arXiv subjects

Bryan Semaan

Publications and source records attributed to Bryan Semaan.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Decolonial Discourse in Postcolonial Contexts: How YouTubers Negotiate Audience Tensions, Platform Governance, and State Influence

Decolonial discourse on online platforms is often framed in terms of creator motivations and expressive possibilities. In this paper, we examine what it takes to sustain such discourse under layered sociotechnical constraints. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with YouTubers engaging in Bengali decolonial discourse, we analyze how audience publics, platform governance, and state influences shape what becomes sayable, visible, and viable. We show how fragmented postcolonial identities among audiences produce legitimacy policing, harassment, and coordinated backlash, requiring ongoing relational labor from creators. At the platform level, differential monetization, opaque moderation, and copyright regimes reorganize which publics are economically viable and reinforce existing hierarchies. Further, intermediaries such as multi-channel networks mediate regulatory pressure, introducing political risks and constraints on participation. In response, content creators engage in strategies of negotiation, including boundary work, infrastructural improvisation, and multi-platform distribution. Overall, our findings highlight the layered dynamics of decolonial discourse in postcolonial contexts and the continuous work required to sustain it in platformed environments.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Categories of Caste: Examining Caste Bias and Morality in Text-to-Image AI Models

Text-to-Image (T2I) models have shown promising utility across various domains. However, such models are also amplifying harmful societal biases in their outputs. In the context of South Asia, recent work has shown caste biases and stereotypes are being perpetuated through Generative AI (GenAI) systems. While this research offers extremely relevant insight into invisibilized narratives of caste discrimination through the GenAI system, they often treat caste as an identity category. Therefore, in this work we shift our ontology to focus on the relational aspect of caste. This enables us to develop a more nuanced understanding of the mechanics of caste discrimination by and through T2I models. Combining an algorithmic audit with critical discourse analysis, we draw on a conceptual frame challenging Brahminical Normativity to show how caste biases are perpetuated beyond the simple binaries of upper vs lower-caste categories. Our contributions are two-fold. Beyond challenging the categorical understanding of caste as a category, we propose an anti-caste approach to tackle the issue of caste bias and fairness in AI systems.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

How do datasets, developers, and models affect biases in a low-resourced language?: The Case of the Bengali Language

Sociotechnical systems, such as language technologies, frequently exhibit identity-based biases. These biases exacerbate the experiences of historically marginalized communities and remain understudied in low-resource contexts. While models and datasets specific to a language or with multilingual support are commonly recommended to address these biases, this paper empirically tests the effectiveness of such approaches in the context of gender, religion, and nationality-based identities in Bengali, a widely spoken but low-resourced language. We conducted an algorithmic audit of sentiment analysis models built on mBERT and BanglaBERT, which were fine-tuned using all Bengali sentiment analysis (BSA) datasets from Google Dataset Search. Our analyses showed that BSA models exhibit biases across different identity categories despite having similar semantic content and structure. We also examined the inconsistencies and uncertainties arising from combining pre-trained models and datasets created by individuals from diverse demographic backgrounds. We connected these findings to the broader discussions on epistemic injustice, AI alignment, and methodological decisions in algorithmic audits.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Infrastructures for Inspiration: The Routine Construction of Creative Identity and Inspiration

Online, visual artists have more places than ever to routinely share their creative work and connect with other artists. These interactions support the routine enactment of creative identity in artists and provide inspirational opportunities for artists. As creative work shifts online, interactions between artists and routines around how these artists get inspired to do creative work are mediated by and through the logics of the online platforms where they take place. In an interview study of 22 artists, this paper explores the interplay between the development of artists' creative identities and the, at times, contradictory practices they have around getting inspired. We find platforms which support the disciplined practice of creative work while supporting spontaneous moments of inspiration, play an increasing role in passive approaches to searching for inspiration, and foster numerous small community spaces for artists to negotiate their creative identities. We discuss how platforms can better support and embed mechanisms for inspiration into their infrastructures into their design and platform policy.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

The Politics of Fear and the Experience of Bangladeshi Religious Minority Communities Using Social Media Platforms

