The growth of technologies promising to infer emotions raises political and ethical concerns, including concerns regarding their accuracy and transparency. A marginalized perspective in these conversations is that of data subjects potentially affected by emotion recognition. Taking social media as one emotion recognition deployment context, we conducted interviews with data subjects (i.e., social media users) to investigate their notions about accuracy and transparency in emotion recognition and interrogate stated attitudes towards these notions and related folk theories. We find that data subjects see accurate inferences as uncomfortable and as threatening their agency, pointing to privacy and ambiguity as desired design principles for social media platforms. While some participants argued that contemporary emotion recognition must be accurate, others raised concerns about possibilities for contesting the technology and called for better transparency. Furthermore, some challenged the technology altogether, highlighting that emotions are complex, relational, performative, and situated. In interpreting our findings, we identify new folk theories about accuracy and meaningful transparency in emotion recognition. Overall, our analysis shows an unsatisfactory status quo for data subjects that is shaped by power imbalances and a lack of reflexivity and democratic deliberation within platform governance.
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Facial Recognition: Understanding Concerns and Privacy Attitudes Across Increasingly Diverse Deployment Scenarios
The rapid growth of facial recognition technology across ever
more diverse contexts calls for a better understanding of how
people feel about these deployments — whether they see
value in them or are concerned about their privacy, and to
what extent they have generally grown accustomed to them.
We present a qualitative analysis of data gathered as part of
a 10-day experience sampling study with 123 participants
who were presented with realistic deployment scenarios of
facial recognition as they went about their daily lives. Responses
capturing their attitudes towards these deployments
were collected both in situ and through daily evening surveys,
in which participants were asked to reflect on their experiences
and reactions. Ten follow-up interviews were conducted
to further triangulate the data from the study. Our results highlight
both the perceived benefits and concerns people express
when faced with different facial recognition deployment scenarios.
Participants reported concerns about the accuracy of
the technology, including possible bias in its analysis, privacy
concerns about the type of information being collected or
inferred, and more generally, the dragnet effect resulting from
the widespread deployment. Based on our findings, we discuss
strategies and guidelines for informing the deployment
of facial recognition, particularly focusing on ensuring that
people are given adequate levels of transparency and control.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1801316
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10289280
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- USENIX Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 246-262
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Introduction Social media has created opportunities for children to gather social support online (Blackwell et al., 2016; Gonzales, 2017; Jackson, Bailey, & Foucault Welles, 2018; Khasawneh, Rogers, Bertrand, Madathil, & Gramopadhye, 2019; Ponathil, Agnisarman, Khasawneh, Narasimha, & Madathil, 2017). However, social media also has the potential to expose children and adolescents to undesirable behaviors. Research showed that social media can be used to harass, discriminate (Fritz & Gonzales, 2018), dox (Wood, Rose, & Thompson, 2018), and socially disenfranchise children (Page, Wisniewski, Knijnenburg, & Namara, 2018). Other research proposes that social media use might be correlated to the significant increase in suicide rates and depressive symptoms among children and adolescents in the past ten years (Mitchell, Wells, Priebe, & Ybarra, 2014). Evidence based research suggests that suicidal and unwanted behaviors can be promulgated through social contagion effects, which model, normalize, and reinforce self-harming behavior (Hilton, 2017). These harmful behaviors and social contagion effects may occur more frequently through repetitive exposure and modelling via social media, especially when such content goes “viral” (Hilton, 2017). One example of viral self-harming behavior that has generated significant media attention is the Blue Whale Challenge (BWC). The hearsay about this challenge is that individuals at all ages are persuaded to participate in self-harm and eventually kill themselves (Mukhra, Baryah, Krishan, & Kanchan, 2017). Research is needed specifically concerning BWC ethical concerns, the effects the game may have on teenagers, and potential governmental interventions. To address this gap in the literature, the current study uses qualitative and content analysis research techniques to illustrate the risk of self-harm and suicide contagion through the portrayal of BWC on YouTube and Twitter Posts. The purpose of this study is to analyze the portrayal of BWC on YouTube and Twitter in order to identify the themes that are presented on YouTube and Twitter posts that share and discuss BWC. In addition, we want to explore to what extent are YouTube videos compliant with safe and effective suicide messaging guidelines proposed by the Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC). Method Two social media websites were used to gather the data: 60 videos and 1,112 comments from YouTube and 150 posts from Twitter. The common themes of the YouTube videos, comments on those videos, and the Twitter posts were identified using grounded, thematic content analysis on the collected data (Padgett, 2001). Three codebooks were built, one for each type of data. 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Additionally, the posts claimed that there are more than 100 people who have played BWC worldwide and provided detailed description of what each individual did while playing the game. These videos also described the tasks and different names of the game. Only few videos provided recommendations to teenagers who might be playing or thinking of playing the game and fewer videos mentioned that the provided statistics were not confirmed by reliable sources. The second theme included posts of people that either criticized the teenagers who participated in BWC or made fun of them for a couple of reasons: they agreed with the purpose of BWC of “cleaning the society of people with mental issues,” or they misunderstood why teenagers participate in these kind of challenges, such as thinking they mainly participate due to peer pressure or to “show off”. The last theme we identified was that most of these users tend to speak in detail about someone who already participated in BWC. These videos and posts provided information about their demographics and interviews with their parents or acquaintances, who also provide more details about the participant’s personal life. The evaluation of the videos based on the SPRC safe messaging guidelines showed that 37% of the YouTube videos met fewer than 3 of the 9 safe messaging guidelines. Around 50% of them met only 4 to 6 of the guidelines, while the remaining 13% met 7 or more of the guidelines. Discussion This study is the first to systematically investigate the quality, portrayal, and reach of BWC on social media. Based on our findings from the emerging themes and the evaluation of the SPRC safe messaging guidelines we suggest that these videos could contribute to the spread of these deadly challenges (or suicide in general since the game might be a hoax) instead of raising awareness. Our suggestion is parallel with similar studies conducted on the portrait of suicide in traditional media (Fekete & Macsai, 1990; Fekete & Schmidtke, 1995). Most posts on social media romanticized people who have died by following this challenge, and younger vulnerable teens may see the victims as role models, leading them to end their lives in the same way (Fekete & Schmidtke, 1995). The videos presented statistics about the number of suicides believed to be related to this challenge in a way that made suicide seem common (Cialdini, 2003). In addition, the videos presented extensive personal information about the people who have died by suicide while playing the BWC. These videos also provided detailed descriptions of the final task, including pictures of self-harm, material that may encourage vulnerable teens to consider ending their lives and provide them with methods on how to do so (Fekete & Macsai, 1990). 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