It’s become easier than ever before to engage with content online, particularly with features like infinite scrolling. However, the smooth user experience of social media apps encourages superficial engagement. In turn, this has contributed to the spread of fake news, misinformation, and hate speech.
Adding friction to the user experience could help tackle these problems.
SFI Applied Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Seungwoong Ha, former SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Joshua Garland (Arizona State University), and External Applied Complexity Fellow Jan Eissfeldt, Global Head of Trust & Safety at the Wikimedia Foundation, are organizing an SFI working group called “Friction and the Case Against Efficiency in Social Media.” Scheduled for September 11–13, the working group will discuss the impacts of introducing friction in social media.
Friction could look like a platform asking the user to read an article before sharing or to reword a potentially hateful message prior to posting. This could nudge the user to look beyond a misleading headline to what is often a more balanced text of the article. In the latter case, “a lot of people would go ahead and reword the post to be less hateful,” says Garland.
Garland adds that “if you slow people down just a little bit, they seem to make better decisions.” This is because when users have to spend more time with each piece of content, the engagement is more thoughtful and deliberate.
“Given that the spread of many kinds of disinformation can be halted with a little time and thoughtfulness, we think friction is a very important factor,” says Ha.
Friction doesn’t always have to be evident to the user, and it needn’t be censorial or apply to all content on a platform. Different types of friction could impact user engagement and content quality in different ways. For example, introducing friction to only content receiving high engagement could keep the user experience mostly smooth while slowing the dissemination of fake news or hate speech.
Beyond impacts on tackling disinformation, the working group will discuss the ethical and practical implications of designing friction in social media. Moreover, the working group will suggest actionable guidelines to develop regulations and industry standards in this direction.
This working group was supported by a grant from the Siegel Family Endowment.