Introducing Squadbox, a tool to fight online harassment with friends.

Hi there! Welcome to our new blog. We plan to use this to keep the world up to date on the progress of Squadbox, a tool we’re building to help people experiencing online harassment by having their friends moderate their messages. Keep reading for information on: our motivation behind the project, how Squadbox works, who we are, and what we need help with/how you can get involved. Stay tuned later this week for a post about our experience at MozFest!

Some links: our website, our Twitter, our GitHub repository, our mailing list.

Motivation

Online harassment has become an increasingly prevalent issue — according to recent reports by Data & Society and the Pew Research Center, nearly half of internet users in the United States have experienced some form of online harassment or abuse. Unfortunately, solutions for combating harassment have not kept up. Common technical solutions such as user blocking and word-based filters are blunt tools that cannot cover many forms of harassment, and can be circumvented by determined harassers.

Recently, researchers have tried to use machine learning models to detect harassment, but these models are imperfect. Given the strong evidence that automated tools are ineffective on their own, we propose that a better alternative is to continue engaging humans in the moderation process. However, while human moderators already make up many of the reporting pipelines for platforms, harassment targets cannot currently count on platform action to shield them from harassment.

We conducted interviews with several targets of online harassment, and found that without existing effective solutions within platforms, targets often turn to the help of friends, using techniques such as giving friends password access to rid their inboxes of harassment, or forwarding unopened emails to friends to moderate. This motivates the design and implementation of tools like Squadbox, that is able to work externally from platforms to combat harassment.

How It Works

People experiencing harassment sign up and create squads, and invite their friends or other trusted individuals to become moderators for their squad. The “owner” of the squad can set up filters to automatically forward potentially harassing incoming content to Squadbox’s moderation pipeline. When an email arrives for moderation, a moderator makes an assessment, adding annotations and rationale where needed. The message is then handled in a manner according to the owner’s preference, such as having the email delivered with a special tag, placed in a particular folder, or discarded.

There are two ways you can use Squadbox, as shown below:

Flow 1: You are experiencing harassment on your current email account and want to get some of your emails moderated by your squad. We help you set up filters on your email so that suspicious emails get forwarded to members of your squad. They determine which emails are harassment and which can be forwarded back to your inbox.

Flow 2: You need an email address to give out to strangers or post publicly, but want to avoid receiving harassing messages. We give you an @squadbox.org email address to use. Emails to that address get sent to members of your squad. They determine which emails are harassment and which can be forwarded to your inbox.

Currently, Squadbox only works with email messages. We have plans to work on integrating it with other platforms like Twitter in the near future!

Users can import their contact lists in order to generate “whitelists” of trusted senders.

Owners set their preferences and give rules to their moderators. Their moderators review messages and approve, reject, and tag them.

Who We Are

Squadbox began as a research project in The Haystack Group at MIT CSAIL, led by Kaitlin Mahar, Amy X Zhang, and David Karger. The tool is currently in beta, and now we’re now working on getting it secure and reliable enough for an actual release. We’re seeking collaborators, testers, and users. Keep reading for information on how to get involved with the project!

Kaitlin, Amy, & David

Future Plans & How to Get Involved

We’re working on making Squadbox more featureful, making it more secure and reliable, and integrating it with communication platforms besides email. The tool is currently in beta, but we’d like to release it widely to the public. Additionally, we’re working on writing documentation and gathering resources for people experiencing harassment, and for the people who might serve as their moderators.

We’re looking for anyone who is passionate about this issue to help us build and improve Squadbox! We need programmers to help us code, designers to improve the interface and user experience, and people with experience and knowledge about online harassment and moderation to help guide our design choices, create resources for owners and moderators, etc.

If you’re interested in helping out in any way, we’d love to work with you! Our GitHub page is a good place to start getting an idea of our current tasks and priorities (repo, issues, our current milestone). Also please feel free to contact us at squadbox@mit.edu.

If you know anyone who might be interested in the project please pass this on!