CAREER: Supporting Deliberative Discourse and Collaborative Governance in Private Social Media Groups

This project studies how people share information and govern their communities in social media platforms designed for private groups. Many people are moving to platforms designed for small groups that offer strong privacy protections, including encryption and closed group memberships. These groups allow people to share news, coordinate activities, and stay connected with friends, families, and communities. However, these platforms often lack tools that help members set shared rules, resolve disagreements, or manage their communities. Instead, current systems usually rely on centralized decisions made by platforms rather than by the communities themselves. As a result, group administrators often receive little support, while members have few opportunities to participate in shaping the rules that guide their discussions. This project will advance methods for ethically studying these groups and develop new ways to help private groups discuss norms, manage disagreements, and govern themselves more effectively. The project team will also develop public-facing educational videos and conduct workshops with U.S. civil society organizations to broaden the impact of the work. This project develops tools and design approaches that help members of private social media groups support constructive discussion and democratic participation. The research plan includes three main activities. The first activity examines how group administrators and members create and enforce rules in private groups using interviews, surveys, and analysis of online discussions. The second activity uses participatory methods to design tools that help group members collaboratively set shared rules and manage their groups. The third activity explores the design of digital tools, including conversational agents, that encourage people to reflect on diverse viewpoints and engage in constructive discussion online. This activity uses technology probes, focus groups, and controlled evaluations to develop and test low-cost prototypes of tools that help group members engage in reflective and deliberative dialogue. Partnerships with community organizations, combined with sustained student-community collaborations on real-world projects, will widen the space of designs that can be explored and increase the chance the ideas from the project propagate into the world. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2542732 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT,01002930DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT,01003031DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Aditya Vashistha | Institution: Cornell University, ITHACA, NY | Award Amount: $449,425 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2542732 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2542732.html