Research shows that providing twitter users with warnings as to the potential consequences of spreading hate speech, will result in a decrease of posting hateful language online for a week.
According to New York University’s Centre for Social Media and Politics, researchers believe that in providing certain users with a warning as to the potential future consequences they could face, twitter would see a decrease in harmful and potentially dangerous language.
Lead author, Mustafa Mikdat Yildirim argues that “even though the impact of warnings is temporary, the research nonetheless provides a potential path forward for platforms seeking to reduce the use of hateful language by users.”
Following twitters mass suspension of numerous accounts including big names like President Donald Trump following the Capitol Riots of January 2021 many have been asking about the effectiveness of current hate speech curbing methods.
In conducting this study, the team chose to collect data from individuals who had been following accounts that were previously suspended for hate speech, in a effort to target an audience that were already ‘at risk’ of suspension.
On the 21st of July 2020 a selection of 600,000 tweets were downloaded that had been posted a week prior and contained at least one word of hate language as determined in previous research.
During this week, twitter was inundated with hateful tweets and comments against the Asian and Black communities following the Black Lives Matter protests and the ongoing coronavirus situation.
A selection of 4300 users were then split into 6 focus groups that were delivered with 1 of 6 prototype warnings, all prefaced with this sentence: “The user [@account] you follow was suspended, and I suspect that this was because of hateful language.”
Each group were provided with different types of warnings ranging from “If you continue to use hate speech, you might get suspended temporarily” to “If you continue to use hate speech, you might lose your posts, friends and followers, and not get your account back.”
The control group did not receive any messages.
The Results
The results showed a 10% reduction in hate speech and harmful language from each group that received a message, whereas there was no significant decrease recorded for the control group. What proved most interesting however is those who received a more polite and well-mannered warning such as “I understand you have every right to express yourself but please keep in mind…” the decline in harmful language reached up to 15 and 20%.
The study concluded that respectful and polite language would be more likely to be seen as legitimate and therefore followed by a larger number of users. This research could be used by social media platforms in the future battle against the spread of racist and hateful language on big platforms like twitter and Facebook, however as the study showed the impact of the warnings dissipated a month later proving that more needs to be done to protect online social media users.
