Youth are particularly likely to encounter hateful internet content, which can severely impact their well-being.While most social media provide reporting mechanisms, in several countries, severe hateful content can alternatively be reported to law enforcement or dedicated reporting centers.However, in Germany, many youth never resort to reporting.While research in human-computer interaction has investigated adults' views on platform-based reporting, youth perspectives and platform-independent alternatives have received little attention.By involving a diverse group of 47 German adolescents and young adults in eight focus group interviews, we investigate how youth-sensitive reporting systems for hateful content can be designed.We explore German youth's reporting barriers, fnding that on platforms, they feel particularly discouraged by defcient rule enforcement and feedback, while platform-independent alternatives are rather unknown and perceived as time-consuming and disruptive.We further elicit their requirements for platformindependent reporting tools and contribute with heuristics for designing youth-sensitive and inclusive reporting systems.

Using smartphone apps during crises is well-established, proving critical for efficient crisis response. However, such apps become futile without an Internet connection, which is a common issue during crises. The ongoing 6G standardization explores the capability to provide local cellular connectivity for areas cut off from the Internet in crises. This paper introduces to the HCI community the concept of cellular island connectivity in isolated areas, promising a seamless transition from normal operation to island operation with local-only cellular connectivity. It presents findings from a survey (N = 857) among adult smartphone users from major German cities regarding their smartphone usage preferences in this model. Results show a shift in app demand, with users favoring general-purpose apps over dedicated crisis apps in specific scenarios. We prioritize smartphone services based on their criticality, distinguishing between apps essential for crisis response and those supporting routines. Our findings provide operators, developers, and authorities insights into making user-centric design decisions for implementing island-ready 6G communication.

In Germany and other countries, specialized non-profit reporting centers combat online hate speech by submitting criminal content to law enforcement agencies, forwarding deletion requests to social media platforms, and providing counseling to victims, thus contributing to the governance mechanism of content moderation as intermediaries between victims and various organizations. Whereas research in computer-supported cooperative work has extensively explored collaboration of and automation for content moderators, there are no works that focus on reporting centers. Based on expert interviews with their staff (N=15), this study finds that most German centers share a collaborative workflow, of which multiple tasks are heavily dependent on inter-organizational exchange. However, there are differences in their implementation of monitoring, content assessment, automation technology adoption, and external collaborators. As the centers are faced with diverse challenges, such as borderline case assessment, psychological burdens, limited visibility, conflicting goals with other actors, and manual repetitive work, our study contributes with nine implications for designing and researching supportive technologies. They provide suggestions for improving hate speech gathering and reporting, researching hate speech prioritization and assessment algorithms, and designing case processing systems. Beyond that, we outline directions for research on inter-organizational collaboration.

Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) provide advisory, preventive and reactive cybersecurity services for authorities, citizens, and businesses. However, their responsibility of monitoring, analyzing, and communicating cyber threats have become challenging due to the growing volume and varying quality of information disseminated through public channels. Based on a design case study conducted from 2021 to 2023, this paper combines three iterations of expert interviews, design workshops and cognitive walkthroughs to design an automated, cross-platform and real-time cybersecurity dashboard. By adopting the notion of cyber situational awareness, the study extracts user requirements and design heuristics for enhanced threat awareness and mission awareness in CERTs, discussing the aspects of source integration, data management, customizable visualization, relationship awareness, information assessment, software integration, (inter-)organizational collaboration, and communication of stakeholder warnings.

Farm Management Information Systems (FMIS) are an important core component of modern farming companies as they allow, e.g. to document activities, create fertilisation plans, and feed digital equipment with required data. Since the entire agricultural sector is an essential component of food production, high standards of resilience should be established in the involved companies. Accordingly, the used software should also be designed with high standards on reliability and crisis capability. Based on a literature review, we found that software for farmers with certain resilience needs is lacking. Thus, we designed and evaluated a new FMIS concept with the user-centred design method. By conducting focus groups (two rounds, total N = 57) in 2017 and 2019, we raised specific front-end and back-end requirements of farmers. Based on the requirements, we developed our concept for both front- and back-end in terms of a decentralised and offline-working FMIS. Through the evaluation with practitioners (N = 16) of the implemented concept, we derived findings and implications, highlighting the need for privacy, stability, and offline-capability, as well as the UI-requirement to be supportive, e.g. with easy to understand icons and terms.

Abstract The negotiation of stakeholder values as a collaborative process throughout technology development has been studied extensively within the fields of Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Human-Computer Interaction. Despite their increasing significance for cybersecurity incident response, there is a gap in research on values of importance to the design of open-source intelligence (OSINT) technologies for this purpose. In this paper, we investigate which values and value conflicts emerge due to the application and development of machine learning (ML) based OSINT technologies to assist cyber security incident response operators. For this purpose, we employ a triangulation of methods, consisting of a systematic survey of the technical literature on the development of OSINT artefacts for cybersecurity (N = 73) and an empirical value sensitive design case study, comprising semi-structured interviews with stakeholders (N = 9) as well as a focus group (N = 7) with developers. Based on our results, we identify implications relevant to the research on and design of OSINT artefacts for cybersecurity incident response.

In many applications and websites people use in their everyday life, their privacy and data are threatened, e.g., by script tracking during browsing. Although researchers and companies have developed privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), they are often difficult to use for lay users. In this paper, we conducted a literature review to classify users into different extit{support personas} based on their privacy competence and privacy concern. With developers of PETs in mind, support personas were envisioned to facilitate the customization of software according to the support needs of different users. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of support personas and based on workshop sessions with 15 participants, we designed a browser extension that supports users with the issue of script tracking by providing different user interfaces for different support personas. The following qualitative evaluation with 31 participants showed that the developed UI elements worked as intended for the different support personas. Therefore, we conclude the concept of support personas is useful in the development process of usable applications that enhance the privacy of the users while also educating them and thus potentially increasing their privacy literacy.

