Major platform social media is in an upheaval. Bluesky and Meta鈥檚 Threads want to be Twitter. LinkedIn鈥檚 . Meanwhile, Twitter has become X. And X wants to be 鈥� possibly including job listings, payment and ride-hailing 鈥� even as . Amid this, after announces the impending death of social media.

The turmoil has many people reconsidering what they want out of social media at scale: Can it be better? Four researchers at the 91探花 have approached this question from different angles.

, a 91探花assistant professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, was the senior author of two papers at the in Minneapolis last week. One about where articles on social media came from, with the aim of curbing misinformation; the other looks at affects social media users.

For the last couple years, , a 91探花doctoral student in the Information School who researches online harassment, has written a that often focuses on the trouble with social media. , a 91探花doctoral student in the Allen School, studies how people enter dissociative states on social media. , a 91探花assistant professor in the iSchool, is researching tools to on social media.

91探花News talked with the four of them about what鈥檚 wrong with social media and how it might improve.

What are some significant problems you see with major social media platforms?

Amy X. Zhang:聽 A big problem to me is the centralization of power 鈥� that the platforms can decide what content should be shown and what should get posted to the top of one feed for millions of people. That brings up issues of accountability and of localization to specific communities or cultures. A singular perspective 鈥� oftentimes coming from, for example, workers in Silicon Valley 鈥� won鈥檛 fit for lots of people. Alongside this is the homogenization of our digital social experiences, which don鈥檛 come close to the richness and vividness of our actual social lives.

Katherine Cross: Amy is quite right. I would add that open platforms 鈥� which anyone can join and on which everyone talks to everyone, constantly 鈥� allow for the most rapid acceleration of virality, far beyond anything that has existed previously. It also means that if someone is trying to start a harassment campaign, they can easily spread it virally to thousands of users. Those of us who remember LiveJournal know that earlier iterations of the Internet were no stranger to drama and harassment. But the design of earlier platforms provided a great many speed bumps for toxicity and abuse. A lot of that friction has gone away as a condition of the design of open platforms. So whether it鈥檚 Tumblr or Twitter or Facebook, these platforms allow for the most rapid acceleration of the worst aspects of our internet use.

Amanda Baughan: Some other problems are the many mechanisms that seek to draw people in and keep them on a site. These can be notifications that are personalized to the content that you like or the time you normally open the app; the infinite feeds that keep you scrolling; and the rewards structure that keeps you on the hunt for content that might scratch your brain in the way that you find most appealing. Even though social media could be a great tool for connection or self-expression, people are often in an adversarial relationship with these interfaces that are trying to keep them stuck.

Martin Saveski: I will add that these platforms are designed for very shallow connections. Right now, I鈥檓 asking: How can we design platforms with scale but still provide an environment where people can communicate and connect more deeply? After Twitter open-sourced its feed algorithm and many of the Facebook files were released, we know what we鈥檇 previously guessed: They primarily optimize for engagement. So how do we do that better? It’s clear that there is value in engagement. But perhaps there are other things that we could be thinking about when designing the experience.

How are you trying to make large social media platforms better for the people using them?

KC: My work is trying to do at least two things, practically. I鈥檓 looking at the lives and travails of content moderators, the people whose jobs it is to make the internet more usable for ordinary people. They deserve better working conditions and more mental health support. The second part is 鈥� I hate to make it seem so simple 鈥� almost an exhortation to spend less time on open platforms. As long as we have open platforms, the only effective solution for a number of problems is to simply get people to use these platforms less.

AB: I’ve been thinking a lot about our experiences online as dissociative, rather than addictive. Dissociation can be part of healthy cognitive functioning. Daydreaming, for example, is considered dissociation. But when you combine people鈥檚 reduced self-reflection and self-monitoring on a platform designed to keep them on a site, people start to sink more time into the platform than they really want to. This explains part of why people have these fraught relationships with their social media 鈥� neither satisfied, nor willing to quit. So I鈥檝e looked at designs that might help people re-engage their self-monitoring and disrupt dissociation. For example, platforms could separate content into smaller chunks, which is currently available on X; add a 鈥測ou’re all caught up鈥� label; or tell users they鈥檝e been scrolling for a certain amount of time.

