Inclusive Content, Ethical Tech, and You

We all want content strategy to be a force for good—we want to make things welcoming, seamless, and maybe even fun to use. But without a process for ensuring our decisions are also inclusive, equitable, and fair, our products can end up with all sorts of biases embedded in them. Let's talk about what we as content strategists and user advocates can do about it: how we can uncover assumptions in our work, have difficult conversations with our teams and companies, and use content strategy as a wedge to open the door for a more ethical and inclusive way forward. (Confab 2018)

Transcript

1. INCLUSIVE CONTENT, ETHICAL TECH, & YOU Sara Wachter-Boettcher // May 2018
2. flickr.com/photos/hjjanisch/8606288865/ (CC BY-ND 2.0)
3. 8:00 p.m.
5. 9:03 p.m.
6. To recap: • There’s no way to turn it off • This is dangerous for people with eating disorders • This feels shamey • “Average” calorie counts are wildly inaccurate • Not all calories are equal • A cupcake is not a useful metric • Pink cupcakes are not neutral—they have social and culture encoding (feminine, white, middle class) • This perpetuates diet culture
7. It took one hour to document these flaws.
8. It took three hours to shut the feature down.
9. How many hours did it take to build?
10. flickr.com/photos/3059349393/8000156483/ (CC BY 2.0)
11. SMALL CHOICES
12. From Dan Hon
13. From Dan Hon
15. From @sallyrooney
16. ‘‘ We talked about getting rid of it but it performs kinda great :/ —Tag Savage, lead writer at Tumblr
17. BIG CONSEQUENCES
18. Screensh0t from a knockoff Peppa Pig video (James Bridle)
19. • Cartoons about torture and suicide • Sexualized characters and themes • Violence and weapons • Kids being tied up and hurt • Kids vomiting and writhing in pain
21. • Word2vec: Natural language processing tool trained using 3 million words from Google News articles.
22. • Word2vec: Natural language processing tool trained using 3 million words from Google News articles. • Can complete analogies: Paris is to France as Tokyo is to _______.
23. • Word2vec: Natural language processing tool trained using 3 million words from Google News articles. • Can complete analogies: Paris is to France as Tokyo is to _______. • Thinks man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker.
24. Image: Google I/O
25. Image: Google I/O • How will we trust who we’re talking to? • Is it OK for a bot to pretend it’s human? • What does recording the call mean for privacy? • Is it fair to outsource task to bots and expect low-wage workers to deal with it?
26. A WAY FORWARD
27. Practice Process Priorities
28. Practice Process Priorities
29. ASSUME
32. • The user had a good year. • The user wants to relive their year. • The user wants to share their year. • The user’s most popular content is positive.
33. • Identity • Location • Emotional state • Physical state • Personal history • Lifestyle • Goals • Pain points
35. ‘‘ My hair type is what’s called ‘4C hair,’ given the level of coiliness. I learned that I needed to add that to my searches in order to find things. It shouldn’t be that way. — Candice Morgan, 
 Head of Diversity & Inclusion, Pinterest
36. Practice Process Priorities
37. If it’s important, it’s planned.
38. If it’s important, it’s resourced.
39. If it’s important, it’s evaluated.
40. Make inclusive design an explicit part of: • Project roles and responsibilities • Roadmapping and project planning • Use cases and scenarios • Content crits and editing cycles • Project postmortems • Employee evaluations
41. Practice Process Priorities
43. ‘‘ We’re an idealistic and optimistic company. For the first decade, we really focused on all the good that connecting people brings… But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough. We didn’t focus enough on preventing abuse and thinking through how people could use these tools to do harm as well. —Mark Zuckerberg, April 2018
44. Image: Pixabay (CC0)
45. Image: Pixabay (CC0)
46. Image: Pixabay (CC0)
47. Image: Pixabay (CC0)
48. Image: Pixabay (CC0)
49. Image: Josh Mattson (CC - BY NC)
53. Image: Brain Traffic
54. Image: Brain Traffic We’re here. 
 We’re gaining influence. How will we use it?
55. @sara_ann_marie rareunion.com sarawb.com thank you