Squadbox : a tool to combat email harassment using friendsourced moderation

Abstract

Online harassment is both a social and technical problem, and has yet to be successfully solved. In order to better understand the issue and the challenges surrounding it, we conducted interviews with eighteen recipients of online harassment to understand their current strategies for coping, finding that they often resorted to asking friends for help. Inspired by these findings, we built Squadbox. Squadbox is a tool to help people experiencing email harassment by allowing them organize a “squad” of friend moderators to protect them from harassing messages. The moderators intercept emails and can reject, organize, and redirect emails, as well as collaborate on filters. Squadbox is designed to let its users implement highly customized workflows, as we found in interviews that harassment and preferences for mitigating it vary widely. We evaluated Squadbox on five pairs of friends in a field study, finding that participants could comfortably navigate around privacy and personalization concerns. This thesis details the interview findings and their design implications, the implementation of the Squadbox prototype, and the findings from the field study.