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Social Media for Activists: Reimagining Safety, Content Presentation, and Workflows

Anna Ricarda Luther, Hendrik Heuer, Stephanie Geise, Sebastian Haunss, Andreas Breiter

TL;DR

Activists rely on social media for rapid mobilization and coordination but face safety, reach, and workload challenges that hinder effectiveness. The authors conducted 14 semi-structured interviews across environmental and queer-feminist movements in Germany, using a card-sorting task to distill needs and feature requests for future platforms. The study identifies three core needs—on- and offline safety, enhanced content presentation, and optimized workflows—and translates them into concrete design and research recommendations, including adaptive anonymity, transparent algorithmic curation, and integrated workflow tools. These findings offer tangible guidance for HCI researchers and platform designers to develop safer, more controllable, and more efficient social media tools that support social movements while balancing platform constraints and policy considerations.

Abstract

Social media is central to activists, who use it internally for coordination and externally to reach supporters and the public. To date, the HCI community has not explored activists' perspectives on future social media platforms. In interviews with 14 activists from an environmental and a queer-feminist movement in Germany, we identify activists' needs and feature requests for future social media platforms. The key finding is that on- and offline safety is their main need. Based on this, we make concrete proposals to improve safety measures. Increased control over content presentation and tools to streamline activist workflows are also central to activists. We make concrete design and research recommendations on how social media platforms and the HCI community can contribute to improved safety and content presentation, and how activists themselves can reduce their workload.

Social Media for Activists: Reimagining Safety, Content Presentation, and Workflows

TL;DR

Activists rely on social media for rapid mobilization and coordination but face safety, reach, and workload challenges that hinder effectiveness. The authors conducted 14 semi-structured interviews across environmental and queer-feminist movements in Germany, using a card-sorting task to distill needs and feature requests for future platforms. The study identifies three core needs—on- and offline safety, enhanced content presentation, and optimized workflows—and translates them into concrete design and research recommendations, including adaptive anonymity, transparent algorithmic curation, and integrated workflow tools. These findings offer tangible guidance for HCI researchers and platform designers to develop safer, more controllable, and more efficient social media tools that support social movements while balancing platform constraints and policy considerations.

Abstract

Social media is central to activists, who use it internally for coordination and externally to reach supporters and the public. To date, the HCI community has not explored activists' perspectives on future social media platforms. In interviews with 14 activists from an environmental and a queer-feminist movement in Germany, we identify activists' needs and feature requests for future social media platforms. The key finding is that on- and offline safety is their main need. Based on this, we make concrete proposals to improve safety measures. Increased control over content presentation and tools to streamline activist workflows are also central to activists. We make concrete design and research recommendations on how social media platforms and the HCI community can contribute to improved safety and content presentation, and how activists themselves can reduce their workload.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 34 sections, 1 figure, 3 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. Social Media and Activism
  4. Previous Research on Supporting Activists on Social Media
  5. Methods
  6. Participants
  7. Procedure
  8. Analysis
  9. Results
  10. Needs of Activists for Social Media Use (RQ1)
  11. On- and Offline Safety
  12. Enhanced Content Presentation
  13. Optimized Workflows
  14. Feature Requests of Activists for Social Media Platforms (RQ2)
  15. On- and Offline Safety
  16. ...and 19 more sections

Figures (1)

  • Figure 1: This figure gives an overview of activist tasks and the role of social media use for these tasks. Each link from the functionalities of Instagram and messenger services (WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal) to the categories of activist tasks indicates that at least two participants mentioned the respective functionality as important for the respective activist task.