NJIT Researchers Evaluate Online Harassment of Marginalized Live-Streamers

Developers of live-streaming software could help block online harassment of women and LGBTQ people, based on new research from NJIT's informatics department where students and faculty studied the common types of harassment and interviewed 25 streamers to understand coping strategies.

The most common types of harassment include body shaming, condescending, hate speech, sexual comments and stalking, while the most common coping mechanisms include automated moderation, emotion management, humor and therapy, explained computer science major Jira Uttarapong, who anticipates graduating in 2022. She worked with doctoral candidate Jie Cai and Associate Professor Yvette Wohn, all from Ying Wu College of Computing.

Uttarapong said the topic is personal for her as a live-streamer and pansexual woman. She's been harassed online simply for being a woman who comments on video games, for being an LGBTQ person and even for her hairstyle. She saw the humor in configuring a robotic responder which directs trolls to her research — "From a research standpoint, they're just confirming our results," she joked — and she attends therapy for deeper support. But she also sees the value in simply blocking or ignoring the trolls, who she said go out of their way to find people to harass.

"I'm really interested in how the platform can unintentionally be enabling certain harassment and how considering those things in their designs can make things better for marginalized groups," she added. "I think this paper's really important … The live-streaming and gaming space, and social interactions within it, are still new to us so it's important to understand how these experiences play out. We can design things in ways that enable or help prevent this stuff."

For example, Utarrapong said, streaming platform designers could make safe spaces for marginalized groups, add layers of user verification and more clearly publish the risks of leaking personal information. She was surprised that more streamers didn't cite professional therapy as a coping mechanism, and suggested that future research should examine women and LGBTQ people separately, as the results made her aware of the large scope of each group.

Uttarapong and Cai presented their work at the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences, held virtually in June, which notably was Pride Month. Funding came from the Mozilla Foundation and National Science Foundation.

The work also represents how any student can find research opportunities at NJIT, even if the core of the research isn't technical.

"Thanks to this research we did with Jira about understanding the experiences of victims, we are currently working on different socio-technical solutions," Wohn added. "I think it’s important to do this foundational work because people think that computing professionals should be making algorithms or designing tools, but we cannot design something without understanding people and their detailed needs, and so the behavioral research that we do in the field of human-computer interaction is essential if we are to address real-world problems."

"This paper interested me from a personal standpoint, and it was my first introduction to research," Uttarapong noted. "I didn't know it could be about things like this."