A Chinese social network鈥檚 attempt to reduce abuse by displaying users鈥� 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 鈥� 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鈥� locations increased by 33.5 per cent after the policy change.
The lesson learned is simple, says Yang: 鈥淲e cannot assume that technology will function in a way that you assume.鈥�
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鈥檚 societal attitudes towards covid-19 policies could have made conversation more pointed on Weibo than on western social media during the period studied.
鈥淔or 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,鈥� says at the University of Liverpool, UK. However, McLoughlin says platforms often take a try-first, check-later approach that doesn鈥檛 account for unintended consequences 鈥� as seems to have happened here.
McLoughlin鈥檚 own research suggests that localised platforms, such as Facebook groups for neighbourhoods, increase the potential for online hate to translate into offline harm.
鈥淭here鈥檚 no silver bullet to fixing online abuse,鈥� he says. But to start, we need to ask different questions. 鈥淲e have an idea of what types of communication we want to avoid 鈥� but we first haven鈥檛 figured out what types of conversation we actually want.鈥�
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