Hi, I’m Sijia, PhD student from UC Berkeley.
Today, I’m going to present our work which uses restorative justice approach to understanding
adolescents’ needs for addressing online harm.
How do we pursue justice when online harm occurs?
Most online platforms use content moderation, which includes a series of actions towards
the person who conducts offense, including removal of their content or banning.
The content moderation approach follows a punitive justice framework, which centers
offenders and regulate their behavior through punishment.
However, it leaves victims out of the decision-making process and fails to adapt to their individual
experiences and needs.
In recent years, researchers have started to explore a victim-centered perspective to
address online harm.
Restorative justice is one justice framework that gives victims’ agency and voice in
deciding how to address the harm.
It argues that victims often have multiple needs that are unaddressed in a punitive justice
process, such as the need for information or truth-telling.
In addition, addressing those needs may require the collective effort of multiple stakeholders
including regulators, offenders, or community members.
We focus our investigation on adolescents, who are a particularly vulnerable group for
harms in the online space.
Restorative justice has been successfully applied to address offline harm for adolescents
in schools.
In this research, we look at how restorative justice may help us understand adolescents’
needs in the online context.
We interviewed 28 adolescents who experienced online harm when they were 10-20 years old.
The harm cases happened on multiple social media platforms, and half of the cases have
an offline part in school.
We examine three interrelated perspectives of needs from adolescents: what, how and when.
“What” refer to types of needs, for example, the need for information or emotional support
“How” refer to how needs can be met through the actions, and the stakeholders who perform
the action.
For example, victims may hope that moderators can ban the offenders.
“When” refers to timing to meet the needs.
For example, some needs are more urgent than others, or the order may matter. For example,
need A may provide conditions to meet need B.
We conducted an interview and design task to understand the three perspectives of needs.
We’ve detailed the task in the paper.
Next, we present our findings on the types of needs, actions and stakeholders participants
identified.
The table is a summary of results.
The first column shows the five needs participants identified, including the need of sensemaking,
emotional support and validation, retribution, safety, and transformation.
The second column shows the actions that can meet the needs.
The following columns checkmark the stakeholders that can perform those actions.
For example, the first row shows that to meet the sensemaking need, participants hope the
offenders can let them understand the motives for conducting harm.
For this presentation, we mainly try to situate content moderation and online platforms in
the results.
How does content moderation help address victims’ needs?
We find that platforms’ moderation meet retribution and safety needs, which is a finding
that aligns with previous literature.
However, only some participants choose to use content moderation to meet those needs.
For example, for safety needs, some participants hope to ensure safety by helping the offenders
understand the harm and their wrong-doing.
Some other participants think that the online community members can give offenders a kind
of public accountability by calling offenders out or reporting them.
Besides, there are needs content moderation doesn’t address, such as the need for sensemaking.
What else can online platforms do besides content moderation?
We find that online platforms actually have a role in all five needs.
For example, for sensemaking, participants think that platforms can give advice and instructions
on how to address the harm.
For transformation needs, participants believe that platforms should continuously improve
their design for prevention of harm or more individualized solutions.
Importantly, we are not suggesting that platforms can or should meet all needs.
We find that addressing online harm needs efforts from multiple stakeholders online
and offline.
For example, for our adolescents participants, many harms happen online but with their school
friends.
Thus, they often need help from the school, parents or classmates.
Next, we talk about the timing to meet different needs.
We asked each participant to visualize a timeline to address their needs.
In the graph, we color-coded the categories of needs on the timeline.
We can see that participants usually attempt to meet the need of sensemaking first.
However, a smaller number of participants in our sample chose to stop the continuation
of harm before making sense of it.
Then, the need for emotional support is dominant and happens at an early stage.
Several participants believe receiving emotional support is urgent after the trauma of harm,
and one also mentioned that they need emotional support before confronting the offenders.
We can see that the need for safety is kind of scattered in the graph.
However, when we broke down the needs into actions in data analysis, we found a clearer
pattern.
For participants who hope to stop the harm immediately, they usually rely on platform
moderation.
When participants hope to stop the harm through talking with offenders and gain their understanding,
it usually happens, or is finally achieved, at a later stage of the timeline.
And, needs for retribution and transformation come last.
We find that needs for punishing the offenders is not the central goal for many participants
— only less than half of our participants include the need, and they usually place it
after meeting the need for sensemaking, emotional support and validation, and safety.
Finally, participants usually describe transformation such as raising public awareness as a long
term goal and place it at the end.
Finally, we want to mention some major lessons and implications from this research.
Following restorative justice, we centered victims’ agency and voice and identified
five needs adolescents have for addressing online harm: sensemaking, support and validation,
safety, retribution, and transformation.
We also identified relevant stakeholders and actions to meet those needs.
Following these findings, we argue for an expansion of the scope of needs, actions and
stakeholders in addressing online harm.
We found that victims often need more than what platforms’ content moderation can provide.
In many cases, victims require actions from multiple stakeholders online and offline.
We find that this is particularly important for adolescents whose online harm experiences
may happen between schoolmates, or even include an offline component on the school grounds.
Many participants identified actions that align with offline restorative justice values
and practices, for example, talking with offenders or emotional support from community members.
In our future work, we would like to explore different implementations of restorative justice
practices in online communities.
Additionally, our research provides a way to see harm as a temporal process.
Participants’ process of addressing needs often involves a series of actions over time.
We find that some needs are more urgent than others, and needs may be dependent on each
other.
Thus, it is important to consider both the relation of needs and the timing of meeting
each need.
In particular, our research also highlights moderation efficiency in ensuring safety needs.
Finally, we want to reflect on how the restorative justice approach centers on the needs of victims
in their own context.
Our research shows the importance of giving victims agency to specify how they would want
to deal the harm.
However, centering victims’ needs doesn’t mean they can do whatever they want.
For example, some participants want their offenders to suffer severely, but it may be
against restorative justice values, or our values as a community.
We argue that when providing victims agency, it is equally important to meet their needs,
like safety or sensemaking, within established community values.
In addition, we also find it challenging for victims to come up with needs immediately.
Throughout our task, participants went back and forth and come up with new ideas on the
go.
In fact, sensemaking is one of the needs they identify.
Thus, while providing victims agency, it is equally important to provide support and guidance
along the way.
Thank you.