Ben Clarke

So there's a lot of people who are commenting quickly and coming out with pretty bad stuff.

We have to assume it's the stuff that the Guardian got rid of.

And it wasn't just a few users.

There were tens of thousands of users who were doing this.

So we think it is a bit about the human psychology, right?

If we don't bite our tongue, if we don't take a moment to pause and reflect, it's likely that we'll come out with stuff which is less productive, including potentially hateful.

I think it's also a technology problem, clearly.

We have many, many communication technologies now, which increasingly it's about speed, it's about efficiency.

And I mean, in many respects, that's good.

It helps us to do a lot of things.

It helps us to navigate the complex world that we live in, in an effective way.

But I think there are also some downsides of this.

It means that, yeah, we're not encouraged to bite our tongue or to take a moment to reflect and pause on what it is that we want to say or why we might find a comment disagreeable and we kind of just fall into loud screams and perhaps not the most productive thing.

So I think it's a little bit both of human psychology, but also how we design comment forums.

This is definitely an aspect of the problem.

I mean, we could, yeah, definitely we could.

So, uh, the thing you mentioned actually with CAPTCHAs is interesting.

We've been experimenting with exactly that, uh, after this study where we found these results.

So we've, we've designed a couple of experiments with some of our students of finding ways to slow people down in comments forums.

We've just constructed our own and done these kind of small scale experimental studies.