AXZ: I鈥檝e been looking at what it would mean to decentralize these major platforms鈥� power by building tools for users or communities who don鈥檛 have lots of time and resources. For instance, if you are getting harassed and you’re developing word lists and blocking harassers, can we that lets you share that with people in a similar situation? I’m also really interested in , like WhatsApp or Signal. Right now, because of encryption, nobody’s moderating content. The platform can’t do it, and there aren鈥檛 tools for users or communities to do it. So you just have massive issues with abuse on these platforms.

MS: Recently I’ve worked with collaborators at Stanford to think about how to . Intentionally or not, algorithms reflect values. We found that if we encode democratic values in platforms鈥� algorithms, we see a reduction in polarization, but people are still reasonably engaged. Now we’re launching a larger field experiment to study how people are affected if we sort their feeds differently or remove some types of information from them?

What do you see as the potential for large social media?

AXZ: I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Twitter. It has been great for my career in many ways. I used to spend lots of time sharing my research, hearing about other people’s research, sometimes even starting collaborations. Twitter has been the de facto place for academic sharing and conversation, but should it be? Is it a place where junior scholars feel welcome to participate? Is it inclusive of everyone’s voices? Is it what we really want out of a forum for scholarly communication? In some ways, yes. But in many ways, no. Twitter has had so many problems over the years with harassment. If we were to design something that reflects the values of an academic community, which does want to be inclusive and to share its research with the world, what could that look like? I don’t know exactly, but I do think it takes some rethinking.

KC: Again, I agree completely with Amy. Twitter could, in theory, be good for sharing articles. Occasionally, when an article of mine really caught fire, it was partially because it was getting shared a lot on a platform like Twitter. But I鈥檝e watched online harassment dynamics play out between journalists or academics. For example, I followed a lot of epidemiologists and public health experts, all of whom had expertise on COVID-19. And I watched as their excessive use of Twitter led them to degenerate into these warring camps. I鈥檝e spoken to many of these people privately, and they said that it corroded actual academic relationships. That’s where I feel that the professional benefits are sometimes overstated.

These platforms can also be good for interpersonal relationships. I’ve made a lot of friends through Twitter. It has occasionally helped my career. It’s useful for networking in very small minority communities, like the transgender community, or any number of other groups of people who make up 1% of the population. It鈥檚 also been great for private crowdfunding because of the ease of virality on an open platform. But I still think that there is something to be said for recouping some of these benefits on smaller, more closed platforms.

Given all the turmoil with major platforms lately, are you hopeful about any of the changes you’re seeing either in platforms or in how the public is relating to these platforms?

MS: In an interesting way, the fact that Musk closed Twitter鈥檚 data access has encouraged researchers to think beyond Twitter. I’m personally very excited about new social media platforms 鈥� especially Bluesky, because people can own their data and also control what they see in their feeds without it being so centralized. Hopefully, that will lead to a better version of whatever we鈥檝e had.

AB: The recent changes of Twitter have shown how much platform design and governance can have a huge impact on people’s experiences. I’ve seen the quality of my feed get much worse, and it’s led me to log off much more quickly. So I hope that this has led people 鈥� who aren’t just social media researchers 鈥� to question how these platforms are made and how they want to use them.

KC: I effectively stopped using Twitter when Musk took over, but earlier this year, I gave up on it completely. I think that, like Amanda, I take hope from the fact that a lot of people are clearing away their preconceptions about social media being inevitable and fixed. I always try to teach my students that no technology鈥檚 form is inevitable. We have a say over its shape.

