Exploring User’s Perception of Explainability of Blocked Content in Online Social Network Services

As a result of the massive amount of user-generated content in online social network services, there is a substantial demand to filter out unwanted content from users’ social space. Current online social network services provide mechanisms to filter and block sensitive content. However, users of such services usually do not know why certain content has been blocked or what sensitive content is. There is a lack of measuring users’ acceptance of different explanations. Insufficient explanations will not prevent users from exposure to unwanted content. Thus, this paper explores the user’s perception of different explanations of blocked content. It investigates the associations between providing different types of explanations of blocked content and users’ previewing behavior. In this study, we conducted a user survey to understand the relationship between different explanations and both intention to click and previewing behavior. The survey included 254 participants that were recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk. We performed several statistical analyses including linear and logistic regression analyses to the obtained responses. Based on the results of the study, blocked content explained as “sensitive” or “violent” reduced the users’ previewing behavior, while explaining blocked content as “sexual/nudity” increased the users’ previewing behavior. The results regarding usage factors indicated that when there was a high agreement from users to block unwanted content, the intention to not click on blocked content explained as “sensitive content” was high. This research could have potential implications for enhancing user experience by reducing the exposure to unwanted content in online social network services using proper explanations.