UseCRT - User experience and usability of Content Reporting Tools in online social media platforms and their user-to-user messaging services

UseCRT project will evaluate the user experience and usability of user content reporting tools in the most popular social media platforms and their user-to-user messaging services; investigated within the context of online harassment as defined by the platforms themselves. This will be achieved through the analysis of platform-specific behaviour policies, UI inspection of reporting tools, and a user-study to understand people’s mental models as they interact with these reporting tools. It aims to improve the user experience of reporting tools to help minimise online harms from sharing within online social platforms. To address this aim, we will:

• Evaluate how the different platforms define and report to respond to different forms of online harassment within their platform-specific policies
• Identify potential usability issue within online social media platform reporting tools
• Understand the user experience and mental models of online social media reporting tools

Main findings

Our work has currently been focused on the analysis of platform governance related documents to understand how harms are being characterised by platforms, and how platforms further charecterise harassment. We have complete an analysis of online dating platform documents finding the following:

• Platforms recognise a variety of harms across their platforms (see Table below)
• Platforms charecterise harms based on the nature of the harm (e.g., behaviour, threat, promotion), their repetitative nature, and the target of the harm (e.g., individuals, groups, children, and those with protected characteristics).
• We find platforms balancing platform and user responsibility, often encouraging users to remain on the platform for as long as possible to allow the platforms to provide users with protective mechanisms.
• There are tentions in the advice being given by platforms related to safety. For example, some platforms prohibit and/or technically restrict taking screenshots, whilst also providing safety advice that involves the taking of screenshots.
• There are geographic differences in user access to external safety tools and resources, with many catering only to the US or Canada. Additionally, tailored protections vary by group.

Publications

O’Brien, C., Roslan, N. A., Abu-Salma, R., Murdoch, S., Zytko, D., & Warner, M. (2025). Online Dating Platform Safeguards and Self-Protection: How Dating Platforms Characterise, Respond to, and Safeguard Against Harms. In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vol. 2025). Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).