NLP and others
22 February 2021
This essay was written as one of the assignments of Academic Pal. If you are interested, you can visit its Instagram or official blog.
We are exposed to violent, discriminate and careless words online more often than in real life. It is not because there are more irrational people on social media, but the characteristics of the online platforms make people feel more comfortable being careless or being protected behind anonymity. However, I believe that every human being naturally desires to become a better person and get respects from others. Therefore, rather than adding more and more rule-based regulations to control people’s incivility online, using such natures of human the being might be a good solution to make a better internet environment.
Specifically, we can use nudge strategies (Lin, 2017) which lead to making people want to show rational behavior. Some studies (Ksiazek, 2015; Santana, 2014) have found that people tend to behave more civilly when they use real names in the comment sections on social media. Also, using reputation management systems that reward positive contributions assists to decrease incivility (Chen, 2019). That being said, instead of punishing people for their uncivil behaviors, rewarding people for positive factors is a good alternative.
Taking Quora as an example, users can vote for others or get votes from others on their posts or comments, and the votes directly influence their reputation on the website. Also, Quora users tend to use their real names to use the reputation as a way to demonstrate a part of their career. With such metrics, not only fewer regulations are needed for the administrators to maintain the platform environment, but also people’s free speech can be protected at a reasonable point.
I do not believe it is possible to make the internet completely safe and harmless. Because I think that the only essential solution to address the problem is a “perfect” educations which is impossible to be done. However in reality, we can still make the internet environment better if we don’t give up working on it.
As we are living in an era of big data, an enormous amount of data is accumulated which reflects people’s behaviors online with corresponding platform’s management systems. More researches on people’s uncivil behavior on online platforms with help of the big data are underway. Quora can be a benchmark for the data analysts to develop such algorithms that ‘nudge’ people to be civil will progressively improve.