Local information is essential for civic engagement, community belonging and well-being, and collective action. As more U.S. communities become "news deserts" without local newspapers or broadcast media, neighborhood- and municipality-level groups on platforms like Facebook, Nextdoor, and Reddit have become key nodes in local information infrastructure. This paper examines how volunteer moderators of these local online groups contribute to sustaining local information infrastructure, focusing on how they understand their groups’ informational function, the roles they assume to realize this function, and the skills they mobilize to fulfill perceived roles. Drawing on an Asynchronous Remote Community study and in-depth interviews with U.S.-based moderators, we conceptualize local volunteer moderation as situated civic labor, emphasizing the interpretive, relational, and context-contingent nature of their work. We offer design implications for platforms to support local knowledge and discretion and sustain democratic practices to strengthen the civic potential of online spaces to serve their local communities.

This work examines how leading generative artificial intelligence companies construct and communicate the concept of "safety" through public-facing documents. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, we analyze a corpus of corporate safety-related statements to explicate how authority, responsibility, and legitimacy are discursively established. These discursive strategies consolidate legitimacy for corporate actors, normalize safety as an experimental and anticipatory practice, and push a perceived participatory agenda toward safe technologies. We argue that uncritical uptake of these discourses risks reproducing corporate priorities and constraining alternative approaches to governance and design. The contribution of this work is twofold: first, to situate safety as a sociotechnical discourse that warrants critical examination; second, to caution human-computer interaction scholars against legitimizing corporate framings, instead foregrounding accountability, equity, and justice. By interrogating safety discourses as artifacts of power, this paper advances a critical agenda for human-computer interaction scholarship on artificial intelligence.

This study examines how WhatsApp has evolved from a personal communication tool to a professional platform, focusing on its use by small business owners in India. Initially embraced in smaller, rural communities for its ease of use and familiarity, WhatsApp played a crucial role in local economies. However, as Meta introduced WhatsApp Business with new, formalized features, users encountered challenges in adapting to the more complex and costly platform. Interviews with 14 small business owners revealed that while they adapted creatively, they felt marginalized by the advanced tools. This research contributes to HCI literature by exploring the transition from personal to professional use and introduces the concept of Coercive Professionalization. It highlights how standardization by large tech companies affects marginalized users, exacerbating power imbalances and reinforcing digital colonialism, concluding with design implications for supporting community-based appropriations.

Through interviews with 16 social justice activists, we explore their challenges of adapting to Instagram, particularly in light of the platform's evolving algorithm. Our findings reveal that the frequent changes in these algorithms significantly impact their ability to engage effectively- and disproportionately impact visibility, especially for those with fewer resources and less algorithmic expertise. Our contributions encompass discussions on activists' challenges in adapting to platform changes, and the strategic shifts towards gaining broader visibility. We also address the expectations of being a '' good digital activist '' amidst algorithmic mediation on Instagram, emphasizing participants' need for navigating platform mediated complexities and maintaining authenticity. Finally, we suggest design implications, advocating features- for both existing platforms and alternative systems exclusively for activism that reduce activists' concerns about quantitative metrics, promote selective privacy, tie amplification to thoughtful engagement, and foster community building through contextual moderation and communication.

Recent studies show that users often interpret social media algorithms as mystical or spiritual because of their unpredictability. This invites new questions about how such perceptions affect the content that creators create and the communities they form online. In this study, 14 creators of algorithmic conspirituality content on TikTok were interviewed to explore their interpretations and creation processes influenced by the platform's For You Page algorithm. We illustrate how creators' beliefs interact with TikTok's algorithmic mediation to reinforce and shape their spiritual or relational themes. Furthermore, we show how algorithmic conspirituality content impacts viewers, highlighting its role in generating significant emotional and affective labor for creators, stemming from complex relational dynamics inherent in this content creation. We discuss implications for design to support creators aimed at recognizing the unexpected spiritual and religious experiences algorithms prompt, as well as supporting creators in effectively managing these challenges.

Commencing as a photo-sharing platform, Instagram has since become multifaceted, accommodating diverse art forms, with poetry emerging as a prominent one. However, the academic understanding of Instagram’s poetry community is limited, yet its significance emerges from its distinctive utilization of a primarily visual social media platform guided by recommendation algorithms for disseminating poetry, further characterized by a predominantly novice creative population. We employ qualitative analysis to explore motivations, experiences, and algorithmic influence within Instagram’s poetry community. We demonstrate that participants prioritize conforming to algorithmic constraints for visibility, yet maintain their community’s values of integrity and originality, illustrating the tension between algorithmic growth and participant authenticity. We introduce the concept of Algorithmically Mediated Creative Labor, a phenomenon specific to non-monetizing creative users who are impacted by the prioritization of professional creators and continually adapt their creative endeavours to align with platform logic, thereby affecting their motivation and creative outputs.

Fat liberation is a social movement advocating for equal treatment of fat people, who are currently subjected to harmful stereotypes, harassment, discrimination at school and work, and medical mistreatment, and is an understudied movement in HCI research. Due to the social and legal acceptability of anti-fatness, many physical spaces, such as businesses and healthcare providers, are unsafe or inaccessible for fat people. We conducted three in-person and virtual participatory design workshops with fat liberationist organizers and community members (N = 15) to imagine fat positive technologies. Participants designed a system to help them find size-inclusive resources, services, and healthcare providers in the offline world with design features centered around intersectionality, and participants’ desire for technologies that recognized their diverse identities and characteristics. We present features and values for a fat-positive information-seeking system and synthesize present and historical HCI theories into a design framework for intersectional fat-positive HCI.