The DOI matches its Crossref record; 145 of the 149 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Yes: Affirmative Consent as a Theoretical Framework for Understanding and Imagining Social Platforms
Abstract
Affirmative consent is the idea that someone must ask for, and earn, enthusiastic approval before interacting with someone else. For decades, feminist activists and scholars have used affirmative consent to theorize and prevent sexual assault. In this paper, we ask: Can affirmative consent help to theorize online interaction? Drawing from feminist, legal, and HCI literature, we introduce the feminist theory of affirmative consent and use it to analyze social computing systems. We present affirmative consent’s five core concepts: it is voluntary, informed, revertible, specific, and unburdensome. Using these principles, this paper argues that affirmative consent is both an explanatory and generative theoretical framework. First, affirmative consent is a theoretical abstraction for explaining various problematic phenomena in social platforms—including mass online harassment, revenge porn, and problems with content feeds. Finally, we argue that affirmative consent is a generative theoretical foundation from which to imagine new design ideas for consentful socio-technical systems.
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Klein, L. F., & D’Ignazio, C. (2024) · ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) · doi:10.1145/3630106.3658543 · Cited by 139
From Treatment to Healing:Envisioning a Decolonial Digital Mental Health
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Women's Perspectives on Harm and Justice after Online Harassment
Im, J., Schoenebeck, S. Y., Iriarte, M. P., Grill, G., Wilkinson, D., Batool, A., Alharbi, R., Funwie, A., Gankhuu, T., Gilbert, É., et al. (2022) · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · doi:10.1145/3555775 · Cited by 75
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Im, J., Dimond, J., Berton, M., Lee, U., Mustelier, K., Ackerman, M. S., & Gilbert, E.
- Affiliations
- University of Michigan (US)
- Sassafras Tech Collective, United States
- And Also too, Canada
- University of Michigan, United States
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2021-05-06
- Pages
- 1-18
- OpenAlex
- W3163524335
- Cited by
- 119
- References
- 149
- Citations by year
- 2026: 31 · 2025: 24 · 2024: 23 · 2023: 23 · 2022: 17 · 2021: 1
- FWCI
- 6.02
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (IIS-1553376)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
- Keywords
- affirmative consent, online consent, social platforms, feminist theory, sexual assault prevention, online harassment, revenge porn, socio-technical design, generative theory
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