Saudi Cultural Missions Theses & Dissertations
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Item Restricted Assessing Child Safety Risk of Alternative Social Apps(University College London, 2024-09-09) Alabbasi, Dana; Warner, MarkChildren’s use of technology has been increasing rapidly and their exposure to online harm is an area of deep concern. Lawmakers and regulators are combining efforts with service providers to mitigate the emerging risks on child safety. This is primarily done by creating age-appropriate restrictions such as design codes on online services that children will likely access. The Office of Communications, Ofcom, an online safety regulator under the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act 2023, proposed a Protection of Children Code of Practice for user-to-user services. This code of practice seeks to enforce compliance with children’s safety duties, assess risks to children, and specify the required steps to mitigate these risks. Pursuant to this, this thesis aims to present an analysis of five alternative social networking applications that include live streaming and instant messaging features (i.e., StreamKar, Chamet, BuzzCast, MICO, and SuperLive) by applying Ofcom’s code of prac tice as a framework. Specifically, it assesses child safety risks through analysing formal and informal documents (i.e., legally binding and non-legally binding documents) and in specting the apps’ user interfaces. Under the analysis, the findings portray the lack of safeguards such as robust age verification mechanisms and content moderation practices in alternative applications. In addition, the analysis discovered several inconsistencies in measures such as reporting and complaints, content moderation, and user support, wherein a gap is seen between what is stated in the documents of these applications and what is, in reality, implemented in the UI. Finally, it is evidently clear from the findings that app policies and in-app features contribute to the risks of harmful solicitation attempts towards children and highlight the need for stronger enforcement of robust safety mechanisms and designs to ensure online safety of child users.54 0Item Restricted Keyword Kaleidoscope: Identifying the difference in keywords predominantly used within one community via contrasting with another community(Saudi Digital Library, 2023) Alhazmi, Alaa; Gutmann, Andreas; Murdoch, Steven; Psychoula, IsminiOnline platforms seek to combat unwanted activities and content by implementing measures to block search terms associated with specific keywords frequently used by malicious actors. However, a persistent challenge arises as this approach may inadvertently affect legitimate content that shares these keywords. This study aims to utilize publicly available datasets of online posts to identify differences in the most prominent keywords in these datasets. The goal is to obtain such distinctions by applying similar methods in harmful and benign communities that share similar language and, consequently, employ them toward more effective search term-blocking. To this end, we employed several analysis methods. Keyword frequencies were computed and compared tabularly, visually, and through hypothesis tests. Topic modeling was applied to the reviews from the datasets to examine the keywords within similar topics and their frequencies. Keyword co-occurrences, delineated by how frequently keywords appeared in the same review as each other, were also tallied, and keywords with the top co-occurrence differences were further explored through plots and representative reviews. While this study centered on two reviewer communities, we have discovered several overarching insights, specifically a similar process could be implemented to guide and aid the process of effective banning in search functionalities. The two datasets examined were found to be speaking about similar concepts. While the ordering of the top keywords shifts between the two, the majority of the most frequent keywords are found near the top of both lists. Despite these similarities, however, differences in the overall frequencies of overlapping keywords existed. Notable dissimilarities between the two communities were discovered either as keywords missing from one top list or the other, or in frequency through Pearson’s chi-squared contingency test. The topic model results showed that some topics were present in both communities but were linked to different keywords in each. Finally, the keyword-keyword co-occurrence analysis in this work indicates that even keywords used commonly by both communities can have alternate associations.13 0