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Welcome, everybody. For the next talk, when algorithms fail in our personal lives, it is a one hour talk. Our lovely speaker with us today is Caroline Sanders. She's a user researcher for IBM. She's also an artist, a researcher and a video game designer. She's from the States. And I should also mention that she is a member of the NYC Resistor Hackerspace. And, oh, I see some fans over here. Cool. We already learned in a bunch of talks over the course of Congress what algorithms do when they fail. Yesterday, we learned about how algorithms can discriminate or not discriminate in the hiring process. And Caroline is going to tell us a little more about when it's better not use algorithms because there are some things that algorithm just can't do that humans can do. So please give it up for Caroline and enjoy the talk. Thank you very much. Hi, everyone, I'm Caroline Senders. I should probably first specify that I'm speaking here of my own accord and on behalf of IBM. So just FYI and that this is actually a presentation also on a very strange and specific art project I did back in late November. So when algorithms fail in our personal lives, this is probably the best way to describe me because I live on the Internet. I've spent the past two years studying online fandoms, communities, Internet culture and online harassment. And this is what I do for fun outside of work. I think a lot about language and conversation as identifiers, and I spend a lot of time reading the way in which conversations unfold on different subjects on Reddit, 4chan, H.A., Wikipedia, the way Wikipedia is used as a conversational tool not just to upload information and obviously Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. And the one thing I've sort of learned from all this is that each of these different platforms have a very different identity and have a very different way in which conversation sort of has evolved linguistically to that platform. The way we talk on Reddit is a lot different than th
e way we talk on Twitter. And I think that that is due to the infrastructural design of the platform itself, as well as the ways in which the platform identifies itself to users. So like a code of conduct two years ago, I are actually like a year and a half ago I really started focusing on online harassment. I specifically focused on GamerGate as a video game designer. I saw GamerGate sort of affecting the community around me. I didn't necessarily I'm not driven to study harassment by why it happens, but rather how how does harassment unfold on different sorts of platforms and how do you platforms allow for different kinds of communication? And really, how open is the general user on a platform? How connected are they to the privacy policies and how aware are they of how exposed they are and how permeable their data and information is? So, Tildy, are I explore complex emotions and emotional reactions within systems and I'm going to briefly cover some of the anti harassing research I've done. So sometimes I write things the Internet doesn't like them. Last April, the Internet sent a SWAT team to my mom's house. If you know what swotting is, it's a very popular online harassment tactic that manifests itself. URL oftentimes a fake violent phone call is placed to a local police department. That violent phone call triggers the militarized police to be deployed. And this is what happened to my mom. Sometimes panels I'm on get canceled because maybe they're kind of controversial. I submitted a design panel to South by Southwest and it was canceled due to harassment and threats of violence. So I guess my work seems kind of contentious. I think that it's pretty straightforward. It's generally design. I don't know why anyone have a really massive opinion around it. But the thing I sort of want to talk about actually is and what I care about exploring is how do systems affect behavior. So I said earlier, I'm here now as an IBM representative, but I spend most of my day job act
ually at working on Watson, working in artificial intelligence as a user researcher around conversational analytics for chat robots. That's kind of a mouthful. So I mean by that is I spent a lot of time working with software that allows users to set up chat robots. So I think a lot about the ways in which I'm designing software to help people design conversations that robots have with people. So when I say I believe that systems affect behavior, I live that every day. And I think about the ways in which the structure of an interface actually will lead people to to converse and what that would look like. So in the past two years of doing just, I guess, broad heuristic ethnographic research, what I've come to realize is users have a myriad of different problems that can be solved in similar ways, but yield radically different results mean that we can sort of start approaching ways to solve problems of harassment through either new kinds of algorithms or a really flexible UI on top of an algorithm, i.e., what if we gave people more robust privacy settings and allowed users to start to articulate the ways in which they're reachable and how their data, really their conversations are read? And I think this because algorithms really aren't that smart and language within an algorithm is a it's decontextualized into data. We as sorry we as users, we provide context to language. Language. Language is what we make it. But in a system, it's not simply just bits of data. So I was driven by this thought, how can I make a flexible system to solve a variety of different problems for a variety of different people? So I did what I do best and I made a low res wireframe and I created sort of speculative wireframe to sort of focus myself on what I thought could be achievable. And then I decided to test it against 20 different users I had interviewed had been affected by GamerGate, as well as a handful of gamer gamers themselves who would interact with me on Twitter. And I would ask the
