Non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), also known as image-based sexual abuse (IBSA), is mediated through online platforms. Victim-survivors must turn to platforms to collect evidence and request content removal. Platforms act as the crime scene, judge, and jury, determining whether perpetrators face consequences and if harmful material is removed. We present a study of NCII victim-survivors' online reporting experiences, drawing on trauma-informed interviews with 13 participants. We find that platform reporting processes are hostile, opaque, and ineffective, often forcing complex harms into narrow interfaces, responding inconsistently, and failing to result in meaningful action. Leveraging institutional betrayal theory, we show how platforms' structures and practices compound harm, and, in doing so, surface concrete intervention points for redesigning reporting systems and shaping policy to better support victim-survivors

Blind people use visual assistance technologies (VAT) to access visual information, yet VAT can expose blind people to privacy risks.Prior HCI research has studied and built AI-enabled obfuscation techniques to detect and remove private content.However, blind people cannot easily spot errors in obfuscation tools.Our paper explores how assessment descriptors, brief visual attributes of objects, may enable blind people to find errors.By conducting interviews and focus groups with blind participants, we found that certain assessment descriptors (color, dimensions, distance) are inadequate to support blind people.Instead, participants discussed assessment descriptors that better reflect their sensemaking process, such as describing multiple objects in a particular space.Expanding the scope of accessible verification beyond assessment descriptors, participants called for greater transparency on how AI-enabled privacy techniques are developed and emphasized the need to co-create training materials on using AI-enabled privacy techniques.Building from our findings and disability studies scholarship, our paper examines how sighted bias could produce assessment descriptors that neglect the needs of blind people and analyzes how participants' preferred assessment descriptors contrast with existing standards of visual description.Lastly, we offer design directions to push for greater transparency in VAT and obfuscation tools.

Peer Reviewed

CHI ’25, Yokohama, Japan

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, videoconferencing platforms have become an essential part of our social, educational, and work lives. Furthermore, the United States continues to grapple with criminal justice reform, employing processes such as restorative justice to replace antiquated punitive approaches to justice with a focus on the multifaceted needs of communities. Essential to the delivery of restorative justice, restorative justice practitioners are community members trained in the process and approaches of restorative practice. Like everyone else, restorative justice practitioners have transitioned from historically in-person facilitation to online facilitation, integrating videoconferencing platforms into their justice-related work. Diverse communities within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) have been examined in light of their digital transitions and the utilization of various digital tools, including videoconferencing platforms prompted by the pandemic. However, the distinctive perspective of restorative justice practitioners in adapting restorative approaches to an online format is unexplored. Therefore, our research examines how restorative practitioners use videoconferencing platforms for justice-related interventions. To do so, we conducted six semi-structured focus group interviews with 22 US-based restorative facilitators to learn about their experiences with online delivery of restorative justice. Our research revealed that restorative facilitators uphold restorative values in their online delivery by embracing the restorative facilitation process and fostering dialogue. Furthermore, we posit that the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community can acquire valuable insights from restorative practitioners on nurturing and sustaining intimacy and connection online.

People go online for information and support about sensitive topics like depression, infertility, death, or divorce. However, what happens when such topics are algorithmically recommended to them even if they are not looking for it? This article examines people's self-diagnostic behaviors based on algorithmically-recommended content, for example, wondering if they might have depression because an algorithm pushed that topic into their view. Specifically, it examines what happens when the sensitive content is not generated by users, but by companies in the form of targeted advertisements. This paper explores these questions in three parts. The first part reviews literature on self-diagnosis and targeted advertising. The second part presents a mixed-methods study of how targeted ads can enable self-diagnostic reactions. The third part reflects on the mechanisms that influence self-diagnosis and examines potential regulatory implications.

Federal e-government services are increasingly replacing traditional methods of interaction in providing immigrants access to information often vital to their immigration processes. As the nature of these services evolve to online systems, immigrants are confronted with navigating them. In this study, we examined the usability and efficacy of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services website (USCIS.gov) through 28 semi-structured interviews with documented African immigrants, representing 7 countries and varying legal status classifications, such as permanent resident or citizen. Our findings describe common experiences, perceptions and difficulties navigating the U.S. Government's online platform; contributing factors include inadequate virtual assistance from Emma - USCIS's computer-generated chatbot, delayed or inconsistent system alerts about case status, and limited website navigation design for visually impaired users, leading to feelings of anxiety while waiting for pending filings. To conceptualize this unique interaction between immigrants and technology, we propose a ''digital border wall'', the virtual space where an immigrant encounters the host country and directly accesses its systems, tools, and policies. As the employment of online immigration services by governing entities increase, so should research into the critical challenges they may impose on an already strained U.S. immigration system.

Blind people use artificial intelligence-enabled visual assistance technologies (AI VAT) to gain visual access in their everyday lives, but these technologies are embedded with errors that may be difficult to verify non-visually. Previous studies have primarily explored sighted users’ understanding of AI output and created vision-dependent explainable AI (XAI) features. We extend this body of literature by conducting an in-depth qualitative study with 26 blind people to understand their verification experiences and preferences. We begin by describing errors blind people encounter, highlighting how AI VAT fails to support complex document layouts, diverse languages, and cultural artifacts. We then illuminate how blind people make sense of AI through experimenting with AI VAT, employing non-visual skills, strategically including sighted people, and cross-referencing with other devices. Participants provided detailed opportunities for designing accessible XAI, such as affordances to support contestation. Informed by disability studies framework of misfitting and fitting, we unpacked harmful assumptions with AI VAT, underscoring the importance of celebrating disabled ways of knowing. Lastly, we offer practical takeaways for Responsible AI practice to push the field of accessible XAI forward.

