 Welcome everybody for the next talk when algorithms fail in our personal lives It is a one-hour talk our lovely speaker with us today as Caroline cinders She's a user researcher for IBM. She's also an artist a researcher and a video game designer She's from the States, and I should also mention that she is a member of the NYC resistor hacker space and Oh, I see some fans over here. Cool We already learned in a bunch of talks over the course of Congress what algorithms do when they fail Yesterday we learned about how algorithms can discriminate or not discriminate in the hiring process and Caroline is gonna tell us a little more about When it's better not use algorithms because there are some things that algorithms just can't do that humans can't do So please give it up for Caroline and enjoy the talk. Thank you very much Hi everyone, I'm Caroline cinders I should probably first specify that I'm speaking here of my own accord and not on behalf of IBM so Just FYI and that this is actually a presentation also on a very strange and Specific art project. I did back in late November. So when algorithms fail in our personal lives This is probably the best way to describe me because I live on the internet I've sent the past two years studying online fandoms communities internet culture and online harassment And this is what I do for fun outside of work I think a lot about language and conversation as Identifiers and I spend a lot of time reading the way in which Conversations unfold on different subreddits on reddit 4chan 8chan Wikipedia the way Wikipedia is used as a conversational tool not just to upload information and then obviously Facebook Twitter LinkedIn and Instagram and the one thing I've sort of learned from all this is that each of these different platforms have a very different Identity and they have a very different way in which conversation sort of has evolved linguistically to that platform The way we talk on reddit is a lot different than the way we talk on Twitter And I think that that is due to the infrastructural design of the platform itself as well the ways in which the platform identifies itself to users So like a code of conduct Two years ago, I or yeah, actually like a year and a half ago I really started focusing on online harassment. I specifically focused on Gamergate as a video game designer I saw Gamergate sort of affecting the community around me. I didn't necessarily I'm not driven to study harassment by why it happens, but rather how? How does harassment unfold on different sort of platforms and how do platforms allow for different kinds of communication? And really how open is the general user on a platform? How connected are they to the privacy policies and how aware are they of how exposed they are and how permeable their data and information is? So TLDR I explore complex emotions and emotional reactions within systems And I'm gonna briefly cover some of the anti-harassment research I've done So sometimes I write things the internet doesn't like them last April the Internets and a SWAT team to my mom's house If you know what swatting is it's a very popular online harassment tactic that manifests itself IRL oftentimes a Fake violent phone call is placed to a local police department that violent phone call triggers the militarized police to be deployed And this is what happened to my mom Sometimes panels I'm on get canceled because maybe they're kind of controversial I submitted a design panel to South by Southwest and it was canceled due to harassment and threats of violence So I guess my work seems kind of contentious. I think that it's pretty straightforward It's generally design. I don't know why anyone have a really massive opinion around it But the thing I sort of want to talk about actually is and what I care about exploring is How do systems affect behavior? So I said earlier, I'm here or not as an IBM representative but I spend most of my day job actually at working on Watson working in artificial intelligence as a user researcher around Conversational analytics for chat robots. That's kind of a mouthful So what I mean by that is I spent a lot of time working with software that allows users to set up chat robots So I think a lot about the ways in which I'm designing software to help people design Conversations that robots have with people So when I say I believe that systems affect behavior I live that every day and I think about the ways in which the structure of an interface actually will lead people to Converse and what that would look like So in the past two years of doing just I guess broad Heuristic ethnographic research what I've come to realize is Users have a myriad of different problems that can be solved in similar ways But yield the radically different results mean that we can sort of start approaching ways to solve problems of harassment through Either new kinds of algorithms or a really flexible UI on top of an algorithm I what if we gave people more robust privacy settings and allowed users to start to articulate the ways in which they're reachable And how their data really their conversations are read and I think this because algorithms really aren't that smart and language within an algorithm is a It's decontextualized into data we is oops. Sorry we as users we provide context to language language is what we make it But in a system, it's not it's simply just bits of data So I was driven by this thought how can I make a flexible system to solve a variety of different problems for a variety of different people? so I did what I do best and I made a low res wireframe and I created these sort of speculative wire frames to sort of focus myself on What I thought could be achievable and then I decided to test it against 20 different Users I had interviewed that been affected by a gamer gate as well as a handful of gamer gators themselves Who would interact with me on Twitter and I would ask them questions about the ways in which they Organize themselves the ways which they talk to other people what conversations they were hoping to get out of interacting with me on Twitter and What I sort of started to learn is that we need to Focus on privacy and social media and it needs to be as Prevalent and as important as writing content itself. So do you see that gray box at the top? That is a placeholder for a button that sends you to a redesigned privacy page So from interviewing these 20 users I got a really robust sense of different kinds of needs and once users wanted out of Twitter I interviewed people that had over a hundred thousand followers that absolutely wanted to remain completely public And they want to be reachable at all times I interviewed some users that had three thousand followers that wanted to be completely hidden