Twitter isn’t exactly known for its enlightening conversations, and social networks know they have a civility problem (even if they might not realize that the main culprit is the user.) Instagram floated the idea of hiding likes on photos to keep users from getting too obsessed with them, and psychology professor Jordan Peterson has even thought of creating his own social network specifically geared toward productive conversations.
“Many hoped that social networking sites would allow for the open exchange of information and a revival of the public sphere,” an article in the Journal of Communication explains. “Unfortunately, conversations on social media are often toxic and not conducive to healthy political discussions.”
For now, we’re stuck with Twitter and its 280-character limit, but a recent evaluation of the social network’s decision to jump from 140 to 280 characters shows that it might have been a step in the right direction.
Twitter doubled its character limit in November 2017. Afterward, researchers analyzed hundreds of thousands of tweet replies to U.S. politicians on the social network to see what would change.
“We show that doubling the permissible length of a tweet led to less uncivil, more polite, and more constructive discussions online,” they report in the Journal of Communication. Since Twitter is “the most widely used social network for political discussions,” the findings appear to express a significant move in a positive direction.
But after looking at how discourse had evolved from 2017 to March 2018, “the declining trend in the empathy and respectfulness of these tweets raises concerns about the implications of the changing norms for the quality of political deliberation.”
In other words, letting people talk longer allows them to express their opinions in a more nuanced manner, but it also just lets them be insulting with more words.
However social networks continue to evolve to address the issue of civil discourse, none of them will tell you the real secret to productive conversations. Sen. Ted Cruz and Alyssa Milano actually had a civil discussion when they took their squabbling offline. So did Ariana Grande and Piers Morgan. All it took was moving from battling behind a screen to talking face to face. People who you would never think capable of getting along can still do so, even in a fractured age.
But extended character limits, despite their small successes, can’t really help people. The real answer is to log out.