Non-consensual Intimate Media (NCIM) refers to the distribution of sexual or intimate content without consent. NCIM is common and causes significant emotional, financial, and reputational harm. We developed Hands-Off, an interaction technique for messaging applications that deters non-consensual screenshots. Hands-Off requires recipients to perform a hand gesture in the air, above the device, to unlock media—which makes simultaneous screenshotting difficult. A lab study shows that Hands-Off gestures are easy to perform and reduce non-consensual screenshots by 67%. We conclude by generalizing this approach and introduce the idea of Feminist Interaction Techniques (FIT), interaction techniques that encode feminist values and speak to societal problems, and reflect on FIT’s opportunities and limitations.

Non-consensual intimate media (NCIM) involves sharing intimate content without the depicted person's consent, including 'revenge porn' and sexually explicit deepfakes. While NCIM has received attention in legal, psychological, and communication fields over the past decade, it is not sufficiently addressed in computing scholarship. This paper addresses this gap by linking NCIM harms to the specific technological components that facilitate them. We introduce the sociotechnical stack , a conceptual framework designed to map the technical stack to its corresponding social impacts. The sociotechnical stack allows us to analyze sociotechnical problems like NCIM, and points toward opportunities for computing research. We propose a research roadmap for computing and social computing communities to deter NCIM perpetration and support victim-survivors through building and rebuilding technologies.

Online harassment is a global problem. This article examines perceptions of harm and preferences for remedies associated with online harassment with nearly 4000 participants in 14 countries around the world. The countries in this work reflect a range of identities and values, with a focus on those outside of North American and European contexts. Results show that perceptions of harm are higher among participants from all countries studied compared to the United States. Non-consensual sharing of sexual photos is consistently rated as harmful in all countries, while insults and rumors are perceived as more harmful in non-U.S. countries, especially harm to family reputation. Lower trust in other people and lower trust in sense of safety in one’s neighborhood correlate with increased perceptions of harm of online harassment. In terms of remedies, participants in most countries prefer monetary compensation, apologies, and publicly revealing offender’s identities compared to the U.S. Social media platform design and policy must consider regional values and norms, which may depart from U.S. centric-approaches.

Social media platforms exacerbate trauma, and many users experience various forms of trauma unique to them (e.g., doxxing and swatting). Trauma is the psychological and physical response to experiencing a deeply disturbing event. Platforms’ failures to address trauma threaten users’ well-being globally, especially amongst minoritized groups. Platform policies also expose moderators and designers to trauma through content they must engage with as part of their jobs (e.g., child sexual abuse). We consider how a trauma-informed approach might help address or decrease the likelihood of (re)experiencing trauma online. A trauma-informed approach to social media recognizes that everyone likely has a trauma history and that trauma is experienced at the individual, secondary, collective, and cultural levels. This paper proceeds by detailing trauma and its impacts. We then describe how the six trauma-informed principles can be applied to social media design, content moderation, and companies. We conclude by offering recommendations that balance platform responsibility and accountability with well-being and healing for all.

Online harassment is pervasive. While substantial research has examined the nature of online harassment and how to moderate it, little work has explored how social media users evaluate the profiles of online harassers. This is important for helping people who may be experiencing or observing harassment to quickly and efficiently evaluate the user doing the harassing. We conducted a lab experiment (N=45) that eye-tracked participants while they viewed profiles of users who engaged in online harassment on mock Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram profiles. We evaluated what profile elements they looked at and for how long relative to a control group, and their qualitative attitudes about harasser profiles. Results showed that participants look at harassing users' post history more quickly than non-harassing users. They are also somewhat more likely to recall harassing profiles than non-harassing profiles. However, they do not spend more time on harassing profiles. Understanding what users pay attention to and recall may offer new design opportunities for supporting people who experience or observe harassment online.

This project illuminates Black women and femme’s experiences with unwanted behavior and harassment on social media, and how they (re)claim and transform their experiences to cope, heal, and experience joy. This work situates Black women and femmes’ experiences within extant social media research, and examines how their unique identity creates multiple forms of interlocking oppression. In our focus groups, participants (N=49) described harms they experienced through racism, misogynoir, ableism, and sexual objectification, and their complex labor of protecting and transforming their experiences online. Despite the harmful effects of unwanted behavior online, participants described a Black feminist transformative politic, in which they cultivated healing and joy through various methods offline and online. Using a transformative justice lens, we discuss their experiences of harassment from white women and men, as well as the complexities of cultural betrayal when experiencing harassment from Black men.

Blind and low vision people use visual description services (VDS) to gain visual interpretation and build access in a world that privileges sight. Despite their many benefits, VDS have many harmful privacy and security implications. As a result, researchers are suggesting, exploring, and building obfuscation systems that detect and obscure private or sensitive materials. However, as obfuscation depends largely on sight to interpret outcomes, it is unknown whether Blind and low vision people would find such approaches useful. Our work aims to center the perspectives and opinions of Blind and low vision people on the potential of obfuscation to address privacy concerns in VDS. By reporting on interviews with 20 Blind and low vision people who use VDS, our findings reveal that popular research trends in obfuscation fail to capture the needs of Blind and low vision people. While obfuscation might be helpful in gaining more control, tensions around obfuscation misrecognition and confirmation are prominent. We turn to the framework of interdependence to unpack and understand obfuscation in VDS, enabling us to complicate privacy concerns, uncover the labor of Blind and low vision people, and emphasize the importance of safeguards. We provide design directions to move the trajectory of obfuscation research forward.

