Lessons on Designing Against Online Harassment from MozFest

The last weekend in October, I traveled to London with the rest of the Squadbox team (Amy X Zhang and David Karger) for MozFest. We had a great time! We got to collaborate and brainstorm with others interested in combating online harassment, and creating a better internet in general.

Mozfest is made up of “sessions”, which are 60–90 minutes long, interactive, and led by a variety of people from all over the world. We went to lead a session called Defining, Combating, & Designing Against Online Harassment. In this post I’ll talk about what MozFest is, what we did there, and what we learned.

If you haven’t read our first post about Squadbox yet, check it out!

What’s MozFest? 🤔

MozFest, or Mozilla Festival, is an event put on by Mozilla focused on the open internet movement — making the internet a more inclusive, welcoming, healthier, and accessible place for everyone. As Mozilla puts it, “MozFest is an annual celebration of the open Internet movement. It’s where passionate technologists, educators, and makers come together to explore the future of the open Web”.

For the last several years, it’s been held at Ravensbourne College in London. The festival is filled with sessions, speakers, and workshops in 6 key areas: privacy & security, web literacy, digital inclusion, open innovation, decentralization, and youth involvement. It has over 1600 attendees from over 50 countries!

We got involved with MozFest through our participation in the Mozilla Open Leaders program, which provides mentorship and training on working open and leading open source projects. It also connects you to an awesome global network of people who are working in similar areas. By the way, Open Leaders is now accepting applications for Round 5!

As part of our application to Open Leaders, we had to write a session proposal for MozFest — it ended up being accepted, so off we went! Our goals for the session (and MozFest in general) were to:

• Meet other people interested in tackling online harassment.
• Work on building a stronger community around Squadbox of developers, designers, activists, potential users, and anyone else interested in the project.
• Collectively brainstorm ways that platforms, tools and personal networks (friends, family, colleagues) could help people experiencing harassment.
• Apply these ideas to inspire future features and development of our tool, Squadbox.

Throughout the weekend, I’d say we made progress on all of these!

Our Session

The general structure of our session was:

• I gave a brief presentation on online harassment, and what we’ve learned from speaking with people who’ve experienced it.
• We broke out into groups, and talked through different scenarios of online harassment that users face, many of which were inspired by interviews we conducted. (In a series of following articles, we will discuss scenarios in more detail).
• We asked participants to keep in mind the following questions when thinking about how to deal with their particular scenario:

1. How can people being harassed combat their harassment without suffering the consequences, such as having to silence themselves online?
2. How might the person being harassed activate their support network — their friends, family, fans, community, workplace, etc. — to help them deal with harassment? What features would be important in a technical solution that allows friends to help? What’s important to consider when creating such tools?

• We came back together and had members of each group share what they talked about.
• We ended with a short demo of Squadbox!

At the end of the session we collected a variety of notes and feedback from the participants. Here were some of the key takeaways:

New Ideas: Our participants shared many ideas they had for building solutions to harassment, and for improving friend-sourced tools like Squadbox. (For a description of how Squadbox works, see our last post here. In a nutshell, it is a tool that lets people recruit friends as moderators of potentially harassing content in their inboxes).

Some of these were:

• Squadbox should let owners make template responses for their moderators to send back to the people harassing them.
• It would be useful for moderators to have a way to send any important content contained in a harassing message on to the owner, without sending them the whole message.
• Owners should be able to set certain tags for their moderators to apply to messages (for example “threat”, “insult”, “spam”), and the owner should be able to choose for each tag whether or not they want to receive the message.
• Rather than blocking senders forever, users could block them temporarily.
• Squadbox would be a good way to gather data on and documentation of the harassment you receive.
• It would be useful to somehow automatically prioritize messages for moderation and figure out which ones the owner needs to receive urgently.

New Considerations: Our participants came from a variety of perspectives and brought some great points about important considerations when designing solutions to harassment. Some of their points:

• Even with trusted friends as moderators, participants were concerned that people could receive messages with extremely sensitive information they don’t want friends to see. Will harassment recipients be comfortable with using the tool?
• It’s important to consider how to allow genuine critical comments and dialogue to get through, while letting individuals protect themselves.
• What would owners who don’t have a close social network to do find moderators?
• If the moderator is a very close friend of the owner, they might be affected too by reading the messages and feel compelled to engage with the person harassing/intervene even if the owner doesn’t want that.
• The person harassing might retaliate if they knew their messages were being moderated. If the moderator is going to respond, maybe it should be a while later, after the person has had a chance to cool down.

Our session!

What Else We Did At MozFest

On Friday night, we attended MozFest Science Fair, where attendees show off projects they’ve been working on.

We were selected to demo, so we had a table set up there where we played a short video demo, handed out stickers and information, and mostly, got to meet and talk to a lot of people who were interested in the project!

We also spent a few hours on Friday making some posters to promote our session. MozFest encourages everyone to hand-make their posters for a personal touch, and they provided all the art supplies!

On Saturday, we went to sessions and talks at the festival. We also got to meet Emily May — she is the co-founder and executive director of Hollaback!, a non-profit dedicated to ending harassment in public spaces. More recently Hollaback! has moved into the internet space by working to combat online harassment with their project Heartmob, a tool to help people experiencing harassment get help from other internet users. On Sunday morning, Emily gave a great talk on online harassment and how bystanders can take action. See her five steps below:

Now What?

We exchanged contact information with many people we met at MozFest (which might be what led you here!) in order to continue the conversation, keep people in the loop on the project, and to continue building a network of collaborators, testers, and users.

As I mentioned in our last post, with new ideas and considerations in mind from MozFest, we’re working on making Squadbox more featureful, making it more secure and reliable, and integrating it with communication platforms besides email. If you’re interesting in getting involved or just seeing more information, check out our GitHub repository.

Thanks for reading!