#CancelMe

Inspiration

Cancel culture has become incredibly prevalent in internet culture, with a huge spike in Google searches in the past year. The term was even Macquarie Dictionary's 2019 Word of the Year. Often public figures such as celebrities, politicians, social media influencers and other individuals in the public eye face incredible amounts of backlash due to posts or comments made online, often many many years ago, which no longer reflect the values they currently embody or may no longer be deemed politically correct. This causes significant issues for the person or group of people being "cancelled", largely surrounding their career, image and level of acceptance by society due the amount of hate being targeted towards them online. In many cases, they are not entirely at fault, and hence an easy way to help prevent or reduce the chances of being cancelled would be greatly beneficial. Not only would this help important public figures, but would also benefit people seeking jobs, or anyone wanting to tidy up the way they are presented to the world through social media.

What it does

#CancelMe is an online web app that allows you to connect your personal social media accounts to quickly and easily remove all traces of the old you that the world should no longer see. We do all the damage control you need in only the click of a button. Users can selectively delete posts based on topic, or remove all posts found by #CancelMe based on their search queries.

How we built it

The web app was built in React, and utilises the Twitter API and Facebook API in order to gather user data. Once the APIs are authenticated by the user, this gives us access to their post history and hence allows us to filter through them and selectively identify what could be problematic posts based on their search terms. From here we remove the unwanted posts by calling the APIs to update their user account. Our website interface was created using React's Material-UI library.

Challenges we ran into

Time was one of the main challenges we ran into. Due to the limited period we had to design, build and test the solution to a problem of our own choosing, this meant we could not fully implement every feature we wanted, or spent as much time on experimenting with different UI colours and layouts to enhance the user experience.

Another challenge we faced was refining our problem during the ideation phase, as there were many pros and cons of various different ideas we came up with. To really sell our product, we needed to flesh out the business model, directly address the target market, be clear about our intentions, and create a product that the world genuinely needs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Most of all, we are proud that we stuck through with this project and pushed our way through this hackathon till the very end. Although at many points we struggled with technical implementation, faced countless numbers of merge conflicts and debugged issue after issue, we built something over a weekend and learned a lot during the process.

What we learned

Although many of us had a little bit of previous experience with React, this project really helped to build on these existing foundational skills, and taught us how to create a new product that none of us had ever made before. It also gave us experience working with APIs, in particular for Twitter and Facebook, to fetch and delete post data. This is also something new we had not done before. We also got some really solid resume tips from some of the mentors.

What's next for #CancelMe

There are many additional features that could be implemented in this project, and existing features that could be improved on. One of the main ones would be to further improve the UI, making the website more aesthetically pleasing whilst also increasing usability and making the experience more intuitive for the user. Additionally we would also like to include many more different social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, Reddit, Instagram, and more. Covering a broader scope of platforms would significantly increase the value of the product. Furthermore there are more advanced natural language processing and machine learning techniques that could be used in order to further optimise our searches. While we currently only support the text format, in the future we would also like to bring images, videos, and comments on others' posts into the consideration for cancelling.