Interventions that encourage users to reconsider their offensive content on Twitter

Home

Discover

Bookmarks

Keep Up With Latest Trending Papers. Computer Science, AI and Machine Learning and more.Subscribe

CC BY

Source arXiv

Social and Information Networks

Interventions that encourage users to reconsider their offensive content on Twitter

Reconsidering Tweets: Intervening During Tweet Creation Decreases Offensive Content

We conduct an online randomized controlled experiment on the social network @twitpic to evaluate a new intervention that aims to encourage participants to reconsider their offensive content and, ultimately, seeks to reduce the amount of offensive content on theplatform.

The intervention prompts users who are about to post harmful contentwith an opportunity to pause and reconsider their tweet.

We find that users prompted with this intervention posted 6% fewer offensive tweets than non-prompted users in our control.

This decrease in the creation of offensive content can be attributed not just to the deletion and revision ofprompted tweets but also to a decrease in both the number of offensivetweets that prompted users create in the future and the number of offensive replies to prompted tweets.

We conclude that interventions allowing users to reconsider their comments can be an effective mechanism for reducing offensivecontent online.

Authors

Matthew Katsaros, Kathy Yang, Lauren Fratamico

◐ Recommended Follows

◐ Latest Activity