m questions about the ways in which they organize themselves, the ways in which they talk to other people, what conversations they were hoping to get out of interacting with me on Twitter. And what I sort of started to learn is that we need to focus on privacy and social media needs to be as prevalent and as important as writing content itself. So do you see that gray box at the top that is a placeholder for a button that sends you to a redesign privacy page? So from interviewing these 20 users, I got a really robust sense of different kinds of needs and wants users wanted out of Twitter. I interviewed people that had over 100000 followers that absolutely wanted to remain completely public and they want to be reachable at all times. I interviewed some users that had 3000 followers that wanted to be completely hidden, but still have their tweets treated as media, thus shareable. And I read some users that wanted to not go private, which is a very public statement on Twitter to have the lock next to you, but wanting to have all the affordance of privacy. So what I've added is you can see is allow these checkmarks to allow a user to start to change the way in which their written content can be accessed and sort of really actually change the way in which the amount of users on Twitter could start to read content they're posting. So one of them is allow followers of your followers to tweet it, use the idea of friends of friends, do not allow accounts. One, do not allow accounts with less than X followers to follow you or don't allow accounts with less than X days, meaning new accounts are often created in moments of harassment campaign. So if an account was a week old with two followers, that's probably a troll account. And additionally also allows users to sort of say like, oh, if you know you're not on my level, you can't tweet at me not judging. That's an interaction someone wanted. And then I sort of started to think more about what does it mean to exist publicly as 
a person on a platform. Twitter is sort of this mixed identity and mixed emotional state. It's both professional and personal. It's used as a networking tool as well as a social aid and a communicative tool. So people either have really persistent aliases or avatars. They've they have followed them from platform a platform, but they're not using their real name. There's levels of pseudo anonymity on Twitter. In my case, I use my real name and I can't really undo that. So my needs and using Twitter, especially the technologist, exist in a much different way than, say, someone who uses it as a casual medium. And we have very different needs. But through these different kinds of dials, I feel that this serves my needs as well as all the users I've interviewed, because we're able to start to tailor through UI and sort of be able to pull from very like top level of information, just mainly around followers as to how accessible I am at other things, such as blocked accounts and blocked tweets. Right now you can only see blocked accounts. You can't see blocked tweets. What if you could? And I pulled from this because within moments of harassment, even if it's a sustained stalker, there's often a tweet that will trigger it. It's never going to someone's account, at least within a harassment campaigns. You're not really going to someone's account and saying today I'm blocking you. There is often an interaction, a tweet that will trigger that response. So what if you could see that, start to group them together and maybe send a report to Twitter or to yourself and sort of you can the user could start to contextualize. This is a way in which these tweets are lame. So if there's mob harassment campaign, a user could say, I think all of these are linked. And if Twitter is implementing any kind of machine learning or natural language processing, they'd be able to start batching multiple reports at once and see how they're all related. Again, what if you could group mentions toget
her? And I did this last night. One thing that I sort of noticed from a lot of my research is that users don't really have an understanding as to how how their language is actually data and how accessible their things are. So I'm sure you've heard a variety of stories around tweets going viral. Someone tweets something and then months later it's dug up or they tweet something. In the case of this really well-known incident, this woman tweeted a really off color joke about AIDS, got on a plane 12 hours later. This tweet, I completely exploded. The background of that story is that this woman only had 100 followers and had never had her tweets interacted with, like, very much at all. Not well, not in the sense of a stranger. So for her, this was a complete moment of the system kind of breaking. And I wonder if there were ways to sort of start to articulate to users how accessible you are, even if you feel small, even if you feel like no one is interacting with your tweets, you're still actually completely open. And the information you sent out into the system is media that can be isolated. And shared quickly, and that's sort of the way in which Twitter functions additionally so so I wondered, like, what if you could just break something down really simply and just sort of say follow impressions and non follower impressions, sort of give an idea as to who's interacting with your tweet and who outside of your perceived social your decentralized social circle on Twitter. And then I started looking at Facebook. And one thing I also sort of learned from additionally, I did another round of interviews specifically for this project. I'm getting into Social Me, a break up coordinator where users actually had no idea what the privacy checkup meant. So I think this is a great addition. You add a button, you can say only friends can see this. But what if Twitter added like a pop up and then said, great, this content right here, this comment, if your friend Jane comments on her mo
m can see it sort of start to really show like how extended networks that you're unconnected to second and third, second and third party relationships can actually interact with your your information. So I'm really driven by this need and this idea as a designer, what would it look like to have a semiprivate space in a public network? And how how could I design that? And I think about this a lot, because our our our communication on the Internet is asynchronous. Right. But a lot of social media creates things as a timeline. This creates a false idea as to how information is actually accessed and how data is actually stored in that false information as articulated to users. So what feels like safer spaces, even if you're completely public because you're not interacted with, is actually a lie. It's a false sense of information. It's a false sense of safety. So I wonder, with all these varying levels of needs that we have as users and as we live more and more of our lives digitally and on social media, what would it look like to design a semiprivate space in a public network? And so, like the past few years have really hit this on home, that there's this nebulous ness surrounding algorithms and social media and the way in which our data is saved. And a lot of that happens when Facebook, for instance, changed their timeline, sort of algorithmically driven, based off content then I think it was last summer. There is this thing called the ice book Ice Bucket Challenge or two summers ago, and these riots in Ferguson, Missouri. And sort of what happened and people realize is the ice bucket challenge, ice bucket challenge posts being waited above these other protests. And the way to work around that was to include Ice Bucket Challenge when you were posting about Ferguson to sort of start to flip and change what you're seeing algorithmically in your timeline. So there's this kind of idea that users don't quite know what and why the algorithm will wait things over other things
