Informing Facebook on Contextual Barriers to Digital Safety & Privacy in India
Project Year: 2015
Role: Team Researcher
Methods: Qualitative Interviews, Literature Reviews, Contextual Inquiry
Company: Facebook & Centre for Social Research
Workshop presentation to stakeholders in New Delhi.
The Problem
In India, social media has created new avenues for young people to interact and engage across India’s vastly diverse cultural and linguistic contexts.
This has also generated new avenues of online harassment and violence that are difficult for social media companies to moderate across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts.
Online violence through social media has also led to an increase in offline violence against women, religious minorities, and historically-oppressed castes.
Young users often lack an understanding of privacy and safety tools on social media platforms with which to protect themselves and combat harrassment.
Presentation to College Students in New Delhi, 2015
Findings
Social media companies like Facebook struggle to moderate hate speech, harassment, and other forms of online violence in languages other than English and non-Latin scripts.
Example from Interviewee: “Someone added me to a group in which they are abusing me in Hindi but written in English script. I reported it to Facebook but they said it was not abusive.”
Moderators lack the cultural expertise through which to understand and respond to culturally- specific forms of harassment.
Example from Interviewee: a photo of her in public was shared online without her consent, having ramifications for her relationships with family.
Young users are unlikely to self-report harassment through platform-internal tools, preferring instead to rely upon offline social networks to address instances of online violence.
Presentation to College Students in New Delhi, 2015
The Project
As part of an ongoing, Facebook-funded research project at the Centre for Social Research in New Delhi, I conducted four weeks of ethnographic contextual inquiry, interviewing, and literature reviews on contextual barriers to digital privacy and safety in India.
Together with a team of 5 researchers, we sought to understand effective ways to increase users’ understanding of existing privacy tools, as well as provide novel frameworks for addressing online violence in the Indian context.
The Center for Social Research successfully proposed an initial grant to conduct 25 workshops with college-aged youth in New Delhi on digital safety and privacy.
College students participating in Social Surfing workshop, 2015.
Deliverables & Impacts
Research Lead, Arnika Singh, during workshop with users
Based on our findings, we designed interactive workshops on online safety that were conducted at 25 colleges in New Delhi, featuring sessions on the history of social media, privacy tools and settings, methods for combatting harassment with positive “counter-speech,” and creative ways to spread awareness about positive uses of social media.
My Role: I conducted interviews, wrote policy reports on anti-violence legislation, created slide decks, and delivered presentations to 500+ users.