Engineering patterns for Trust and Safety on social media platforms: A case study of Mastodon and Diaspora

IF 3.7 2区计算机科学 Q1 COMPUTER SCIENCE, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Journal of Systems and Software Pub Date : 2025-01-15 DOI:10.1016/j.jss.2024.112322

Geoffrey Cramer, William P. Maxam III, James C. Davis

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Context:

Trust & Safety (T&S) Engineering is an emerging area of software engineering that mitigates the risks of harmful interactions in online platforms. Numerous studies have explored T&S risks on social media platforms, taxonomizing threats and investigating individual issues. However, there is limited empirical knowledge about engineering efforts to promote T&S.

Methods:

This study examines T&S risks and the engineering patterns to resolve them. We conducted a case study of the two largest decentralized SMPs: Mastodon and Diaspora. These SMPs are open-source, so we analyzed T&S discussions within 60 GitHub issues. We analyzed T&S discussions that took place in their online repository and extracted T&S risks, T&S engineering patterns, and resolution rationales considered by the engineers. We integrate our findings by mapping T&S engineering patterns onto a general model of SMPs, to give SMP engineers a systematic understanding of their T&S risk treatment options.

Results:

T&S issues are a challenge throughout the feature set and lifespan of an SMP. A taxonomy of 12 solution patterns are developed, paving the way for academia and industry to standardize Trust & Safety solutions. We conclude with future directions to study and improve T&S Engineering, spanning software design, decision-making, and validation. We conclude with future directions to study and improve T&S Engineering, spanning software design, decision-making, and validation.

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来源期刊

Journal of Systems and Software 工程技术-计算机：理论方法

CiteScore

8.60

自引率

5.70%

发文量

193

审稿时长

16 weeks

期刊介绍： The Journal of Systems and Software publishes papers covering all aspects of software engineering and related hardware-software-systems issues. All articles should include a validation of the idea presented, e.g. through case studies, experiments, or systematic comparisons with other approaches already in practice. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: •Methods and tools for, and empirical studies on, software requirements, design, architecture, verification and validation, maintenance and evolution •Agile, model-driven, service-oriented, open source and global software development •Approaches for mobile, multiprocessing, real-time, distributed, cloud-based, dependable and virtualized systems •Human factors and management concerns of software development •Data management and big data issues of software systems •Metrics and evaluation, data mining of software development resources •Business and economic aspects of software development processes The journal welcomes state-of-the-art surveys and reports of practical experience for all of these topics.