Toxicity by Design: Affordances, Audience Choice, and Toxicity on Twitter

• In Event: Online Hate, Toxicity, Intolerant Discourse, and Its Political Effects

Abstract

Since much of Americans’ interpersonal relationships have moved to virtual platforms, political scientists have expressed concern that the specific conversational norms of social media sites may be reshaping the way people engage with politics. Specifically, the toxic conversations that proliferated during Twitter’s heyday have been targeted for their role in increasing feelings of dislike and distrust between citizens with conflicting political views. As new platforms emerge to fill Twitter’s role in users’ online diets, what can designers do to make social media sites more amenable to everyday political talk that advances democratic goals? This paper answers that puzzle by looking at four design features commonly used on Twitter: hashtags, mentions, replies, and quotes. I assess the level of toxicity in everyday political talk on Twitter by analyzing a corpus of over 300,000 tweets about face masks collected during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. I find that tweets that are replies are significantly less toxic than those that are quotes, despite being equally negative in sentiment. This raises the possibility that people discuss difficult topics with less toxic language when they are engaged in a one-on-one conversation than when they are projecting their thoughts to a wide audience of spectators. My findings suggest further experiments to understand how website designers can incorporate features that encourage everyday talk that is less toxic, and thus more likely to increase citizens’ political knowledge and tolerance.

Author

• Marie Schenk, Lehigh University