Despite significant research on online harm, polarization, public deliberation, and justice, CSCW still lacks a comprehensive understanding of the experiences of religious minorities, particularly in relation to fear, as prominently evident in our study. Gaining faith-sensitive insights into the expression, participation, and inter-religious interactions on social media can contribute to CSCW's literature on online safety and interfaith communication. In pursuit of this goal, we conducted a six-month-long, interview-based study with the Hindu, Buddhist, and Indigenous communities in Bangladesh. Our study draws on an extensive body of research encompassing the spiral of silence, the cultural politics of fear, and communication accommodation to examine how social media use by religious minorities is influenced by fear, which is associated with social conformity, misinformation, stigma, stereotypes, and South Asian postcolonial memory. Moreover, we engage with scholarly perspectives from religious studies, justice, and South Asian violence and offer important critical insights and design lessons for the CSCW literature on public deliberation, justice, and interfaith communication.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Reimagining Communities through Transnational Bengali Decolonial Discourse with YouTube Content Creators

Colonialism--the policies and practices wherein a foreign body imposes its ways of life on local communities--has historically impacted how collectives perceive themselves in relation to others. One way colonialism has impacted how people see themselves is through nationalism, where nationalism is often understood through shared language, culture, religion, and geopolitical borders. The way colonialism has shaped people's experiences with nationalism has shaped historical conflicts between members of different nation-states for a long time. While recent social computing research has studied how colonially marginalized people can engage in discourse to decolonize or re-imagine and reclaim themselves and their communities on their own terms--what is less understood is how technology can better support decolonial discourses in an effort to re-imagine nationalism. To understand this phenomenon, this research draws on a semi-structured interview study with YouTubers who make videos about culturally Bengali people whose lives were upended as a product of colonization and are now dispersed across Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. This research seeks to understand people's motivations and strategies for engaging in video-mediated decolonial discourse in transnational contexts. We discuss how our work demonstrates the potential of the sociomateriality of decolonial discourse online and extends an invitation to foreground complexities of nationalism in social computing research.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

The "Colonial Impulse" of Natural Language Processing: An Audit of Bengali Sentiment Analysis Tools and Their Identity-based Biases

While colonization has sociohistorically impacted people's identities across various dimensions, those colonial values and biases continue to be perpetuated by sociotechnical systems. One category of sociotechnical systems--sentiment analysis tools--can also perpetuate colonial values and bias, yet less attention has been paid to how such tools may be complicit in perpetuating coloniality, although they are often used to guide various practices (e.g., content moderation). In this paper, we explore potential bias in sentiment analysis tools in the context of Bengali communities that have experienced and continue to experience the impacts of colonialism. Drawing on identity categories most impacted by colonialism amongst local Bengali communities, we focused our analytic attention on gender, religion, and nationality. We conducted an algorithmic audit of all sentiment analysis tools for Bengali, available on the Python package index (PyPI) and GitHub. Despite similar semantic content and structure, our analyses showed that in addition to inconsistencies in output from different tools, Bengali sentiment analysis tools exhibit bias between different identity categories and respond differently to different ways of identity expression. Connecting our findings with colonially shaped sociocultural structures of Bengali communities, we discuss the implications of downstream bias of sentiment analysis tools.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

"Hey, Can You Add Captions?": The Critical Infrastructuring Practices of Neurodiverse People on TikTok

Accessibility efforts, how we can make the world usable and useful to as many people as possible, have explicitly focused on how we can support and allow for the autonomy and independence of people with disabilities, neurotypes, chronic conditions, and older adults. Despite these efforts, not all technology is designed or implemented to support everyone's needs. Recently, a community-organized push by creators and general users of TikTok urged the platform to add accessibility features, such as closed captioning to user-generated content, allowing more people to use the platform with greater ease. Our work focuses on an understudied population -- people with ADHD and those who experience similar challenges -- exploring the creative practices people from this community engage in, focusing on the kinds of accessibility they create through their creative work. Through an interview study exploring the experiences of creatives on TikTok, we find that creatives engage in critical infrastructuring -- a process of bottom-up (re)design -- to make the platform more accessible despite the challenges the platform presents to them as creators. We present these critical infrastructuring practices through the themes of: creating and augmenting video editing infrastructures and creating and augmenting video captioning infrastructures. We reflect on the introduction of a top-down infrastructure - the implementation of an auto-captioning feature - shifts the critical infrastructure practices of content creators. Through their infrastructuring, creatives revised sociotechnical capabilities of TikTok to support their own needs as well as the broader needs of the TikTok community. We discuss how the routine of infrastructuring accessibility is actually best conceptualized as incidental care work. We further highlight how accessibility is an evolving sociotechnical construct, and forward the concept of contextual accessibility.

cs.HC↗