The use of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) to monitor and detect cybersecurity threats is gaining popularity among Cybersecurity Emergency or Incident Response Teams (CERTs/CSIRTs). They increasingly use semi-automated OSINT approaches when monitoring cyber threats for public infrastructure services and incident response. Most of the systems use publicly available data, often focusing on social media due to timely data for situational assessment. As indirect and affected stakeholders, the acceptance of OSINT systems by users, as well as the conditions which influence the acceptance, are relevant for the development of OSINT systems for cybersecurity. Therefore, as part of the ethical and social technology assessment, we conducted a survey (N=1,093), in which we asked participants about their acceptance of OSINT systems, their perceived need for open source surveillance, as well as their privacy behavior and concerns. Further, we tested if the awareness of OSINT is an interactive factor that affects other factors. Our results indicate that cyber threat perception and the perceived need for OSINT are positively related to acceptance, while privacy concerns are negatively related. The awareness of OSINT, however, has only shown effects on people with higher privacy concerns. Here, particularly high OSINT awareness and limited privacy concerns were associated with higher OSINT acceptance. Lastly, we provide implications for further research and the use of OSINT systems for cybersecurity by authorities. As OSINT is a framework rather than a single technology, approaches can be selected and combined to adhere to data minimization and anonymization as well as to leverage improvements in privacy-preserving computation and machine learning innovations. Regarding the use of OSINT, the results suggest to favor approaches that provide transparency to users regarding the use of the systems and the data they gather.

Besides the merits of increasing digitization and interconnectedness in private and professional spaces, critical infrastructures and societies are more and more exposed to cyberattacks. In order to enhance the preventative and reactive capabilities against cyberattacks, Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) are deployed in many countries and organizations. In Germany, CERTs in the public sector operate on federal and state level to provide information security services for authorities, citizens, and enterprises. Their tasks of monitoring, analyzing, and communicating threats and incidents is getting more complex due to the increasing amount of information disseminated into public channels. By adopting the perspectives of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Crisis Informatics, we contribute to the study of organizational structures, technology use, and the impact on collaborative practices in and between state CERTs with empirical research based on expert interviews with representatives of German state CERTs (N=15) and supplementary document analyses (N=25). We derive design and policy implications from our findings, including the need for interoperable and modular architecture, a shift towards service level agreements, cross-platform monitoring and analysis of incident data, use of deduplication techniques and standardized threat exchange formats, a reduction of resource costs through process automation, and transparent reporting and tool structures for information exchange.

The research field of crisis informatics examines, amongst others, the potentials and barriers of social media use during conflicts and crises. Social media allow emergency services to reach the public easily in the context of crisis communication and receive valuable information (e.g. pictures) from social media data. However, the vast amount of data generated during large-scale incidents can lead to issues of information overload and quality. To mitigate these issues, this paper proposes the semi-automatic creation of alerts including keyword, relevance and information quality filters based on cross-platform social media data. We conducted empirical studies and workshops with emergency services across Europe to raise requirements, then iteratively designed and implemented an approach to support emergency services, and performed multiple evaluations, including live demonstrations and field trials, to research the potentials of social media-based alerts. Finally, we present the findings and implications based on semi-structured interviews with emergency services, highlighting the need for usable configurability and white-box algorithm representation.

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the use of social media in emergency and crisis events has greatly increased and many studies have concentrated on the use of ICT and social media before, during, or after these events. The field of research that these studies fall under is called crisis informatics. In this article, we evaluate and analyze crisis informatics research by looking at case studies of social media use in emergencies, outlining the types of research found in crisis informatics, and expounding upon the forms of interaction that have been researched. Finally, we summarize the achievements from a human–computer interaction perspective and outline trends and challenges for future research.

The value of social media in crises, disasters, and emergencies across different events (e.g. floods, storms, terroristic attacks), countries, and for heterogeneous participants (e.g. citizens, emergency services) is now well-attested. Existing work has examined the potentials and weaknesses of its use during specific events. Fewer studies, however, have focused on citizens' perceptions of social media in emergencies, and none have deployed a representative sample to examine this. We present the results of the first representative study on citizens' perception of social media in emergencies that we have conducted in Germany. Our study highlights, for example, that around half (45%) of people have used social media during an emergency to share and or look for information. In contrast, false rumours on social media (74%) are perceived as a threat. Moreover, only a minority of people have downloaded a smartphone app for emergencies (16%), with the most popular ones' weather and first aid apps.

Recent disasters have shown an increase in the significance of social media for both affected citizens and volunteers alike in the coordination of information and organization of relief activities, often independently of and in addition to the official emergency response. Existing research mainly focuses on the way in which individual platforms are used by volunteers in response to disasters. This paper examines the use of social media during the European Floods of 2013 and proposes a novel cross-social-media application for volunteers. Besides comprehensive analysis of volunteer communities, interviews were conducted with "digital volunteers" such as Facebook moderators of disaster-related groups. Based on the challenges identified, we designed and implemented the cross-social-media application "XHELP", which allows information to be both, acquired and distributed cross-media and cross-channel. The evaluation with 20 users leads to further design requirements for applications aiming to support volunteer moderators during disasters.