But still have their tweets treated as media thus shareable And I viewed some users that wanted to not go private Which is a very public statement on Twitter to have the lock next to you But wanting to have all the affordances of privacy So what I've added as you can see is allow These checkmarks to allow a user to start to change the way in which their written content can be Accessed and serve really actually change the way in which the amount of users on Twitter could start to read content They're posting so one of them is allow Followers of your followers to tweet at you so the idea of friends of friends do not allow accounts less than X with Do not allow accounts with less than X followers to follow you or don't allow accounts with less less than X days Meaning new accounts were often created in moments of harassment campaign So if an account was a week old with two followers, that's probably a troll account And additionally also allows users to sort of say like oh if you know you're not on my level You can't tweet at me not judging. That's an interaction someone wanted And then I've sort of started to think more about what what does it mean to exist publicly as a person on a platform Twitter is sort of this mixed identity and mixed emotional state. It's both professional and personal It's used as a networking tool as well as a social aid and a communicative tool So people either have really persisted in aliases or avatars They've they have followed them from platform to platform, but they're not using their real name There's levels of pseudo anonymity on Twitter in my case. I use my real name, and I can't really undo that So my needs and using Twitter Especially the technologists exist in a much different way than per se someone who uses it as a casual medium And we have very different needs, but through these different kinds of dials I feel that this serves my needs as well as all the users I've interviewed because we're able to start to tailor through UI and sort of be able to pull from very like top level of Information just mailing around followers as to how accessible I am Add other things such as blocked accounts and blocked tweets right now you can only see Blocked accounts you can't see blocked tweets What if you could and I pull from this because within moments of harassment yet even if it's a sustained stalker There's often a tweet that will trigger it. It's never going to someone's account At least within a harassment campaigns. You're not really going to someone's account saying today. I'm blocking you There is often an interaction a tweet that will trigger that response So what if you could see that start to group them together and maybe send a report to Twitter or to yourself and sort of You can the user could start to contextualize this is a way in which These tweets are linked so if there's mob harassment campaign a user could say I think all these are linked And if Twitter is implementing any kind of machine learning or natural language processing They'd be able to start batching multiple reports at once and see how they're all related Again, what if you could group mentions together? And I added this last night One thing that I sort of noticed from a lot of my research is that users don't really have an understanding as to how How their language is actually data and how accessible their things are So I'm sure you've heard a variety of stories around tweets going viral Someone tweets something and then months later. It's dug up or they tweet something in the case of this really Well-known incident this woman tweeted a really off-color joke about AIDS Got in a plane 12 hours later. This tweet I completely exploded the background of that story is that this woman only had a hundred followers and Had never had her tweets interacted with like very much at all Not and then well not in the sense of a stranger. So for her this was a complete moment of the system kind of breaking And I wonder if there were ways to sort of start to articulate to users how accessible you are even if you feel small even if you feel like No one is interacting with your tweets You're still actually completely open and the information you send out into the system is media that can be isolated and shared quickly And that's sort of the way in which Twitter functions additionally So anyway, so I wondered like what if you could just break something down really simply and just sort of say Follower impressions and non-follower impressions sort of get an idea as to who's interacting with your tweet and Who outside of your perceived social your decentralized social circle on Twitter? And I started looking at Facebook and one thing I also sort of learned from Additionally, I did another round of interviews specifically for this project I'm getting into Social media breakup coordinator where users actually had no idea what the privacy checkup meant So I think this is a great addition you add a button You can say only friends can see this But what if Twitter added like a pop-up and then said great this content right here this comment if your friend Jane Comments on her mom can see it sort of start to really show like how extended networks that you're unconnected to Second and third second and third party relationships can actually interact with your your information So I'm really driven by this need and this idea as a designer What would it look like to have a semi private space in a public network? And how how could I design that and I think about this a lot because our our our Communication on the internet is asynchronous, right? But a lot of social media creates things as a timeline This creates a false idea as to how information is actually accessed and how data is actually stored and that false information Is articulated to users so what feels like safer spaces even if you're completely public because you're not interacted with is actually a lie It's a false sense of information. It's a false sense of safety So I wonder with all these varying Levels of needs that we have as users and as we live more and more of our lives digitally and on social media What would it look like to design a semi private space in a public network? And so like the past two years have really hit this on home that there's this nebulousness surrounding algorithms and social media and the way in which our data is saved and A lot of that happens when Facebook for instance changed their timeline to sort of be algorithmically driven based off content Then I think it was last summer There was this thing called the ice buck ice bucket challenge or two summers ago and these riots in Ferguson, Missouri And sort of what happened and people realized is that ice buck challenge ice bucket challenge posts were being weighted above