Andrew Woo

Appearance

Social Media Needfinding ​

Interview Hunches ​

  • I would like to build a social media app for the handicapped- mostly the visually impaired, because most digital technology isn’t braille friendly.
  • How is social media affected in the emerging world of assistive NLP models? Is there any impact? Should there be changes?

Interview Plan ​

  • Introductions
  • Basic social media outline- online interactions that they’ve had, etc
  • Ethics such as privacy in the modern world, value of personal data, ads, personalized content
  • Analyze values using non-specific questions
  • Things that seem missing, potential disability concerns
  • Artificial intelligence blurb
  • Future of the internet/social media/ online interactions/etc

Interviewees ​

  • Iris: Rising high school senior, heavy use of social media- planned college major is mechanical engineering or Aero. Heavy usage of social media, up to 4-5 hours a day disregarding content platforms such as YouTube.
  • Hak-seong: Visually impaired Korean senior(over sixty), unable to use many social media applications, but heavily reliant on smartphones and digital technology.

Iris's Viewpoints ​

      Iris is a heavy user of social media, ranging from generic platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Messenger, and rarely Discord, all the way to content platforms such as Pinterest and YouTube. She enjoys scrolling through short videos on TikTok, or checking on her friends in Instagram as a form of relaxation. As she has moved in many occasions, many of her friends are only available online, so her life is closely intertwined with the usage of social media. On concerns regarding censorship and the dangers of free speech, Iris stated "a social media platform is not a branch of the Judiciary government, jury, or court." Although basic censoring against mutilation, heavy gore, excessive nudity, and violence is required for any platform, but minor incidents such as swearing or the usage of choice words should not be censored. Dangerous trends, such as the tide pod challenge or the borderline abusive Egg Crack challenge should stay, because it is on the user to recognize the dangers of such behavior, not the platform. For example, Parkour was an interesting yet clearly dangerous topic, and censorship against Parkour is currently not implemented. Iris held similar viewpoints for illegal activity. Unless the activity contained excessive behavior as mentioned above, there should only be minimal censorship. Iris also held a pretty liberal view regarding the dangers of privacy and artificial intelligence in social media: as it was out of her expertise, she assumed that most social media apps already track a lot of private information such as browsing history to provide personalized content, but stated that "the stance against data collection seems to be almost fear mongering." She assumed that there must be strict guidelines such as the Code of Ethics by ACM, but more closely related to data use. Thus, the evolution of social media regarding data collection and facial recognition technology would be implemented ethically.
      Upon mentioning marginalized and impaired users of social media, Iris stated that the visually impaired could have a lot of trouble with using social media, as Braille is impossible to use with digital technology, and for other marginalized groups such as those with impaired hearing could use captions, etc. Still, as people with disabilities were part of the minority users, Iris valued the features for the majority higher. "If there are available resources to implement such features, you should. If there aren't, it shouldn't be the focus." Her values seem to be aligned closely with pragmatism. When asked about the future of social media, she mentioned the possibility of VR/AR technologies being included. Considering how much the world had changed in just twenty years, she claimed not many could predict how things would turn in the future.

Hak-seong's Viewpoints ​

      Hak-seong is a Korean senior with visual impairment, and has no choice but to rely on certain social media, navigation, and digital technology to assist her in daily activities. She mainly uses KakaoTalk, which is a Korean messaging app, wide adopted in the country, to the point where a hiccup could bring certain operations to a halt. Due to many petitions and the organizations for people with disabilities in Korea, Kakao has implemented great accessibility features for its less able users. Sadly, most budding and mature social media solutions in Korea are not very accessibility focused.
      Hak-seong had some strict views regarding censorship; "In Korea, there's already plenty of censorship going around. Most sites with nudity are outright blocked by the government. Gambling websites are entirely blocked. Dangerous content isn't really allowed to spread, either by censorship or by community backlash." She was in favor of stricter censorship laws to make the Korean internet even safer for everyone. "It may be better to censor for all rather than by age group and community, because such identification can be easily faked today." Hak-seong didn't really have many concerns regarding privacy online- "I don't care what they do with my data. It's scary to think they could hear every conversation, but I know they don't. If anything, they send me targeted advertisements and interesting feeds related to visual impairment, which is quite useful as I don't have to spend ten minutes searching."
      Hak-seong is heavily invested in text to speech and scrolling select technologies. Per app features are great as not all apps are the same, but it'd be useful to have some universal feature as well to handle apps that do not have any accessibility features. Even though accessibility is implemented in Kakao, it still feels clunky to use, so a more directed approach with development of accessibility features could be useful. Hak-seong is part of the stakeholder of any korean application, as she is part of the potential userbase, she feels that accessibility features should be a priority in development. "Any technology should be built in mind of all of it's users, whether or not they are part of the majority or minority." She believes that every user should have equal opportunities and experiences when using an application.

