<aside> 🔮 Scope: The goal of the research is to (1) identify existing patterns for prosocial norming, proactive moderation, or moderation, and (2) to inform the discussion guides for Sprint 2 research.

Sprint 2’s theme is “Shaping conversational cultures.” We will develop features and experiences (like onboarding experiences or new community roles) that proactively shape healthy conversations, encourage prosocial engagement, and enable people to hold one another accountable in digital spaces.

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Questions

Findings

Notes

• Voice makes people less likely to dehumanize people that hold opposing views
  • “In cases of disagreement, we observed a reliable tendency for communicator to be dehumanized less when evaluators heard their voices than when evaluators read the same content. This effect occurred both when the semantic content was presented in the form of speech transcriptions and when it was presented via the communicators’ own written statements. Adding visual cues to a communicator’s voice did not systematically increase evaluations of the communicator’s mental capacities.” (Schroeder et al)
• The role of anonymity in influencing online behavior is mixed.
  • [Anonymity has a positive impact] Reviewing anonymous and non-anonymous comments about a contention topic (immigration) across 13 newspapers Santana found that anonymous commenters were significantly more likely to be uncivil than their non-anonymous counterparts. 53% of anonymous comments were uncivil versus 28.7% of non-anonymous comments. (Santana 2014)
    • Note: “Civility was measured on a three-point scale. A comment was considered ‘‘uncivil’’ if it had at least one of the following: personal or inflammatory attacks, threats, vulgarities, abusive or foul language, xenophobic or other hateful language or expressions, epithets or ethnic slurs, sentiments that are racist or bigoted, disparaging on the basis of race/ethnicity or that assign stereotypes.” (Santana 2014)
  • [Anonymity has a positive impact] In a later study focused on comments related to the 2016 presidential election across 24 daily newspapers, 6 national broadcast news networks and online-only news websites, Santana again found that “anonymous commenters were not only more likely to be uncivil but also more likely to not engage in any of what the academic literature outlines as requirements for quality dialogue.” Just over 75% of comments from non-anonymous commenters, for example, did not incorporate the use of a rational argument, and nearly 33% were uncivil in their expression. (Santana 2019)
  • [Anonymity has a positive impact] In a study of Techcrunch comments before and after they imposed a real identity requirement, non-anonymous users wrote more relevant (on-topic) comments, used less profanity, expressed less anger and more affect words, more positive emotion words and fewer negative emotion works. Anonymous comments were also “liked” less than pseudonymous comments. Longer thread length is associated with less anonymous participation and non-anonymous participation yielded a longer duration of participation in the community. Finally, participation did not significantly decline after the change. (Omernick & Sood)
  • [Anonymity has a positive impact] In a study of the top 20 U.S. online news sites (a mix of print, TV, radio, and online-only), “requiring on-site user registration is associated with both higher civility and lower hostility scores, while requiring third-party user registration (e.g., via Facebook) is associated with lower hostility scores. Prohibiting anonymity is associated with less hostility.” (Ksiazek)
  • [Anonymity has a positive impact] Coe, Kenski, and Rains (2014) and Ruiz et al. (2011) found that user registration (which connects individual usernames with personally identifiable information) discouraged hostile comments on newspaper websites. (Kim et al)
  • [Anonymity has a positive impact] Rowe (2014) compared comments on political news between the Washington Post site and the Washington Post Facebook page and found that comments on Facebook were more civil and polite than on the news site due to the lack of anonymity. (Kim et al)
  • [Anonymity has a mixed impact] However, Hilleand Bakker (2014) found that anonymous comments on news sites were more elaborate than non-anonymous comments on Facebook. (Kim et al)
  • [Anonymity has no impact] By contrast, Berg found in a 2016 experiment that anonymity does not necessarily have a negative effect on the discussion quality. Instead, issue controversiality is found to have a greater impact. (Berg)
  • [Anonymity has no impact] In an experimental study of 140 university based conversational pairs, anonymity and invisibility did not have a statistically significant effect on the different measures of self- disclosure (self-report of self-disclosure, revealed information, revealed thoughts) and prosocial behavior (self-report of prosocial behavior, complimenting the chat partner, contributing to a positive atmosphere, and prosocial expressions). (Lapidot-Lefler, Barak)
• Reputation management systems are related to lower hostility
  • The presence of a reputation management system (a so-called ‘‘reputation economy,’’ where an individual’s social capital is measured in terms of likes, votes, badges and other positive indicators of their status as contributors) is also related to lower hostility. (Ksiazek)
  • In his recent study of MSNBC.com, and specifically the affiliated commenting platform NewsVine, Braun (2015) highlighted the use of a voting mechanism and other reputation indicators to strategically empower the community of commenters to police their own discussions by ‘‘incentiviz(ing) pro-social behavior’’
• Allowing private messaging actually decreases civility and increases hostility
  • Offering the option to engage in private conversations is related to lower civility scores and higher hostility scores. (Ksiazek)

References (Proactive moderation)