Unraveling Entangled Feeds: Rethinking Social Media Design to Enhance User Well-being

TL;DR

This paper explores how social media algorithms impact user mental well-being, revealing users' folk theories of entanglement and proposing design strategies to improve emotional health and user control.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of entanglement in social media interactions and offers design recommendations to mitigate mental health harms based on user insights.

Findings

Users develop folk theories explaining their social media experiences.

Entanglement describes emotional disconnect between actions and outcomes.

Designs focusing on context and control can reduce harm.

Abstract

Social media platforms have rapidly adopted algorithmic curation with little consideration for the potential harm to users' mental well-being. We present findings from design workshops with 21 participants diagnosed with mental illness about their interactions with social media platforms. We find that users develop cause-and-effect explanations, or folk theories, to understand their experiences with algorithmic curation. These folk theories highlight a breakdown in algorithmic design that we explain using the framework of entanglement, a phenomenon where there is a disconnect between users' actions and platform outcomes on an emotional level. Participants' designs to address entanglement and mitigate harms centered on contextualizing their engagement and restoring explicit user control on social media. The conceptualization of entanglement and the resulting design recommendations have implications for social computing and recommender systems research, particularly in evaluating and designing social media platforms that support users' mental well-being.