This project illuminates what data youth believe online advertisers and social media companies collect about them. We situate these findings within the context of current advertising regulations and compare youth beliefs with what data social media companies report collecting based on their privacy policies. Through interviews with 21 youth ages 10-17 in the United States, we learn that participants are largely aware of how their interactions on the website or app are used to inform personalized content. However, certain types of information like geolocation or how long data is retained is less clear to them. We also learn about what school and family factors influence youth to adopt apps and websites. This work has implications for design and policy related to companies' personal data collection and targeted advertising, especially for youth.

Social media platforms aspire to create online experiences where users can participate safely and equitably. However, women around the world experience widespread online harassment, including insults, stalking, aggression, threats, and non-consensual sharing of sexual photos. This article describes women's perceptions of harm associated with online harassment and preferred platform responses to that harm. We conducted a survey in 14 geographic regions around the world (N = 3,993), focusing on regions whose perspectives have been insufficiently elevated in social media governance decisions (e.g. Mongolia, Cameroon). Results show that, on average, women perceive greater harm associated with online harassment than men, especially for non-consensual image sharing. Women also prefer most platform responses compared to men, especially removing content and banning users; however, women are less favorable towards payment as a response. Addressing global gender-based violence online requires understanding how women experience online harms and how they wish for it to be addressed. This is especially important given that the people who build and govern technology are not typically those who are most likely to experience online harms.

We are delighted to present this issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, which contains scholarship from the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) community. This issue has 190 papers, 177 submitted in June 2020 and 13 submitted in October 2020. It represents contributions from two Program Committees, including external reviewers, Associate Chairs, and Editors, who together have conducted a rigorous review process. As Papers Chairs, we are grateful for the community's collective efforts to continue shaping and sharing CSCW's tradition of high-quality scholarship during a global pandemic.

Older adults are often portrayed as passive social media users who consume content rather than actively posting content. However, this binary divide between active and passive social media use overlooks nuanced kinds of engagement online. Via an eye-tracking study of older adults' Facebook use, this work shows how not clicking or commenting on content can involve engaged kinds of social media use even if they are not visible to other users or to the platform. Older adults' decisions to not actively click or comment on social media content---an act which is often associated with non-engagement---can be intentional and relational acts of caregiving. We draw from feminist care theories to draw parallels between the invisibility of care work that older adults do on social media and the invisibility often rendered in their offline lives. We discuss theoretical, methodological, and design implications for supporting older adults as engaged participants in relational and intentional care work.

Social media platforms aspire to deliver fair resolutions after online harassment. Platforms rely on sanctions like removing content or banning users but these punitive responses provide little opportunity for justice or reparation for targets of harassment. This may be especially important for youth, who experience pervasive harassment which can have uniquely harmful effects on their wellbeing. We conducted a text-message based survey with 832 U.S. adolescents and young adults, ages 14-24, to explore their attitudes towards social media companies' responses to online harassment. We find that youth are twice as likely (41% versus 20%) not to trust social media companies' ability to achieve a fair resolution as they are to trust them. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of youth expressed a preference for an apology from the offender after online harassment, and they were twice as likely to prefer a private apology to a public one (29% versus 14%). Preferences also vary by identity, revealing how a one-size-fits-all approach can harm some youth while benefitting others. We reflect on the opportunities and risks associated with institutional trust and restorative justice for supporting youth who experience online harassment.

We are delighted to welcome you to this issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, which contains scholarship from the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) community. This is the second issue that represents the new quarterly submission model. This issue has 91 papers accepted from the January 2020 round (16 previously accepted papers from the January 2020 round were published in a prior issue and another 19 accepted this round will be published in a later issue). This represents an overall 40.6% acceptance rate from the 310 submissions in January 2020. This issue represents the contributions of external reviewers, Associate Chairs, and the dedicated Editors, who were essential to carrying through the review process, especially during a global pandemic. As Papers Chairs, we are delighted to continue shaping and disseminating CSCW's tradition of high-quality scholarship.

No abstract available.

Digital data pervades everyday life, from personal photos shared on social media to voice commands for Amazon Alexa. A widespread industry culture of 'move fast and break things,' however, has compelled data management practices that prioritize profit over preservation. This paper draws from archival theories of appraisal to foreground control, power, subjectivity, and emotion in computing practices that treat data storage as a neutral or objective cost-center. We draw on postmodern archival appraisal theory that recognizes the archive as a powerful and subjective curator of identity and memory. The theoretical basis of archival decision practices, in turn, establishes the value of the archival record and thus the need to save it. With three primary issues of appraisal theory as a framework, we report on an interview study with adults (N=17), ages 51-72, who are in a transitional life-stage that focuses them on their experiences and memories that are worth keeping or discarding. We sketch implications for data management paths that forefront legacy, life transitions, precarity, and control.

