David Jay of CHT: "A Guide for Technologists Responding to COVID-19"

[Alphabet workers news]

The Center for Human Technology (CHT) was founded two years ago by two former Google employees as a thinktank to pressure and influence tech firms to build products that support and protect people, rather than products that exploit human vulnerabilities. David Jay, Head of Mobilization at CHT, recently wrote an essay about tech product design in the COVID-19 era, with six specific recommendations. Some extracts below. Emphasis is mine.

- Bruce

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https://medium.com/center-for-humane-technology/trauma-informed-care-a-guide-for-technologists-responding-to-covid-19-a547d35f12db
Trauma-Informed Care: A Guide for Technologists Responding to COVID-19

... Historically tech companies have imagined themselves making already happy and balanced people happier and more balanced...

[But] now, in the midst of a global pandemic, unprecedented economic downturn and terrifying surge in misinformation, the inaccuracy of that platonic ideal is becoming widely acknowledged. Widespread trauma has always shaped how people experience social media, but now it is impossible to ignore. That platonic user is feeling overwhelmed and anxious. Many are grieving, coping with the loss of income, stuck at home in a toxic or even abusive family. Someone may self-soothe by watching Twitch for hours a day and find themselves drawn to streamers who express the kind of anger that they feel unsafe expressing at home. They may respond to losing their income and sense of self-worth by turning to the internet to find someone to blame who they can actively fight back against...

In my conversations I see a quiet acknowledgement that beneath their desire for inspiration, connection and joy, many people are turning to social media to do the hard and extremely messy work of coping with trauma. Platforms built to serve users engaging content are ill-equipped for this task, they’ve hired and trained very few people who understand this work and how to support it. That needs to change...

... to navigate this new world, tech employees need to update the platonic user at the center of their product’s culture. And to do that, we must change how we listen.

Towards Trauma-Informed Product Design

These steps, adopted from materials designed to create trauma-informed social services, are intended as the starting point of a discussion about how to create a trauma-informed culture inside of a tech platform or individual product team...

1. Listen, Don’t Solve

In CS and UX courses, we are often trained to think in terms of problems and elegant solutions. Now is a time to abandon that way of thinking. An individual’s trauma is not a problem that can be understood or solved by anyone else. A discussion about addressing trauma should start not with feature ideas, but with new ways to understand and make sense of others’ experience...

3. Focus on Supportive Relationships

Most social platforms exist to build relationships, but not all relationships help.

... unsupportive relationships and interactions tend to be the focus of integrity teams, but how is the presence of such relationships analyzed for patterns? Is there a collective tide rising where more and more bad actors are coming about from their own unprocessed trauma. Rather than just seeking to identify and silence bad actors, try to understand and counteract the relational environments in which they thrive.

4. Support those who build trust

... expect to find a diverse ecosystem of effective, sometimes destructive methods for addressing trauma to be growing in response to the widespread need. You will need to form an opinion about which parts of this ecology to support and which to prune. Some, who encourage people to bury their trauma by lashing out at others or who prey on feelings of disorientation with sophisticated disinformation campaigns should be forwarded to your policy team.

5. Make Choices Collaboratively

... Insight into how your product can change won’t primarily come from your team and it won’t be discernable from your metrics, it can only come from those you are working to support. This means inviting people with experience addressing trauma on your platform into your design process and compensating them for their work...

It’s common to think of user choice as a friction to be minimized, to use recommendations and A/B optimization to make choices as effortless as possible so that users get what they want. But in trauma recovery an effortless choice is often a destructive one...