In New York City, law enforcement regularly monitors the social media use of young people who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), compiling binders of Twitter and Facebook posts to link them to crimes or gangs.
Something as benign as liking a photo on Facebook can be used as evidence of wrongdoing in a trial, so when police officers misinterpret social media posts—which often include slang, inside jokes, song lyrics, and references to pop culture—it can lead to serious consequences.
To prevent these kinds of misinterpretations, SAFELab, a transdisciplinary research initiative at the Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Social Practice and Policy, has launched a new web-based app that teaches adults to look closer at social media posts: InterpretMe.
The tool is currently open to members of three groups—educators, law enforcement, and the press.
“These are the people who come into contact with young people regularly and have influence over their lives,” says Siva Mathiyazhagan, research assistant professor and associate director of strategies and impact at SAFELab. “Yet many of them don’t have the cultural context to understand how young people talk to one another online.”
Development of the app began when SAFELab director Desmond Upton Patton, the Brian and Randi Schwartz University Professor at Penn, was an associate professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work in New York.
Students from the School of Social Work met weekly with youth at the Brownsville Community Justice Center, a community center designed to reduce crime and incarceration in central Brooklyn, asking them for help in interpreting and annotating social media posts made by people their age.
“The young people at the Brownsville Community Justice Center understood how emojis, slang, and hyper-local words are used online,” Mathiyazhagan says. “Their insights were key to building the platform.”
InterpretMe is built on the insights the SAFELab team gained after creating and testing their training modules. Instead of walking users through a carefully crafted scenario, InterpretMe allows users to upload real life social media posts and then takes them through a set of exercises built on the SAFELab training.
This story is by Hailey Reissman. Read more at Annenberg School for Communication.