. So when you post something on Facebook, the feedback is I have no idea when it's accessible, how it's accessible and if it will be accessed. So that led me to this project that I created, I created a fake performance art piece. I mean, it's a real art piece called Social Media Breakup Coordinator, where I turned a video game art gallery in New York called Baby Castles into a doctor's office. And I held a 15 minute therapy consulting sessions on social media. I had users fill out a twenty two point very standard user quiz around why they were showing up. But then when they sat with me, I had them sign a terms of service agreement. I listen to them and then I started to write down notes. But before I started this project, I reached out to a variety of different people because I was sort of from my research, I sort of started to realize that there's a lot of different moments where there needs to be human intervention within algorithms, within social media. So how do you start to I mean, how do you start to pull away from different groups that you've been associated with? How do you start to cut ties and how do you start to cut ties between information when you cross post against different platforms? So a good example of that is what happens if someone in your family dies and that ends up in Facebook memories because you Instagram it. What does that feel like to have that emotional trigger or does it feel like to quit a job and not and not be sure, like if your new coworkers can see your old coworkers or if you post something negative about your old job, are you still connected to your boss and what can they see? And generally, there's this lack of understanding that I found that most general users, probably not most people in this room, have a lack of understanding around how much their information is accessed. So I was curious on on a bunch of levels if if people would actually pay me to give them advice, if they would trust me as a professional and if they would a
ctually engage with my services. And then I was curious if I could actually then covertly sort of teach them the privacy policies of all the different platforms they were on. So when I started this project, I realized I need to talk to a variety of different professionals. I'm a user researcher and so my profession lies in talking to users and designing solutions for them. But as social media starts to overtake more and more aspects of our lives, I realize that there are certain things that I'm not equipped to handle. So what happens if someone has suffered trauma on social media as a victim of harassment? I still can't offer anyone feedback on that, and that's sort of not my place. So I spoke to a rape crisis counselor, an engineer, a data scientist and professor and a private therapist and a private psychiatrist. And the takeaway I got was mainly this. And this is something I'd love to impart on those social media engineers and designers is it's not my job to necessarily tell people what to do. It's my job to listen to what people need to get done. So an example from that is, let's say a user came to me for Social Me a break up coordinator and said I have an abusive boyfriend and he's horrible and we have a child together and I want to on Facebook friend him. It's not my place to necessarily say, OK, wait, can I know more like are you close to this family? Like, let's start to cut down all these ties. And the reason I would ask that is thinking as a designer, if you're Facebook friends with someone and then you're Facebook friends with their parents, and then it says on that person's like profile who their family is, the system has created more ties to that person. Even regardless of if you unfriend them, you would need to block them as well as unfollow all of these other people related to them and tied to their profile that to actually really separate and allow the feedback I got was. It's not necessarily your job to let to tell a user all of that, if they're tel
ling you what exactly they need, you sort of need to listen and guide from there and not really get into. Well, why are you here? What are all these different, really specific and highly personal details? So why would I do this? I was just very interested in the ways in which people live their lives online, and I really wanted to see if I could also gather a lot of data from this project. I had 16 people fill out 22 different questions and meet with me and walk through all their different problems. And I was really curious if I could provide solutions the way an algorithm would. I outlined 10 different solutions that I could affix to people based off different questions that they answered in a certain order. And again, the covered point of this project was to sort of teach people about the permeability of their posts and really how privacy is looked at and interacted with on social networks and with the onset of all these different apps, particularly in America, that are offering to outsource emotional labor to a person, meaning there's all these new jobs have been created of. We'll break up with your boyfriend for you. I was really sort of curious to see if people would actually engage with me face to face. So when I launched the project, people thought it was real. And then the media thought it was real and this was really it was really hard to explain to, for instance, Jezebel that this was an art project because they were like, but you're charging people and you made them sign a contract. Is the contract legally binding? Yes, it is. So you charge the money? I did. Did you give them fake feedback? No. The feedback was all sincere. I really legitimately tried to help solve these problems, but it's an art project. And the reason it's an art project is to me, it's a massive comment on the sharing economy that's in America. And just this idea that I could be an emotional mechanical Turk and I completely made that by design and intention. Should people be trusting me 
