The recent research in the field of software engineering and open-source software (OSS) has shown a significant shift towards addressing social sustainability and ethical concerns within the development process. Studies are increasingly focusing on methods to improve social sustainability by influencing feature prioritization in software development, with a notable emphasis on deprioritizing antisocial features through the use of persona models. Additionally, there is a growing interest in detecting and mitigating toxic behavior within OSS communities, leveraging advanced machine learning techniques that integrate psycholinguistic and moral foundations theories to enhance the accuracy of toxicity detection in OSS communication channels. Security concerns are also being addressed, with research highlighting the prevalence of fake stars in GitHub repositories, which not only undermine the credibility of popularity metrics but also pose risks to user security. Furthermore, innovative approaches to identifying dark patterns in user interfaces are being developed, using logistic regression and bag-of-words representations to promote ethical design practices and protect user rights. These developments collectively indicate a move towards more socially responsible and secure software development practices.

Noteworthy papers include one that demonstrates the effectiveness of persona models in deprioritizing antisocial software features, and another that significantly improves toxicity detection in OSS communications using moral and psycholinguistic features.