Squadbox: A Tool to Combat Email Harassment Using Friendsourced Moderation

Communication platforms have struggled to provide effective tools for people facing harassment online. We conducted interviews with 18 recipients of online harassment to understand their strategies for coping, finding that they often resorted to asking friends for help. Inspired by these findings, we explore the feasibility of friendsourced moderation as a technique for combating online harassment. We present Squadbox, a tool to help recipients of email harassment coordinate a "squad" of friend moderators to shield and support them during attacks. Friend moderators intercept email from strangers and can reject, organize, and redirect emails, as well as collaborate on filters. Squadbox is designed to let its users implement highly customized workflows, as we found in interviews that harassment and preferences for mitigating it vary widely. We evaluated Squadbox on five pairs of friends in a field study, finding that participants could comfortably navigate around privacy and personalization concerns.

[1]  Tamara Shepherd,et al.  Histories of Hating , 2015 .

[2]  Arvind Narayanan,et al.  I never signed up for this! Privacy implications of email tracking , 2018, Proc. Priv. Enhancing Technol..

[3]  Björn Gambäck,et al.  Using Convolutional Neural Networks to Classify Hate-Speech , 2017, ALW@ACL.

[4]  Cliff Lampe,et al.  Classification and Its Consequences for Online Harassment , 2017, Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact..

[5]  J. Wolak,et al.  Does online harassment constitute bullying? An exploration of online harassment by known peers and online-only contacts. , 2007, The Journal of adolescent health : official publication of the Society for Adolescent Medicine.

[6]  Robert E. Kraut,et al.  Shaping Pro and Anti-Social Behavior on Twitch Through Moderation and Example-Setting , 2017, CSCW.

[7]  Amanda Lenhart,et al.  Online Harassment, Digital Abuse, and Cyberstalking in America , 2016 .

[8]  Alexei Bastidas,et al.  Technology Solutions to Combat Online Harassment , 2017, ALW@ACL.

[9]  R. Geiger.  Bot-based collective blocklists in Twitter: the counterpublic moderation of harassment in a networked public space , 2016 .

[10]  Alice E. Marwick,et al.  Online Harassment, Defamation, and Hateful Speech: A Primer of the Legal Landscape , 2014 .

[11]  Mark S. Ackerman,et al.  Mailing Lists: Why Are They Still Here, What's Wrong With Them, and How Can We Fix Them? , 2015, CHI.

[12]  Cody Buntain,et al.  A Large Labeled Corpus for Online Harassment Research , 2017, WebSci.

[13]  Michael S. Bernstein,et al.  EmailValet: managing email overload through private, accountable crowdsourcing , 2013, CSCW.

[14]  Jesse Fox,et al.  Women’s experiences with general and sexual harassment in online video games: Rumination, organizational responsiveness, withdrawal, and coping strategies , 2017, New Media Soc..

[15]  Aaron Smith,et al.  Crossing the line: what counts as online harassment? , 2018 .

[16]  Robert Faris,et al.  Understanding Harmful Speech Online , 2016 .

[17]  Zahra Ashktorab,et al.  Identifying Women's Experiences With and Strategies for Mitigating Negative Effects of Online Harassment , 2017, CSCW.

[18]  Michael Veale,et al.  Like Trainer, Like Bot? Inheritance of Bias in Algorithmic Content Moderation , 2017, SocInfo.

[19]  Olson Jacob Duane.  A Primer of the Legal Landscape , 2015 .

[20]  Lucas Dixon,et al.  Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale , 2016, WWW.

[21]  Amy Johnson,et al.  Reporting, Reviewing, and Responding to Harassment on Twitter , 2015, ArXiv.

[22]  Elizabeth D. Mynatt,et al.  Characterizations of Online Harassment: Comparing Policies Across Social Media Platforms , 2016, GROUP.

[23]  Michael S. Bernstein,et al.  MyriadHub: Efficiently Scaling Personalized Email Conversations with Valet Crowdsourcing , 2017, CHI.

[24]  Pascale Fung,et al.  One-step and Two-step Classification for Abusive Language Detection on Twitter , 2017, ALW@ACL.

[25]  Radha Poovendran,et al.  Deceiving Google's Perspective API Built for Detecting Toxic Comments , 2017, ArXiv.

[26]  Ingmar Weber,et al.  Understanding Abuse: A Typology of Abusive Language Detection Subtasks , 2017, ALW@ACL.

[27]  Zahra Ashktorab,et al.  Designing Cyberbullying Mitigation and Prevention Solutions through Participatory Design With Teenagers , 2016, CHI.

[28]  Kevin Munger.  Tweetment Effects on the Tweeted: Experimentally Reducing Racist Harassment , 2017 .

[29]  Maeve Duggan,et al.  Online Harassment 2017 , 2017 .

[30]  Amy Bruckman,et al.  Hollaback!: the role of storytelling online in a social movement organization , 2013, CSCW.

[31]  Eric Gilbert,et al.  The Bag of Communities: Identifying Abusive Behavior Online with Preexisting Internet Data , 2017, CHI.