RESOCIAL: ‘User vulnerabilities and Resilience on SOCIAL media platforms and the metaverse: a sociolegal and design perspective’ seeks to identify, measure, and thereby mitigate human vulnerabilities on social media platforms (including the metaverse and immersive technologies), thereby fostering the resilience of their users. RESOCIAL is an NWO-NWA Synergy Grant Project which started in 2024 and will run for two years. It is led by Dr. Gianclaudio Malgieri from Leiden University.
Investigating user vulnerabilities on social media is important because people increasingly live their social life online and experience new and/or amplified risks to their fundamental rights (e.g., manipulation, online violence, discrimination, stigmatisation). This project will contribute to solving these issues through an interdisciplinary, participative, multi-stakeholder approach, starting from four use cases of vulnerability (children, vulnerable consumers, vulnerable data subjects, victims of gender-based violence). The project aims to address these challenges by combining socio-legal and socio-technical investigations via three postdoc projects, one of which at University of Twente.
Vulnerability-Sensitive Design for Social Media & the Metaverse
In this postdoc project, carried out by Dr. Lorena Sánchez Chamorro, we address socio-technical challenges and investigate how we can mitigate vulnerabilities on social media and the metaverse through developing a Vulnerability-Sensitive Design approach. The aim is to identify and validate best practices that can lead to accounting for and mitigating human vulnerability throughout the design process of these technologies, together with the societal partners and by treasuring the lessons learnt of the special resilience of traditionally vulnerable groups.
The research aims to employ and build on Value-Sensitive Design (VSD), a participatory design approach which allows to account for human values in a systematic way throughout the process of designing (digital) technologies. Through workshops with end-users and representatives as well as with social media companies, we plan to elicit values that are at stake in designing for vulnerability and identify possible value tensions. Based on this, we aim to investigate how to translate these abstract values to concrete design requirements and governance practices. The resulting design approach will be refined and validated through a pilot design focused on victims of gender-based violence. Through this we aim to contribute to realizing an online environment that is developed in a safe, value-sensitive and inclusive manner together with those who are most affected.