@inproceedings{donabauer-etal-2024-empowering,
    title = "Empowering Users and Mitigating Harm: Leveraging Nudging Principles to Enhance Social Media Safety",
    author = "Donabauer, Gregor  and
      Theophilou, Emily  and
      Lomonaco, Francesco  and
      Bursic, Sathya  and
      Taibi, Davide  and
      Hern{\'a}ndez-Leo, Davinia  and
      Kruschwitz, Udo  and
      Ognibene, Dimitri",
    editor = "Kumar, Ritesh  and
      Ojha, Atul Kr.  and
      Malmasi, Shervin  and
      Chakravarthi, Bharathi Raja  and
      Lahiri, Bornini  and
      Singh, Siddharth  and
      Ratan, Shyam",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Threat, Aggression {\&} Cyberbullying @ LREC-COLING-2024",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.trac-1.16",
    pages = "155--166",
    abstract = "Social media have become an integral part of our daily lives, yet they have also resulted in various negative effects on users, ranging from offensive or hateful content to the spread of misinformation. In recent years, numerous automated approaches have been proposed to identify and combat such harmful content. However, it is crucial to recognize the human aspect of users who engage with this content in designing efforts to mitigate these threats. We propose to incorporate principles of behavioral science, specifically the concept of nudging into social media platforms. Our approach involves augmenting social media feeds with informative diagrams, which provide insights into the content that users are presented. The goal of our work is to empower social media users to make well-informed decisions for themselves and for others within these platforms. Nudges serve as a means to gently draw users{'} attention to content in an unintrusive manner, a crucial consideration in the context of social media. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted a user study involving 120 Italian-speaking participants who interacted with a social media interface augmented with these nudging diagrams. Participants who had used the augmented interface were able to outperform those using the plain interface in a successive harmful content detection test where nudging diagrams were not visible anymore. Our findings demonstrate that our approach significantly improves users{'} awareness of potentially harmful content with effects lasting beyond the duration of the interaction. In this work, we provide a comprehensive overview of our experimental materials and setup, present our findings, and refer to the limitations identified during our study.",
}

Social media have become an integral part of our daily lives, yet they have also resulted in various negative effects on users, ranging from offensive or hateful content to the spread of misinformation. In recent years, numerous automated approaches have been proposed to identify and combat such harmful content. However, it is crucial to recognize the human aspect of users who engage with this content in designing efforts to mitigate these threats. We propose to incorporate principles of behavioral science, specifically the concept of nudging into social media platforms. Our approach involves augmenting social media feeds with informative diagrams, which provide insights into the content that users are presented. The goal of our work is to empower social media users to make well-informed decisions for themselves and for others within these platforms. Nudges serve as a means to gently draw users{'} attention to content in an unintrusive manner, a crucial consideration in the context of social media. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted a user study involving 120 Italian-speaking participants who interacted with a social media interface augmented with these nudging diagrams. Participants who had used the augmented interface were able to outperform those using the plain interface in a successive harmful content detection test where nudging diagrams were not visible anymore. Our findings demonstrate that our approach significantly improves users{'} awareness of potentially harmful content with effects lasting beyond the duration of the interaction. In this work, we provide a comprehensive overview of our experimental materials and setup, present our findings, and refer to the limitations identified during our study.
Donabauer, Gregor Theophilou, Emily Lomonaco, Francesco Bursic, Sathya Taibi, Davide Hern{\'a}ndez-Leo, Davinia Kruschwitz, Udo Ognibene, Dimitri
Empowering Users and Mitigating Harm: Leveraging Nudging Principles to Enhance Social Media Safety