Explicitly comparing censorship or content monitoring to counter-speech
interventions, Alvarez-Benjumea and Winter (2018) test whether decreasing
social acceptability of hostile comments in an online forum decreases the use
of hate speech. They ﬁrst designed an online forum and invited participants to
join and engage in conversation on current social
topics. They then
experimentally manipulated the comments participants observed before
posting their own comments. They included a censoring treatment in which
participants observed no hate comments and a counter-speech treatment in
which hate speech comments were uncensored but were presented alongside
posts highlighting the fact that hate speech was not considered acceptable on
the platform. Comparing the level of hostility of the comments and instances
of hate across the treatment conditions, they ﬁnd that the censoring treatment
was the most effective in reducing hostile comments. However, the authors
Social_Media_and_Democracy