these other protests and the way to work around that was to include ice bucket challenge when you were posting about Ferguson to sort of start to flip and Change what you were seeing algorithmically in your timeline so there's this kind of idea that You users don't quite know what and why the algorithm will weight things over other things So when you post something on Facebook the feedback is I have no idea when it's accessible how it's accessible and if it will Be accessed So that led me to this project that I created I Created a fake performance art piece. I mean it's a real art piece called social media breakup coordinator where I turned a video game art gallery in New York called baby castles into a doctor's office and I held 15-minute Therapy consulting sessions on social media. I had users fill out a 22 point Very standard user quiz around why they were showing up But then when they sat with me I had them sign a terms of service agreement I Listened to them and then I started to write down notes But before I started this project I reached out to a variety of different people because I sort of From my research I sort of started to realize that there's a lot of different moments where there needs to be human intervention within algorithms within social media So how do you start to un? How do you start to pull away from different groups that you've been associated with? How do you start to cut ties and how do you start to cut ties between information when you cross posts against different platforms? so a good example of that is what happens if Someone in your family dies and that ends up in Facebook memories because you Instagramed it What does that feel like to have that emotional trigger? What does it feel like to quit a job and not and not be sure like if your new? Co-workers can see your old co-workers or if you post something negative about your old job Are you still connected to your boss and what can they see and generally? There's this lack of understanding that I found that most general users Probably not most people in this room have a lack of understanding around how much their information is accessed So I was curious on a bunch of levels if if people would actually pay me to give them advice if they would trust me as a professional and if they would actually engage with my services and then I was curious if I Could actually then covertly sort of teach them the privacy policies of all the different platforms. They were on So when I started this project, I realized I need to talk to you a variety of different professionals I'm a user researcher and so my profession lies in talking to users and designing solutions for them but as social media starts to Overtake more and more aspects of our lives. I realized that there are certain things that I'm not equipped to handle So what happens if someone has suffered trauma on social media as a victim of harassment? I still can't offer anyone feedback on that and that's sort of not my place So I spoke to a rape crisis counselor an engineer a data scientist and professor and A private therapist and a private psychiatrist and the takeaway I got was mainly this and this is something I'd love to impart on most social media Engineers and designers is it's not my job to necessarily tell people what to do It's my job to listen to what people need to get done. So an example from that is let's say a user came to me for social media breakup coordinator and said I have an abusive boyfriend and he's horrible and we have a child together and I want to on Facebook friend him It's not my place to necessarily say Okay, wait, like can I know more like are you close to this family? Like let's start to cut down all these ties and the reason I would ask that is thinking as a designer if your Facebook friends with someone and then your Facebook friends with their parents and then it says on that person's like Profile who their family is the system has created more ties to that person even regardless of if you unfriend them You'd need to block them as well as unfollow all of these other people related to them and tied to their Profile that to actually really separate And a lot of the feedback I got was It's not necessarily your job to let to tell a user all of that if they're telling you what exactly they need You sort of need to listen and guide from there and not really get into Well, why are you here? What are all these different really specific and highly personal details? So why would I do this? I Was just very interested in the ways in which people live their lives online And I really wanted to see if I could also gather a lot of data from this project I had 16 people fill out 22 different questions and meet with me and walk through all their different problems and I was really curious if I could provide solutions the way an algorithm would I outlined 10 different solutions that I could have fixed to People based off different questions that they answered in a certain order And again the covert Point of this project was to sort of teach people about the permeability of their posts and really how privacy is looked at and interacted with on social networks and with the onset of All these different apps particularly in America that are offering to outsource emotional labor To a person meaning there's all these new apps have been created of will break up with your boyfriend for you I was really sort of curious to see if people would actually engage with me face to face So when I launched the project people thought it was real and Then the media thought it was real and This was really it was really hard to explain to for instance Jezebel that this was an art project Because they were like but you're charging people and you made them sign a contract is the contract legally binding Yes, it is so you charge the money I did did you give them fake feedback know the feedback was all sincere. I really legitimately tried to help solve these problems But it's an art project And the reason it's an art project is to me It's a massive comment on the sharing economy that's in America and just this idea that I could be an emotional Mechanical Turk and I completely made that by design and intention should people be trusting me with their data Yes, because I am a professional and I made sure to very Very clearly articulate the ways in which I would use their data how they'd be protected and that I would not share any personal information about them. I went through all of those steps, but is that sort of the Like negotiation we have with social networks. Do we have that kind of interfacing? And also the a bit an even bigger comment was no one ever commented on price I charged one dollar a minute and to sort of sit and listen all day to people I only gave