Civility vs. Incivility in Online Social Interactions: An Evolutionary Approach

Abstract

Evidence is growing that forms of incivility–e.g. aggressive and disrespectful behaviors, harassment, hate speech and outrageous claims–are spreading in the population of social networking sites’ (SNS) users. Online social networks such as Facebook allow users to regularly interact with known and unknown others, who can behave either politely or rudely. This leads individuals not only to learn and adopt successful strategies for using the site, but also to condition their own behavior on that of others. Using a mean field approach, we define anevolutionary game framework to analyse the dynamics of civil and uncivil ways of interaction in online social networks and their consequences for collective welfare. Agents can choose to interact with others–politely or rudely–in SNS, or to opt out from online social networks to protect themselves from incivility. We find that, when the initial share of the population of polite users reaches a critical level, civility becomes generalized if its payoff increases more than that of incivility with the spreading of politeness in online interactions. Otherwise, the spreading of self-protective behaviors to cope with online incivility can lead the economyto non-socially optimal stationary states. JEL Codes: C61, C73, D85, O33, Z13. PsycINFO Codes: 2240, 2750.

Online Networks and Subjective Well‐Being

“…Sabatini and Sarracino () found that the use of SNS is significantly and negatively correlated with trust in unknown others and in public institutions in Italy for the period 2010‐11. Antoci et al () explained the possibly detrimental effects of the use of SNS as a consequence of online incivility, a widespread phenomenon including aggressive and disrespectful behaviors, vile comments, harassment, and hate speech that makes online social environments potentially hostile for users (Rainie et al, ; Duggan, ). The relevance of this phenomenon is illustrated by the PRC, which reports that non‐negligible proportions of SNS users do witness bad behavior on those sites.…”

Bots and online hate during the COVID-19 pandemic: case studies in the United States and the Philippines

“…By employing more interpretable features, it becomes more straightforward to describe the social and communicative dynamics which underpin hate speech as it is used in context. This enables researchers to better understand not just which texts may be linked to hate speech, but also how they communicate hate, evolve in communities, and reinforce conflicts [3,33,47,50].…”

A Crisis in Civic Conscience in the United States? Knowledge and Understanding of the U.S. Bill of Rights among a Group of Undergraduate Students Citizens of the United States

“…Events and discussions unfolding of the past year highlight the struggles ahead" (2017, p. 2). Interestingly, Antoci, Delfino, Paglieri, Panebianco, and Sabatini (2016) created a model of interaction between three groups: haters (who engage in hate speech and offensive language) H, politers (who engage in polite behaviour) P, and withdrawers N, in the context of social media and face-to-face interactions. They reported that their model "…suggests that politeness can survive in a world with a fair share of haters only if the payoffs of polite people are not heavily affected by haters" (2006, p. 14).…”