Hi everyone! My name is Jane Im and I'm a PhD student at the University of Michigan.
Today I'm going to talk about our work on using affirmative consent as a
theoretical framework for understanding and reimagining social platforms.
This is work done with co-authors, Jill, Melody, Una,
Katherine, Mark, and Eric. Before I continue, I want to give a
content warning that in this talk, I will mention sexual abuse.
So, the current social internet is plagued with many problematic
interactions that violate people's consent such as online harassment and
cyberstalking. And these disproportionately impact
marginalized groups such as women of color.
In other words, many platforms are built without the idea of consent.
Our work started off by asking the question, "How can we protect people's
consent, especially marginalized populations'
consent on the social internet?" Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, we got the
idea from, and were inspired by, feminist scholars and
activists, as they have tried to define consent for decades
in order to prevent sexual assaults. And in particular, we focused on
affirmative consent. Affirmative consent is the idea that
someone must ask for and earn enthusiastic approval before
interacting with another person. It was an important feminist movement in
the United States to prevent sexual assaults. And it
emphasizes the initiator to ask for the other
person's agreement before the interaction. It views women
as desiring and active beings with agency.
So in our work, we first defined affirmative consent, by deriving from
feminist, legal, and Human-Computer Interaction
literature. I'm going to go over how we defined them, and then explain how
we can use them. First, affirmative consent is voluntary,
which means that consent is an agreement that is freely given
and enthusiastic. Next, affirmative consent is informed,
which means people can only consent to an interaction
after being given correct information about it, in an accessible way.
Third, affirmative consent is also revertible, which means consent can be
revoked at any time. Next, affirmative consent is specific. It
means that people should be able to consent to a particular action
or a particular person, and not a series of actions or people.
Lastly, affirmative consent is unburdensome. The cost
associated with refusing to consent shouldn't be so high that a person gives
in and says yes, when they would rather say no.
So far, I've talked about how we defined affirmative consent.
But perhaps a more interesting question is how this theoretical framework can be
used to understand and design social platforms.
In our work, first, we argue that the framework is explanatory. It lets
researchers and designers pinpoint which property is being violated in design,
and provides a way to dissect a wide range of social computing problems.
For instance, while prior work has documented problem with content feeds,
often related to their opacity, we reframe these feed issues as
violating affirmative consent's voluntary principle. Simply put, users
cannot tell systems what they want in their feeds,
which is the main core issue.
And if you're curious about how we explain other various issues using the
framework, please check out our paper.
Next, we argue that the framework is also generative, meaning that it can also be
used to create design solutions grounded in consent, to tackle problems
on the social internet. It helps us answer the question, "If you
build a totally new social platform grounded in consent,
how would it look like?" To tackle this question,
what we did was we applied the five concepts of affirmative consent
to seven common features of social platforms such as messaging,
, profile, etc. Then, we asked "What would a voluntary messaging look like?"
"What would an informed messaging look like? What would a revertible messaging
look like?" We did this until we came up with about
35 design ideas grounded in consent. And I'm going to end the talk by
discussing one of my favorite examples, voluntary content feeds. If you apply the
voluntary principle to content feeds, the feed should ask users what they want to
see periodically. For example, this imaginary platform
Socious asks the user what they want to see this week.
And when the user selects their preferences, the feed would be updated
immediately. This is just one of the potential
designs that could result from the framework of
affirmative consent. So again, please see the paper for more details.
And I want to wrap up by saying our work, in short, emphasizes the importance of
understanding and further reimagining and building social platforms grounded
in consent. Thank you for listening and please check
out our project website. Thank you.