with their data? Yes, because I am a professional and I made sure to very, very clearly articulate the ways in which I would use their data, how they would be protected, that I would not share any personal information about them. I went through all those steps, but that's sort of the negotiation. We have a social networks. Do we have that kind of interfacing? And also an even bigger comment was no one ever commented on price. I charged one dollar a minute and to sort of sit and listen all day to people and only gave them 15 minute blocks, it was actually incredibly taxing physically. It was an all day event where I think I only had I gave myself like 15 minutes for lunch. I definitely have a whole new type of respect for therapists that I was grilling. So I started to break down before I started the projects to what platforms I would cover. These are examples of my Post-it notes. I had covered resistor in one evening and I sort of break things down based off the four major platforms that are used in America, which is LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And I started to break down by what I thought were the foremost broad and most universal social grouping. So friends, family, work and romantic. And I started to sort of think about why your romantic partner would friend you on LinkedIn, for example, or why they would follow you on Instagram, or why your boss would friend you on all of those platforms. And I started to attach different emotional responses. So should you LinkedIn connect with your dad? Maybe. Should you LinkedIn connect with your lover if you want to, but you don't have to. But then these are connections. If there are different parties, apps that you don't really use like that, you then have to break down later. If those if those relationships our. Ceremony said everyone thought that this project was real because I went through really great pains to also make it look real. So when people showed up, we had a receptionist who had coffee, there was
 a waiting room, and I had people sign in with the date they arrived. The reason and I think even the time and the time of their appointment, there was then a paper version of the quiz. If someone walked in, you know, sometimes you get walk ins, the doctor gets that all the time. This is me working. This is what my desk look like. Everyone got their own folder that I would write their name on. I would write out what I called a receipt. So it's all the advice I'm giving them and then I'm taking my own notes. We both got a copy of the terms of service agreement and then I would send them on their way. So it looked actually. Fairly, it looked very legit, you know, I mean, a falling apart building, but I'm giving you legitimate advice and you just paid me fifteen dollars, says our receptionist. Lauren, this is the waiting room. This actually wasn't posed. I popped my head out and saw a bunch of people sitting and reading, This is me providing advice. And these are some students of mine that showed up. I taught a class on visual storytelling in social media and they had showed up to observe. So then this is also what the breakdown of the terms of service agreement looked like. This is the first page. It's pretty standard. One of my favorite lines is my observations of this person's behavior and responses gives me no reason to believe that this person is not fully competent to give conformed knowing and willing consent. I should also clarify a really dear friend of mine who's my collaborator, Fred Jenning's, works for a law company called Tor Ekland. They do a lot of digital law cases. So he actually drafted this up specifically for me, for the needs of this project. I told him to keep it short and I told him to build certain things so users could really sort of see if they were scanning what I'm talking about. So as you'll see, various social media platforms are emboldened with like what I'm with what I'm giving. But then I had him outline the nature of services. And wha
t you'll see is that the client acknowledges the coordinator, the coordinator provides neither content or materials included, such as financial advice, counseling or therapy. And I really wanted to highlight I am not a therapist. This is not a therapy session. If anything, I'm like a really weird SEO advisor that you've consulted to maybe talk about your personal life with. But I am definitely not a therapist. And what's funny is that I actually had so I had 12 people fill this out online for people do walk ins. And what's fascinating is I only had two people show up and talk to me about heartbreak. This project was not inspired by a breakup. It's actually about breaking up with social media. I had someone show up and ask me a lot of really specific questions about LinkedIn and her workplace and what's the proper way to, like, break up on LinkedIn with your old job. And I was like, you should just probably unfollow them. I'm like, do you talk to them on Facebook? She's like, I do. I don't do that. And I sort of tried to gather all this really fascinating information specifically around the ways in which my users were using social media. And this is something I actually I'm going to openly share probably post this talk if you all want to look at what I'm accruing. But different things like, you know, let's get a little personal. Why are you here? Romantic reason, work, reason, friend, family, general, social media. And maybe these questions seem really innocuous, but in the sense of the way in which I was structuring my personal algorithm, I had built each of these questions, triggered a different kind of answer that I could give someone and I could string answers together so I could give a combination of answer, a plussed answer D plus answered J to sort of give someone a highly personalized response to what they had given me. But this is sort of the way algorithms work. It's not highly personalized. The combination to the user just feels personalized. And on my end
, that was sort of the art project for myself. And I asked a general question, do you feel safe online? I was slightly surprised. Only two people said no, but I was more surprised that actually only two people said no. I thought it would be less. And then at times I thought it would be more. Given my research and online harassment, I was prepared for someone to show up and sort of say, like, oh, I'm being victimized of harassment. And I had a whole different answer ready for them. But just the fact that most people had come with very general problems, I was actually surprised that in general, 16 percent of applicants don't feel safe online. So I asked, how often do you use social media pretty much every day, how often do you want to be using it? Pretty much every day. And then I found the most fascinating was when people described what they used it for. And so people about half half of users said they they used it for socializing. When I asked what do you want to use it for, they said half of users replied with networking. So there's a sort of pull to actually be taken off social media. And this is what I learned from all of this. A lot of advice I gave people was maybe you should just quit Facebook. And that was met with a resounding no. How dare you suggest that? And I was like, OK, great, let's pull back. Let me offer something else. Do you have a smartphone? Of course. Delete the app from your phone. They're like, oh, that's brilliant. Like, I know, right? Well well, the one thing I actually found the most fascinating was most people did not understand Facebook's privacy checkups. So whenever people talked about that, they wanted to socialize less and be less accessible. The first thing I always said was, well, what is your privacy checkup like? Have you done one? They're like, oh, my God, what's that? I'm like, we have a problem. And the one thing I actually found super fascinating is that most users didn't realize and this is actually hyper specific to one use