E-commerce sites have an incentive to encourage impulse buying, even when not in the consumer's best interest. This study investigates what features e-commerce sites use to encourage impulse buying and what tools consumers desire to curb their online spending. We present two studies: (1) a systematic content analysis of 200 top e-commerce websites in the U.S. and (2) a survey of online impulse buyers (N=151). From Study 1, we find that e-commerce sites contain multiple features that encourage impulsive buying, including those that lower perceived risks, leverage social influence, and enhance perceived proximity to the product. Conversely, from Study 2 we find that online impulse buyers want tools that (a) encourage deliberation and avoidance, (b) enforce spending limits and postponement, (c) increase checkout effort, (d) make costs more salient, and (e) reduce product desire. These findings inform the design of "friction'' technologies that help users make more deliberative consumer choices.

Parents can be subjected to scrutiny and judgment for their parenting choices. Much of this scrutiny is experienced online, especially around stigmatized topics such as divorce, custody, postpartum depression, and miscarriage. Prior theory suggests that parents might be able to access greater support online when anonymous, but other evidence suggests that anonymity may increase bad behavior. Drawing from ten years of Reddit parenting boards, we show that parents are more likely to discuss potentially stigmatizing topics using anonymous ("throwaway") accounts. We find that, on average, throwaway comments are more likely to receive a response, receive more responses that are longer, and receive responses that have higher karma scores than topically similar comments posted by non-throwaway accounts. We argue that self-identified throwaway accounts provide a crucial environment for supporting parents with stigmatizing experiences. They also provide a shared platform signal (the throwaway account) which enables other Reddit users to access shared experiences and support. We propose that a hybrid combination of identified and anonymous platforms could provide more supportive online experiences for parents and other users.

What does reliability mean for building a grounded theory? What about when writing an auto-ethnography? When is it appropriate to use measures like inter-rater reliability (IRR)? Reliability is a familiar concept in traditional scientific practice, but how, and even whether to establish reliability in qualitative research is an oft-debated question. For researchers in highly interdisciplinary fields like computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human-computer interaction (HCI), the question is particularly complex as collaborators bring diverse epistemologies and training to their research. In this article, we use two approaches to understand reliability in qualitative research. We first investigate and describe local norms in the CSCW and HCI literature, then we combine examples from these findings with guidelines from methods literature to help researchers answer questions like: "should I calculate IRR?" Drawing on a meta-analysis of a representative sample of CSCW and HCI papers from 2016-2018, we find that authors use a variety of approaches to communicate reliability; notably, IRR is rare, occurring in around 1/9 of qualitative papers. We reflect on current practices and propose guidelines for reporting on reliability in qualitative research using IRR as a central example of a form of agreement. The guidelines are designed to generate discussion and orient new CSCW and HCI scholars and reviewers to reliability in qualitative research.

Gender equality between mothers and fathers is critical for the social and economic wellbeing of children, mothers, and families. Over the past 50 years, gender roles have begun to converge, with mothers doing more work outside of the home and fathers doing more domestic work. However, popular parenting sites in the U.S. continue to be heavily gendered. We explore parenting roles and identities on the platform Reddit.com which is used by both mothers and fathers. We draw on seven years of data from three major parenting subreddits-Parenting, Mommit, and Daddit-to investigate what topics parents discuss on Reddit and how they vary across parenting subreddits. We find some similarities in topics across the three boards, such as sleep training, as well as differences, such as fathers talking about custody cases and Halloween. We discuss the role of pseudonymity for providing parents with a platform to discuss sensitive parenting topics. We conclude by highlighting the benefits of both gender-inclusive and role-specific parenting boards. This work provides a roadmap for using computational techniques to understand parenting practices online at large scale.

The digital sharing economy has introduced opportunities for economic growth, productivity, and technological innovation. However, the adoption of sharing economy applications may be inaccessible to certain demographics, including older adults, low-income adults, and individuals who are not college educated. This research investigates how the demographic factors: trust, computer self-efficacy, and perceived ease of use, impact participation in the sharing economy. Drawing on survey data with 508 participants, we found that trust in institutions, computer self-efficacy, and perceived ease of use positively correlate to individuals' past use of and willingness to pay for future sharing economy services, but age is negatively correlated. Surprisingly, we do not find that sharing economy users are more likely to have higher trust in strangers, higher incomes, or more education. We compare our findings to existing research, discuss why institutional trust might negate other concerns about sharing economy use, and explore opportunities to support broader participation in the sharing economy.

Father involvement is important for child well-being. However, fathers still do significantly less childcare than mothers, due in part to traditional gender norms. This research investigates whether incorporating do-it-yourself (DIY) language and imagery into parenting blogs is an effective mechanism for boosting fathers' willingness to perform childcare activities. We conducted a between-subjects experiment with 374 participants in the U.S. who responded to ten parenting blog posts. Subjects were randomized to view posts with either DIY or neutral language and either routine childcare activities (e.g., changing diapers) or interactive ones (e.g., finger painting). Results show that DIY language actually decreases a father's willingness to do a childcare activity. Further, fathers underestimate how socially appropriate it is for them to perform childcare activities and this misperception relates to their willingness to get involved. We draw on social norms literature to recommend next steps for designing interfaces to support father involvement in childrearing.

Prior research shows that parents receive a number of benefits through sharing about their children online, but little is known about children?s perspectives about parent sharing. We conducted a survey with 331 parent-child pairs to examine parents? and children?s preferences about what parents share about their children on social media. We find that parents and children are in agreement in their perception of how often and how much information parents share about their children on social media. However, there is disagreement about the permission-seeking process: children believe their parents should ask permission more than parents think they should, and parents believe they should ask for permission more often than they actually do, especially younger parents. We describe two categories of content that children are okay, or not okay, with their parents sharing about them. We offer design directions for managing parent sharing.

