Less hate, more speech: breaking the bad in online comments

The research project Less Hate, More Speech implements a field experiment in comment moderation on major mainstream media sites in Romania. The media partners are Gsp.ro – one of the biggest news websites in Romania with over 3m unique visitors per month, and the third most widely read newspaper offline – and Tolo.ro, which is the blog of its chief editor, a top investigative journalist in Romania.

The main goal of Less Hate, More Speech is to understand the narratives and frames that might make people find the better angels in themselves, i.e. make them stop expressing, acting, talking in prejudiced, intolerant, discriminatory and uncivil ways in the public domain.

The focus of this session will be on the first findings after almost a year of implementing the moderation system, on it's impact and emerging trends, on user behavior and results from online experiments.