AXZ: When I started grad school, Facebook was the dominant thing. It was so hard for me to imagine a world without it, or without the social networking paradigm of people following each other. I just assumed that this was the future. Now we鈥檙e in this fragmented landscape. People are leaving Facebook for other platforms, then leaving those platforms for even other platforms. We lose something with that fragmentation, for sure. When Twitter first appeared, there was some excitement about its role for democracy, that it could be 鈥渢he global town square.鈥� It was perhaps naive of us to think that, and we’ve learned the downsides. Now we鈥檙e correcting toward a fragmented landscape, which is maybe more reflective of how we interact socially and is perhaps healthier.

KC: In my dissertation, I argue that social media has often been anti-political. During the previous in 2009, for instance, there was so much hope that Twitter and open platforms like it were going to be self-organizing networks that could change the world. What we began to get were things like the , during which , but not the endurance of democracy, because the latter requires a public to be able to deliberate. In theory, Twitter can get masses of people out onto the streets, which is extraordinarily important. But it gives them no mechanism for deciding what to do with all that power that they have gained. And it’s why these movements often dissolve. These platforms are very good at provoking internecine conflict, but not good at providing a space for safe, effective deliberation to do or become something new as a collective.

For more information, contact Baughan at baughan@cs.uw.edu, Cross at kcross1@uw.edu, Saveski at msaveski@uw.edu and Zhang at axz@cs.uw.edu.

Sometimes when we are reading a good book, it’s like we are transported into another world and we stop paying attention to what’s around us.

Researchers at the 91探花 wondered if people enter a similar state of dissociation when surfing social media, and if that explains why users might feel out of control after spending so much time on their favorite app.

The team watched how participants interacted with a Twitter-like platform to show that some people are spacing out while they’re scrolling. Researchers also designed intervention strategies that social media platforms could use to help people retain more control over their online experiences.

The group May 3 at the CHI 2022 conference in New Orleans.

“I think people experience a lot of shame around social media use,” said lead author , a 91探花doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “One of the things I like about this framing of 鈥榙issociation鈥� rather than 鈥榓ddiction鈥� is that it changes the narrative. Instead of: ‘I should be able to have more self-control,’ it鈥檚 more like: ‘We all naturally dissociate in many ways throughout our day 鈥� whether it’s daydreaming or scrolling through Instagram, we stop paying attention to what’s happening around us.'”

There are multiple types of dissociation, including trauma-based dissociation and the everyday dissociation associated with spacing out or focusing intently on a task.

Baughan first got the idea to study everyday dissociation and social media use during the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown, when people were describing how much they were getting sucked into spending time on their phones.

“Dissociation is defined by being completely absorbed in whatever it is you’re doing,” Baughan said. “But people only realize that they’ve dissociated in hindsight. So once you exit dissociation there’s sometimes this feeling of: How did I get here? It’s like when people on social media realize: ‘Oh my gosh, how did 30 minutes go by? I just meant to check one notification.'”

The team designed and built an app called Chirp, which was connected to participants’ Twitter accounts. Through Chirp, users’ likes and tweets appear on the real social media platform, but researchers can control people’s experience, adding new features or quick pop-up surveys.

“One of the questions we had was: What happens if we rebuild a social media platform so that it continues to offer what people like about it, but it is designed with an explicit goal of keeping the user in control of their time and attention?” said senior author , an assistant professor in the 91探花Information School. “How does a user鈥檚 experience with this redesigned app compare to their experience with the status quo in digital well-being design, that is, adding an outside lockout mechanism or timer to police their usage?”

Researchers asked 43 Twitter users from across the U.S. to use Chirp for a month. For each session, after three minutes users would see a dialog box asking them to rate on a scale from one to five how much they agreed with this statement: “I am currently using Chirp without really paying attention to what I am doing.” The dialog box continued to pop up every 15 minutes.