E-commerce designers must decide how many products to display at one time. Choice overload research has demonstrated the surprising finding that more choice is not necessarily better?selecting from larger choice sets can be more cognitively demanding and can result in lower levels of choice satisfaction. This research tests the choice overload effect in an e-commerce context and explores how the choice overload effect is influenced by an individual's tendency to maximize or satisfice decisions. We conducted an online experiment with 611 participants randomly assigned to select a gourmet chocolate bar from either 12, 24, 40, 50, 60, or 72 different options. Consistent with prior work, we find that maximizers are less satisfied with their product choice than satisficers. However, using Bayesian analysis, we find that it's unlikely that choice set size affects choice satisfaction by much, if at all. We discuss why the decision-making process may be different in e-commerce contexts than the physical settings used in previous choice overload experiments.

Consumers are turning to Facebook Groups to buy and sell with strangers in their local communities. This trend is counter-intuitive given Facebook's lack of conventional e-commerce features, such as sophisticated search engines and reputation systems. We interviewed 18 members of two Mom-to-Mom Facebook sale groups. Despite a lack of commerce tools, members perceived sale groups as an easy-to-use way to quickly and conveniently buy and sell. Most important to members was that the groups felt safe and trustworthy. Drawing on these insights, we contribute a novel framing, community commerce, which explains the trust mechanisms that enable transactions between strangers in some groups. Community commerce fosters trust through (a) exclusive membership to a closed group, (b) regulation and sanctioning of behavior at the admin, member, and group level, and (c) a shared group identity or perceived similarity (though, surprisingly, not through social bonding). We discuss how community commerce affords unique and sometimes superior trust assurances and propose design implications for platforms hoping to foster trust between members who buy, sell, or share amongst themselves.

Prior research shows that the social construction of gender evolves in relation to specific economic and social processes. This paper examines how the practice of DIY (do-it-yourself) making has become a productive frame for a collective of fathers in the U.S. to express masculinity, amidst increasingly precarious economics and shifting norms of gender and labor in the home. Drawing from a qualitative interview study with fathers (n=22) and visual analysis of DIY father blogs (n=29), we examine how DIY fatherhood was produced across the material and discursive practices of blogging. This paper contributes an empirical account of a contemporary phenomenon: the construction and performance of DIY practice as a category of fatherhood identity and domestic masculinity. Further, the paper describes how fathers engage in entrepreneurial thinking as a form of domestic male labor.

Online harassment is a pervasive and pernicious problem. Techniques like natural language processing and machine learning are promising approaches for identifying abusive language, but they fail to address structural power imbalances perpetuated by automated labeling and classification. Similarly, platform policies and reporting tools are designed for a seemingly homogenous user base and do not account for individual experiences and systems of social oppression. This paper describes the design and evaluation of HeartMob, a platform built by and for people who are disproportionately affected by the most severe forms of online harassment. We conducted interviews with 18 HeartMob users, both targets and supporters, about their harassment experiences and their use of the site. We examine systems of classification enacted by technical systems, platform policies, and users to demonstrate how 1) labeling serves to validate (or invalidate) harassment experiences; 2) labeling motivates bystanders to provide support; and 3) labeling content as harassment is critical for surfacing community norms around appropriate user behavior. We discuss these results through the lens of Bowker and Star's classification theories and describe implications for labeling and classifying online abuse. Finally, informed by intersectional feminist theory, we argue that fully addressing online harassment requires the ongoing integration of vulnerable users' needs into the design and moderation of online platforms.

Increasing numbers of American parents identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT). Shifting social movements are beginning to achieve greater recognition for LGBT parents and more rights for their families; however, LGBT parents still experience stigma and judgment in a variety of social contexts. We interviewed 28 LGBT parents to investigate how they navigate their online environments in light of these societal shifts. We find that 1) LGBT parents use social media sites to detect disapproval and identify allies within their social networks; 2) LGBT parents become what we call incidental advocates, when everyday social media posts are perceived as advocacy work even when not intended as such; and 3) for LGBT parents, privacy is a complex and collective responsibility, shared with children, partners, and families. We consider the complexities of LGBT parents' online disclosures in the context of shifting social movements and discuss the importance of supporting individual and collective privacy boundaries in these contexts.

Mealtimes are a cherished part of everyday life around the world. Often centered on family, friends, or special occasions, sharing meals is a practice embedded with traditions and values. However, as mobile phone adoption becomes increasingly pervasive, tensions emerge about how appropriate it is to use personal devices while sharing a meal with others. Furthermore, while personal devices have been designed to support awareness for the individual user (e.g., notifications), little is known about how to support shared awareness in acceptability in social settings such as meals. In order to understand attitudes about mobile phone use during shared mealtimes, we conducted an online survey with 1,163 English-speaking participants. We find that attitudes about mobile phone use at meals differ depending on the particular phone activity and on who at the meal is engaged in that activity, children versus adults. We also show that three major factors impact participants' attitudes: 1) their own mobile phone use; 2) their age; and 3) whether a child is present at the meal. We discuss the potential for incorporating social awareness features into mobile phone systems to ease tensions around conflicting mealtime behaviors and attitudes.

