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Online platforms are riddled with harassment, which significantly impacts the well-being of users. Unfortunately, the content moderation solutions provided by platforms often disappoint end-users as they fail to equip individuals with sufficient controls for their personal situations. In this work, the author, who personally experienced a sustained harassment campaign on Twitter, decided to regain control by constructing an automated, personalized, and collaborative anti-harassment system to protect herself, which has proven itself to be effective. The experience of developing---and re-developing in the face of repeated platform API changes and restrictions---this personalized content moderation system highlights many design issues that make managing severe online harassment such a challenge and invites critical study of the power dynamics between large online platforms and individual users. Through this analysis, this report aims to inform better designs to help platforms more effectively protect victims. 

YouTube is the world's most widely used video platform, with over 70% of content viewed through algorithmic recommendations. While prior audits have examined polarization in YouTube's long-form video recommendations, the platform's fast-growing Shorts feature remains understudied. In this paper, we present the first large-scale audit comparing political content exposure and engagement dynamics across short-form and long-form videos on YouTube. We design a matched audit based on the insight that many news media organizations publish both short and long versions of the same content and collect 50,000 pairs of long-form and short-form video recommendations from both political and nonpolitcal seed videos. We analyze recommendations along several dimensions: the frequency of political recommendations, the diversity of retrieved videos, the engagement those videos receive, and finally, the partisan alignment between recommended videos and seed videos. Our results highlight fundamental differences between each algorithm, which we hope we can inform future research in analyzing the impact of YouTube recommendations. 

Voice-based social media platforms that enable attendees to have real-time, ephemeral interactions with each other—such as X-Spaces, Discord, and Clubhouse—have seen considerable growth in recent years. While prior research on these spaces has predominantly focused on moderating harms, our work seeks to understand emergent practices employed by hosts to proactively shape their discussion space— focusing on the facilitation aspect of moderation duties. Drawing on facilitation strategies, we study these practices through three comprehensive studies using mixed-methods: survey of social-audio users, co-design interviews, and analyzing training sessions for hosts. Our findings reveal insights into the issues faced by hosts and attendees, current facilitation practices, opinions on technological solutions, and factors that could be responsible for some of the identified issues such as the available training for hosts. We found that hosts themselves are often significant sources of issues due to practices such as focusing more on self-promotion than facilitating discussions. In addition, host training sessions seem to encourage behaviors that contribute to the negative perception of hosts. We draw on outcomes from co-design interviews to guide the design of future tools to support hosts in facilitating social-audio spaces. Our findings provide insights that could help create a more positive experience for both hosts and attendees. 

Studying computer science is a journey: people start at different times, travel at different paces, and pause along the way. In this experience report, we describe a peer-led, year-long program designed to welcome students to Computer Science and Engineering as a discipline, department, and academic program. We detail the logistical, curricular, and personnel structures of this program, highlighting design choices we made to (a) open multiple ways to join the program all year, (b) de-emphasize "getting ahead", (c) prioritize reflection, and (d) connect students to existing resources. Throughout, we emphasize the critical role of peer mentors in leading and shaping this space. We share our own lessons learned, as well as reflections from students and mentors on the value of this learning community outside of formal classroom structures.