r that came through, but most users didn't realize that you are accessible even with very private settings on Facebook to nine Facebook friends, chat messaging you. And if you respond to that message, that chat is moved into your general stream of chat and it makes your information accessible to that person you have not friended. So I had a friend who was like, well, I want to be super private. The reason I keep my Facebook open is like, what if a young game developer is trying to reach me? And I was like, did you know that that chat does us? He's like, Oh, I had no idea. I was like, well, that's terrifying. But you could maybe use it this way if you're not concerned about harassment, but your concern about being reached because he was more concerned that friends could be exposed through his openness, which I was like, that's very, very considerate. Kind of the way to sort of take your Facebook. One thing I learned is that no one knew anything about Instagram's privacy policies, nor did they care. They're like, Instagram is fine. We don't care. Again, most people want to use social media as a networking tool. But the biggest takeaway was every single person that showed up. And I had a variety of people that were incredibly savvy. They were engineers. They actually thought that they did not understand social media as well as they could and that they needed someone to help them better understand. And they need someone to help them better understand who they paid fifteen dollars to and a hacker video game space. But and I want that story because it is a that is a joke. But I also really think about the fact that, like, these tools are so nebulous that you would go to a space and pay someone fifteen dollars that you've never met before. That says they're an expert to just handle this for you. And that, for me, was the sort of the biggest takeaway, how how can we make things feel more accessible or better yet, how do we let's let's make a new platform. I'm putting us up 
here because this is one of my biggest pet peeves. You would probably never explain how to estimate someone through screenshots. You probably say, oh, do you see that little thing on your phone? Right. The chat, open it up right in a no, say something. So I when this project launched, a friend wrote about me and some and some work I had been doing and one of her followers legitimately believed that I did not understand Facebook and he took it upon himself to try to explain Facebook to me. Which other than being kind of insulting because I work for a tech company and I have a masters in interactive technology. What I found illuminating is the fact that this is not a weird response. This is not unusual for someone to say, oh, right. Facebook is so hard to use when it comes to privacy and like creating list to post to people that I'm going to screenshot everything for you. And that is never the way in which you should explain a communication tool to someone if you have to screenshot something to someone you fucked up as a designer and. And those are my general thoughts on that. I can't even I just can't. So I guess what I impart to you and all of us here is let's make something not shitty. And I know the reason people use Facebook. And this is not a talk to get off Facebook. I use Facebook. Facebook will persist for a very long time. Think of all the third party apps that use Facebook as an automatic login. That is a design pattern that reinforces the need of Facebook and everyday users lives. But as a as a designer and technologist, I want to make something better, even if it's just for my friends. We could do social media that onion thoughts, and that's where the future of this project comes in is I'm actually working on a social media co-op with two technologists in New York, Dan Pfeiffer and Max Vinton, and doing another round of social media break up coordinator in Oakland in January. And I'm hoping to keep gathering data around the ways users use these platforms 
through my performance art piece, but also as well as covertly, you know, keep departing information on privacy and what it would be like if we lived our lives just a little less online. And I'm hoping to sort of eventually have a really robust data set that could be used as an actual data set and not as just a sampling. Thanks. Well, thanks for this inspiring talk, Caroline, if you have questions, please move to the microphones that are in the room and then you can ask your question. And we have the first person at microphone number to ask away. Yeah, did you ever raise the question why those people didn't understand the subject on Facebook, etc. and still used it? I mean, it's like walking into a gun shop, purchasing a firearm, and you have no idea what to do with it, right? I think so. What I said sort of like later in the presentation is we have these design patterns in everyday life that really actually enforce this use of Facebook. So this project is really sort of centered around general users and a general understanding of technology. We are moving to a very highly digitally literate and data literate society, but we're not there yet. There's pockets of literacy. This is a really good pocket of literacy right here where a really awesome community. But one thing I sort of strive is like the people that are misusing or misunderstanding Facebook, they're not like elderly parents, their actual cohorts of mine that are my age people, younger and people even a few years older. And I think the reason is that Facebook is really easy and it's highly addicting to use. And it's it's like a phone book. Everyone's there at stores birthdays for you, which is really actually helpful. It's a it's a fast way to talk to people. But I think the bigger thing is, too, is it's enforced on other sites. So think of all the websites you go to during a day and how many of them say login with Facebook, sign up with Facebook, like login with Twitter. And those design patterns, which se
