Civility on Nextdoor
The Social Media Governance Initiative (SMGI) has partnered with Nextdoor to test alternatives to punitive governance mechanisms. In line with SMGI’s mission to bring community vitality and prosocial theories, we have suggested prosocial governance designs that might encourage people not to break the rules and be civil to each other.
The goal of the project is to use prosocial approaches to increase civility on social media platforms. The unique aspect of this project is that unlike many other scholarly works that focus on creating a “hate” or “uncivility” lexicon to measure hate or offensive behavior, we want to create a civility lexicon to measure civility and help understand what design features can impact civility.
Researchers:
Tom Tyler, Macklin Fleming Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology and Founding Director of The Justice Collaboratory, Yale Law School
Farzaneh Badiei, Director of Social Media Governance Initiative, Yale Law School
Jisu Kim, Resident fellow at the Information Society Project and affiliated scholar at the Justice Collaboratory, Yale Law School
Curtis McDonald, PhD candidate, Department of Statistics and Data Science, Yale University