The study involved nearly half a million comments and 50k users across sites including AOL, Salon, Newsweek, RT, and Sky Sports; demonstrates the ability of technology to positively affect the quality of conversation.
OpenWeb, a leading audience engagement and conversation platform released the findings of an extensive study done in collaboration with Jigsaw’s Perspective API. Jigsaw is a unit within Google that forecasts and confronts emerging threats, creating future-defining research and technology to keep our world safer. Perspective API is a tool developed by Jigsaw that makes it easier to host better conversations, by using machine learning models to detect the potential toxicity of a comment.
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The study measured the impact of deploying a “nudge” to potentially offensive or profane comments, encouraging commenters to reevaluate their message. The goal of the test was to measure if such a nudge could reduce toxicity within conversations. The study involved more than 400,000 comments across a select number of OpenWeb’s partner publishers, including AOL, Salon, RT, and Newsweek.
In addition to testing the effect of the “nudge,” OpenWeb created a variety of messages to measure how users react to different statements. The study then assessed the effect that responses to the nudge had on overall community behavior and toxicity.
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Highlights from the study:
- 400,000 comments and 50k users were analyzed over 3 months, from May through July 2020
- 34% of commenters who received a nudge edited their comments
- Of those who edited, 54% changed it to be immediately permissible
- 45% removed or replaced the toxic element
- 8% reshaped their entire comment
- 12.5% lift in civil and thoughtful comments being published overall
“The results of this case study are further evidence that technology can have an effect on human behavior,” said Nadav Shoval, CEO and co-founder of OpenWeb. “There are ways machines can learn and respond to behavior and create safer environments for us all, without suppressing speech. That’s what we’re working to achieve.”
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