Ben Clarke

Yeah, I think there's nothing in them, which is inherently either good or either bad.

They're just another means for us to communicate, right?

So there's nothing that's per se better or worse than, say, having a face-to-face conversation.

It's really all down to how we design them.

So if we design them in a way that means we put the emphasis on reflection and we encourage people actually to spend more time there, but not only saying the worst stuff, right, but actually contemplating what it is that they're doing,

we could design slow tech.

You know, there's lots of kind of like slow food movements.

We could easily have slow tech in this way where we do have more democratic debates.

So I think there's nothing negative in having online discussions.

They could have that promise.

Of course, that promise hasn't really played out since this kind of early internet optimism, but it could be that way if we decide to design our online spaces that way.

Yeah, absolutely.

We looked at 38 million comments on The Guardian's website, The Guardian from the UK.

We had an instinct, based on reading a lot of academic literature, that it might be the case that people who responded quickly in the comment sections, both to the news article overall and to the other comments that were presented in response to the article, that those ones might contain more of the hateful stuff.

So we ran a big analysis of this, 38 million comments, including 1 million comments that The Guardian took away, the most hateful stuff, basically.

What we found was, yes, statistically significantly, the comments that came earlier on, both in response to the news article overall and in response to other commenters, was more likely to be hateful, basically.

So quicker comments, greater increased risk of hateful content being there.

I suppose not.

So we have this hypothesis going in that it might be like this based on quite a diverse literature.

There are some things in the psychology literature which would suggest that when we see red, we might need to curb our tongue or bite our tongue so that we don't come out with like...