Building better settings for online content curation
Hsu, Silas
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/125687
Description
Title
Building better settings for online content curation
Author(s)
Hsu, Silas
Issue Date
2024-07-03
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Karahalios, Karrie
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Karahalios, Karrie
Committee Member(s)
Wang, Yang
Sandvig, Christian
Cobb, Camille
Saha, Koustuv
Department of Study
Siebel Computing &DataScience
Discipline
Computer Science
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
autonomy
agency
control
user interface
human-computer interaction
advertising
choice
Abstract
Content curation algorithms today play a large role in deciding what news, social media posts, recommendations, and ads we see online. Major platforms’ designs and deployments of these algorithms, however, have eroded users’ autonomy – their ability to govern for themselves how they want to live their lives. The algorithms often act against user wishes, and promote content that invites user engagement as opposed to high-quality content. Users experience algorithm-promoted misinformation and algorithm-induced filter bubbles. The system of targeted advertising that platforms rely on for profits facilitates mass manipulation. And platforms and their algorithms effectively impose content curation decisions on their users.
To give users autonomy, we must empower users to align content curation systems with their values. Control settings – user interface widgets that invite users to adjust and steer content curation algorithms – promise to do just that. But good design of settings remains a challenge. This thesis contributes guidelines and methodology for making more usable and useful settings. First, I present ways that we can make settings easier for users to find and understand. Second, I demonstrate that users’ expectations towards a setting increased their satisfaction towards feed content. Lastly, I show that users don’t want direct control over everything, and suggest factors that increase the likelihood that users will want direct control. These findings help build a framework that can generate design guidelines for content curation settings, with which regulators can eventually take action to ensure platforms deploy content curation systems that support user autonomy.
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