em really innocuous to us, actually are really important. They further enforce the the the ubiquity of Facebook because it makes it easy. So then I mean, I'm shuddering. Think about all the third party apps that would be associated right now with a Facebook login if you've done that for every site. But the common user does not know that. And that's sort of the issue, I think. All right, next question from Mike before, please. Hi. Thank you very much for this interesting talk. I have basically two questions that are the same, and they are on the art project, part of your talk. And the first one is how did you make sure that people would actually understand that this was a piece of performance art? Did you rely on the absurdity of your proposition that would be recognized? Because clearly people thought not unlike in terms of satire, there needs to be some element of exaggeration or something that makes it clear that this isn't intended as this is intended as a piece of art. So I was just wondering what you thought was that in the second part was where do you saw the data that you get from your piece of art you presented as a research outcome almost. So that obfuscates the kind of art arsenis of your project and turns it into Real-Life data. And isn't that also one of the problems why people are so careless with Instagram? Because they see it as art when they photograph their food. Whether that's true or not is open to debate, but they don't see it as an actual act of data collection. So yeah, right. So I guess to sort of back up the way in which I did, the way in which I sort of describe myself as a speculative designer and I think about critical design a lot and critical making and like, what is that line? And oftentimes you're making something real that is sort of making a point in the way in which I, like most people, seem to sort of get that this was an art project of mine. And it helped that I was in New York doing this and I was doing it in an art gallery. That
's a video game gallery. So there were arcades in the back of the space. But certain people, I actually realized because I had a couple of people phone-in that had sort of seen this and signed up online and were not in New York. And I realize that they didn't know that this was an art piece. And I kind of went with it. And a lot of that is they were signing a series of service agreement. I was I did tell them, like, this is not therapeutic advice. I'm not held liable for any decisions that you make. And I said all that over the phone to make sure that they understood that. And then I told them, these are just suggestions and you don't have to follow them and you are allowed to push back. And that's what I tell every every participant is I'm giving you these suggestions based off my best practice knowledge in this algorithm. I have design that you don't get to see. So your questions are triggering certain results. But you are also allowed to say, I don't like that, and then I can tailor them slightly. If you don't like the result at all, you should take the quiz again. But the bigger thing is that it walks this really weird line and this is a weird antidote. But I'm also a portrait photographer. My background is actually in fine art photography and I got a Masters Interactive technology years later and my work is always it was my family and I recreating moments post Hurricane Katrina. So people always ask, or are these real photographs, Caroline? Well, they weren't taken on the fly. I set them up, but they were real to me. And they're saying something. And that's the way in which I would describe this project. It's not real, but it was real to us in the moment. And it's commenting on things and also providing a real solution. Thank you. All right, next question from Mike, number three, please. Hi. Do you know of some software that shows how open you are to other people? For example, a Facebook app or something that. Yeah, it's also a mirror of your sinfulness. I don'
t know of any sort of checker like that. I use a variety of different things. A friend of mine made a really great Wi-Fi sniffer, which is like at the extreme end of what you're talking about. I generally I know that you all should do this. I often will unfollow and follow and unfriend and befriend people and change my privacy settings. And then I try to log out and get someone else to log in and see if they'll let me audit and then I will see what I look like to other people. That's a level of insanity that I don't think most people in this room should necessarily engage with. But I don't actually know of a checker that lets you sort of see that. I know that there are analytics systems you can download for, say, Persay with Instagram to see like who's unfollowed you and followed you and who's following you. That follows other people that, you know, which currently Instagram does not have that analytic feedback for users. It's a third party app you have to download. Twitter has started ad analytics on the side to sort of give you an idea of how accessible your tweets were. But they'll never say like this is who didn't follow you that access this tweet today. But they give you a more robust analytic breakdown of your tweet about puppy dogs did really well, but your tweet about OPSEC did not. All right, make them before, please. Hi. I really appreciate your insights on visual design and the user experience of data at rest. I'm really curious what your thoughts are on temporal design and the user experience of data in motion. You know, because you mentioned that one of the the the things that came out of your interviews was, you know, people having a sense of just sort of not understanding social media and feeling like they need help understanding social media. You know, in programing, we talk about code smells, which are sort of features of, you know, code and how people use code that are a sign that something's probably not designed right here. Right. And it seems to
 me that, you know, that sense of misunderstanding is is a design smell, maybe that there's just too much trying to trying to consume user's attention. And, you know, we need to change the rate at which we're delivering it anyway. That's it's an open ended question. I'm just really curious what your thoughts are there. So I've actually thought about this a lot. I actually haven't met with any engineers at Facebook or Twitter. But if you're here, I'd love to talk to you. But I met with someone that worked in branding at Twitter and I asked him to just sort of talk about his day job and describe how the branding team targeted ads, because I figured that was a really good way to get a sense of how the algorithm was working. He started spouting a lot of buzzwords as he is prone to want to do a coworker of mine from a really old job. But he said something was really fascinating to me where he's like, well, you know, Caroline, there's just so much noise. And he's like, you know, we have all these different algorithms working. He's like, there's just so much noise on top of each other. And he's trying to find this little signal. So I know, for instance, with Twitter, it's exactly that problem that they infrastructurally design themselves incorrectly. And to combat it, you can't. They're at a point where I feel like they cannot shut it down and rebuild it and become minimal, like with a better working code base. So they're building on top of everything. And the reason I also think that, too, is a lot of anti harassment initiatives that they have. They've been rolling out for verified users and not for the common user base. So if you're a verified user, what the way in which they're anti harassment initiatives work, it works way different and way better for you. So they have an algorithm working where you will never see is a verified user certains harassment tweets, they're catching them before they come to you and you can look at them later. But there's all these really hig
