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

这项研究将开发工具，使日常用户和社区能够定制支撑其在线社交环境的算法和界面。我们社会中的很大一部分人现在定期在线参与社交活动，但目前社交活动在平台上的集中化和同质化只提供少量可能的配置，这与实现包容性社会背道而驰。不符合大多数人的人必须与那些没有考虑到他们的配置作斗争。例如，来自边缘化背景的用户必须与无法区分针对他们的骚扰和非骚扰内容的平台范围内的内容过滤器作斗争，而神经多样性用户则难以控制他们的社交媒体使用。这项研究将对社交计算行业产生重大影响，因此，它将使这些平台上的数百万用户受益。教育和推广计划将帮助未来的计算机科学家认识到他们构建的应用程序的社会影响，并让学生和公众参与想象改善社会的替代社交媒体设计。为了实现在这些社交平台上进一步包容的目标，这项研究将专注于向那些面临当前社交媒体设计最大挑战和障碍的人学习和设计，例如记者和内容创作者、神经多样性用户以及经常面临骚扰的边缘化个人。然后，它将制定新的策略，降低用户参与社交策展的障碍，以便任何没有技术技能或没有大量时间投入的人仍然可以受益。从经验上讲，这项研究将使用混合方法来收集边缘化用户希望为其社会环境提供的大型策展数据集。它将通过构建新颖的技术和协作系统来做出技术贡献，这些系统将为用户提供使用最小努力或技术技能执行所需策展的方法。特别是，它将研究新的用户启示，将小型策展任务嵌入到用户在社交媒体上的日常体验中，以及允许多组人共享或集体建立自定义配置的协作模型。最后，它将构建并发布一个灵活的研究工具包，其中嵌入了实证工作的发现。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.