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Matias, J. N., Szalavitz, S., Zuckerman, E. FollowBias: Supporting Behavior Change Toward Gender Equality by Networked Gatekeepers on Social Media. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. ACM
Networked gatekeepers on social media increasingly influence
which people and groups receive media attention. Many
unknowingly direct much greater attention to men than to
women. Can technologies support these gatekeepers to follow
their own values of equality? Theories of value consistency
suggest that confronting people with inconsistencies between
values and behavior prompts behavior change. In this paper,
we introduce FollowBias, a novel system that offers feedback
on the percentage of women that users follow on Twitter.
We conduct field deployments of FollowBias with 61 and 78
participants, exploring differences between their values and
behavior, their explanations of those differences, and their
changes in behavior. In the first, FollowBias users had a 45
percentage point greater chance of increasing the percentage
of women followed over one week. In the second, we fail to
find an effect. We also offer findings on political and ethical
trade-offs in designing systems for behavior change toward
equality.