Brennan Schaffner

Prior work on dark patterns, or manipulative online interfaces, suggests they have potentially detrimental effects on user autonomy. Dark pattern features, like those designed for attention capture, can potentially extend platform sessions beyond what users would have otherwise intended. Existing research, however, has not formally measured the quantitative effects of these features on user engagement in subscription video-on-demand platforms (SVODs). In this work, we conducted an experimental study with 76 Netflix users in the US to analyze the impact of a specific attention capture feature, autoplay, on key viewing metrics. We found that disabling autoplay on Netflix significantly reduced key content consumption aggregates, including average daily watching and average session length, partly filling the evidentiary gap regarding the empirical effects of dark pattern interfaces. We paired the experimental analysis with users' perceptions of autoplay and their viewing behaviors, finding that participants were split on whether the effects of autoplay outweigh its benefits, albeit without knowledge of the study findings. Our findings strengthen the broader argument that manipulative interface designs can and do affect users in potentially damaging ways, highlighting the continued need for considering user well-being and varied preferences in interface design.

Moderating user-generated content on online platforms is crucial for balancing user safety and freedom of speech. Particularly in the United States, platforms are not subject to legal constraints prescribing permissible content. Each platform has thus developed bespoke content moderation policies, but there is little work towards a comparative understanding of these policies across platforms and topics. This paper presents the first systematic study of these policies from the 43 largest online platforms hosting user-generated content, focusing on policies around copyright infringement, harmful speech, and misleading content. We build a custom web-scraper to obtain policy text and develop a unified annotation scheme to analyze the text for the presence of critical components. We find significant structural and compositional variation in policies across topics and platforms, with some variation attributable to disparate legal groundings. We lay the groundwork for future studies of ever-evolving content moderation policies and their impact on users.

Technology ethics is increasingly at the forefront of human-computer interaction scholarship, with increasing visibility not only to end users of technology, but also regulators, technology practitioners, and platforms. The notion of “dark patterns” has emerged as one common framing of technology manipulation, describing instances where psychological or perceptual tricks are used to decrease user agency and autonomy. In this panel, we have assembled a group of highly diverse early-career scholars that have built a transdisciplinary approach to scholarship on dark patterns, engaging with a range of socio-technical approaches and perspectives. Panelists will discuss their methodological approaches, key research questions to be considered in this emerging area of scholarship, and necessary connections between and among disciplinary perspectives to engage with the diverse constituencies that frame the creation, use, and impacts of dark patterns.

Users often turn to subscription video on demand (SVOD) platforms for entertainment. However, these platforms sometimes employ manipulative tactics that undermine a user's sense of agency over time and content choice to increase their share of a user's attention. Prior research has investigated how interface designs affect a user's sense of agency on social media and YouTube. For example, YouTube's autoplay left users feeling like they had less control over their time. We extend this work by investigating the design elements of Netflix, the most used SVOD, for the impact they have on users' senses of agency. We conducted interviews with 20 participants that used Netflix regularly, asking about their experiences and perceptions of features in the Netflix platform design that may affect their sense of agency. We found that a user's sense of agency was at odds with the platform's design. Users, who were often seeking entertainment for mood management, were met with features that encouraged watching more than they originally planned to and watching content they may not otherwise watch. We discuss design recommendations that Netflix could employ to reaffirm their users' agency.