The medium is the message: toxicity declines in structured vs unstructured online deliberations
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11280_2024_Article_1269.pdf
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1.13 MB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
1bbb6c0b4a283b5118a54fcb9592c1b9
Author(s)
Klein, Mark
Majdoubi, Nouhayla
Date Issued
May 2024
Journal
World Wide Web
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Klein, M., Majdoubi, N. The medium is the message: toxicity declines in structured vs unstructured online deliberations. World Wide Web 27, 31 (2024).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Humanity needs to deliberate effectively at scale about highly complex and contentious problems. Current online deliberation tools—such as email, chatrooms, and forums—are however plagued by levels of discussion toxicity that deeply undercut the willingness and ability of the participants to engage in thoughtful, meaningful, deliberations. This has led many organizations to either shut down their forums or invest in expensive, frequently unreliable, and ethically fraught moderation of people's contributions in their forums. This paper includes a comprehensive review on online toxicity, and describes how a structured deliberation process can substantially reduce toxicity compared to current approaches. The key underlying insight is that unstructured conversations create, especially at scale, an “attention wars” dynamic wherein people are often incented to resort to extremified language in order to get visibility for their postings. A structured deliberation process wherein people collaboratively create a compact organized collection of answers and arguments removes this underlying incentive, and results, in our evaluation, in a 50% reduction of high-toxicity posts.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Collective Intelligence
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-024-01269-0
