Gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) by design

GESI by Design (SubProject#5), (Qatar University (QU), HBKU College of Science and Engineering (CSE), HBKU College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS), we study how to mitigate issues related to Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) in social media in Qatar and the Arab world and increase awareness of them. We will use digital nudging techniques based on annotation and a bespoke set of reactions and emojis and devise tools to facilitate a structured dialogue. The aim is to encourage a more civilized and inclusive language and interaction.

In this project, we want to research and develop socio-technical approaches that promote civilized dialogue and inclusive language on social media. We will utilize Nudge and persuasion techniques to influence users to consider their posts and social interaction online and enhance empathy and respect for others. Grammarly, a software primarily designed for spelling and grammar checking, has introduced a tone detector to enhance the awareness and considerations of recipients by giving users an estimate of the tone of their language (https://www.grammarly.com/tone). A similar approach will be followed in this project for the Arabic language as a basis for the influence. Besides the individual posts, we will also design for civilized interaction and dialogues. We will research and develop a richer set of reactions that extends the classic set of Like / Dislike and provides a more profound and semantically clear set of reactions. The set included the direct reactions, e.g. ‘insightful’, “fact-based, ‘source missing’, or indirect and annotation-based, e.g. color scheme expressing the level of trust in the shared post.