hly specific changes. And I have not yet seen a verified user account. No one's let me log into theirs again. If you have that, let's chat. But I've seen enough screenshots and read enough about and talk to friends who have it. And it's like it's like Twitter 2.0. It's just slightly better. So what I think they're like the bigger issue is there's so much data and motion that they can only isolate it for what what they are infrastructurally deciding who is a power user and that power user infrastructurally actually becomes a better power user. Actually, I guess the hidden question I have there is really more more of, you know, is Twitter eventually doomed to tear itself apart because it's triggering people's system one responses instead of instead of instead of their reasoning? Right. So I actually I really don't have an answer to that question because as a Twitter user who's thought about quitting, but I really love the community I have on Twitter, it's kind of a weird emotional negotiation that I have of like I don't know how accessible I am. And I face harassment on a usually monthly basis for a variety of different things. And it's this weird negotiation. I have a why am I still here? But I actually legitimately like it. And I think that that's sort of like the big issue is it's like maybe it will pull itself apart. But harassment, while affects a lot of people, it's also affecting hyper specific groups of people. And I think a lot of the fear around it, rightly so as well. If it happens to one person, it could happen to you because we're infrastructurally in the same place. We're both equally open. But I would I I guess I'm not sure like I'm interested to see what happens in the next two years, next two or three years and see because Twitter is not gaining any new followers at this point. They're kind of starting to plateau. So they are not growing at a rate in which other social media networks are growing. And that's a major issue. And some of that issue could 
be tied towards bad infrastructural design or really poor code of conduct. All right, the next person on microphone four, please. Last year, my brother blocked my mom on Facebook and she still vocally bitter about it. I mentioned this because many times our online social network is almost mapped all closely intertwined with our offline social network. So did you look into making changes into this social network that's online? How does that affect your social network offline? As much as you meet and following, stop talking to your boss or your former colleagues, you'll still meet them at conferences and activities. So how do you deal with that change of this network online, which does not actually give a clear picture of how your social network looks like the digital interaction between the offline and online after that change? I definitely thought about that a lot. So just in general, as a researcher, I've always been really intrigued by societal norms and propriety and like what? It's polite behavior across many different cultures. And I'm speaking as an American, but I come from a hyper specific place in the United States. I come from Louisiana, which is the American South, but we're hyper, hyper specific culture. We speak two languages. It's English and then Cajun, which is an oral based language. I only know a couple of words, but New Orleans, where I'm from, has the highest rate of birth retention. 75 percent of people, they're born there. Stay there. So the ways in which I socialize is as a New Orleanian, it's very different in the ways I socialize as a New Yorker. And that's true. And I think when you get, like even more localized, if you look at Americans versus Canadians versus Mexicans and getting into Latin America. So I thought about that a lot that like actually a lot of the interactions you have offline definitely affect and influence the interactions you have online. So a lot of advice I sort of gave people was also having to break down, like, how oft
en do you interface with this person? And let's think of the most neutral and polite way to, like, break things down. So, yeah, I thought about that a lot. Like, I, I never I it yet with the people I've I've given advice to said unfriend someone oftentimes like unless the relationship has incredibly soured, that's usually the advice. But if it's in the case of a boss, for instance, my reaction is oftentimes why don't you reach out to them if they're an old boss and say like I'd love to keep in touch, here's my email, but like, I'm keeping my Instagram just for friends only. All right, next question from Mike, No one from your project. I'm curious to know if you think that social breakup is actually possible or if it's not really possible because people end up seeing your stuff anyway. Is it bad if my response is both, I think that as social media users for a really long time, we've been taught to interact with social media in a particular way. And I don't think that that way is correct. Facebook actively wants you to postmaster's Twitter and Instagram wants you to share and accumulate followers. And that's the way in which these networks grow. You're creating content and that content is analytics and they package and sell that to advertisers. I'm politically agnostic on that. But I have my own personal thoughts as a researcher. That's just what they do. But I think that that push towards sharing and cross platform sharing that you can crosspost perhaps in terms of like privacy is a horrible idea. What are you saying? When are you saying it? How are you saying it? Or all or all identifiers? And they're all identifiers that can pinpoint location and who you are and who you are offline, where you are. And that's something I often do try to impart to people is what are you saying and when and does it need to be set online? So I personally, I always give this example with people that sit with me and like I personally try to not post location, but I have a very specific r
