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      We Should Not Get Rid of Incivility Online

      1 , 2 , 1 , 3 , 1
      Social Media + Society
      SAGE Publications

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          Abstract

          Incivility and toxicity have become concepts du jour in research about social media. The clear normative implication in much of this research is that incivility is bad and should be eliminated. Extensive research—including some that we’ve authored—has been dedicated to finding ways to reduce or eliminate incivility from online discussion spaces. In our work as part of the Civic Signals Initiative, we’ve been thinking carefully about what metrics should be adopted by social media platforms eager to create better spaces for their users. When we tell people about this project, removing incivility from the platforms frequently comes up as a suggested metric. In thinking about incivility, however, we’ve become less convinced that it is desirable, or even possible, for social media platforms to remove all uncivil content. In this short essay, we discuss research on incivility, our rationale for a more complicated normative stance regarding incivility, and what other orientations may be more useful. We conclude with a post mortem arguing that we should not abandon research on incivility altogether, but we should recognize the limitations of a concept that is difficult to universalize.

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          Most cited references28

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          Democracy online: civility, politeness, and the democratic potential of online political discussion groups

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            The New Videomalaise: Effects of Televised Incivility on Political Trust

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              The “Nasty Effect:” Online Incivility and Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                (View ORCID Profile)
                (View ORCID Profile)
                Journal
                Social Media + Society
                Social Media + Society
                SAGE Publications
                2056-3051
                2056-3051
                July 16 2019
                July 2019
                July 16 2019
                July 2019
                : 5
                : 3
                : 205630511986264
                Affiliations
                [1 ]The University of Texas at Austin, USA
                [2 ]University of Kansas, USA
                [3 ]New America Foundation, USA
                Article
                10.1177/2056305119862641
                d021c0ad-2113-4a57-ae97-9a3e1e4ab8a6
                © 2019

                http://journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license

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