them 15 minute blocks. It was actually incredibly taxing physically It was an all-day event where I think I only had gay. I gave myself like 15 minutes for lunch I definitely have a whole new type of Respect for therapists. That's I was grueling So I started to break down before I started the projects to what platforms I would cover These are examples of my post-it notes I had covered resistor in one evening and I started to break things down based off the four major platforms that are used in America, which is LinkedIn Facebook Twitter and Instagram and I started to break down by what I thought were the four most broad most universal social grouping so Friends family work and romantic and I started to sort of think about why Your romantic partner would friend you on LinkedIn for example or why they would follow you on Instagram or why your boss would Friend you on all of those platforms and I started to attach different emotional responses So should you LinkedIn connect with your dad? Maybe? Should you LinkedIn connect with your lover if you want to but you don't have to but then these are connections if they're different Party apps that you don't really use like that. You didn't have to break down later if those if those relationships sour So remember when I said everyone thought that this project was real It's because I went through really great pains to also make it look real So when people showed up we had a receptionist who had coffee There was a waiting room and I had people sign in with the date. They arrived The reason and I think even the time and the time of their appointment There was then a paper version of the quiz if someone walked in, you know, sometimes you get walk-ins the doctor gets that all the time This is me working. This is what my desk looked like everyone got their own folder that I would write their name on I Would write out what I called a receipt. So it's all the advice. I'm giving them and then I'm taking my own notes We both got a copy of the terms of service agreement and then I would send them on their way. So it looked actually Fairly it looked hackery legit, you know, I'm in a falling apart building But I'm giving you legitimate advice and you just paid me $15. This is our receptionist Lauren, this is the waiting room This actually wasn't posed. I like popped my head out and saw a bunch of people sitting and reading This is me providing advice and these are some students of mine that showed up I taught a class on visual storytelling and social media and they had showed up to observe So then this is also what the breakdown of the terms of service agreement looked like this is the first page It's pretty standard one of my favorite lines is My observations of this person's behavior and responses Gives me no reason to believe that this person is not fully competent to give conformed knowing and willing consent I should also clarify a really dear friend of mine. Who's my collaborator Fred Jennings works for a Law company called Tor Eklund. They do a lot of digital law cases So he actually drafted this up specifically for me for the needs of this project I told him to keep it short and I told him to bold certain things so users could really sort of see if they were scanning what I'm talking about So as you'll see various social media platforms are emboldened with like what I'm with what I'm giving But then I had him outline the nature of services and What you'll see is that? The client acknowledges the coordinator the coordinator provides neither content or materials included Such as financial advice counseling or therapy, and I really wanted to highlight. I am not a therapist This is not a therapy session if anything I'm like a really weird SEO advisor that you've consulted to maybe talk about your personal life with But I am definitely not a therapist And what's funny is that I actually had so I had 12 people fill us out online for people do walk-ins And what's fascinating is I only had two people show up and talk to me about Heartbreak This this project was not inspired by a breakup. It's actually about breaking up with social media I had someone show up and asked me a lot of really specific questions about LinkedIn and her workplace And what's the proper way to like break up on LinkedIn with your old job? And I was like you should just probably Unfollow them. I'm like do you talk to them on Facebook? She's like I do I'm like don't do that And I sort of started to gather all this really fascinating information Specifically around the ways in which my users were using social media and this is something I actually I'm going to openly Share probably post this talk if you all want to look at what I'm accruing, but different things like you know Let's get a little personal. Why are you here romantic reason work reason friend family general social media? And maybe these questions seem really innocuous But in the sense of way the way in which I was structuring my personal algorithm I'd built each of these questions triggered a different kind of answer that I could give someone and I could string answers together so I could give a combination of answer a Plus answer D plus answered J to sort of give someone a highly personalized Response to what they had given me but this is sort of the way algorithms work it's not highly personalized the combination to the user just feels personalized and On my end that was sort of the art project for myself And I asked a general question. Do you feel safe online? I Was slightly surprised only two people said no, but I was more surprised that actually only two people said no I thought it would be less and then at times. I thought it would be more given my research in online harassment I was Prepared for someone to show up and sort of say like oh I'm being victimized of harassment I had a whole different answer ready for them, but just the fact that most people would come with very general problems I was actually surprised that in general 16% of Applicants don't feel safe online So then I asked how often do you use social media pretty much every day? How often do you want to be using it pretty much every day? And then I found the most fascinating was When people described what they used it for and so people About half half of users said they will they used it for socializing when I asked What do you want to use it for they half of users replied with networking? So there's a sort of pull to actually be taken off social media And this is what I learned from all of this a lot of advice I gave people was maybe you should just quit Facebook and that was met with a resounding no How dare you suggest that and I was like, okay great. Let's pull back. Let me offer something else Do you have a smartphone? Of course Delete the