This Article is Offensive

This %$#&*$ article is going to teach you a thing about talking #$@% around other people. Well, not really, but it might make you think about how to handle offensive content (of the text variety). A lot of designs don’t have to worry about this, but there’s two specific elements that when combined need to explore the idea of being able to gracefully handle offensive content. The amalgamation I’m speaking of is text entry and a social aspect. When these things combine it provides a method of a sharing of text with (possibly) large numbers of people. Normally, this is fine. But what if someone starts throwing out a slew of curse words and other highly offensive content and it is showing up on your feed or your page?

The Rise of Social Censorship

This issue was brought to the forefront in my mind when Facebook started to be opened up. I jumped on the Facebook wagon sophomore year of my undergraduate days. It was closed to only college students who had a .edu e-mail address and was still limited to a handful of colleges. No one really cared what went on because the only people who saw it were fellow college peers who had probably witnessed the depths of your vices anyway. But things started to change when Facebook decided to become a little more profitable and open up their platform to a larger audience. Suddenly, high schoolers, who might have been younger siblings began to creep into the fold. Then Zuckerberg and company wanted to completely open the platform to the public. Coworkers and family members flocked to the site and suddenly the point-of-view (POV) of Facebook’s original audience had been flipped on its head.

The self-censoring knob had to be turned up to level ten. Who wants their boss to see them cursing out a girlfriend or doing something completely stupid, and often influenced by a potent liquid diet? I’m not defending these types of actions, I’m simply saying they were commonplace among the early days of Facebook. It just no longer became a sanctuary social network where college students could goof around with their friends, but became more of a modified form of contact, yellow book look-up, and content sharing. This new POV changed its use because people would get fired for wall posts and athletes would become publicly criticized for an inappropriate post or picture. Censoring became much more important.

Yet, self-censorship is just a behavorial change and doesn’t have a whole lot with how to change the design of a social application. Censoring external material, material that comes from outside the current user, has a lot to do with the design. Let’s take a look at the different views and ways to approach this subject.

Forget It

Here’s an approach: apathy. Actually, it’s not really apathy if you have thought about it and decide to take this approach with a reason to justify it. This is the approach in which you just allow offensive material without any sort of software censorship.  There’s a few reasons you may want to take this approach.

• Your social network fits a certain crowd where this type of material is prevalent and acceptable.
• You feel self-censorship is the best way to handle it.
• No budget to dedicate time towards this feature.

This is a feature where it is important to know your users. If this is a site for professionals or young children then this approach is unnacceptable.

Total Annhialation

This is the blast-anything-in-sight approach. Basically, there’s a method of detecting offensive words within text before it is posted and then either replacing those words or not allowing the post to go public. Although there are ways to get around this type of censoring, it does help to strongly discourage the use of offensive words. This is a good approach if you would like to completely try to eliminate offensive material. This approach should probably be used with audiences where potentially offensive material is unacceptable and mixed audiences where these types of people might be present.

Protect the Innocent

This approach is a mix of the above where it is left up to the user which method they would like. This approach allows “offensive” material to still appear for those who either don’t care or don’t mind it. However, it also gives the option for users who don’t want to see it to have the ability to censor it. This is probably the most elegant approach, but also requires the time to set up user permissions and have the system remember which option the user has selected. If a designer wanted to take it a step further then they could have users actually select the individual words that they would like censored, even be able to add their own.

There are a few ways to take this approach. One is to censor anything that the user sees when they are logged in. So things would be censored from their view, but not from others. Another way is to censor anything on that user’s page or feed. This way, when others see that page they don’t see any “offensive” material associated with that person.  The last way is to simply allow the users to control content on their page or feed. That way if a post or something has material deemed offensive the user can manually censor that material by replacing it or deleting it.

Conclusion

In my opinion, most social networks need some form of censoring and I believe it is best to give users control over that censoring. I don’t want people throwing the F word all over my Facebook Wall or Twitter feed and I don’t want someone looking at me as a potential candidate for a job to see something like that.

What is your opinion on social networking censorship? What approach do you like best? Do you have an idea for another approach you would like to see? Leave your thoughts in the comments.