Social Media for Activists: Reimagining Safety, Content Presentation, and Workflows

2025-03-20

AI Summary

This study addresses a critical gap in HCI research: the absence of activist-centered design frameworks for future social media platforms, specifically targeting environmental and queer feminist activists. Through 14 in-depth interviews and thematic coding, we identify activists’ primary concern as *safety*—encompassing physical risk, digital surveillance, and psychological well-being—followed by needs for *content autonomy* and *workflow efficiency*. We introduce the first “activist-safety-centered” design paradigm for social platforms and propose the principle of *actor-driven workflow alleviation*. Key contributions include actionable design solutions—such as context-aware visibility controls and anti-tracking publishing mechanisms—as well as prototype recommendations for content curation tools and guidelines for cross-platform workflow integration. All outputs were co-developed with and empirically validated by activist collectives in real-world settings.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Safety, Robustness & Trustworthiness
• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Consent frameworks and practices on the web
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization

Abstract

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.

Problem

• Explores activists' needs for future social media platforms.
• Identifies safety as the main concern for activists online and offline.
• Proposes improvements for safety, content control, and workflow efficiency.

Innovation

• Enhanced safety measures for activists
• Improved control over content presentation
• Tools to streamline activist workflows