app from your phone. They're like, oh, that's brilliant. I'm like, I know, right? Whoa Well, the one thing I actually found the most fascinating was most people did not understand Facebook's privacy checkups So whenever people talked about that they wanted to socialize less and be less accessible The first thing I always said was well, what what what is your privacy checkup? Like have you done one? They're like, oh my god, what's that? I'm like We have a problem And the one thing I actually found super fascinating is that most users didn't realize and this is actually hyper specific to one user that came through but most users didn't realize that You are accessible even with very private settings on Facebook to Nine Facebook friends chat messaging you and if you respond to that message That chat is moved into your general stream of chat and it makes your information accessible to that person You have not friended So I had a friend who was like well, I want to be super private the reason I keep my Facebook open is like What if a young game developer is trying to reach me and I was like, did you know that that chat does this? He's like, I had no idea. I was like well, that's terrifying But you could maybe use it this way if you're not concerned about harassment, but you're concerned about being reached because he was more concerned that Friends could be exposed through his openness, which I was like, that's a very very considerate Kind of the real way to sort of take your Facebook One thing I learned is that no one knew anything about Instagram's privacy policies nor did they care They're like Instagram's fine. We don't care Again, most people want to use social media as a networking tool But the biggest takeaway was every single person that showed up and I had a variety of people that were Incredibly savvy they were engineers They actually thought that they did not understand social media as well as they could and that they needed someone to help them better understand And they need someone to help them better understand who they paid $15 to in a hacker video game space But and I want that to sort of resonate because it is that is a joke But also really think about the fact that like these tools are so nebulous That you would go to a space and pay someone $15 that you've never met before that says they're an expert to just handle this for you And that for me was the sort of the biggest takeaway. How how can we make things feel more accessible or better yet? How do we let's let's make a new platform? I'm putting us up here because this is one of my biggest pet peeves You would probably never explain how to SMS someone through screenshots You probably say oh do you see that little thing on your phone right the chat open it up right in a number? Say something so I when this project launched a friend wrote about me and some and some work I had been doing and one of her followers legitimately believed that I did not understand Facebook and He took it upon himself to try to explain Facebook to me which other than being Kind of insulting because I work for a tech company and I have a master's in interactive technology What I found illuminating is the fact that this is not a weird response This is not unusual for someone to say oh, right Facebook is so hard to use when it comes to privacy and Like creating lists opposed to people that I'm going to screenshot everything for you And that is never the way in which you should explain a communication tool to someone if you have to screenshot Something to someone you fucked up as a designer And Those are my general thoughts on that I Can't even I just can't So I guess what I impart to you and all of us here is Let's make something not shitty And I know the reason people use Facebook and this is not a talk to get off Facebook I use Facebook Facebook will persist for a very long time think of all the third-party apps that use Facebook as an automatic login That is a design pattern that reinforces the need of Facebook in everyday users lives But as a as a designer and technologist, I want to make something better even if it's just for my friends We could do social media that onion thoughts and That's where the future of this project comes in is I'm actually working on a social media co-op with two technologists in New York Dan Pfeiffer and Max Fenton and doing another round of social media breakup coordinator in Oakland in January And I'm hoping to keep gathering data around the ways users use these platforms through my performance art piece but also as well as Covertly, you know keep departing information on privacy and what would be like if we lived our lives just a little less online And I'm hoping to sort of eventually have a really robust data set that could be used as an actual data set and not as just a sampling Thanks Well, thanks for this inspiring talk Caroline if you have questions, please move to the microphones that are dispersed through the room and Then you can ask your question And we have the first person at microphone number two ask away Yep Did you ever raise the question why those people didn't understand the settings on Facebook, etc? And still used it. I mean it's like walking into a gun shop Purchasing a firearm and you have no idea what to do with it, right? I think so What I said sort of like later in the presentation is we have these design patterns in everyday life that really actually Enforced this use of Facebook. So This project was really sort of centered around general users and a general understanding of technology We are moving to a very highly digitally literate and data literate society, but we're not there yet There's pockets of literacy. This is a really good pocket of literacy right here. We're a really awesome community, but One thing I sort of strive is like the people that are misusing or misunderstanding Facebook. They're not Like elderly parents. They're actual cohorts of mine. They're my age people younger and people even a few years older And I think the reason is that Facebook is really easy and it's highly addicting to use and it's it's like a phone book Everyone's there. It stores birthdays for you, which is really actually helpful It's a it's a fast way to talk to people But I think the bigger thing is too is it's enforced on other sites So think of all the websites you go to during a day and how many of them say login with Facebook sign up with Facebook Like log in with Twitter and those design patterns, which seem really innocuous to us actually are really important They further enforce the the the ubiquity of Facebook because it makes it easy So then I mean I'm shuddering thinking about all the third-party apps that would be associated Right now with a Facebook login if you've done that