The restaurant industry has become increasingly reliant on digital technologies for business operations, digital marketing, and promotion, especially amid and after the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper presents the findings of a two-year study exploring how women- and minority-owned restaurants in Chicago and Detroit encountered and overcame digital challenges in their day-to-day operations, across a range of levels of digital skills and literacy. Drawing from semi-structured and impromptu interviews with restaurant owners (n= 47) and participant observation, we apply HCI literature on infrastructuring and patchworking to highlight how restaurateurs’ experiences often run counter to the assumptions of a "typical" user. Indeed, they often must build and leverage their—offline and online—networks of support to overcome failing infrastructures, both within the restaurant industry and on digital platforms. Concurrently, we emphasize the importance of community building and social infrastructuring to overcome these challenges while also building up alternative networks of resources for their communities, especially considering identity-related inequalities and amid a global moment of crisis.

Social media platforms and their governance policies often fail marginalized users in high-stakes contexts, including war, violent attacks, human rights violations, humanitarian crises, and situations of systemic oppression. Through interviews, autoethnography, and digital ethnography, this paper presents three case studies from Venezuela, Nigeria, and the United States to examine how marginalized populations engage with social media in non-normative ways. We analyze how platform design and policies intersect with participants’ identities, marginalization, and labor. Our central finding is that users’ urgent infrastructural and contextual needs are often overlooked, revealing structural flaws in social media design that mimic physical-world power asymmetries. In response, users develop innovative workarounds, engage in self-censorship, and adopt coping strategies, undertaking additional, often invisible, sociotechnical repair work that reinforces their precarity. To address these complex needs, we urge social media companies to collaborate with marginalized users to integrate alternative infrastructural features, such as emergency response tools and exit mechanisms for wellbeing.

Technologies like online support networks and safety apps hold promise for improving personal safety. However, these tools often fail to address the widespread violence against gender-diverse individuals, particularly transgender Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (TBIPOC) in the United States. To better understand technology’s role in managing safety among TBIPOC individuals, we conducted 22 semi-structured interviews. We found that participants engaged in what we call safety labor, the emotional and cognitive work of managing misrecognition, assessing risk, and downplaying discomfort to maintain self-preservation. Visibly-trans participants faced greater vulnerability and tended to feel safer when their trans identity was not visible. Technology enabled sharing locations and rides, and sending coded messages. Findings highlight the need for tailored technologies that protect privacy and help TBIPOC individuals when they experience violence. Our research contributes a deeper understanding of TBIPOC experiences and informs technology development to promote TBIPOCs’ safety.

Shadowbanning is a unique content moderation strategy receiving recent media attention for the ways it impacts marginalized social media users and communities. Social media companies often deny this content moderation practice despite user experiences online. In this paper, we use qualitative surveys and interviews to understand how marginalized social media users make sense of shadowbanning, develop folk theories about shadowbanning, and attempt to prove its occurrence. We find that marginalized social media users collaboratively develop and test algorithmic folk theories to make sense of their unclear experiences with shadowbanning. Participants reported direct consequences of shadowbanning, including frustration, decreased engagement, the inability to post specific content, and potential financial implications. They reported holding negative perceptions of platforms where they experienced shadowbanning, sometimes attributing their shadowbans to platforms' deliberate suppression of marginalized users' content. Some marginalized social media users acted on their theories by adapting their social media behavior to avoid potential shadowbans. We contributecollaborative algorithm investigation : a new concept describing social media users' strategies of collaboratively developing and testing algorithmic folk theories. Finally, we present design and policy recommendations for addressing shadowbanning and its potential harms.

Marginalized social media users struggle to navigate inequitable content moderation they experience online. We developed the Online Identity Help Center (OIHC) to confront this challenge by providing information on social media users' rights, summarizing platforms' policies, and providing instructions to appeal moderation decisions. We discuss our findings from interviews (n = 24) and surveys (n = 75) which informed the OIHC's design, along with interviews about and usability tests of the site (n = 12). We found that the OIHC's resources made it easier for participants to understand platforms' policies and access appeal resources. Participants expressed increased willingness to read platforms' policies after reading the OIHC's summarized versions, but expressed mistrust of platforms after reading them. We discuss the study's implications, such as the benefits of providing summarized policies to encourage digital literacy, and how doing so may enable users to express skepticism of platforms' policies after reading them.

Trans technology – technology created to help address challenges that trans people face – is an important area for innovation that can help improve marginalized people’s lives. We conducted 104 interviews with 115 creators of trans technology to understand how they involved trans people and communities in design processes. We describe projects that used human-centered design processes, as well as design processes that involved trans people in smaller ways, including gathering feedback from users, conducting user testing, or the creators being trans themselves. We show how involving trans people and communities in design is vital for trans technologies to realize their potential for addressing trans needs. Yet we highlight a frequent gap between trans technology design and deployment, and discuss ways to bridge this gap. We argue for the importance of involving community in trans technology design to ensure that trans technology achieves its promise of helping address trans needs and challenges.