Toxicity and Harassment

Definition

Toxicity and Harassment examines detecting and reducing abusive conduct while preserving legitimate disagreement and minority expression within the broader domain of the cohesion, inclusion, participation, resilience, safety and discourse quality of communities.

Why this matters

Toxicity and Harassment can materially affect autonomy, safety, public trust, market integrity, community cohesion and institutional decisions. Poorly designed interventions can suppress legitimate speech, entrench bias or create false confidence.

Research questions

Under which conditions can detecting and reducing abusive conduct while preserving legitimate disagreement and minority expression be measured or improved reliably, and how do effects vary by platform, population, context and intervention?

Hypotheses

A transparent, context-aware approach combining provenance, behavioural evidence and accountable human review will improve exposure, recurrence and reporting trust more than single-score, content-only or opaque automated approaches.

Proposed methods

community surveys; network and discourse analysis; participatory research; moderation experiments; deliberative trials; longitudinal cohort tracking; incident review; expert review; affected-user interviews; reproducibility testing; methods adapted specifically to Toxicity and Harassment

Stakeholders and beneficiaries

community members; moderators; local government; civil society; educators; platforms; researchers; public-interest organisations