Abhishek Roy
Abhishek leads user research efforts on online deception and manipulation in Google's Trust & Safety team. In this role, he oversees quantitative and qualitative research studies focused on gaining insights into user behavior, perceptions, and preferences. These insights are used to drive changes that promote user protection across Google products. Abhishek has worked at Google for over 12 years and has previously led teams conducting user research and policy enforcement efforts on products like Google News and Google Search.
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Online scams are a growing threat in India, impacting millions and causing substantial financial losses year over year. This white paper presents ShieldUp!, a novel mobile game prototype designed to inoculate users against common online scams by leveraging the principles of psychological inoculation theory. ShieldUp! exposes users to weakened versions of manipulation tactics frequently used by scammers, and teaches them to recognize and pre-emptively refute these techniques. A randomized controlled trial (RCT) with 3,000 participants in India was conducted to evaluate the game's efficacy in helping users better identify scams scenarios. Participants were assigned to one of three groups: the ShieldUp! group (play time: 15 min), a general scam awareness group (watching videos and reading tips for 10-15 min), and a control group (plays "Chrome Dino", an unrelated game, for 10 minutes). Scam discernment ability was measured using a newly developed Scam Discernment Ability Test (SDAT-10) before the intervention, immediately after, and at a 21-day follow-up. Results indicated that participants who played ShieldUp! showed a significant improvement in their ability to identify scams compared to both control groups, and this improvement was maintained at follow-up. Importantly, while both interventions initially led users to to show increased skepticism towards even genuine online offers (NOT Scam scenarios), this effect dissipated after 21 days, suggesting no long-term negative impact on user trust. This study demonstrates the potential of game-based inoculation as a scalable and effective scam prevention strategy, offering valuable insights for product design, policy interventions, and future research, including the need for longitudinal studies and cross-cultural adaptations.
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Seeking in Cycles: How Users Leverage Personal Information Ecosystems to Find Mental Health Information
Ashlee Milton
Fernando Maestre
Stevie Chancellor
Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2024)
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Information is crucial to how people understand their mental health and well-being, and many turn to online sources found through search engines and social media. We present the findings from an interview study (n = 17) of participants who use online platforms to seek information about their mental illnesses. We found that participants leveraged multiple platforms in a cyclical process for finding information from their personal information ecosystems, driven by the adoption of new information and uncertainty surrounding the credibility of information. Concerns about privacy, fueled by perceptions of stigma and platform design, also influenced their information-seeking decisions. Our work proposes theoretical implications for social computing and information retrieval on information seeking in users' personal information ecosystems. We also offer design implications to support users in navigating their personal information ecosystems to find mental health information.
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Scams are a widespread issue with severe consequences for both victims and perpetrators, but existing data collection is fragmented, precluding global and comparative local understanding. The present study addresses this gap through a nationally representative survey (n = 8,369) on scam exposure, victimization, types, vectors, and reporting in 12 countries: Belgium, Egypt, France, Hungary, Indonesia, Mexico, Romania, Slovakia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. We analyze six survey questions to build a detailed quantitative picture of the scams landscape in each country, and compare across countries to identify global patterns. We find, first, that residents of less affluent countries suffer financial loss from scams more often. Second, we find that the internet plays a key role in scams across the globe, and that GNI per capita is strongly associated with specific scam types and contact vectors. Third, we find widespread underreporting, with residents of less affluent countries being less likely to know how to report a scam. Our findings contribute valuable insights for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in the online fraud and scam prevention space.
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Evidence-Based Misinformation Interventions: Challenges and Opportunities for Measurement and Collaboration
Yasmin Green
Andrew Gully
Yoel Roth
Joshua Tucker
Alicia Wanless
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (2023)
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Conspiracy influencers have become a major means of spreading health misinformation, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous research has found that a small number of these influencers are responsible for a large portion of misinformation related to public health. Although there has been research on the spread of misinformation, there has been comparatively little on the strategies conspiracy influencers use to spread their message across platforms. To better understand these strategies, we conducted a crosssectional study of 55 influencers, analyzing their platform usage, audience size, account creation date, and content originality. Our results indicate that these influencers use multiple platforms to circumvent algorithmic discrimination and deplatforming, tailor their content to monetization channels and that despite the rise in popularity of unmoderated platforms, there’s still a reliance on moderated platforms to build an audience. Our findings can inform strategies to combat the spread of health misinformation in the online ecosystem.
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