Talks by Villegas and Shim

On March 12 at 3 PM, the Rutgers School of Graduate Studies Research Café will feature two compelling research presentations by Ph.D. candidates Salvador Guzmán Villegas and Yunhee Shim. This event, part of the ongoing interdisciplinary series, will provide a platform for graduate students to share their research and engage in scholarly discussions.

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Salvador Guzmán Villegas is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. His research focuses on the communicative processes of carcerality and social inequalities. His current project focuses on how legal status impacts privacy management strategies across close relationships and community social networks. Salvador also serves as a part-time instructor, research assistant, and an Honors College mentor.

Navigating Disclosure: The Social and Relational Impacts of Legal Status in Latina/o Mixed-Status Couples: Estimates by the Pew Research Center suggest that about 10.5 million undocumented immigrants reside in the United States and that more than 5.9 million American families live with at least one undocumented family member. Despite protections for undocumented immigrants, such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, only about 800,000 undocumented young adults qualify for protected status. Thus, fear and uncertainty are endemic to many undocumented individuals and families because of the risk of deportation and its overreaching consequences on others. Although some scholars have begun to uncover the way undocumented mixed-status couples and families navigate complexities of insecure citizenship status(es), there remains a gap in understanding how Latina/o undocumented mixed-status partners engage in disclosure strategies and share their legal status with their partners and subsequently make sense of their social and relational environment. Thus, this study aims to map the relational and social impacts of status disclosures among Latina/o undocumented mixed-status couples.

Yunhee Shim is PhD candidate majoring in LIS at the Department of SC&I. Her major research interests are platform governance,content moderation, and fairness, which fall in the fields of social computing and HCI. Her primary research interest focuses on online harm in platforms,particularly interpersonal harm, and strategies to mitigate it through moderation features.

Incorporating Procedural Fairness in Flag Submissions on Social Media Platforms: Flagging mechanisms on social media platforms allow users to report inappropriate posts/accounts for review by content moderators. These reports are pivotal to platforms’ efforts toward regulating norm violations.This paper examines how platforms’ design choices in implementing flagging mechanisms influence flaggers’ perceptions of content moderation. We conducted a survey experiment asking US respondents (N=2,936) to flag inappropriate posts using one of 54 randomly assigned flagging implementations. After flagging,participants rated their fairness perceptions of the flag submission process along the dimensions of consistency, transparency, and voice (agency). We found that participants perceived greater transparency when flagging interfaces included community guidelines and greater voice when they incorporated a textbox for open-ended feedback. Our qualitative analysis highlights user needs for improved accessibility, educational support for reporting, and protections against false flags. We offer design recommendations for building fairer flagging systems without exacerbating the cognitive burden of submitting flags.

Fostering Interdisciplinary Research Conversations

The Research Café will once again serve as a hub for intellectual exchange, bringing together graduate students from various disciplines to discuss social justice, digital governance, and communication research. This event will provide an opportunity for attendees to engage with cutting-edge research, ask questions, and network with peers in a supportive academic setting.

All graduate students and faculty interested in these topics are encouraged to attend. Join us on March 12 at 3 PM for an engaging conversation on these timely and impactful research topics!