for every site But the common user does not know that and that's sort of the issue. I think All right next question from Mike number four, please Hi, thank you very much for this interesting talk I have basically two questions that kind of are the same and they are around the art project part of your talk and the first one is How did you make sure that People would actually understand that this was and a piece of performance Did you rely on the absurdity of your proposition that that would be recognized because clearly people thought not and like in terms of satire There needs to be some element of exaggeration or something that makes it clear that this isn't Intend as this is intended as a piece of art So I was just wondering what we thought was that and the second part was where do you So the data that you get from your piece of art you presented as a research outcome almost So that obfuscates the kind of art Artiness of your project and turns it into real-life data And isn't that also one of the problems why people are so careless with? Instagram because they see it as art when they photograph their food whether that's true or not is right open to debate But they don't see it as an actual act of data collection. So yeah, right So I guess to sort of back up The way in which I The way in which I sort of describe myself as a speculative designer And I think about critical design a lot and critical making and like what is that line and oftentimes you're making something real That is sort of making a point and the way in which I expect like most people seem to sort of get that this was an art project of mine And it helped that I was in New York doing this and I was doing it in an art gallery That's a video game gallery. So there were arcades in the back of the space But certain people I actually realized when I because I had a couple people phone in that had sort of seen this and signed up online And we're not in New York, and I realized that they didn't know that this was an art piece and I kind of went with it And a lot of that is they were signing a service of service agreement. I was I did tell them like this is not Therapeutic advice. I'm not held liable for any decisions that you make and I said all that over the phone to make sure that they Understood that and then I told them these are just suggestions You don't have to follow them and you are allowed to push back and that's what I tell every every participant is I'm giving you these suggestions based off my Best practice knowledge in this algorithm. I have designed that you don't get to see so your questions are triggering certain results But you are also allowed to say I don't like that and then I can tailor them slightly if you don't like the result at all You should take the quiz again But the bigger thing is that it walks this really weird line and This is a weird anecdote, but I'm also a portrait photographer My background is actually in fine art photography and I got a master's in interactive technology years later And my work is always it was my family and I Recreating moments post-hurricane Katrina. So people always ask are these real photographs Caroline? Well, they weren't taken on the fly I set them up, but they were real to me and they're saying something and that's the way in which I would describe this project It's not real, but it was real to us in the moment and it's commenting on things and also providing a real solution Thank you. All right next question from Mike number three, please Do you know of some software that shows how open you are to other people for example a Facebook app or something that Yeah shows you a mirror of yourself more or less. I don't know of any sort of checker like that I use a variety of different things a friend of mine made a really great Wi-Fi sniffer Which is like at the extreme end of what you're talking about. Um, I generally I Not that y'all should do this I often will unfollow and refollow and unfriend and refriend people and change my privacy settings And then I try to log out and get someone else to log in see if they'll let me audit And then I will see what I look like to other people That's a level of insanity that I don't think most people in this room should necessarily engage with But I don't actually know of a checker that lets you sort of see that I know that there are analytics systems You can download for say per se with Instagram to see like Who's unfollowed you and followed you and who's following you that follows other people that you know Which currently Instagram does not have that analytic feedback for users. It's a third-party app You have to download Twitter has started to add analytics on the side to sort of give a an idea of how accessible your tweets were But they'll never say like this is who Didn't follow you that access this tweet today, but they give you a More robust analytic breakdown of your tweet about puppy dogs did really well, but your tweet about opsec did not All right Mac number four, please Hi, um, I really appreciate Your insights on visual design and the user experience of data at rest I'm really curious what your thoughts are on Temporal design and the user experience of data in motion, you know because you mentioned that one of the the the things that came out of your interviews was You know people having a sense of just sort of not understanding social media and feeling like they need help understanding social media You know in programming we talk about code smells which are sort of features of You know code and how people use code that are assigned that something's probably not designed right here Right, and it seems to me that you know that sense of misunderstanding is is a design smell Maybe that that there's just too much trying to try to consume users attention and you know We need to change the rate at which we're delivering it. Anyway, that's it's an open-ended question I'm just really curious what your thoughts are there So I've actually thought about that a lot. I actually haven't met with any engineers at Facebook or Twitter But if you're here, I'd love to talk to you But I met with someone that worked in branding at Twitter And I asked him to just sort of talk about his day job and describe how the branding team Targeted ads because I figured that was a really good way to get a sense of how the algorithm was working He started spouting a lot of buzzwords as he is prone and want to do Excuse a co-worker of mine from a really old job, but he said something that's really fascinating to me Where he's like, well, you know Caroline there's just so much noise And he's like, you know, we have all these different algorithms working He's like, but it's just so much noise on top of each other and he's trying to find this