eason I can't do that. And I had a lot of internal, like, dialog of should I post assignments at CCC? What if someone's here and they want to talk to me about something that I want to talk about? Or what if I say I'm home? Like, does that make my mom more of a target if someone wanted to try to swat us again? And those are extreme examples. But it's also important to think about, like, are you accidentally doxing yourself? You know, if you're saying I'm at the bar downstairs from my apartment, let's check in on Foursquare and then post that on Instagram. You've pinpointed where you live and that's information that people don't actually need. And so I always try to sort of walk this line of like I think it's totally fine to post pictures of food and family and friends and and to do it frequently. But I think it's important to sort of know, like, are you highlighting where you are? And like, are you highlighting regular patterns in your lives? And are you then amplifying that to a variety of people that you don't know and you have no idea how many people are accessing it? All right, we have another question from the Internet. I've got a question from the Internet. Yesterday, there was a talk titled The Possibility of an Army by Consonantal who bought thousands of fake accounts. What do you think about these actions? I guess any more contacts, this person bought thousands of fake accounts to actually I don't have any context for that. I mean, so I in graduate school, this woman, this fantastic ethnographer, Tricia Wang, came to speak to us. And the professor Clay Shirky at the time was saying he bought her 50000 followers in a day. And it was just I think he's paid like one hundred dollars. And I think it's really fascinating in which the ways that that bumps you up into a different sort of social strata and how it made her it presented her in a completely different way online. That changed the way in which people interacted with her in the amount of followers she star
ted to accrue on a daily basis. I mean, I think so this person created like a thousand different accounts. I think that that's what that question movement, from what I read, that he bought them. Oh, he bought them. I would be curious to know why, like if he was looking at data or if he just bought a thousand followers, but I guess any more information? All right, well, the person is not here, so we don't know we have another question from Mike number three. Hi. So my sister had an occasion where someone who she sort of became a stalker and didn't really know her very well, but then started to send really weird messages to her. And it got to a point where they were following her on Instagram and she can't like can't really control because this person knows who she is. And her friends, she she couldn't control her information. And so this person would send stuff based on, oh, we bought this blender and and would deliver it to our house along with letters about like how they would have sex even though they had never really interacted before. And it got really scary and unsafe. And it's sad for that person. But also it became really scary for my sister and she didn't know where to go and what to do. And when she went to the police and said, I'm scared that this person might might come and touch me, like when I'm going home late at night, what should I do? They said, well, until something happens, we really can't, like, do anything for you. So what I'm there may be resources out there for for people who are facing this, but for those watching this video, what would you recommend them to do? First of all, I want to say I'm so sorry for your sister. That's horrible. And secondly, what I would suggest doing is there are a variety of different nonprofits that exist. Crash override is one once you've been harassed in a really specific way. But what I would suggest is Smart Girls Guide to Privacy has this. It's this really fantastic book. And they list where you can access, I 
think, lawyers that are more digitally savvy around digital crimes. And my recommendation in a case of that, with that kind of persistence, whereas a regular person, meaning a regular stalker, it's one entity and they're actually starting to sort of move away from social media and moving into like letters, you should get a lawyer and then from there figure out ways to assign what's a space between you and the other person across state lines even and figure out, like, I don't know the particulars of this case. If this person is in a different state than your sister, that gets a little bit trickier. Are they in the same city? So they're in the same city. There's a lot more you can do. My recommendation would be to immediately find a lawyer who is well versed in online harassment. But if that person is in the same city and they're sending letters, I think that's a pretty good reason to move, like to start pressing charges like that. That would be my immediate reaction. All right, thank you. Another question from microphone number four. Yes, thank you for your wonderful talk. First of all, you one thing I find myself personally very preoccupied by is not just the question of how to act on social media in the present, but also how to clean up after my past. Certainly things I've I've like written or posted before. And I actually find that the obstacle towards doing that is frequently infrastructural. It's really hard to sort of have an oversight of everything you've done in the past. Do you what do you sort of see as the future of design on these platforms? Are they intentionally making it difficult or have they coated themselves into a corner and it's just going to become a bigger problem? I guess I would say to basing off the way the design is now, I think it's a mixture of having coded into a corner and also trying to make design minimal. So a lot of trends and designer around optimization and usability. But we're optimizing for speed and we're making things more usab
le for mobile. But we're not optimizing or designing for safety and we're not optimizing or designing for like longevity of life within interacting with and on these platforms. So I would say it's like a misuse of design priorities. And I think that now there is some pushback with people sort of saying, like, how is this being accessed? There's harassment persisting on on this platform. How is this happening or what's happening because of these reasons, you know, etc.? I would say that it's just a mis alignment of priorities within a design hierarchy and a coding hierarchy. All right, any other questions? It seems like we ran out of questions or we got them all cleared up for now. So thank you very much for your questions. Thank you very much for coming. And please give it up for Caroline again and for some time. Thank you.