Affordances and Design Principles of The Political Left and Right

TL;DR

This study explores how political ideologies influence social media design by analyzing co-designed mockups from Finnish political groups, revealing distinct value-driven features aligned with liberal or conservative perspectives.

Contribution

It introduces a novel co-design approach to examine how political ideologies shape social media affordances and design principles, highlighting ideological differences in early-stage prototypes.

Findings

Right-leaning groups favored market-based visibility features.

Left-leaning groups prioritized open profile work.

Design outcomes varied along liberal-conservative lines.

Abstract

Like any form of technology, social media services embed values. To examine how societal values may be present in these systems, we focus on exploring political ideology as a value system. We organised four co-design workshops with political representatives from five major parties in Finland to investigate what values they would incorporate into social media services. The participants were divided into one right-leaning group, two left-leaning groups, and one mixed group. This approach allows us to examine the differences in social media services designed by groups with different political ideologies i.e., value systems. We analysed produced artefacts (early-stage paper mockups) to identify different features and affordances for each group and then contrasted the ideological compositions. Our results revealed a clear distinction between groups: the right-leaning group favoured market-based visibility, while left-leaning groups rejected such design principles in favour of open profile work. Additionally, we found tentative differences in design outcomes along the liberal--conservative dimension. These findings underscore the importance of acknowledging existing political value systems in the design of social computing systems. They also highlight the need for further research to map out political ideologies in technology design.