Assignment 1: Needfinding
Hunch
How can I make social media safer for users?
Reports
Interview 1: Joshua Hubbard
Joshua Hubbard is an assistant news director at ABC7 San Francisco. He oversees investigative, consumer, and sports news and has been working in the TV business for 20 years while currently obtaining his MBA from UC Davis. He typically spends 2 hours on social media each day for work, plus another hour for personal use. He often used Twitter and Reddit for news research purposes, browsing sources like r/BayArea for potential stories, but ever since Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk, he has been shifting away from it as a source of information. Interestingly, the main reason he provided for the decline in his usage of X (formerly Twitter) was not a general distaste for the new owner or the increase in right-wing sentiments on the site as I anticipated, but rather specifically the removal of blue checkmarks as a form of verification. With the removal of the original verification checkmarks and the implementation of Twitter Blue checkmarks, it became a chore for Hubbard to separate the real accounts from the fake and to know who to trust. “Twitter was an important tool for journalists during breaking news situations. We could identify local journalists on the scene of the story to get the most up-to-date and accurate information.” he said, but with the sheer amount of misinformation now on the site, it’s become much less of an appealing source. Additionally, he noted that oftentimes he would see questions in the comments section about information that was covered in the article, stating that many people say they get their news from social media but they’re actually just reading the headline. When asked about his thoughts on ChatGPT in the news industry, Hubbard revealed that he had actually created his own small-scale generative AI to take a list of bullet points and turn them into a news article as part of a class. Unfortunately for him, Disney (the owner of ABC) prohibits generative AI from being used due to privacy concerns, but he would use ChatGPT if he could. “It’s not perfect,” he acknowledged, but nevertheless he believes, “generative AI has a strong future in the world of journalism.”
Interview 2: Andrew Chau
Andrew Chau is an entrepreneur and self-described “avid social media user.” He participated in social networks like Xanga and Friendster before the dawn of the current social media giants as well as many more over the years including MySpace, Vine, Clubhouse and more, but today primarily uses Instagram and Threads, and browses on TikTok without posting. Publicly, he mostly uses social media to make announcements, while anything personal he posts privately to the people on his Close Friends list on Instagram. When asked about the separation, he pointed to his personal safety, remarking that if he’s “going to the park with my dog [...] I don't want people to know where I'm at because I'm a CEO, and people hate CEOs, and they're gonna steal my dog because they think I’m rich or whatever.” In addition, he worried about the general toxicity of social media. “I love that feature,” he continued, “because so much of my life is, like, in the public, like, that I do not want people [to] criticize. [...] They’re gonna say, [...] ‘Why are you at that restaurant? Don’t you know there are people starving?’” he said heatedly. He then went on to say that he believes that part of the cause of the toxicity is that people “hide behind their keyboard.” To illustrate his point, he proudly recounted an anecdote about a particular Twitter user who would often make negative tweets about his company, Boba Guys. One day, while Chau was working in the shop, he recognized the user from their profile photo and confronted them. Upon being called out, the person quickly fled in embarassment. But Chau was adamant that the solution to this toxicity isn’t found in an application feature, but in the users. The reason he uses Threads is because of its more “intellectual” atmosphere, which he attributed to the fact that the people on Threads are those who rejected Twitter and its “snarky” community. Even though it’s essentially a clone of Twitter, it has a totally different vibe.
Design Opportunities
Journalists are currently underserved by social media from the standpoint that one of their best sources, Twitter, is now gone and most alternatives are not as suitable for breaking news. TikTok is decent but in video form and there's still a lot of misinformation. A social media for journalists could help decrease the amount of work they need to do for fact checking and non-journalists who might use it would feel more confident that the information that they see is true.
Social media for people who are worried about their privacy. As a public figure, Chau was worried about doxxing, but it doesn't happen exclusively to people like him. A privacy-oriented app could help protect users in real life so that they don't get their dogs stolen or get called out when they walk into a store.
An app focused purely on keeping up with people you know. That's one of the main reasons why Hubbard used social media, and Chau felt like he had to be very careful about what he showed to whom, so having an app where you could see what your friends and family are doing without worrying as much or being exposed to as much toxicity could be useful.