Party Politics, Values and the Design of Social Media Services

Abstract

There have been several attempts to support political engagement through novel social media services. While the political nature of any technologies is widely acknowledged in human-computer interaction, such considerations have been less studied when designing for political engagement in social media services. We used speculative design probes to gauge how political elites perceive alternative social media interfaces designed to increase media diversity and decrease political polarisation. We show how elites? reactions to design probes could be rooted into party ideologies. Based on these, we discuss directions how social media services could be designed. Our underlying contribution is wider. We show how studying elites can provide insights about politics embedded into proposed novel social media services for political engagement. Second, we demonstrate what elites? perspective provide fruitful way to expand and rethink concepts that have been used to study ordinary people before. Finally, we discuss potential challenges of replacing economic interests with political interest in social media service design and provide a richer account on the discussion about social media regulation. Therefore, we pave the way to more research to critically study elites within social computing scholarship and highlight the importance of understanding political motivations which can guide the development of social media.