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Debiasing Desire: Addressing Bias & Discrimination on Intimate Platforms

Published: 01 November 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Designing technical systems to be resistant to bias and discrimination represents vital new terrain for researchers, policymakers, and the anti-discrimination project more broadly. We consider bias and discrimination in the context of popular online dating and hookup platforms in the United States, which we call intimate platforms. Drawing on work in social-justice-oriented and Queer HCI, we review design features of popular intimate platforms and their potential role in exacerbating or mitigating interpersonal bias. We argue that focusing on platform design can reveal opportunities to reshape troubling patterns of intimate contact without overriding users' decisional autonomy. We identify and address the difficult ethical questions that nevertheless come along with such intervention, while urging the social computing community to engage more deeply with issues of bias, discrimination, and exclusion in the study and design of intimate platforms.

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    cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
    Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 2, Issue CSCW
    November 2018
    4104 pages
    EISSN:2573-0142
    DOI:10.1145/3290265
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    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike International 4.0 License.

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    Published: 01 November 2018
    Published in PACMHCI Volume 2, Issue CSCW

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    Author Tags

    1. bias
    2. design
    3. discrimination
    4. ethics
    5. intimacy
    6. law
    7. online dating
    8. platforms
    9. policy

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