little signal So I know for instance with Twitter, it's exactly that problem that they Infrastructurally design themselves incorrectly and into combat it You can't they're at a point where I feel like they cannot shut it down and rebuild it and become minimal Like with a better working code base, so they're building on top of everything The reason I also think that too is a lot of anti harassment initiatives that they have They've been rolling out for verified users and not for the common user base. So if you're a verified user What the way in which their anti harassment initiatives work it works way different and way better for you So they have an algorithm working where You will never see as a verified user certain Harassment tweets they're catching them before they come to you and you can look at them later But there's all these really highly specific Changes and I have not yet seen a verified user account. No one's let me log into theirs again if you have that let's chat But I've seen enough screenshots and read enough about it and talk to friends who have it and it's like it's like Twitter 2.0. It's just slightly better So what I think they're like the bigger issue is there's so much data in motion that they can only isolate it for what what they are infrastructurally deciding Who is a power user and that power user infrastructurally actually becomes a better power user? Actually, I guess the hidden question I have there is really more more of you know Is Twitter eventually doomed to tear itself apart because it's triggering people system one responses instead of the instead of Instead of their reasoning right so I actually I Really don't have an answer to that question because as a Twitter user who's thought about quitting, but I really love the community I have on Twitter It's kind of a weird emotional negotiation that I have of like I don't know how accessible I am and I face harassment on A usually monthly basis for a variety of different things and it's this weird negotiation I have of Why am I still here, but I actually legitimately like it and I think that that's sort of like the big issue Is it's like maybe it will pull itself apart? But harassment while affects a lot of people. It's also affecting Hyper-specific groups of people and I think a lot of the fear around it rightly so is well if it happens One person it could happen to you because we're infrastructurally in the same place. We're both equally open But I would I I guess I'm not sure like I'm interested to see what happens in the next two years next two or three years and see Because Twitter is is not gaining any new followers at this point. They're kind of starting to plateau So they've like are not growing at a rate in which other social media Networks are growing and that's a major issue and some of that issue could be tied towards bad infrastructural design or really poor code of conduct All right the next person at microphone for please Last year my brother blocked my mom on Facebook and she's still vocally beta about it I mentioned this because many times our online social network is almost directly mapped or closely intertwined With our offline social network. So did you look into? Making changes into this social network. That's online. How does that affect our social network offline as much as you may and follow And stop talking to your boss or your former colleagues. You still meet them at conferences and at parties So how do you deal with that change of this network online? Which does not actually Give a clear picture of how your social network looks like the two the interaction between the offline and online after that change I definitely thought about that a lot. So just in general as a researcher I've always been really intrigued by societal norms and Propriety and like what is polite behavior across many different cultures and I'm speaking as an American But I come from a hyper specific place in the United States I come from Louisiana, which is the American South, but we're a hyper hyper specific culture We speak two languages. It's English and then Cajun, which is an oral-based language. I only know a couple words But New Orleans where I'm from has the highest rate of birth retention 75% of people that are born there stay there So the ways in which I socialize as a New Orleans and it's very different in the ways I socialize as a New Yorker And that's true And I think when you get like even more localized if you look at Americans versus Canadians versus Mexicans and getting into Latin America So I thought about that a lot that like actually a lot of the interactions you have offline Definitely a fact and influence that the interactions you have online So a lot of advice I sort of gave people was also having to break down like how often do you interface with this person? And let's think of the most neutral and polite way to like break things down. So yeah I thought about that a lot like I I never I Haven't yet with the people I've I've given advice to said unfriend someone oftentimes Like unless the relationship has incredibly soured that's usually the advice But if it's in the case of a boss for instance, my reaction is oftentimes why don't you reach out to them? If they're an old boss and say like I'd love to keep in touch. Here's my email, but like I'm keeping my Instagram Just for friends only All right next question from Mike number one From your project. I'm curious to know if you think that social break up is actually possible or if It's not really possible because people end up seeing your stuff anyway Is it bad if my response is both? I think that as social media users for a really long time We've been taught to interact with social media in a particular way And I don't think that that way is correct Facebook Actively wants you to post more as to Twitter and Instagram wants you to share and accumulate followers And that's the way in which these networks grow you're creating content that content is analytics And they package and sell that to advertisers I'm politically agnostic again on that But I have my own personal thoughts as a researcher That's just what they do, but I think that that push towards sharing and cross-platform sharing that you can cross post perhaps in terms of like Privacy is is a horrible idea What are you saying? When are you saying it? How are you saying it or all are all identifiers and they're all identifiers that can pinpoint location and who you are And who you are offline where you are and that's something I often do try to impart to people is What are you saying and when and doesn't need to be set online? So I personally and I always give this example with people that sit with me I'm like I personally try to not post location, but I have a very specific