Communications of the ACM
Researchers Study How to Make Online Arguments Productive
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The Internet can seem like the place to go to get into fights. Researchers at the University of Washington worked with 257 people to understand online arguments and to develop potential design interventions that could make online discussions more productive and centered around relationship-building.
The team describes its work in "Someone Is Wrong on the Internet: Having Hard Conversations in Online Spaces," published in the Proceedings of the ACM in Human Computer Interaction.
"Despite the fact that online spaces are often described as toxic and polarizing, what stood out to me is that people, surprisingly, want to have difficult conversations online," says lead author Amanda Baughan.
Many users leverage designed features that support "a no-road-back approach to disagreement: you can unfollow, unfriend, or block them. All of those things cut off relationships instead of helping people repair them or find common ground,"says senior author Alexis Hinikerl. The UW team examined how to help people "have hard conversations online without destroying their relationships."
From University of Washington
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