Social Control and Interactivity in Anonymous Public Events

Online event hosting platforms, such as Zoom Meetings and Twitch Streams, have revolutionized the way we socialize with one another. These platforms offer a rich set of interactive features such as live chat and gestures, enabling dynamic and engaging social events. In public events, however, participants are not well-known entities originating from the same institution, and thus traditional access control fails to provide means for maintaining order without disrupting interactivity. Zoombombing and cyberbullying in Twitch Streams are symptoms of this dilemma. The design of the aforementioned event hosting systems thus resort to social control mechanisms that allow moderators to monitor the social interactions of the participants and respond to disorderly behavior in real time. The designer of an event hosting system needs to make sure that social control mechanisms preserve interactivity expectations.  In this paper, we introduce HIPE (Highly Interactive Public Event), a framework for modelling social control mechanisms, articulating interactivity expectations, as well as verifying if social control interferes with interactivity. We catalogued 4 classes of social control mechanisms that can be reused in the design of event hosting systems, including sanction, remedy, containment, and retaliation. Additionally, we formulated a 2-safety hyperproperty known as (a, p)-interactivity, for expressing the degree of interactivity expected of an event hosting system. Furthermore, we designed a model checking algorithm for verifying (a, p)-interactivity.  An empirical case study has been conducted to illustrate the interplay between social control and interactivity, as well as to evaluate the performance of our model checking algorithm. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work to formally study the balancing of social control and interactivity in public events.