EmoFirefly: Promoting fairness on social media
Introduction
Emofirefly is a plugin for social media such as Twitter and TikTok that categorizes comments. Through Textual sentiment analysis, comments can be divided into four categories: Annoyed, Gloomy, Neutral, and Cheerful. Users can view the comments they want based on their preferences.
At the end of the project, the vision is to combine this plug-in with hardware (such as a mobile phone case) into a tangible interface, which can more intuitively show readers' emotions when they see comments, or when reviewers comment.
Users: People who are psychologically fragile, emotionally unstable, and easily disturbed by the outside world.
Main Stakeholders: Social media companies, especially Twitter and Weibo, which contains a lot of current events that lots of people with different standpoints can comment on.
Self-Driven Research Project
Supervisor
Zhanling Feng (graduated from RCA IDE)
Time
Aug. 2020 - Oct. 2020
My Skills
Research
UI/UX design
Background
Today, with the internet as ubiquitous as it is, information resources are growing rapidly. Although mass media has brought people a wealth of information resources, this often confuses people, affecting people's moods and falsely manipulating public opinion.
Astroturfing Definition
Creating the impression of public support by paying members of the public to pretend to be supportive. -- Urban Dictionary
Social Media Definition
Social media is a tool and platform that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences and opinions with each other.
Reseach
The internet gives people the platform to express their opinions and desires in a real sense. However, the problem of "astroturfing" has become increasingly prominent. They obstruct, muddy and even manipulate "internet public opinion", greatly affecting the normal expression of public opinion online, and increasingly arousing the dissatisfaction and hatred of netizens.
Social Media Comment Area Analysis
Over the years, the comment function on social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Weibo and Bilibili has developed a growing number of ways for people to express their comments and opinions, including text comments, liking, and reposting, as well as the ability to post emojis and images in the comment area.
However, these mainstream platforms still lack the ability for people to truly convey their emotional expression. And in the comment area, opinions are not classified, and various comments are mixed together with limited 'sort by' functions. This has allowed astroturfing to become more widespread, which is a negative trend.
Tweet Structure Analysis
Retweet
The Tweet page consists of four parts: Content, General, Feedback, and Comment.
Replies. Words + Pictures + Gif + Vote + Locations
Like
Share. Share tweets within or outside the platform.
Users' Feelings to Tweet
Twitter desperately needs nuance in the convos here. When someone tweets about something sad, something that rightly causes anger, etc, we have to give it a like to acknowledge we read it & are with them. But sometimes, a Like seems so inappropriate, ppl reply w.”that’s a like of”
Twitter has a harassment problem, and every woman on this site has seen it. A man can continuously antagonize survivors and shrug off mass reporting, but the moment a woman shows anger at him, or at the system enabling him, she is punished. We’ve seen it time and again.
I‘m beginning to feel like my voice doesn’t matter anymore. I tweet out my opinions and nothing but silence. Why? I’m struggling with this today.
Introduce a Dislike button besides the Like button, or features similar to YouTube and Facebook. By the way, I love and enjoy Twitter.
Conclusion
1. Strengthen the distinction between positive and negative emotions
2. Strengthen post moderation and combat harassment
3. Fully meet people's needs for self-expression
Concept Prototyping and Evaluation
I proposed three Assumptions and made a simple interactive prototype. I found three users to show them several new comment functions. In the process of communicating with them, many new ideas emerged.
Assumption 1: Real thoughts about the attitude of people you don’t know (does it matter or not?).
Assumption 2: Would you like to see an emotional change process as an event ferments?
Assumption 3: What does social media lack the most. What features do you want to add?
Interview
Bon
22, Business Administrator
A rational male college student with a calm mind
Attitude toward comments on social media
1. Whether or not to respond to negative comments depends on his mood.
2. He thinks the majority of people hold moderate opinions.
3. Rarely reports negative comments, and rarely gets angry.
Vision
Comments could be classified, but negative comments cannot be blocked, because the world is diverse and speech is free.
Evelyn
28, Entrepreneur
A sensitive person with a strong sense of curiosity
Attitude toward comments on social media
1. Will avoid negative comments which can affect her emotions. But she is also curious about bad reviews.
2. Will not block or report negative comments, as she thinks this will make her feel more guilty.
Vision
To react to extreme comments, people could "throw rotten eggs", and there could be an animation that is thrown out and pasted on the screen. This could be decompressive and satisfying.
Jack
25, Engineering
A opinionated and self-aware person
Attitude toward comments on social media
1. Online comments are exaggerated, and many people are dissatisfied with reality. They express negative opinions on the internet and have no bottom line.
2. Misled by astroturfing in the past, but realizes this and now takes a strong stance.
Vision
When people complain, the platforms could recognize the content, publish some of it but cause other parts to be pending subject to moderation.
Conclusion
Personality
1. People's ability to accept negative reviews is still very high.
2. People are wise and they can recognize astroturfing.
3. People still strongly support freedom of speech.
Methods
1. Categorize comments based on their positive or negative emotion.
2. For other people's comments, people can "give a monetary gift" or "throw rotten eggs" for evaluation.
3. The system automatically hides extreme comments (but doesn't delete them).
Problem Definition
Design Aim
1. Comments on social networks are unclassified, disorganized, and prone to manipulation by actors commenting in bad faith.
2. People can't express their feelings through comments visually.
Design Inspiration
Design a plugin that can add people‘s emotions before they comment. Comments will be categorized into four kinds of emotions: Gloomy, Cheerful, Annoyed, and Neutral.
For comments, users take corresponding interactions: 1. Give monetary gifts to comments. The more positive gifts, the comment is highlighted, and the more negative gifts, part of the user’s ability to comment will be restricted. 2. Users can see comments similar to their own.
Nature provides rich precedent for the ability for individuals to unite as groups. The sound of crickets chirping is the expression of both an individual’s voice, and a greater chorus of many insects, coordinated in a decentralized manner to produce a synchronous output. A single cricket’s sound is amplified when it joins the collective whole. The overall appearance is of an organism of much greater size and power than would be implied by a number of disconnected individuals.
Design Concept
I compare comments to fireflies of different types. If the content of the comment is of the same position, it is considered a group. Fireflies of the same group emit the same color of light and vibration frequency.
Concept Diagram
After activating this plugin, comments on social media platforms will be divided into these four categories, so that people can more intuitively check the emotional tendency of comments. In addition, users can conduct emotional evaluation when making comments, which can more directly express their own emotions.
Plugin Design
Framework
Sketch
Wire Flows
User Flows
Viewer
Publisher
Scenario
Functions
Mockup
朱烨晨
致力于创新设计