Engaging with the comments on Facebook posts about news articles makes you a more toxic person, an analysis of nearly 6.5 million comments suggests.
Jason Reifler at the University of Exeter, UK, and his colleagues gathered the comments from 11,305 Facebook posts published by 33 news outlets during October 2018. They then asked a polling company to survey 2200 people in the US for a nationally representative sample.
aimed to see if online comment sections played a role in increasing toxicity both online and off. 鈥淚f we see bad behaviour online, we make inferences about the larger group as a whole,鈥� says Reifler.
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The participants were asked to read a sample of Facebook posts and then suggest an appropriate comment. The team ranked these comments using Google鈥檚 Perspective API tool, which is commonly used to assess the toxicity of online text. Comments are rated from 0, not at all toxic, to 1, very toxic. For example, 鈥淕OOD LEAVE FOR AFRICA鈥� was rated 0.5, while 鈥淟ol what a loser school鈥� was rated 0.8.
The pollsters also asked participants how often they comment on Facebook. The suggested comments of people who said they never comment on Facebook ranked 0.18 on average, while those who said they did so more than once a day provided comments rated 0.23 on the toxicity scale.
This might be an underestimate for the toxicity of online comments, as people may be more civil when speaking to a pollster. The team found that the average toxicity of all suggested comments was 0.19, compared with 0.33 for the actual Facebook comments.
The team also wanted to find out how being exposed to toxic comments on Facebook affects people. Half of the participants were shown the Facebook posts with no comments, while the other half were shown the posts along with their 鈥渇eatured comments鈥�, which Facebook selects algorithmically. The researchers claim these are often the most toxic comments, rating an average 0.9. Exposure to these feature comments increased the toxicity of language people felt willing to use with pollsters by up to 0.33, says the team.
鈥淔acebook has known about these mechanisms for years, but refused to change them, as their business model relies on maximising engagement at all cost,鈥� says Johan Farkas at Malm枚 University, Sweden.
A Facebook spokesperson told 快猫短视频 that the 2018 data 鈥渄oes not reflect our recent work in this area鈥�. They added that political content only makes up an estimated 6 per cent of what US users encountered on Facebook, and that 95 per cent of hate speech is removed before it is reported.