Families are becoming more culturally heterogeneous due to a rise in intermarriage, geographic mobility, and access to a greater diversity of cultural perspectives online. Investigating the challenges of cross-cultural parenting can help us support this growing demographic, as well as better understand how families integrate and negotiate advice from diverse online and offline sources in making parenting decisions. We interviewed parents from 18 families to understand the practices they adopt to meet the challenges of cross-cultural parenting. We investigated how these families respond to conflicts while integrating diverse cultural views, as well as how they utilize the wealth of parenting resources available online in navigating these tasks. We identify five themes focused on how these families find and evaluate advice, connect with social support, resolve intra-family tensions, incorporate multicultural practices, and seek out diverse views. Based on our findings, we contribute three implications for design and translations of these implications to concrete technology ideas that aim to help families better integrate multiple cultures into everyday life.

The number of stay-at-home dads (SAHDs) in the U.S. has risen dramatically over the past 30 years. Despite gaining social acceptability, SAHDs still experience isolation and judgment in their offline environments. This research explores how SAHDs use the Internet and social media related to their roles as fathers. We conducted interviews with 18 SAHDs about their families, their identities, and their social experiences. We find that they turn to social media to gain social support and overcome isolation they experience offline. However, they engage in strategic self-disclosure on particular platforms to avoid judgment related to being SAHDs. They rely on online platforms to give off both traditionally feminine and masculine impressions'as loving caregivers of their children while simultaneously as do-it-yourself men who make things around the house. Through creating Facebook groups and using anonymous social media sites, SAHDs create multidimensional social networks that allow them to cope better with the role change. We reflect on the evolving roles of SAHDs in society, and put forth an argument for greater support for diverse kinds of parenting online.

Extensive scholarship has investigated technology use among families. Existing work has focused primarily on parents' reactions to and restrictions of their children's technology use; here, we explore the underlying tensions surrounding technology use in the home. We draw on historical perspectives of adolescence and family life to better understand technology's impact on present-day parents and teens. Through an interview study with 18 parent-child pairs (19 parents; 23 children, ages 10-17), we find a number of technology tensions, including 1) parents' underestimation of children's technology use; 2) children's perception that parents only tell them which behaviors to avoid; 3) both parents' and children's poor adherence to household technology rules; and 4) parents' and children's desire for mutual attention. We argue that the use of personal devices introduces distinctive challenges into modern family life, due to the limited visibility (or practical obscurity) of personal device use, expectations of constant connectivity, and overly-romanticized notions of family time. We consider the historical evolution of both teenage and family life, and conclude that consistent and realistic expectations around work, attention, and adolescence may help families better manage household technology use.

Parents and children both use technology actively and increasingly, but prior work shows that concerns about attention, family time, and family relationships abound. We conducted a survey with 249 parent-child pairs distributed across 40 U.S. states to understand the types of technology rules (also known as restrictive mediation) they have established in their family and how effective those rules are perceived to be. Our data robustly show that children (age 10-17) are more likely to follow rules that constrain technology activities (e.g., no Snapchat) than rules that constrain technology use in certain contexts (e.g., no phone at the dinner table). Children find context constraints harder to live up to, parents find them harder to enforce, and parents' most common challenge when trying to enforce such rules is that children -can't put it down.- This is consistent with the idea that banning certain technologies is currently easier than setting more nuanced boundaries. Parents and children agree that parents should also unplug when spending time with family, while children alone express frustration with the common parent practice of posting about children online. Together, our results suggest several mechanisms by which designers and families can improve parent-child relationships around technology use.

Parents, educators, and policymakers have expressed concern about the future implications of young people's sharing practices on social media sites. However, little is known about how young people themselves feel about their online behaviors being preserved and resurfaced later in adulthood. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 28 college-going, primarily female, young adults about their use of social media and their transition from adolescence into young adulthood. We find that participants recognize archival value in their own Facebook histories, despite sometimes perceiving these histories to be embarrassing. They experience tensions between meeting their current self-presentational goals and maintaining the authenticity of historical content. To reconcile these tensions, they engage in retrospective impression management practices, such as curating past content. They also engage in 'backstalking' behaviors, in which they view and engage with other users' Facebook histories' openly with close ties and discreetly with weak ties. We consider this ludic engagement through the lens of emerging adulthood and discuss the theoretical implications of our findings, especially in light of emerging applications which intentionally resurface digital traces.

While extensive research has investigated the risks of children sharing their personal information online, little work has investigated the implications of parents sharing personal information about their children online. Drawing on 102 interviews with parents in the U.S., we investigate how parents decide what to disclose about their children on social network sites (SNSs). We find that mothers take on the responsibility of sharing content about their children more than fathers do. Fathers are more restrictive about sharing to broad and professional audiences and are concerned about sharing content that could be perceived as sexually suggestive. Both mothers and fathers work to leverage affordances of SNSs to limit oversharing. Building on prior work, we explore parental disclosure management, which describes how parents decide what to share about their children online. We also describe an emerging third shift of work that highlights the additional work parents take on to manage children's identities online. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications for designing SNSs to better support family life online.

Fathers are taking on more childcare and household responsibilities than they used to and many non-profit and government organizations have pushed for changes in policies to support fathers. Despite this effort, little research has explored how fathers go online related to their roles as fathers. Drawing on an interview study with 37 fathers, we find that they use social media to document and archive fatherhood, learn how to be a father, and access social support. They also go online to support diverse family needs, such as single fathers' use of Reddit instead of Facebook, fathers raised by single mothers' search for role models online, and stay-at-home fathers' use of father blogs. However, fathers are constrained by privacy concerns and perceptions of judgment relating to sharing content online about their children. Drawing on theories of fatherhood, we present theoretical and design ideas for designing online spaces to better support fathers and fatherhood. We conclude with a call for a research agenda to support fathers online.

