Social media etiquette with the help of AI

There are many both really awesome and really horrible stories about how the internet is shaping our lives in the 21st century.

Social media despite its cool aspects also provide us with at least two problems:

• The harsh tone often found in debates.
• The amount of (useless) content.

Both problems have made me more or less quit social media, but I am hopeful that AI will be able to counter the harsh tone.

Some might label me “a softie”, unable to handle the internet’s tone. I won’t dispute that. Negative interactions, like hate and trolling, noticeably affect my mood for the worse. I recall a few instances where I was the one engaging in trolling and being excessively harsh. Not something I am proud of and definitely not a behavior I aim to make a habit of.

Negative interactions carry so much more weight. Based on my own experience and my impression of others, I think we need a lot more positive interactions to make up for the negative ones, and since the positive ones are so much harder to come by this is a problem. The negativity seems too easy to cultivate, and there is no immediate cost to use social media as an outlet: Transform all my anger into words and press “Send” (before I get to think about it).

I would love to see AI used on social media platforms to detect trolling and hateful speech. Not disallowing it but interrupting the user posting it. An interruption will make the user pause and give them the opportunity to reflect. Maybe the AI could even suggest an alternative wording, that would still get the point across but without being a douchebag.

Another interesting idea I would love to see explored, is limiting the amount of “publishing” likes, re-posts, etc., each day (or some other interval). It would nudge users to reflect by questioning themselves: Is Donald’s latest crazy comment important enough for me to use my limited amount of interactions? … or should I save it for the cat video … or my sister’s bachelor party tonight.

Just like in IT systems: Ensure high data quality as early as possible in the process.

• As a last resort, we block a user so we cannot see what they publish.
• But it would be better if the social media platform was able to filter (and sometimes remove) negative interactions. That way the content consumers would seldom have to see negative interactions in the first place.
• But it would be even better if the user never published unnecessary negative interactions at all. Suddenly blocking and filtering become much less important.

With no “cost” attached to publishing, feeds are flooded with poor quality like (unnecessary) negative messages, also the “cost” shouldn’t be money. Unless rich people are significantly better at not getting carried away by their emotions and writing negative messages – I doubt it.

There need to be obstacles to avoid it being too easy to make a bad decision.

I want and need a better social media experience to regain my trust in them.