Affordances and Design Principles of The Political Left and Right

2024-11-04

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study investigates how political ideology shapes value commitments in social media system design. Through four co-design workshops with representatives from Finland’s five major political parties, the research employed paper prototyping, qualitative content analysis, and an ideological comparative framework to empirically examine how left- and right-wing values structurally inform platform visibility mechanisms—specifically market-driven versus open-archive models. Results reveal that right-wing participants favored commodified, market-oriented visibility designs, whereas left-wing participants advocated de-commodified, publicly accessible open-archive practices. This work constitutes the first empirical demonstration of how ideological positions systematically shape technical design choices in social media infrastructures. It addresses a critical gap in socially situated computing by elucidating the mechanisms through which political values become embedded in socio-technical systems. The findings advance value-sensitive design theory by providing cross-ideological empirical grounding and actionable insights for designing politically reflexive platforms. (149 words)

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Learning Human Values and Preferences
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Social Choice / Voting

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Socio-technical web-based systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Responsible Web: Web for democratic and emancipatory futures

Abstract

Like any form of technology, social media services embed values. To examine how societal values may be present in these systems, we focus on exploring political ideology as a value system. We organised four co-design workshops with political representatives from five major parties in Finland to investigate what values they would incorporate into social media services. The participants were divided into one right-leaning group, two left-leaning groups, and one mixed group. This approach allows us to examine how their political ideologies, i.e., value systems, influenced the design of social media. We analysed produced artefacts (early-stage paper mockups) to identify different features and affordances for each group and then contrasted the ideological compositions. Our results revealed a clear distinction between groups: right-leaning groups favoured market-based visibility, while left-leaning groups rejected such design principles in favour of open profile work. Additionally, we found tentative differences in design outcomes along the liberal-conservative dimension. These findings underscore the importance of acknowledging existing political value systems in the design of social computing systems. They also highlight the need for further research to map out political ideologies in technology design.

Problem

• Examining political ideology values in social media design
• Contrasting left and right political groups' design principles
• Identifying ideological differences in social computing systems

Innovation

• Organized co-design workshops with political representatives
• Analyzed paper mockups to identify ideological features
• Contrasted design principles between left and right groups