Reducing the rate of personal insults in social media with bystander bots (opens in new tab)

Prompted by previous research on strategies for reducing interpersonal conflict and addressing problematic behaviors in online communities, a randomized controlled trial on Reddit compared various responses for reducing the rate of personal insults users post to the site. We generated replies from five deescalation strategies and used an automated procedure for posting them as replies to insulting comments. The findings reveal that automated r...