Victim-Centred Abuse Investigations and Defenses for Social Media Platforms
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Mar 3, 2025
Abstract
Online abuse, a persistent aspect of social platform interactions, impacts
user well-being and exposes flaws in platform designs that include insufficient
detection efforts and inadequate victim protection measures. Ensuring safety in
platform interactions requires the integration of victim perspectives in the
design of abuse detection and response systems. In this paper, we conduct
surveys (n = 230) and semi-structured interviews (n = 15) with students at a
minority-serving institution in the US, to explore their experiences with abuse
on a variety of social platforms, their defense strategies, and their
recommendations for social platforms to improve abuse responses. We build on
study findings to propose design requirements for abuse defense systems and
discuss the role of privacy, anonymity, and abuse attribution requirements in
their implementation. We introduce ARI, a blueprint for a unified, transparent,
and personalized abuse response system for social platforms that sustainably
detects abuse by leveraging the expertise of platform users, incentivized with
proceeds obtained from abusers.
