Hello.
My name is Farnaz Irannejad Bisafar
from Northeastern University.
In this talk, I want to discuss our paper
on "Supporting Youth Activists' Strategic Use of Social Media."
Activism is defined as actions for social change
with the goal of building inclusion and equity
for marginalized groups.
More specifically, youth activism can not only
help improve public policies but it can also
affect the development process of youth positively.
Recent social movements showed the important role
of social networking applications
for collective action with new forms of participation
for youth in politics and activism.
These practices that youth use for online activism branch
from investigation of various social issues
and mobilization of action.
And the approaches that youth take for these practices
can branch from casual to purposeful.
But research shows that it is more common for youth
to use social media casually.
For example, by liking and sharing a post,
which can be valuable, for example,
by raising awareness about issues,
but their impact can be limited.
On the other hand, strategic practices of using social media
involves using social media in goal-oriented and informed
ways.
For example, a strategic approach
to circulating content online may
involve identifying influential people that can connect youth
to a broader network.
So to complement casual practices of online activism,
in our study we tried to understand
how network visualizations can help youth
engage in online civic action more strategically
by equipping them with knowledge about the social capital
available to them in their network,
which is basically the resources that people
can access through their social connections.
This is important because research
shows that people usually have difficulty
accurately remembering and accessing
their online social capital.
To explore this question, we studied youth activists
at youth empowerment organizations
where youth engage in social action
with the goal of creating positive, social change
at individual and community level.
The youth organization that we partnered with
empowers low income youth between the age
of 14 to 21 years old.
The youth focus on various social issues
from developing trust between police and youth
to mental health and racism.
We interviewed 13 youth at the organization.
During each interview, we asked youth
to examine prototypes that visualize
their hypothetical Twitter followers.
This visualization prompted discussions
around the information that youth
needed to learn about their network connections
to make informed outreach.
The information that was visualized
was about network characteristics
of youth followers.
For example, their age, how active
they are in social media, and how many connections they have.
Also, one of the visualizations showed
the most frequent hashtags that were used by followers,
and in this paper, we mainly report
on how youth interpreted those hashtags.
First, by seeing the hashtags, youth
inferred information about the list of the followers
that they were shown.
For example, they inferred whether their followers
were aware about social issues that they were interested in.
Based on the knowledge they had inferred from the hashtags,
they talked about making decisions
about the people they wanted to reach out to,
which fell into three categories; people
who would be interested in the work of activism based
on the hashtags they posted, people who would be interested
but might have a different network
and that they could access that network through that person.
And lastly, people who may not be
aware about their work of activism
and that they needed to reach out to to bring awareness.
In seeing these visualizations, youth also
talked about how they could use information
that they have learned about their followers' hashtags
to help them solicit both direct and indirect help.
I would like to conclude this talk by some suggestions
for future work.
We suggest that future work should
explore how learning about others' interest
could help activists initiate interactions online, which
in turn could help them to connect with others using
their personal social media accounts by creating more
personal rapport with those they want to engage with.
Also, future work can study how supporting tools
for online activism can impact how youth activists utilize
the various types of social capital available to them.
For example, our findings show that youth mostly reached out
to their bonding capital, which could result in overlooking
the value of their bridging capital
that can connect youth to a larger and more through
genius network.
So tools that can expose youth activists
to various types of capitals within their networks
and encourage them to reach out to individuals
who can serve as bridges can help them reach out
to a more diverse audience that they
can benefit for their work.