Ben Clarke

the worst stuff which might pop up to our mind when we're angry or when we meet a particularly disagreeable comment.

So we have this hypothesis it might be like this.

And I mean, kind of in our common language, right, we talk about the fact that you should hold your breath, take a deep breath, count to 10, all these kind of things, which reflect that, you know, often when we face for something we disagree with strongly, what might happen if we respond quickly is perhaps not the most productive thing we could come out with.

Somewhat, yeah.

So this was another thing that we tested for in our analysis, and we found what was called an incivility contagion effect.

So if one of the comment threads contains something hateful, it increases the chance that further comments will be hateful.

And the more that that happens, the increased risk that more hateful comments will come in the same thread.

And time is still a factor.

So when that happens, increasingly so, the comments come quicker and quicker and quicker.

It is human, I think.

So one thing that I should probably stress about the analysis is there were a lot of different commenters who were doing this, right?

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.

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