Studies of mapper conflict in OpenStreetMap (OSM) have focused exclusively on cartographic vandalism and its effect on data quality. This paper takes a broader view on mapper conflict in OSM. Using a Delphi survey method, we collect qualitative data on perceived conflict from long-time OSM mappers. We ask mappers about four aspects of conflict in OSM: (1) topic of conflict, (2) factors leading to conflict, (3) effects of conflict, and (4) potential conflict management methods. Our results show that conflict in OSM can be explained by clashing values and opinions within and across different mapper subgroups and can be exacerbated by negative mapper behaviors. The boundaries of these subgroups, while implicit, are often defined by gender, mappers' geographic location, level of expertise, and mappers' professional affiliation. Based on these results, we discuss design options for OSM's existing public communication channels that often become foci of mapper conflict management.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580758
With the 2022 US midterm elections approaching, conspiratorial claims about the 2020 presidential elections continue to threaten users' trust in the electoral process. To regulate election misinformation, YouTube introduced policies to remove such content from its searches and recommendations. In this paper, we conduct a 9-day crowd-sourced audit on YouTube to assess the extent of enactment of such policies. We recruited 99 users who installed a browser extension that enabled us to collect up-next recommendation trails and search results for 45 videos and 88 search queries about the 2020 elections. We find that YouTube's search results, irrespective of search query bias, contain more videos that oppose rather than support election misinformation. However, watching misinformative election videos still lead users to a small number of misinformative videos in the up-next trails. Our results imply that while YouTube largely seems successful in regulating election misinformation, there is still room for improvement.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580846
Accessing online support services can be dangerous for some users, such as domestic abuse survivors. Many support service websites contain ``quick exit'' buttons that provide an easy way for users to escape the site. We investigate where exit buttons and other escape mechanisms are currently in use (country and type of site) and how they are implemented. We analyse both the security and usability of exit mechanisms on 323 mobile and 404 desktop sites. We find exit buttons typically replace the current page with another site, occasionally opening additional tabs. Some exit buttons also remove the page from the browser history. When analysing the design choices and shortcomings of exit button implementations, common problems include cookie notices covering the buttons, and buttons not remaining on the screen when scrolling. We provide recommendations for designers of support websites who want to add or improve this feature on their website.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581078
To support efficient, balanced news consumption, merging articles from diverse sources into one, potentially through crowdsourcing, could alleviate some hurdles. However, the merging process could also impact annotators' attitudes towards the content. To test this theory, we propose comparative news annotation; that is, annotating similarities and differences between a pair of articles. By developing and deploying NewsComp---a prototype system---we conducted a between-subjects experiment (N=109) to examine how users' annotations compare to experts', and how comparative annotation affects users' perceptions of article credibility and quality. We found that comparative annotation can marginally impact users' credibility perceptions in certain cases; it did not impact perceptions of quality. While users' annotations were not on par with experts', they showed greater precision in finding similarities than in identifying disparate important statements. The comparison process also led users to notice differences in information placement and depth, degree of factuality/opinion, and empathetic/inflammatory language use. We discuss implications for the design of future comparative annotation tasks.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581244
Social norms play a significant role in how conspiratorial content and related misinformation impact online communities. However, less is understood about the mechanisms by which particular aspects of a community may drive perceptions of social norms in the community. Using anti-vaccine conspiracies as a testbed, this paper experimentally examines three such features and their relationships : prevalence of conspiratorial content, community response, and explicit community rules. Results show that prevalence of content has a significant effect on norm perceptions, while the results did not support the effects of explicit rule on norm perceptions. However, these effects can be mitigated by the way a community responds to such content. Furthermore, perceived norms also influence other expectations about the community, from escalated behaviors to belief in other conspiracy theories. The paper concludes by highlighting the implications of these findings for online platform design, for community governance, and for future research about the relationships among conspiratorial content and norm perceptions.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580946
A significant share of political discourse occurs online on social media platforms. Policymakers and researchers try to understand the role of social media design in shaping the quality of political discourse around the globe. In the past decades, scholarship on political discourse theory has produced distinct characteristics of different types of prominent political rhetoric such as deliberative, civic, or demagogic discourse. This study investigates the relationship between social media reaction mechanisms (i.e., upvotes, downvotes) and political rhetoric in user discussions by engaging in an in-depth conceptual analysis of political discourse theory. First, we analyze 155 million user comments in 55 political subforums on Reddit between 2010 and 2018 to explore whether users' style of political discussion aligns with the essential components of deliberative, civic, and demagogic discourse. Second, we perform a quantitative study that combines confirmatory factor analysis with difference in differences models to explore whether different reaction mechanism schemes (e.g., upvotes only, upvotes and downvotes, no reaction mechanisms) correspond with political user discussion that is more or less characteristic of deliberative, civic, or demagogic discourse. We produce three main takeaways. First, despite being "ideal constructs of political rhetoric," we find that political discourse theories describe political discussions on Reddit to a large extent. Second, we find that discussions in subforums with only upvotes, or both up- and downvotes black are associated with} user discourse that is more deliberate and civic. Third, and perhaps most strikingly, social media discussions are most demagogic in subreddits with no reaction mechanisms at all. These findings offer valuable contributions for ongoing policy discussions on the relationship between social media interface design and respectful political discussion among users.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580644