Travel Pals

Running a social platform also poses the challenge of what content to censor or moderate. Because this is a travel-oriented platform, we don’t expect that there will be much content posted with malintent, however, we are taking into account the possibility for issues within cultural divides coming from having an app that focuses on global travel. We aim to have the typical moderation features that help filter out known racial slurs, and we will work to keep that up to date. However this is, in the end, an information-sharing platform that will hopefully work in a majority self-policing manner much like Bruckman suggests on Wikipedia (Bruckman, 2022, Chapter 6). Each user will have a score depending on how useful or liked their contributions are in the community, but also from them taking actions to keep their community safe. As someone earns a higher ranking, and obtains an “Experienced Traveler” tag, we’ll ask them to work as a moderator within their local community. This is an information platform and we’re expecting that there will be a good level of comradery to keep the community running smoothly.

Part of this community is also focused in the physical space, and we need to take into account the offline safety of our users when they use our app to connect. Like many dating apps, we will have features that require verification to ensure they’re who they say they are, including a team to analyze each report of malicious actors and take action where needed. We also mandate the use of government-issued photos. When it’s finally time to meet your new travel buddy, there are live location reporting tools baked into the app, so that another friend can know where you are at all times. We know that we are unable to catch every bad actor on our platform, so we always encourage our users to heed caution when they’re meeting people off our platform.