. In this study, we conduct semi-structured interviews with 26 Facebook Group moderators in order to better understand moderation tasks and their associated challenges. Through qualitative analysis of the interview data, we identify and address the most pressing themes in the challenges they face daily. Using interview insights, we conceptualize three tools with automated features that assist them in their most challenging tasks and problems. We then evaluate the tools for usability and acceptance using a survey drawing on the technology acceptance literature with 22 of the same moderators. Qualitative and descriptive analyses of the survey data show that context-sensitive, agency-maintaining tools in addition to trial experience are key to mass adoption by volunteer moderators in order to build trust in the validity of the moderation technology.
The Work to Make Facial Recognition Work
Authors: Greiffenhagen Christian , Xu Xinzhi , Reeves Stuart
Published: April 2023

Facial recognition technology (FRT) has become a significant topic in CSCW owing to widespread adoption and related criticisms: the use of FRT is often considered an assault on privacy or a kind of neo-phrenology. This discussion has revolved around uses of FRT for identification, which are often non-voluntary, in particular for surveillance wherein people are (by and large) unwittingly recognized by FRT systems. At the same time, we have also seen a rise of forms of FRT for verification (e.g., passport control or Apple's Face ID), which typically are overt and interactive. In this paper we study an interactive FRT system used for guest check-in at a hotel in China. We show how guests and bystanders engage in 'self-disciplining work' by controlling their facial (and bodily) comportment both to get recognized and at times to avoid recognition. From our analysis we discuss the role of preparatory and remedial work, as well as dehumanization, and the importance of CSCW paying closer attention to the significance of interactional compliance for people using and bystanding facial recognition technologies.
To Err is AI: Imperfect Interventions and Repair in a Conversational Agent Facilitating Group Chat Discussions
Authors: Do Hyo Jin , Kong Ha-Kyung , Tetali Pooja , Lee Jaewook , Bailey Brian P.
Published: April 2023

Conversational agents (CAs) can analyze online conversations using natural language techniques and effectively facilitate group discussions by sending supervisory messages. However, if a CA makes imperfect interventions, users may stop trusting the CA and discontinue using it. In this study, we demonstrate how inaccurate interventions of a CA and a conversational repair strategy can influence user acceptance of the CA, members' participation in the discussion, perceived discussion experience between the members, and group performance. We built a CA that encourages the participation of members with low contributions in an online chat discussion in which a small group (3-6 members) performs a decision-making task. Two types of errors can occur when detecting under-contributing members: 1) false-positive (FP) errors happen when the CA falsely identifies a member as under-contributing and 2) false-negative (FN) errors occur when the CA misses detecting an under-contributing member. We designed a conversational repair strategy that gives users a chance to contest the detection results and the agent sends a correctional message if an error is detected. Through an online study with 175 participants, we found that participants who received FN error messages reported higher acceptance of the CA and better discussion experience, but participated less compared to those who received FP error messages. The conversational repair strategy moderated the effect of errors such as improving the perceived discussion experience of participants who received FP error messages. Based on our findings, we offer design implications for which model should be selected by practitioners between high precision (i.e., fewer FP errors) and high recall (i.e., fewer FN errors) models depending on the desired effects. When frequent FP errors are expected, we suggest using the conversational repair strategy to improve the perceived discussion experience.