Design Opportunities ​

  • A social media app/extension meant to integrate apps lacking accessibility features for visually impaired people
  • A social media app that separates age groups (verification is hard) and creates a space with safer guidelines and less conflict
  • Social experiment: two communities in single app, but one is heavily censored and moderated, with guidelines while the other is entirely left to the community- asides from outright illegal content.

Iris's Interview Notes ​

Instagram, tik tok, YouTube, messenger, pinterest, discord Non academic day: 4-5 hours average on non content, 7 hours max with content stuff, potentially running in background

Tik Tok: censorship is necessary on all platforms in many degrees, publicly discouraged behavior, mutilation, excessive nudity, heavy gore, etc should all be censored, but curse words excessive. Privacy is supposed to be important, but already most social media apps are tracking almost everything, there probably is already a lot of safety guidelines, possibly fear mongering.

Dangerous trends (without physical violence) should stay, if you lack the brain cells to not recognize the dangers then it’s not the fault of the platform. Parkour and things are interesting and dangerous, but should remain. Tide pod challenge is your own fault.

Illegal activity online: least amount of censorship necessary, having access is more important. Unnecessary to go out of way, post illegal activity: not the platform’s job to judge

Social media platform is not a jury nor a court, but age groups require different levels of censorship.

Disability concerns: visually impaired is big problem, but disabled individuals are not part of the wide audience. Bigger apps have the capacity to reach out and incorporate minority groups, but smaller apps may not have the focus

Disability dongle: designing for the minority is useful at all times, but shouldn’t be the focus unless there’s available resources. Still, important and good to include focus

Computer vision/facial recognition & generative language models: not too well versed, but there should be good foundations from machine learning ethics researchers, just like solid guidelines in data collection that probably exist- deep fakes are concerning but have relative faith to not screw up guidelines

Robot revolution and things won’t happen- but online interactions could kinda switch to VR/AR? 20 years long time, no-one can really guess

Hak-Seong's Interview Notes ​

KakaoTalk- korean social media app, nearly used by the entire country.

Unable to find many messaging apps with the same accessibility features of Kakao

Dangerous pranks and trends are very uncommon in Korean media, and are generally viewed as negative, so don't really see them often.

Illegal activity online: should be censored, there's already plenty of censoring going on in South Korea, including most forms of nudity, gambling websites, etc.

Disability concerns: there's really only a few things that can be used in Korea for disabled people- huge reliance on text to speech and generative AI to communicate. Kakao does a great job including everyone, but the user experience feels a little clunky.

Per app text to speech is very important, NAVER(biggest browsing website with many things such as forums) doesn't do as good of a job, so accessible technology feels very limited

Privacy concerns: Definitely doesn't seem as important as other issues, mainly accessibility. Uncomfortable with her data being taken without expressed understanding, but personalized content and advertising was definitely very useful, as she didn't need to actively search for products that help her specific situation.

She is part of the potential userbase of a media app, so it makes sense to include features for her, whether or not the feature will only be used for the minority. Feels strongly that inclusion and designing for all, not the majority, should be design values for all companies, especially social media that allows her to connect to her loved ones

Accessibility unfortunately isn't always an important part of the progress of tech. Every user should have equal opportunities and experiences when using a app.