Summary:
The paper “Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities” analyzes the behavior of banned users from three different online platforms from the moment they joined to the moment they got banned. The three platforms used for this research paper were the general news site CNN, the political news site Breitbart and the computer gaming news site IGN. Using this information the paper found that banned users, before they were banned, tended to focus on a small number of threads, were more likely to post irrelevant information than other users and were more successful at getting responses than other users. More interesting was the information they found on how the banned user’s behavior would change over time. They found that as time went on a future-banned user would write even worse, become less and less tolerated by the other members of the community and that their antisocial behavior would get even worse as community feedback become harsher.
Reflection:
The idea that antisocial behavior gets even worse as a community’s feedback to that behavior gets harsher is interesting. I suppose for many people getting attacked by a community of people wouldn’t make the individual want to reevaluate their actions and be more social. Rather it would probably make that individual feel like they are being wronged for no good reason and come to resent the community. At this point if it gets bad enough they probably either leave the community or decide to bash and/or troll the community until they get banned.
Questions:
- What could be done for antisocial users as they are newly signed up to prevent them from potentially getting worse and eventually banned?
- Should anything be done?
- Are anonymous and ephemeral sites like we discussed last week a better fit for these antisocial users?
