A Chinese social network’s attempt to reduce abuse by displaying users’ estimated locations alongside posts actually gave fellow users a new weapon with which to sling insults.
In April 2022, Weibo, the closest Chinese equivalent to X (formerly Twitter), began to display the province or municipality where someone is based according to their internet protocol (IP) address – a policy that was designed to reduce incivility.
To measure the impact of the change, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and his colleagues compiled a list of 96 uncivil or abusive words in Chinese. Then they checked how frequently these words appeared in posts replying to 66 notable media profiles on Weibo for 12.5 days before, and 12.5 days after, the policy change.
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The likelihood of abuse referring to users’ locations increased by 33.5 per cent after the policy change.
The lesson learned is simple, says Yang: “We cannot assume that technology will function in a way that you assume.”
Yang points out that the analysis only looks at one type of uncivil conversation, and displaying IP locations could have had more positive effects elsewhere. He also says that China’s societal attitudes towards covid-19 policies could have made conversation more pointed on Weibo than on western social media during the period studied.
“For years social media platforms have attempted to introduce a range of measures which remove, or at least reduce levels of negative content on their platforms,” says at the University of Liverpool, UK. However, McLoughlin says platforms often take a try-first, check-later approach that doesn’t account for unintended consequences – as seems to have happened here.
McLoughlin’s own research suggests that localised platforms, such as Facebook groups for neighbourhoods, increase the potential for online hate to translate into offline harm.
“There’s no silver bullet to fixing online abuse,” he says. But to start, we need to ask different questions. “We have an idea of what types of communication we want to avoid – but we first haven’t figured out what types of conversation we actually want.”
New Media & Society
