Responsible Messaging in Social Media

Refresh Wellness app intends to offer a novel approach to address the global prevalence of mental health disorders, in Canada and abroad. We are in the process of developing a comprehensive mental wellness platform that can be used in both individual and workplace settings to monitor and analyze mental health patterns, and generate appropriate solutions to address them.
The app features a system that allows users who follow each other to exchange messages back and forth. Ideally this system will support use cases such as asynchronous support groups. However, there is potential for this feature to be abused by some users, a behavior that is common on many popular social media apps today. Since the Refresh Wellness app intends to support mental wellness, we cannot allow toxic behavior to propagate through our user base. Refresh intends to apply an aggressive moderation approach, including both automatic filters to prevent objectionable content and tools for the user to mitigate contact with toxic users or user behaviour. This project seeks to both provide a messaging system and the moderation back-end to let our employees take effective action against both content and users when needed.

Faculty Supervisor:

Raymond Spiteri

Student:

Partner:

Refresh Enterprises Inc.

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Health and Related Sciences & Technology; New and Digital Media; Social Innovation

University:

University of Saskatchewan

Program: