Hate speech abounds on certain corners of social media. Some people post racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, or homophobic comments, and these contribute to a harmful and hateful discourse online. Some companies filter, censor, or censure accounts when they cross the line. Other companies have proved unwilling to ban such content, citing free speech concerns. Recently, some researchers asked if people might engage with such posters online in order to prevent them from posting hate speech.
The website Optimist Daily ran a story about their work. Here's how they introduced it:
Led by public policy professor Dominik Hangartner, the research team identified 1,350 English-speaking Twitter users who had posted racist or xenophobic content. The researchers then assigned these users randomly to a control group or one of three test groups. The test groups were then prescribed different counterspeech strategies: empathy-eliciting messages, humor, or warning of consequences.
For example, the empathy eliciting messages might have read "your post is very painful for Jewish people to read...", or "For African-Americans, it really hurts to see people use language like this". Another example can be seen in the comment about immigrants in the photo above, accompanying this post.
The humorous messages included a meme of an animal with a quip such as "please sir, stop tweeting".
The warning-of-consequences messages read, for example, "Hey, remember that your friends and family can see this tweet too."
What happened after one of these responses was posted? Here is how the journalist described the results:
The researchers found that by far, the most effective strategy for getting these users to delete or amend hateful content was counterspeech messages that elicit empathy.
Questions
a) What words in the journalist's story convey that this was an experiment? I would additionally classify it as a field experiment--can you see why?
b) What was the independent variable? What were its levels? Was the IV manipulated as independent-groups or within groups?
c) There are two dependent variables mentioned in the quotes above. What are they? If you were the researcher, what other DVs would you be interested in? (you can consult the original study to see some of the other DVs)
d) How were the participants in this study selected? Did they use a random sampling method? Or something else?
e) This study was approved by the researchers' IRB, but the participants in this study apparently did not provide informed consent to participate in the research. Why do you think the IRB approved the study?
Here is a link to the original journal article in PNAS. You can use it to study the graphs of the study's outcome.
