Emotionally Aware Moderation: The Potential of Emotion Monitoring in Shaping Healthier Social Media Conversations
This work addresses the challenge of fostering healthier conversations on social media platforms, offering a novel approach to moderation that could mitigate hate speech, though it is incremental in its application of emotion regulation tools.
The study tackled the problem of uncivil behavior on social media by proposing emotion monitoring dashboards to increase users' emotional awareness and reduce hate speech, with results showing effectiveness in reducing hate speech but also unintended increases in negative emotions like anger, fear, and sadness during sensitive discussions.
Social media platforms increasingly employ proactive moderation techniques, such as detecting and curbing toxic and uncivil comments, to prevent the spread of harmful content. Despite these efforts, such approaches are often criticized for creating a climate of censorship and failing to address the underlying causes of uncivil behavior. Our work makes both theoretical and practical contributions by proposing and evaluating two types of emotion monitoring dashboards to users' emotional awareness and mitigate hate speech. In a study involving 211 participants, we evaluate the effects of the two mechanisms on user commenting behavior and emotional experiences. The results reveal that these interventions effectively increase users' awareness of their emotional states and reduce hate speech. However, our findings also indicate potential unintended effects, including increased expression of negative emotions (Angry, Fear, and Sad) when discussing sensitive issues. These insights provide a basis for further research on integrating proactive emotion regulation tools into social media platforms to foster healthier digital interactions.