Theories of empowerment explain how people gain personal and political control to take action to improve their lives. However, empowerment theories were developed prior to the Internet and fail to account for the speed and scale that people can find one another online. One domain where empowerment is critical is caring for children with special needs, in which parents are required to navigate a complex maze of services and processes to access care for their child. We conducted 43 interviews with parents of children with special needs to investigate whether using social media sites helps them to perform this caregiving work. Critically, parents are able to do this through almost real-time access to other parents on Facebook. This work introduces the concept of networked empowerment, that describes how parents find other parents, access resources, and explore new ways for promoting health advocacy among caregivers at a local and national level. We conclude with design implications for facilitating faster and better access to information and support for caregivers.

The practice of sharing family photographs is as old as the camera itself. Many mothers now share baby photos online, yet little is known about what kinds of baby photos they share and their motivations for doing so. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 22 new mothers, we find that they share cute, funny, milestone, and family and friend photos but refrain from sharing crying and naked photos. While some mothers harbor concerns about controlling information, oversharing, and digital footprints, the benefits of receiving validation outweighs their concerns. Sharing baby photos on Facebook helps new mothers enact and receive validation of "good mothering." However, mothers are charged with the responsibility of stewarding their children's privacy and identities online. We introduce the concept of privacy stewardship to describe the responsibility parents take on when deciding what is appropriate to share about their children online and ensuring that family and friends respect and maintain the integrity of those rules. As a result, mothers must exchange benefits of sharing baby photos with risks of creating digital footprints for their child.

In this work, we designed and field-tested a system called Home Trivia to explore how we can use activity traces captured in the home to allow household members to reflect on how they use technology, which has become an issue of increasing concern among families that have seen their home lives intertwined with Internet-enabled devices. Home Trivia captures traces of using technology at home and then shows those traces to family members as content of a puzzle game they can play together. The results of testing Home Trivia in the field show that the design of the game allows engagement and reflection to reinforce each other. Moreover, our work enriches and further develops the idea of using ambiguity as a resource for design with the insight that allowing users to reduce ambiguity through recollecting past events and communicating with others can help trigger reflection.

Social media use is widespread, but many people worry about overuse. This paper explores how and why people take breaks from social media. Using a mixed methods approach, we pair data from users who tweeted about giving up Twitter for Lent with an interview study of social media users. We find that 64% of users who proclaim that they are giving up Twitter for Lent successfully do so. Among those who fail, 31% acknowledge their failure; the other 69% simply return. We observe hedging patterns (e.g. "I thought about giving up Twitter for Lent but"?) that surfaced uncertainty about social media behavior. Interview participants were concerned about the tradeoffs of spending time on social media versus doing other things and of spending time on social media rather than in "real life." We discuss gaps in related theory that might help reduce users' anxieties and open design problems related to designing systems and services that can help users manage their own social media use.

Follower count is important to Twitter users: it can indicate popularity and prestige. Yet, holistically, little is understood about what factors -- like social behavior, message content, and network structure - lead to more followers. Such information could help technologists design and build tools that help users grow their audiences. In this paper, we study 507 Twitter users and a half-million of their tweets over 15 months. Marrying a longitudinal approach with a negative binomial auto-regression model, we find that variables for message content, social behavior, and network structure should be given equal consideration when predicting link formations on Twitter. To our knowledge, this is the first longitudinal study of follow predictors, and the first to show that the relative contributions of social behavior and mes-sage content are just as impactful as factors related to social network structure for predicting growth of online social networks. We conclude with practical and theoretical implications for designing social media technologies.

Facebook is a global phenomenon, yet little is known about use of the site in urban parts of the developing world where the social network's users are increasingly located. We qualitatively studied Facebook use among 28 young adults living in Viwandani, an informal settlement, or slum, in Nairobi, Kenya. We find that to overcome the costs associated with Internet use, participants consolidated diverse online activities onto Facebook; here we focus on the most common practice--using Facebook to support income generation. Viwandani residents used the site to look for employment opportunities, market themselves, and seek remittances from friends and family abroad. We use our findings to motivate a design agenda for the urban poor built on an understanding that Facebook is used, with mixed-success, to support income generation. A key part of this agenda calls for developing ICT interventions grounded in users' existing practices rather than introducing new and unfamiliar ones.

Facebook use is pervasive in developed countries where computers, smartphones, high-bandwidth Internet, and electricity are ubiquitous. In this paper, we examine Facebook use in a country where social media participation is growing, but less developed technological infrastructures and uneven access to technology limit use. We conducted observations and 24 interviews at Internet cafés in rural Kenya. Our findings reveal how costs associated with using the Internet, limited access to computers and smartphones and unreliable electricity hinder online participation. We draw on these results to discuss the critical role of constraints in understanding social media use, to raise questions about broadening online participation and to highlight ethical issues researchers must consider when studying Facebook use in developing regions.

Minorities are the fastest growing demographic in the U.S. and the poverty level in the U.S. is the highest it has been in 50 years. We interviewed middle to upper class, suburban, white American parents and low-income, urban, African-American parents to understand how each group incorporates technology into their lives. Participants had teens in their homes and devices like computers and cell phones played a powerful and preeminent role in family life. Our results show that socioeconomic differences both reflect and reinforce technology use at home. Specifically, low socioeconomic status families share devices more often and low socioeconomic status teens have more responsibility and independence in their technology use. We argue that that as low socioeconomic status families become the majority demographic, the CHI community needs to better understand how to design for these groups.

