CeDEx Seminar - Mateusz Stalinski (University of Warwick)

Toxic Content and User Engagement on Social Media: Evidence from a Field Experiment

As much as forty percent of social media users have been harassed online, but there is scarce causal evidence of how toxic content impacts user engagement and whether it is contagious. In a pre-registered field experiment, we recruited participants to install a browser extension and randomly assigned them to either a treatment group where the extension automatically hides toxic text content on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube or to a control group without hiding. As the first stage, 6.6% of the content displayed to users was classified as toxic by the extension relying on state-of-the-art toxicity detection tools and duly hidden in the treatment group during a six-week long period. Lowering exposure to toxicity reduces content consumption on Facebook, as well as ad consumption and ad clicks on both Facebook and Twitter – all beyond the mechanical effect of our intervention. We also report that toxicity negatively affects active time spent on some of the treated platforms while increasing the time spent on 38 pre-registered non-treated related sites, behavior consistent with toxicity seeking. Lastly, the intervention reduces the average toxicity of content posted by users on Facebook and Twitter, evidence of toxicity being contagious.