“We used their rating as a way to measure dissociation,” Baughan said. “It captured the experience of being really absorbed and not paying attention to what’s around you, or of scrolling on your phone without paying attention to what you’re doing.”

Over the course of the month, 42% of participants (18 people) agreed or strongly agreed with that statement at least once. After the month, the researchers did in-depth interviews with 11 participants. Seven described experiencing dissociation while using Chirp.

In addition to receiving the dissociation survey while using Chirp, users experienced different intervention strategies. The researchers divided the strategies into two categories: changes within the app’s design (internal interventions) and broader changes that mimicked the lockout mechanisms and timers that are available to users now (external interventions). Over the course of the month, participants spent one week with no interventions, one week with only internal interventions, one week with only external interventions and one week with both.

When internal interventions were activated, participants got a “you’re all caught up!” message when they had seen all new tweets. People also had to organize the accounts they followed into lists.

For external interventions, participants had access to a page that displayed their activity on Chirp for the current session. A dialog box also popped up every 20 minutes asking users if they wanted to continue using Chirp.

In general, participants liked the changes to the app’s design. The “you’re all caught up!” message together with the lists allowed people to focus on what they cared about.

“One of our interview participants said that it felt safer to use Chirp when they had these interventions. Even though they use Twitter for professional purposes, they found themselves getting sucked into this rabbit hole of content,” Baughan said. “Having a stop built into a list meant that it was only going to be a few minutes of reading and then, if they wanted to really go crazy, they could read another list. But again, it’s only a few minutes. Having that bite-sized piece of content to consume was something that really resonated.”

The external interventions generated more mixed reviews.

“If people were dissociating, having a dialog box pop up helped them notice they had been scrolling mindlessly. But when they were using the app with more awareness and intention, they found that same dialog box really annoying,” Hiniker said. “In interviews, people would say that these interventions were probably good for ‘other people’ who didn’t have self-control, but they didn鈥檛 want it for themselves.”

The problem with social media platforms, the researchers said, is not that people lack the self-control needed to not get sucked in, but instead that the platforms themselves are not designed to maximize what people value.

“Taking these so-called mindless breaks can be really restorative,” Baughan said. “But social media platforms are designed to keep people scrolling. When we are in a dissociative state, we have a diminished sense of agency, which makes us more vulnerable to those designs and we lose track of time. These platforms need to create an end-of-use experience, so that people can have it fit in their day with their time-management goals.”

Additional co-authors are and , both 91探花doctoral students in the iSchool; , a 91探花undergraduate student in the iSchool; , a 91探花doctoral student in the human centered design and engineering department; and , an associate professor at the University of Buffalo. This research was funded by Facebook and the National Science Foundation.

For more information, contact Baughan at baughan@cs.washington.edu and Hiniker at alexisr@uw.edu.

Grant number: 18459955

The internet seems like the place to go to get into fights. Whether they’re with a family member or a complete stranger, these arguments have the potential to destroy important relationships and consume a lot of emotional energy.

Researchers at the 91探花 worked with almost 260 people to understand these disagreements and to develop potential design interventions that could make these discussions more productive and centered around relationship-building. The team 聽this April in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the ACM in Human Computer Interaction Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.

“Despite the fact that online spaces are often described as toxic and polarizing, what stood out to me is that people, surprisingly, want to have difficult conversations online,” said lead author , a 91探花doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “It was really interesting to see that people are not having the conversations they want to have on online platforms. It pointed to a big opportunity to design to support more constructive online conflict.”

In general, the team said, technology has a way of driving users’ behaviors, such as logging onto apps at odd times to avoid people or deleting enjoyable apps to avoid spending too much time on them. The researchers were interested in the opposite: how to make technology respond to people’s behaviors and desires, such as to strengthen relationships or have productive discussions.

