2025/03/20 by Anna Luther, Anna Ricarda Luther, Hendrik Heuer +3 · 1 voice · 3 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Ethics and Social Impacts of AI #Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection #Misinformation and Its Impacts #cs.HC
paper · pdf · doi:10.1145/3706598.3713351
arxiv published 2025/03/20 · arxiv updated 2025/03/20 · openalex publication_date 2025/04/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Social media is central to activists, who use it internally for coordination and externally to reach supporters and the public. To date, the HCI community has not explored activists' perspectives on future social media platforms. In interviews with 14 activists from an environmental and a queer-feminist movement in Germany, we identify activists' needs and feature requests for future social media platforms. The key finding is that on- and offline safety is their main need. Based on this, we make concrete proposals to improve safety measures. Increased control over content presentation and tools to streamline activist workflows are also central to activists. We make concrete design and research recommendations on how social media platforms and the HCI community can contribute to improved safety and content presentation, and how activists themselves can reduce their workload.