Vulnerability on Social Media: A Gift, A Curse, or Just a Thing That Happens?

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This blog post summarizes the paper “Toward a Feminist Social Media Vulnerability Taxonomy,” published in the Proceedings of ACM in Human-Computer Interaction (PACM) in April 2023. It will be presented at CSCW ’23 in October 2023.

Kristen Barta*, Cassidy Pyle*, and Nazanin Andalibi. 2023. Toward a Feminist Social Media Vulnerability Taxonomy. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 7, CSCW1, Article 100 (April 2023), 37 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3579533

*asterisk denotes co-first authorship

“I define vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. To be human is to be in vulnerability” — Brené Brown

Vulnerability is a fundamental condition of humanity, though how individuals experience it varies greatly. Often, vulnerability is conceived of as inherently negative, synonymous with risk and harm, and something to be avoided.

In CSCW and social computing scholarship, vulnerability is often negatively connoted, positioning social media users as vulnerable to privacy violations, harassment, and platform policies.

But what if “vulnerability” comprises more than risk and harm?

To uncover the nuances of vulnerability on social media from a human-centered perspective, we posed the following research question:

How do individuals perceive and experience vulnerability in their encounters with and on social media?

We conducted interviews with 20 U.S.-based social media users that addressed the topics of identity and visibility on social media, broadly, as well as perceptions and experiences of vulnerability on/with social media.

From our interview data and our understanding of Mackenzie et al.’s (2013) prior feminist vulnerability taxonomy, we derived a Feminist Social Media Vulnerability (FSMV) Taxonomy. In this taxonomy, we consider the sources, states, and valences of vulnerability experienced by social media users. The figures below summarize these three dimensions of vulnerability and our contributions.

Table 2. Feminist Social Media Vulnerability (FSMV) Taxonomy, including source, state, and valence. Some of these categories, observed in our analysis, draw from past work in in-person (Mackenzie et al., 2014; Gilson, 2011) and social media (Brock, 2020; Schoenebeck & Blackwell, 2020) settings. Others (indicated by *) are new categories we discovered through our analysis.

Fig 2. A conceptual feminist taxonomy of social media vulnerability. Terms followed by an asterisk (*) denote conceptual categories we introduce in this work. Other conceptual categories are derived from Mackenzie et al.’s (2014) feminist taxonomy of vulnerability and Gilson’s (2011) work on vulnerability.

Where does vulnerability on social media come from?

Sociotechnical Sources of Vulnerability

While an existing feminist philosophical taxonomy of vulnerability focuses on how interpersonal interactions and social, political, economic, and environmental situations may promote vulnerability, we argue that an FSMV taxonomy must contend more explicitly with sociotechnical situations that can cause and/or exacerbate vulnerability.

Social media platforms can enable vulnerability that initially stems from interpersonal interactions, for instance, by rendering content visible to individuals who then harass the content producer.

Yet, a social media platform also exists as an actor that perpetrates vulnerability, for instance, through rendering content hypervisible or potentially “shadowbanning” or otherwise suppressing content in ways that are undesirable for users and often intertwined with their social identities.

How does social media shape the state of vulnerability?

Networked States of Vulnerability

Traditionally, vulnerability is thought of as being relevant only when directly enacted upon an individual or community. Yet, we note that socio-technical contexts shift this dynamic and, as such, introduce “networked vulnerability,” wherein vulnerability is observed and indirectly experienced in networked online environments. For instance, witnessing racism on social media that is directed not toward oneself in particular but to a member of one’s racial or ethnic group could facilitate networked vulnerability.

Photo Credit: Alona Miller

How is vulnerability on social media perceived as desired/undesired/ambivalent?

Desired Vulnerability

As we noted earlier, vulnerability is often synonymized with risk or harm. However, our findings indicate that indirect and direct experiences with vulnerability on social media can also be desired. For instance, disclosing your experience with a chronic illness may feel cathartic and enable social support exchange.

While participants also noted perceptions of social media vulnerability as undesired or ambivalent, we highlight perceptions of desired vulnerability here in this blog post to highlight perceptions of vulnerability that are not solely associated with risk and harm.

What might designers do to curb undesired vulnerability while retaining opportunities for desired vulnerability?

Granular control over content and profile visibility over time

Undesired vulnerability sometimes emanates from non-networked others being able to find and respond to content in unexpected ways. Audiences can also experience undesired vulnerability when content producers expose them to their own desired vulnerability without the audience’s consent.

1. Privacy settings: easily toggle between private and public not only on an account level but on an individual post level
2. Audience settings: easily toggle to indicate who may reply to or share content, how they may share, and to whom
3. Allowing settings to persist over time by default: allowing content posted when a user had their account set to private to remain private by default, even if one switches to a public profile/account

Photo Credit: Lifewire

Granular control over content consumption

Undesired vulnerability can also emanate from the consumption of content that espouses negativity, hate, and harassment, especially to others holding a similar identity.

1. Disabling video auto-play by default
2. Bolstering content warning systems
3. Increasing similar proactive indicators of sensitive content
4. Creating human-centered news feeds: make it easier for individuals to select topics that they are/are not interested in seeing at particular times in the day/week

Photo Credit: Brian David Films

While design considerations such as these may help social media users manage their own vulnerability, our findings emphasize that vulnerability on social media is the result of complex interactions between/across different sources, states, and valences. Our paper highlights these additional aspects: Read the full paper here!

References

Brock Jr, A. (2020). Distributed blackness. In Distributed Blackness. New York University Press.

Gilson, E. (2011). Vulnerability, ignorance, and oppression. Hypatia, 26(2), 308–332.

Mackenzie, C., Rogers, W., & Dodds, S. (2014). Introduction: What is vulnerability and why does it matter for moral theory. Vulnerability: New essays in ethics and feminist philosophy, 1–29.

Schoenebeck, S., & Blackwell, L. (2020). Reimagining social media governance: Harm, accountability, and repair. Yale JL & Tech., 23, 113.