Researchers Ask: Does Enforcing Civility Stifle Online Debate?

n poll after poll, Americans say they are deeply concerned about rising incivility online. And extensive social media research has focused on how to counteract online incivility. But with Civic Signals, a project of the National Conference on Citizenship and the Center for Media Engagement, researchers took a different approach: If you started from scratch, they asked, what would a flourishing, healthy digital space look like?

They quickly realized that it wouldn’t always be civil.

The Civic Signals project, which began about four years ago, initially involved conducting a thorough literature review and expert interviews in the U.S. and four other countries to identify the values — or “signals” — people want reflected in the design of online spaces. The team then conducted focus groups and polled more than 22,000 people in 20 countries who were frequent users of social, search, and messaging platforms. Gina Masullo, a professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin, brought an expertise in incivility research to the group. But “pretty early on in the process,” she said, the team concluded that if one of the goals was to support productive political discourse, civility alone was insufficient.

“It’s not really that we are advocating for incivility,” said Masullo. “But if you are going to have passionate discussion about politics, which we want in a democracy, I would argue, people are not always going to talk perfectly about it.” In her book “Nasty Talk: Online Incivility and Public Debate,” she points out that “perfect” speech can be so sanitized that we wind up saying nothing. 

  No one is arguing that social media companies shouldn’t combat the most harmful forms of speech — violent threats, targeted harassment, racism, incitement to violence. But the artificial intelligence programs that the companies use for screening, trained using squishy and arguably naive notions of civility, miss some of the worst forms of hate. For example, research led by Libby Hemphill, a professor in the University of Michigan’s School of Information and the Institute for Social Research, demonstrated how white supremacists evade moderation by donning a cloak of superficial politeness.

“We need to understand more than just civility to understand the spread of hatred,” she said.

Even if platforms get better at hate Whac-A-Mole, if the goal is not just to profit, but also to create a digital space for productive discourse, they will need to retool how algorithms prioritize content. Research suggests that companies incentivize posts that elicit strong emotion, especially anger and outrage, because, like a wreck on the highway, these draw attention, and, crucially, more eyeballs to paid advertising. Engagement-hungry folks have upped their game accordingly, creating the toxicity that has social media users so concerned.

What people really want, the Civic Signals project found, is a digital space where they feel welcome, connected, informed, and empowered to act on the issues that affect them. In a social media world optimized for clicks, such positive experiences happen almost despite the environment’s design, said Masullo. “Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with making money for the platforms,” she said. “But maybe you can do both, like you could also make money but as well not destroy democracy.” 

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