reason I can't do that and I had a lot of internal Like dialogue of should I post the diamonds at CCC? What if someone's here and they want to talk to me about Something that I don't want to talk about or what if I say I'm home Like does that make my mom more of a target if someone wanted to try to swat us again? And those are extreme examples, but it's also important to think about like are you accidentally doxing yourself? You know if you're saying I'm at the bar downstairs for my apartment Let's check in on four square and then post that on Instagram. You've pinpointed where you live and that's information that people don't actually need and So I always try to sort of walk this line of like I think it's totally fine to post pictures of food and family and friends and to do it frequently But I think it's important to sort of know like are you highlighting where you are and like are you highlighting regular patterns in your lives? And are you then? Amplifying that to a variety of people that you don't know and you have no idea how many people are accessing it All right, we have another question from the internet I've got a question from the internet yesterday There was a talk titled the possibility of an army by constant doll who bought thousands of fake accounts What do you think about these actions? I guess I need a little more context this person bought thousands of fake accounts to Actually, I don't have any context for that. I mean I so I in graduate school this woman this fantastic ethnographer Trisha Wayne came to speak to us and The professor clay shirky at the time was saying he bought her 50,000 followers in a day and it was just I think he's paid like a hundred dollars And I think it's really fascinating in which the ways that that bumps you up into a different sort of social strata and how like It made her it presented her in a completely different way online That changed the way in which people interacted with her and the amount of followers. She started to a crew on a daily basis I Mean, oh, I think I'm so this person created like a thousand different accounts. I Think that that's what that question may have meant from what I read that he bought them. He oh he bought them. I Would be curious to know why like if he was looking at data or if he just bought a thousand followers But I guess I need a little bit more information All right, well the person is not here, so we don't know we have another question from Mike number three Hi, um, so my sister had an occasion where someone who she sort of became a stalker and Didn't really know her very well But then started to send really weird messages to her and it got to a point where they were following her on Instagram And she can't like can't really control Because this person knows who she is and her friends She she couldn't control her information and so this person would send stuff based on oh we bought this blender and and it would deliver it to our house along with letters about like How they would have sex even though they had never really interacted before and it got really Scary and unsafe and it's sad for that person But also it became really scary for my sister and she didn't know Where to go and what to do and when she went to the police and said I'm scared that this person might Might come and touch me like when I'm going home late at night. What should I do? They said well until something happens. We really can't like do anything for you. So what? I'm there may be resources out there for for people who are facing this but for those watching this video What would you recommend them to do? First of all, I want to say I'm so sorry for your sister. That's horrible And secondly what I would suggest doing is There are a variety of different Non-profits that exist crash override is one once you've been harassed in a really specific way, but what I would suggest is Um Smart Girls Guide to Privacy has this. It's this really fantastic book and they list where you can access I think lawyers that are more digitally savvy around digital crimes and My recommendation in a case of that with that kind of persistence where it's a regular person I'm meaning a regular stock or it's one entity and they're actually starting to sort of move away from social media and moving into like letters you should get a lawyer and then from there figure out ways to assign What's it? Space between you and the other person across state lines even and figure out like I don't know the particulars of this case If this person is in a different state than your sister that gets a little bit trickier. Are they in the same city? So they're in the same city. There's a lot more you can do my recommendation would be to immediately find a lawyer who is well-versed in Online harassment, but if that person's in the same city and they're sending letters I think that's a pretty good reason to move like to start pressing charges like that would be my immediate reaction All right. Thank you another question from microphone number four Yes, thank you for your wonderful talk first of all One thing I find myself personally very preoccupied by is not just the question of how to act on social media in the present but also how to clean up after my past certainly things I've Like written or posted before and I actually find that the obstacle towards doing that is frequently infrastructural It's really hard to sort of have an oversight of everything you've done in the past Do you what do you sort of see as the future of design on these platforms? Are they intentionally making it difficult or have they coded themselves into a corner and is this going to become a bigger problem? I Guess I would say to basing off the way the design is now I think it's a mixture of having coded into a corner and also trying to make design minimal so a lot of Trends in design are around optimization and usability, but we're optimizing for speed and we're making things more usable for mobile But we're not optimizing or designing for safety And we're not optimizing or designing for like longevity of life within interacting within on these platforms So I would say it's like a misuse of design priorities And I think that now there is some pushback with people sort of saying like how is this being accessed? There's harassment persisting on on this platform. How's this happening? Oh, it's happening because of these reasons, you know, etc I would say that it's just a misalignment of Priorities within a design hierarchy and a coding hierarchy All right, any other questions? It seems like we ran out of questions or we got them all cleared up for now So thank you very much for your questions. Thank you very much for coming and please give it up for Caroline again and for awesome talk. Thank you