“Currently many of the designed features that users leverage during an argument support a no-road-back approach to disagreement 鈥� if you don’t like someone’s content, you can unfollow, unfriend or block them. All of those things cut off relationships instead of helping people repair them or find common ground,” said senior author , an assistant professor in the 91探花Information School. “So we were really driven by the question of how do we help people have hard conversations online without destroying their relationships?”

The researchers did their study in three parts. First, they interviewed 22 adults from the Seattle area about what social media platforms they used and whether they felt like they could talk about challenging topics. The team also asked participants to brainstorm potential ways that these platforms could help people have more productive conversations.

Then the team conducted a larger survey of 137 Americans ranging from 18 to 64 years old with political leanings that ranged from extremely conservative to extremely liberal. These participants were asked to report what social media platforms they used, how many hours per week they used them and if they had had an argument on these platforms. Participants then scored each platform for whether they felt like it enabled discussions of controversial topics. Participants were also asked to describe the most recent argument they had had, including details about what it was about and whom they argued with.

Many participants shared that they tried to avoid online arguments, citing a lack of nuance or space for discussing controversial subjects. But participants also noted wanting to have discussions, especially with family and close friends, about topics including politics, ethics, religion, race and other personal details.

When participants did have difficult conversations online, people tended to prefer text-based platforms, such as Twitter, WhatsApp or Facebook, over image-based platforms, such as YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram.

Participants also emphasized a preference for having these discussions in private one-on-one chats, such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, over a more comment-heavy, public platform.

“It was not surprising to see that people are having a lot of arguments on the more private and text-based platforms,” Baughan said. “That really replicates what we do offline: We would pull someone aside to have a private conversation to resolve a conflict.”

Using information from the first two surveys, the team developed 12 potential technological design interventions that could support users when having hard conversations. The researchers created storyboards that illustrated each intervention and asked 98 new participants, ranging from 22 to 65 years old, to evaluate the interventions.

The most popular ideas included:

Democratizing

In this intervention, community members use reactions, such as upvoting, to boost constructive comments or content.

“This moves us away from the loudest voice drowning out everyone else and elevates the larger, quieter base of people,” Hiniker said.

Humanizing

The goal of this intervention is to remind people that they are interacting with other people. Some ideas include: preventing users from being anonymous, increasing the size of users’ profile pictures, or providing more details about users, such as identity, background or mood.

Channel switching

This intervention provides users with the ability to move a conversation to a private space.

“I envision this intervention as the platform saying: ‘Would you like to move this conversation offline?’ Or maybe it has some sort of button, where you can quickly say: ‘OK, let’s go away from the comments section and into a private chat,'” Baughan said. “That could help show more respect for the relationship, because it doesn’t become this public arena of who’s going to win this fight. It becomes more about trying to reach an understanding.”

The least popular idea:

Biofeedback

This intervention uses biological feedback, such as a user’s heart rate, to provide context about how someone is currently feeling.

“People would tell us: ‘I don’t want to share a lot of personal information about my internal state. But I would like to have a lot of personal information about my conversational partner’s internal state,'” Hiniker said. “That was one of the design paradoxes we saw.”

The next step for this research would be to start deploying some of these interventions to see how well they help or hurt online conversations in the wild, the team said. But first, social media companies should take a step back and think about the purpose of the interaction space they’ve created and whether their current platforms are meeting those goals.

“I would love to see technology help prompt people to slow down when it comes to things like knee-jerk emotional reactions,” Baughan said. “It could ask people to reflect: Is this a good use of my time? How much do I value this relationship with this person? Do I feel like it’s safe to engage in this conversation? And if a conversation happens in a public space, it could suggest taking it offline or going to a private space.”

Justin Petelka, a 91探花doctoral student in information science; Amulya Paramasivam, a 91探花undergraduate student majoring in human centered design and engineering; and , , and , who completed this research as undergraduate students at the UW, are also co-authors on this paper. This research was funded by Facebook.

For more information, contact Baughan at baughan@cs.washington.edu and Hiniker at alexisr@uw.edu.