PressProtect: Helping Journalists Navigate Social Media in the Face of Online Harassment
Catherine Han, Anne Li, Deepak Kumar, Zakir Durumeric
TL;DR
This work formalizes the online safety needs of journalists facing persistent harassment and introduces PressProtect, a client-side interface for Twitter/X that categorizes reader replies by toxicity and relevance to a journalist's story. It combines need-finding with eight interviews and a subsequent eight-person user study, using GPT-3.5 for relevance and Perspective API for toxicity to guide content presentation. The results show that journalists perceive PressProtect as protective, adaptable to other public-facing roles, and capable of reducing exposure to harmful content while preserving useful engagement, though the authors identify a need to distinguish imminent physical threats from other harassment. The study emphasizes multi-stakeholder governance, newsroom support gaps, and platform design implications to advance safer, more usable online spaces for vulnerable populations, suggesting paths for collaboration among newsrooms, platforms, and third-party developers.
Abstract
Social media has become a critical tool for journalists to disseminate their work, engage with their audience, and connect with sources. Unfortunately, journalists also regularly endure significant online harassment on social media platforms, ranging from personal attacks to doxxing to threats of physical harm. In this paper, we seek to understand how to make social media usable for journalists who face constant digital harassment. To begin, we conduct a set of need-finding interviews with Asian American and Pacific Islander journalists to understand where existing platform tools and newsroom resources fall short in adequately protecting journalists, especially those of marginalized identities. We map journalists' unmet needs to concrete design goals, which we use to build PressProtect, an interface that provides journalists greater agency when engaging with readers on Twitter/X. Through user testing with eight journalists, we evaluate PressProtect and find that participants felt it effectively protected them against harassment and could also generalize to serve other visible and vulnerable groups. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and recommendations for social platforms hoping to build defensive defaults for journalists facing online harassment.