Let's Talk About Socio-Technical Angst: Tracing the History and Evolution of Dark Patterns on Twitter from 2010-2021

Abstract

Designers' use of deceptive and manipulative design practices have become increasingly ubiquitous, impacting users' ability to make choices that respect their agency and autonomy. These practices have been popularly defined through the term "dark patterns" which has gained attention from designers, privacy scholars, and more recently, even legal scholars and regulators. The increased interest in the term and underpinnings of dark patterns across a range of sociotechnical practitioners intrigued us to study the evolution of the concept, to potentially speculate the future trajectory of conversations around dark patterns. In this paper, we examine the history and evolution of the Twitter discourse through #darkpatterns from its inception in June 2010 until April 2021, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to describe how this discourse has changed over time. We frame the evolution of this discourse as an emergent transdisciplinary conversation that connects multiple disciplinary perspectives through the shared concept of dark patterns, whereby these participants engage in a conversation marked by socio-technical angst in order to identify and fight back against deceptive design practices. We discuss the potential future trajectories of this discourse and opportunities for further scholarship at the intersection of design, policy, and activism.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Social network analysis; HCI design and evaluation methods; Collaborative and social computing.

Analysis of Dark Pattern-related Tweets from 2010

“…In 2022, Obi et al [8] analyzed tweets related to dark patterns. They applied multiple research methods, including descriptive statistics, network analysis, and content analysis, to gain insight.…”

“…For the objective analysis of the tweets, we adopted Obi et al's objective classification [8], as shown in Table 4.…”

“…While prior work [1][2][3] mainly focused on the taxonomies of dark patterns and found the existence of dark patterns on different online services, few studies have focused on obtaining users' responses towards dark patterns using large-scale investigations. In 2022, Obi et al [8] analyzed large-scale Twitter data to reveal how dark pattern-related discussions evolved. Their analysis using tweets with the #darkpattern hashtag found that the discussions were additive and pluralistic, gathering diverse disciplinary perspectives in ways that preserve disciplinary interests.…”