Many young African American males have a passion for video games, but they don't often translate that passion into learning about computing. Part of the problem is that they do not identify with computing as a social norm within their peer group. This disidentification with computing can negatively impact academic performance and limit opportunities for upward mobility. We developed a job training program called Glitch Game Testers in which young African American men are trained to 'Sbreak open the black box' of their game consoles to learn about computing. Perceptions of peers' technical competency were measured before and after the summer 2010 program. Results showed that participants were more likely to view their peers as technical resources and their overall access to technical resources increased. Broader implications for motivating technology adoption in HCI are discussed.

With millions of teenagers on the Internet, millions of parents are trying to understand what their teens are doing and why. Understanding how technology use impacts teens' learning, growth, and social development is critical for their health and wellbeing and for the welfare of the family. Yet, balancing parent authority with teen privacy and autonomy is difficult. We conducted an interview study with 16 parents to examine challenges in "technoparenting" - parenting teens' technology use. Parents said they wanted more transparency in their teens' use of cell phones and the Internet and they struggled with their own unfamiliarity with technology. Technoparenting is a distributed problem and, surprisingly, parents wanted support and collaboration from the broader community. We conclude with design implications for a socially translucent "digital window".

Conflict and disruption are a part of everyday life, yet research in the home largely examines consensus and rituals. In this paper, we use Holmes and Rahe's categorization of major life events in order to investigate disruption within the home. We examine posts contributed to an online technology support board and show how life disruptions fundamentally impact technology practices and routines. We conclude that examining technology in the context of life disruption is a worthwhile area for further work.

The attention economy motivates participation in peer-produced sites on the Web like YouTube and Wikipedia. However, this economy appears to break down at work. We studied a large internal corporate blogging community using log files and interviews and found that employees expected to receive attention when they contributed to blogs, but these expectations often went unmet. Like in the external blogosphere, a few people received most of the attention, and many people received little or none. Employees expressed frustration if they invested time and received little or no perceived return on investment. While many corporations are looking to adopt Web-based communication tools like blogs, wikis, and forums, these efforts will fail unless employees are motivated to participate and contribute content. We identify where the attention economy breaks down in a corporate blog community and suggest mechanisms for improvement.

Computing education suffers from low enrollment and a lack of diversity. Both of these problems require changes across the entire computing education pipeline. The "Georgia Computes!" alliance, funded by the National Science Foundation's Broadening Participation in Computing program, seeks to improve the computing education pipeline in Georgia. "Georgia Computes!" is having a measurable effect at each stage of the pipeline, but has not yet shown an impact across the whole pipeline.

We describe the implementation of a six-week course to teach Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to high school students. Our goal was to explore the potential of HCI in motivating students to pursue future studies in related computing fields. Participants in our course learned to make connections between the types of technology they use in their daily lives and the design processes that went into creating these technologies. We suggest that by portraying computing through the lens of HCI, as an innovative, creative, and challenging field with authentic, real-world applications, we may be able to motivate students to become more interested in computing.

Studies show that teenagers perceive computing to be boring, antisocial, and irrelevant to their lives. We interviewed 13 teenagers from local Atlanta schools and observed over 40 teenagers in after-school technology programs to learn more about their perceptions of computing. We then interviewed 22 graduate students in the Human-Centered Computing and Human-Computer Interaction programs at Georgia Tech in order to learn about the factors that motivated them to pursue degrees in computing. We found that teenagers perceived computing to be boring, solitary, and lacking real-world context, yet graduate students described their research as exciting, social, and having a direct and meaningful impact on the world around them. Our results suggest that there is an opportunity to increase interest in computing among teenagers by bridging the gap between their perceptions of computing and the actual opportunities that are offered in computing disciplines. In this paper, we first describe our interview results. We then discuss our findings and propose a design-based curriculum to teach teenagers core computing principles. The goal of this curriculum is to prepare and motivate them for careers in today's expanding, Internet-based, global economy. We suggest that by portraying computing as an innovative, creative, and challenging field with authentic, real-world applications, we may be able to motivate teenagers to become more excited to pursue careers in computing.

Teenagers describe their perceptions of computing as boring, anti-social, and irrelevant to their lives. We are working on a broadening participation in computing project to portray computing as an innovative, creative, and challenging field with authentic, real-world applications. We have developed an Introduction to HCI course for teenagers in which they will participate in design-based projects using end user development tools on the web. The increasing availability of web-based software for creating mashups offers an opportunity to engage teenagers in computing by meeting them in their existing informal and fun environments on the Web.

Over the last several years, studies of instant messaging have observed its increasing role in the workplace[1] and in social situations[2]. We propose that modifying applications to interact with users over Instant Messaging (as IM bots) extends the collaborative benefits of IM into new areas. As IM Bots participating in group chatrooms, applications that had previously been restricted to a single user command line are able to engage in many to many interactions between users and applications. Current command line oriented user interfaces can be made into collaborative interfaces that exhibit (at a basic level) the ethnomethodological property of accountability as well as supporting legitimate peripheral participation.

VERN is an online collaborative tool that coordinates and distributes the process of finding optimal meeting times across the members of a group. The system combines the underlying democratic process inherent in email chain conversations with a remapping of the voting process to a calendar-based graphical user interface. As an alternative to existing forms of constrained democracy in which members vote from a previously defined set of options, we offer VERN as a case study for the potential of using a visual interface to enable all group members to contribute equally without constraints to the group decision making process.