Social media platforms letting down autistic users

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Mainstream social media platforms need redesigning to avoid deepening social exclusion of autistic people, according to Queen Mary University of London research presented today (April 26) at the CHI Human Factors in Computing Systems conference held during Autism Acceptance Month.

Language and communication differences associated with autism can make relationships challenging and lead to isolation—but researchers on Queen Mary's "Autistic Adults Online" project are exploring how the power of social media could be harnessed to help overcome these issues.

Researchers led by Queen Mary's Professor Nelya Koteyko held in-depth interviews with autistic adults to explore how they use social media, how they feel about the way the platforms work and how that impacts their interactions. Their findings reveal challenges facing autistic social media users and how the platforms could be designed to better support their inclusion.

Professor Koteyko explained, "Mainstream social media design is mainly based on the way non-autistic (allistic) people think. This could make social exclusion for autistic people worse. Our participatory research aims to show how looking at social media from an autistic perspective can help identify these biases and work towards addressing them."

The new paper details the strain that autistic people feel when adapting their communication style to interact with other social media users. One research participant expressed: "Trying to work out how you're meant to react. Are your emotions appropriate? How do you say that? How do you have to fluff it out to make it palatable to other people? Just exhausting, totally exhausting."

Social media features intended to enhance interactions often had the opposite effect for autistic users. Someone in the study said, "It's totally confusing, emojis; I don't know how I'm feeling, so how do I know which one to use?" Others struggled with GIFs and hashtags for similar reasons.

Despite some useful features, participants also described how Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were not ideally suited to their preferred style of sociality. Commenting on Twitter a participant explained, "It feels like a muddle of people, where things aren't grouped necessarily by subject matter. It's sometimes very difficult, to get them all sort of grouped together in my head."

Based on their interdisciplinary research that draws on linguistics and human computer interaction design, Professor Koteyko and the team have recommendations for social media platform designers to make online spaces more inclusive for autistic adults, such as:

Create more powerful tools to engage in interest-based sociality and to establish connections based upon mutual interests

Create more sophisticated filters to remove upsetting, impolite, negative, and confrontational content

Create more explicit and conspicuous tools for setting the visibility and availability of profile information and user-generated content, and provide more granular control over who can view and respond to that content

Enable further configuration and customization options for algorithmic content feeds

Create multi-modal tools that support autistic adults with understanding tone and meaning in content created by other users, and tools that support exploratory self-understanding of the tone of their own content prior to sharing within a network.

Create tools that support autistic adults to manage their time on social media, and avoid over engagement

Commenting on the study, on participant said, "This study has brought to light the varied and distinctive experiences of how autistic people interact with social media. While it does have the power to connect people across the community, there are risks in how to manage a different kind of social unpredictability that we also have to deal with in face to face situations. There are some concrete actions from this research which deserve to be given serious consideration by the companies which are responsible for these social networks."

Professor Koteyko concluded, "The intent of this study was not to draw generalisable conclusions about the autistic population, but about the design of social media platforms. Mainstream social media platforms can learn from the experiences of autistic people to create platforms that are kinder and more considerate towards everyone."

The paper has also been published as part of the Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Social media is indeed totally overwhelming. I only use Mastodon and Wrong Planet now days but I suppose WP isn't social media thank god. Mastodon is full of autistic people.

Are there any specific Mastodon instances you would recommend?

Social media lets down all marginalized groups. Case in point, there are "mutual aid networks" on Twitter (MA in this sense meaning people literally begging for it) which do NOT get boosted on the platform. As well, imagine how much help could be disseminated via the millions upon millions of user just donating a few dollars en mass every few weeks.

There is one called neurodifferent.me

And neurodiversity-in.au (Australian NDs)

I'm sure there are more. I will ask Mastodon people, they are helpful.

Yes. They said:

autistics.life
disabled.social
cutie.city

Based on the 7 years I was on Facebook, 2009-2015, and 2017, I would reword that,
"Professor Koteyko explained, "Mainstream social media design is mainly based on the way non-autistic (allistic) people think."
to
"Mainstream social media design is mainly based on the way non-autistic (allistic) ADHD sensory-craving people think."

Another reason also occurred to me why these platforms are letting autistic users down.

Social media is a flood, an avalanche of information, far too much to process.

We struggle to prioritise the most important piece of information anyway, so no wonder social media is swamping our brains in information and paralysing us.

This is true, actually! Back when I was a teenager, forums like this one were king and far more active. I much prefer that over modern social media.